In our latest podcast I talk with Armando Fox and Dave Patterson, two of the RAD Lab team behind the recently released Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing.

The Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (RAD Lab) at the University of California, Berkeley – sponsored by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Sun – is well connected to the companies and research shaping the Cloud Computing space, and their report is intended to offer a coherent view of the opportunities being created now and in the future.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Amazon Web Services
• Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF)
• Larry Ellison on Cloud Computing (as reported by the Wall Street Journal
• Google App Engine
• James Hamilton’s paper on Cloud Computing costs (PDF)
• Microsoft Azure
• The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View From Berkeley
• Richard Stallman on Cloud Computing (as reported by The Guardian)
• Washington Post analysis of Hillary Clinton’s travel, powered by Amazon

This conversation was recorded on Tuesday 17 February, 2009.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

In our latest podcast I talk with Jeff Hardy, Vice President of Business Operations at SmarterTools. We talk about SmarterTools and discuss a process of due diligence that the company pursued late in 2008 whilst seeking a Cloud hosting provider to support their latest product.

During the conversation, we refer to the following resources;

• Amazon Web Services
• Azure
• Cloud Computing – Challenges, Benefits and the Future blog post
• Mike Culver, Amazon
• EF Data Corp.
• Google App Engine
• Honeywell
• Parallels Hosting Summit
• PubCon
• Rackspace
• Salesforce
• Seeing Through the Fog – The Current State of Cloud Computing from an Independent Development Perspective presentation (PDF)
• SmarterTools, Inc.
• SmarterTrack

This conversation was recorded on Friday 23 January, 2009.

For other Talis podcasts in this Nodalities series, see here. To subscribe to updates from all of Talis’ podcast series, see here.

Here on Nodalities we tend to focus upon discussion of the Semantic Web, with an emphasis on the Web bit.

In our writing, as in our coding work inside the company, we remain very conscious that the Linked Data mantra we have taken to heart is part of a broader social, economic and technological picture. The technologies of the Semantic Web stack, too, are just components in a broader toolkit that must be used in building real applications and services that will scale to meet genuine business requirements now and in the future.

Cloud Computing is receiving a lot of press at the moment, doubtless aided by Microsoft’s entry into the space with Azure. Interestingly, it is also possible to detect a shift in the language of Cloud Computing’s enthusiasts that resonates increasingly strongly with some of our own observations. No longer ‘just’ a cheap, responsive and scalable adjunct to the corporate data centre, Cloud Computing services are finally being perceived as key drivers toward the Web of Data; even champions of the old model such as Salesforce now see enabling third party access to corporate data as a core aspect of their value proposition.

In a post here, I’ve tried to explore this in a little more detail. The worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web are moving closer together, and some fusion of the two appears inevitable.

I’d welcome your thoughts.