SAP is making a big bet in the cloud.

SAP, the quintessential big enterprise software company is making a big change. It’s going all in on the cloud, and as the New York Times reports, it’s a move that could alienate some of its enterprise customers.

SAP doesn’t seem to care. There is no “innovator’s dilemma.” It recognizes the future is in the cloud and its firmly aiming its business in that direction. This is in stark contrast to companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which have made nods to the cloud, but haven’t really fully embraced it.

Adobe turned some heads recently when it announced it was dropping the boxed version of Creative Suite in favor of a product they were calling Creative Cloud. It sounded very much like they too were going all in on the cloud, leaving the world of physical software behind, but when you dig a little deeper, you see that it’s not really a cloud suite at all. The main applications of the suite like Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop actually are downloaded and installed on your desktop.

As Roo’s mother might have said in Winnie the Pooh, “Roo dear, if the applications are on the desktop, it’s not really a cloud application.” Sure, it has file sync and share and some other cloud pieces, but at its core it’s a desktop subscription service, not a cloud at all, and what appeared to be a brave, even bold move by Adobe isn’t that brave or bold at all.

Similarly, Microsoft talks about the cloud a lot and it says what you expect a cloud vendor to say. Heck, at the SharePoint conference in November it was encouraging customers to go to the cloud  version of SharePoint even if its customers weren’t necessarily ready to go with them. But again a closer examination shows this isn’t cloud at all, it’s a fully hosted version SharePoint, same as the one you install in your data center. The only difference is the location of the software.

It’s important to note that Microsoft does offer some pure cloud services in that it owns Yammer, a cloud company it bought last year and it has Azure, which appears to be a pure cloud development platform, but it also throws around the term when it’s not always appropriate.

But now we have SAP saying they’re a full fledged cloud vendor, but can we believe them anymore than the others? I think we can because the evidence points to a huge cloud investment in the form of 7 data centers around the globe and 30,000 computers put to bear on the project for starters.

That would suggest a company that is serious and not just talking the talk and indiscriminately throwing around the term “cloud” for the marketing points it gets from it. The New York Times article even suggests that SAP could be building out infrastructure services that could put it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services.

It always gets interesting when established companies go after the disruptors and try to beat them at their own game. Amazon has a built-in advantage in a significant head start and an acute understanding of the cloud that can only come from a company that’s been built from the ground up as cloud vendor, but SAP brings enormous resources to the table.

Right now SAP appears to be doing and saying the right things, but whether it can make the transformation into a pure cloud vendor remains seen. But it sure should be fun to watch it try.

Cloud storage has gotten so ridiculously cheap, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t be using it.

We are in a golden age of cloud storage. We can buy unlimited backup on BitCasa for $99 a year or 10 GB for free. There’s also Dropbox and Sky Drive and Box and Google Drive  and iCloud and Amazon — all offer a varying amount of free space and attractive pricing packages if you want more.  There are so many options for such low prices, it boggles the mind.

You want local storage, you say? We can get a 2TB portable drive for around $100. .

Like everything else in technology this march to cheap storage has been steady. My first PC had a 20 MB (that’s megabytes, folks) hard drive.  Today, I have a 4GB thumb drive on my key chain — one of those that’s just the USB connector and a rubber cover. I recently bought a light-weight 1 tb portable drive that fits in the palm of my hand for $99. It still blows my mind that this little thing holds a terabyte.

Yet even with the low cost of local storage, we never seem to have enough do we? Whether we are an individual or an enterprise, we always seem to fill whatever capacity we have.

I have been buying computers for a long time and each time I’ve bought one, the hard drive had ever  more capacity, and I would think — I’ll never fill up that much hard drive space — only to find I did. I’m sure many IT pros have thought the same thing with their storage arrays. There must be some kind of law like Moore’s Law around chip capacity that we will always fill whatever hard drive capacity we have.

That’s the beauty of the cloud. It’s like that old Jay Leno Dorito’s ad — “Don’t worry. We’ll make more. ” It will always scale for you. You don’t have to worry about it because the cloud provider does. I know personally I have at least half a dozen cloud storage accounts. My stuff is spread across the digital heavens because it’s so darn cheap.

Just this week, Bitcasa came out of Beta with a new storage product that provides unlimited storage for $99 a year. I find it hard to believe they can continue to offer unlimited storage for so little, but for now, that’s the price. What’s more, it has client-side encryption, so they have no idea what’s on there and claim there’s no way for them to know — even under threat of subpoena.

