Today I had a really interesting conversation with my friend and colleague Richard Davis, CEO of Elastichosts a small (but perfectly formed) Cloud Computing company. Richard and I first met when he was a Business Technology consultant at McKinsey & Co and I was his client at BT. We worked together on a major project that looked at Data Center economics in some detail.

As a result of that engagement (and a few others along the way) Richard decided that data centers should be used to house computing clouds that could be delivered and torn down in seconds in a highly flexible way. He and a partner, Chris Webb then set out on the task of constructing the cloud operating system they needed to deliver on the vision.

Elastichosts has now delivered a mature, scalable and incredibly easy to use management platform that provides pre-assembled or self configured guest servers. Have a look at the video that demonstrates how cloud computing can be made to look easy: