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.
Marc Benioff unveiled Salesforce.com’s Chatter application on the opening day of the firm’s annual DreamForce conference in Moscone Center In San Francisco.
Salesforce Chatter is a secure, private social network intended for enterprise use. Chatter has social computing features along the lines of Facebook and Twitter and is composed of a Chatter App and a Chatter Social Development Platform.
The Chatter App includes standard social computing features like Profiles, Status Updates, Feeds and Content Sharing. Users of Twitter and Facebook will see familiar functionality and social media tools built into Chatter App.
The Chatter Social Platform; billed as the Collaboration Cloud, will include standard social media and collaboration components as well as Twitter, Google and Facebook developer toolkits. The Chatter Social Platform will also include API’s that will enable developers to integrate data from both cloud and on premise apps into Chatter.
Salesforce Chatter is scheduled to go live in 2010. Chatter will be included in all paid editions of SalesforceCRM and Force.com and a Chatter edition that includes Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content ad Force.com will be available for $50 per user per month.
