“PC era is vanishing, cloud computing rising — Google and IBM are “ramping up” their efforts to dominate cloud computing, it has been suggested — watch out, Microsoft?”
Los Angeles — While Microsoft and Yahoo in an frosty stalemate over a proposed merger, rivals IBM and Google are ramping up their efforts to together dominate what they believe will be the dominant software delivery model in the 21st century — so called cloud computing.
The companies intend to tap their widespread technological world view and significant talent to build a worldwide network of servers for consumer and business use.
Commenting on the initiative, Eric Schmidt, Google Inc.’s CEO and chairman said: “It is the story of our lifetime” adding that the alliance between the companies started few years back when IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano contacted Google wanting to know its thoughts about so-called “distributed computing”.
A great deal of their efforts thus far has taken place behind the scenes under a low profile, but the companies’ close association was fully apparent Thursday when their CEOs made a rare joint appearance on stage at an IBM conference in Los Angeles.
Schmidt, who addressed the IBM’s PartnerWorld conference here, afterwards joined the stage at the Nokia Theater with Palmisano to talk about cloud computing, globalization and other issues.
Palmisano and Schmidt consecutively complimented one another on issues ranging from leadership to technological innovation. They also maintained that their companies share lots of similarities, despite obvious differences between a consumer Web giant that calls Silicon Valley home and a suburban New York-based centenarian of business computing.
“We are boring, they are exciting; we are slow, they are fast; we are fat, they are skinny,” Palmisano joked. But the contrasts between IBM and Google are mostly skin deep, he said, noting that both vendors are “grounded in values” and share “a common technical alignment.”
The two CEOs jollied like old golf buddies, praising each other’s organizations and rarely giving moderator Pankaj Ghemawat, a professor of global strategy at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, a chance to ask questions.
Schmidt’s comments came amid intensified interest in the strategic moves that Google, which generates almost all of its revenue from Internet search advertising aimed at consumers, is making into the desktop applications marketplace.
Last month the Mountain View, Calif., search giant announced a partnership with Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM), whereby Salesforce, which makes Web-based applications for sales executives, would distribute Google’s desktop products, including word processing and spreadsheet tools, to its customers. Google’s applications are currently free, but some premium applications will later be available only for a fee.
Operating with IBM and with its network of resellers and systems integrators is “certainly one of the key planks of the strategy, because otherwise we can’t reach the customers,” Schmidt said.
He added some IBM applications were already embedding Google technology.
Google has already distributed to consumers a number of free, cloud-based services such as e-mail and storage, but it has barely tapped the lucrative commercial market. With the exception of security requirements, “there is not that much difference between the enterprise cloud and the consumer cloud,” Schmidt said at one point.
Although the executives did not specify any time frame regarding when the firms would begin rolling out production versions of their cloud computing services, they reportedly “left little doubt” that their efforts are accelerating.