Keep Your Head – and Money – Out of the Clouds

Grazed from Barron’s. Author: Tiernan Ray.

The fervor for disruption has become a fever. Last week I noted that cloud-computing software companies such as Salesforce.com (ticker: CRM) and Workday (WDAY) are the new stock-market darlings because they are disrupting the traditional businesses of Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) and the like.

But the market’s appetite for everything cloud is rapacious, and those current darlings will have to soon make way for a flood of new stock issues. Some of the new players are essentially building the cloud itself: They’re building the infrastructure that is allowing computing work to move off of the server computers stored in an enterprise’s own data center, and instead be run at the facilities of a telecommunications operator or a hosting provider…

FireEye (FEYE) of Milpitas, Calif., for example, runs a network with thousands of what are called "virtual machines." These are simulations of a desktop or server computer that are emulated in software, rather than existing as an actual piece of hardware…

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