If hybrid is the Holy Grail of IT, we must look beyond the clouds

By Paul Cragg, CTO, Easynet

Golf clubs, cars and IT rarely get talked about in the same sentence outside a board meeting, but surprisingly they have one thing in common: they all come in hybrid form. All combine different features to create a single, better product with improved performance. And all are created from designs based on technology innovation.

For the sake of argument, I’m going to leave golf clubs and cars well alone so we can focus here on hybrid IT, which several surveys confirm to be ‘the new normal’. Hybrid IT, though, means different things to different organisations.

Generally it refers to IT which integrates different clouds from different providers. It could be a private/public cloud combination of a local server and a cloud service, which bring the benefits of private cloud without the prohibitive costs.  Global analysts Gartner talk about it being ‘a new mission …

Oracle’s recent acquisitions fill gaps in the Oracle Marketing Cloud

Gerry Brown, Senior Analyst, Customer Engagement

Between October 2013 and February 2014 Oracle made three acquisitions that enhance the Oracle Marketing Cloud proposition. The first acquisition was Compendium for marketing content management; the second was Responsys, a cross-channel marketing platform; and the third BlueKai, a data management platform and data marketplace focused on the marketing industry.

Many “core” marketing technology applications are already provided by the Oracle Marketing Cloud. The three acquisitions are enhancements designed to supplement, add value to, and differentiate Oracle’s offer, and certainly give Oracle a larger footprint in cloud marketing applications. It should also be noted that the Oracle Marketing Cloud is part of the larger, more embracing Oracle Customer Experience Cloud, which includes commerce, sales, service, social, and marketing.

Oracle has unfulfilled ambitions in the “Marketing Cloud” area, and believes that the market offers a strategic business opportunity. These acquisitions provide three key challenges …

Six of the best: Business, backups and the BBC

The latest edition of Six of the Best, featuring the CloudTech editorial team’s favourite links from around the web, has either a slightly hotchpotch feel to it, or covers an extremely wide range of cloud computing stories over the past couple of weeks. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.  

1)      Moving to the cloud? Don’t rush to kiss legacy applications goodbye [Forbes]

Dominick Paul, national vice president of strategic solutions for SunGard Availability Services, opens with an anecdote. He kicked off a presentation at a CIO summit by explaining that “with the advent of the cloud, UNIX was now a legacy platform.” The audience got the joke – given that UNIX was the hottest thing just five years ago, it seems bizarre to consider it legacy because of the cloud.

As a result, Paul’s theory in the article goes: “Just because cloud-based technologies are the …