Benioff Attends Open World
Well, that was interesting. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff just completed a speech at Oracle Open World, perhaps the ultimate example of co-opetition. It was apparent to me early on that Marc’s purpose for being there was to refute Larry Ellison’s rant at the Churchill Club in which he compared Cloud Computing to vapor.
I got a hint earlier today when someone said that the event had been put together quickly, which to me confirmed the need to refute Larry who spoke a couple of weeks ago at Churchill. Benioff started out by graciously telling the audience that he had worked at Oracle and attended Open World many times in his 13-year career, even presenting on the same stage he was now on. He went further pointing out that the Oracle database is one of the key components of the Salesforce service and thanked Oracle executives for the graciousness.
But there was little doubt in my mind that Benioff felt he needed to refute Ellison’s off the cuff assertions at the Churchill Club. He did that with ease and just when you might have thought he’d reached the end of his talk, he brought up the CIO of EMC Corporation Sanjay Mirchandani to discuss that company’s hybrid CRM approach that includes Salesforce and Oracle for on-premise CRM. It was almost as if he wanted to say that Salesforce can play the hybrid game as well as Oracle.
I guess the Open World setting proved too much of a temptation for Benioff. It’s in the same city as Benioff’s office. The venue was easy to get, Michael Dell another big Salesforce customer spoke at Open World this morning and was available to be on stage with Benioff for part of the afternoon.
There’s little doubt that Benioff was able to refute Ellison but the bigger question for me was why he felt he needed to. We haven’t seen this kind of action for many years and it makes for lively times in these challenging days.
Both sides now
As luck would have it, I knew nothing about Larry Ellison’s rant at the Churchill Club on September 21 about cloud computing when I wrote last week’s piece on cloud computing. I saw it on YouTube.
You have to admit that Larry is a heck of a showman and the video is fun to watch. But whenever someone in that kind of situation starts to nit pick over definitions it says to me that they’re hoping no one will notice that they might be a bit threatened by a next generation technology.
Various analysts have pointed out the cloud is really an amalgamation of several technologies including Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). I can’t disagree with any of that though it is a rather mechanistic summation, but my reaction to all this parsing of nomenclature is, so what.
Say what?
Really, so what.
My take on cloud computing is different, it’s part cultural and part historic and the two are twisted tightly together. The history of the technology industry is one of overcoming shortages and cloud computing is part of that progression.
When storage and memory were in relative short supply we kept data on tape and programs on punch cards. We responded by building more and denser capacity until the shortage went away and we found ourselves with extra capacity at greatly lower costs. We had capacity to spare and instead of wasting it, clever individuals built the relational database.
Computing power has always been short but once we got into Moore’s Law the curve kept delivering new capacity to burn every eighteen months or so. Did we waste it? Some did, but enterprising souls built the graphical user interface of GUI and graphics cards and they changed computing.
Along the way as these improvements became ubiquitous and cheap — then something magical happened. We started branching out and the improvements didn’t stay in the confines of enterprise computing. They leaked out into a plethora of unimaginable products. Consider the iPod, for example, nothing but a tiny computer with a baby-sized disk. Talk about unintended consequences, I know some people were thinking about these devices but there weren’t that many and look at the effect this one device has had on our culture.
iPod is only the best known example but there are many others. For example, our cars are now bristling with processors and memory for fuel injection, ABS brakes, navigation systems (probably with a DVD in your trunk) and more.
But we are not done.
Then it was bandwidth. Ethernet was an interesting standard but it was slow. Bright minds turned their attention to networking, changed the way our applications use networks so that they use less bandwidth and others made more of it available culminating in the ultimate consumer bandwidth, the Internet. Tell me that hasn’t changed your life.
What’s different today is that we have a relative abundance of everything. If it comes to us as a service we no longer think about all of the provisioning and cost that was once part of our calculus. Platforms and applications coming in as a service ensure that bright minds can dream big and who knows what they’ll come up with?
So far all of that abundance has enabled us to build not artificial intelligence, that appears to still be in the future, but artificial, or should I say synthetic, relationships. I mean social media here. The relationships we maintain through social media are available to us because the cost of maintaining them in time and effort and real dollars is so low that it might as well be free. And the power of these relationships is that at any time, for the right reason, they can become full blown active relationships that provide friendship, information, help or anything you might expect of a friendship. And, of course, physical distance is much less of an issue than ever.
Our advances in technology have been the sometimes-surprising results of efforts to overcome scarcity and other adversities. Social media is a child of the ubiquity delivered through the Internet and it is still in its precocious early years. And logically, social media is not the only advance we should expect from this ubiquity, though I can’t say what the next things will be.
So when I hear someone, even kiddingly, say that cloud computing is nothing new or that it’s just water vapor, it makes me think that someone isn’t getting it. We only have a few faint ideas about what cloud computing will ultimately yield and that alone is why it is so important.
