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.
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...
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...
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...
This is the news… today
I recently set up a new Tumblr site, in addition to my main blog here at cloudofdata.com. It’s been running for a few days now, and I’m deliberately posting just one entry each day to explore a topical news item, issue, or trend. We are all inundated by a constant stream of press releases, tweets,...
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...
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...
RSS - Posts