I’ve finally got a way to keep my eye on the cloud computing and SaaS reports coming from Gartner, Forrester, Burton Group, and The 451 Group, so if you get lost in the papers these folks are publishing – CloudEnterprise.info’s Analysts category should hopefully be what you need.

Today we’ll have a quick look at the two reports David W. Cearley and David Mitchell Smith published at Gartner on March 10.

I found the first of them – “Key Attributes Distinguish Cloud Computing Services” – quite basic but probably good if you are only getting started with cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service. It talks a little bit about the emergence of cloud computing and then goes into the key characteristics which set it aside from hosting and other earlier technologies:

• Elasticity and scalability,
• Delivery as a service and service boundary serving as the abstraction layer,
• Ability to expose web services,
• Ability to stack one service onto another (e.g. a start-up on top of Amazon EC2),
• Being optimized for cloud environments with multitenancy and other techniques.

The second report – “Cloud Computing Services: A Model for Categorizing and Characterizing Capabilities Delivered From the Cloud” – is kind of going to the next level by trying to suggest an taxonomy of various cloud computing services.

Traditionally, everyone roughly agreed on three main layers of cloud solutions:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – basically raw compute and storage services such as Amazon’s EC2 (Gartner calls it: “System Infrastructure Services”.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS) – higher-level development environments which abstract the underlying technology and provide for scalability and rapid application development such as Google App Engine or salesforce.com’s force.com (Garter’s naming: “Application Infrastructure Service”).

3. Software as a Service (SaaS) – classical online software such as Gmail or salesforce.com (for Gartner, “Application Services”).

But then, the report continues and talks about 4 additional layers of the stack:

4. Information Services – services which process data like Feedburner or Yahoo RSS Feeds.

5. Business Process Services – like advertising and payroll.

6. Ecosystem Management and Security Services – various services not really providing stand-alone value but making other services usable for the enterprise, including management (like RightScale) and security (like OpenID) – I personally found it a bit confusing that services so different in their nature got into the same category.

7. Enabling Technologies – not really publicly exposed services but underlying technology (hardware, OS, etc.) which helps the providers deliver their services.

The report has many more examples in each of the category and provides Gartner’s estimates on when each of them will go through various maturity phases – a very interesting and recommended reading.

Both reports are available for purchase at gartner.com.

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