cloud computing
Power To The People
Today’s a big day! Not just because we’re announcing a major overhaul of our product. It’s a big day because with this announcement, we’re emancipating business users from the shackles of IT. We’re allowing business users to build applications in the cloud without needing programmers.
Here’s how it happened. When TrackVia came online nearly five years ago, it was presented and purchased as an online database. The core differentiators were meant to appeal to IT types: security, performance, data integrity. Though TrackVia was different than most of today’s cloud databases, for example by having a user interface instead of requiring web service calls to get data in and out, it was still mostly just another way to store data in the cloud.
Business Users Pushing IT to Adapt
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article about businesses adopting Apple’s iPads. The article said that business users seeking increased productivity are spurring IT departments to support the new devices. This isn’t new, the article points out, and cites an analyst from Forrester Research named Ted Schadler:
What Small and Medium Sized Businesses Should Know About the Cloud
For a lot of small-business owners, "cloud computing" is the latest buzzword to leave them puzzled. “Broadly speaking, any service or program sent over an Internet connection can be considered a cloud service. An outside vendor runs the servers and software, so the buyer doesn't have to worry about the technical issues in-house—and can focus on its own business,” says Rodger Cheng from The Wall Street Journal.
However, there’s more to it than that. Cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) offers a plethora of benefits that allows small businesses to engage and compete in the same activities big businesses do. Today's web-enabled world is one in which even small businesses of less than 20 people absolutely must have a Web presence, and beyond that, small-scale Web applications to deliver customer services. The good news is that all this is possible in the cloud.
