Cloud Computing Tests

Watching the live stream of Marc Benioff's keynote at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference today in San Francisco. He's moving quickly from topic to topic burying the ledes in many of them. He says, "databases need to be in the cloud" and then moves on. Took Travis to note to me that Techcrunch this morning posted a notice that Salesforce launched database.com, a SimpleDB-like cloud data storage service. Update: At the end of his talk, before handing the mic over to the product people, he runs through the list of products -- database.com included. It looks like an

impressive list, putting Salesforce as a serious company to watch in the cloud infrastructure space.

At some point, he moves on to some digs at Oracle. (There are many of these throughout.) One story he tells leads up to his call for a cloud test. "We need a cloud computing test" soon followed by "beware the false cloud." It's a nice couple lines. The slide that goes along with it makes a lot of sense when going up against Oracle.

But it's not necessarily as good as Amazon's list of cloud attributes:

Note that the first slide talks about cloud (kloud) definition number 1 (software as a service). Amazon, of course, is offering up cloud definition number 2 (infrastructure as a service).

Now if only Marc could go after Microsoft for their brainless "into the cloud" TV commercials. (We're not linking to them because you won't forgive us if we do.)