<p>What is Happening? As we put together the final plans for Saugatuck's 2012 Cloud Business Summit (to be held on Nov 14 in New York City), a pair of critically influential IT Master Brands is helping to spotlight some important differences in how Cloud is being built, adopted, used and sold, and how this affects customers and partner ecosystems.</p><p>Within the past week, traditional IT Master Brands IBM and Oracle each made significant strategy, offering and business announcements regarding Cloud IT. Oracle's Cloud pronouncements in particular marked noteworthy steps forward on multiple technology and business fronts for the enterprise application and DBMS leader.</p><p>While both IBM and Oracle are huge, established IT master Brands with dominant large enterprise IT and business presences, very traditional customer bases, and massive ecosystems, Saugatuck felt that Oracle's Cloud positioning and efforts run the risk of being perceived as "me, too" while IBM has been able to build and push forward a Cloud position that appears much more forward-thinking and in tune with the pace and directions of Cloud IT adoption.</p><p>Were both companies competing only in traditional IT and business markets, we would not be concerned with such differences for long, as their substantial development and engineering resources (internally and within the ecosystems) would, over time, tend to equal one another and balance competitive advantages.</p><p><a href="http://www.information-management.com/blogs/ibm-oracle-take-different-strides-with-cloud-10023281-1.html">Keep reading...</a></p>