Enterprise 2.0

Dell's designs on cloud computing

SAN FRANCISCO--Standing 52 stories in the air at the upscale Carnelian Room in the Bank of America building here, executives from Dell, Facebook, and Salesforce.com discussed the meaning and use of the latest technology buzzword, cloud computing.

The sky was blue and cloudless, but it didn't adversely impact the atmosphere of what turned out to be a Dell marketing event. It was pitched as an announcement about a partnership that involves "the next generation of cloud computing."

You might recall that Dell is the company that owns the URL Cloudcomputing.com, and made a failed attempt … Read more

Zoho's last stand

Sridhar Vembu, CEO of AdventNet, is not afraid of going up against Microsoft Office or Google Apps. He is also the CEO of Zoho, which recently announced that it had achieved 1 million registrations (between 300,000 and 350,000 log on to the service monthly) for its cloud-based set of productivity applications. Vembu is now making a financial case that Zoho is better positioned than Google to take on Microsoft in the upcoming office suite sweepstakes.

Vembu's analysis is based on a comparison of revenue per employee and profit per employee metrics. "The gap in revenue per … Read more

Up the downturn: How to survive in tough economic times

Guest post: Christopher Lochhead, the former chief marketing officer at Scient and Mercury, offers his advice on how companies can do more than pray for survival in a prolonged economic downturn.

It's easy to be great when things are going great. The real test of leadership is who are you when things are tough. Leaders take market share in bad times, and losers lose share, money, and market cap.

We seem to be heading into a multi-quarter (or maybe longer) downturn. Planning for a long downturn is the right approach, even if you think this is just a blip.… Read more

Personal assistant start-up readies consumer service

In November 1999, Patrick Grady gathered some friends and advisers to talk about creating an Internet service that would transform the way businesses services are delivered to large corporations. The idea was to build an on-demand Web services platform and a digital personal assistant that takes the hassle out of making travel and dining plans, shipping packages, setting up Web conferences, procuring event tickets and scheduling parking or car services. The metadata-driven technology would take into account user and business preferences and normalize service interfaces so that users could access data from several providers, such as airline or hotel reservations.… Read more

Cloud computing on the horizon

SAN FRANCISCO--Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. "We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way," he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability. … Read more

Microsoft's big switch to server/client computing

Speaking at Structure 08, Debra Chrapaty, corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft, shed some light on the cloud-based infrastructure supporting Microsoft's online services.

Despite characterizations that Microsoft is stuck in the client/server world, the company is spending billions to apply the cloud, or server/client, model, where most of the computing happens in the cloud and some small amount on the client (offline support for applications). But until Microsoft Office and other applications are built for the cloud, the laggard characterization will continue to stick to the company's forehead.

Microsoft has one of the … Read more

Is Google's BigTable too private?

SAN FRANCISCO--During a panel discussion at the Structure conference here Wednesday, various representatives from the cloud-computing world offered their views. Panelists included:

Christophe Bisciglia, senior software engineer, Google Jason Hoffman, founder and chief technology officer, Joyent Tony Lucas, CEO, XCalibre Communications Lew Moorman, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development, Rackspace Geva Perry, chief marketing officer, GigaSpaces Joe Weinman, VP of Strategic Solutions at AT&T

The panelists agreed that there will be open and proprietary, as well as specialized, cloud platforms. The discussion got a little heated between Google's Bisciglia and Joyent's Hoffman on the … Read more

Amazon's blueprint for cloud computing

In the early morning at Structure 08, AMR Research's Jonathan Yarmis described various tech trends around cloud computing. Mendel Rosenblum, a founder and technical lead behind VMware, outlined the role of virtualization in data centers.

Now Werner Vogels, vice president and CTO at Amazon.com, is talking about why Amazon is in the cloud computing business, how it got there, and why customers should want it. Instead of every company or developer doing the heavy lifting, dealing with the "muck" as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likes to say, Amazon opened up its software-as-a-service stack (Amazon Web Services) … Read more

The new geek chic: Data centers

Forget about flashy Web 2.0 applications. The real, geeky coolness of the Web is the growing acreage of data centers that deliver bits to billions of devices. At GigaOM's Structure 08 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, infrastructure--"clouds" of servers, storage and networks--was the headliner.

Jonathan Yarmis, vice president of advanced, emerging and disruptive technologies at AMR Research, said changes in the next five years will make the past Internet revolution feel like child's play. He didn't explain exactly how the next five years will be more revolutionary than evolutionary, but outlined the … Read more