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,”...
KnowledgeTree offers Comfort Blanket; helps customers pull data from Cloud
Image by Anua22a via Flickr KnowledgeTree, a provider of cloud-based document management solutions based in Raleigh, North Carolina, today announced that customers on their enterprise payment plan will be able to download copies of documents, workflows and associated metadata for local backup. As Krish noted over on CloudAve when the company recently announced their single...
Talking about Microsoft BPOS with Scott Rodgers and Bob Fahey of Avanade
In my latest podcast I talk with Scott Rodgers and Bob Fahey of multinational IT Consultancy firm, Avanade. Formed as a partnership between Microsoft and Accenture, Avanade focuses upon delivering IT solutions based upon Microsoft’s suite of technologies and products, including Cloud offerings such as Azure and the company’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS)....
Cloud Computing in Context
My presentation from Friday’s Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference in London is now on Slideshare, and reproduced here. Cutting through the Hype: Clouds in Context set out to question some of the preconceptions that many people seem to hold about Cloud Computing, and I suggest that the majority are less black and white...
3Tera announces SLA and aims for 99.999% availability
IT companies keen to attract new business to their Cloud offerings need to work hard at building customer confidence in their ability to deliver, in actually delivering, and in responding rapidly and effectively when things — inevitably — break. Although neither a panacea nor universally offered, the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a routinely applied tactic that...
Jeff Hardy tells me why SmarterTools ‘built their own Cloud’
Continuing my current run of podcasts, I spoke with Jeff Hardy of SmarterTools on Friday. Jeff is VP of Business Operations for the company, and gave a presentation (PDF) at PubCon towards the end of last year in which he dissected some of the marketing noise around major providers of Cloud-based hosting. As we discuss...
Sinclair Shuller attempts to clean up the language of the Cloud
Yesterday’s blog post by Apprenda CEO Sinclair Shuller is an interesting attempt to clarify the hodge-podge of terms that tend to be thrown around almost interchangeably; Cloud, SaaS, PaaS and more. Have a read, and see what you think. I spoke to Sinclair recently, ahead of today’s announcement of their SaaSGrid offering, and there’s plenty...
Sage preparing SaaS offering for 2009… just in the UK?
Ahead of announcing their half-year results this week, it appears that the biggest software company in the UK is finally preparing to go up against SaaS offerings from MYOB, Intuit, Microsoft and others. Sage is a titan of the UK software scene but has struggled recently, both with expansion beyond Europe and (like others) with...
Cloud Computing Day comes to the UK this month
Tarry Singh draws my attention to National Cloud Computing Day, which comes to the UK on Friday 12 December. The creation of UK-based KashFlow, National Cloud Computing Day “is being organised… to encourage UK small businesses to evaluate online applications and speed up the migration from traditional word processing, spreadsheet, accounting, email and contact management...
‘Reinventing the Wheel’ becomes world’s only growth industry ?
I am increasingly concerned by the extent to which the tech sector's current and future behemoths squander finite effort on reinventing 'context' at the expense of excelling in delivery of their 'core' proposition. The post explores some of the reasons for this reinvention of wheels, and asks whether previously sound reasoning is increasingly becoming a...
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