The Blog

  • January 31, 2013
  • IaaS Market—Who Wants It?

    I saw this headline on Yahoo Finance, “Oracle Has Big Plans To Beat Salesforce And Amazon In A $72 Billion Market”  and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

    First, the market in question is Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS and I didn’t think that Salesforce was actually in the IaaS market.  This shows how far we still have to go in cloud computing just to get the terms right and set the playing field.

    IaaS is all about computing infrastructure — the servers, memory, disks, operating systems, middleware, databases and maybe applications — that any modern business needs to support its information processing when it chooses not to manage all this by itself.  Companies subscribe to IaaS services and it’s like Walmart for conventional IT.  You know this.

    Second, IaaS is part of a cloud industry that also includes software as a service or SaaS — systems that are centrally managed and subscribed to and PaaS or platform as a service.  PaaS is the top of the heap right now, the place you go when you don’t want to manage the gear as in IaaS but still want a robust place to design, develop and manage applications that are embedded into your business processes AND to generate those apps for multiple platforms from a single design.

    Interestingly, a PaaS provider probably, but not necessarily, is an IaaS provider by the simple logic that the “P” is software and it has to live somewhere.  So this brings us to the headline and article and my issues with it.

    Oracle has some very nice server, storage and in-memory gear that it acquired when it bought Sun or built once it had the Sun gurus on board and working with its database mavens.  It can very well supply the IaaS market — those organizations that want to run their own IT shows but not operate their own data centers.  Great!  Amazon is in that business.  Google is in that 0business.  Oracle is in that business and it is trying to be in the PaaS business with its still-being-delivered Fusion platform.  Salesforce is in the PaaS business but not really in the IaaS business except by accident of circumstance noted above.

    The article quotes some succulent swipes between Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, and Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, and Marc’s former boss.  The quotes are old and largely irrelevant but you have to admit, these guys sure know how to grab a headline.

    Published: 11 years ago


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