Rackspace Private Cloud: Repackaging Fanatical Support Around OpenStack
Yesterday Rackspace announced Rackspace Cloud Private Edition, a repackaging of their Cloud Builder services around the OpenStack product. If you want to hear a purely open source perspective on this move, I recommend you to read Christian Reilly’s article on the topic. However, I am going to approach the topic from the business strategy point [...]
Cloud Spring
Following the November 7 announcement of Rackspace’s tantalizingly named (and OpenStack-powered) Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, I’ve found that I have descended into doing something I don’t normally do – getting all hot under the collar over what amounts to really nothing more than a clever positioning statement. First, let me clear a few things up. I [...]
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
Dropping Costs While Still Providing Support–A SmartPayroll Case Study
Over the past couple of years I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time with Asantha Wijeyratne, CEO of SmartPayroll, a New Zealand Payroll provider. I’ve been interested to talk to him, partly because he’s a lovely guy with an interesting business ethic, but also because his business is growing rapidly,
OpenStack Rolls Out Diablo–DashBoard Included
Yesterday OpenStack rolled out the latest release of its software, this time codenamed “Diablo”. Diablo sees OpenStack edge closer towards finally answering those who say it isn’t yet ready for real world implementations and specifically includes the following additional components; OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) OpenStack Compute additional functionality OpenStack Image Registry One aspect of the release that [...]
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 [...]
Life On The Open Waves
For those of you who are either generally interested or perhaps following from afar, it has certainly been difficult to miss the numerous goings-on within the OpenStack community over this last couple of weeks. In what could yet turn out to be the biggest soap opera to appear out of Texas since “Dallas”, there is certainly no shortage of drama - the [...]
Open Source, my aaS ?
On February 23rd, Infoworld blogger and cloud expert David Linthicum posted an article that, until today, I had been studiously trying to prevent from playing over and over like the proverbial stuck record in my rather inquisitive mind. My inquisition, and subsequently my inability to let this escape my attention, was not necessarily raised the [...]
Service Please…
On Tuesday of this week (Feb. 8th) my cloud-buddy, Ben Kepes, lined me up to participate in a Focus Group Round Table event entitled “Forwards and Upwards – 2011 In The Clouds“. Using his excellent moderating skills, Ben championed a very interesting 45 minute discussion (mp3 recording of which can be found here) with myself, [...]
Will Rackspace Hijack OpenStack Project?
Yesterday the news about Rackspace buying Anso Labs, a cloud computing consulting firm who played a big role in developing the compute part of OpenStack project, came out and sent the cloud punditry scrambling for an opinion about its impact on OpenStack. Gavin Clarke wrote an article on The Register raising some concerns about Rackspace [...]
Amazon Feels Pressure And Beefs Up Their Support Services
Even though Amazon has a large lead over other public cloud providers, they still have to sweat out as they target the enterprise customers. Recently, Opsource and Rackspace, two other public cloud providers targeting the same customers started offering managed cloud services with the same cloud like pricing. Already, Rackspace has established their mark in [...]
Does Every Company Need a Robert Scoble? (infographic)
What I learned in 2010 can be summed up in one individual Except for reading the occasional year end articles (notables include Kotadia, Maggie Fox, McAfee) I typically skip the tradition of trying to summarize an entire year in 10 bullet points. The Enterprise 2.0/Social Business space is just too dynamic with many starts, stops [...]
A Move To Cloud Helps Data Center Providers Maximize Profits
Industry observers have been wondering about the impact of cloud computing on the traditional datacenter providers. There is always the question lingering about the hit datacenter providers will take as they move from the traditional managed hosting world to cloud based world. Conventional Wisdom tells us that premium enterprise hosting is always a safer bet [...]
Looking Back 2010: Key Cloud Acquisitions
This is the final post in the Looking Back 2010 Series and, also, for the year 2010. After looking at the three key cloud events in this year (thanks to James Urquhart for kicking up the discussion on Twitter), I want to do a post talking about some of the key acquisitions in the cloud [...]
Top 10 Cloud Predictions by…
Time for a lunch time blog entry… Information Management recently put together some cloud predictions for the cloud industry. Here’s my 2 cents for the key points I picked out. You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. Thank goodness. Get rid of the whole premise, it’s kind of stupid. The basis of [...]
