There is little doubt that cloud computing is big news, but who is gaining your mind share? Amazon, NetSuite, and Salesforce.com, have been in the news recently with a number of announcements. So many that I've been attempting to track them by creating specific journals for each. ...

Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution. As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of y...

Cloud computing offers significant economies in deploying and managing applications. While enterprises are not yet ready to move mission-critical applications to cloud computing, CIOs and CTOs are increasingly wanting to create applications that are "cloud-ready." A cloud-ready appl...

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...

The enterprise architect role is in flux, especially as we consider the heightening interest in cloud computing. The down economy has also focused IT spending to seek out faster, better, and cheaper means to acquire and manage IT functions and business processes.

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 44. Our topic this week on BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, and it is the week of July 13, 2009, centers on Software AG's bid to acquire IDS Scheer for about $320 million. We'll look into why this could be ...

Many of today's large enterprise networks are burning cash and are overly dependent upon layers of manual processes (like DNS, DHCP and IPAM for starters) to stay available and secure. Networks were created this way from the start; we architected networks to work just like the environ...

The repeated Twitter hacking exposes the complex and serious security issue on the web. Unfortunately for Twitter (Google Apps, Facebook, and others), the problems have unfolded in a public arena, forcing them respond quickly to calm users and resulting in a short term solution (that ...

Business managers know that in spite of the benefits of every new technology/business model, there are also risks and issues like trust, loss of privacy, regulatory violation, data replication, coherency and erosion of integrity, application sprawl, and dependencies, a...

The growth of storage capacity led to an attitude that storage was too cheap to manage, but this didn't last long. Before we knew it, IT was faced with a flood of data, easily too much to manage. Faced with limits to their ability to control data growth, IT tried to get the business in...

Marissa Mayer is one of the technology luminary’s that are driving the future of search, discovery and online experience.  She was one of Google’s first 20 employees and the first female engineer at Google.  She is currently the VP of Search and User Experience at Google, a...

First of all let met say I've suspected something fishy from the start of this latest social denial of service attack on various social networks. The more I dig the more, the more it seems to have been committed & perpetrated by someone friendly to Georgia not Ruissia. I believe this f...

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since we first created the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) with the goal of defining and enabling interoperable enterprise-class cloud computing platforms through application integration and stakeholder cooperation. Over the last...

For all the buzz about cloud computing, there remains a key challenge for companies: regulatory compliance and governance issues. Left unaddressed, these issues could derail the long-term growth of cloud adoption. That's why more companies are coming to market with ever-evolving sol...

People often describe the act of changing focus from one related but distinct task to another as “wearing two different hats.” Like moving from “developer” to “administrator” when you’re trying to deploy an application in a testing environment. You’re the developer, but then you have t...

This is the first post I am writing to illustrate the main novelties of the new version of the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Manager. OpenNebula is an open-source toolkit for building Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud infrastructures based on Xen, KVM and VMware virtualization platf...

Yesterday's post "Cloud Computing as a Commodity" received some very interesting feedback. In particular were the comments suggesting the creation of a Cloud Service Provider Rating System similar to a corporate "credit rating" that estimates the service worthiness of a cloud computing...

IBM expanded its software offerings on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by delivering a WebSphere eXtreme Scale 7.0 Development AMI (Amazon Machine Image). The Development AMI can be used for development and test of commercially available applications without any IBM charg...

I seem to keep coming back to the same question when discussing Cloud Computing. Can cloud computing be treat as a commodity that could be brokered and or exchanged? Recently a few have attempted to do this, notably a German firm called Zimory. To give you a little background, befor...

Hackers have developed an automated, easy-to-use tool to break into Oracle databases that’s going to be unveiled at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas in a few days. Supposedly it’s for simulating attacks on computer systems but it will also be available to prying employees l...

