Happy fifth birthday, cloud computing

29.08.2011
In the vacuum between Hurricane Irene and Labor Day weekend, a major focus of the tech universe this week is on VMworld in Las Vegas.

It's here that the major and minor vendors are bringing out their latest virtualization and cloud offerings.

Dell Monday made one of the conference's bigger announcements by unveiling a cloud infrastructure service based on VMware technology.

Dell's announcement arrives five years to the month after Amazon announced its Elastic Compute Cloud beta, or EC2, which may well have been the first service to call itself a cloud.

Pointing out the distance between Dell's new service and Amazon's EC2 unveiling isn't to suggest that Dell is a laggard in the cloud business. It was also just this year that Hewlett-Packard announced an ambitious focused on business.

The announcements by Dell and HP show that for all the hype surrounding cloud computing in recent years, the path to mainstream business adoption is a long one.