In May I’ll be visiting San Francisco for the third time in six months. This time it’s to attend NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference, on their tab.
Curiously enough, NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson has been warning against the false cloud.
It’s pretty clear that everything is going to the cloud. I think the real issue is that there are real clouds and fake clouds. The fake clouds are people who are taking existing technology and saying, ‘We can host it for you and that’s the cloud’.
That is not the cloud. If the application is not web-native it’s not going to give you any of the benefits of the cloud. You’re not going to get any of this cost reduction, customisation migration or anytime, anywhere access because you are still using this funky intermediary technology to access that hosted application.
Microsoft is famous for saying ‘all our applications are in the cloud’. No they’re not. They’re their existing applications hosted someplace. That failed back in 1999 — how’s it going to succeed in 2010?
That’s interesting because Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff was also telling us to “beware of the false cloud” at their Dreamforce conference, which I attended in December. You can here him say exactly that on the Patch Monday podcast.
And that’s interesting because Nelson and Benioff used to be colleagues at Oracle. Funny old world.
Anyway, I’ll tell your more about this particular trip as it aproaches.