Ben Kepes
Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.
More about Ben here.
Forrester Confuses “Best” with “Most Accessible”
I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the traditional analyst firms. Their people are incredibly smart and very thorough, but sometimes in their search for massive levels of details, they miss the very point of technology. A good case in point is the recently released Forrester Enterprise Cloud Database Wave report.
Ping Identity – Managing and Monitoring Through Cloud Outages
For anyone who has been living under a rock for a few weeks, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had an outage a week or so back which was the latest in a relatively long list of outages that has plagued their US-East region. Commentary has generally been voiced in two areas – the naysayers have come [...]
Workday Launches Version 18 – Quick Analysis
At the Workday Rising event being held in Las Vegas this week, Workday announced the latest version of its product, on top of which they held an analyst/influcner day that I was following remotely. I’ve got a few thoughts about the analyst day but first a recap of the news.
TwinStrata CloudArray Now Supports NAS for Heterogeneous Storage Management
I’ve written previously about TwinStrata – a company whose CloudArray storage gateway is designed to enable organizations to deploy cloud SANs which combine public and private cloud storage providers along with their existing storage infrastructure. It’s a logical play – while pure cloud may be the holy grail and the
The 20 Year Enterprise Innovation Cycle–Defrag Session (Plus Free Passes!)
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of decades thinking about the organization of the future – every now and then I bump into people or read something that renews my interest in this crystal ball-gazing habit of mine. I’m sensing a real acceleration in the need
BMC Launches MyIT – Bridging the IT/Business Divide
Cross posted from the BMC blog. I spend most of my time talking to technology vendors, IT folks and business people all in an effort to drive organizational benefits through the use of technology. Over years of doing this, I’ve noticed a stark divide that exists within an organization between
Actual Cloud – The One To Chose
I’ve been a part of, or at least a witness to, a huge number of battles about what constitutes the “real cloud.” These battles seem to generally be fought on a Sunday afternoon U.S. time – that kind of suits me fine because it means the Monday mornings in my time zone have enough entertainment [...]
GreenQloud and Xeround Launch Cloud Database on 100% Renewable Energy
A year or two ago a minor storm circled around the cloud community after a report was published questioning the environmental impacts of cloud computing. The report was pretty flawed – it omitted to take into account the generally lower per-unit impact of cloud as opposed to traditional IT, but that didn’t stop some hand [...]
Open Discussions On Open Cloud
As I go from conference to conference, I’m seeing more and more examples of people talking about the “open cloud.” Proponents talk about choice, flexibility and the inherent safety of the open cloud. Opponents, on the other hand, point to fragmentation, immaturity and concerns about anything that is available without
Mambu Aiming to Power a banking Disruption
A recurring theme that I talk about is how traditional sectors, bloated with process and seemingly unable to innovate, are ripe for disruption. Two areas of particular interest are the telecommunications and banking industries. banking in particular is an industry that is heavily protected by regulation. This regulation helps it
Mentoring TechStars Cloud, and an Invitation to Apply
Just looking at the success that TechStars companies have post demo day is a real validation of the program – it creates amazing team building opportunities, awesome visibility for the startups involved and fantastic access to angels and early stage investors.
Continuuity Launches Big Data Application Fabric–Warning: Buzzwords Abound
Coming out of stealth today at Strata and Hadoop World is Continuuity, a company that is looking to position itself within the PaaS landscape as it gives organizations the ability to build, deploy and scale big data apps. All of which sounds dangerously like buzzword heaven so it’s worth taking a look at what Continuuity [...]
Gartner’s Latest IaaS Magic Quadrant Released–Meh With a Bit of Interesting
I’m not usually big on Gartner’s crystal-ball-gazing Magic Quadrant methodology – some people claim it’s pay-for-play writ large. I don’t know about that, it just seems to be a somewhat hokey, albeit scientifically-based, prediction of what might occur or, more often, hat already is. Anyway – with that said, the latest IaaS MQ is pretty [...]
Lowering Mobile Development Barriers to Entry
Icenium is today launching what would appear to be a very compelling proposition – an environment that enables cross platform mobile development that decouples development from a particular development environment, full suite of developer products and SDK. Icenium decouples the compilers from the platform and makes the SDKs available in
OneLogin Launches Cross-Application Search
The announcement by Salesforce a few weeks ago that it was moving into the enterprise Single Sign on (SSO) space was both an excellent validation that sso across cloud and on-premise applications is needed, but also a rude awakening to the existing independent SSO vendors like OneLogin and Okta. While
