SaaS for Agility, Lightweight as an Enabler
In a recent CloudU report, we talked at length about how an organization should approach a move to the Cloud and which applications they should pick as initial prospects for migrating. In the report we advised organizations to look at applications that; • Have significant interaction with external applications or services • Are
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 what could be a pushed for it. Everybody else; Microsoft, Xerox, Canon, and practically every single other company was missing it. Xerox Parc had it right in front of them, the GUI, Mouse, Object Oriented Language, and about every single thing we assume for computer use and development today but wasn’t doing anything with it. They were all missing it, except Jobs. The eccentric, crazed, reality distortion field generating Jobs pushed forward and found those that agreed, this was absolutely the future. Today’s computers owe so much to Jobs efforts to pull these people together, to what he saw as the future, and our modern computing world will forever be indebted to Steve Jobs.
Howard Hues had done this 50 years earlier. He simply stated, “nobody wants to fly on a plane at 10k feet and get shaken to pieces, planes need to fly at 30,000 feet or more were the air is smooth!” He then went about working to get a plane built that could do this! The Government was in his way, the industry was fighting him, everybody said this wasn’t the way to go. Nobody could build a plane that would do that right now! It’s absurd. He did it, and bought every single one of them he could putting the airline (TWA) in hock at the same time! But it paid off, and his airline had the nicest planes, best flight in the world, easily. Today’s airlines are all modeled after this ideal, our modern travel owes a huge debt to what Howard Hughes pushed forward.
The competition, the fighting pushed the envelope, but in both cases a visionary could see the future. To them it was plain as an image on a clear sunny day. To them, the future didn’t need to be tomorrow, it was ready right now. The future just needed dragged kicking and screaming directly into today! They did this, they pulled people together who could make these changes, and they with their teams yanked the future right into humanity’s grasp.
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Cutting Through the Fog of Cloud Computing Definitions
In recent years, the term “cloud computing” has been used and abused by vendors and their marketing groups to denote just about anything the vendor offers other than on-premise systems. Analysts too have piled on, each offering their own definition of cloud computing. This 2009 Wall Street Journal article outlined the confusion. The result has been fruitless [...]
Flawed Analysis–On Clouds “Playing Nice”
The other day someone alerted me to a new report put out by IT news that lauds itself as a “technical study of the integration and extension options offered by the largest 20 software-as-a-service vendors serving the Australian enterprise.” The report looks at a few different dimensions including; Can I get my data in and [...]
Poor Retail
SaaS, or Shopping as a Service is killing retail. If there was one investment or model that I would have considered safe forever – say 20 years ago, it would be retail. If I had, I was sure wrong. The Internet and sales tax laws are conspiring to make retail a thing of the past. [...]
IBM Wants Bureaucrats to Socialize More
The IBM Federal Community Cloud just got a little bit more socialable. Last week, IBM introduced a new set of social collaboration tools for Obama’s cloud. President Obama has been pushing a “Cloud First” initiative for Government IT projects. The decree came last November in an effort to consolidate or reduce some 2,100 data centers. [...]
Will “Mad Men” Drive the Social Enterprise?
Note this is a special guest post from industry authority Bruce Richardson. His blog can be found at http://stellwagenresearch.blogspot.com/. Bruce has a 30-year career in high-tech, harkening back to the days in which he worked alongside George Colony (founder and CEO of Forrester), Frank Gens (Chief Research Officer of IDC),…
Cloudburst Expected on Wall Street | Xignite Raises $10M
When not moonlighting at Chaotic Flow and Cloud Ave, I’ve been toiling away at Xignite for the better part of the last three years, and I’m happy to announce that the company has successfully closed $10 million in B round funding. The round was led by of Starvest Partners‘ Deborah Farrington who is #77 on [...]
Following Good Practice, The Negative Bits About Windows Azure First, But Gems Included! :D
Ok, I’ve used Windows Azure steadily over the last year and a half. I’ve fought with the SDK so much that I stopped using it. I decided I’d put together this recap of what has driven me crazy and then put together something about the parts that I really like, the awesome bits, the parts [...]
Cloud in a Box
Panasonic wants to sell SMBs hosted voice – and is doing so via retail with its new “Panasonic Cloud Business Phone System.” Available now at Amazon, Best Buy, Office Depot, and Staples. The vast majority of hosted voice services downplay the phone itself – usually positioning it as optional (use a softphone) and treating it [...]
A Cloud a Risin’
Is the Cloud OS going to replace traditional server operating systems? Are the days of server based Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, UX, etc. over? Last week: Citrix acquires Cloud.com VMware announces vSphere V In terms of enterprise voice, we are starting to see the trend of centralization – hosting branch offices off a centralized voice [...]
Customer Focus: the Constellation Supernova Awards
Constellation Research, founded by fellow Enterprise Irregular and star analyst Ray Wang has just announced the ambitious Supernova Awards program, focusing on – what a twist! – customer champions of innovation, rather than vendors. Krish and I both feel honored to have been invited as Judges for the Cloud Computing category. Below is the official [...]
Cloud Failure, FUD, and The Whole AWS Oatage…
Ok. First a few facts. AWS has had a data center problem that has been ongoing for a couple of days. AWS has NOT been forthcoming with much useful information. AWS still has many data centers and cloud regions/etc up and live, able to keep their customers up and live. Many people have NOT built [...]
Microsoft Office 365 Getting Closer
Microsoft is rapidly moving Office to an Internet app that will run in a browser. It is called Office 365. It’s a huge part of Microsoft’s all-in cloud strategy. Office 365 was introduced in limited beta last year, bringing together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service. Today [...]
