Last week Nati Shalom visited my company to present Gigaspaces and his understanding of what is meant by Cloud.
Interestingly we got to the Pay for Use paradigm.
At the moment I don’t have a car but rather I use the services of GreenWheels.nl or ConnectCar.nl when I want to travel around Amsterdam, NL.
Greenwheels
Both these providers offer a car on a pay as use service with a small monthly contract charge. The fees are divided over time, kilometer usage and petrol per kilometer used. When I don’t need a car I don’t pay. Great.
In the IT world we have the same concept offered by companies such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing. This is getting to be very popular with my clients especially for short term usage in test environments. Also based on a per usage model, a fixed fee per hour based on the size of machine. Again when I no longer need the machine I don’t pay. I can scale up to use multiple machines and of course I have to pay per machine used but it is simple. A lot of clients have difficultly achieving this in their own IT department.
