2009 has certainly been a cloudy year. The sheer volume of real innovation somehow makes all of the hype worthwhile. While there were many companies doing interesting and innovative things in the cloud - Microsoft Windows Azure could be a strong 2010 contender - the decision on who wins for 2009 is no contest. Amazon... Continue Reading →
I was surprised to find an Amazon Web Services booth at the Microsoft PDC yesterday. They had nothing specific to say regarding additional Windows support or capabilities - at least not officially. What I did get was a wink-wink, nudge, nudge when I commented on Azure's integration with Active Directory and other touchpoints. "This is... Continue Reading →
I had a "discussion" on twitter a few weeks ago where I predicted that Microsoft's Windows Azure would be "the one to beat" in the enterprise. It's nice that companies are using Amazon and other clouds, but for the 80-90% of Windows/.NET applications that run your typical enterprise, Azure will be king. I'm at the... Continue Reading →
Setting aside the shameless cloud-washing that's going on from some vendors, there are a lot of cloud service providers (CSPs - providers of cloud) today. Many of those listed in Sys-Con's Top 150 report are CSPs, while others are providing extensions, tools or services for clouds. Everybody's a cloud provider these days - and as... Continue Reading →
Back in July I wrote my post about databases in the cloud. The big surprise that I discovered at the time was that the only "Native" RDBMS offering in the cloud came from Microsoft. Microsoft SQL Azure (launching formally at the PDC in a few weeks) is a mostly-compatible SQL Server as a Service release... Continue Reading →
I've been doing a lot of work on private (internal) clouds lately - it's a result of my new job with Unisys. Part of that work has been spending time with customers on their plans for cloud computing -- internal and external. There's some very interesting work going on in the private cloud space, and... Continue Reading →
I was in a meeting last week with Gartner's Ben Pring and he made an interesting observation that cloud computing at the end is just a result of Moore's law. The concept is fairly simple and charts a path of increasingly distributed computing from mainframes, to minicomputers, to workstations and PCs (which resulted in client/server),... Continue Reading →
Any new technology market has its own lifecycle and rhythm. From mainframes, through smartphones, there's the early years, the rapid growth, some slowing down and inevitably a decline. Some technologies never go away completely (e.g. mainframes), while others never really get a foothold (insert your own example here). Open source was a software movement that... Continue Reading →
There has been a lot of good discussion lately about the semantics of private vs. public clouds. The general issue revolves around the issue of elasticity. It goes something like this: "If you have to buy your own servers and deploy them in your data center, that's not very elastic and therefore cannot be cloud."... Continue Reading →
Today RightScale did a webinar on their Cloud Business Intelligence offering with Talend, Jaspersoft and Vertica. One of the bigger objections to cloud BI in the past has been security -- how can I move all of this mission critical data to a public insecure cloud? With Amazon VPC now in the picture, the BI... Continue Reading →
John Treadway 