The Wall Street Journal reports that Google and IBM are spending between $20-$25 million on hardware, software and services on various college campuses for the research and development on cloud computing. Cloud computing which has been generating a lot of interest from tech giants such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Google, enables multiple software applications to run parallel with each other. These increases the software’s processing power and capabilities that enables resource sharing among different data centers.
Starting with some 400 computers on selected U.S. campuses, IBM and Google plans to expand this hardware into around 4,000 scattered on different location. These computers will be available from six universities such as University of Washington in Seattle, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Stanford, UC at Berkeley and University of Maryland.
The collaboration plan started when Google’s Eric Schmidt and IBM’s Samuel Palmisano met at the Google office and they found out that they have similar views and interest on cloud computing.
Palmisano said that combining forces with Google on the cloud computing development plan would certainly result in a powerful force that would come out with something significant for the benefit of both companies and the software application industry as well.
Although both companies did not specifically gave a hint that their team up is a possible preparation for a battle against rival Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, which also has their own cloud computing program, it is very obvious that IBM and Google’s partnership is lethal partnership that could very well pose a threat to Microsoft and HP’s cloud computing programs. HP is banking on the millions of Google Apps users, while Google believes that HP’s pool of expert programmers could very well serve both companies to gain significant grounds on the cloud computing technology.
