Apple's cloud efforts could help the company blunt competition from Google, Microsoft, and services like Amazon's cloud-based music player.
Apple may be prepping an "iCloud" service under the codename
"Castle,"
according to blogs digging into the third build of Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" Developer
Preview 2.
Digital
Daily reported April 29 that Apple had bought the iCloud domain name from
Xcerion, a Swedish hybrid-cloud vendor. That information came from unnamed
sources. Current rumors suggest Apple paid $4.5 million for the rights to the
name, although that number remains unconfirmed by the company.
Now, the French Website
Consomac.fr
is reporting references to a Castle service in a build of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion,
the next version of the Mac OS. A sample screen from the April 30 posting
suggests an option for users to upgrade from MobileMe, the company's online
storage service, to Castle.
Apple is certainly taking steps toward deeper cloud
integration with its existing products. In addition to a recent job posting for
a
"Cloud
Systems Software Engineer," the company has constructed a massive data
center in North Carolina that will reportedly help its future cloud efforts.
Meanwhile, the
Green
(Low Carbon) Data Center Blog reported April 13 that Apple had hired away
Kevin Timmons, general manager of Microsoft's Datacenter Services unit;
although Microsoft confirmed that Timmons was moving on, Apple did not return
eWEEK's request for comment.
Apple faces increased competition in the consumer-cloud
arena from the likes of Amazon.com, which recently launched a cloud-based
locker and player for music, and Google, which has serious designs on both
music and e-books. And although Microsoft's current cloud efforts seem primarily
focused on the business-software side of the equation, CEO Steve Ballmer has
suggested that "every one of our products will be engineered to deliver the
full benefits of the cloud."
Robust cloud offerings-particularly ones that allowed users
to save their music, documents and media to an online locker-could help Apple
potentially blunt those threats.
Apple will likely reveal more at this year's Worldwide
Developers Conference, set for June 6-10 in San Francisco. "At this year's
conference, we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS," Philip
Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, wrote
in a
March 28
statement posted on Apple's corporate Website. "If you are an iOS or Mac OS
X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to
miss."
Other sources have also suggested that the next version of
iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, will heavily incorporate the cloud into
its offerings.
"The new iOS will be heavily built around the cloud, and we
could see several new services launch from Apple that take advantage of this,"
read a March 26 report on
TechCrunch.
"But much of the cloud stuff will be talked about first at WWDC."
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