Commentary

Fritz Nelson
 

Cloud Storm At Web 2.0

At the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco, executives from Salesforce.com, Google, Adobe, and VMWare attempted to take the cloud discussion beyond the typical "compute-in-cloud" model, and into some uncomfortable and ambitious places.

At the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco, executives from Salesforce.com, Google, Adobe, and VMWare attempted to take the cloud discussion beyond the typical "compute-in-cloud" model, and into some uncomfortable and ambitious places.

A few highlights for me:


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

First, it was refreshing that we could move beyond the simple plumbing and really talk about a cloud compute model instead of the computing itself. I don't need to re-hash the significance of that. It's been written far more eloquently elsewhere, but the opportunity to begin thinking more intelligently about this is a welcome step. VMWare's Paul Maritz, the lone "plumber" on the panel, was especially lucid here, talking about the shift to a more information-centric view of the world where not only our information, but the information about that information, will become so vital that it will outlive us. He mentioned concepts like an information bank and even an information marketplace where independent providers can add value around that information. There's tremendous business opportunity here.

Second, Adobe. It never occurred to me before hearing from Kevin Lynch that Adobe planned to play such a role, but it makes sense: Flash and Flex as the client connection points (or user interface) to the cloud resources. Lynch called it "getting back lost treasures of the desktop," meaning providing the rich user experience he thinks we've moved away from. I also didn't know Adobe was moving apps like Acrobat and Photoshop into the cloud -- so these guys are pretty serious about this.

Third, I continue to be amazed by the way Salesforce is dominating the market. Despite Mark Benioff's snide asides (always amusing, and always pretty much spot on), Salesforce is at a $1B annualized run rate now, according to Benioff. With the AppExchange model and Force.Com, it's done an amazing job at locking up the applications market. I wasn't able to go to Dreamforce, but Benioff talked on stage about some fancy Starbucks application integrated into Facebook mashed up with some sort of recruiting application from Dell -- I have NO idea what all of that means, nor could I find any details on the web, but it just struck me that Salesforce is moving extremely fast. My favorite line: When Tim O'Reilly mentioned Microsoft's efforts in the cloud (Azure), Benioff asked "do you mean A Zune?"

Finally, this panel closed with thoughts on platform as service plays and the very dangerous road of proprietary approaches we seem to be heading down. This is where things really get interesting.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links