Stories about: Salesforce.com

Australian mining companies may still be enjoying a boom, but just about anybody else who sells anything into a world that is denominated in US dollars is struggling enormously with cost pressures, says Gartner EXP research director Andy Rowsell-Jones

A hat-trick of technology stories has caught my attention in recent weeks. The first one was Google launching its App Engine, essentially a competitor to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web-based environment and Microsoft's tranche of Live services. It's an environment where you're again using external systems for processing and storage. Interesting, but CIOs will quite rightly ask what the benefit is for them.

When Google launched its web-based e-mail service (Gmail) on April 1, 2004, many people thought it was an April Fool's Day joke, and perhaps with good reason. That same day, the company had posted plans to open a research facility on the moon.

To outsource or not - it's a serious business decision. But the problem is that words carry baggage, and none more so than the word 'outsource'.

Writer Nicholas Carr will earn the enmity of even more tech veterans with his newest prediction: Cloud computing will put most IT departments out of business. "IT departments will have little left to do once the bulk of business computing shifts out of private datacentres and into the cloud," Carr writes in his new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Quite frankly, I'm not a fan of cloudy weather. As a redhead with curls, clouds mean dampness and frizz, and something sleek and well defined turns into a nebulous hairball. Something sleek and well defined: now there's a laudable ambition for CIOs struggling with legacy, ERP, CRM, limited bandwidth and capacity. Most enterprises are still struggling to achieve that degree of integration, never mind incorporating Web 2.0, commercialising it effectively, and protecting brand.

Although some would trace back the roots of software as a service to mainframe timesharing, what we would now call SaaS, or on-demand computing, is really experiencing its second coming.

Monday's announcement that Salesforce.com would provide Google Apps for free to its customers sparked off a debate among analysts about whether Google's web-based software can make inroads with large businesses, and specifically the Fortune 500.

Attended what was billed as a smackdown between SAP and Salesforce at the Churchill Club's "Great Debate: The Future of Enterprise Software." The two belligerents were Hasso Plattner, co-founder of SAP, and Mark Benioff, found of Salesforce.com.

Cloud computing looks to be a "classic disruptive technology," says Forrester Research in an interesting new report published this week. For enterprise IT shops, cloud computing still poses some real risks, including an almost complete lack of service-level agreements and customer references, plus some genuine security and compliance concerns, according to Forrester. But even so, IT shops are tapping into cloud services for targeted projects: "There's a high likelihood that developers inside your company are experimenting with it right now," writes senior analyst James Staten in the report,"Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?"

Mark Zuckerberg, watch your back. Sergey and Larry? Consider early retirement.