
Sorry Database Nerds, Nobody Actually Gives a Shit…
So I’ve been in more than a few conversations about data structures, various academic conversations and other notions about where and how data should be stored. I’ve been on projects and managed projects that involve teams of people determining how to manage data so that other people can just not manage data. They want to […]

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 […]

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 […]

Scale Out vs Scale Up – ProfitBricks Aims to Challenge the Current Thinking for IaaS
One thing that few people argue about in the move to the cloud is the accepted view that the best way to achieve scale is by throwing together lots of lightweight commodity machines with relatively low specifications, and stringing them together to achieve scale. It’s a compelling story and one

Big Data–Over Hyped Buzzword or Enterprise Focus?
Of all the myriad of terms that the tech industry throws around at the moment, none is as often subverted for marketing spin as “big data”. So much so that few people can actually agree on what big data is. For me, I’ll revert to Wikipediaand it’s definition which states; big data is a collection […]

4 Big Data Myths – Part II
This is the second and the last part of this two-post series blog post on Big Data myths. If you haven’t read the first part, check it out here. Myth # 2: Big Data is an old wine in new bottle I hear people say, “Oh, that Big Data, we used to call it BI.” One […]

Disruptive Cloud Start-Ups – Part 1: NimbusDB
Being at Under The Radar (UTR), watching disruptive companies present and network with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and venture capitalists is an annual tradition that I don’t miss. I have blogged about disruptive start-ups that I saw in the previous years. The biggest exit out of UTR, that I have witnessed so far, is Salesforce.com’s $212 […]

I’m Not Looking, But These Job Posts Just Suck
BEWARE: This is the beginning of a rant. If you’re temperamental it might piss you off. You’ve been warned, prepare to have a bit of rant with reality thrown on top for good measure. I’m not looking for another gig. I’m extremely happy with what I’m doing right now. The Russell Team I’m working with […]

Why the “NoSQL” moniker is useful – for now
There’s been a lot of crowing as of late from folks that wish the whole NoSQL “movement” (where “NoSQL” means “not only SQL” – but gets misinterpreted a LOT) had been named something else. Since the whole movement is essentially engineers at this point, I thought I’d weigh in (I’m just a lowly marketing guy, […]

Zoho shakes the SaaS world with CloudSQL
Zoho is the sponsor of this blog but this is an independent analysis done by me based on the same information Zoho shared with other bloggers. Zoho today announced the availability of CloudSQL, a middleware that allows Zoho customers to access their data on Zoho SaaS applications using SQL queries. This sits between the Zoho […]