The tech industry has been abuzz the past week now that the Oracle acquisition of Sun has cleared the last hurdle from the European Union and is officially complete.
Oracle and Sun executives have begun addressing a number of questions about how Oracle will integrate Suns various hardware, system and software stacks into the Oracle ecosystem.
IBM last month rolled out its Beta Cloud to the general public. The Beta Cloud is IBM’s dynamically provisioned runtime environment that includes tools to develop and test application code on IBM software.
With this new offering on the market it will be interesting to see who dominates amongst Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Force.com as the environment of choice for Cloud development.
The following video shows developers how to create environments on the Beta Cloud.
On Demand Business Intelligence has picked up traction in the past year as both SMB’s and their larger brethren turn to hosted BI solutions to deploy BI projects faster with less risk and at lower cost. Initially reserved for analyzing excel files and for small departmental projects, BI in the cloud is now being utilized for extremely large data sets and data warehousing projects.
GoodData is one of the first firms to offer BI in the cloud and just recently won the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. GoodData offers standard BI functionality and tools for Analytics, and Dashboard and Report creation but due to its Cloud architecture offers scalability and collaboration ability not available with on premise BI tools.
A few of GoodData’s competitors include SAP Business Objects, Swirrl, and SQLStream. Expect to see more competitors jump into the space as both computing cycle costs come down and as more companies make the transition to the cloud for BI projects.
