Cloud Computing Gone Native

摘要

The punch line came about 20 minutes into the demo. Osman Kent, CEO and co-founder of Numecent, showed a mischievous smile as he clicked off the last of his PowerPoint slides. "You've just seen a PowerPoint presentation," he said. "But I don't have PowerPoint installed on my machine." What he had was a thin client, showing a list of applications he was running remotely. PowerPoint was listed in that registry. Then it dawned on me. The presentation I just saw was also a demo. It was running on Nu-mecent's cloud-streaming technology, dubbed NaaS (Native-as-a-Service). Kent was in San Francisco in July, part of his tour to promote NaaS. We met at a gourmet coffee stand in the Mission, the Bohemian district where unorthodox ideas are universally encouraged. Kent described NaaS as a "white-label cloud-paging platform." NaaS is a play on the familiar terms SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service).