With deep pockets Microsoft is able to fight it out on multiple fronts. With Azure, in the coming months, it will take on SalesForce.com as a formidable cloud platform provider. It's no more just software as service; it will be framework as a service at the finishing line. Read up Dec. 1, 2009 04:45 AM EST Reads: 461
In today’s technology-dependent enterprise environment, the efficiency of most business processes depends directly on the effective performance of the IT infrastructure. Almost every single activity - from servicing a customer to shipping purchased products - is dependent upon one or m...
The Enterprise Cloud Requires a real time infrastructure and a management discipline that understands and can enforce service level discipline. Organizations have become increasingly dependent on technical infrastructure to enable customer interactions. As such, the business has a vest...
Interesting post by Nick Carr in which he points to the supposed first published evidence of the concept of Cloud Computing. The proof comes in the document, dated March 30, 1965 which outlines a Western Union executive's ambitious plan to create "a nationwide information utility, whic...
Here's an important reminder for cloud service providers: character counts.
Ethics, Values, and Trust are table stakes – for anyone who wants to succeed in business long term – but especially for cloud service providers.
As a cloud customer, I am not simply buying/renting your ha...
Lots of discussion lately about the need for virtualization in a cloud computing context. On one side you have people saying it's not necessary and adds extra complexity, on the other you have people (vendors) saying that virtualization is inherently a cloud infrastructure. Some even g...
As a preface to the series of articles I will be writing on the Value Proposition and Business Cases for Cloud Computing, I wanted to discuss the layers below and within the cloud. It is important to understand what each of the layers is composed of, what the intended function of that ...
People often ask me where I believe the biggest opportunities for Cloud Computing currently are, at first I thought they were asking about the technical particulars like public clouds, platforms etc, but recently I've come to realize it isn't so much the technology as much as where the...
With the massive push toward cloud computing in the enterprise, there are some considerations that hardware vendors will have to come to terms with in the long run. Unlike the old infrastructure model with hardware bearing the brunt of fault tolerance, the new infrastructure model plac...
At the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California, the opening keynote session venue was completely filled, with the organizer (SYS-CON Events) obliged to quickly expand the audience into two overflow rooms, in addition to mounting displays in hallways adjacent to t...
What is enterprise cloud computing? Simply stated, it’s a behind-the-firewalls use of commercial, Internet-based cloud technologies specifically focused on one company’s or one business environment’s computing needs. Enterprise cloud computing is a controlled, internal place that offe...
"Virtualization requires massive volume to be profitable. Cloud computing will enable that massive volume." With succinct sound bites like that, it is not surprising that Barry X Lynn, CEO of 3Tera, is much in demand as a speaker at conferences devoted to Cloud & Virtualization. In thi...
While acknowledging that lots of work is currently being done to differentiate and integrate private and public cloud solutions, Microsoft Architect David Chou believes that Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) is the area of Cloud Computing that will make its impact most noticeably in 2...
Only one publication in the world has been tracking Cloud Computing 24x7 since December 6, 2006, when we first mentioned the concept in an article: Cloud Computing Journal. Since then worldwide interest in the Cloud paradigm of massively scalable IT resources and capabilities delivered...
Doing more with less is a familiar refrain for IT professionals, and today’s challenging business environment has only increased the pressure on managers to achieve efficiencies, maximize performance and improve responsiveness of the data center. More and more frequently, IT is turning...
With an ever-increasing number of companies now buying computing, storage, and networking power as they need it from the cloud, SYS-CON.TV recently invited four leading industry thought leaders to discuss how Cloud Computing brings the economics of the Web to Enterprise IT and where th...
Back in June, we released the very first security hardened virtual machine images for the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. These original images were based upon the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and were configured in accordance with the guidelines published b...
I’ve always found that the obvious things in life are easy to understand once you see them. I’ve got a good one for you. The obvious thing here is ISVs should reduce POC installation and configuration time to near zero. It is obvious, isn’t it? And easy to understand. As it turns out, ...
Check out Charles Torre talking with George Moore (21 year MS veteran) about the what is behind the billing of Azure. Watch the interview on Channel 9 here.
21 year Microsoft veteran and Software Architect George Moore is involved in defining and implementing an effective strategy for...
According to a Dow Jones report, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is bullish about perhaps using M&A to grow Google's cloud computing business - in contrast Schmidt noted that Microsoft was in his view "having trouble moving to cloud computing." According to the report, Schmidt expects the move...
