Category: News

The more you focus on the business benefits of Cloud, the more likely you’ll be leaning toward public over private deployment models. Furthermore, this mind shift isn’t all about security risks. Once you work through the issues, you’ll likely come to the same conclusion: there’s generally little or no solid business reason to build a private Cloud.

I had the pleasure of speaking at two quite different Cloud Computing conferences last week: Opal’s Business of Cloud Computing in Dallas and UBM’s CloudConnect in Bangalore. As the conference names and locations might suggest, the former was the more business-oriented while the latter was chock full of techies. What I didn’t expect, however, was that the business Cloud crowd had a more mature, advanced conception of Cloud than the technical audience. While the techies were still struggling with essential characteristics like elasticity, trying to free themselves from the vendor nonsense that drives such conferences, the business folks generally had a well-developed understanding of what Cloud is really all about, and as a result, focused their discussions on how best to leverage the approach to meet both tactical and strategic business goals…

But the road to cloudy happiness is a long and winding one. Getting your applications into the cloud takes preparation.

The first step is to nail down the motivation for the move. Cost reduction is usually a key motivator, as companies pool resources by virtualising their hardware.

Agility is another. Putting applications in the cloud makes it possible to provision computing power and storage faster and more flexibly than running them on dedicated tin. Cloud computing also helps regulate volatile demand…

‘Disruptive’ is a word tossed around a lot in technology circles to describe new innovations and their transformative effects on the industry. But is this disruption a good thing? Or a bad thing?

That depends on who you ask.

Phil Wainewright, writing for his SaaS blog at ZDNet, believes cloud computing technology is both inherently good and inherently bad.

“There’s a reason we call [game-changing technologies] disruptive. They displace established industries and bring misfortune to those on the receiving end,” he said. Adoption of cloud computing tech in the enterprise is disruptive in a bad way for existing IT hierarchies and in a good way for business and existing revenue models, he explained…

The dense, cheap widgets aren’t generally available. They aren’t ready for prime time yet.

Instead Dell’s got a seed program happening called Copper that won’t brighten Intel’s mood any since Dell is the second-largest maker of x86 servers behind HP, and HP is also skipping down the ARM path. What’s more, Dell, at least, is ultimately contemplating the enterprise mainstream despite the risk of cannibalization.

It said Tuesday morning that it’s shipped ARM-based clusters to a few "hyperscale" customers for evaluation and it’s putting demonstration clusters at Dell Solution Centers worldwide – as well as at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the supercomputing center at the University of Texas in Austin – where they can be remotely accessed by ISVs so they can develop the nascent ARM server ecosystem…

HP Wednesday named Bill Veghte chief operating officer, a newly created position that relieves the former Windows executive of running the company’s poorly functioning software operation two years and three CEOs after he got the job.

Veghte is keeping the corporate strategy charter he was given a few months ago as well as responsibility for Autonomy, HP’s great problematic British acquisition that he was given last week when Autonomy founder Mike Lynch was fired.

HP doesn’t have much of a strategy, at least nothing that doesn’t resemble what everybody else is doing and that – as of last week – is to focus on Big Data, cloud and security – all of which depend on software…

There are two prominent cloud technology strategies these days. First: Let’s copy everything Amazon Web Services (AWS) is doing. (You know who you are!) Second: Let’s rebrand our old technology as a private cloud.

The lack of innovation and creativity in cloud computing is beginning to bug me, and it should bug those of you in enterprise IT. Here’s how to spot technology providers that are, er, innovation-challenged.

What’s lacking is new ideas: specifically, ideas that bring different approaches to familiar problems. Ideas that should lead to new technology and service categories, as well as bring much more value to the enterprise. However, most of the bigger cloud computing providers seem to consider innovation and creativity as high-risk concepts. Instead, they focus on replicating products and services that already work in the market…

Cloud computing has been generating considerable hype these days. Every participant in the data centre and IT ecosystem has been rolling out ‘cloud’ initiatives and strategies from hardware vendors, ISVs, SaaS providers, and Web 2.0 companies – start-ups and incumbents are equally active.

Cloud adoption in Europe will lag the US by a minimum of two years due to concerns over data privacy, security and regulations.

Or so says abacus-stroker Gartner, which reckons that the eurozone’s economic meltdown won’t help either.

"However, some of cloud computing’s potential risks and costs – namely security, transparency and integration – which are generally applicable worldwide, take on a different meaning in Europe," he added…

According to the results of IDC’s latest cloud survey, Cloud Adoption in the Asia Pacific – Retail Industry, only 19 percent of APAC retailers have started looking to adopt some practice of cloud computing services.

However, the cloud deployment is slowly gaining momentum; 32 percent of respondents say that they are evaluating cloud implementation in the next two to five years…

The project, being presented today at the Social Innovation Summit at the United Nations Plaza in New York City, is designed to give nonprofit organizations the ability to share applications, services and IT support using cloud computing technologies. The idea is that nonprofits who participate may be able to save money on capital, hardware, software and IT support costs and allow them to access cloud apps from a variety of devices, according to the initiative’s website…