"We've all heard of public, private, and hybrid clouds, but what happens when you connect a giant data center on a closed network and sell your cloud services exclusively to a select group of businesses with shared needs?" asks Ken Jennings (yes, the former "Jeopardy" champ). The answer is the "community cloud," which is not quite a hybrid cloud, but more of a specialized cloud available strictly for member businesses.
The NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) Technologies has built one of the first such community clouds -- targeted at the financial sector, obviously -- called the Capital Markets Community Platform, which provides all member companies with the horsepower needed for the billions of transactions per day they make, but its appeal is more than just raw computing capability.
To set itself apart from other cloud platforms, the Capital Markets Community Platform also provides specialized services, apps, and analytics to suit the particular needs of its customers, with the idea it's not a cloud that users have to bend to their needs, it's a cloud built specifically with their needs in mind. Members of the community cloud benefit from the fact that the cloud provider knows its customers' space -- how they conduct business, their particular needs, their regulatory environment, their security requirements -- very well.
This story, "The 4th wave of cloud computing will be vertical," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Keep up with the latest tech videos with the InfoTube blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.