Even the most paranoid among us has to like that.

So sure at 2TB for $100 you could back up some stuff and have it locally where it can never be at the mercy of ‘The Man’ –whether the government or the service provider — but when you can get unlimited encrypted storage for $99 a year, that’s gotten to the point where it’s pretty darn hard to resist. And you can get your files anywhere from any device , as well as  mark files for offline access if you know you’re not going to have a WiFi connection.

It’s the golden age of cloud storage. You would foolish not take advantage.

Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo

As mobile devices usage continues to rise, we see PC sales decline.

We’ve seen all the signs lately that the PCs days are numbered and mobile and cloud, well they’re the cat’s meow, the BMOC, the big dog.

Oh , you’ll still see PC skulking around, showing up at parties and being annoying, but in 2012, we seemed to make a clear transition from desktop to mobile. Even Microsoft has seen this coming. Hence the rush to the cloud, the emphasis on mobile and the even the release of a Microsoft branded tablet with more coming.

We’ve all heard that Windows 8 PC sales have been slow. NPD reported at the end of November that Windows 8 sales were sluggish as were PCs and laptops in general with notebooks down 24 percent and desktop sales down 9 percent.

Granted it was early days, but Preston Gralla writing on his Computerworld blog after the holidays found that Windows 8 sales were still in the doldrums, and Gralla referenced a variety of sources reporting essentially the same bad news with lagging sales — and some computer manufacturing executives were beginning to express frustration at the lack of Windows 8 PC and laptop sales.

I trust that it has nothing to do with the quality of Windows 8. Whether you love it or not doesn’t have much to do with the lack of sales. It’s because the sales have shifted to mobile devices. In Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report this year, one telling slide was # 25, which showed in the fourth quarter of 2010, smartphones and tablet shipments surpassed PC and notebook shipments for the first time — and are expected to skyrocket in the coming years, while PC and notebook shipments will remain flat. Go have a look, it’s pretty telling. I’ll wait.

What’s even more telling is the next slide which predicts that sometime this year, the installed base of mobile device users will surpass the installed base of PC and Netbook user for the first time. Those two slides tell the tale of the changing demographics in technology usage (in case you needed a picture of what’s become obvious to just about everyone).

That not enough for you? How about this little data point then? Apple reported recently that it surpassed 40 billion total downloads in the App Store  since inception with almost half of those coming in 2012 and 2 billion in December alone. The App Store now has an astonishing 775,000 apps now. There are simply a lot of idevices out there and people appear to love to download apps.

And it’s not just Apple. ReadWriteWeb reports that Google, the other mobile behemoth, and its Google Play Android store is growing even faster and could pass a million apps before Apple does.

All this data seems to agree that mobile is ascending and PC is waning. This doesn’t mean we’ll stop using PCs or that the PC will go the way of the dinosaur, at least for the near term, but it does mean the PC will have less and less use in our lives, and as that is going to have an impact on traditional PC software like Windows and Office for the desktop. It’s a mobile world and the traditional PC is just going to have to get used to it.

Photo Credit:

(c) Can Stock Photo

Microsoft’s new look Windows 8 and Office integration is designed to do what it always has: lock users in to an all-Microsoft product approach.

Microsoft  has certainly has an exciting few days. Last Thursday it was Windows 8, Friday it was the Surface with Windows RT and this week, it was the Windows 8 phone. It’s actually a bit overwhelming to have all these product announcements on top of each other like this, but it reveals Microsoft’s mobile and cloud strategy quite clearly — and surprisingly it looks quite familiar.

On the surface (if you’ll pardon the expression), it appears, this is a company that has seen the light. They have bought into Ray Ozzie’s whole Dawn of a New Day post-PC rhetoric, and they are all in on the cloud and mobile. They have designed a hybrid operating system to work on mobile or the desktop. They’ve created their own tablets along with those from partners, and they have a new line of phones coming from OEMs in time for the holidays. They also have the cloud services in place.

Everything looks right. They seem to understand the cloud-mobile connection they have been missing for so long, but there’s one slight problem. They can’t seem to let go of the past. For all these years, Microsoft has been mostly a software company that made lots of money locking in customers on high margin items like Windows and Office and it was great — until it wasn’t anymore.

