MIT CIO leadership awards now accepting applications
Everyone knows I am a strong advocate of Chief Information Officers. It’s a tough job fraught with pressure from management that demands simultaneous cost cutting and innovation along with increasingly sophisticated business requirements for technology-enabled transformation. Despite these challenges and many more, there are great CIOs using technology to drive significant and meaningful business improvements. […]
Cloud Academy: Test Drive Your Cloud Skills
According to IDC’s prediction, 7 million new cloud related IT jobs will be created by 2015. As cloud is still evolving, there is an overall lack of knowledge, skills and experience in the IT industry. This is intensified by the fact that new cloud features and innovations are introduced weekly by cloud service vendors, especially […]
Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde talks about Big Data, and lessons from the world of High Performance Computing
It’s sometimes easy to assume that the large clusters of commodity servers commonly associated with open source big data and NoSQL approaches like Hadoop have made supercomputers and eye-wateringly expensive high performance computing (HPC) installations a thing of the past. But Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde argues that the world of HPC has evolved, and […]
The Case for Tiered Storage in Private Clouds
Fall of last year I wrote a controversial whitepaper detailing my concerns about how distributed storage was being marketed. The blog introduction and the whitepaper were both entitled Converged Storage, Wishful Thinking, and Reality. There was a certain amount of expected blowback from folks at RedHat and Ceph as well as more thoughtful replies from […]
Don’t Ever Make Anyone “Head of Sales / Marketing / Engineering / Whatever” in SaaS
A few months ago, I gave a great SaaS Founder CEO a Gift. A real gift. This founder CEO was at about $1m in ARR, doing well, but with only a smidge of angel funding and limited resources. And I gave him an insanely great VP of Sales candidate. An amazing fit for his company, […]
What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From WhatsApp
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion has dominated all news in Silicon Valley for the past 48 hours. Yesterday, I was at a urinal, and a group of people asked me what I thought. Most of the discussion seems to be around whether Mark Zuckerberg was crazy to pay so much for a relatively […]
Saving the dry, lifeless soul of enterprise software
A special edition of CxOTalk (episode 44) brings together three top analysts to discuss why enterprise software is so uninspired and how to fix the problem. The conversation is fun, exciting, and completely engaging.
Wintersmith Documentation
I set out a few days ago to put together a documentation site. I had a few criteria for this site: A static site that I could push to Github to use with their github pages feature. The static site is generated from markdown. It just works. It’s easy to get it into a workflow […]
Everyone in SaaS Needs to Do Customer Support. At Least Until You Have 50 Employees. But Ideally, Forever.
I’m not sure if you saw the recent rant of David Marcus, president of PayPal. Complaining his employees weren’t using PayPal apps. Well, dude, what do you expect? Yes, you’re right. It’s not cool your team doesn’t use PayPal every day. But PayPal isn’t Google. Or Facebook. It’s not a service everyone is necessarily going […]
I’ve Got a JavaScript & Node.js Webinar, Webstorm Tutorial Videos, Work & Flow With JavaScript Development and More…
Webinar: Node.js Development Workflow in WebStorm This coming week I’m doing an intro to work and flow with Node.js JavaScript Programming that I’m working with JetBrains on. In the webinar I’ll be covering the following key topics in the webinar: Open an existing project & getting WebStorm configured for running, testing and related working tasks. […]
Why Multi-Cloud? Evolution, Freedom
What drives the creation of countless apps, tools and platforms in the IT market today? The ever-growing web as well as the `consumerization of IT` provide end users with an abundance of options and full discretion. We now understand the vital need to internalize the concept of spreading knowledge and information across a variety of […]
Cloud, DevOps and Herding Cats
The conventional wisdom is that 2014 is that year that enterprise IT finally “rolls up the sleeves” and gets serious about cloud adoption. But what does this really mean? Basically we’re seeing the era of cloud pilots and proof-of-concepts in the enterprise drawing to close, especially around IaaS and to a certain extent PaaS. CIOs […]
When customers want a product roadmap, do this instead
Product roadmaps suck. There, I said it. <exhales> OK, let’s explain that. Roadmaps that are real, living documents representing what you will deliver…are awesome. But that may not be the case for you; it wasn’t for me. Instead, a product roadmap was at its core a sales document for a prospect call. A lot of effort, with […]
So You’re Shutting Down Your Startup And You’re Scared…
I ran across Startups Anonymous, and a post entitled, “We’re Shutting Down and I’m Scared” caught my eye. For better or worse, I’ve either been through or participated in shutting many companies down, so I thought it would be fun and potentially useful to provide my blow-by-blow advice: *** After over two years, backing from […]
Finding an Investor Who is in Love with You
I often talk about what I’m looking for when I meet with an entrepreneur. Above all else I’m looking for a genuine passion for what the entrepreneur is doing. It’s even a direct quote in my Twitter bio. Of course passion isn’t enough. You need a set of innate skills that differentiate you from the […]
