Why Amazon wins | Innovate the core, innovate to transform
Take a look at your organization’s innovation projects. Are you strategically balancing your efforts between the core business and future growth areas? In advising companies about innovation, an area I stress is the value of consciously pursuing both little and BIG innovation. Often, companies pursuing innovation can be categorized as either: Seeking small innovations such as operational […]
What to Make of Amazon’s Work Practices?
There is much discussion about this weekend’s article in the NY Times regarding Amazon’s work practices. People seem polarized between, “that’s what it takes to succeed” to “I can’t believe what a heartless, intolerant and misogynistic company culture they’ve built.” I’ve heard the gamut from reading opinions online and even hearing the debate in circles […]
Amazon iterates, Google partners
Positive cloudy news from two of the big three, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) making some significant improvements to their DynamoDB service and Google signing on as a sponsor of the OpenStack cloud platform. AWS has got this incremental improvement thing down to a fine art, to the extent that too many competitors have stopped […]
Hewlett-Packard gets real
The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy reports HP’s Bill Hilf as saying that: “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head [with Amazon].” Well, yes. But, and it’s a huge but… this doesn’t mean HP is abandoning (or should abandon) the […]
Focus On Your Customers And Not Competitors
A lorry is a symbol of Indian logistics and the person who is posing against it is about to rethink infrastructure and logistics in India. Jeff Bezos is enjoying his trip to India charting Amazon’s growth plan where competitors like Flipkart have been aggressively growing and have satisfied customer base. This is not the first […]
50% on S3? AWS Helping Google Into the Game or Stopping the Cloud Race to Zero?
One day after Google announced a substantial price reduction for their cloud services, Amazon announced their own dramatic price reduction on several AWS offerings. This move will reduce the revenues of one of Amazon’s most profitable services, the S3, by about 50%. What were the AWS leaders thinking just before Andy Jassy went on the […]
Amazon’s Cloud Price Reduction, A Desire To Compete Hard And Move Up The Value Chain
Recently Google slashed price for their cloud offering. Amazon, as expected, also announced their 42nd price reduction on their cloud offerings since its inception. Today, Microsoft also announced price reduction for their Azure offerings. Unlike many other people I don’t necessarily see the price reduction by Amazon as waging a price war against the competition. […]
Google is Amazon’s Only Real Competition
Recently, Barb Darrow wrote a great note to Google Compute Platform, suggesting “8 things it could do to freak Amazon out.” As long term readers know, I predicted Google’s entry into the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market long before anyone else. Cloudscaling is also well known for having created the Google Compute Engine (GCE) APIs for […]
5 Recommended AWS re:Invent Breakout Sessions for Scalability and Optimization
I’m OnDemand is heading to Las Vegas for Amazon’s official cloud show – AWS re:Invent. In my honest opinion, the show is the most significant conference in the cloud and IT industries, and includes a number of fantastic educational sessions. To navigate the sessions, Amazon has provided conference attendees with a great tool that helps […]
The Perceived Risk of The Purely Cloud Deployment
In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”. Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, […]
Open Letter to the OpenStack Community: OpenStack’s Future Depends on Embracing Amazon. Now.
Dear Stackers, For three years, elements of the OpenStack community have arbitrarily and unfairly positioned OpenStack against incumbents, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware (VMW). The practical expression of this view is that OpenStack should build and maintain its own set of differentiated APIs. I’ve made no secret of my belief that this choice […]
Who are you, Cloud Broker?
Cloud brokers were recognized and described by Gartner analysts as the `Intermediary services that support fast cloud adoption`. From their customers’ perspectives cloud brokers are the system integrators (SI) or the `cloud enablers` that support fast adoption and maintenance of cloud technologies. For example, the independent software vendor (ISV) can benefit greatly from a cloud […]
Rethinking IT Transformation for the Cloud
As cloud computing matures and success models emerge, enterprises are now getting serious about using cloud to drive IT transformation. JP Morgan Chase, Toyota, GE and other leading organizations are moving beyond incremental costs savings and are using cloud and next generation platforms to drive innovation, growth and competitive advantage. Unfortunately many CIOs and their […]
Amazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio
Following several discussions with fellow bloggers and industry executives, I found it quite fitting that the natural cloud leaders are the top software and web giants: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While Amazon’s AWS is The public cloud today Google recently reported that it is doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, […]
Has the Time Come for Cloud Insurance?
In the enterprise market much of the adoption for public cloud IaaS services so far has been driven by innovators and early adopters. One of the defining characteristics of these early adopters is their willingness to accept and manage risk. These risks can come in many forms, including technological, organizational, operational and financial. Financial risk […]
