Earlier this morning, Microsoft unveiled Azure, their foray into the burgeoning cloud computing industry.  This, coming days after the announcement of Rackspace's acquisition of virtual private server provider Slicehost (Disclosure: I'm a happy Slicehost customer) and online storage provider Jungledisk, means there will soon be some big league competition for the incumbent Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for the estimated $42 BN this market will grow to by 2012. This trend toward more affordable big-league server capacity for companies is a boon to start-ups and small companies who can't finagle the cost of building and running their own server farms, but at the same time bodes poorly for those companies currently operating under the Software as a Service (SaaS) / Application Service Provider (ASP) model. These services we all know and love were, and still are in some circumstances, ideal for keeping technical infrastructure out of the way of creating complex solutions to elegantly address the business needs of all sized interests.   The biggest caveat (or best feature, depending on what side of the desk you're sitting at) with the SaaS/ASP model was the overhead they introduced to terminating your contract; when all your eggs are in someone else's basket, they've got some leverage when you need those eggs somewhere else. This new-ish wave of cloud computing (I love buzz words) has effectively established a middle ground: you can own your data without owning your hardware, albeit introducing a need for technical staff to pull all the cords and levers to get your blimp off the ground.  What does this mean for agencies like Molecular? We fill that need for expertise in getting our clients' dreams into the skies, and with a new slew of infrastructural options to build upon, we're able to provide more choices and, ideally, better-fitting options to our clients, and to stay in the picture to meet their needs and steer their business forward as their enterprise floats in the cloud.]]>