How To Win The Cloud Wars

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bryron Deeter.

Today “the cloud” surrounds us, literally and figuratively. IBM and Microsoft are running enterprise-oriented ads about cloud computing, Apple features iCloud and Siri (running in the cloud) prominently in marketing messages, and while Amazon.com remains most famous for e-commerce, its Amazon Web Service unit is the cloud infrastructure running popular websites from Netflix to Pinterest.

Underneath these friendly marketing campaigns and infrastructure offerings rages an early battle for the future of the software industry, with tens of billions of dollars at stake. For years, the entrenched software giants have spent most of their energies selling against the cloud computing trend and the startup companies that were leading this revolution: see Oracle/Ellison vs. Salesforce/Benioff. But the fight has largely proven futile, and the big guys have switched to playing catch up by building, buying and partnering their way to relevance…

What it means for entrepreneurs is that for the first time in over two decades the software landscape is open and level for new entrants. The incumbents’ size and scale are now more than offset by the “baggage” associated with legacy business models, outdated technology offerings, and investor expectations…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/09/18/how-to-win-the-cloud-wars/