Curating a bit of the Cloud over at GigaOM Pro
Image via CrunchBase I’ve been a fan of Om Malik‘s boutique analyst site, GigaOM Pro, pretty much from the outset, and happily renew my subscription each year. The site covers a wide range of industry topics, and those Quarterly Wrap-ups are worth the fee all by themselves. I’ve written a few reports for them in [...]
NATO takes tentative Cloud steps, with help from IBM
As part of a restructuring of the organisation’s US-based data centres, the acronym-laden NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) today announced that its ACT (Allied Command Transformation) will be deploying IBM‘s PCS (Private Cloud Solution*) inside its HQ SACT (Headquarters, Supreme Allied Commander Transformation) in Norfolk, VA. According to IBM’s E.J. Herold, the company is delivering [...]
In a world of niche Clouds, how do you define a useful niche?
There are a couple of interesting posts on the blog of the UK’s FLESSR project, detailing their efforts to work out how feasible it might be to offer a new Cloud service to universities. More on that in a moment. I don’t think I’ve ever really been convinced by the argument that everything will end [...]
Is there a disconnect between Big Data and the Web of Data ?
Image via Wikipedia ‘Big Data‘ is currently capturing the imagination, attracting hype, investment and ambitious startups in almost equal measure. Kim and Eric Norlin’s excellent Defrag and Glue events have gained big-name company, with O’Reilly‘s Strata and GigaOM‘s Structure both set to arrive in the first quarter of 2011. Venture firms like IA Ventures have emerged, specifically [...]
Oxygen Cloud differentiates by targeting Enterprise
I love Dropbox. It has been part of my backup strategy for a long time, but my increasing use of mobile devices and tablets has made it absolutely invaluable. All the documents and files I use on my main computer are constantly synchronised – seamlessly, painlessly, and effectively invisibly – with Dropbox, making them easily [...]
Containers, Computers and Catalan sunshine
Image by dannybirchall via Flickr I took a quick trip to the Catalan city of Barcelona earlier this month; surely the first time I’ve been to that city without seeing the sea. I was there as a guest of HP, to hear some of the latest happenings in their storage business. Over two days, we [...]
Do we need a Registry… to register technologists’ numerous contradictory uses of the term?
The act of registration seems ingrained in all of us, especially where dealing with ‘authority.’ That seemingly random agglomeration of letters and numbers on the back and front of our cars? A registration number. We visit the Registry Office in order to make births, marriages and deaths official. Indeed, in the dark days before it [...]
Talking with Ric Telford about IBM, the Cloud, and Collaborative Healthcare
In my latest podcast I talk with Ric Telford, Vice President for Cloud Services at IBM. I spoke with Kristof Kloeckner – the company’s CTO and VP Cloud Computing Platforms – last year, and in my conversation with Ric we get updates on IBM’s journey into the Cloud. He touches on some of the work [...]
A podcast with Felix Van de Maele, discussing Collibra
Steve Ardire introduced me to Felix Van de Maele, CEO of Brussels-based Collibra, at the Defrag conference in Denver last month. We met again at the European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC), where Collibra won the seedcamp event. I spoke with Felix recently to record a podcast exploring the issues that Collibra sets out to address [...]
Keep your Executive Assistant happy if moving to the Cloud
Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) [...]
HP sees opportunities in the Cloud
Hewlett-Packard‘s VP and CTO for Cloud Services Strategy, Russ Daniels, has an interesting job that encompasses far more than ‘simply’ worrying about how HP’s existing data centre business can adapt to the rise of utility computing. In a wide-ranging conversation that provides insight into the breadth of HPs interest and ambition, he recently spoke with [...]
Business sees value in the Cloud; yet security remains a concern
I spoke with Avanade CTO Tyson Hartman on Friday, ahead of the company’s publication of results from their Cloud Computing survey this morning. This study, conducted for Avanade by Kelton Research, interviewed 502 senior executives in seventeen countries. It found that 65% of those surveyed internationally (and 80% in the US) believe Cloud Computing to [...]
