We were recently nominated for "Best cloud consulting 2012" from UP 2012 and are hoping to win at their Third Annual Global Cloud Computing Conference taking place on December 12th in San Francisco.
We are honored and are really hoping to win and need your help.
If you think CLOUDscores and scorethecloud help, we would love it if you would go to http://up-con.com/vote?page=19 and vote for us. We are up against some big names and tough competition, though we think we are better, just not bigger, so every vote helps!
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
CLOUDscore - Salesforce.com versus Oracle CRM
With Dreamforce and Oracle Open World both in the last 30 days there has been a lot of new and announcements about their various products. Some of it is really good news. Some is interesting. Some is false..
We worked up a quick CLOUDscore for them both based on what we know. Salesforce.com scores an 81 and Oracle scores a 67. Both of them make a good product for our use case, salesforce.com was a better choise. This does not mean that it is a better choice for you since you may rank them or score the differently.. Let's walk through the differences.
Company wise they both have solid datacenters, recoverability and are stable companies with great management teams. With Oracle it's a bit hard to tell. Their website is a little hard to follow and we don't yet have a relationship with Oracle but we think it's a pretty safe bet that they have redundancy built into their cloud solution, since they have a practice around DR.
Relationship wise though salesforce.com is much closer to us. To be fair we have worked with them for many years and our relationship with Oracle really revolves around them auditing us for licensing every few years. Oracle very well may be better or at least comparable when it comes to company relationships, attention and influence. Use your best judgement on that.
From a Legal perspective they both score roughly the same. I could not find specific mention of a SAS70 or SSAE certification on the Oracle side, but they listed enough other certifications to make me believe they have it and just didn't list it. Ask before you sign though and make sure it covers the general computer controls you expect.
Neither deal with assignment if you get bought , Oracle's SLA penalty is actually better then Salesforce.com's. They will give you 10% back for a missed SLA. As the contract reads though that looks like the max as well. So if they go down once, you get 10%. If they go down 10 times, you still get 10%. Salesforce.com seems to be 3% per issue. Neither talks about maximum increases in their default contracts, though this is probably negotiable given a large enough deal.
Under Openness, salesforce has a trust site, where Oracle doesn't, at least not that we could find. Oracle does though have the option to bring their solution in house which really helps make them attractive. Salesforce.com has no option other than their hosted model.
Salesforce does a better job on free training resources for users. We couldn't find much detail around Oracle's infrastructure and how global it was or how well it would perform. We gave them fairly high marks because of their other practices in this space. Oracle does have a desktop client though which is good and bad. It's good in that it allows them to offer offline pretty seamlessly, but it makes more requirement for the client.
Salesforce.com seems to have a better development community, or at least a more focused one. Oracle owns Java which is obviously widely used, but it was hard to find CRM specific development groups. While they may exist they seemed hard to find. While Oracle having the option to bring the software in house helps them with Openness, it hurts them here since they tend to have a slower pace of innovation. Of course they are huge, so when they want to make a splash it can be a big one, but having to test more installations means they need to spend at least some time on that. Not that they aren't still releasing regularly, we think salesforce.com is a little faster to market.
Just a reminder this is based on a single CLOUDscore and our environment may not match yours. We encourage people to do their own due diligence, but do recommend you use our CLOUDscore methodology. We think it is good. :)
If you want to run your own numbers you can get the public cloud score sheet from here. If you do, we would love to see your score and add it to our database, Please share it with us and email it to us at info at scorethecloud.com
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Is it PaaS or IaaS? Don't ask Oracle
Oracle Open World is this week. It is one of the largest tech events and generally comes a few weeks after Salesforce.com's Dreamforce. Both Oracle and Salesforce try to outdo each other and since they are both in San Francisco it usually makes for some humorous stories.
Last year Oracle cancelled Mark Benioff (salesforce,com CEO) who was scheduled to be a keynote speaker after he bashed their "cloud strategy". He quickly put together an event at a local hotel just down the street. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adjvEEs1A6w. This year Mark made a point to say he wasn't invited to Oracle Open World this year. He took on Microsoft in 2010, but I digress.
