New clouds floated by NetSuite and SAS

NetSuite's SuiteCloud launch and the SAS Institute's announcement of a 38,000-square-foot cloud computing facility followed the day after Sun's introduction on Wednesday of its own cloud initiative.

NetSuite's SuiteCloud, rolled out on Thursday, is a cloud platform in a similar vein to Salesforce's Force.com. SuiteCloud offers a developer's network; a program for building applications and add-ons that will work with NetSuite's software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment; and an online marketplace for posting developers' SuiteCloud applications.

Force.com and SuiteCloud, however, both require developers to learn proprietary programming languages. Sun's new cloud environment, on the other hand, will rely on the much more widely used Java language.

While cloud platform services spare developers from concern about underlying infrastructure, cloud infrastructures afford more customizability, according to Sun's Tucker.

The new $70 million, 38,000-square-foot cloud computing facility announced by SAS, also on Thursday, will provide plenty of physical cloud infrastructure, but only for expansion of SAS's own OnDemand, a SaaS platform supporting about a different different application areas, including education, Web analytics, and business intelligence.

Not to be left out of this week's string of cloud announcements, Salesforce.com on the same day announced a new subscription-based training program for business customers using applications running on Force.com.

Earlier this week, Lew Tucker, Sun's CTO for cloud computing, described the new Sun Open Cloud Platform as both a cloud "infrastructure," along the lines of competitor Amazon.com's EC2, and a cloud "platform" in the same category as cloud services from Salesforce.com and Google.