You may wonder whether it’s too early to make the call given the lack of interoperability standards, security concerns, and common definition of cloud computing. Well, the IPTV space shares many of the same similarities – emerging technology, emerging standards, emerging adoption, var...
Many of us have spent years explaining to customers why our various versions of Platform as a Service (PaaS) are their best alternative for customization and deployment of business software applications. Logically, there is little reason not to choose a PaaS as the core architecture f...
In conjunction with GS1 Canada, HP announced a product recall process Monday that straddles many participants across global supply chains. The pressures in such multi-player process ecologies can mount past the breaking point for such change management nightmares as rapid food or produ...
The underlying question is, "How do we get from today's organizational business infrastructure (and processes) to that of a Cloud computing business model?" And by Cloud computing business model I am referring to an "IP enabled, scalable, virtualized, multi-tenant, subscription based ...
Cloud Computing is one of the many things enterprise CIOs, CTOs and other engineers will master in delivering capability. I believe in the power of new Cloud Computing technologies and concepts and think we should all continue our focus there.
I have said, and still say, the same thi...
With today's announcement of CA (NASDAQ: CA) and Amazon (NasdaqGS: AMZN) partnering to leverage and support Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) with CA's Enterprise IT Management (EITM) offering we are witnessing the continued focus and support by mainstream, traditional IT companie...
Another storm? Didn't we just have one in the financial and credit markets you say?
Well, yes, and no. Yes, we did have a storm, though it wasn't one of innovation, unless we count the complex and innovative derivative instruments created by Wall St. in which banks, investment firms...
Articles and blog posts associated with security and cloud computing are a daily occurrence, unless some well-publicized breach occurs in the cloud. At that point the number of commentaries and discussions will increase exponentially, and then, over the following week, return to norma...
Potentially massive savings can be had from thwarting legal discovery fulfillment problems in advance by governing and managing information. In a sponsored podcast, I recently examined how the well-managed -- versus the haphazard -- information oversight approach reduces legal risks. Y...
Too many think of cloud storage as just another or the next type of storage. As usual with this view, it is associated with a view that the "next" storage type is bigger, faster and cheaper. Because each generation of storage is always bigger, faster and cheaper. As such, proponents...
Governance has proved important when adopting SOA solutions by preventing delays in software delivery from compliance interoperability, security risks, and poor service quality. The topic has been a hot one at this week's Open Group conference in Toronto.
Recently, I attended SOAWorld 2009 in New York City, and I had the pleasure of listening to many distinguished speakers talk about extremely interesting topics. One of my favorite talks was given by a fellow IBMer, Kareem Yusuf. During the course of Kareem's keynote, he discussed SOA,...
Following Unisys’ recent announcement regarding their cloud computing strategy, I had the opportunity to speak with Rich Marcello, president of Unisys Systems & Technology, and Sam Gross, VP of Unisys Global IT Outsourcing Solutions. What struck me was the coherence and clari...
IBM's experiment with group authorship for Cloud Computing interoperability is starting to pay off. Earlier today, Doug Tidwell posted the first draft of a Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper produced extensively via a new Google group created to help define the various use case req...
If your business relies on the speedy resolution of an issue from your cloud provider, then test them before you try. Send them that email out-of-hours to see how quickly and how useful the reply actually is. Try and reach someone on the phone. Look around the forums to see how many qu...
In a podcast featuring a panel industry thought leaders, moderated by yours' truly, we offer new insight into the current status of cloud offerings and the future need for open standards and governance. Who is using the cloud for what -- and where this trend is going -- are discussed a...
There is a very real difference between on-demand computing and on-demand infrastructure. What the cloud provides now, and is described by just about every cloud pundit as the benefit of cloud computing, is on-demand compute resource provisioning. Central to this theme is provisioning,...
A few blogs (slashdot) are reporting a story posted last week on PCworld.com titled "Trademarks: The Hidden Menace" in which Keir Thomas asks why open source advocates are keen to suggest patent and copyright reform, yet completely ignore the issue of trademarks. In his story, he says ...
After more than two “azure” months, with lots of new stuff to learn, a whole new alphabet soup to digest and a dozen or so Microsoft evangelists trying to navigate us through the plethora of “cloud services” that seem to pop up every day from Microsoft’s software-making machine, I beli...
