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 →
Last night Amazon announced the most significant cloud development of 2009 - the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The AWS Developer Blog version is here. The importance of VPC cannot be overstated. It will literally change how enterprises think about public cloud providers and the opportunity to gain efficiency and flexibility in datacenter operations. By... Continue Reading →
Update: InfiBase has ceased operations, but the analyses they are providing may continue. Stay tuned. A stealth start-up called InfiBase has published some very interesting data on their blog recently. It makes me want to know more about them, so if you have the scoop let me know. First, they have put out two posts... Continue Reading →
As a general rule, I am happy to count Salesforce.com as a cloud computing company. They really made the SaaS market what it is today, and their Force.com platform-as-a-service was a great innovation. They are not an infrastructure cloud provider like Amazon, Rackspace or others, but okay - they're a cloud company. However, when I... Continue Reading →
John Treadway 