Unless you have been visiting outer space or had your head buried deep down in the sand lately, you have by now heard of the term cloud computing. Cloud computing can be defined as service-based computing, where a company buys software or storage as a service (SaaS) from an internal or external provider.

There are many good examples of cloud computing in action these past years, such as e-mail from either Microsoft(hotmail), Yahoo or Google(gmail). Instead of running your own mail servers, you simply allow your employees to use the services provided by those companies to eliminate the capital costs of doing it yourself. You may not have complete control, or get everything your heart desires in a mail solution, but the price sure is right. It will be interesting to see how long these companies can go without charging for these services. Another example is Windows Live, with Windows Live Messenger maybe one of the most used of such applications. It’s not completely hosted in the clouds, because you have a client you download and install, but you can also use the Windows Live Web Messenger which is such an app!

Another “Software as a Service” cloud company is SalesForce.com, which provides software to manage customer relations management (CRM) and sales campaigns. Not having to build out the infrastructure for these applications internally can save big money, and enable the people in the IT department to focus on delivering new customer facing applications which impact the bottom line.

The desire for companies to reduce costs and focus IT on core business applications which can increase profits, productivity of the companies employees and last but maybe most importen the shareholders value brings us to the killer apps for the cloud.

So what is this killer app, which app is a killer app in the Cloud? I have a good suggestion, what about iTunes, let’s face it, we are flooding over with ipods,ipod touches and iphones. The one thing I hate with iTunes is every time I change my computer or reinstall it. If I had had my iTunes app in the cloud, this would be simple for me, I cloud hook my iPhone up from any place at any time and have no problems. Yes, you cloud do this with a Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp in the Clouds like the one that Amazon EC2, they offer XenApp, but not XenDesktop to my knowledge yet that is… but what if I cloud have iTunes as a standalone app in the cloud? Now that would be something!

Other killer apps that come to mind is what ever big vendor flavour you may have of innvoice systems, these systems like Agresso, Visma or other needs big infrastructure to work, like salesforce you could have this in the cloud and save the same money and manpower.

Please, if you have any suggestions to killer apps for the clouds please drop a comment!