Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
Dell Boomi Announces New Milestones and Partnerships
Only days after the announcement that Dell was going to return to private ownership, Dell subsidiary Boomi has come out with some news about its integration platform This is really timely given the near universal acknowledgement that software lies at the core of Dell’s future (more on this in a later post) and that it [...]
IBM SmartCloud Docs Enters The Market But Does It Still Matter?
Last month IBM released SmartCloud Docs (formerly called IBM Lotuslive Symphony) at a pricing competitive to other offerings in the market like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. It is free for existing SmartCloud Advanced customers and $3 per user per month for SmartCloud Standard customers. It is based on Apache OpenOffice and offers solid [...]
AWS, Redshift and Co-Opetition
Long time technology commentators understand the tensions between platform companies, intent on both growing their business and creating a healthy ecosystem, and ecosystem partners who leverage what the platform brings, but remain apprehensive about the long term intensions of the platform vendor. Case in point – the growing number of services offered by Amazon Web [...]
Why Cyber Monday’s Days Are Just Getting Started
We recently celebrated two of the busiest shopping days of the year here in the U.S., Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) where millions of people flock to stores to find great deals, and Cyber Monday where millions of shoppers find amazing prices online. IBM stated that sales on Cyber Monday we’re up “30.3% from [...]
Cloud app integration: Incredibly important, but also problematic
My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource [...]
TwinStrata CloudArray Now Supports NAS for Heterogeneous Storage Management
I’ve written previously about TwinStrata – a company whose CloudArray storage gateway is designed to enable organizations to deploy cloud SANs which combine public and private cloud storage providers along with their existing storage infrastructure. It’s a logical play – while pure cloud may be the holy grail and the
Questions To Ponder: Services World And Integrated Stacks
I have decided to start a new series called “Questions To Ponder” which I will push out on some Fridays. The idea is to take a controversial topic and ask a few relevant questions so that CloudAve readers can ponder about it on their weekend. The first in this series is about the role of [...]
BMC Acquires VaraLogix, Releases Version 3.0 of CLM
BMC software the IT service management vendor that is arguably best known for producing the Remedy ITSM product, also has an interest in providing a broad set of tools for the management of enterprise’s IT assets – it’s cloud life management (CLM) and cloud operations management (COM) toolsets are platforms
GigaOM Pro report on Hadoop and cluster management
My latest piece of work for GigaOM Pro just went live. Scaling Hadoop clusters: the role of cluster management is available to GigaOM Pro subscribers, and was underwritten by StackIQ. Thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with me during the preparation of this report. As the blurb describes, From Facebook to Johns [...]
Hardware, Cloud And Cloud Washing
Yesterday, under the shadows of OSCON 2012, Portland based cloud cost management company Cloudability ran a future of cloud fireside chat in which myself and fellow CloudAve blogger and Analyst Ben Kepes participated. The chat was moderated by TechCrunch blogger Alex Williams. We discussed various topics and where the industry is heading. During our discussion, we [...]
HP’sCloud Forays – DreamWorks runs on OpenStack Powered Production Kit
At HP Discover (disclosure – HP covered my T&E to attend Discover), almost half of the opening day keynote was given over to DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg to articulate why DreamWorks has gone “all in” with HP. Katzenberg’s presentation was entertaining, and told the usual tails of an industry that is undergoing seismic shifts and [...]
Trash talk and FUD harms the Cloud industry
Over here we are anticipating this year’s Cloud Computing World Forumin London, but over in the US Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder and CEO since 1977, has pivoted his position on the Cloud along with “crossing a line” to trash key competitors. Elsewhere old guard software giants like IBM are mis-communicating the Cloud messages. How does [...]
Intelligent Platforms – PaaS For The Internet Of Things
Recently, I travelled to India to give a talk at Cloud Connect conference in Bangalore. The talk is based on the Intelligent Platforms model I have been advocating in this space. It is similar to what I spoke at the Pitney Bowes Data Day event with little modifications. I have embedded the slides below. Intelligent [...]
Opportunities and Challenges for IT Managers
Recently I was invited by IBM to host a lunch in Auckland that bought together a handful of IT managers from a range of organizations. the aim of the lunch was to have a discussion, in a neutral forum, about the opportunities and challenges that cloud brings to their organizations. the makeup of the participants [...]
