The Big Opportunities in the Cloud
Recently I was invited to take part in a series of private briefings where large financial institutions sat down with one or two industry analysts to “pick their brains” about what they’re seeing as broad trend in the sector. In an attempt to democratize what could otherwise be information kept within a walled garden, I [...]
More on the IT Business Boiling Point
ver the last few days I’ve been talking to people about the tension that exists between “traditional” and “next generation” software platforms. The discussions had their genesis in a post I wrote specifically looking at NetSuite and Oracle, but relate to a host of other vendors – Microsoft contrasted with Box. IBM contrasted with Appirio [...]
Dell Strikes Deal with enStratus
Exciting news today from enStratus that they have joined the Dell Emerging Solutions Ecosystem to be the delivery mechanism for Dell OpenStack powered clouds. With the deal, enStratus will be used by Dell to deliver the following functions to OpenStack customers; Deliver applications with consistent governance and automation Control budgets and security access [...]
Is agility and focus worth a price premium – on converged infrastructure costing more…
If we accept that the role of IT is to aid an organization in its strategic objectives, then it makes sense that any time it spends doing low level routine stuff is detrimental to that aim. Any technology that frees up IT to do higher order stuff, to really add value, should be embraced. Almost regardless of the cost.
Clarifying the Acronyms – SaaS, PaaS and IaaS
Anyone who has been around tech for a while will know that there are a million and one different acronyms. While there are legitimate names for all of these (honestly, it’s much easier to say “ISDN” rather than “Integrated Services Digital Network”) it makes life hard sometimes for folks outside the industry. Sometimes that difficulty [...]
On Public, Private and Horses for Courses…
I recently wrote a post critiquing some shortsighted thinking around Cloud Computing and in particular the relative cost implications of a Cloud versus Self-Hosted approach. A recent series of events has reminded me of this issue and bought me back to the topic. Recently Zynga, during a regular earnings call, released the somewhat startling fact [...]
Opa Aims to rethink Development for the Cloud
I’ve been researching a whitepaper for CloudU that looks at the different languages modern developers of cloud applications need to think about and it struck me that we’re running into some problems. While the myriad different components of web applications give great flexibility, they do little to hide the complexity of development and a key [...]
Tier 3 Brings Out The Heavy Guns!
There are cloud offerings and then there are cloud offerings. As of today, Tier 3 just loaded up some big guns. Over the years Tier 3 has provided an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) play using various geographically located data-centers with high level disaster recovery, high availability (99.999%), utility compute, and high speed storage to [...]
Cloud is Simple. Well, It’s Real Complex but that Complexity Can, and Should, be Hidden from Users.
An interesting discussion occurred on the CloudU LinkedIn group recently. It was started by an awesome post from James Urquhart admonishing people to accept the fact that Cloud is complex and to simply deal with it. The inimitable Sam Johnston posted an interesting response, the essence of which was that, while Cloud is undoubtedly complex, [...]
6fusion Introduces Free Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere
One of the key traits of cloud computing is the fact that it follows a utility model with resources able to be metered by use. That’s a glorious thing as lots of benefits drop out of that – the ability to pay by use, the ability to cost recover with
On Privacy, and Software Vendor’s Access to Customer Data
A mini firestorm broke out recently when 37Signals posted about their 2011 growth statistics. As part of the post, 37Signals told the world that the 100 millionth file to be uploaded to their software was the picture of a cat. Naturally those who subscribe to conspiracy theories got all fired
Is agility and focus worth a price premium – on converged infrastructure costing more…
Krish wrote a post covering a report which showed that the costs involved in utilizing converged infrastructure (ie a consistent approach towards hardware and software that sees everything in a data center fit together like lego) runs to some 15% more expensive than when using a more “Do It Yourself” approach. The topic of [...]
CollabNet Shows the Future of PaaS
I’ve been very bullish over the past couple of years about the role PaaS will play in a cloudy world. I see it as the future for cloud services. I’ve also commented about the increasing homogeneity of PaaS offerigns as they all start chasing each other to add new languages and frameworks – from the [...]
Cloudology–All That is Bad About IT
I haven’t got a lifetime’s experience in IT. Rather than an impediment in my career however, I’ve found that having come from a varied background has given me a degree of perspective that perhaps some of my lifers don’t enjoy. Case in point – this Cloudology diagram that Simon Wardley pointed out to me recently [...]
OpenLogic Announces General Availability of CloudSwing PaaS
The other day Krish bemoaned the fact that PaaS is rapidly becoming homogenized as all players rapidly follow their competitors in rolling out features and languages. As Krish said; …[they] talk about differentiation in terms of user experience. But, ladies and gentlemen, I hear the same from every other PaaS
