Clearly the buzzword of the moment is cloud computing. Like all buzzwords, there is a fair amount of hype associated with a concept that in reality is little more than the reinvention of hosted computing models around a more dynamic set of services.

The real question, however, is not whether cloud computing will take hold, but rather in what form. Arguably, it's extraordinarily unlikely that one set of cloud services is going to be able to serve all the needs of a customer. Instead, what we're going to see evolve is a more federated approach to cloud computing where the needs of an IT organization are serviced by multiple clouds of computing that need to be appear integrated to the end user.

To accomplish that, the industry as a whole needs to start defining a stronger set of interoperability standards for cloud computing services. Already, the folks at 3tera say they seeing customers ask for rudimentary federated cloud computing services across multiple providers to support disaster recovery plans.

But that's only the first step. As customers increasingly discover that cloud computing has the potential to accelerate their plans to take their business global, the need to integrate multiple cloud computing services around the globe will accelerate.

Furthermore, it's extremely unlikely that any one service will be able to handle all the needs of a customer. What we're already seeing is cloud computing services such as Amazon that tend to specialize in areas such as storage. We'll see similar specialty sets of cloud computing services around, for example, databases and security.

As a first step down this path, 3tera plans to roll out shortly a tool called GlobalView that will not only give customers visibility into the 3tera cloud but will also be extended to include support for services from Amazon and services that will be developed around the V-Cloud technology from VMware.

The next challenge will be how to handle billing across all these integrated sets of services, but the future direction is clear. Federated sets of cloud computing services by the end of 2009 will become an industry norm as the continuing uncertain economic times push customers to embrace cloud computing models as part of an effort to limit both risk and expense using a computing model that is also more agile.