Aaron Levie answered to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Information Technology

This question may sound in different manner, for example: "What's better, iPhone or Android?", or "What to choose, Amazon or OpenStack?", or "Who will win, Skype or SIP?". In other words, what's better: a finished product made by one vendor or open ecosystem, where you can select the best components from different vendors? Last week news helped Aaron Levy (Box.com CEO) to find the answer for this Ultimate question. Of course, finally, he came to the conclusion that is beneficial to him, but his ideas are anyway very interesting (original here).

So what happened last week? Oracle partnered with former enemy - Microsoft and now they offer the joint cloud solution. The next day Oracle reconciled with Salesforce and now the entire Salesforce platform will work on Oracle database. So the vendors, that for many years were building their own stacks and building walls around them (and slinging mud on each other), suddenly decided to make friends and integrate their solutions.



Aaron says this is a cyclical process. And the history repeats itself. First, one vendor invents and creates a brand new product. It wants to do everything itself and keep all the components under the control. Then the competitors arise and try to create something better, and when they fail - they learn how to play with each other and develop open standards.

And when (quote) "technology becomes good enough," open systems beat closed monopolies. Right now, Aaron says, when SaaS services have learned to create normal API-interfaces, the optimal solution - is to pick up the best apps from different vendors (quote): "HCM from Workday, CRM from Salesforce, ERP from Netsuite, Support from Zendesk, Social from Jive ".

And of course, cloud storage from Box. Especially now when Box rolled out the seamless integration with Salesforce CRM.

Aaron calls this combination of the best components - Cloud Stack and says that it's certainly better than any proprietary stack from Microsoft, Oracle or Salesforce.

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