Developing product demos or helping pre sales/services team put the demos together is a common task performed by product managers Many enterprises use a private cloud for hosting product demos. They have dedicated teams that performs this function with help from product managers. However, these clouds are geared for internal audience and thus limits product managers from testing new ideas/concepts with their core focus groups/user communities. Exposing new functionality (beta program, technical previews etc ) via internal demo infrastructure is complicated and usually is a bureaucratic process (multiple IT approvals) in large organizations.
Src:http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Public Cloud offerings can simplify this entire process. Cloud infrastructure can be used for demo, beta programs, end user studies etc. Vendors that offer "platform as a service" could be used to install, configure and showcase the products. There are quite a few vendors who offer these cloud services. Amazon Simple Storage (S3), Simple DB, EC2 would be a good starting point. Amazon EC2 provides a virtualized computing environment. It offers the pre packaged virtual appliances (DB, OS, App Servers etc) bundled in a native format (Amazon Machine Image format) which could be commissioned on as needed basis and configured with your applications. The "pay as you use” model makes it easy to justify the investment for your product portfolio. Try your beta / release candidate/ sneak previews with Amazon EC2.