Then Microsoft had an identity crisis, and it took some time and decided it wanted to be a cloud and mobile vendor — but it wanted to operate the way it always has by locking people into a Microsoft system where you use Microsoft products all the time — still making Windows and Office the center of everyone’s world. Brilliant, right? It combines the old with the new, but it fails to take into account a couple of key changes to the world.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer put it this way in a Wall Street Journal interview this week when he was asked to define the Microsoft vision today: “We talk internally about enabling people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential. Whether that’s sexy or not, putting you in control of your world, and letting you do things you weren’t able to do before, that’s what we’re about for people and for businesses.”

Essentially Ballmer’s company view comes down to this: Tablets and phones and desktop computers all integrate in an all-Microsoft vision where you can access Office on the desktop or in the cloud and it’s all held together by Windows 8 across devices. You see, it’s the same old all-Microsoft strategy in a cloud and mobile package and this time they even can sell their own hardware. Sounds pretty great — for them.

Sure, Microsoft saw the cloud and mobile trends, probably before it was too late, but the world wasn’t standing still while they came to their senses. People have been choosing their own devices for some time now, and just maybe people don’t love Microsoft all that much to want a Windows phone and a Window tablet to go with their Windows desktop/laptop. Maybe they want variety. Perhaps they want and a Samsung Galaxy S3 or an iPhone. Maybe they want Nexus 7 or an iPad mini. They may very well want a Window device too, but all Windows? That’s just not likely, not when there are so many other options out there.

And while the whole software strategy of going to the cloud with Azure and Office 365 and so forth all plays into this,  it’s not realistic to believe that everyone is going to choose the Microsoft cloud product — not when there are so many enterprise-friendly consumer-like alternatives out there now.

The thing is, if this were three years ago and companies were still handing out Blackberries and an IBM ThinkPad, and everyone had a beige box under their desk running Office and Windows, the strategy might have worked just fine, but the world shifted under Microsoft’s feet even while it was trying so hard to adjust.

Microsoft did get part of the story right, and they deserve a great deal of credit for it, but maybe they just couldn’t or didn’t want to see the BYOD piece. The fact is that when you peel back all the hardware and software, and get to the core of it, this strategy is the same one they have been delivering for the last 20 years. It’s  just baked into the company DNA to design their offerings this way and they don’t seem to know how to do it any other way.

The problem isn’t what Microsoft has delivered, it’s that it took so long, and there are just so many alternatives out there now. Microsoft doesn’t have the field to itself anymore and no matter how well designed the phones and the tablets and the operating system and the cloud services may be; there are others that are just as good and maybe better — and everyone gets to choose now.

Photo Credit: Microsoft 

Users don’t care if the service that went down was hosted in the cloud or you data center. An outage is an outage.

Yesterday, social networks, those that were still up, that is, lit up with complaints about Amazon going down and taking down many useful services with it. As someone who writes frequently about the cloud, and as a user, I understand the frustration people feel when a service is down, but I’m wondering how many Exchange servers went down yesterday and we didn’t hear a word.

The thing is when Amazon goes down it’s very public. When you’re an IT pro and you get called from your kid’s soccer game because one of your crucial systems has gone down, you and your colleagues aren’t likely yacking about it on Twitter: “Oh man, the Exchange Server at Acme Widgets” went down. Bill Smith in IT is is in deep doo-doo.” Not likely to see a tweet like that.

Now think about the likes of Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, Flipboard, Heroku, Airbnb and lots of others and no wonder it felt like the Internet was broken yesterday. As an article on The Next Web pointed out, the last major Amazon outage was in June when an electrical storm was the root of the problem. If you had 4 months between issues in your data center, and the last was due to natural causes, I’m guessing you would be happy with that.

That’s because things go wrong in private data centers all the time. Ask anyone who’s on call in IT and they’ll tell you some stories. The difference is when a public cloud platform goes down, it has a much greater impact and much more public view. You can’t hide when Twitter is blowing up about your company being down, and all those major properties are affected, yet the result is pretty much the same. Your customers are dead in the water.

When you think about the difference between a public cloud and a private one, the public one serves many different companies, while you’re private one serves your internal customers. Each one is offering a set of services. From the user perspective, if you’re down it doesn’t matter who’s running the data center. The bottom line is that you can’t do you work.

