On demand computing, under a variety of brand names, is a hot topic again in financial services, in part because city centre locations favoured by banks are running out of space and power for data centres. IBM, HP and Sun have offerings, but so do companies from outside financial services, such as Amazon. Slight problem there for any mission-critical users – its system went down for eight hours on 20 July, a jump in outage time from February when the system was down for 2 hours.
Not quite ready for prime time, I’d say. Still, the model is an interesting one. Larry Scott, Sun’s former president for financial services told me that in a tour of startup tech companies about the only computer he saw were laptops. Firms were leasing compute power from suppliers like Amazon as they needed it and many planned to run their entire operations on Amazon.
You can find details on the Amazon web site under “For Developers”

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