While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing.

The article, written by Stephen T. Arnold, concludes that: "Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement....[T]his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot."

Stephen E. Arnold, who blogs at arnoldit.com, monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries, as he says, "to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets."

In his article he writes:

"What impressed me is that this patent document, like other recent Google applications, makes use of an infrastructure as platform. The computational and input output tasks are simply not an issue. Google pretty clearly feels it has the horsepower to handle ad hoc translation in real time without worrying about how data are shoved around within the system. As a result, higher order applications that were impossible even for certain large government agencies can be made available without much foot dragging. I find this remarkable."

Read the article in full here.