The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application
A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply [...]
What Makes Cloud Transformation So Hard?
Transformation is not a new concept, and has been around a long time before cloud and big data. It has always been a pretty nebulous term, but generally has referred to the fundamental reinvention or redesign of a business or function. From an enterprise-wide perspective this typically has meant redefining everything from target markets, products [...]
One of the Biggest Mistakes Enterprise Startups Make
The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. “We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra. I believe it’s flawed. While I have some sympathy with [...]
HP’s Cloud: The Giant Ship Lost its Way
HP stands still, not taking the initiatives and real risks expected of a true industry leader. At the Discover conference, I learned why some companies don’t last and why this IT giant is at risk of losing in this new era IT battle.
What really is Open Source Software and what’s this community nonsense they ask…
Open Source Software (OSS), Why Some Fail At It OSS has won the war. It has been over for years now. Microsoft has ceded, Oracle, VMware and many others have stepped up and attempted to embrace the open source community. Sometimes they’ve been successful, sometimes they haven’t. They’re slowly changing their models to play well [...]
Amazon AWS is the Cloud (for now anyway)
Every day I talk, write and comment about the “Cloud”. Every time I mention the cloud I try to make sure that I add the name of the relevant cloud operator, “Rackspace Cloud, “MS Cloud” (Azure) or “HP Cloud”. Somehow all of these cloud titles don’t right to me – it seems the only title [...]
HP’s AWS Strategy
HP yesterday announced that they are releasing their public cloud in public beta. During the media blitz preceding the announcement, Zorowar Biri Singh SVP and GM for HP Cloud Services (disclosure: a friend of mine from before he joined HP) told Business Insider about how they plan to compete with AWS. He told them that [...]
Ctrl – Alt – Social
In the tech world in which everything is recycled, retooled, and spit out like un-digestible gristle, one often comes across the phrases such as groupware is “dead” or “email is dead.” Oddly enough these are euphemisms or perhaps more correctly the opposite: dysphemisms – the substitution of a disagreeable word…
Carrot Beats Stick
WooHoo: You’ve just unlocked the URL of Blogville Badge! With Hostess becoming as bankrupt as the nutritional information in a Ding Dong and Kodak redefining the Kodak moment of another kind of bankruptcy, I immediately thought of my childhood. Thankfully those cheerful marketing images that blanketed the store shelves were replaced by a different set [...]
If Your Company is Still Blocking the Move to Social, Then Join Electronic Arts in Battle
The world’s largest gaming company is going through a remarkable transformation into a Social Business. Electronic Arts understands that today’s technologies, unlike those of the past decade, are no longer limited to the individual. They impact everyone. Impact that’s revolutionizing … Continue reading →
What Startups Can Learn From Tim Tebow
The Tim Tebow phenomenon has become the biggest story in the NFL, exceeding the routinely remarkable perfection of the Green Bay Packers and the quietly dumbfounding turnaround of the 49ers under Jim Harbaugh.For those who aren’t sports fans, Tim Tebow…
Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw [...]
IBM Announces FISMA Compliant Social Cloud – Will It Make Govt. Efficient?
After a soft release in early October, IBM has announced that they are releasing a social cloud targeting the US government agencies. This is a set of social and collaboration tools IBM is building on top of Federal Community Cloud they announced last year. Federal community cloud are secure, private cloud environments, part of IBM’s established [...]
Understanding How Dilution Affects You at a Startup
Dilution. Or as industry insiders call it, “taking a haircut.” Everybody knows that when you raise money at a startup your ownership percentage of the company goes down. The goal is to have the value of the startup go up by enough that you own a smaller percentage of a much larger business and therefore [...]
Twitter’s Walled Garden Strategy
Twitter today announced that they will be wrapping all the links posted on tweets using their t.co short URL. They are doing this with claims about better security but I feel that it is bad from the ecosystem perspective and user perspective. To be specific, it is both anti-competitive and anti-user. Tens of millions of [...]
