Open vs. Closed: The Cloud Wars

October 9, 2012 Off By David
Object Storage

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

For all the freedom promised by cloud computing, businesses may be really looking at less choice and more constraint than ever before. Whether that happens is the technology industry’s next great battleground.

On one side are large incumbent tech providers like Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, who already have broad portfolios of technology and deep corporate relationships after years of selling products. On the other are younger companies, whose products and services were built for cloud computing and thus may offer more innovative approaches…

At its recent annual customer showcase, Oracle’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, made much of his company’s “engineered systems” approach to cloud computing, a merger of hardware and software that he argued enables faster performance and better security. Oracle, which has been around for three decades, also guarantees fast service response times to customers who buy the full Oracle “stack,” a term covering everything from computing’s most elemental hardware to its most advanced software applications, instead of competing products. Buy from many, Oracle says, and you won’t get the same service…

Read more from the source @ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/open-vs-closed-the-cloud-wars/