Guest post by “Oracle on Wednesday announced the availability of Cloud Office 1.0, a Web-based productivity suite that is set to give online applications from Microsoft and Google a fresh dose of competition.
Cloud Office is integrated with the on-premises Oracle Open Office, of which version 3.3 was also announced Wednesday. Like Open Office, Cloud Office is based on ODF (Open Document Format). It provides a set of spreadsheet, text and presentation applications and is compatible with Microsoft Office, according to Oracle.”
If Oracle can integrate this well with both OpenOffice and MS Office it could be a big winner for them. Their brand will give them an edge over the likes of Google when it comes to selling this into large enterprises.
Even though Oracle is viewed as a villain, this sounds interesting.
I’m still skeptical about storing so much data in the cloud, no matter who the vendor is. I just wish they sold an appliance that a businesses could buy and connect it to a SAN, then maybe backup to the cloud for redundancy. Of course the backup would be encrypted as well so the vendor (Google, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, who ever) couldn’t see what you’re storing.
Edited 2010-12-21 22:57 UTC
As far as I understand, you can deploy Oracle Cloud Office in your private could if you want.
States “on-premise or on demand deployments” so I guess you’re right. I still doubtful.
That link also says Oracle is aiming this product for ISP’s and Telcos.
Just imagine “Comcast Office, powered by Oracle”!
Still waiting for more details (like pricing) before a final opinion is made. If one could deploy this on their site that would be really cool, however I can’t bring myself to believe that any of these companies are interested in letting users retain ownership of their data. If their target customers are ISP’s/Telcos then I can guess that you have to pay for a lot of licenses to be able to store data within your own data center. I’ll try keep an open mind but it’s hard not to be pessimistic.
Honestly, how hard is it to set up something like an webdav server or something, and just save your documents to said place, have it encrypted, backed up etc and then just have OpenOffice itself save to the mounted webdav server?
Then again, I am one of those who think that the ‘cloud’ crap is exactly that. Crap.
There is a reason why we have monstrous amounts of cheap hard drive space now.
Cloud is a buzzword that won’t disappear soon enough.