A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the need for reliable, secure clouds in the midst of Amazon AWS’s massive outages, which affected a wide swath of technology startups, including some of our own portfolio companies. This will have lasting consequences on the product and development processes at startup companies, as they will have…
Musings on cloud computing technology trends The rapid growth of Amazon’s EC2 and other cloud service providers is testament to the obvious benefits of cloud computing – cost effectiveness and scalability. However, many barriers remain for the cloud model to truly gain widespread adoption in the enterprises, and that is because there are still major…
After all these years… They were probably the least memorable, if not the least entertaining ads during the entire super bowl. The Chatter.com 30 second spots, one featuring a pop superstar and the other featuring dancing elephants were the site’s foray into the mainstream (by the way, chatter is part of salesforce.com). Chatter, which may…
Gartner just wrote this interesting piece called the “Rights and Responsibilities for Consumers of Cloud Computing Services” and published it in the Cloudbook. It is worth a read, and I added some of my insights on how and where to address the issues (what should be in the cloud agreement and what is more of a policy…
Last week, Hunter Richards at Software Advice blogged about how VARs should navigate the cloud computing market and related virtualization trends. Based on his recommendations, in order for VARs to maintain their business and competitive positioning, they should do the following: Specialize Develop competency on a leading PaaS Make the cloud’s efficiency work for you and utilize cloud…
This week I heard two announcements concerning venture capital investment into expansion stage software vendors in the cloud computing space. One is Symplified, which raised $9 million from insiders and Quest. I wrote in the past about the importance and opportunity for a new breed of identity and access management vendors in the cloud context. Quest seems…
This year, 2011, brings a lot of new innovation in the tech arena, not to mention a plethora of new and most likely annoying buzz words…my guess is that most will center on some form of geo location technology (Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook places are becoming more and more mainstream) “Hey, look at me I’m…
Enterprise IT executives are struggling to answer the question: Do we go with a private cloud solution or a public cloud solution to meet business demands? Or do we start with public and then switch to private once we catch up?Or do we do hybrid?And if we do hybrid, what goes where and why? Start-up…
When I speak with IT heads at various organizations about cloud computing, regardless of their size, they express a mix of excitement and dread. They express excitement because the cloud presents a great opportunity for IT to offer self-service with better utilized resources to its clients. They express dread because they’re under pressure to deliver,…
One of the most active segments of the cloud computing market these days is Platform-as-a-Service plays, or PaaS. Today, this sector is primarily dominated by start-ups and expansion stage software companies, but incumbent software vendors are moving in via acquisitions. Just last week, a new entrant, Cloudbees, received venture capital investment from venture funds including…
