Coming soon—the App Cloud? A listing on Apple's job site sniffed out by Apple watchers Wednesday suggests that the company is eager to add bodies to a "small team" working on the "future of cloud services at Apple."
Just what those cloud services are wasn't stated in the listing for a full-time cloud systems software engineer with "experience in scalable and extensible systems" first spotted by Apple Insider.
The job requires "experience programming to and deploying on RDBMS systems" and will involve plenty of work on Apple's "core backend platform frameworks and systems."
Apple's future in the cloud is predicted to include forays into everything from a streaming video subscription service with an accompanying "iTV-like device" tipped by Jeffries & Co. analyst Peter Misek to a total overhaul of Apple's existing MobileMe storage and e-mail service that would scrap MobileMe's $99 yearly subscription fee and make it free.
Both the cloud-based video service and the MobileMe ramp are rumored to be "coming soon"—perhaps as early as this month. If so, the job listing would indicate that Apple either needs a last-minute troubleshooting cloud specialist or else has even more cloud expansion in mind for the future.
Clues point to the latter and a big hint towards Apple's plans for the cloud lies in North Carolina. That's where Apple has built a huge new data center for MobileMe and a possible new cloud-based iTunes service. What's more, the company plans to build a second giant data center in North Carolina right next to the first on land it also owns, Misek said in an interview with The International Business Times, and could have plans for more data centers in the U.S. and Europe.
One thing Apple seems unlikely to do—at last in the near-term—is to emulate a Google or an Amazon, both of which have business-targeted Platform-as-a-Service-type cloud offerings in addition to their more established consumer-facing enterprises.
Apple seems much more likely to just stick with its loyal consumer base as it grows its cloud presence. On the other hand, when you start building massive data centers, you tend to find yourself with excess capacity—why not sell it to whoever's buying?