Friday, August 7, 2009

Canada Computes in the Cloud

IDC Canada, Canadian subsidiary of the Boston-based IT market research and consulting firm, released a study recently in which it profiles 10 Canadian Cloud Solutions to Watch (IDC #CA4TIW9).

The report profiles some interesting companies with interesting products, including Rypple, which offers an online service for gathering instant and anonymous feedback on just about anything from networks of friends, employees, clients, suppliers, etc.

Cloud computing is of course enormously important, not least because everybody believes it’s important. Never mind that it may raise dire security and privacy concerns and that some of the supposed economic advantages may prove illusory over time.

IDC estimates that by 2012, 9% of spending on IT services worldwide, “including business applications, application development and deployment, system infrastructure software, storage and servers, will be in the Cloud.”

Note that the cloud has now been dignified with capitalization – at least by IDC.

Most of the 10 Canadian Cloud Solutions I’ve checked out so far appear to have some merit, but Rypple stands out. It’s simple, elegant, well presented and – at least to my knowledge – innovative.




The first thing journalists want to know about ground-breaking products like this one is, who if anyone is actually using them and do they deliver the claimed benefits. Rypple can actually answer those questions. It recently posted a bunch of testimonial videos from customers at Vimeo, a – hmmm – cloud-based video distribution service.

Heck, if AfterByte had any followers, I might Rypple them to ask for suggestions on how to improve the blog.

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