News & Views

May 11, 2011 from Information Week – “Microsoft’s announcement on Tuesday that it will pay $8.5 billion to acquire Skype stunned the technology world. But it shouldn’t have been too surprising. Starting this week, for the first time in a decade, the software giant is free to operate without hands-on scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice. Microsoft can now spend its $50 billion cash pile mostly as it sees fit…”

180 View – The article predicts that Microsoft will be on a buying spree. I can see Microsoft buying SaaS vendors. Too bad that Oracle owns most of NetSuite.

May 1, 2011 from Accounting Today – “…Of all the news at Microsoft Dynamics’ recent Convergence conference, it was, not surprisingly, its proposed cloud strategy that drew the most attention. Yet many questions remain as to exactly how the company plans to bring its products and partners with it to the cloud.

As more than 9,000 users and resellers convened here for the annual confab, keynote addresses by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer and corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions Kirill Tatarinov offered little in the way of specifics on the company’s plan to bring its Dynamics products to the cloud…”

180 View – The article also includes “In a meeting with the press and analysts, Microsoft executives gave a brief preview of its Dynamics cloud strategy, as Tatarinov confirmed that the company is planning every future major ERP product release to be Software-as-a-Service, beginning with Dynamics NAV in 2012.” Now that is big news but it’s not clear how Microsoft will be able to pull this off as SaaS products are typically browser-based and use a multi-tenant architecture (one instance of the software being used by multiple organizations).

May 18, 2011 from Forbes – “I wanted to share news of an announcement this morning at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s business and technology conference being held in Orlando, Florida this week. The announcement states that SAP and Microsoft will work together on making application development and cloud management easier for developers and IT staff, helping customers harness the power of cloud computing. Additionally Microsoft was named the SAP Global Technology Partner of the Year…”

180 View – If you don’t understand what’s happening, don’t feel so bad as we don’t either.

January 27, 2011 from Toolbox for IT – “Private clouds.  Public Clouds.  Hybrid clouds.  We’re being bombarded by those who claim that these are new, revolutionary, and potentially insecure IT configurations which will challenge our notions of data privacy and compliance.  Unknowns.  Big risks.

To this I say it’s all a bunch of hot air.  In my humble opinion private clouds will make as much sense ten years from now as owning your own power plant does today…”

180 View – Besides agreeing with the author’s opinion, I’m an old Dylan fan and liked the title.

October 18, 2010 from the Financial Post ·- “…The cloud is simply a way to let people access critical applications to run their business through a Web browser from anywhere,” he says. “There is no reason small businesses can’t have the same tools as larger organizations.”

Running servers and applications can be an expensive proposition for many businesses, he adds. “What cloud does is remove the burden of IT and maintaining applications so businesses can service clients and make money.”

Cloud services can also relieve the security headaches that come with managing in-house infrastructure. “It can be more secure than having an in-house infrastructure, because cloud services are professionally managed and hosted,” … “Providers end up putting a tremendous amount of security that businesses simply couldn’t afford on their own, including biometric lockdowns, fire suppression systems and full replication of data at multiple data centres…”

180 View – It’s true that cloud computing has made it easier for small companies to compete with larger companies. But it does not mean that larger companies don’t want to take advantages of cloud computing. They can do this with a private cloud.

September 22, 2010 from InformationWeek – “Theatrics aside, Ellison’s conversion from cloud-ranter to cloud-computing arms merchant reveals a great deal about today’s rapidly shifting IT landscape….”

180 View – Good article if just for Larry Ellison’s (Oracle CEO) view on the difference between SaaS and Cloud Computing. According to Ellison, Cloud Computing provides each customer with their own separate and virtual environment including hardware and software that can run a wide variety of applications – sometimes called a private cloud. SaaS (Software as a Service) on the other hand is one application and the environment is shared by many customers. SaaS vendors will tell you that the shared environment (also called multitenant architecture) is a positive in that there is much less work involved in maintaining and updating the application.

July 2010 from The Washington Post – “Ballmer structured the keynote around the theme of Microsoft moving to “the cloud” — that is, “cloud computing”, in which programs live on Web servers accessible from any device with an Internet connection instead of being confined to individual computers…

A cloud-computing strategy also requires a modern Web browser that can run anybody’s Web application. The current release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer does not qualify as such — undercutting Ballmer’s claim that “we very much embrace” Web standards — so he had to talk about its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 instead…

Ballmer closed the keynote by all but commanding attendees to buy into its cloud-computing vision — “If you don’t want to move to the cloud, we’re not your folks” — before pledging that “the next 12 months will be some of our most exciting, phenomenal and incredible times together…”

180 View – Microsoft does not yet have a solution for ERP in the clouds but you can bet they will soon. I read an article in Computer World on August 31, 2010 entitled “Microsoft to build giant data center in Va.” and the closing paragraph was “Microsoft has other large data centers in Chicago; San Antonio, Texas; Quincy, Washington; and Dublin, Ireland. They support what Microsoft hopes will be a growing online services business, including hosted enterprise applications and its Azure cloud development platform. “

May 2010 from CAmagazine – “…One of the distinctive features of cloud computing is that data can be localized, shared and stored in several countries, depending on what the service provider decides. When a company opts for cloud computing, it relinquishes control over its information channels. Accordingly, the different laws in countries where the data circulates can make it difficult for an organization to ensure adequate protection of information. For example, in the US laws such as the USA Patriot Act and the Stored Communications Act have an impact on data confidentiality…”

180 View – When you read that “the USA Patriot Act and the Stored Communications Act have an impact on data confidentiality”, it’s not clear on the extent of the risk. There is probably way more risk that an employee will expose confidential information by throwing out confidential papers, theft of a laptop, loss of a USB key…

March 4, 2010 from TechCrunch– “Earlier today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a speech at the University of Washington where he said that the company was going “all in” with its strategy to move Microsoft products to the cloud…”

180 View – This is a big change in direction for Microsoft and just as it takes an ocean liner time to change direction, so will it take time for Microsoft to move to the cloud or SaaS.

December 22, 2009 from Forbes – “…Over the past year, cloud computing has captured significant attention of CEOs, CIOs and IT personnel alike, as businesses began to investigate the value of moving certain workloads to a cloud model. Facing mounting pressures to provide better services quickly, while reducing costs, many IT decision makers found the economics and capabilities of cloud compelling. Now with analyst firm Gartner’s recent proclamation that cloud computing is the number one technology in its annual “Top 10 Strategic Technologies” list, clear that 2009 marked the maturation of this emerging form of computing…”

180 View – When you read the article, you may have some doubts about the “maturity” of the cloud which is still changing shape with the recent introduction of private vs public clouds and open source vs proprietary interfaces.