
Five big themes driving enterprise data and app development in 2015
f you read most of the prediction articles for 2015, it’s pretty clear that the conventional thought is that enterprise IT will continue to grow more collaborative with organizational phenomena such as DevOps becoming more common, that mobile computing will continue its ascent, and of course cloud computing will continue to augment and in some […]

Disruptive Enterprise Platform Sales: Why Buy Anything, Buy Mine, Buy Now – Part I
I think of enterprise software into two broad categories – products or solutions and platform. The simplest definition of platform is you use that to make a solution that you need. While largely I have been a product person I have had significant exposure to enterprise platform sales process. I have worked with many sales […]

How ITaaS is Reviving the Service Catalog
The service catalog hasn’t exactly been one of the hotter topics in enterprise IT. Introduced as a IT service management best practice with ITIL v3, the general idea is that IT should provide a central list of services, SLAs, and prices along with service request processes. Users go to the service catalog, pick what they […]

Enterprise PaaS Is About Making Money, Not Saving It
I’ve written before about how the ‘deploy and scale’ demo of PaaS is really just a superficial illustration of its potential. It functionally buckets PaaS with automation tools like Chef or Puppet which probably does both a disservice. One of the key benefits of running enterprise PaaS at scale is incredible insight it gives you […]

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 […]

Make smart business decisions like a picky consumer
As a consumer, you have choices for everything right at your fingertips. You decide it’s a “healthy” day so you substitute a salad for the fries. Or at Starbucks, when a plain latte just won’t cut it, you order a grande, double pump caramel, soy latte. In the consumer world, you don’t have to sacrifice […]

You Can’t Automate Your Way to the Cloud
When racing to execute a ‘cloud’ strategy, it can be very tempting for IT organizations to try and automate their way to the cloud. A key benefit of the cloud is operational efficiency. We know that humans are error prone and costly, which makes automation such an enticing solution. Add to this the fact that […]

Enterprises Are Climbing Aboard the Cloud Disruption Train
Saving money is nothing compared to beating your competitors to market with a better product. This is the revelation that’s rapidly taking hold in the enterprise CIO’s office. Until very recently, most enterprise IT leaders would tell you that their primary goal in moving to cloud computing was related to cost reduction, primarily through server […]

Best of Breed versus Polyglot Revisited
If you feel that PaaS is a new-age devops/application management tool, like any management tool user or vendor, you’ll want maximum breadth of coverage. Nobody wants multiple monitoring, backup, deployment or configuration management solutions for each platform or application in their environment. Heterogeneous breadth coverage with the ever elusive “single pane of glass” is the […]

Top Five Challenges Facing Enterprise Application Developers
Several common themes have emerged from discussions with a broad array of enterprise developers. In this post, I’ll share some of what I’ve been hearing. I would love to get your feedback. 1) Cloud Apps are Hard to Get Right – While abstraction of infrastructure has helped agility and application management, it doesn’t make it […]

The Truth About Lock In
Last week I was invited to speak at a Microsoft conference in Redmond about building cloud applications for portability across clouds and infrastructure. In my presentation, I approached the issue of application portability from the enterprise perspective. This means that developers generally are not choosing servers, clouds or other infrastructure components. Developers focus on building […]

Enterprise software wars: 5 points of advice for CIOs
Enterprise software, long a complex domain only of interest to specialists, has become the darling of venture capital investors and start-ups. This post presents context and concludes with advice for CIOs on navigating the changing enterprise software landscape. Enterprise software eats the world (photo credit: Michael Krigsman) To get a sense of growing interest in […]

PaaS and Mobile Enterprise – Real Conversations with Customers
One of the benefits of working on cutting edge technology like PaaS is that I get to have conversations with enterprise customers about the transformations that PaaS will bring. Increasingly, I’m seeing lots of interest in the intersection of PaaS and mobile enterprise (yeah, it’s not just an attempt by me to put together two buzzwords!). […]

Conference Report: Workday Rising
Last week I attended the analyst event organized along with Workday Rising 2012 conference. Workday Rising is Workday’s (previous CloudAve coverage)(Disclosure: Workday is the sponsor of CloudAve and this is my own personal opinion but they paid for my travel and stay) user conference and it was their attempt to interact closely with their customers […]