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 […]
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 […]
Money for IaaS, money for streaming data
$83 million for Digital Ocean, with its bare-bones spin on cloud-based infrastructure… and $24 million for Confluent, the company behind Apache Kafka. Digital Ocean’s not an AWS-killer (and doesn’t think it is, either), and Kafka addresses a rather specific set of use cases around messaging between devices and/or application components… but both are solid pieces of […]
Size Matters, sort of
The Amazon Web Services cloud sees ten times as much usage as the next fourteen competitors combined, according to a new report from industry research firm Gartner. At least according to Business Insider’s reporting of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for public cloud. And over at VentureBeat, HP’s public cloud is now too small to […]
Interview With an AWS Cloud Champion
Allow me to introduce a good friend, Peter Sankauskas, who I met through the AWS cloud community. Our level of cloud experience evolved with the expansion of the cloud, Amazon in particular, and we have both become prominent members of the AWS community. Having learned more about open source and development, I’d like to focus on the […]
451 Research on IaaS
This diagram, from a recent 451 Research report, is intriguing. AWS is top of the heap, “used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers in the study (57%) and is also cited as the most important IaaS provider by 35% of these current IaaS customers.” But look at Rackspace, ahead of AWS on ‘promise’ and only just […]
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 […]
Amazon binds itself more tightly to the enterprise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) spent years being dismissive of anything that didn’t run in an AWS data centre. Private and hybrid clouds were, we were repeatedly and vehemently told, ‘false clouds.’ There was no value in doing anything cloudy any way but the Amazon way. Non-cloudy workloads were, simply, anachronistic. Left alone, they’d get on with the […]
Top 4: “Nobody Reads Blogs… Except Everybody Read Blogs”
I know I know, the marketers say it’s all about the single articles now. Nobody reads blogs. Nobody subscribes to blogs. Ya know, except of course for that small percentage of people that do. …marketing, it’ll make you insane if you’re not careful. But seriously, here’s a few blogs that are actually worth reading. They’re […]
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 […]
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 […]
OpenStack: A Community Torn Apart – Freedland, Bias and Scoble
Last month, I attended the OpenStack summit in Tel Aviv. This was yet another great event brought to us by the brilliant Gigaspaces team (especially @shar1z) headed by one of the most important cloud evangelists in Israel and the world, @natishalom. OpenStack aims to provide the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. Wikipedia […]
Cloud Model 2014: Hybrid, Google, Brokerage, Startups and The Enterprise
2013 has been incredibly eventful for the cloud industry, mostly for making itself an eminent presence in the mainstream IT market. Businesses of all sizes have made their ways to the cloud, confirming my 2013 predictions. Government agencies worldwide take the cloud seriously, as demonstrated by the CIA’s contract switch over to Amazon from IBM. […]
ITaaS is About More Than Just Cloud
ITaaS, short for IT-as-a-Service, is one of the more misleading acronyms around. Because it follows the somewhat annoying “XaaS” pattern, many assume that like SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS it’s just another cloud delivery model or technology platform. This mistaken assumption will prove to be very costly for many in enterprise IT. ITaaS is in fact […]
Looking in the Mirror: A Response to My Open Letter
Last week I published an open letter to the OpenStack community calling for more focus on Amazon Web Services (AWS) compatibility. I feel strongly about this, as do others. However, in retrospect, I could have gone about elevating this issue in a different manner. I realize now that it might have been better had my […]