The Burton Group recently completed a certification review of Citrix XenServer 5.5 with Citrix Essential 5.5 Platinum Edition. After reviewing XenServer against extensive production-ready criteria (27 required features, 42 preferred features and 24 optional features—these guys are thor...

Software as a Service (SaaS) is getting a lot of attention these days. The concept of SaaS is not new and has existed for a while. It has been referred to by other names such as Application Service Provider (ASP), Managed service provider (MSP), on-demand services, cloud computing, uti...

My first read through a post on the Cloud Front Office led me to scoff disdainfully at the re-emergence of a concept central to a successful SOA implementation: the service catalog. Oh, we called it "registry" and then "registry/repository (reg/rep)" and finally "governance" but the co...

Despite the title of Andrew Conry-Murray’s article in InformationWeek — “Why Business IT Shouldn’t Shrug Off Chrome OS” — it’s on balance quite negative about the prospects for enterprises adopting Google’s upcoming operating system. Andrew argues that enterprises are going to want hyb...

I'm currently at a wedding, killing time reading various blog feeds. In that task, I just read a generally insightful commentary thanks to particularly ridiculous question in a post by Eric Knipp at Gartner. In the post he asks if The Cloud Will Save The World? Initially I didn't se...

One of the oft discussed business challenges of cloud-based application deployments – or any remote app deployment where a service has to communicate over the public internet – is latency. It takes more time to fetch data when a request has to leave the LAN, and latency is usually vari...

Microsoft calls Windows Azure a "cloud services operating system" that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Platform. They've also said they will offer a private data center version of Azure that will be capable of being hosted wit...

HP will offer the HP Solutions Virtual Event for The Americas. The three-day session will feature 30 breakout sessions, seminars, presentations and demo theater presentations.

This is the summary of Survey conducted by onCloudComputing (www.oncloudcomputing.com). in which the participants were asked only one simple question “What they are looking for in 2009 in relation to Cloud Computing”. So we can also call the following as “Cloud Computing Trends 2009"...

Who says there are no second acts in life? After having caught its breadth with the webMethods acquisition almost exactly two years ago, Software AG has struck again with an offer to buy roughly half the shares of IDS Scheer from the company’s founders. The offer, worth roughly $320 mi...

It amuses me when people start throwing about phrases like “interoperability” and “federation” in a space still hopping in the middle of the hype cycle. You would think that with our long and growing history, we in IT could be realistic about the prospects of any early implementers...

Erik Carlin from Rackspace sent me a heads up that the new Rackspace CS API is now live. In the email he also noted that they are planning to open source both the Servers and Files API specifications later in a separate announcement.

According to a PC World article, cloud computing and cybersecurity will be the high-growth areas for government IT spending over the next few years. The analysis and consulting firm Input projected that the federal government's cloud-computing market will grow by 27 percent over the ne...

Following Unisys’ recent announcement regarding their cloud computing strategy, 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 clari...

Recently I read an article about a traditional enterprise grid computing company who is attempting to enter the nascent cloud computing market. Without naming names, I will say the technology is probably decent, what they seem to lack is any real insight into the cost advantages that c...

If I had to classify the questions I get on a routine basis, among the first in the list would be “Why should I buy software for reason X when Microsoft has built it in free. X could be anything from firewall software for desktops through availability tools for SQL Server. It’s absol...

Cloud computing is much more than a just newcomer on the Internet hype curve. The heritage of what cloud computing represents dates back to the dawn of information technology (IT), to the very beginnings of how government agencies and large commercial enterprises first accessed powerfu...

Cloud Computing presents unique opportunities to companies to reduce costs, outsource non-core functions and scale costs to match demand. However, the Cloud also presents a new level of complexity that makes ensuring application performance in the Cloud a unique challenge, in particula...

An entire ecosystem is evolving around cloud computing. Interface standardization efforts, commercial products, cloud infrastructure and management services, virtual appliance providers and open-source solutions are filling niches in the cloud ecosystem. The role and position of a comp...