Three days in Yorkshire
Unusually for me, I’ve found myself at reasonably local events over the past few days. Leeds last Wednesday to hear people discuss big data, York last Friday to talk about open data, and Hull today to check out the city’s impressive new work space. It’s easy to look beyond the local environment, and to assume...
A prism bends light. #PRISM reporting bends truth
I wasn’t going to talk about the current fuss around PRISM, but the speed with which conjecture, rumour and some (good) newspaper investigative work has turned into ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ online makes this worth addressing. The conjecture may be correct. The NSA, the FBI, TLA and ETLA might be plugged right into the data centres of the...
Cloud on merit, not by dictat
The #CloudFirst trend is spreading, with Government Minister Francis Maude finally committing the UK to the approach earlier this month. But I remain concerned that there’s too much stick and not nearly enough carrot… and that cloud adoption more generally is ill-served by this mandate-driven ‘solution.’ Technological advances and shifting business requirements affect Government just as much...
Unpicking the multi-cloud at GigaOM Structure
Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant. Hybrid clouds, in which one public cloud and one private cloud...
Discussing Virtual Machine interoperability with the Open Data Center Alliance
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this...
Seeking Simplicity’s Sweet Spot
Albert Einstein, you may have heard, was a clever man. He scribbled equations on blackboards, thought big thoughts, and all of that. But, allegedly, he also said Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. These words have resonated with me recently, as I’ve heard pitches from one company after another, all...
Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Last night, cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,”...
Survey lifts covers on Cloud Promiscuity: good thing, bad thing, or who cares?
Figures from RightScale‘s latest State of the Cloud Report (free registration required) suggest “a strong interest in multi-cloud strategies” amongst respondents. The rationale for hybrid cloud (mixing a public cloud service like Amazon’s with something running in your own data centre, colocation site or hosting facility) is reasonably well understood, but why might companies choose to use more...
OpenStack Summit – thoughts from Portland
OpenStack has come a long way since the project was first unveiled at OSCon back in 2010. This week, almost 3,000 people gathered in Portland, Oregon, to continue the job of defining, debating, developing, and delivering the code upon which the OpenStack community depends. Alongside the developers, though, there were some early signs of tangible...
Not quite ready to live in the cloud
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can...
Doing the DataBeat
For the past two years, Ben Kepes and I have helped the team at VentureBeat assemble the programme for their annual Cloud Computing event, CloudBeat. It looks as though we may end up doing something similar with them this year, as CloudBeat moves from Redwood City to downtown San Francisco, and from November to September....
Discussing Data Markets in New York City
As part of GigaOM’s Structure:Data Conference (taking place in New York City on 20-21 March), Jo Maitland and I are going to host a Mapping Session on Data Marketplaces. What are they, what are they doing, why do they matter, and how does their future look? The session is intended to be highly interactive, so attendees...
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