American Idol: Cloud Computing

Tonight I watched the inaugural broadcast of “American Idol,” auditioning in Boston for the 2010 season. I was amazed to see hundreds of hopefuls and their friends and families gathering in Gillette Stadium for a chance to be heard by audition professionals and maybe even by the judges themselves. It’s a great opportunity to jump-start a singing career.

Cloud computing reminds me just a little of winning “American Idol.” Cloud computing clearly rose to the top of IT media attention, analyst recommendations, business and IT awareness in 2009, and now it’s slated for a concert tour that will reverberate for decades. The winning artists include all cloud vendors, researchers, educators, analysts, journalists, bloggers, tweeters, investors, and ultimately IT professionals and end users who use the cloud-based instruments at their disposal to create stellar solutions and performances.

If you are going to audition thousands of singers nationwide and narrow the final competition to 36, you definitely need a vetting process. Similarly, due to the low barriers to entry provided by cloud computing itself (infrastructure and platform as a service), many new cloud-based solutions are entering the market and will be vetted.

Like the judges of “American Idol,” I'm delighted to showcase these winners:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

What will be your vetting process for the many cloud solutions at your disposal? What types of stellar solutions do you want to create in the clouds this year?