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 →
Skytap announced today a Windows 7 cloud-based testing solution for ISVs and corporate developers. Testing is one the oft-cited use cases for cloud computing in the enterprise. For many companies the cost of provisioning and managing testing infrastructure can be very expsnsive. With Windows 7 due in a few months, and many reviewers giving it... Continue Reading →
Chris Hoff has a new post over at Rational Survivability where he attempts to make sense of when a SaaS solution should or should not be considered "cloud." In his analysis, Hoff atttempts to strictly apply NIST's cloud computing definition to various types of SaaS offerings (say hosted email vs. Salesforce.com). I think that this... Continue Reading →
Whew! The last few days have been very busy, but totally fun. Last night we kicked off the first CloudCamp event for the Greater Boston area at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge. If you have not been to this facility, you should check it out. Microsft is being very generous with this for technology... Continue Reading →
I had a call with Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces this morning to discuss their announcement of their XAP (eXtreme Application Platform) 7.0 release. XAP is like JBoss or WebSphere on steroids with lots of support for scaling out and leveraging today's multi-core server environment. There are a lot of reasons why someone might want... Continue Reading →
There is a lot going on in the cloud related to database management systems (DBMS) these days, but I could not find a good roundup to reference - so here you go. For the purpose of this analysis, I divide cloud DBMS offerings into four categories based on whether or not they are "relational" and... Continue Reading →
Following Unisys' announcement on Wednesday regarding their cloud computing strategy (Unisys Moves to Break Through Barriers to Adoption of Cloud Computing) 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 clarity of... Continue Reading →
Cloud computing is in its infancy. Even SaaS is a relative newcomer in the enterprise, even though it has been around for many years and gained popularity with the rise of Salesforce.com. In most large enterprises, only a fraction of applications are "rented" and hosted outside the firewall. What if the following adoption curve holds... Continue Reading →
I got a chance to spend time with James Duncan and Bryan Bogensberger of Joyent at #e2conf today. I've always been a little bit cloudy on what Joyent actually does. Their Web site (which is getting a makeover) is not all that clear today. Let's take a look at their stack as they described it... Continue Reading →
The diagram below gives a bit of insight into where IBM is today and where they are heading. I posted this last week, but removed the diagram at IBM's Request. Now I'm reposting it after seeing Sean Poulay from IBM presented the chart at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.
John Treadway 