The Cloud Service Provider's Guide to the Amazon Kindle Fire

One month in, I’m still loving my Amazon Kindle Fire. And I have a hunch that maybe — just maybe — a lot of TalkinCloud readers found their own Amazon tablets under their trees on Christmas Eve. I thought it might be helpful to go over how a few vendors are bringing some enterprise expertise to the Kindle Fire’s already-considerable cloud play, and make a few recommendations of my own.

Hosted messaging provider Intermedia was the first company to bring its offering to the Amazon Kindle Fire. At the time of that announcement, Intermedia cited huge growth in the tablet market at large and the rising consumerization trend in IT, especially in the SMB space. And with so many new Kindle Fires coming online with Christmas behind us, Intermedia’s foresight may well pay off for customers and users alike.

Later, cloud security specialist Symplified announced its identity and access management (IAM) solution will soon be Kindle Fire-compatible. To be more specific, Symplified’s trademark single sign-on (SSO) portal will be getting a Kindle-optimized version in January 2012.

Finally (at least thus far), VMware released a version of its popular VMware View virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) client for the Kindle Fire. For cloud service providers running a VMware shop, that’s potentially a huge boon for many of the same reasons cited above: it means it should be a relative snap to get a customer’s new tablet up and running.

There are some other partner-friendly applications available on the Kindle Fire’s Amazon Appstore, including Box (cloud storage/sync), Quickoffice Pro (productivity) and LogMeIn Ignition (remote desktop).

In short: Yes, the Amazon Kindle Fire may be designed primarily with media consumption in mind. But like its pricier forebear, the Apple iPad, partners, users and vendors alike are finding a surprising amount of enterprise usability in the $199 tablet.