TechPulse 360

SDForum Cloud Computing And Beyond conference

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took aim at cloud computing last week, calling it a fashion sure to go out of style. Just weeks earlier, Lawson Software predicted the young business would collapse in two years.

Of course, both are traditional software vendors, so you might expect the digs. But that didn’t stop software-as-a-service vendors from going on the defensive Thursday at the SDForum Cloud Computing and Beyond conference.

There is a lot of value in the cloud and the notion of delivering software as a service over the Net, said Rajen Sheth, senior product manager at Google. “There is a point in the future we might get to where everything is in the cloud.”

“Cloud computing is like a battleship,” echoed Sanjog Gad, senior vice president at SAP. “You ignore it at your peril.”

The vendors argued cloud computing is still relatively new, but is maturing and changing rapidly. At SAP, also a traditional software vendor, Gad said the company is looking at a hybrid model that “decouples the software from the hardware” and permits customers to mix hosted and on-premise applications. The company is looking at software architecture from the ground up, he said.

New models also allow customers to prospect of picking best of breed components from among vendors, said Daniel Druker, senior vice president at Intacct.

That should give traditional software vendors (with big integrated applications suites) some pause.