In effect, giant IBM hopes this loosely allied swarm will overwhelm application offerings from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

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An example of an application that does not work well in a simple cloud environment is a shared database, such as the typical Oracle database application, where the information is one big block of data that needs to be manipulated all the time by many computing processes and where access to the shared data needs to be synchronized and managed.

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It is popular among users of SAP, Oracle and IBM, according to a recent survey by the Business Application Research Centers (BARC).

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"This took a lot of software development and a lot of business development, " says Chief Executive Doug Renert , who formerly headed application sales at Oracle.

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"This took a lot of software development and a lot of business development, " says Chief Executive Doug Renert , who formerly headed application sales at Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ).

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In effect, giant IBM hopes this loosely allied swarm will overwhelm application offerings from the likes of Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), Oracle and SAP (nyse: SAP - news - people ).

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Marc Benioff all but educated the market on the benefits of software-as-a-service, the advantages of using a lightweight, easily configurable hosted sales force application compared to the generally accepted status quo of the time: complex enterprise software typified by Siebel, now an Oracle acquisition.

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