Category Archives: Cloud

Also this year cloud computing was a large topic at Gartner’s annual symposium in Barcelona. It shared the limelight with the other three forces of the Nexus (Social, Mobile and Information) but managed to pop into most conversations and presentations. For those who missed it – and for attendees that did not manage to beContinue reading “What happens in Barcelona…. can now be seen here”

At the end of last month the EU released its plans for “Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”. But although the document (s) – just like EU commissioner Kroes in this video – do a good job describing in non-technical terms what cloud is and why Europe should care about having a competitiveContinue reading “Is the way to the European Cloud paved mainly with good intentions?”

Although self-service -together with elasticity, pooling/sharing, etc. – is a defining attribute of cloud computing, many of the companies expressing an interest in cloud computing do not seem to be aware of that. In fact, when asked: who do you expect to provision your services to the cloud?; who will monitor your services’ performance andContinue reading “A Cloud That Cares? Or About Eating Your Cloud And Having it too.”

Innovations are commonly judged by how fast they reached 50 million users (Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years, etc.). Another way to look at this is by time equivalents: If one Dog Year equals 7 human years than how many years of traditional IT do we travel in oneContinue reading “On Dog Years, Cloud Years, and A-years”

Not all major changes are visible to the naked eye. Standing next to a glacier it is difficult to determine direction (does it grow or shrink across seasons) and watching continents move takes even some stamina for the casual observer. Luckily this is not the case for cloud computing. Apart from the very noticeable cloudContinue reading “On Plate Tectonics, Glacier Shifts and Cloud Forecasts”

It seems like every time a major cloud provider runs into an outage (like yesterday), the topic of cloud SLAs rises to the surface. But in many cases the benefit of an SLA may be limited  to using it as a paper handkerchief to dry the tears of frustration of the user, while he waitsContinue reading “Are SLA’s like wedding vows?”

Edison is believed to have said “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, and 9 out of 10 times “implementation trumps innovation” when it comes to achieving commercial success, but is it just me, or has the well of new ideas around cloud computing run a bit dry recently? Big Data is rapid gaining groundContinue reading “Are Conference Calls the New Coffeehouses of Idea Enlightenment?”

Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life – well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under “followers” in Twitter and the revenue number for research (that’s excludingContinue reading “Truth in (round) numbers?”

A few days ago I attended the analyst summit of one of Europe’s large service providers and the theme of industrialization rang through very clearly in many of the presentation and interview sessions. Those of you who followed my earlier writings know that applying the lessons of modern manufacturing to today’s IT, is a topicContinue reading “The rise of IT-industrialization”