Top 10 current technology conflicts

The new year has gone and it seems that peace on earth and goodwill to all mankind has been put on the back burner.

The original plan for this week's Top 10 was to look into cyber conflicts between governments but, with the Egyptian situation still unresolved, we felt this was in bad taste. Instead, we restricted things to the tech industry, with the odd exception.

The technology industry is one of the most perfect markets out there. Adam Smith would have applauded it, and the area is as interesting to the industry watcher as the Serengeti is to David Attenborough. The flat corporate structure means lots of innovation and the speed of progress means lots of corporate battles.

Something Shaun and I noticed on the list was the lack of Apple. We put it down to the fact that Apple dominates in the fields it chooses. As for the rest, here's the latest list of troubles in the tech world.

Honourable Mention: Cloud computing
Iain Thomson: As we considered the list of current conflict zones, cloud came up immediately, but the more we discussed it the more it became clear that cloud is now a skirmish, rather than a full-blown battle.

Cloud services are certainly disruptive and will make or break certain established technologies. But some of the hype surrounding cloud's future omnipotence has not been matched by reality.

Sure, cloud is much better at some applications than installed software, provided you have a reliable internet connection, but it sucks at some key applications.

This reality gap has never been more apparent than with Google's CR-48 cloud laptop. It's one of those beautiful ideas - a cloud operating system - until you try to use it in practice.

The pervasive internet is the wave of the future, analysts agree, but until we all have reliable internet connections cloud conflicts will be limited to certain key industry areas.

Shaun Nichols: One big hurdle to the adoption of cloud computing, particularly in the enterprise space, is security.

While some applications have transitioned quite readily, others have been held back because executives simply don't feel comfortable moving data to the cloud.

It seems that when you have essential applications that business depends on the idea of handing everything over to a third party service doesn't appeal to too many IT decision makers. Likewise, studies have shown that companies are still extremely wary of moving large amounts of storage over to cloud services.

This idea was the central focus of last year's RSA Conference and, with the 2011 conference a few weeks away, it remains at the forefront of discussion.

Solving the problem may take a cultural rather than a technological shift. There's not much reason to believe that a server in a professionally maintained and guarded data warehouse is any less secure than one in a server room at your average office building, but you're not going to change minds overnight.

Honourable mention: Salesforce and cloud challengers
Shaun Nichols: It used to be that Salesforce was able to sell itself on the novel idea of cloud computing.

While more established foes such as SAP and Peoplesoft required users to purchase a licence and run local software, Salesforce moved all the heavy computing and storage to the cloud and users ran the application in their browser. More importantly, billing was on a monthly per-user basis, requiring little upfront investment.

That flexibility allowed Salesforce to grow into an enterprise giant with annual revenues in the billions of dollars. The company now counts subscribers in the biggest businesses on the planet and a range of products that has expanded beyond the CRM space.

But in that time, the rest of the industry has also changed. The big companies may have taken a while to get with the software-as-a-service programme, but they're finally onboard. Offerings such as Oracle CRM on Demand and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are taking aim at the market and Salesforce is directly in their crosshairs.

It was one thing for Salesforce to establish itself in the CRM space, now Marc Benioff and company have to hold the ground they've claimed.

Iain Thomson: Shaun has a bee in his bonnet about this and I can understand why. Anyone who's been exposed to multiple Salesforce briefings can get a little infected, or resistant again, by the rabid enthusiasm of the company's staff. Nevertheless Salesforce does have a case.

The company blazed the way in terms of bringing cloud to the enterprise, but the competition has picked up its game. Salesforce is no longer the only player in town and faces serious competition. The next year is going to be very interesting.