According to NIST (Liu et al. 2011), a cloud broker is a cloud computing actor that manages use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between many providers and cloud customers.
Whereas many cloud platforms try to lock customers in to their entire suite of products, Spell works with any language framework and lets users plug and play on the platforms of their choice by simply commodifying the hardware.
Other newcomers have posited a contest between many cloud companies offering mix-and- match applications that customers buy, versus incumbents locking customers into a cloud-based "stack" of computing power and applications.
"Many cloud users realize too late that traditional vendor pricing schemes are meant to lock in customer data.
We distinguish between malicious cloud customers and non-customers.
If there was an outage in one cloud, customers could be redistributed among other clouds.
Are cloud customers indemnified for unscheduled downtime?
Many cloud computing issues remain unsettled.
The companies clearly saw the mutual benefit here with Microsoft getting access to the massive Salesforce.com cloud customer base and Salesforce pleasing customers by working more closely with Microsoft tools, which many of its customers are using today.
