
Considering PaaS
If there’s ready cash at hand, lock-in and “proprietary” is demoted in favor of a quick buck; if the developers are building a general application with a longer time between compile and cash, an open, standard platform is more attractive.

PaaS choices today
In the light of Salesforce.com’s swathe of announcements at Dreamforce last week and other recent developments, it’s a good time to take stock of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) landscape. What are the choices now available to developers and business people looking to build applications on a ready-to-run cloud platform? As part of this review, I’ll report […]

Well, I am a systems guy…
It’s amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word unique, which means one of a kind, if you add very or any other modifier to it, you get mush. Today’s word might be amazing. There is entirely too […]

Impression from Dreamforce 2010
Long gone are the days when Dreamforce was a smallish conference devoted to SaaS; the first conference 10 years ago had fewer than 1000 attendees. This year’s conference had over 30k attendees (business users, IT users and vendors) almost 70% higher than last year’s. The lines in and around the Moscone, the hotel rates and […]

Dreamforce 2010
Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference opened last Tuesday morning to the driving beat of WILL.I.AM and the showmanship of its flamboyant CEO Marc Benioff. Dreamforce is always a lively event but this year the energy level was over the top and only overshadowed a little by Benioff’s much discussed rainbow socks. I suppose you have to accept […]

Software CEOs talking fluent dork: its the developers, stupid. New Kingmakers
A little after I wrote up the news yesterday that salesforce.com was acquiring Heroku I came across a quote from Marc Benioff, tweeted by @timanderson “Ruby is the language of the cloud 2″ Computerweekly has a fuller version: “Ruby is the language of Cloud 2 [applications for real-time mobile and social platforms]. Developers love Ruby. […]

Heroku Signals Force.com Wasn’t Working
What a radical thought. How dare he splash cold water on Force.com during Dreamforce! Hear me out. Like many, I read the news that SFDC would be acquiring Heroku, a Ruby on Rails in the Cloud startup, for $212M. Perhaps unlike many, the news really bothered me. It didn’t smell right, and here is why: Marc […]

News Analysis: Salesforce.com Buys Heroku For $212M – Shows Commitment To Next Gen Apps
Acquisition of Heroku In Line With Platform Future of Salesforce.com At Marc Benioff’s keynote, the CEO reiterated his commitment to 6 clouds: Sales, Service, Data (Jigsaw), Collaboration (Chatter), Cloud Platform (Force.com), and Database (database.com). As Salesforce.com continues to diversify its portfolio into adjacent markets, the platform as a service (PaaS) component remains a key area […]

Salesforce acquires Heroku: Dork Move, guys.
I came into the office this morning to see a tweet that stopped me in my tracks. Salesforce.com is acquiring Heroku for $212m. In cash! Beyond the obvious bubbliciousness of the deal was a cold hard truth about the once and future kingmakers – developers. You see I didn’t first hear about Heroku from a […]

Enterprise Cloud Cross-Currents
The new year has kicked off with some contrasting cross-currents for enterprise cloud aficianados and neophytes alike. On the positive side of the balance sheet, there’s a new and surprising Gartner prediction that a fifth of enterprises will have migrated…