The cloud presents midmarket service providers in the technology space as an invisible online mall of autonomic boutique development tool vendors whose products; consumers use in the cloud as part of a diversified but dynamic pool of talents. The pool is composed of middleware companies, contract developers and integrators as well as web design firms to mention but a few of the skill sets and talent descriptions.
Tens of thousands of companies are lined up to offer such services via Amazon, MSN, and Google. Other providers are emerging to compete for the heretofore difficult-to-target small to midmarket businesses. Their goal is to get those companies to stay in the cloud, consuming (and remitting payments for) their portion of the pool indefinitely.
The benefits to those companies that participate in cloud computing depend on their individual business strategies as much as they do the technology behind cloud computing. Business is an act of ambition wherein responsible parties must correlate the assets and resources available to them to those potential transactions that can be conducted successfully. Changes to this equation that provide the entrepreneur or small business administrator with a more competitive stance and greater operational efficiencies are generally rare and usually very expensive to implement.
The More Competition, the Business
In theory, the nature of cloud computing introduces greater numbers of collaborative but competitive solutions. Each consuming company makes a separate determination but those implementations, as they become possible to execute in the cloud, are directly related to the prior cultivating decision of the cloud’s pool of participants.
The cloud’s intermediary performance functions to convey three indispensable services to interconnected consumers, merchants and or service providers.
1. Authentication at the browser interface
2. Security setup and tear down
3. Validation of the authenticated parties
All of the Internet browsers serve the user interface function. The web servers supplied by one or another cloud computing enabled pool participants service consumer requests managed by administrative frameworks such as AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. Therein, the parties to a transaction are introduced and the opportunity to build an instance for a trust of a secure temporary condition is presented. Optional components for modifying the transaction may be introduced to allow further flexibility in the conduct of complex transactions involving remote connections to other pool servicers’ offerings required to perform regulated transactions.