The announcement this week that Google released a beta version of a robust cloud computing platform called Google App Engine that lets anyone build apps on Googles renowned and highly scalable infrastructure underscored a key trend in the software industry today. Namely that software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the cloud of the Internet. Googles entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud as well as a few smaller players like Bungee and Heroku has turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight. What makes these offerings so interesting is their promise to turn enormous amounts of operational competency and accumulated economies of scale (which are enormous in Amazons and Googles cases) into a highly competitive new software platform, akin to Windows or Linux, except entirely hosted off-premises and on the Internet.
We are excited to release our fourth annual Mobile Megatrends 2011 themed around what else? how software is fundamentally changing the telecoms value chain. In this fourth annual research presentation we take a deep dive into the many facets of change in the mobile industry; the DELL-ification of mobile, the battle for experience ecosystems, apps as web 3.0, the use of open closed strategies to commodise protect and how telcos can compete in the age of software.]
A. Latif, A. Saeed, P. Hoefler, A. Stocker, and C. Wagner. Proceedings of I-Semantics 2009. 5th International Conference on Semantic Systems, page 568--577. Journal of Universal Computer Science, (2009)