Oracle and Microsoft To Announce Cloud Partnership Monday

symbolset writes "While some might liken the deal to the Empire joining up with the Trade Federation, there may be some interesting outcomes for this one. On Monday Microsoft and Oracle are expected to announce a 'cloud" partnership'. Although the two companies often seem to be at odds, two of their founders — Bill Gates and Larry Ellison — are partners in charity in the 'giving pledge.' Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? 'Oracle is battling an image not of growing up, but of growing old. On Thursday the company announced lower than expected earnings, which it ascribed to a tough economy overseas. Cloud-based software grew well, but remains a small part of its overall revenue. The company also said it would raise its dividend and announced a big stock buyback, behaviors usually undertaken by tech companies when they begin to grow more slowly.'"

Partnership of two dead cows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Partnership of two dead cows...
Really, who cares?

Whose going to put stuff in the cloud now???

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're supposed to put business data into US based clouds? Have you missed the news?? Never heard of PRISM?

For example Cloudera, Cloud based Hadoop cluster for businesses:
http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/home.html
Backed with venture capital from....NSA... because terrorists something something

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cloudant
The there's Cloudant, the database in the cloud, which got backing from VC company run by NSA

Oh but my favorites are the always on video recording Looxcie and their sister company vidcie, Looxcie is a life cam you wear all the time that uploads your life to the cloud, and vidcie is a business video system, have those important business meetings using vidcie... back with NSA VC money, because terrorists do conference calls!
http://www.looxcie.com/
http://www.vidcie.com

Seriously, nobody in their right minds is going to move any critical business data into the US cloud, when the NSA can (and does) grab it with secret warrants and their laws say they can do anything that's in US interests.

Their VC company I-Q-Tel, clearly backs business cloud startups and now we know they grab US databases, its easy to see the purpose for trying to get companies to put their secret business data into the US cloud.

Other VC choices:
http://www.platfora.com/
Datamining unstructured data. Remember the claim that NSA don't datamine the data? And yet we got the GCHQ leak showing GCHQ using NSA data mining software! This is a typical datamining company they sunk capital into.

Connectify
http://www.connectify.me/
Wifi sharing software that reports back a lot of linkage info:
"By using Connectify location based services, you authorize us to locate your hardware and to record, compile and display your location. As part of Connectify, we may also collect and store certain information about our users, such as, users’ wireless mobile subscriber ISDN and/or IMEI numbers (as applicable) and users’ network access identifier information.""

3vr
http://www.3vr.com/
"3VR, the video intelligence company, enables organizations to search, mine and leverage video to bolster security".. more data mining.

Their VC company is called InQTel:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm

Re:Cloud schmoud

[homey of my owney]

That's true. Didn't Larry even say say something like "I don't know what the hell cloud computing means" - shortly before Oracle actually announced any cloud stuff?