The concept of cloud computing, or running multiple computational systems on a network, is not a new one, of course. But it’s often fascinating to note the history of computing, from IBM’s 50th anniversary of the mainframe earlier this year to time-sharing on a CPU mainframe.

As a result, a video posted by renowned filmmaker David Hoffman has brought about a fascinating insight on AT&T’s vision of cloud computing as far back as 1993.

“You can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud”, the video tells AT&T customers.

The video was put up in April last year but came to wider attention after Salesforce.com chief exec Marc Benioff tweeted it out last night:

If you want to know who invented the cloud take a look at this: https://t.co/8VPDgKPbO5 @marcporat

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) May 6, 2014

The technology which arises …

The concept of cloud computing, or running multiple computational systems on a network, is not a new one, of course. But it’s often fascinating to note the history of computing, from IBM’s 50th anniversary of the mainframe earlier this year to time-sharing on a CPU mainframe.

As a result, a video posted by renowned filmmaker David Hoffman has brought about a fascinating insight on AT&T’s vision of cloud computing as far back as 1993.

“You can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud”, the video tells AT&T customers.

The video was put up in April last year but came to wider attention after Salesforce.com chief exec Marc Benioff tweeted it out last night:

If you want to know who invented the cloud take a look at this: https://t.co/8VPDgKPbO5 @marcporat

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) May 6, 2014

The technology which arises …

Adrian Ho, Principal Analyst, Enterprise

There is mounting enthusiasm for cloud services in the Asia-Pacific region, and enterprises are building the business case for cloud. The ultimate aim for enterprises is to build secure but extremely agile ICT infrastructures that will allow them to be nimble and innovative, and to move faster than their competitors. The cloud dividend delivers the highest yield for enterprises if it can help them to achieve that competitive advantage over their peers.

A series of cloud announcements at IBM Impact potentially put clear water between IBM and its competitors in the region. The company gave details of its highly anticipated Cloud Marketplace, which will be driven by role-based service offerings. In addition, it has launched integration services that help enterprises integrate and orchestrate their complex hybrid cloud environments. More importantly, with BlueMix IBM is building a developer and independent software vendor (ISV) community that will …

The battle for viewership in the streaming age is well and truly joined. Amazon and Netflix, the two leading players in this market, have both redoubled their efforts to get the upper hand in market share, creating original programming and investing in its infrastructure.

Netflix, notably, has a ‘Long Term View’, first outlined a year ago and updated several times since, asserting that as “apps are replacing channels, remote controls are disappearing, and screens are proliferating…linear TV is popular, but ripe for replacement.”

Amazon, however, has an industry leading cloud infrastructure behind it, as well as $61bn in revenue compared to Netflix’s $3.6bn. Netflix, not surprisingly, has the upper hand in terms of subscribers, but it’s not an open and shut case – 30m for Netflix with 7.8m outside the US, compared to 10m for Amazon Prime. Crucially, two thirds (67%) of streaming subscribers use Netflix …

The battle for viewership in the streaming age is well and truly joined. Amazon and Netflix, the two leading players in this market, have both redoubled their efforts to get the upper hand in market share, creating original programming and investing in its infrastructure.

Netflix, notably, has a ‘Long Term View’, first outlined a year ago and updated several times since, asserting that as “apps are replacing channels, remote controls are disappearing, and screens are proliferating…linear TV is popular, but ripe for replacement.”

Amazon, however, has an industry leading cloud infrastructure behind it, as well as $61bn in revenue compared to Netflix’s $3.6bn. Netflix, not surprisingly, has the upper hand in terms of subscribers, but it’s not an open and shut case – 30m for Netflix with 7.8m outside the US, compared to 10m for Amazon Prime. Crucially, two thirds (67%) of streaming subscribers use Netflix …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

At the end of March 2014, and in short succession, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft announced significant price cuts to their public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offerings. Widely reported in the press, the market rejoiced at the news, which combined price cuts with other announcements.

IaaS price cuts are not a new trend, but the most important aspect of this latest round of cuts is that it reflects Google’s unambiguous ambition to position itself as a major IaaS player. However, the company has much more to do to catch up with AWS, because price cuts are not the main weapon in an IaaS vendor’s arsenal.

For more information, see the upcoming Ovum report IaaS: Beyond Price Cuts.

IaaS is also one of the key topics that will be covered at the Ovum Industry Congress, May 13/14, 2014, at the Victoria …

Earlier this week, IBM announced another series of cloudy launches, chief of which being the IBM Cloud Marketplace, a ‘one stop shop’ for IBM’s IaaS, PaaS and SaaS portfolio. CloudTech caught up with Doug Clark, cloud leader at IBM UK&I, to find out more.

“Everybody is moving to as-a-service,” Doug Clark, cloud leader at IBM UK&I says. “It’s almost the entire landscape is moving there.”

With the release of the IBM Cloud Marketplace, as CloudTech reported earlier this week, almost everything in IBM’s portfolio is available under one roof – it’s an enterprise app store with a little edge. More interestingly, the branding move towards ‘IBM-as-a-service’ is gathering pace.

“It was Ginny [Rometty, IBM chief exec] who I first heard talk about IBM-as-a-service,” Clark explains. “But what’s been exciting for me is when I’ve been talking to clients, I’ve been using the …