Oracle joins the cloud-integration party late, but says its wizard-driven SOA Suite will appeal where on-premises apps prevail. Oracle introduced the Oracle Cloud Adapter for Salesforce.com on Thursday, vowing that it won’t be too little, too late on the subject of cloud application integration. Oracle says its SOA Suite have been used to construct one-off, Web-services integrations into cloud-based applications for years. However the Adapter for Salesforce.com is the primary of many packaged integrations that the seller says will broaden its choice of greater than 300 pre-built adapters heretofore fascinated about on-premises application integration. “We’re making things easier so as opposed to having to read documentation and work out which APIs to name, we package all of it in a graphical, wizard-driven adapter,” Demed L’Her, VP of product management for Oracle integration products, said in an interview with InformationWeek. [Want more on cloud integration? Read Informatica Adds Integration Options As Cloud Demand Multiplies.] The Cloud Adapter for Salesforce.com works with the Oracle SOA Suite wizard-based... Read More »

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 »