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
Alfresco–Cloud Content Management with a Hybrid Theme
The cloud content management world is fairly divided between those who believe a public cloud delivery model is the best option for customers (example, Box.com) and those who believe enterprises will only adopt a cloud approach when it is firmly protected within the confines of an enterprise’s own private cloud. The reality is, of course, [...]
Hewlett Packard: a tale of many clouds
Hewlett Packard used its Discover event in Frankfurt last week to reassert the company’s cloud credentials. Public, private, hybrid; HP is painting pictures that encompass them all, whilst seeking to protect hardware revenues and reassure conservative executives at some of its largest and most profitable customers. But HP has been here before, making bold claims [...]
‘Autonomy Inside’ matters at Hewlett Packard
The Hewlett Packard marketing machine was busy last week, assuring the world that the company’s £7.1bn ($11.7bn) acquisition of Autonomy still made sense despite an eye-watering financial write down and unseemly public squabbling with the Cambridge company’s former management. HP CEO Meg Whitman used her keynote at HP Discover in Frankfurt to assert that the [...]
On Organizations’ Real Requirements Around BigData
Every time another vendor takes the “big data” moniker and applies it to some legacy system a cat somewhere on the internet dies. Like “cloud” a couple of years ago, big data has become the term de jour – and vendors seem to think that simply using it will give them some magic power to [...]
Book Review: ‘Cloudonomics: The Business Value Of Cloud Computing’
One of the most interesting areas in the conceptual discussion of the cloud is the economic impacts it can bring. The conversation is so much broader than just cost savings; there is a deep and complex series of discrete topics to look at relating to both costs and ROI relating to cloud. One of the [...]
What Will Identity Look Like in the Future?
At the defrag conference recently, I took part in a few sessions that looks at the broader role of identity in a world were more and more people use cloud-based tools. One of the sessions was led by Pat Patterson, Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce. In his session, Patterson drew a picture of the history [...]
HP Announces Private PaaS Powered by Stackato
At HP’s Discover event here in Frankfurt today, the company will be announcing a private PaaS offering, built on top of Stackato, the PaaS which is itself a fork of the open source Cloud Foundry initiative. HP has entered into an agreement with ActiveState, the company behind Stackato, to OEM its platform and integrate it [...]
Heroku Joins Cloud Foundry for Multi-PaaS Support from Appsecute
Let’s settle two things from the outset – firstly, PaaS is (I believe) the future of cloud services and will be the area for growth in the coming years. Secondly, I’m an investor and board member in Appsecute so I’m naturally bullish about what they’re doing. That said, today’s announcement
HP Discover Europe and the Viability of HP’s Cloud Play
I’m heading to Europe for HP’s Discover event and the conference has me thinking about the last Discover event I attended in Las Vegas earlier his year and HP’s awful few weeks around the Autonomy debacle. Alongside my theme du jour of traditional enterprises (and traditional vendors) being disrupted by new, more flexible and adaptable [...]
