Database in the sky?
December 13, 2010
For some time now we at LUCRUM have been talking about cloud-based Business Intelligence solutions as a viable market alternative. We partnered with www.1010-data.com, offering big data – data warehouses in the cloud, and with Ocucue, offering “object” (as opposed to KPI) based data visualizations in the cloud. Executives from both of these organizations presented at our BI Symposium back in September.
Well, BI in the cloud just made a big leap forward. The poster child of cloud companies, Salesforce.com, has now entered the mix. Salesforce announced a few days ago the availability of www.database.com, a service they (salesforce) will be offering, based upon their existing architecture. WOW… The game should start moving even faster now, what with Salesforce now directly competing with the major Database vendors (Oracle and Microsoft specifically). I personally find it interesting as well that of all the areas Salesforce could have brought to the cloud (vertical/horizontal solutions, ERP/MRP systems, yet another email system, etc) they chose Database. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it makes sense relative to leveraging their existing infrastructure, but I think it’s an interesting vote on where BI, Data and the cloud are headed.