#cloud giants

Currently playing in my Saturday hombrew session, and one of the players (a gnome monk) got levitated by a cloud giant.

As of right now, she is 150 feet in the air.

That yellow circle?? The 2nd, flying cloud giant who’s 90 ft above the monk.

tl;dr: The crew asks allies for advice and plans another cloud heist to free Tomo with the leadership of the Anvilless, a Dwarven crime syndicate. Some Prep I sat down with the factions and made a table to see how each faction felt about the other and some interesting tidibts came out of that. I also realized that 14 factions is just too many. I crossed out 2 that the players hadn’t met or…

tl;dr: The Dullgray River Rats visit neighbors, the Caravan Guard Union and the Order of the Splindle, and set up some dangerous jobs. Ocean, Level 3 ThiefGavin, Level 3 Mage I have a page full of notes that I haven’t shared with anyone on the city’s factions and have been daydreaming about what the city’s major power is up to. Ioun City is ruled by a group of arcane capitalist nightmares who…

Original Post

With the great shift to big data centers and cloud computing, is it possible to build another Oracle? Depends on whether you think this technology breaks the world.

“The old way of architecting software just won’t work,” says Todd McKinnon, co-founder and chief executive of Okta, a company that handles user management for companies renting software from remote providers like Salesforce.com and Google. “People underestimate how dramatic this is.”

McKinnon is obviously biased, but he does have a point. Provisioning and managing employees is arguably a more important part of corporate software than making systems work – if people cannot get to the software effectively, the product is useless.

Using Okta, employees get a single sign-on that clears them to retrieve software from a diverse array of software providers. The company can create new identities to secure other software, and control employee access from a central point. That speeds deployment, configuration, and training, some of the bigger running costs in corporate computing. The company says it can handle the security and licensing issues in cloud services, too.

The big bet here is that more and more software comes online, moving up from relatively non-critical parts of the company like email and sales management software (it’s okay if it goes down for a few minutes) to top-tier financials. At that point, an outfit like Okta is deep inside the business, offering and managing access more software packages than most companies now have, on- or offline.

That doesn’t mean, however, that  Okta has it all over the incumbents. Naysayers argue that enterprise technology, still the bulk of overall tech spending, is a mature industry with a greater focus on cost savings than dramatic disruption. Giant incumbents like IBM, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft and, yes, Oracle, guard the turf too closely.

McKinnon admits “the competition can get to where we are, it’s hard, but they can.” That’s why he needs to sew up as many relationships with companies and service providers now, providing a lot of connections and a deep level of integration. Longer term, he needs to be more than an authentication company, and more of provisioning service himself. “People will put all of corporate IT in cloud services, and we will empower them to do it more effectively.”

Possible? Nine years ago I was on the wrong side of this argument with Diane Greene, founder of VMWare. That was during the dot-bust rollup, and I said it was impossible to do another Oracle. You watch, she said – there are new ways to do things.

She was right – VMWare’s virtualization software has morphed into a potential operating system for entire data centers — but she also flinched, and sold her company to EMC for about $650 million (spun out of EMC, VMWare’s  current market cap is $35 billion – about a fifth of Oracle’s, but not bad.)