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Enterprise Cloud Computing

We must bring together the worlds of SOA, BPM, Cloud, REST, and HOA. The secret to getting all these architectural trends to work well together centers on how we deal with state information. We must first separate application state from resource state, and then subsequently take the co...
If the leadership in your organization is mature and has a good track record – rest assured that a risk-mitigated decision to dabble in the public cloud is a vote of confidence in your direction. It's little more than innate human nature to strive to control the environment around us....
Imagine there was a technology that could solve some of the top issues for IT managers of large companies: managing a large fleet of users’ devices, with all the associated maintenance tasks, and maintaining the security and integrity of devices by preventing malicious software install...
We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers. We've been talking about cloud computing for years now, and I think it's pretty well established that we can do cloud computing quite well technicall...
Cloud Computing is not really a market or set of markets at all. It’s part of a paradigm-shifting trend that is reinventing how organizations large and small purchase, provision, utilize, pay for, and think about IT resources. Eventually, everything will be the Cloud, which from the ma...
This morning Cognizant, the company where I work as an analyst, reported their earnings. In the earnings call Cognizant CEO Francisco D'Souza stated, "This year we expect to deliver about $500 million in SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) related services." That is a significant...
I teach a lot of SMAC strategies workshops (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) around the world. Conducting these involves a lot of travel. I have been pondering these last few days just how much my travel experience has changed over the past decade. I could continue. I research ...
I read the following question recently, "Are we acting strategically enough to matter?" I remember the question, because I believe it is so important for us all to answer. It is a question all IT and business people should be asking themselves! In this picture of charging elephants,...
A mini Y2K event for applications stranded on those old, obsolete servers. The challenge is clear. EOL means no more patches and security vulnerabilities increase on a daily basis. For those wishing to keep their machines running, this is a situation that requires action.. There are t...
George Newstrom, head of Dell's federal government defense and national security business, outlines the evolution of information technology from mainframes and servers to "disruptive" technologies such as cloud computing and mobile devices. Platform one saw mainframes and terminals hi...
The scale and automation of cloud computing deliver economies of scale – and price points – that can’t be matched by traditional computing platforms. Managers can minimize capital expenses and align operational costs to business demands with scalable, flexible resource deployments. Tho...
The demand for distributed data and services is increasing as big companies are more and more spread across the world. Cloud services are raging from simple storage and up to complex computing processes. Depending on the needs there are products that run completely into the cloud whil...
When I was writing about the cloud and disaster recovery I was only considering the tip of the iceberg, the obvious over-provisioning of expensive, specialized infrastructures needed in case the production environment failed. A duplicate data center is necessary today but perhaps less...
Outsourcing commodity capabilities to the low-cost provider while focusing your strategic value-add on customized offerings is an oft-repeated pattern in the world of business, but it hasn’t really taken hold in the world of IT until the rise of Cloud Computing. The reason it’s taken s...
TTNET, the largest internet service provider in Turkey, with six million subscribers, significantly improved applications deployment while cutting costs and time to delivery. What was the situation there before you became more automated, before you started to use more software tools?...
In mobile app development, we're seeing a major philosophical split between the "nativists" (running directly on the device hardware) and the "virtualizers" (with their scripting and interpretive layers and containers). Both enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs) know the...
Over the past two decades relational databases have been most successful in serving large scale OLTP and OLAP applications across enterprises. However, in the past couple of years with the advent of Big Data processing, especially for processing unstructured data coupled with the need ...
Last night CloudVelocity CEO Rajeev Chawla was able to talk to Brian Gracely at The Cloudcast on CloudVelocity and the hybrid cloud. The 33 minute interview (Accelerating the Hybrid Cloud (#83) is now available for download. A special thanks to Brian, who asked some of the most probin...
I started in the web performance industry – well before Application Performance Management (APM) existed – during a time when external, single page measurement ruled the land. In an ecosystem where no other solutions existed, it was the top of the data chain to support the rapidly evol...
In my research on companies that are transforming themselves by adopting an integrated SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) strategy, I came across a recent blog article by the CIO of Woolworths Limited, Dan Beecham. I will share some excerpts from it here. Woolworths is an Aus...
