Online retail giant Amazon is providing financial firms with an inexpensive way to rent compute power cheaply--Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The company says that customers can get set up on the service quickly, drawing on vast resources while paying only for what they use. Part of its Web services business, Amazon released a beta version of the cloud offering in August 2006.
Geva Perry, chief marketing officer of GigaSpaces, a New York- and Herzliya, Israel-based developer of high-capacity computer architectures, says Amazon's on-demand service is a good choice for firms whose activity has peaks and valleys. Some organizations have responded to business volatility by over-provisioning their computing resources, which is costly, he notes. As an alternative, GigaSpaces customers can, in ten minutes or less, start running their applications on Amazon's cloud.
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