In any booming industry, rivalries are inevitable. In this article, The New York Times delves into the storm cooking in the Cloud.
If the Hatfields and McCoys lived in Silicon Valley, they would be fighting with piles of cash and lines of software code instead of knives and shotguns. And the fight would be over who wins the most customers in the computer industry’s growing “cloud” of software services, Quentin Hardy writes in The New York Times.
That is how it is for Aneel Bhusri and Zachary Nelson, whose companies are in contention over the next major shift in computing. In a way, the men are reliving history.
Two decades ago, their mentors feuded, and that time, too, the dispute took place against the backdrop of a major shift in corporate computing — when customers gave up their mainframes and moved to software that relied on personal computers closely connected to a server.
Mr. Nelson, the chief executive of NetSuite, used to work for Lawrence J. Ellison, the billionaire chief executive of Oracle.
Mr. Bhusri, co-founder of a competitor company called Workday, used to work for David Duffield, a rival of Mr. Ellison’s. Mr. Duffield is the low-profile founder of PeopleSoft, a once-powerful maker of corporate software that Oracle acquired in a bitter, 17-month hostile takeover fight.
How bitter? Oracle defeated a federal antitrust lawsuit brought by the Justice Department before it could reel in its rival. And a month after PeopleSoft was acquired, 5,000 of its 11,000 employees were laid off.
Together, NetSuite and Workday are among a growing circle of technology outfits poised to cash in on the migration to cloud computing services and perhaps elbow aside today’s corporate software giants, like Oracle and the German company SAP.
Ron Hovsepian corporate offers collaborative solutions based on the cloud. More information on its services can be accessed on this website.
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