May 18, 2014
Forget ‘the Cloud’; ‘the Fog’ Is Tech’s Future
Grazed from WSJ. Author: Editorial Staff.
I’m as big a believer in the transformational power of cloud computing as anyone you’ll meet. Smartphones, which are constantly seeking and retrieving data, don’t make sense without the cloud, and any business that isn’t racing to push its data and software into someone else’s data center is, in my view, setting itself up for disruption by a competitor who is.
But cloud advocates are fond of declaring that 100% of computing will someday reside in the cloud. And many companies are in business to sell you on that notion. Here’s the reality: Getting data into and out of the cloud is harder than most engineers, or at least their managers, often are willing to admit…
Actian Corporation has announced a partnership with NetSuite, a leading provider of cloud-based financials/ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, to offer NetSuite customers the ability to seamlessly connect their business-critical NetSuite ERP data with a variety of other data sources.
Like many of its traditional rivals, Oracle has adopted an ’if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ attitude towards OpenStack in an implicit acknowledgment that the project is disrupting the proprietary systems and software that currently account for the bulk of its revenues. But the database maker has arrived late to the party, allowing the competition to race ahead and establish a beachhead in what is poised to become a very lucrative market in a few years’ time.
There are few things in the tech world that are the sole responsibility of one company, but Adobe has managed to monopolize cloud-based technology for the general public. When it went down on May 14 in the early evening Eastern Standard Time, it forced many to think twice about using the cloud for their document storage. For more than 24 hours, the Creative Cloud Suite (CCS) was offline, and so were many users.
SafeGov.org continues to ask Google questions about its past scanning of Gmail messages that used data mining to serve up ads to Google Apps for Education users. Opponents of Google’s recent practice of scanning Gmail messages to help target advertisements to Gmail users continue to pressure the search giant on the issue.
With tech behemoth Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ) announcing its results for the fiscal second quarter on May 21, the company’s greatest problem continues to be its inability to develop a secure, alternate source of revenue that can help offset its dependence on the rapidly shrinking PC industry. While CEO Meg Whitman deserves a pat on the back for finally putting the brakes on the company’s continued revenue slide, HP’s return to profitability still seems like an elusive dream to a majority of investors.