Continuity Rolls Out Public Beta of its Big Data PaaS
When Continuuity launched late last year I was pretty skeptical given the buzzword heavy press release, light on any real specifics. After spending some time talking with the founders however I was more positive, and not only because of the princely $10M funding round the company had just raised. As I said at the time: […]
Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further […]
FinancialForce on a Tear
When salesforce.com invested in FinancialForce a few years ago, there was keen interest in how this would help the company grow. There’s never been much clarity around those numbers since the parent company of FinancialForce, Unit4, doesn’t break out the individual numbers of operating divisions. That is a bit clearer now since in its last reporting period, […]
Managing customers’ expectations when moving your company’s application or service into the Cloud
In my last post, I outlined some of the challenges technology vendors often face when confronted with customer demands that don’t meet the vendors’ cloud providers’ contractual obligations. Now let’s talk about some of the strategies I’ve used to bridge these gaps when negotiating with the cloud service provider. Get your customer and your cloud […]
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…
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
Force.com and the Uber-Democratization of Programming
In the last few weeks I’ve started to riff on James Govenor’s meme, that of developers becoming the new kingmakers. I recently wrote a post discussing what I saw happening with Salesforce – how the combination of force.com and Heroku was creating a real gravity pull for developers and that Salesforce was primed to be […]
Cloud research: Cost matters most and confusion remains
Although cloud computing holds the promise of innovation and business transformation, buyers remain focused on cost and are confused over license models.
Cloud Computing and Distributed Computing, Something is Broken
First off, I’m going to start off with some definitions to clarify things for this conversation. Cloud Computing, in general, has been perverted to mean almost anything available for sale today in technology. It’s rhetorically stupid. But we all still use the term to some degree. Going back to cloud computing at the core, we’re […]
Cloud app integration: Incredibly important, but also problematic
My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource […]
Nonsense “Cloud” Marketing, Kill The Cloud Already, Please!
PSA: “Warning: Cloud Washing is in FULL EFFECT! Be cautious or you could be bitten by this nasty virus, a rant on marketing nonsense.” Yesterday I was buying a router. The router I ended up getting has a USB port for attaching a drive as a NAS for media. Not for file sharing, but simply for […]
Continuuity Launches Big Data Application Fabric–Warning: Buzzwords Abound
Coming out of stealth today at Strata and Hadoop World is Continuuity, a company that is looking to position itself within the PaaS landscape as it gives organizations the ability to build, deploy and scale big data apps. All of which sounds dangerously like buzzword heaven so it’s worth taking a look at what Continuuity […]
RackWare Aims to Power Cloud Mobility
An interesting recent trend I’ve been seeing is that of new vendors differentiating their cloud service through giving customers ultimate flexibility around what they use on their cloud – rather than shoehorning them into a couple of OS options, or a few pre-defined server sizes and specs, these vendors provide
Thor Project Opens Up, Building the Cloud Foundry Ecosystem with the Community
The Iron Foundry Team are big advocates of open source software. We write code across all sorts of languages, just like many of the development shops out there do. Sometimes we’re heavy on the .NET, other times we’re all up in some Java, Ruby on Rails, spooling up a Node.js Application or something else. So …
Analyst? Commentator? Advisor? Investor? What’s In a Name?
For awhile now I’ve been thinking about how best to describe what I “do”. I run Diversity, a pretty diverse (hence the name) operation which covers a bunch of different things – I spend time evangelizing about Cloud Computing, I opine on the technology landscape, I consult to large technology
