IBM WebSphere users who use the widgetry on Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud as IBM arranged last week may miss the extra oomph they usually get from IBM's gravity-bound DataPower acceleration appliance, which reportedly can't make the climb to EC2.

Not only is DataPower encased in an earth-bound piece of hardware, it's a proprietary ASIC-based piece of hardware to boot, according to DataPower competitor Vordel, whose DataPower-replacing XML Gateway and acceleration products happen to work on EC2. So WebSphere-on-EC2 users need not be unhappy with their performance.

Anyway Vordel says there are benefits to cloud computing but finds it's less clear is how an organization can connect its internal systems up to a cloud-based infrastructure in a secure, managed manner. So, it figures there's a place for application gateways to act as "onramps" from the local network up to the cloud.

There now that that problem's solved maybe somebody can explain why IBM would give the cloud store away to a bookseller like Amazon.

Amazon, by the way, continues its silence on AWS revenue and growth and what percentage of its overall revenue the cloud represents. Heck, it won't even say where its data centers are or how many people it's got running them.