Cloud computing for enterprises, work it through your head

Here are some great quotes from a Hiperware white paper I just read:

In combination, cluster computing and multi-core computers have the potential to provide unprecedented performance, scalability and reliability for enterprise software.

Much of the significant benefit evident in the ideology of multicore and cluster computing -- lower costs, higher availability and scalability -- is effectively negated by the cost, time, risk and complexity involved in developing and deploying software that can run on these systems.

... What hinders businesses from taking advantage of multicore and clustered hardware is the lack of a simple means – such as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) method – so that software developers can quickly develop, test and deploy
enterprise software on these systems.

By taking the engineering complexity away from multi-core and cluster-computing, Hiperware Platform makes it significantly easier for developers to write software that can be partitioned across multiple computers or CPU-cores or virtual machines.

The new paper goes on to detail several enterprise computing use-case scenarios that show how cloud computing architectures and methodologies, if enterprise developers can exploit them, will rapidly advance cost-benefits.

Cloud computing is not just for Google and Amazon, folks. It will be synonymous with high performance and then good old enterprise mission-critical computing, in all its forms, in the coming years.

The new neat trick will be managing how the clouds and SOAs relate and interact. And that spells more integration as a service, and more federated policy management and enforcement as a service. It's a whole new abstraction for middleware.

Cloud computing could be the next big opportunity for middleware.