OneCloud

Future of the Cloud, Suite or Best of Breed?

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The last few weeks have been very interesting. Oracle held their annual conference, followed by SalesForce, and then Box. It was a good time to be in San Francisco as you had three distinct approaches to helping the Enterprise.

  • Oracle, for all the jokes around them “discovering” the cloud this year, offered a story about their tight stack of hardware and software.
  • SalesForce announced Chatterbox which makes Content Management a native feature to their platform.
  • Box announced new partners and new tools for integrating Box with all sorts of other cloud-based applications.

What you have are two suites and a best of breed approach. A recent NY Times blog post on Open vs Closed covered the two approaches well. What is the right choice? What is the future?

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Mobile and The Convergence of Personal and Work Life

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While breaking bread with a Box employee, Chris, last night, I had a revelation. Historically I’ve really only consider three types of workers that need a complete set of business tools on their mobile device.

  • Road Warriors: These people are never at their desk. Even if they don’t travel, they are always running between meetings at various locations.
  • Silicon Valley: Mobile is cool, we are cool, we have to use mobile. Doesn’t everyone use it?
  • Mobile Cult: They don’t live or work in Silicon Valley but they want to be that cool. Not only do they like to use their mobile device while at their desk, they carry it everywhere to show people. Have you seen their cool light saber app?

The point being that for the everyday worker, mobile computing was for our personal lives. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, books, games, and anything else to keep us entertained. Mobile work consisted mostly of emails and taking pictures of whiteboards.

The thing is, a funny thing has happened during the mobile revolution, our personal and work lives started to blur together into a single existence.

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