A tale of two clouds: Oracle-on-Amazon vs. Salesforce.com

It's all been very exciting in The Cloud lately!
I had actually planned this post to cover my visit to Cloudforce London which took place on 8th Sept 2010 but I only just got round writing and the cloud discussion has already moved on to something far far more interesting. That is, the competing visions of cloud computing from Marc Benioff's Salesforce.com and Larry Ellison's Oracle.

"Beware of the false cloud!" was the cry of Marc Benioff in his engaging keynote at Cloudforce London. Benioff announced his "cloud computing test" where he said cloud computing:

• Requires no additional hardware or software
• Is democratic - that is being able to offer the same solution to large and small customers
• Is multi-tenant

It's got serious cloud appeal

Anyone who knows anything about delivering IT solutions will have heard of cloud computing by now. Since the initial rumblings from the salesforce.com office back in the early noughties, the promised dream of cloud computing has been well publicised even while real offerings were pretty scarce. You might be excused then, for thinking that cloud computing is going to follow the many over-hyped and charred trails of other "hot" ideas in terms of visible impact to businesses. You would be very wrong with that conclusion.

While a lot has been written about cloud computing it is only now that the model is really providing enterprise-level alternatives to businesses. The options are now mature enough to prompt even the largest slumbering enterprises to raise one eyelid and take a look. The Google Atmosphere event that took place in April this year is a case in point. Around 300 business executives (many of those CIOs) assembled at the Googleplex to hear leaders in the IT industry share real examples of enterprise adoption of cloud solutions. One such speaker was Walt Oswald, CIO of Motorola who said: