The coming war for developers
In March, I discussed IDC's 2014 forecast. This unusually dramatic set of predictions based on what IDC refers to as the third platform, a confluence of cloud computing, mobile devices and...
View ArticleThe death of the SLA
I’ve attended countless cloud presentations discussing vendor relationships and contract agreements. A common feature of these presentations is a discussion of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and...
View ArticleWhy the enterprise cloud needs shadow IT to succeed
I stumbled across a ZDNet article by Larry Dignan linking to Rightscale’s 2015 State of the Cloud Report referencing how Azure’s use is growing and it’s now become an emerging No. 2 competitor to AWS,...
View ArticleAmazon opens up about AWS revenues
Two weeks ago AWS announced its financial results and, for the first time, broke out AWS revenues. AWS, it said, achieved $4.6 billion in 2014, and will reach $6.2 billion in 2015, with a growth rate...
View ArticleCloud computing has its 'Jevons Moment'
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published “The Coal Question,” a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England’s...
View ArticleLessons learned from Cloud World
It’s easy to despair about the cloud computing industry and its seemingly endless navel-gazing. It often seems that the cloud crowd is more interested in internecine warfare than actually helping...
View ArticleAre cloud price hikes a harbinger of the future?
Last week, blogger Aidan Finn posted an excerpt from a Microsoft email announcing 13 percent price hikes in the European region. Reaction from the trade press was immediate, predicting that this...
View ArticleInnovation in the cloud: Do-it-yourself online eye exams
Proponents of cloud computing often insist that one of its biggest benefits is not decreased costs, but greater agility. To them, obtaining infrastructure in minutes rather than months is a...
View ArticleOpen source in the enterprise brings opportunities and challenges
I’ve long been a believer in open source for the enterprise (indeed, my first book was called Succeeding with Open Source and was targeted at an enterprise audience). When I first encountered open...
View Article4 principles that will shape the future of IT
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to attend a number of conferences, ranging from the most establishment events you can think of all the way to highly technical yet informal meetups. The...
View ArticleIT Moves from SGA to COGS
For anyone in the tech industry, these are the best of times and the worst of times. As I noted in my last piece, we are in a period of tremendous innovation, but also one of enormous dislocation,...
View ArticleWhat cloud computing means for your applications
I’ve written a number of times about the sea change in technology that is occurring and how it’s affecting enterprise IT organizations. Most recently, I wrote about how open source is eating the...
View ArticleCloud consequences: JP Morgan calls time on IT-as-usual
A couple of weeks ago, JP Morgan released a report called “CIO Survey Foreshadows Changing of the Guard,” based on a survey of senior IT leaders from large enterprises. The report received a few days...
View ArticleWhy private clouds will suffer a long, slow death
A couple of weeks ago Amazon announced its quarterly numbers. As has been the case over the past year or so, the numbers looked good. Really good. Derided for years as a profitless company propped up...
View ArticleThe long, slow death of private cloud continues
I must have touched a nerve with my last post, as I was contacted by two vendors that wanted to share their perspective on private cloud computing. Even though I don’t consider myself an analyst and...
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