The New York Times reported that the issue was at the Northern Virginia data center, but it was still not clear what happened as of last night, and may take several days for Amazon to sort it out. It appears that everyone is back up and running this morning, so whatever it was has been resolved.

All Things Digital recently reported on a Forrester survey that suggested that people aren’t using the Internet as much as they used to, but the survey architects themselves said this might be a perception problem. Forrester analyst Gina Sverdlov told All Things Digital, “Despite the fact that they always have connected devices and are always online, they don’t really realize they’re online.”

And the same dynamic is likely in play in your data center. Most employees don’t know the source of their application, and don’t really care if it’s hosted in your data center or in the cloud, but they will care if they can’t do their work for whatever the reason because in the end an outage is an outage. The only difference is who’s getting paid to fix the problem.

 Photo Credit | Nature’s Images on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.

As Oracle and Salesforce wrestle with one another, both companies are struggling to deal with a changing market.

Salesforce and Oracle both recently completed their user conferences in San Francisco. They were both splashy, well-attended affairs with 50,000 attendees at Oracle Open World and 90,000 at Dreamforce, but both companies showed signs that with great size, it becomes harder to maneuver quickly in a changing market.

If you want to go by pure numbers, then Salesforce won that game at their conference, but it’s not that simple of course.

Make no mistake, these are both big, successful companies, but they each have flaws and reacting to change is one of them. Due to their sheer size, it makes it all that much harder to make adjustments to changing markets and trends.

Let’s look first at Oracle, which made its mark in the age of large, complex enterprise software packages. It used its wealth to buy up a variety of software niches including content management, CRM and enterprise search (to name but a few), using its riches to check all the necessary boxes. But what it didn’t anticipate is the company down the street that was building its own empire in the cloud where it was less complex and easier to manage.

It took a long time for Oracle to see the light because after all going to the cloud was completely against the entire focus of the company. They wanted to own the data center, but were wise enough to realize that for many companies, the data center was beginning to shrink because they were moving at least some of the operations to the cloud.

Oracle may be stubborn, but it’s not stupid and starting a few years ago began offering the first cloud services. They have recognized they need to offer services in the cloud, but what’s not clear is if they can create cloud products that their market wants while still trying to protect their core enterprise software business.

It’s a dilemma that many disrupted companies face as they try to live between two worlds and don’t really grasp the new one very well, while the old one is diminishing in market importance creating a strategic dilemma.

Salesforce has played the role of great disruptor, but as we have seen this year with Craigslist, as the original disruptors go mainstream, they too can be disrupted and become just as slow to react to changes around them as Oracle has been.

And so we have Marc Benioff at the recent Dreamforce conference talking about “discovering” the value of social in the enterprise, and how for him, the light just went on even though social has been in the enterprise for years now. The problem isn’t that Benioff hasn’t understood the value of social. His company has been making purchases of its own including tools like Buddy Media and Radian6 for social media monitoring, but Salesforce has been late to social, just as Oracle was late to the cloud.

As these two giants face off against each other, I wonder if each of them can be flexible enough to keep their core businesses intact while reacting to the changes around them. It’s going to be a huge challenge for each of them and it should be fun to watch.

Photo by emdot. Used under Creative Commons License.

The fact is the type of hack that victimized Mat Honan last weekend could happen to anyone.

By now you’ve very likely heard of the horrible experience of Mat Honan, the reporter who had his entire digital life wiped out by hackers over the weekend. I’m sure it reinforced the worldview of every cloud naysayer on the planet, and they are gathering somewhere and having a grand “I-told-you-so” party — but even the most radical anti-cloud adherent would have to admit deep down that this was an extreme case.

I’m not here to defend Apple and Amazon and their monumental screw-ups that allowed this to happen, but neither am I about to write off cloud computing because of this incident. While an incident of this sort has to make any sane person pause, I think we have to be careful about suggesting it proves once and for all that cloud computing is inherently a bad idea.

In fact, it might not be a cloud security issue, per se, at all. Rodney Brown, writing on the Cloud Ecosystem blog nailed it when he wrote, “This isn’t a cloud security issue. It is an IT security issue — and one as old as hacking itself.” His point was this wasn’t a hack in the pure sense of the word where the hacker found some sort of back door into the cloud service and wreaked havoc.

