The Morning Download: A CIO’s Guide to Cloud Infrastructure
February 27, 2013
Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steve Rosenbush.
Good morning. For many CIOs, the main decision about moving at least some of their IT infrastructure to the cloud is no longer if, but how. We’re not talking about simply moving noncore business apps like email to the cloud. We’re talking about moving computing power and storage to the cloud. It may seem like the products in this quickly growing market are all the same, but they aren’t. That’s what CIO Journal’s Tom Loftus learned when he called three vendors–Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc.–and asked them to explain what they have to offer customers in the way of infrastructure and platform services.
Loftus’s main conclusion: “Amazon and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft provide customers with certain amenities that Google’s new offering, at the moment, does not.” Don’t miss his report–including the survey that clarifies how these three companies structure agreements with customers…
No one leaves this cloud. Cloud software vendor Salesforce.com Inc. Tuesday introduced a series of new mobile applications, including a chat function and applications allowing sales and marketing staff to make use of touch capabilities available with many new mobile device types. CIO Journal’s Michael Hickins notes that while the new features enhance its sales management tool suite, they also further the vendor’s goal of becoming indispensable to its customers – and thus more difficult for customers to replace. “Indeed, the companies are competing not only to prove they’re best able to offer customers more innovative products, but to tie their product sets more closely together in a way that weds their customers more permanently to their technology,” Hickins says…
Read more from the source @ http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/02/27/a-cios-guide-to-cloud-computing-infrastructure/?mod=google_news_blog