Clouds are on the horizon in the IT industry.

Clouds are on the horizon in the IT industry.

Clouds are forming over the ICT landscape, but these have nothing to do with a downturn in the industry. Rather, cloud computing - or the delivery of ICT products and services over the internet - is the way of the future.

If anything, the trend will shower more revenue on the industry as this new method of accessing computing power enlarges the overall market. And if ICT analyst IDC is right, no breeze is about to get up and blow the cloud away - this will be the prevailing form of ICT service delivery for a couple of decades.

"This is about the IT industry's new model for the next 20 years," says IDC's Vernon Turner, the firm's Boston-based head of enterprise infrastructure, consumer and telecoms research.

Many of the industry's hardware, software and services heavyweights are readying cloud computing offerings and, last month, one of them, Google, announced a deal with the University of Auckland to provide access to applications via the internet to 50,000 students, staff and alumni.

Google is the youngest of the companies Turner names as cloud computing front-runners, but is generally said to be making the running.

Whether that's actually so isn't yet known. IDC is just getting down to the nitty-gritty of measuring the market, and Google won't say what proportion of its revenue comes from cloud computing.

However, the Goliath of internet search claims to have 500,000 business customers worldwide for its internet-delivered Google Apps, and says it is signing new ones at a rate of 3000 a day.

As well as the University of Auckland, Waikato University is also a customer, along with Macquarie University in Australia, and the state of New South Wales, which has done a deal for Google to provide 1.2 million Gmail addresses to school kids. They are among thousands of education customers the company says it has.

Education customers pay nothing for rights to Google Apps Education Edition, which includes email, Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software), a shared calendar, instant messaging, website creation software and the ability to create a customised web home page on the institution's domain.

Commercial customers are charged US$50 ($71) per user, per year.

Initially, says University of Auckland electronic campus manager Matt Cocker, Auckland will be making use of the email, calendar and chat applications, with each user having 7GB of mail storage space.

That should mean an improved service for users, while the university IT department is freed up to focus on supporting the institution's teaching and research activities. Cost savings should follow.