On the contrary, the hacker found a way to waltz into Honan’s computing life through the front door by figuring out a way to get the information he needed to access the system. It’s a problem that IT faces every single day when a clever phishing email can give a hacker the keys to your network without having to do any heavy lifting.

If you are an IT pro, and you’re sitting there smirking because the cloud just got its just desserts,  I wouldn’t be so quick to gloat because as I’ve always maintained, the cloud operates in a data center just like yours, and in the end it’s no different than yours. In fact, it’s just as vulnerable as your system was to the type of social engineering scam the hacker pulled to get Honan’s data.

This incident was scary and horrible and it clearly illustrated just how easy it can be to get enough information to get inside somebody’s systems, and I’m not trying to minimize that. Last weekend it was Matt Honan who got unlucky, but just because you’re locked behind the safety of your firewall, don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re safe. The same kind of scam that worked for Honan’s hackers could work to get inside your systems too. And you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe it.

Several stories including personal experience came together this weekend to illustrate just how far iCloud has to go.

Several stories and personal experience came together this week to let me know in no uncertain terms that iCloud is a service that needs a lot of work.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the poor bloke who lost his entire digital life last weekend when hackers gained access to his iCloud account simply by asking Apple technical support for his password. OK, the tech support rep asked for some sort of identifying information first and the hacker supplied them with 4 digits from the guy’s credit card; the ones that Amazon showed openly on the web.

There is a ton of blame here for this guy’s predicament starting with his own lax personal security — but any of you with your security house in order, please feel free to cast the first stone. But Apple Tech Support, do you think you could maybe ask for a little bit more information before handing over the keys to this guy’s digital kingdom? Seriously. And Amazon, you’re not free and clear either, buddy. Why show any credit card information on the Web at all.

Why are we even asking these questions? Unfortunately, we learned the cloud is far from fool-proof this week (with the emphasis on fool).

Once the hackers gained access to his iCloud account, they were able to wreak havoc and wreak they did wiping out the contents of his ipad, iphone and Mac Book. And I mean, poof, all gone. No trace. And the poor sap hadn’t backed up his kid’s pictures. This guy is a case study in personal security laxness, but my issue here is not with him, it’s with iCloud and Apple tech support.

This story broke the same week that Apple Co-founder and general man about town, Steve Wozniak issued his own paranoid proclamation that the cloud was evil.  Seems even before the other story broke Woz had some concerns about the cloud. His concerns weren’t about security so much though as content ownership, but the timing was interesting to say the least.

Then there was my own personal experience, which happened over the weekend. I got a little notice from Google Drive that I had filled my 5 GB quota, which must have happened backing up all my vacation pictures. Not to worry I thought, I have tons of space on iCloud and I can move some documents over there. Not so fast though because I soon realized iCloud isn’t a general backup service at all. It’s a very specific backup service, a fairly useless walled garden, designed to backup your Apple content and only your Apple content.

To be fair, Apple does allow you to back up Microsoft Office documents along with your iWorks documents, but really, I just wanted to choose a bunch of files which were neither iWorks nor Office documents and back them up. iCloud didn’t allow for this. My question is: Why ever not?

I don’t use the Mac calendaring system nor do I use the Mac mail system or contacts. So the service, other than Find My iPhone, is basically useless to me.

The photo stream backup from my iPhone is nice, except that it’s only good for the most recent 1000 pictures, which may seem like a lot, but I’ve got almost 3000 on my iPhone. I really wouldn’t want to lose 2000 of them because Apple has chosen to skimp on my allocated hard drive space and won’t let me expand that number, even by purchase.

Apple has tons of money, huge fancy data centers and really smart engineering talent. Why can’t they get this right? Why can’t I backup my hard drive to iCloud if that’s what I choose to do, especially after I purchased extra space.

As implemented this service is useless. Time for Apple to go back to the drawing board on this one, and this time, do right by your users.

Trust is still a major issue for many IT pros when it comes to the cloud, but by holding back, you could be hurting your company in the name of protecting it.

I’ve been covering the cloud for years now and the old trust card gets played just about every time we bring it up. It’s been that way forever, but after all these years, it still comes down to who you really trust more, your data center or the vendor’s.

I got to thinking about this (again) when I read about Box’s $125 million venture cash infusion from VC General Atlantic (GA) this morning. That’s a lot of money for cloud company and it’s on top of a lot of money they got last year too.

