Showing posts with label Larry Ellison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Larry Ellison. Show all posts

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Is cloud just hype or is it here to stay?

Just this week I was asked by my team for input on five questions. In this post, I’ve written-up my answer to the first.


1) Is cloud just hype or is it here to stay?

There’s no doubt that cloud is here to stay. Major enterprises have put down serious investments in this space including my own employer a major consulting firm who is making significant investment of time and skills in the cloud.

It is easy to see why people feel that Cloud might be all hype. Since the initial simple web-based CRM offering from SFDC announced at the start of the last decade, the promised dream of cloud computing has been well publicised while real offerings were pretty scarce. There’s no wonder that many people taking a look at the offerings back then, may have concluded that there was a lot of talk and not much “behind the curtains”. While a lot has been written about cloud computing over the past years, it is only now that the model is really providing enterprise-level alternatives to businesses. There have been some significant developments in 2010 that lead me to conclude that options are now real enough to prompt all enterprises to 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. And recently at

Sunday, September 26, 2010

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