The non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced on Monday what everyone has known for a long time - that the U.S. economy is in a recession. As the economy and stock market spiraled downward over the past year, at least one thing on the rise was "Cloud Computing" as a technology meme. (Of course, the phrase "technology meme" is favored since it sounds so much better than "hype" ;-> ) As is the case with these technology memes, the definition of the particulars is seldom precise. However, the reason for the increased number of conversations around cloud computing is easy to understand -- Under current economic conditions, flexible, Internet-accessible technology and services are going to be in many cases much more attractive alternatives to building, buying, or managing infrastructure or business capabilities directly.

As the phrase is broadly used, "cloud computing" encompasses concepts such as "software as a service" (last year's meme?). However, you also see the concept used in a narrower sense to refer to a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are accessed as services through publicly available APIs. These services can fulfill basic infrastructure needs such as storage or virtual servers (Amazon's S3 and EC2 being the best-known examples) or they can provide conceivably any other type of business functionality ranging from something tiny and specific (an address validation service) to something like the Force.com Platform that enables a wide-range of complex business functionality/capability to be built on top of the main Salesforce application.

But of course, none to which I refer is new. The architectural approaches are not new and neither are the services that I mention as examples. What is new is wrapping these up within the cloud computing meme.

Beyond the Hype, A New Focus on APIs

While the cynical might look at this as merely swapping last year's buzz words for this year's, many (me included) are buying into the notion that the latest economic earthquake, taken with other trends, will result in an additional and accelerated "tectonic shift" in the way enterprises fulfill a wide-variety of business capabilities, including HR management functions.

The other key trend that also is contributing to this shift is the growing number of vibrant developer communities that offer a seemingly non-stop pipeline of creative applications using social networking APIs. This gets to the issue I really want to examine over the next dozen posts or so. Along with the rise of the cloud computing meme is much renewed interest and thinking about APIs. This is both a technical topic (what makes a good API?) as well as a topic that many HR service providers are trying to figure out in terms of business strategy and growth.

Don't these sound like fun topics? More to follow on both of these aspects of APIs.