Amazon Cloud Player
It’s official – we’ve established that the cloud is disruptive for just about every industry. Not every industry, but Amazon’s introduction of Cloud Player
The newly launched Cloud Player and Cloud drive are two directly integrated personal cloud offerings, which put a very notable emphasis on music streaming & storage. Cloud Player is a web-based music player which lets users play and upload music onto Cloud Drive which is a cloud storage service, similar to Box.net, Dropbox and others, which offers a number of paid plans as well as 20GB worth of memory to host files, and not just music formats, for free. Music purchased from Amazon directly saved to Cloud Drives is not counted against the storage limit.
Cloud Player and Cloud Drive, of course, represent more than just a handy new service for users. In addition to adding iTunes to Amazon’s competing products list, the offerings strengthen the fact the cloud revolution is a rapidly accelerating cross-industry phenomenon. This is despite the fact Amazon is having some troubles getting certain label rights so far, according to a Wall Street Journal reporting.
Label rights or not, the music industry is only one evidence of how prominent cloud computing has become in the past few years – simply because it facilitates a superior type of offerings. Research firm Deloitte for example, released a report covering the top 10 disruptive and emerging technologies it expects “to play a crucial role in how businesses will operate globally over the next 18 months. “
The first “emerging technology” highlighted in the report was “Almost Enterprise Applications”, under which Deloitte categorised the as-a-Service offering. While the title may not be completely accurate from some points of view, the research firm does acknowledge the importance of this model – which brings us to the second cloud highlight from the report, “Capability Clouds”. Deloitte says these deployments “move beyond the building blocks of capacity clouds,” to deliver fully-polished solutions addressing enterprise-scale demands.
Indeed, the cloud is showing its signs in a very large number of industries. And, as traction grows, more serious segments are beginning to display accelerating adoption. Among these is the CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering) applications spectrum, which according to VP Brian Matthews is simply better in the cloud compared to the old method. This translates into lowered costs and better performance.
Another notable area is the aerospace and defense industry, in light of the “Disruptive Information Technologies: Leveraging the Benefits, Avoiding the Pitfalls” report. The report includes recommendations for the optimal use of IT offerings in this segment, including cloud computing, social networking and mobile in that order.
Cloud computing has been dubbed the biggest thing since the PC and the client-side server. And, it looks like executives in almost every area share this mindset at least partially. From the consumer level all the way up to enterprise-scale applications, the advantageousness of the cloud is constantly on the rise.
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