Oracle this year is talking a lot about their cloud, but they seem to be using different lingo then everyone else. They were talking about their IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution. That was one area that people said they were missing so they made a show of announcing it. Good for them and I think they have some pretty good products. I loved Sun. Java everyone loves and Oracle has always made a great database.
But when they talk about IaaS I think they are confused. See IaaS is Infrastructure. Things like OS, hardware, network, storage, but in Oracle-land they include the database later, which in reality makes it more like a platform as a service or PaaS play. In fact they compare it to Amazon Web Services, which is the leader in PaaS, not IaaS. Amazon has an IaaS play but that's called EC2.
This feels a little bit like "putting lipstick on a pig". Not that their platform as a service isn't a solid offering, but if they want to play in the infrastructure as a service playground at least sell one. They shouldn't just rename their platform offering as infrastructure and expect no one to notice...
Last year Oracle cancelled Mark Benioff (salesforce,com CEO) who was scheduled to be a keynote speaker after he bashed their "cloud strategy". He quickly put together an event at a local hotel just down the street. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adjvEEs1A6w. This year Mark made a point to say he wasn't invited to Oracle Open World this year. He took on Microsoft in 2010, but I digress.
Oracle this year is talking a lot about their cloud, but they seem to be using different lingo then everyone else. They were talking about their IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution. That was one area that people said they were missing so they made a show of announcing it. Good for them and I think they have some pretty good products. I loved Sun. Java everyone loves and Oracle has always made a great database.
But when they talk about IaaS I think they are confused. See IaaS is Infrastructure. Things like OS, hardware, network, storage, but in Oracle-land they include the database later, which in reality makes it more like a platform as a service or PaaS play. In fact they compare it to Amazon Web Services, which is the leader in PaaS, not IaaS. Amazon has an IaaS play but that's called EC2.
This feels a little bit like "putting lipstick on a pig". Not that their platform as a service isn't a solid offering, but if they want to play in the infrastructure as a service playground at least sell one. They shouldn't just rename their platform offering as infrastructure and expect no one to notice...
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Asking the right questions about contracts
I was doing a cloud score on a vendor and one of the questions we ask is around termination of the contract. Many times in the past I have had to get out of a contract for various reasons, downsizing, mergers, change of direction etc. I always make sure that a termination clause exists now.
But just asking if the contract can be terminated early isn't enough. Recently I asked the question and the answer was, "yes with 30 days notice". A very reasonable answer. This gives the vendor time to find a way to reuse the capacity and was enough time for us to switch providers if we needed to. I was very happy with that answer and gave them a "5" for that question.
A few days later though I was reading through the contract and while the contract can be cancelled with 30 days notice, there is an early termination fee. That by itself is not unusual telco's normally will charge you for their build out costs, which can be expensive. Cellular contracts often will make you pay for the phone if you cancel early to make back their money etc.
The problem was though that the early termination fee was equal to the monthly fee times the number of months left on the contract. So I can terminate the contract but it costs me the same as if I kept the contract and I had to pay it all at once...
I've changed the question to be two parts, can I cancel, and what if any is the fee to cancel.
But just asking if the contract can be terminated early isn't enough. Recently I asked the question and the answer was, "yes with 30 days notice". A very reasonable answer. This gives the vendor time to find a way to reuse the capacity and was enough time for us to switch providers if we needed to. I was very happy with that answer and gave them a "5" for that question.
A few days later though I was reading through the contract and while the contract can be cancelled with 30 days notice, there is an early termination fee. That by itself is not unusual telco's normally will charge you for their build out costs, which can be expensive. Cellular contracts often will make you pay for the phone if you cancel early to make back their money etc.
The problem was though that the early termination fee was equal to the monthly fee times the number of months left on the contract. So I can terminate the contract but it costs me the same as if I kept the contract and I had to pay it all at once...
I've changed the question to be two parts, can I cancel, and what if any is the fee to cancel.
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