According to a 2011 survey by the Independent Oracle User Group, over 50% of Oracle’s customers have deployed or are considering deploying private clouds. Most private clouds today support non-production workloads because enterprises are unable to deploy mission-critical applications in their private cloud.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Sr. Principal Product Director at Oracle, will discuss how the same Oracle technology that powers the Oracle Public Cloud e...| By Praising Gaw | Article Rating: |
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| July 25, 2008 11:15 AM EDT | Reads: |
63,763 |
Praising Gaw's Blog
Every time I log into Facebook, or search for flights online, I am taking advantage of cloud computing. However, neither of these examples would be considered SaaS. According to Gartner, cloud computing is not just a buzzword; it does have a distinct meaning separate from SaaS.
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Recently, I’ve noticed that a lot of vendors have started talking about “cloud computing” in their marketing materials. In many cases they’re referring to solutions that were previously called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which begs the question – what is the difference between these two terms, anyway? Is “cloud computing” simply a new industry buzzword with no real meaning? Or is there actually a difference between the two? 
Fortunately, the analysts at Gartner helped to answer my question with a recent report that clearly addressed just this issue. According to them, cloud computing is not just a buzzword; it does have a distinct meaning separate from SaaS.
The way I understand it, “cloud computing” refers to the bigger picture…basically the broad concept of using the internet to allow people to access technology-enabled services. According to Gartner, those services must be “massively scalable” to qualify as true “cloud computing”. So according to that definition, every time I log into Facebook, or search for flights online, I am taking advantage of cloud computing. However, neither of these examples would be considered SaaS.
While most (but not all) Software-as-a-Service solutions fall under the larger cloud computing definition as “massively scalable”, they also have a number of other defining factors. First, SaaS is software that’s “owned, delivered, and managed remotely by one or more providers.” It also “allows a sharing of application processing and storage resources in a one-to-many environment…on a pay-for-use basis, or as a subscription.”
So, with all that said, I can clearly state that Fortiva is a SaaS solution using cloud computing…but does it really matter? At the end of the day it comes down to how well the solution meets the needs of the user, both from a feature-functionality, as well as from a total cost of ownership perspective. Whatever you want to call it, the benefits of SaaS solutions go well beyond the buzzwords that may be used to describe them. Understanding that is much more important than getting caught up in the terms marketers use to try to get customers’ attention.
[This post appeared originally here and is republished in full with the kind permission of the author.]
Published July 25, 2008 Reads 63,763
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
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Praising Gaw is VP of Marketing at Fortiva.
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abramowski 03/10/09 09:08:00 AM EDT | |||
One addition to your article would be a brief discussion of Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is a technology stack that lives between the Cloud infrastructure & the software as a service application. Every software application must have an environment that runs that software. The environment is made up of web servers, application servers, database servers, search servers, etc. All of this needs to be wrappered together with managed services like application level monitoring, backups and continuous improvement. This is the PaaS layer. |
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Simple Difference 07/17/08 05:44:37 AM EDT | |||
Cloud computing serves *developers & companies* who develop software and services. SaaS serves *end users* who use software. |
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Brian de Haaff 07/15/08 06:51:44 PM EDT | |||
There sure is a lot of confusion when it comes to talking about cloud computing. Yet, it does not need to be so complicated. There really are only three types of services that are cloud based: SaaS, PaaS, and Cloud Computing Platforms. I am not sure being massively scalable is a requirement to fit into any one category. We recently published a blog post on this subject with the purpose of simplifying the discussion via images and cutting through the confusion. You can read about it here - "The ASP is dead, long live the Cloud" https://community.paglo.com/blog_topic/index/110-the-asp-is-dead-long-li... Brian de Haaff, |
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In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Sr. Principal Product Director at Oracle, will discuss how the same Oracle technology that powers the Oracle Public Cloud e...May. 21, 2012 11:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,620 |
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With BigDataExpo 2012 New York (www.BigDataExpo.net), co-located with 10th Cloud Expo, now just three weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are t...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just three weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
Whether your company is large or small, you are probably exploring Big Data solutions and using cloud services and will need to integrate with other enterprise workloads.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Gwyn Clay, CEO of Stonebranch, will share detailed information about how their customers are already integrating Workload Automation with tools like Hadoop, and running workloads completely in the cloud using a modern enterprise-wide workload automation solution that is 100...
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As a Platinum Plus Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, Rackspace Hosting is offering special passes to SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Manage...
The move to cloud-based applications has undeniably delivered tremendous benefits. However, the associated distribution creates various challenges from the quality perspective:
End-to-end tests need to pass through multiple dependent systems, which are commonly unavailable, evolving, or difficult-to-access for testing.
Accessing such systems often involves transaction and bandwidth fees.
Teams need to test and tune the system under test against a realistic and broad range of performance and ...
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Which do you think is the most important cloud computing standard still to tackle?
Who should and shouldn’t be using a PaaS product today, and why?
Can a public cloud ever be truly secure?
How important is open source to cloud computing and Big Data?
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