IBM doubles down on health with Watson
IBM doubles down on health with Watson: Hot off its Jeopardy win, IBM’s clever Watson quickly started looking for problems that might help Big Blue recoup some of the project’s development costs. Healthcare was one obvious area, with relatively constrained sets of problems, copious data to ingest and understand, and oodles (a technical term) of […]
Roundtrip Revenue: Probably, Just Do It.
If you’ve been around since the Web 1.0 days, a certain phrase may send shivers up your spine — “Roundtrip Revenue.” People went to jail at AOL for this, folks, overstating revenue by as much as $1 billion that wasn’t really real. It was just matched against AOL purchases, making the revenues in essence nonexistent. […]
Public Cloud Economies of (Web-)Scale Aren’t About Buying Power
As you no doubt heard this week, Rackspace has announced the intention to focus on managed cloud. Inevitably this brought observations from many about RAX, and others, ability to compete effectively against the web scale public cloud giants: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. One of the commenters was Mike Kavis (twitter link), a long time cloud pundit […]
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. […]
PR finger pointing: IBM and Bridgestone wrangle over failed ERP
A legal dispute between tire company, Bridgestone, and system integrator, IBM, over a failed ERP implementation has escalated into a war of words between the companies. Instead of keeping quiet about the details, in accord with usual practice, IBM has taken a strident public position against its customer Bridgestone. This approach represents a break from […]
Cloud Marketing, IBM Does it Wrong (personal letter attached)
The 102 year old veteran IT company seems to have taken countless steps toward the development of CloudSmart, the IT giant’s proprietary cloud that, despite its large investments, has not demonstrated any sort of progress… until now, that is. In July, IBM upped its game by announcing its acquisition of Softlayer, an open cloud platform […]
OpenStack, why passion found in favor of open source standardization?
OpenStack platform continues to be followed. But the usual question comes in mind that why passion found in favor of open source standardization? Interoperability in the cloud is a great feature of OpenStack, but this is not the only reason. There are many good things about this platform which we need to know. OpenStack is […]
Analysis: IBM and Pennsylvania share blame in massive IT train wreck
After significant delays and cost overruns, Pennsylvania has terminated a contract with IBM to provide new software for the state’s unemployment compensation system. Photo credit: Michael Krigsman The state’s Secretary of Labor and Industry, Julia Hearthway, made the decision following an $800,000 independent study [pdf download], conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, that blames both […]
Unsupervised Machine Learning, Most Promising Ingredient Of Big Data
Orange (France Telecom), one of the largest mobile operators in the world, issued a challenge “Data for Development” by releasing a dataset of their subscribers in Ivory Coast. The dataset contained 2.5 billion records, calls and text messages exchanged between 5 million anonymous users in Ivory Coast, Africa. Various researchers got access to this dataset […]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may […]
Dell Boomi Announces New Milestones and Partnerships
Only days after the announcement that Dell was going to return to private ownership, Dell subsidiary Boomi has come out with some news about its integration platform This is really timely given the near universal acknowledgement that software lies at the core of Dell’s future (more on this in a later post) and that it […]
IBM SmartCloud Docs Enters The Market But Does It Still Matter?
Last month IBM released SmartCloud Docs (formerly called IBM Lotuslive Symphony) at a pricing competitive to other offerings in the market like Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. It is free for existing SmartCloud Advanced customers and $3 per user per month for SmartCloud Standard customers. It is based on Apache OpenOffice and offers solid […]
AWS, Redshift and Co-Opetition
Long time technology commentators understand the tensions between platform companies, intent on both growing their business and creating a healthy ecosystem, and ecosystem partners who leverage what the platform brings, but remain apprehensive about the long term intensions of the platform vendor. Case in point – the growing number of services offered by Amazon Web […]
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 […]
TwinStrata CloudArray Now Supports NAS for Heterogeneous Storage Management
I’ve written previously about TwinStrata – a company whose CloudArray storage gateway is designed to enable organizations to deploy cloud SANs which combine public and private cloud storage providers along with their existing storage infrastructure. It’s a logical play – while pure cloud may be the holy grail and the
