Much like the Mobile OS Wars in 2009, the Cloud Wars are starting to pick up steam. Google was a long time member of the Apple Board of Directors. Soon after iOS started to explode, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google removed himself from the board due to a “conflict of interest.” As Google further developed Android he knew the two companies would butt heads on technology. A recent article by the VAR Guy announced that Microsoft is blocking cloud companies such as Salesforce, Google, and VMware from attending WPC14. The article goes on to later talk about how it appears these 3 are the top rivals of Microsoft (seeing as Amazon Web Services, Apple, and Oracle are allowed to attend). So what does this mean for the channel?

Microsoft is making a huge push into the cloud with the Office 365 Suite and is clearly trying to take hold of some of the Google Apps market share. Salesforce is the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to cloud solutions in any industry. Finally VMware runs in direct competition with Microsoft’s Hyper-V server virtualization platform. So as we keep a close eye on the future of Microsoft, it is clear that cloud will be the predominate push. Let the cloud wars begin!