Benioff’s Dream: Toppling Microsoft, Oracle, And SAP
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff loves to map out the arc of enterprise IT history during his keynotes, narrating the evolution from mainframe to client-server to the rise of the Internet and on to today. He did it again this week at the company’s packed, 10,000-attendee-strong Cloudforce event in New York. And as he’s been doing all year, he presented social networking and cloud computing as inevitable next steps for IT.
Benioff has adroitly positioned Salesforce.com at the center of both of these trends, but the social part is actually a fairly recent development. The company spent 12 out of its 13 years in business leading the no-software, software-as-a-service movement. Subscriptions for SaaS-based CRM are still the core business, but between last year’s launch of the Twitter-like Chatter service and this year’s acquisition of social media monitoring company Radian6, Salesforce is trying to cast itself as the innovator to turn to transition to a socially connected business approach…
Rackspace’s plan to beat Amazon: “Fanatical support”
Rackspace Hosting is one of the most buzzed-about players in cloud computing. The Texas-based company recently hit the $1 billion mark (in annualized run rate revenue), and has signed on more than 160,000 customers. Last year it unveiled OpenStack, an open source cloud platform also backed by NASA.
While giving away your software for free may not sound like the best strategy, Rackspace (RAX) believes it will help accelerate the industry in the long run. The company also believes its dedication to customer support — not pure technology — is what gives it an edge over the growing pool of much-larger rivals, which include giants Amazon (AMZN) and Verizon (VZ).
I recently caught up with Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, to find out how the web-hosting provider has made customer support a core part of its business. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation, which took place at the company’s new office in San Francisco:…
European Distrust of US Data Security Creates Market for Local Cloud Service
A recent survey indicated that 70 percent of Europeans have concerns about their online data and how well companies secure it and now two Swedish companies, Severalnines and City Network, have begun promoting their newly merged service as "a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act." Under the U.S. Patriot Act, data from European users of U.S.-based cloud services can secretly be seized by U.S. law enforcement agencies.
"We believe that a service owned and operated locally in the E.U., and fully compliant with E.U. data protection laws, will be very attractive for European companies. U.S. companies with European operations will also benefit from the lower latency of a locally hosted solution," said City Network chairman Johan Christenson.
This gap in the market is also being exploited by other firms such as DNS Europe, Colt and MESH. The latter strongly promotes its location in Germany and "data separation in strict compliance with German data protection laws."…
Cloud Computing: Egnyte Says You Can Dump Your FTP Servers Now
Egnyte wants you to bury your file servers – their day is over – and now it claims you can throw your FTP servers into the hole too like they were grave goods to be discovered and wondered over by some next-century archeologist.
In their place Egnyte (given the silly way we spell things you’re supposed to say ignite) proposes its HybridCloud, a next-generation storage, file-sharing and backup scheme originally targeted at SMBs that lately – at least in the last three quarters – has been attracting large accounts, including 30 departments in the Fortune 1000.
It’s thought to resolve a psychological barrier to cloud adoption by reassuringly keeping copies of what’s in the cloud on-premise. That’s obviously why they call it HybridCloud. Companies aren’t supposed to feel they’re losing control of their data…
The 4 Myths of Cloud Computing in Business
With all the talk about cloud computing and its impact on business, innovation and sustainability, it’s important to understand what the cloud is — and what it isn’t.
James Staten, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, provided his company’s take on the subject this week at the Autodesk University, where cloud computing was Topic A for the annual users conference that drew more than 8,000 people. [Disclosure: Autodesk hosted my stay at the event.]
The main advantages cloud computing provides — connectivity, mobility, flexibility and the power of infinite computing — are easy to grasp. But less well understood is the definition of clouding computing and its key attributes…
SugarCRM Cloud Computing Strategy
I don’t often have the chance to speak with the folks of SurgarCRM. So, it was a bit surprising to have Sugar reach out to me to discuss the company’s Cloud Computing strategy and present a recent example of that strategy in action — an initiative SugarCRM and IBM have been jointly working on to offer Sugar’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering on IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise cloud computing platform.
SugarCRM’s Cloud Strategy
Sugar has long offered its technology as a service offering and as an open source software project. This offered customers the choice of using either Sugar’s IT infrastructure or their own. Sugar realizes that customers want more choice, higher levels of security, reliability and availability. To that end, Sugar is engaged in developing packaged versions of its technology for different Cloud Computing service environments. One of the first examples to become public was the SugarCRM/IBM initiative…
5 ways to benefit from NIST’s cloud road map now
Most government technology managers face the common problem of how to keep up with policy flow, the steady and sometimes torrential stream of IT directives, guidance and requirements from oversight agencies on how to modernize agency systems.
But in area of cloud computing, at least, help is on the way. On Nov. 2, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a “cloud computing technology road map,” a set of steps to setting up cloud systems that its creators said would help clear their path to cloud adoption.
The draft document, "U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, Release 1.0" (NIST Special Publication 500-293) defines high-priority requirements for standards, official guidance and technology developments that need to be met for agencies to accelerate their migration to the cloud model…
The Year in Review: Cloud Computing Expands, CIOs on the Move
Upheaval might best describe 2011. Globally the year will be remembered for the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami, the death of Osama bin Laden, the ongoing financial crisis, and, somewhere, the population tipping past the 7 billion mark. In the U.S., presidential politics got into full swing, Steve Jobs’ passing dealt a blow to the technology community, and Occupy Wall Street protests gained momentum in cities around the country.
In public-sector IT, upheaval was the norm as 2011 saw a significant number of new CIOs, accelerated adoption of cloud computing, and the rise to prominence of the tablet … well, really just the iPad — though Amazon’s Kindle Fire might finally give Apple some real competition.
In this issue, Government Technology’s traditional year in review, our editorial and design staff recap the year that was. On the following pages you’ll find assessments of the key issues CIOs and public-sector technology professionals faced; a timeline of events; and a few lists showcasing what readers of Govtech.com were most interested in…
It’s cloud prediction time: IDC, Gartner weigh in
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.
Analyst powerhouses IDC and Gartner both rolled out their latest cloud computing and big data predictions and statistics Thursday morning, and while some are bold, others might have you saying “Duh.” Here’s what they have to say, and how that squares with what I see.
On big data
“Big Data will earn its place as the next ‘must have’ competency in 2012″ (IDC). It’s hard to dispute this, if it hasn’t earned that status already. However, IDC does rely on some questionable logic to support its claim. It predicts that 2.43 zettabytes of unstructured data will be created in 2012, but much of that is only a big data problem to the degree it requires a lot of storage. Photo, video and music files will comprise a lot of that volume, and I think we’re a ways of way from doing meaningful analysis of those data types at a broad scale…
CloudPassage Named Finalist in UP-START 2011 Cloud Awards
CloudPassage Inc., the leading cloud server security company, announced today that it was selected as one of three finalists for the most promising startup category of the UP-START 2011 Cloud Awards. The panel of judges, representing recognized leaders in technology, evaluated 350 nominations from emerging and next-generation cloud companies before selecting a shortlist of finalists.
UP-START sought disruptive and next generation Cloud Computing companies, as well as innovative stealth mode and emerging solution providers who are defining cloud technology. CloudPassage will be among the award finalists who will present at the UP 2011 Cloud Computing Conference. The conference will showcase the leading technology innovators in cloud computing, and provide a forum for business and technology leaders to learn more about how cloud computing can enable growth and innovation for companies across all industries…