Are you being served ?
As I write this latest post, I’m somewhere over the US, cruising at 35,000 feet and hastily making vapor trails toward attendance at my first Gluecon event in Broomfield, Colorado. And you know what, I’m pretty excited too. Not only has Gluecon got a great lineup for 2011 and a promise of being an excellent [...]
Gluecon 2011: Changing the Game
Gluecon is unlike any conference I’ve ever run before. Because it’s aimed at developers, the topics are far more technical than my feeble marketer’s brain can easily comprehend. And because Glue isn’t defined as “a cloud computing” conference, it’s not caught in the echo chamber of “defining” this, that and the other thing. Glue seeks [...]
Earn your Defrag XP
If you’re a gamer, you’re familiar with earning “XP” (experience points). If you’re not familiar with it, your kids are probably staring at you right now and wondering why you’re so weird. Basically, you accrue XP by playing a game over time – and that XP is good for boosting the benefits associated with your [...]
Get in on the Ground Floor
At some point in my life, I got interested in markets. Really interested. I started out interested in public markets, and I’ve grown into my interest in more private markets. But, overall, I love markets — the trades, the liquidity, the exotic instruments — hell, I used to LOVE doing some pretty funky options trades [...]
Understanding the Open Graph Protocol
David Recordon (of Facebook) sent over his session title this morning. Now, I think we all kind of figured that David would be addressing Facebook’s Open Graph stuff, but it’s nice to get “official confirmation” from him on that front. I commented on Dave Linthicum’s podcast this week that I was a bit unsure of [...]
The 7 Stages of Tech Industry Development
Anyone that’s been reading my blog posts here or over on Defrag has probably figured out that I’m a big fan of recurring cycles in history, industries, societies, etc. It’s always especially interesting to watch it play out in the tech world. Yesterday’s acquisition of Cast Iron Systems by IBM seems like an indicator of [...]
Glue is Coming – Win Free tickets
In less than two weeks I’ll be winging my way half way around the world (for the third time this year). So why do I put myself through it? Well in part because I get to attend such awesome events as one I’ll be taking part in at the Omni Interlaken in Denver in a [...]
Rounding the Bend – Free Tix to GlueCon
It seems appropriate to reference horse racing the Monday morning after the derby. Yes, we are “rounding the bend” — 23 days until Gluecon. I feel like I’ve droned on endlessly about how great it’s going to be (I probably have), so let me just take a different approach by highlighting some things I’m looking [...]
Moving Between Layers
I was just reading this piece on the “three layers” of the Cloud by David Linthicum — incidentally, David will be keynoting Gluecon. I think what David proposes is a useful framework (useful because it’s not overly nuanced) for thinking about the Cloud. Briefly: Layer 1: The Basics of Infrastructure as characterized by storage, middleware [...]
AuthN, AuthZ and Gluecon
As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, I’m not an engineer. Still, along the way, even the non-engineers like me pick up some tidbits of knowledge. One of the things I learned in my years spent in identity management (”IdM”) is the difference between Authentication (”AuthN”) and Authorization (”AuthZ”). And, as it turns out, [...]
Agility, black swans and the Cloud
Alright, I admit it! This whole public-private-hybrid cloud debate the clouderati love to go back and forth about just — *yawn* — never really — *yawn* — did much for me. Only you crazy engineering types could get so worked up over the purity of a definition. Same thing for the whole “capex/opex” cloud benefit [...]
The Clouds Disappear
I’ve blogged in the past about the “value” being in the “glue” when it comes to the “cloud.” I had a conversation earlier this week about the term “cloud,” and it made me want to clarify my thinking/writing on this a bit. To be fair, I’m not sure my thoughts are fully formed on this [...]
An Interesting Agenda Shapes Up At Gluecon
Gluecon, a great conference organized by Eric Norlin at Denver each year, is shaping up very well this year with more emphasis on the technical side. I attended the event last year and I posted my thoughts about the event here and here. Towards the end of the event last year, I casually mentioned to [...]
A Startup Guy and His Tale of Recovery
I’m a startup guy. I didn’t know that until I was already neck-deep in a startup, but it’s true. I often get asked why Glue’s sponsors are so dominated by startups. Partially that’s because guys like Techweb (producers of Cloud Connect) have “national account” reps for the big guys; folks that can pick up a [...]
The Value is in the Glue
One the recurring themes I keep seeing is that the adoption of cloud computing is being driven by our current sucky economic circumstances. I don’t disagree that the macro-economy is a *contributing* factor in cloud adoption, but I really don’t think it’s the primary driving factor. Rather, I think cloud adoption is part of a [...]
