I am Joining Forrester
On 17 December, 2008, I published a blog post to announce that I was leaving Talis and setting out as an independent Analyst and Consultant. Today, everything changes once more: I am in London, about to start my first day as Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, opining on all things cloudy within Forrester’s CIO-serving team....

On Forbes
I started writing for Forbes this week, and should be posting there reasonably regularly. I’ll be writing about similar topics to those I cover here, including cloud computing, big data, and points in between. You can follow along here, and subscribe to the RSS feed here.

A semantic journey
Earlier this week, Gigaom announced their latest event; Structure Intelligence. “In the past year we’ve seen massive growth in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Our own Derrick Harris has been covering this area for years and we have decided it’s time to give this rapidly growing area a platform (and conference) of its own.”...

Private cloud silliness
Private clouds are real. It’s well past time to grow up and accept this. Not every IT workload is most logically run in a cloud, now or in the future. But, for those workloads where cloud is advantageous, it seems likely that public cloud will eventually supplant both private cloud and hybrid cloud deployments. Public...

Infochimps CEO Jim Kaskade talks about acquisition and the big data opportunity
I first came across Infochimps as they set about building one of the early Data Market offerings. I recorded a couple of podcasts with CTO and co-founder Flip Kromer over the years, in 2009 and 2012, tracking some of the ways in which the company and the market were evolving. Since then the company has...

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Quentin Clark discusses data, data platforms, and more
The Data Platform Group at Microsoft does a lot, from SQL Server and their Hadoopey HDInsight offering through to Business Intelligence and analytics capabilities which sit in or on top of the humble Excel spreadsheet. I’ve touched upon pieces of this whole before, in a 2009 podcast on Azure with Amitabh Srivastava (then Corporate VP...

Acknowledgement matters
In face to face interactions we are programmed to recognise the importance of feedback. As we move many previously physical interactions online, are we in danger of forgetting just how important it is? When you walk into a shop and buy something, a plethora of tangible and intangible signals reassure you that all is proceeding...

Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde talks about Big Data, and lessons from the world of High Performance Computing
It’s sometimes easy to assume that the large clusters of commodity servers commonly associated with open source big data and NoSQL approaches like Hadoop have made supercomputers and eye-wateringly expensive high performance computing (HPC) installations a thing of the past. But Adaptive Computing CEO Robert Clyde argues that the world of HPC has evolved, and...

orchestrate.io CEO Antony Falco dissects the database industry
Portland-based Orchestrate (orchestrate.io) rolls out its commercial NoSQL offering today, claiming to significantly decrease the time, cost and complexity of putting cloud-based data to work. I took the chance to speak with co-founder and CEO (and former Basho co-founder) Antony Falco, to learn more about the company and the problems it’s seeking to address. Our...

Podcasting again… with StorSimple’s Marc Farley
I used to podcast pretty regularly, on this site and elsewhere. Then other things got in the way and, before I knew it, almost two years had passed since my last podcast here. Well, it’s time to put that right. I’m podcasting again, and I’ve got a nice pipeline of guests lined up over the...

Can the cloud do ‘in perpetuity’ ?
Cloud computing is great, right? As a way to get something up and running quickly, affordably, and with a minimum of fuss, it can rarely be beaten. But some of the most compelling attributes of the public cloud are best suited to ephemeral or (relatively!) short-term use cases. You can spin up a cloud server...

Is PaaS dying?
The ‘platform’ tier in the middle of cloud computing’s architecture is being squeezed, folded and reshaped beyond recognition. Even with continued investment, can it survive the transformative pressures forcing down upon it from the software/application layer above, or the apparently inexorable upward movement from the infrastructure layer upon which it rests? To look at recent...