Cloud Architecture Weekly Roundup 1-14-2011
We have frequently held up Business Intelligence as an example of how the cloud is changing the way companies do business because of the commodification of Information Technology services. With BI being consumed “as-a-Service”, it’s no longer necessarily reserved for enterprises with large budgets. The article below looks at the next evolution of BI consumption – mobile.
Salesforce.com continues to explore new ways to add functionality to Salesforce CRM. ClickTools’ investment in SurveyMonkey should “provide joint customers cloud-based survey tools integrated with Salesforce CRM.” ClickTools is a popular app on the Salesforce AppExchange.
A recent graphic by Gartner called the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure has raised some debates as a result of its placement of Amazon among the Visionaries but not among the Leaders in IaaS. The lead analyst on the project justifies the placement by pointing out that Amazon allows customers to self-service their accounts without contracts. The author correctly asserts that the cloud is about “commoditization through scale and through sharing of resources which leads to what we call elasticity” and not about contracts. Scroll about halfway down the article to get into the meat of his reasoning.
Wikipedia turns ten this weekend. Wikipedia stands as an important milestone in crowdsourcing and how we access and trust information over the internet. Its success has become so ubiquitous that its name, regarded as being so odd not too long ago, has become synonymous with “information available on the internet.”
This final article provides a great analogy for how cloud computing is the result of decades of work and innovation and yet continues to catch the occasional enterprise off-guard and unaware.
