New ideas are taking shape

As the Internet evolves from its roots in messaging and Web pages into a general-purpose computing platform, it will host more and more Web-delivered applications and services that we use for everyday life and business. Services and storage can be obtained as needed, easing the software-licensing load by replacing local installations with online applications, or reducing hardware and resource needs by consolidating the infrastructure remotely.

IBM's reach into the cloud space includes the following products and services:

IBM Computing on Demand enables you to ramp up to supercomputing power without capital expenditure over a virtual private network when your capacity needs to expand.

LotusLive provides a suite of security-minded collaboration solutions—such as communications, meetings and mail—for businesses, their partner companies and customers.

IBM Information Protection Services help you safeguard and access your valuable data when you need it, through secure, enterprise-standards backup, retention and retrieval.

Cloud computing has been applied in myriad ways:

• IBM helped North Carolina State University create a Virtual Computing Lab to provide every student in the state access to educational materials, select software and storage resources in the cloud.
• The IBM Technology Adoption Program (TAP) applied cloud principles to reduce the time, hardware, labor and costs needed to get new technologies to early adopters, shortening from weeks to hours the time required to build out an infrastructure.
• IBM establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, based in an industrial park in Wuxi, to provide each software company in the park with its own virtualized computing resource.
• Rapid growth in emerging markets in sub-Saharan Africa is fueling a need for powerful, but efficient and affordable, IT services and technology backbones. Government agencies, banks and telecommunications firms are taking advantage of cloud computing.