The Wisdom of Clouds

What the iPhone teaches us about cloud adoption

James Urquhart — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:24:00 PDT

Chris Hoff (now a colleague at Cisco, but long a phenomenal blogger in his own right) described in a recent post a fascinating analogy for the inevitable adoption of cloud computing--the adoption of the Apple iPhone:

While I have often grouped Cloud Computing with the consumerization of IT (and the ...

The new generation of cloud-development platforms

James Urquhart — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:15:00 PDT

Software development "in the cloud" has been one of the really interesting developments to come out of the cloud computing market so far. While many early players, such as Zimky and Coghead died on the vine, there is a pretty robust Platform as a Service (or "PaaS") market out there today, with Google App Engine taking the most visible lead, and a pretty solid stable of Ruby on Rails-based hosting providers telling a compelling story of their own.

Such success is driving some new players to seek the spotlight, however. I wanted to highlight two that I found most interesting. They are very different from one another, but those differences highlight the breadth of opportunity that remains in the PaaS market.

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IBM releases new enterprise cloud portfolio

James Urquhart — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 23:26:00 PDT

IBM launched late Monday a new portfolio of products and services for the enterprise cloud computing market, which the company claims builds on lessons learned from earlier cloud initiatives.

Targeted at providing standardized platforms for specific computing workloads, the products and services, launched under the Smart Business and IBM CloudBurst ...

Open Cirrus research cloud gains new members

James Urquhart — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:01:00 PDT

HP, Intel, and Yahoo are announcing Monday at the first Open Cirrus Summit that they have signed on three more research organizations to their joint cloud test bed. The new institutions include the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, and MIMOS, a strategic research ...

The cloud conversation is changing

James Urquhart — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 05:00:00 PDT

Update: Updated link to Hoff's terminology map and related image to his latest version.

I was privileged to be a part of the Enterprise Cloud Summit that took place at the beginning of Interop in Las Vegas a few weeks ago. The program was excellent, with an all-star list ...

Five things Cassatt taught us about cloud computing

James Urquhart — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 23:51:00 PDT

The widely reported sale of key technology and talent assets from utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt to CA on Tuesday serves as a lesson to us all about the challenges that lay before enterprises transitioning to virtualization, automation and cloud computing.

I had reported that the end was near a ...

Cloud is an operations model, not technology

James Urquhart — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:57:00 PDT

One of the most common questions I get from those exploring cloud computing for the first time is "what is the difference between cloud computing and virtualization?" It is an excellent question, as most IT departments are currently exploring the ways in which virtualization enables automation and provisioning agility. Given ...

Google App Engine gets the Force.com

James Urquhart — Wed, 27 May 2009 11:39:00 PDT

In a press release Wednesday morning, Salesforce.com and Google announced the availability of Force.com for Google App Engine, a platform as a service integration that allows App Engine developers to more easily integrate their applications with data from Salesforce.com.

Force.com for Google App Engine provides developers ...

Enterprise "app stores" in the cloud

James Urquhart — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:10:00 PDT

In conjunction with the well attended Interop and Enterprise Cloud Summit conferences in Las Vegas this week, cloud infrastructure and service vendor 3TERA announced the 3TERA AppStore, an online portal containing a variety of "cloud ready" components for use on their AppLogic platform. This is the latest commercialization of cloud ...

Exploring cloud interoperability, part 3

James Urquhart — Sat, 16 May 2009 08:55:00 PDT

While most readers probably think "portability or mobility" when they think of cloud interoperability, the vendor community sees a shorter-term opportunity in standardizing the operation of clouds and cloud infrastructures. It's not that vendors don't care about image portability; it is an especially critical opportunity for so-called "cloud ...