Tie-Up to Train Experts in 'Cloud Computing' to Develop New Online Services

30 July 2008

The Straits Times

Section: News

By: Alfred Siew

Some 60 experts here will be trained in the new field of 'cloud computing', in a tie-up involving technology giants Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo and researchers in Singapore, Germany and the United States.

The aim is to build up expertise on new online services, ranging from the management of customer data to analysis of social trends, that will be delivered over the Internet in the next few years.

These services, which used to run only on computer servers set up in companies and university campuses, can now be accessed remotely on a large pool of 'shared' computer servers linked anywhere on the Internet.

This means computer resrouces can be shared among more users, cutting costs.

This new way of harnessing computer storage and number crunching is being developed by almost all big technology firms, including the partners in the new tie-up as well as bigwigs like Google, which famously runs its search services on hundreds of thousands of PCs hooked up on a network.

The tie-up announced late on Tuesday will enable researchers to develop more online services based on cloud computing, so called because it accesses the Internet, which is often drawn as a cloud in computer network diagrams.

Six excellence centres - in the US, Germany and Singapore - will be set up to do this.

In Singapore, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) expects to work on as many as 45 projects, with 15 of them being global collaborations.

The concept of sharing computing resources over a network is not new, but proponents say this time broadband networks are faster and more reliable, making it more feasible.

IDA assistant chief executive Khoong Hock Yun told reporters on Wednesday that that it hopes to encourage more companies to take up cloud computing.

He said a florist, for example, can tap on the technology, by paying a montly fee to run a customer database on the Net instead of forking out an upfront fee for a dedicated server to do the same job.

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