Forward-thinking organizations realize that accelerating the speed with which they can deliver new applications and services is critical in making their enterprise more agile – and by extension delivering critical business competitiveness. In order to do so, they must break the cycle t...
Cloud has arrived. Everyone in the business, from the CEO to the customer relations manager, wants in on a computing model that promises to lower costs while delivering better service and greater efficiency. The business finally sees the potential of IT to add value, yet such high expe...
Forrester analyst James Staten says that “the whole value of cloud computing is tied to areas of IT that can be standardized, automated, and shared among multiple constituents.[1]” Automation through the cloud is the next step for cloud-based innovation to reduce costs and increase pro...
The lack of emphasis on self-service Private Clouds is a telling indicator of the state of Cloud Computing (in particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS) in the enterprise. If an enterprise IT shop were to truly implement a self-service Private Cloud, and actually got it to work...
We have been blogging about the same problems and problem patterns we see while working with our customers over the past few of years. There have always been the classic application performance landmines in the areas of inefficient database access, misconfigured frameworks, excessive m...
The success or failure of public cloud services can be measured by whether they deliver high levels of performance, security and reliability that are on par with, or better than, those available within enterprise-owned data centers. Gartner predicts that the global public cloud comput...
Have you had a chance to review the full inventory of Google's solutions and apps lately? I have been working with many of them this week and am impressed with how Google is enabling enterprises to become true social businesses. It is very interesting how they are not just demonstratin...
The Open Group’s first conference in Australia will focus on enterprise transformation. Speakers and a variety of sessions will place the transformation in the context of such vertical industries as finance, defense, exploration, mining, and minerals. As a prelude to the event, Briefi...
The concept of "Just-in-Time" was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of discipli...
When VMware announced its hybrid cloud initiative it made perfect sense. The hybrid cloud market could provide substantial growth opportunities for VMware, as discussed in VMware Crosses the Rubicon and Hybrid is a Whole New Cloud. Yet one respected tech analyst has recently suggested ...
The ability to guarantee performance to thousands of applications at once has garnered praise from analysts and enterprises alike. Without this guarantee, cloud providers will not be able to meet the rising performance requirements of enterprise customers. Given the compelling advantag...
Symantec recently took a stroll down memory lane to revisit the first seeds of cloud computing that took hold more than a half-century ago. Symantec created an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing, highlighting just how far the technology has progresse...
OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service offering. (see my prior post for an explanation of IaaS). OpenStack is an OpenSource project, founded by RackSpace, NASA and others. OpenStack can be deployed as a public or private cloud. Project NOVA, or OpenStack Compute, provisions and...
VMware’s (VMW) recent hybrid cloud announcement was both expected and yet provocative. It falls into a pattern of successful moves made in virtualization security and networking as the company to grow its addressable market by virtualizing servers and delivering increased IT agility, e...
OpenStack is an OpenSource offering of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). For a review, here is a quick overview of IaaS and OpenStack. OpenStack is admittedly not trivial to manually install. I have started a manual install beginning with the Identity Service (keystone) here, other ...
Everyone has an argument for the ideal technological approach to cloud computing: public vs. private (vs. hybrid), open vs. closed, vertical vs. horizontal, etc. Larry Ellison’s thoughts on the proprietary cloud aside, an open cloud environment is inevitable. Companies will have a vari...
A move to the cloud brings serious benefits, particularly for startups who often need to ramp up their IT capacity quickly without the burden of investing in new hardware or training staff. If your company is ready to offload its applications to the cloud, how do you decide which provi...
Achmea Holding, one of the largest providers of financial services and insurance in the Netherlands, has made large strides in running their IT operations like an efficient business itself by rearchitecting its IT operations based on clear metrics. Gardner: Why is running IT more like...
Having delivered many talks on business architecture over the years, I’m often struck by the common vision driving many members in the audience – a vision of building cohesion in a business, achieving the right balance between competing forces and bringing the business strategy and ope...
In a constant effort to improve customers’ cloud experience and increase adoption, cloud providers are starting to introduce WAN optimization capabilities into their service offerings. This technology will allow organizations to realize significant performance improvements for cloud ap...