I'm currently in Seoul South Korea for a variety of meetings with SK government and technology industry folks.

Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting with the largest South Korean mobile provider.

During the meeting they described a great potential use case for telecom focused IaaS cloud offerings. Basically what they've done is created an on demand compute infrastructure specifically for their network of mobile application developers.

The service is offered free of charge to their partners and provides all the tools necessary for the development, testing and deployment of mobile applications specifically tailored to their particular mobile network environment. This may be one of the best use cases for semi-private cloud I've heard of.

In a sense they're subsidizing the infrastructure costs for mobile application developers they work with. They are basically covering the costs associated with the more routine aspects of mobile app development while also empowering a new and broader group of potential partners by providing a quick and easy way to develop applications for their environment. Another advantage is in gaining a greater pool of potential network specific applications & developers. Very smart.

For me this use of a private partner cloud represents a great example of the opportunities for offering free cloud based IaaS services specifically for your partners, suppliers and best customers. The free to partners model for cloud computing may be the next logical step for cloud computing. Large technology companies like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Oracle and others may start using these partner clouds as part of their channel and developer programs. If you develop for our platform, we'll give you everything you need to do so, free of charge. This could include everything from compute to storage, development to deployment.