Without getting into the umpteenth discussion about what, ho wand where the Cloud is, I think we can safely assume that for average people, and especially for businesspeople, Cloud Computing is when you run an application or store some data on someone else’s server somewhere out there “in the Cloud”. By this definition, Salesforce.com, just to name an instance, fits just about everybody’s idea of Cloud Computing .
Oracle’s Larry Ellison would beg to differ, and he actually traded insults onstage at Open World 2010 with Salesforce’s boss Marc Benioff, whom he accused of “just running a few applications on some servers.” To which Benioff memorably replied: “You can’t run a cloud in a box, Larry” – referring to Oracle’s jumbo-sized „Exalogic Elastic Cloud“ which Ellison had just introduced.
Which is funny, because according to Chandar Pattabhiram, VP Product Marketing at Cast Iron Systems, a small Silicon valley startup recently acquired by IBM, the box metaphonre is actually a pretty good description of Salesforce itself.
