It has been almost 30 years since USENET defined the network AS the computer. While many may not have known or paid attention to it at the time, USENET has been heralding the era of internet-based services such as Google and Facebook with what is now called Cloud Computing.

Each of these services requires a significant amount of computational grunt, but the work is done in their data centres, not on your PC. In recent years this model of computing has come to be known as cloud computing. Most, if not all, of the computing work happens out the internet – somewhere – as though it is happening in a big computing cloud. Nowadays, the range of services that can be performed in the cloud is growing rapidly, from application hosting and data storage right through to running a company’s entire IT systems, which has been a great assistance in maintaining USENET feeds and the integrity of its newsgroups.

On newsgroups, more evidence has emerged that cloud research and development is a growing worldwide phenomenon. Open Cirrus announced:

At its first annual summit last week in Palo Alto, the collaborative cloud computing research initiative Open Cirrus announced that its membership is expanding. The facility comprises six data-centre sites around the world, provided by its founding partners: HP Research Labs, Intel Research, Yahoo Research and the University of Illinois in the US; the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany; and the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore.

Cloud innovation is currently being driven primarily by the applied research efforts of the world’s cloudy giants: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, powered by technology innovations created by the likes of Cisco, Citrix, IBM, Intel, HP, Sun and VMware. Of course, we should not forget the innovations driven by the many smaller cloud vendors and technology start-ups.

Today, IBM is debuting cloud computing technology targeted at providing businesses with the automation of the consumer Web. Aimed at large enterprises, the technology is formed around the notion of tying cloud services to specific IT tasks. Two initial services announced focus on application development and virtual desktop management. HP also has developed Cloud Assure to help make any moves to cloud models mission critical in nature.

This is pushing everything in the computing stack onto the network, as a service, which profoundly changes the way problems are solved and software is designed. Just about anyone who’s paid attention to the evolution of computing will agree that we’ve been moving in this direction for a long time. No doubt marketers will do their best to make it the next big thing and take advantage of the hype, but it’s no more fad than the internet. It makes sense, and it’s here to stay. Another future defined by USENET.