Will Amazon enter the CAE industry?

I really enjoy listening to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. He thinks out of the box and it has been proven time and again that he knows how to make things happen. I have to admit that I only understand a small portion of what he is saying regarding the scalability of Amazon etc.

But I stumbled on an article in this month's Wired magazine on Amazon Web Services (AWS). There was a reference to "cloud computing". Essentially it allows start-ups, developers etc. to develop the next best thing while utilizing the massive computation and hardware resources of Amazon. They have dumped close to $2B into the IT infrastructure. Yeah, B=billion!!!

So, this seems like a variation of ASP's (Application Service Providers) or something that could rival Google Apps. This idea has been around for quite some time, but until recently broadband accessibility was in its infancy. This is changing rapidly. It will not be in the distant future that we will be connected all the time, everywhere we go.

Web based computing for engineers is not too far behind. Some companies already offer this service for a small select % of their users. However, the process is too clunky, model sizes are too large and the amount of user interaction is too high. I firmly believe that this will evolve in the near future, drastically. It is already happening on the PDM/PLM side of the world. Take Arena Solutions, for example. They coin their technology, "on demand".

I am looking forward to the day when Upfront CFD is available as an online app. The computing can be done "in the clouds". Allows for really large models to run really fast. Would be kind of odd to do your engineering design via Amazon? But, I think it will only be a matter of time before one of the big boys gets involved in CAE. Whether it be Amazon, Microsoft, Apple - whoever. Personally, I hope to never have to deal with these monster companies. But, I would love to leverage some of their technology to make our lives a bit easier.