Run an entire enterprise — including sophisticated IT — from the cloud? Just a couple of weeks again, I posted Ismael Ghalimi’s list of all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Ismael cited Dabble DB as an example of a cloud database that can provide such functionality.

Since that posting, Amazon Web Services announced a “limited beta” of a new service called SimpleDB.

SimpleDB, Amazon says, is a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provide the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.

Amazon charges for SimpleDB services on a per-use basis, which initially is priced at 14 cents per machine-hour consumed. Data transfer rates range from 10 cents per gigabyte for data transferred to the database to 13-18 cents per gigabyte for outgoing data. Structured data storage is $1.50 per gigabyte a month.

Cloud computing has interesting implications for enterprises in the long run. Already, cloud computing appears to be leveling the playing field for many start-ups, helping to basically avoid the necessity of any enterprise IT investment at all.

For example, online podcasting service GigaVox Media, an Amazon Web Services customer, reportedly spent just over $80 in its first two months of business on storage, messaging and processing. (I went into some detail about this case and cloud computing over at my ZDNet blog.)

GigaVox uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store files from podcasts, videocasts, and advertising images. The alternative would have been to buy disks and storage arrays to provide back-up storage, which typically range in price between $2,500 to $20,000 for network-attached storage units. GigaVox would also have had to invest in switches and hubs, as well as the expertise to put it all together and manage on an ongoing basis.

The company then adopted Amazon EC2 to fulfill its transcoding and automated show-assembly needs, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to serve as the glue between these services monitoring EC2 server instances, queuing transcoding requests, and issuing instructions for program processing. As Doug Kaye, co-founder and CTO of GigaVox, put it in a Webcast:

“Even if we could have done this with a cluster of outsourced managed servers, which still wouldn’t have been as scalable, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars more,” said Kaye. “We didn’t have to buy a single server. We didn’t have to spend any time in a ‘cage.’”

Cloud computing services such as SimpleDB are more likely to catch on among smaller companies and startups. However, Oracle and Microsoft have little to fear at this point among enterprise customers suddenly dropping their onsite databases installations in favor of cloud databases. In fact, open source databases such as MySQL may suffer the most.

Along with small businesses, the cloud databases will most likely start to catch hold among individuals or departments within organizations that need to pull something together quickly, without the necessary budget machinations. But as with all new paradigms, cloud services may start at the peripheries of enterprises and slowly be absorbed into more and more functions. That’s the route open source is taking now, and Microsoft technologies took in the 1990s.