I’ve always been a member of the school of thought that says that Governments
should keep out of areas that private businesses play in. That said there are
cases where a focused provision of services by Governments can prove an enabler
to a countries businesses, and by extension the economy.
A good example of a positive project is that facilitated by Singapore’s
Infocomm Development Authority (IDA). The IDA has facilitated the creation of Alatum, a grid-computing
platform that includes computing power, storage and software applications on a
pay-per-use, on-demand and online basis.
The IDA has built a consortium of an entire host of hardware, software and
networking companies to aggregate many different products under the Alatum
umbrella.
A couple of interesting quotes come from two of the consortium players in
Alatum. From Singapore Computing Systems (SCS);
SCS is pleased to launch Alatum as the grid computing platform with the
widest offerings of software, computing power, storage and bandwidth on demand
services, and backed by proven global grid players. We are also encouraged by
the strong signups from local independent software vendors as well as enterprise
customers so far. We hope more will take advantage of Alatum’s offerings, and as
the platform means in Latin, to provide wings to help companies take flight in
their business.
and from HP
HP sees the next wave of technology being driven by a new model of computing
called cloud computing. Businesses will increasingly access a wide range ‘cloud
services’ available on-demand on the Internet. Alatum services are an apt
introduction to the promise of cloud services, and HP is excited to be part of
this new paradigm of services provisioning
Alatum is specifically targeting the SMB sector, and intends to give
businesses without individual IT infrastructure, the ability to mix and match
their computing, application and storage requirements, all under the Alatum
umbrella.
It’s a logical move for the Singaporean government – it gives its growing businesses a local source of the IT tools they need, and hopefully does a lot of the heavy lifting for them so they can go on with the business of being in business. Particularly timely as for an economy as dependent on financial services as Singapore is – in these troubled times growing other businesses is a smart move.
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