Cutting Through the Cloud

September 23, 2013 Off By David

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Over the next few years, what happens to the several trillion dollars that businesses spend on technology will be decided by executives like Jeff Allen. As big business hitches its computer systems to the latest technology wave, Mr. Allen and others will have the tricky job of ensuring that old systems work with the many new systems finding their way into his company.

“A lot of normal companies are struggling to stitch together lots of different software” from different technology providers, said Mr. Allen, a marketing vice president at Standard Register, a specialty publishing and communications company in Dayton, Ohio. Eventually, he said, he will have to choose from only three or four big suppliers. Eventually. But not right now…

Corporate technology buyers are looking at a menu of new and old technologies and names both familiar and obscure. Old-guard companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have been joined by new names like Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite. Google and Amazon now have corporate-computing services. And yet another group of upstarts is nipping at that newer generation’s heels, ready to provide easy-to-use apps like the ones consumers download to their smartphones…

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