The vision of cloud computing is simple. Just as people reach out to the Internet today to search for data, in the future they will tap into the Net’s servers to run their apps.
Some skewer cloud computing as marketing hype. Others go so far as to predict that in the next century most companies will ditch their in-house computers and tech staff, just as they stopped paying for systems and specialists to generate their own electricity in the last century.
Making the vision a reality will require years of work, much of it in creating new approaches to software, said panelists at an annual research event at the headquarters of Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. here. The new tools needed range from parallel programming primitives to authentication standards and application programming interfaces.
