Cloud 2020 Summit: Perturbing the Punditocracy
Two independent analysts who have contributed an unvarnished voice of pragmatism to the cloud conversation are Ben Kepes of Diversity Limited and Krishnan Subramanian of Rishidot. They’ve made a name for themselves in providing points of view that everyone might not always agree with, but everyone respects because they bring thoughtful analysis and clarity to [...]
Survey lifts covers on Cloud Promiscuity: good thing, bad thing, or who cares?
Figures from RightScale‘s latest State of the Cloud Report (free registration required) suggest “a strong interest in multi-cloud strategies” amongst respondents. The rationale for hybrid cloud (mixing a public cloud service like Amazon’s with something running in your own data centre, colocation site or hosting facility) is reasonably well understood, but why might companies choose to use more [...]
The rise of the bros, and the fall of the geeks
One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was the 1984 classic, “Revenge of the Nerds.” If you haven’t watched it yet, take two hours to do so–yes, it’s available on Netflix: The movie really spoke to me–a guy so nerdy that the kids at my private school for gifted children nicknamed me [...]
Enterprise startups against the big guys: CxO Talk 7
On CxO Talk, episode 7, co-host Vala Afshar (absent this week due to travel) and I welcome venture capitalist Evangelos Simoudis. Evangelos is senior managing director at Trident Capital, where he invests in late stage and growth companies, with a focus on enterprise applications. Here is the entire video conversation: The conversation starts with the venture [...]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
To Dublin, in search of evidence
I travelled to Ireland last week, to attend the second meeting of the European Data Forum (EDF). The EDF provided travel support for my trip, and I am grateful to them for that. I was searching for evidence of ways in which smart use of data is having a transformative effect upon European businesses. Although some [...]
Ignoring that harmless looking “Force Majeure” clause in your cloud services provider agreement?
“Force Majeure” – An event that is a result of the elements of nature, as opposed to one caused by human behavior. This nugget is a common clause in contracts that essentially frees both parties from liability or obligation when an extraordinary event or circumstance beyond the control of the parties, such as a war, [...]
The Five-Step Maturity Model for Building a Collaborative Organization
In my book, The Collaborative Organization, I featured a maturity model that Chess Media Group created based on our client experience and research. The purpose of the maturity model is to help organizations where they are today, where they should go in the future and the value of doing so, and how to get there. [...]
Doing the DataBeat
For the past two years, Ben Kepes and I have helped the team at VentureBeat assemble the programme for their annual Cloud Computing event, CloudBeat. It looks as though we may end up doing something similar with them this year, as CloudBeat moves from Redwood City to downtown San Francisco, and from November to September. [...]
The Future Employee Must Posses the Skill and Will to Learn
Thomas Friedman recently wrote an article for the NYT titled, “Need a Job? Invent It” which addresses how our educational institutions are not teaching students the skills that value most. He goes on to point out that in today’s economy there is no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job. Things are changing quickly and by time [...]
The Evolution of the Networked Enterprise: New McKinsey Research
McKinsey just released some more research on the use of social and collaborative technologies within the enterprise. Not surprisingly they found that adoption levels are continuing to climb and are almost double what they were in 2009. The more important finding from the research they conducted was that organizations are moving beyond the experimentation phase with many [...]
Thrive For Precision Not Accuracy
Jake Porway who was a data scientist at the New York Times R&D labs has a great perspective on why multi-disciplinary teams are important to avoid bias and bring in different perspective in data analysis. He discusses a story where data gathered by Über in Oakland suggested that prostitution arrests increased in Oakland on Wednesdays [...]
Enterprise startup lessons from Muhammad Ali
During conversation with Christian Gheorghe, CEO of startup analytics vendor Tidemark Systems, I raised the issue of competition with established vendors. Tidemark’s product includes a real-time display, called Storylines, which allows ordinary users to interact easily with deep business data; it’s the kind of thing destined to attract competition from the large vendors. Also read: Larry Dignan’s ZDNet article on [...]
Who is Node PDX for? Who should attend? What’s going on? Where are we at?
Node PDX is a conference that is for programmers (ticket link below!!) both new to the industry and stalwarts, ladies and gentlemen, and simply the curious or already seasoned pros of JavaScript. Our goal is to have great speakers, great topics, encourage and support intelligent and forward thinking conversation. All of this and we’ll strive [...]
Mozilla Launches Open Badges; Creates an Educational and Skill Currency
Mozilla recently unveiled a project that they have been working on for over a year and a half called Open Badges. The concept is built around people being able to gain recognition for skills that they earn on the web, anywhere on the web. Ideally an individual will be able to acquire virtually any skill on any [...]
