Ben Kepes
Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.
More about Ben here.
Ravello and the Developer’s Application Hypervisor Attract $26M in Funding
While in Israel last week, I took the opportunity to meet with Ravello, a company just coming out of stealth that aims to ease the process of development and deployment of enterprise applications. Founded by the creators of open source hypervisor KVM, Ravello aims to enable the replication of existing applications, with no changes, such […]
Overcoming The Cloud Cost Conundrum
The fact that cloud computing means that technology is democratized and available to all is either the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. For business units it’s great – it gives them the ability to acquire technology without going through the often long and torturous process with IT. For IT and CFOs, however, technology democratization is painful…
Traditional IT Shops Starting to Evangelize Cloud, and End to the FUD In Sight?
I was interested to read some coverage of the recent event that was run by Amazon Web Services in Sydney, Australia to celebrate the launch of two Sydney availability zones for the company. As an aside its interesting to look at the list of services that AWS has chosen to go to market with. It […]
More Proof That Shadow IT is a Growing Issue
When talking with organizations about how the cloud can help them, I’m often told that cloud has no place in their organization and they’re not using it in any way, shape or form. They also point to the perceived security risks that cloud brings as their #1 reason for not using any flavor of cloud. […]
Overcoming the Perils of Licensing with CiRBA
The efficiency that virtualization brings is good and all, but there still exists issues around licensing costs. Essentially having a virtualization product, and making licensing changes to optimize a customer’s costs are two very different things. CiRBA, a provider of capacity control software, aims to help with this problem with
Churn and SaaS
SaaS companies are faced with copious amounts of advice about pricing, monetization, funnel management and all the different things used to describe the processes involved in attracting, gaining and maintaining customers. One of the big areas that companies think about is that of churn – or how many customers “drop off” and stop using the […]
VMware, Puppet Labs and an Infrastructure Future
News recently that VMware, fresh from spinning out most of its developer focused non-virtualization assets in the Pivotal Initiative, has put a huge $30M finding into Puppet Labs. As part of the deal, VMware and Puppet will team up to produce a new IT management solution for VMware customers to use that leverages the automation […]
Microsoft’s Cloud OS Play–A Logical Converged Cloud Offering
A week or two ago, Microsoft made a slew of announcements all aimed at creating a consistent story around hybrid cloud services. It’s a compelling product launch, and one which, frankly, takes Microsoft which was only a year or two ago one of the key whipping boys for the cloud cognoscenti, to a place of […]
On the Ethic of Delivery – Required Watching
Over the past few years I’ve been a kind of informal adviser to the Defrag event. The role is less than onerous, Eric Norlin totally understands what his participants (and at defrag, attendees really are participants and not simply an audience) most want to see. Defrag has always been a
SAP Business Suite on HANA, Because Big Data is a Stupid Term
I spent a lot of time last year talking with vendors about big data and it’s ramifications for both the tech industry and the economy at large. Often these conversations centered around one or another vendor’s use of the big data term as the buzzword de jour, regardless of whether anything they do even vaguely […]
Sure Dropbox is Potentially Insecure, but Does it Matter?
It’s summertime down in my neck of the woods and that’s a good time to go out on a limb with a statement that might get people a little fired up. Bear with me on this one though… Over on GigaOm Barb Darrow has a good write up about the findings of a survey commissioned […]
Bridging the Chasm Between IT and the Business
People go to great lengths to explain how cloud computing is democratizing IT and enabling the end-users of technology to make some decisions themselves about what they use, how they use it and how quickly they can get set up. A plethora of enterprise vendors have got their start in
Acquisition News – Cloud Sherpas Broadens the Franchise and Moves Into ITSM
I’ve been covering Cloud Sherpas since its inception – I’m particularly interested in this new breed of services brokerage that is proving successful despite deriving its revenue from a small sliver of a very small annual charge – this in comparison to the traditional on-premise world where companies enjoyed massive consulting fees for implementation project […]
Because Old School Retail is Dead–NetSuite Acquires Retail Anywhere
NetSuite’s acquisition of Point of Sale (POS) vendor Retail Anywhere creates a powerful offering that allows retail businesses to compete in the face of a challenging environment.
Which Apps To Move To The Cloud?
I don’t preach an “all or nothing” cloud approach. Cloud is a sliding wedge and existing organizations should look at taking baby steps and slowly increase the breadth and depth of their cloud usage.
