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Zynga, creator of eight of the IO most popular social networking games on Facebook, is becoming a tech vendor - selling data center capacity on its game hosting platform. That service gives startup game -makers the technology on which to launch and run online games.
Amazon first sparked the infrastructure-as-a-service trend when it started selling its raw cloud computing infrastructure in 2006. But Zynga is the first gaming company to produce an infrastructure uniquely geared to the burgeoning online game industry.
In that way, Zynga's zCloud platform is more akin to the New York Stock Exchange's efforts to sell cloud computing services to financial traders. Both Zynga and NYSE are trying to sell computing services finely tuned to an industry need, selling both computing power and industry-focused software and data.
Zynga has swiftly moved from being highly dependent on Amazon to becoming a competitor. Zynga just 12 months ago had relied on Amazon for 80% of its computing capacity, running only 20% on its own data center capacity. Since then, it has flipped that...