Cloud Computing

Ejected from Oracle's Open World. An impromptu gathering at a nearby restaurant. Fulsome explanations from PR flacks and tweets galore. The relations between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff went from wary and grudging mutual admiration, to red hot rhetoric. How red hot...

Many organizations pursuing lower overhead costs and improved customer service are adapting their business models to the cloud. However, some fail to realize that this move only pays off when monetization models change as well. Productization, enrollment, payment capture and customer support are inh...

Turn on an episode of Seinfeld and return with me to the 1990s! This summer the National Venture Capital Association released results for the second quarter of this year, showing that $7.5 billion was invested in 966 deals. This represented an increase of 19 percent in dollars and deals over the...

VMworld 2011 occurred a couple of weeks ago, but the energized crowd of 19,000-plus attendees and the raft of VMware and partner announcements that accompanied it make it worth revisiting. Virtualization and cloud have become nearly synonymous. In fact, a few wily vendors tend to use the terms inter...

In my previous commentary in this space, I suggested that the evolution of the channel in the cloud is entering a new stage in its development. Last month's Dreamforce conference, hosted by Salesforce.com, served as a showcase for a series of new channel initiatives which clearly indicate the growin...

VMware made a number of announcements at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas on Monday. Among its new projects is a global cloud offering. This is, so to speak, a network of clouds from multiple services in various countries. Customers will work with their local vCloud Datacenter service provider to get into ...

Business users are drawn to the cloud. Of course, that's not surprising, considering they tend to see only the benefits: self-service freedom, scalability, availability, flexibility, and the pleasure of avoiding various nasty hardware and software headaches. IT leaders, on the other hand, aren't al...

Many small-business owners may not realize that the cloud plays a big role in their business operations, and its importance is growing every day. I'm often asked, "What exactly is the cloud, and why does my company need it?" Simply put, the cloud hosts resources and applications that are accessed th...

Over the past two years, I've been chronicling the evolution of the channel in the cloud in my monthly commentaries in this space. Although many industry pundits have predicted the disintermediation of the channel in the cloud computing marketplace, I continue to see signs of success but under a new...

Walmart is integrating its video streaming service, Vudu, with its Walmart.com website. Walmart acquired the cloud-based movie service in 2010. The service lets customers buy or rent movies to be streamed directly from Walmart.com or Vudu.com or from one of 300 Vudu-enabled devices including selec...

Intel's recently announced plans to acquire Fulcrum Microsystems, a privately held fabless Ethernet semiconductor company, may seem counterintuitive to some. Founded in 1999, Fulcrum develops integrated, standards-based 10- and 40-GbE switch silicon designed to deliver low latency and workload-balan...

When the first EMC-sponsored study aimed at determining the size, scope and implications of digital information growth appeared five years ago, its authors employed restraint with the title, "The Expanding Digital Universe." In the follow-up study two years later, "Expanding" morphed into "Diverse a...

Google's recent decision to abandon its Google Health program has raised new questions about how far the healthcare industry is willing to go down the cloud computing path. The reality is that Google's decision was not a reflection of the healthcare industry's resistance toward cloud computing, but ...

Amazon has announced three enhancements to its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services, which launched earlier this year: a storage plan with unlimited space for music; free storage for all Amazon MP3 purchases; and iPad support for Cloud Player for Web. The Cloud Drive allows users to upload files to...

I'm still surprised by the range of companies and nonprofit organizations moving to the cloud, and pleased to hear about the business benefits they are gaining from their decisions. An illustration of this growing movement is a series of webcast interviews I recently conducted of CXOs from a variety...