October is pretty active month in the cloud computing space, with two big events happening this week that caught my eye: the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and the Cloud Adoption Arena virtual event. The Web 2.0 conference is about more than just the Internet; it’s evolved to focus on technologies & business models – particularly cloud computing. The Cloud Adoption Arena is taking a hard look at how the difficult year for the economy is actually spurring the adoption of cloud strategies. Quite simply, I love these kinds of conversations.

But all this talk about where the cloud is going got me thinking about where we’ve come from. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago that I was talking about getting beyond the fluff of cloud computing, and eWEEK was asking if we can “bet on the cloud.” The evolution of cloud computing allows you to draw a number of parallels to similar technologies. Living and breathing virtualization, I can’t help but feel some déjà-vu when I hear the main issues of cloud computing discussed (both pros and cons): it’s incredible for efficiency, flexibility and scalability of your business, but what about manageability, security and overall maturity of the market? These are all things we’re saying about virtualization just a few short years ago.

But, like virtualization, the major players stepped up to drive cloud computing forward. VMware launched their vSphere operating system – a major step to addressing those concerns over manageability & security. Microsoft has launched their Azure platform, which helps simplify the entire development cycle of the cloud – from web developers to ISVs to system integrators. And, from a standards perspective, groups like the Cloud Security Alliance and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) have taken control of this market to help ensure its evolving in a responsible way.

And, at AMD, we’ve been addressing the infrastructure needs. We now have a Six-Core AMD Opteron EE processor available that draws an ACP of 40W, as well as the “Kroner” server platform to further address energy efficiency. These low-power, highly scalable, fully-featured solutions help cloud providers operate an extremely efficient, highly utilized and dense computing environment.

The same way that AMD was ahead of the curve in developing on-chip virtualization features like Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and focusing on low-power server processors to ensure a highly utilized physical machine was saving energy costs – AMD is out in front with cloud computing again. The conversation has evolved from “will this catch on” to “how can we shift our business model to adapt,” and it’s conferences like the two happening this week that are instrumental in driving that discussion.

What do you think? Are we finally beyond the fluff?

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD.

Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.