Salesforce.com’s biggest announcement of Dreamforce ’13 is Salesforce1, but is it a branding exercise or a game changer? Salesforce1 is the massive story of Dreamforce 2013, but just how real is it and what’s going to it do for Salesforce.com customers? Unlike Dreamforce announcements of years past, Salesforce1 is shipping upon announcement, available within the type of dowloadable mobile apps. But there’s more work to be done if it’ll live as much as its billing as a “next-generation platform” which will connect partners, employees, customers, and customers’ customers through any device with “state-of-the-art, consumer-grade functionality.” It’s tough to boil the facts out of some whirlwind, buzzword-packed keynote presentations. But Q&A sessions with Salesforce executives and interviews with customers and partners helped us fill in the various fuzzier aspects of the platform. So here is a closer study what it brings and what it promises. As we’ve reported, Salesforce1 is a unifying, mobile-friendly, API-rich wrapper around everything Salesforce.com offers. The corporate is mobilizing everything, pointing to... Read More »

From Europe’s efforts to create regulations for data localization to worries over the protection of the cloud, the leaks of the past eight months have cast a shadow over cloud providers. RSA CONFERENCE — San Francisco — Last summer’s revelations of the level to which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) collected data on American and foreign targets has caused rifts between global businesses which are hindering efforts to secure the cloud, said Richard Clarke, CEO of fine Harbor and a former US cyberczar, on the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit on Monday. The steady leak of documents up to now eight months detailing the operations of the NSA intelligence collection activities has damaged both US policy efforts abroad and the business of plenty of multinational companies, especially cloud providers. Efforts to implement strong security guidelines for the cloud should overcome efforts by other nations to implement data residency restrictions to hinder competition, Clarke said. [For more from RSA, see RSA Conference 2014: Complete Coverage.]... Read More »

The machines are coming for a few of our jobs. Be afraid or welcome our new robot overlords, as you like. The robots are coming, and that they want our jobs. That’s progress. Inside the 20th century, they wanted our women. Actually, the robots don’t need all of our jobs. They’re said to be ready to competing for approximately 47% of them, a minimum of within the US, given current technological expectations. So only 1/2 us might want to retrain. The opposite option is to affix the Resistance. Who knew The Terminator was an employment double entendre? The other 1/2 us should get used to being lonely at the job, that may evolve into making certain our mechanized colleagues don’t malfunction or do something unexpected. Small consolation though it can be, if you are the last human at the factory floor, you will not have to worry about turning out the lights if you happen to leave. That is the type of task robots do... Read More »

Iaas and PaaS platform distinctions will soon become irrelevant, as OpenStack’s Solum project shows. There’s been a renewed debate recently over the numerous layers of cloud computing stacks. At stake is a fight for cloud computing market share and mind share — and probably, the way forward for cloud platforms. Beyond a small group of technologists, cloud computing remains largely a mystery for many people. Ironically, i suspect that is the point of the cloud: To behave as an abstraction of the complexity present in more traditional data centers and alertness hosting infrastructures. At the guts of the cloud platform debate is a brand new reality: Cloud consumers not ought to manage or worry in regards to the underlying infrastructure. The question of platform occurs only for those who ask who or what controls operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and networking components. Platform as a service (PaaS) focuses not at the infrastructure pieces, but at the deployment of applications and configuration settings for the appliance-hosting... Read More »