All Things Digital reports that brings the total venture capital to an impressive $285 million. Somebody obviously thinks this company (and by extension, the cloud), is worth a substantial investment. Venture capitalists don’t usually throw this much money at a company they think is going to be a loser, let’s put it that way.

Box also announced today that it was bringing in GA partner and former GE CIO Gary Reiner on board as a member of the Board of Directors.  In the All Things Digital post, Reiner acknowledged there sometimes a trust issue in the cloud, but for him it came down to this:

“Rather than fight the constant losing battle to keep the bad guys out, better to let someone whose reputation depends on security develop a service specifically for sharing files across a company or with partners,” Reiner said in the All Things Digital post.

So that’s it in a nutshell. Everyone is vulnerable these days. You can be as vigilant as you can and all it takes is a phishing email, someone gives up their password and boom; a hacker is inside your system through the front door, and there’s little you can do to prevent this scenario from playing out. No matter how much you try to educate your users, all it takes is one ignorant one (and the hackers are well aware of this).

No system is foolproof, that much is clear, but users need access to their content across a variety of platforms and devices. Box and similar services solve that problem for you. As Reiner pointed out, it really comes down to the survival of the business for cloud vendors to protect your data.

Box has made no secret of the fact that it wants to be the online file sharing and collaboration platform for the enterprise. As such, it needs to prove its security prowess on a daily basis. If something bad were to happen it would have negative impact across the entire business model.

In the end, as I’ve always said, a data center is a data center whether its on-premise or in the cloud and is subject to the same vulnerabilities regardless of its location, but as your employees become increasingly mobile being able to access content becomes all that much more crucial.

You should absolutely drill your vendor about potential issues and how they deal with it. You should go in with your eyes open, but don’t shut off the cloud because of the trust issue or you could be hurting your business in the name of protecting it.

Can a traditional enterprise software and hardware company suddenly compete in the cloud? I think not.

Don’t get me wrong I find the idea of the dinosaur software and hardware company taking on the preeminent cloud computing vendor (and one of the earliest examples) to be highly entertaining. Oracle is the poster child for traditional enterprise software implementations. It is the polar opposite of what you think of when you think about cloud services.

It’s complex instead of simple. It’s expensive instead of cheap. It’s hard to implement instead of easy. It requires significant resources to install, configure, maintain and manage. In short, it’s everything cloud is not — yet now Oracle wants to be your cloud vendor.

Does anyone else see a major disconnect here?

Let’s not forget, up until his company jumped into the fray, Ellison has gone out of his way to make fun of cloud computing. In 2008, he was quoted in a Guardian article as calling it complete gibberish in this delicious quote:

“Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? [The Cloud] is complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

Maybe he’s evolved in 4 years. Who knows? But it’s also impossible to ignore the recent Google/Oracle patent trial around Java appeared to be a full-scale attack on cloud computing.

So when that tack failed, Oracle did an about face and decided to embrace cloud computing instead (or perhaps it was just trying to clear away the competition ahead of its announcement).

But anytime a company the size of Oracle gets involved, it has to make the competition pause. Perhaps that’s why Salesforce made a big acquisition last week when it purchased Buddy Media just days before the Oracle announcement. (Coincidence? We think not.)

Brent Leary, who is co-founder and partner at CRM Essentials LLC, a CRM consulting/advisory firm focused on small and mid-size enterprises, says it’s never too late for a company the size of Oracle to take a shot.

“I think we’re too early in the game to say anything that happens now is too late.  But that doesn’t mean companies can wait around to make moves,” he said.

He added, “Historically Oracle is an acquisition machine, but now with Salesforce joining the arms race the purchases seem to be accelerating. There’s a lot at stake here, and the companies who can quickly add and integrate missing pieces to their cloud puzzle stand to gain significant mindshare.”

True enough, but can a company built as a traditional hardware and software company really take on a vendor who has built its cloud business from the ground up? My feeling is that this is going to be a very difficult transition for Oracle, regardless of its market clout, precisely because it has built its business up to now as being the anti-cloud.

Time will tell if Oracle can compete, but my gut tells me this doomed to fail because Oracle while trying to move to the cloud still must protect its core software and hardware businesses — and it’s going to be tricky balancing those two competing requirements.

Photo courtesy of Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco 2009. Used under Creative Commons License.