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In conjunction with its S3 storage offering and other Web Services products, ever-expanding Web giant Amazon has launched a beta version of a content delivery network called CloudFront.

The service, which promises “low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments,” uses a global network of edge locations to keep the system humming.

Amazon announced in September its intentions to launch a CDN, with a target date of the end of 2008. It also made clear then that pricing would be consumption-based. Amazon has declared that there is “no minimum fee” for CloudFront; customers pay only for what they use.

There are loads of CDNs out there: it’s an on-demand, business-focused offering for which companies are willing to pay good money. But because Amazon already has a big grip on the cloud with its existing Simple Storage Service, or S3, CloudFront is likely to be a power player from the start.

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Amazon launches content delivery network

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft’s forthcoming Office Web Applications will allow users to create and edit spreadhseets, presentations and Word documents through a browser–but only so long as there is an active Internet connection.

In an interview Monday, Microsoft senior vice president Chris Capossela said that, at least initially, the browser based versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint won’t have an offline mode.

“In the first generation we are certainly looking at having them be connected,” he said. “For offline usage of course the Office suite is incredibly powerful.” (See YouTube video below for his full comments on the matter. Apologies in advance for the bad sound quality.)

Google has been working to add an offline ability to Google Docs, while Zoho was even earlier to add the ability to work within a browser while offline.

Capossela’s comments came following the launch of Microsoft Online, the company’s hosted versions of Exchange and Sharepoint.

Microsoft confirmed at last month’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles that it was bringing to market browser-based versions of its Office applications. The company has said that a technology preview version should be available still this year.

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Office Web Apps won’t work offline

According to Chris Petersen, APAC director of channels at Open Text, it is unlikely that enterprise data will ever go to the cloud due to regulatory issues and bandwidth costs.

In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Petersen gave his outlook on the enterprise future in the cloud.

Despite the fact that many and many more companies warm up towards cloud computing, Petersen insists the organizations will continue to store a large part of data in-house and demand on-premise software. He attributes his reasoning to regulatory compliance and the higher bandwidth costs associated with moving data offsite as substantial barriers to mainstream enterprise adoption of cloud computing technology.

The funny thing is that Petersen’s employer tends to think otherwise, judging by Open Text’s recent move into the Windows Azure cloud by offering a “first-of-its-kind” records management and archiving capability for Microsoft’s new cloud-based operating system Windows Azure. Open Text will incorporate these cloud-based capabilities into its Enterprise Library Services offering early next year.

Records management is a pretty extensive part of any enterprise, often taking up massive amounts of server space. Petersen is making his point only to prove that cloud computing is not a threat to the Enterprise CMS industry players like Open Text because the need to keep thorough records of in-house data will persist, he said.

But we all know his attempt is a futile one. Gartner predicts cloud computing to be one of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 for enterprise-level businesses. SaaS is thriving, CMS market included, as predicted earlier this year.

If anything, today’s customers with tight IT budgets, especially in the SMB sector, will look beyond such expensive solutions as Open Text and explore cloud- or SaaS-based alternatives.

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Enterprise Ain’t Going Into the Cloud?

Adobe Systems wants to have it both ways.

Microsoft’s power with programmers is tethered to desktops and laptops, the vast majority of which run Windows. Google is trying to dominate what it believes is the new frontier, cloud computing, where applications run on the Web. Adobe, though, is trying to run down the middle with a strategy that touches on both domains.

“It’s a balance of the client and cloud together that makes for the most effective applications and the best development,” said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch, who’s planning to speak on the subject in a keynote speech Monday at the company’s Max conference in San Francisco.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Since Adobe’s $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition in 2005, programming technology has been rising in importance within a company that got its start with publishing software such as Photoshop. The technology that brought the two companies together, Flash, will hog the spotlight at the conference.

Flash got its start as a way to give Web pages animations and basic applications such as games, but it’s grown up since then. The Flex technology has given developers a more mature programming model, and the addition of video-streaming abilities to the Flash Player that’s plugged into the vast majority of Web browsers has given Adobe’s technology incumbent status. Who can live online without YouTube?

Adobe is still working on Flash, releasing Flash Player 10, aka Astro, in October. At Max, though, a Flash cousin called AIR–the Adobe Integrated Runtime–will share the stage with the release of version 1.5.

Flash and AIR are key to bridging the cloud-PC gap. For example, Adobe has launched an online Photoshop.com service, where members can upload, edit, and share photos. The site uses Flash to run the processing-intensive editing software on people’s own computers, not Adobe’s servers, Lynch said.

“Our operational costs for hosting that application are much lower than if we had server-side processing,” and users get better performance, Lynch said.

But Flash still lives largely within the browser. Adobe hopes to uproot it with AIR, a “runtime” foundation for housing applications. AIR runs Flash programs but also has a built-in engine for showing Web pages and for running programs written in JavaScript, which is widely used for Web-based applications. And AIR is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and programmers who write AIR applications don’t have to worry about what operating system is on a person’s computer.

But there’s a risk to choosing a hybrid strategy: gains in flexibility often come at the expense of specialization, and specialized applications often work better. Sun Microsystems tried for years to get Java to catch on as a cross-platform runtime, but 13 years after its launch, it has yet to catch on with mainstream computing applications.

Google’s cloud computing is limited by the comparatively feeble abilities of JavaScript running in Web browsers, but extensions such as Gears are bringing some advanced features. But Google gets the advantage of software that’s available from all sorts of computing devices–your own, a friend’s, a kiosk in an airport, your iPhone–as long as you have a network connection. And there’s a natural collaboration component that comes with online applications that matches well with business needs.

Microsoft is moving slowly cloudward, but its cash cows remain Windows and Office. Its software is more powerful and responsive than any Web-based application–as long as you have your PC with you.

AIR applications can take advantage of local computing power, though–and the big new feature of AIR 1.5 is that it uses Flash Player 10, which brings 3D graphics, better text handling, the ability to mix different audio signals, and other abilities that make it a more reasonable competitor to Windows.

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