02391nas a2200133   4500008004100000022001400041245004300055210004000098260004200138520200800180100001702188700001602205856003602221       2010                        eng d  a1913-610200aEditorial: Cloud Services (April 2010)0 aEditorial Cloud Services April 2010  aOttawabTalent First Networkc04/20103 aCloud computing may be the  biggest game changer within the enterprise since the adoption of the Internet in the 1990s and the personal computer in the 1980s. The economic climate, coupled with the rate at which technology is changing, is forcing companies to reduce information technology (IT) expenditures, increase productivity, and build more collaborative solutions as opposed to building everything internally. Cloud computing allows companies to outsource functions that are not core to their business or have become a commodity. Much of the technology driving cloud computing services is open source software. The LAMP stack has become widely adopted as the standard engine running much of the cloud services. With the exception of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, most cloud service providers have embraced open source software, allowing them to drive costs down while providing reliable services for their customers.

Pay-as-you-go is the new economic model for IT as we enter a new decade. Gone will be the days of making large purchases of commercial software with huge maintenance costs. In this new world, enterprises will consume only the services they need, only when they need them, and will pay for the resources required to scale up and down as necessary. This paradigm shift should force IT executives to focus more on building business functionality and less on managing and maintaining infrastructure and commodity applications. Open source software will play a huge role in making the shift to cloud computing economically feasible. At the same time, commercial software companies are racing to the cloud and are struggling to replace their expensive software licensing models with a pay-as-you-go model in order to make them an attractive alternative to open source software in the cloud. It should be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years. The articles that follow provide insights into what cloud computing is and how it is changing the IT landscape.1 aLavigne, Dru1 aKavis, Mike  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/338