We do our best to tell you everything you need to know about cloud computing, but it’s hard to fit everything in every week. Here are three articles that are worth your attention: an unusual list of thinkers who shaped the cloud, a guide to cloud computing acronyms and a potential new trend in SaaS.
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Simon Wardley’s Top 10 Influential Thinkers in the Cloud
Simon Wardley wrote a list of his top 10 influential thinkers in the cloud. Most of them aren’t who you’d expect. For example, his number one choice was Douglas Parkhill, author of the 1966 book The Challenge of the Computer Utility. Wardley also selected a few economists and an evolutionary biologist.
Don’t Know Your PaaS from Your IaaS?
Adron Hall at Cloudave provided an overview of some of the key terms in cloud computing: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. If you’re still confused, or need to educate someone on the basics, it’s a good link to check out.
SocialText Announced a Yammer Migration Tool
SocialText announced a tool this week for migrating free Yammer accounts into its own service. SocialText touted its security and additional features as reasons for companies to switch to SocialText, but Yammer has a clear security policy for premium accounts and has been expanding its feature set beyond microblogging. SocialText does, however, offer a managed appliance option to run behind customers’ firewalls – a feature Yammer does not offer. Also, many IT departments may balk at having to pay Yammer to delete accounts that users weren’t supposed to create in the first place. This sort of ill-will may lead many companies to look elsewhere for social software solutions, and SocialText is trying to court those companies.
What’s really interesting here is how easy SocialText is trying to make it to switch from another service. Most SaaS providers I’ve talked to offer an API or some other way to export data. And most say they will work with customers to import data from other services. However, specific migration tools are rare. As the market heats up, we may be seeing more of these.
Photo by Chris & Laurie Juszak
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