News from Dreamforce and VMworld

Salesforce.com Inc. held its Dreamforce 2011 conference this week where it announced a number of new social capabilities for its cloud offerings. Meanwhile, VMware Inc. rolled out new cloud offerings at its VMworld 2011 conference.

Focal Points:

• Salesforce.com moved its platforms to the next level through a series of company and partner announcements at its Dreamforce '11 conference. Chatter Connect extends Chatter to any custom or third-party application to make it social. The Chatter REST application program interface (API) simplifies integration of Chatter into other, non-social applications such as Intranets and portals, custom mobile apps and other enterprise apps. In addition, Chatter for SharePoint allows companies to make Microsoft Corp.'s SharePoint social. With touch.salesforce.com users can access salesforce.com applications from the most popular operating systems, smartphones, and tablet devices providing user-friendly experience and customizations for touch devices. In addition, the company launched Siteforce, a leading-edge Web content management system for managing a company's marketing Web sites with great agility. Web developers will be able to use its drag-and-drop studio to build pixel-perfect sites, and business users can edit content in seconds. Siteforce makes it fast and easy to deploy, add sites and scale traffic. On the partnership side, Salesforce.com added Concur Technologies Inc.'s expense management application, Infor's ERP, and Workday Inc.'s workforce data into the Salesforce.com cloud. Workday will deliver two new offerings. The first will enable Workday data to be integrated into Chatter to securely share, collaborate and act upon workforce data in real-time. The second will allow customers to create custom applications with Workday data feeds on the Force.com platform.
• VMware launched a number of new products and services aimed at enterprises running a mix of private and public cloud computing environments. With vCloud Connector 1.5 enterprises can move virtual machines from their data center to a cloud, or between clouds. A public beta version is being released this week. Enhancements in version 1.5 include faster transfers in which multiple VMs are moved in parallel. Additionally, if a connection is lost because of network congestion or other trouble, the transfer process picks up right where it left off when the connection is restored. Also announced was the Global Connect partnership between VMware and four global vCloud Datacenter service providers: Bluelock Inc. in North America; Colt Technology Services Group Ltd. in Europe; Softbank Telecom Corp. in Japan; and Singapore Telecommunications Group (SingTel) in the Asia-Pacific region. If a company executes a contract with one of the four, it is honored by all of them, according to company executives. VCenter Site Recovery Manager 5 for backup and disaster recovery in a cloud environment was unveiled, too. This version uses array-based replication and solves a major customer problem with storage backup – i.e., the inability to replicate a firm's storage easily to a cloud service provider unless the company's data center has the same storage hardware as the service provider. VMware is also introducing vFabric Data Director, which is software that helps enterprise applications access the vast amounts of data in a cloud environment. VFabric Data Director is designed for applications that are delivered via mobile devices, through social media or in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery mode.
• VMware's Chief Technology Officer Steve Herrod told VMworld attendees that his company intends to reduce the big security headache created by file-sharing services such as Box.net Inc., Dropbox Inc., or Microsoft SharePoint. VMware is planning to control how files get shared with its "Project Octopus" dropbox. The concept is to create a central storehouse for file sharing and eliminate user-controlled one-offs. Access lists would allow administrators to determine who sees and uses what, while an advanced tool would eliminate dormant files once it passes its expiration date. (According to VMware surveys 80 percent of corporate files are no longer accessed after two years.) Project Octopus uses data-synchronizing technology from VMware's Zimbra email server. VMware currently plans on Project Octopus being available for deployment on premises or through the cloud, and will not require companies or service providers to buy the Zimbra mail server.

Experton Group believes the cloud computing markets gained steam over the past week as Salesforce.com and VMware filled in missing capabilities gaps. Salesforece.com made migration to the public cloud easier by adding new tools and simplifying integration with corporate data centers and business requirements. On the other hand, VMware believes private clouds will dominate in the future and it intends to be the platform upon which enterprises build all of their private cloud environments. Studies find a hybrid environment of private and public clouds are the most economical. IT executives should scrutinize the options and migrate current environments to the set of cloud implementations that best satisfies their development and production requirements.