
2013 – The Year of the User – Again.
I’ve long since given up the perennial quest of predicting “what this year will bring”, skillfully leaving this particular exercise in bland rhetoric to those bold enough to want to suggest whether 2013, 2014, 2015 or 2021 will indeed finally prove be the year of VDI, Linux on the Desktop or herald the arrival of other such […]
The 5V’s of The Data Landscape
While not yet having reached the cringe-factor of “cloud”, the term “big data” is certainly becoming much discussed, and, as I’ve done many times with it’s buzzword stable-mate, I find myself asking, “What exactly is it?” Thankfully, NIST have yet to offer an insipid and face-numbingly trite definition (hooray) but unfortunately, the leading definition of […]

Sensory Overload
It usually starts with some ghoulish headline about “big data” and ends in a look toward the heavens, accompanied by a shake of the head and a deep, woeful sigh. The kind of big data they are talking about is not applicable to me, not yet, maybe not ever. It hasn’t reached the point where […]

Can You Feel The Force?
Last week, I was fortunate enough to have a “customer success story” published by our friends at Apigee. It’s not something our organization tends to do very often, but in cases like this one, where we feel that there is sufficient industry-relevant and generally interesting content to stir other people’s imaginations, then we give these […]

Beware the “C” word…
Over the last few days, I’ve read a selection of articles from some so-called “leading” tech journalists who continue to position “cloud” and “cost savings” firmly in the opening sentences of their respective copy, baiting the target audience into joining their supposition that at the end of the unicorn rainbow, lies indeed, the proverbial pot […]

There Goes The Neighborhood
Not too long after vmware’s Cloud Foundry made its pomp-and-circumstance debut, I was fortunate enough to be sitting down to (and paying for) an interesting dinner with several of the senior figures in the Cloud Foundry core team, including head honcho Derek Collison and all round good guy Killian Murphy. After a few aperitifs and […]

Trading Places
Almost a year ago, I was deep in conversation with other members of the Clouderati discussing (philosophically, I might add) where the future of cloud computing and the associated services might lead and, more importantly, what that may mean for the next generation of enterprise CIOs. You may be aware of my enterprise background and […]

The Identity Crisis
In the three weeks that have passed since being subsumed into the high-velocity Citrix machine, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time meeting with, and listening to, a broad range of existing and potential customers, both service provider and “enlightened” enterprise, as they work through the planning and delivery phases of their respective cloud […]

Enter The Data Hugger
At the recent Gluecon event in Colorado, I was fortunate enough to run into my friend Sam Ramji from Apigee and took the opportunity to grab some time with him after he had delivered his excellent panel presentation which was intriguingly entitled “Globalization, Black Swans, and APIs”. It’s always great to bounce ideas and share […]

Are you being served ?
As I write this latest post, I’m somewhere over the US, cruising at 35,000 feet and hastily making vapor trails toward attendance at my first Gluecon event in Broomfield, Colorado. And you know what, I’m pretty excited too. Not only has Gluecon got a great lineup for 2011 and a promise of being an excellent […]

Inside The Box
Last week, Cisco (and thecloudcast.net) all round good guy, Brian Gracely, posted a very thought provoking piece entitled “The 5 P’s of Cloud Computing“. In the blog post, Gracely uses his strikingly simple yet very powerful framework to drive home a rather obvious, yet seemingly hard-to-grasp concept – not everything about cloud computing success is […]