I have no doubt in my mind that Thomas Edison, were he alive today, would instantly spot the real value of cloud computing. Most people think it's the economics. To one of history's most prolific inventors, cloud computing would mean innovation. You see, cloud isn't just about how cheap you can make a VM, or... Continue Reading →
The enterprise market is a bit like a a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. On the one hand, the investment by service providers in "enterprise class" cloud services continues to accelerate. On the other hand, pretty much all I hear from enterprise customers is how they are primarily interested in private clouds.... Continue Reading →
Here is a little story I tweeted last night... ONCE Upon a Cloud, there was a big river that ran wide and deep. And it was called Amazon.com And this great river Amazon grew fast upon great Infrastructure that it built, so that it was a marvel to behold in all the land. And the... Continue Reading →
I often get asked about where cloud tools and technologies are being sold/implemented today. Note that cloud tools is different from "clouds" in that you use the tools to build/automate your cloud. Things like infrastructure stack software, orchestration, configuration management, etc. fall into the category of cloud tools. There are three primary markets I am seeing today.... Continue Reading →
I had a number of conversations this past week at CloudConnect in Santa Clara regarding the relative offerings of Microsoft and VMware in the cloud market. Microsoft is going the vertically integrated route by offering their own Windows Azure cloud with a variety of interesting and innovated features. VMware, in contrast, is focused on building... Continue Reading →
David Linthicumwrote a piece today in InfoWorld regarding the coming wave of cloud vendor consolidation. After CA's acquisition of 3Tera, it's natural to ask how you can protect yourself from having your strategic vendor acquired by a larger, less focused entity. Face it, the people building these startups are mostly hoping to have the kind of success... Continue Reading →
Last week Amazon announced the addition of full database consistency as an option for SimpleDB users. Most of you know that SimpleDB is a "NoSQL" database that allows you to build very scalable Web apps without the typical scaling limitations of SQL databases. One of the limitations of SimpleDB has been the reliance on "eventual consistency" at... Continue Reading →
Skytap is known as a cloud dev/test provider today, but they have been seeing more workloads coming on-board including ERP migration, training, demos, etc. So perhaps they are not as targeted as we think. This can be a risk, where customers start to wonder what you stand for. Skytap entered in the dev/test market, and... Continue Reading →
I think we might be at the very beginning of an interesting new phase in the evolution of cloud computing -- regional and local clouds. Local and regional hosting is nothing new - there have been smaller players operating in the shadows of the big hosting companies for years. Some of these organizations are resellers... Continue Reading →
At the enterprise level, the interest in private clouds still exceeds serious interest in public clouds. Gartner and others predict that private cloud investments in the enterprise will exceed public cloud through 2012. In my conversations with people, there appears to be some confusion as to just what is a private cloud, where you might... Continue Reading →
John Treadway 