Microsoft’s Cloud OS Play–A Logical Converged Cloud Offering
A week or two ago, Microsoft made a slew of announcements all aimed at creating a consistent story around hybrid cloud services. It’s a compelling product launch, and one which, frankly, takes Microsoft which was only a year or two ago one of the key whipping boys for the cloud cognoscenti, to a place of [...]
PaaS and Mobile Enterprise – Real Conversations with Customers
One of the benefits of working on cutting edge technology like PaaS is that I get to have conversations with enterprise customers about the transformations that PaaS will bring. Increasingly, I’m seeing lots of interest in the intersection of PaaS and mobile enterprise (yeah, it’s not just an attempt by me to put together two buzzwords!). [...]
Cloud research exposes gaps between CIOs and business leaders
We often hear that IT is not aligned with the business, which is a catchall concept loosely meaning that business leaders and IT folks do not understand each other’s goals. Although differences in perspective and goals between these groups do exist, the gaps are difficult to measure, quantify, or even describe precisely. Nonetheless, these differences [...]
A Journey From SQL to NoSQL to NewSQL
Two years back I wrote that the primary challenge with NoSQL is that it’s not SQL. SQL has played a huge rule in making relational databases popular for the last forty years or so. Whenever the developers wanted to design an(y) application they put an …
CloudPassage Cloud Security Survey
CloudPassage was kind enough to share with me the raw data from their latest cloud computing security survey. In many ways this is what you would expect to see in a survey of companies that are still working out exactly what they want to do in the cloud and the approaches they want to take [...]
Which Apps To Move To The Cloud?
I don’t preach an “all or nothing” cloud approach. Cloud is a sliding wedge and existing organizations should look at taking baby steps and slowly increase the breadth and depth of their cloud usage.
Saasu Drops Freemium–Some Users Balk at the Change
On New Years Eve, while on a holiday skiing trip in the French Alps, expat Aussie and Clouderati ringleader Sam Johnston wrote a series of tweets exclaiming his anger about a change that cloud accounting vendor Saasu had made to its terms and conditions. earlier this year, a Saasu blog post advised customers that it [...]
2013 – The Year of the User – Again.
I’ve long since given up the perennial quest of predicting “what this year will bring”, skillfully leaving this particular exercise in bland rhetoric to those bold enough to want to suggest whether 2013, 2014, 2015 or 2021 will indeed finally prove be the year of VDI, Linux on the Desktop or herald the arrival of other such [...]
[Some of] what you need to know about the cloud for 2013
Towards the end of last year, David Linthicum and I joined GigaOM’s Adam Lesser on a skype chat to take a look back at cloud successes and failures in 2012, and forward to cloud opportunities in 2013. GigaOM released the conversation as a podcast this morning. Amazon, Rackspace, Google, OpenStack, DropBox, and more get a [...]
Three Cloud Visionaries in 2012
2012 is over and blogosphere is buzz with post-mortem and predictions. I thought I will jump in and write about three people in the cloud computing space who inspired me with the work they are doing. Let me make it clear that there are many others who had an impact in the space but these [...]
Moving PaaS Beyond the Sound Bites in 2013
Most of the discussion around PaaS these days tends to focus on the rapid application deployment capabilities. That’s the easiest thing to demo in a 3-minute video so it tends to get the headlines. I believe that in 2013 we will move on from this eye candy and dig into some of the higher value [...]
Minimize Regrets And Not Failures
While I ponder on 2012 and plan for 2013, I always keep the regret minimization framework (watch the short video clip above) in back of my mind. Of course luck plays a huge part in people’s success, but we owe it a lot to Jeff Bezos. We probably wouldn’t have seen Amazon.com and we most [...]
Big Data as Core, Big Data as Context, and Big Data as Buzzword Bingo
It’s neither particularly newsworthy nor insightful to suggest that ‘Big Data’ gets everywhere these days, but two recent items reminded me of the gulf between credible execution of a big data play and the more questionable tacking of the big data meme onto an otherwise useful product. Christmas is coming. Which means skating, and pantomimes [...]
CloudSherpas–$40M in Funding and Another Aquisition
I’ve been following Google Apps and Salesforce reseller since it launched a few years ago – in that time I’ve seen them acquire companies globally and grow into a real force in the space. I’m always a little dubious about how much long term viability there is in a company that makes its money earning [...]
Drivers for Cloud Adoption–CIO Research
Interesting survey results just released that indicate cost isn’t the highest factor in cloud adoption (yay – at last people are talking more about non-cost impacts of cloud) – Respondents believe compliance requirements, value and competitive advantage are the key drivers for cloud adoption. The survey polled 330 global CIOs
