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Selling the clouds

March 2nd 2011

Jasper Ditton

Head of Digital at Marketecture, helping clients to achieve their business and marketing objectives using digital marketing channels. Starting as a developer, Jasper moved to strategic and operational client services roles 5 years ago and has worked with some of the UK's largest brands and a huge variety of public sector, B2B and B2C clients.

Have you ever installed a screen saver that helps scientists process stellar data to look for new stars?

One example of this type of "distributed computing" project is Einstein@Home which harnesseed the power of home machines to find a rare star.

Well, there is now a B2B example in the form of SpotCloud - the world's first spot market for cloud computing. Launched on February 14th, it works in the following way:

  • Companies with spare computing capacity put it "up for sale"
  • Others which have a short-term need for data crunching bid for it
  • Enomaly - the company behind SpotCloud - takes a cut of between 10% and 30% depending on the size of the deal

The platform is opaque meaning companies who sell cloud computing services can offload some capacity without the existing client base raising an eyebrow, and in keeping with the cloud model, the whole system works with the Google App Engine to park the buyer's virtual machine on App Engine before it is sent to the seller's servers.

So the real question:

How long before computing power/hr is traded in the wider financial markets as an actual commodity with an accompanying futures market?

Place your bets now and let's see whether or not something solid arrives or the concept remains up in the air!