Deducting business foods with clients is no more so clear-cut following the passing of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That’s because meals are still 50% deductible, but entertainment isn’t. Make sure you make a clear distinction between entertainment and meals by keeping an expense log documenting the business reason for each meal.
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And I question that IBM could have implemented a model it didn’t think got sustaining potential. The writer appears unaware that Oracle is attempting to return to the IBM period of the 1960s. In fact, Larry Ellison has said so himself. The IBM mainframe at the right time was an individual integrated system of hardware, operating system, data source, and applications constructed from the ground up to together work.
IBM’s AS/400 group of machines (now called Series I) got this concept even further. Oracle’s strategy of using its Exa-boxes is to return to this single technology stack from hardware through applications, manufactured from the bottom up to work together. Will Oracle achieve success? Only time will tell. And, certainly the 1, 000 customer amount that the writer mentions is not enough of a way of measuring success yet.
Regardless, what does any of this have to do with cloud processing? Nothing Absolutely. Oracle is launching a public cloud offering, with its Exa-boxes within the infrastructure. Other providers can do the same using commodity hardware, as Google, Amazon, Microsoft among others have already done. But the Oracle offering that Linthicum is criticizing which the writer is defending is not Oracle’s public cloud service.
Rather it is an arrangement whereby Oracle customers can, for a monthly fee, rent preconfigured Oracle application servers and run them in their own data centers. Linthicum is completely right: it has nothing to do with cloud computing. According to the NIST definition of cloud computing, there are five essential characteristics of cloud computing and Oracle’s hardware local rental offering will not satisfy four of them.
On-demand self-service. Oracle’s local rental agreement will not permit the customer to unilaterally provision-processing capabilities, such as server network and time storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider. Resource pooling. Oracle’s local rental agreement will not pool computing resources for multiple customers in a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically designated and reassigned according to consumer demand. Rapid elasticity. Oracle’s offering will not allow computing features to be elastically provisioned, and released, in some instances automatically, to size outward and inward commensurate with demand rapidly. As Linthicum highlights, the customer has to pay extra for spikes in demand and there is absolutely no provision to ramp down demand, and cost.