Historically, users viewed IT departments as the people who ran the basic infrastructure "plumbing," were inflexible when it came to doing anything new, and generally far more of an inhibitor to the business than an enabler. That take was at least middling unfair in most cases, but it was grounded in certain realities.
For most organizations, IT was primarily focused on a fairly common--if hardly standardized--set of tasks. Functions like enterprise resource planning, financials, human resources, and e-mail all had to work. But they weren't something that especially advantaged the organization most of the time. Yes, an accounting system more
The idea of convergence, of one device replacing several, has long been a popular theme in forecasting high-tech gadgetry. It's also something that doesn't happen as often as predicted.
Some of the reasons relate to design and technology. It's hard to make a multitool as elegant for each individual function as specialist devices are. A form factor that's optimized around, say, being a phone demands serious technical compromises when it comes to a totally different function, such as taking a picture. And rapidly evolving technology means some functions in a device are inevitably behind the technology more
Computers that reliably understand human communications have been a staple of fiction going back decades or more. The Enterprise's computer in the 1960s vintage "Star Trek" series is as good an example as any. And truth is, that particular science-fictional ability probably would not have seemed all that remarkable to the typical person of the time.
Access billions of pages of text, pictures, and video from a gadget I can fit in my pocket? Play a game with immersive graphics on a huge, high-resolution screen that hangs on the wall? For a computer engineer, the fact that those inexpensive more
Cloud computing needs governance. Which is to say that cloud computing needs processes, policies, and procedures. In a way, this is no different from IT more broadly. But virtualization, dynamically moving workloads, and an increased reliance on third parties for many types of IT functions mean that well thought-out and documented processes, policies, and procedures tend to be more important in cloud computing than with a more static and manual environment.
Interchangeable Lens Compacts (ILCs) are a case in point. Significantly smaller than today's dSLRs, they're also referred to as micro-4/3 (after the mirrorless interchangeable lens standard used by many of these cameras) or the somewhat tongue in cheek EVIL which alludes to the Electronic Viewfinder that's an option for most models in this class.
A photographic landmark of sorts took place at the end of 2010. Dwayne's Photo accepted the last roll of Kodachrome slide film for processing. Kodachrome was long a favorite of many professionals and advanced amateurs but required a unique and complex development process; Dwayne's was the last lab to provide this service.
Digital has replaced film for most, pros and amateurs alike. And it's not standing still. The current trends are mostly positive--which isn't to say there aren't a few product and technology areas that couldn't stand improvement.
Asking why cloud computing is happening today is something of a tautology. That's because an inclusive definition of cloud computing essentially equates it with a broad swath of the major advances happening in how IT is operated and delivered today.
Pervasive virtualization, fast application and service provisioning, elastic response to load changes, low-touch management, network-centric access, and the ability to move workloads from one location to another are all hallmarks of cloud computing. In other words, cloud computing is more of a shorthand for the "interesting stuff going on in IT" than it is a specific technology or approach.more
A recent multiple-city speaking tour in Asia gave me the opportunity to gain some real-world insight into traveling with an iPad rather than my usual laptop and Kindle.
The business part of the trip was something of a whirlwind and then I was taking vacation for about a week. So I figured that if I weren't going to be creating or editing documents, I might as well keep my luggage as light as possible.
My experience was mixed.
On the positive side, the iPad is a great device for watching video and playing casual games. Crammed into an economy more
2011 will be the Year of the X. Next year, Technology Y will kill Technology Z. Something will "die."
These sorts of predictions are commonplace as we approach the end of the year. They have a satisfying finality to them. They're dramatic. They're also, with few exceptions, rarely correct--certainly not in any literal sense.
That's because IT rarely advances in a way that invokes mass extinctions and spontaneous generation. Rather it's a more evolutionary process. There's lots of change but even when rapid the new stuff often doesn't displace the old--and overnight replacements are rare indeed. For example, proclamations about the death of Bluetooth were wildly premature even though that technology didn't live up to early promises.
This is especially true of cloud computing, given that it refers as much to the way the industry is moving to implement IT as the technology it uses to do so. Will those changes lead to broad shifts in where and how computing is done? Certainly, that's what makes cloud computing of so much interest after all. But we're mostly talking about transitions rather than sharp inflection points.
Within that context though, cloud computing is a rapidly developing set of trends that's generating lots of interest and discussion. And those discussions suggest to me some things that are going to be qualitatively different next year compared to this past one and some that will remain elusive.
Less focus on definitions (and dare we say hype?). If we were to do a survey of presentations, articles, and analyst research reports throughout this past year, we'd find that many of them spent a lot of time defining and categorizing cloud computing. I myself wrote a Cloud 101 white paper earlier this year. This sort of content may be old hat to the analysts and vendors who have been writing about or implementing cloud strategies over the past few years. But, as I've discovered to only partial surprise, themes that some of us consider well-worn are still fresh to many mainstream audiences. That said, in 2011, we can collectively start to move on from talking about the big picture while remembering that the future doesn't happen everywhere at the same time.
Large research organizations use models to codify their findings in something approaching a consistent way. The downside is that they sometimes seemingly try to pound square pegs into a round hole--which is to say applying a standard methodology to things that are so different that they're hard to compare in a standardized way.
Gartner's "Hype Cycle" is an example. The underlying concept is pretty simple. New technologies enter the market, become the subject of breathless hype, fail to immediately live up to the most breathless hyperbole, start to therefore be perceived as failures, and finally become useful for more
This blog takes a deep (and often skeptical) look at trends big and small in the world of enterprise servers, data centers, and "Yotta-scale" computing, delving into related software, networking, and device trends driving change in (or being driven by) back-end systems.
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