Cloud openness, and what "open" means exactly in the context of cloud computing -- whether on-premise or in a public cloud--are hot topics at the CloudOpen conference, which is being held by the Linux Foundation in San Diego this week. CloudOpen is a new event being run in parallel with LinuxCon.

That those on stage and in the audience at this event favor openness is hardly news. Nor is the fact that an open cloud is a challenge that goes beyond open source. During a panel moderated by Red Hat's John Mark Walker, Greg DeKoenigsberg of Eucalyptus … Read more

Much has been written about security and other headaches that employee-owned devices can cause for IT departments. Much of this hand-wringing is arguably overblown given all the products, technologies, and established best practices available to mitigate risk. Nonetheless, dealing with a wide variety of client hardware over which they have little control requires at least some level of planning and work for IT professionals.

The justification for this effort? Sometimes it's framed with productivity metrics. But, really, the usual justification is that it's happening with or without IT's acquiescence and participation. The storyline then continues on about … Read more

"Big Data" promises to turn terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes (with, presumably, zettabytes and yottabytes to come) of what's often ambient digital detritus into useful results. That promise often seems to come with an implicit assumption; with enough data and the tools to crunch it, useful insights will follow. Insights that can be used to make businesses more efficient, tailor everything from medicine to advertising for individuals, and employ instrumentation and automation on larger and more complex physical systems than ever before.

For example, we're in the early days of what sometimes goes by the name of … Read more

NEW YORK--Industry consortia are pervasive. But they often don't amount to much -- a spate of press releases, a series of progressively less energetic meetings making little progress, and the eventual fade to black. And even most successful consortia tend to be about vendors cooperating on specific standards and technologies. Important, but very limited in scope.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has been an exception. It announced in October of 2010 with a membership including more than 70 global IT leaders, representing $50 billion dollars in annual IT spend. Intel has been the organizing force and is the … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Most discussions about where computing is and where it's going end up touching on three big themes: mobility, big data, and cloud computing. Yesterday's MIT Sloan CIO Symposium was no exception, whether those precise terms were used or not.

Perhaps the most striking example of just how rapidly mobile devices are forcing IT organizations to adapt came from Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar, who said that "60 percent of interactions are now through an Android or an iPhone." He also noted that essentially BlackBerry's entire share had shifted to Android over a … Read more

Early discussion of cloud computing focused on the public option. In fact, the economic concept of computing delivered as a sort of utility by mega service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft was at the core of the original cloud-computing concept.

As it turns out though, these public clouds are hardly the only form that cloud computing has taken. Computing is more complicated than a true utility like electricity. For this and other reasons, private and hybrid clouds -- which use computers and other IT resources controlled by a single organization -- have evolved to become an important part … Read more

Cloud computing seems to often get used as a catch-all term for the big trends happening in IT.

This has the unfortunate effect of adding additional ambiguities to a topic that's already laden with definitional overload. (For example, on a topic like security or compliance, it makes a lot of difference whether you're talking about public clouds like Amazon's, a private cloud within an enterprise, a social network, or some mashup of two or more of the above.)

However, I'm starting to see a certain consensus emerge about how best to think about the broad sense … Read more

It's dangerous for those of us in the tech industry to naively take what we see playing out in our workplaces every day as a mirror of the wider world. High-tech workers are often more technically savvy and likely to be early adopters. High-tech employers are likewise more inclined to let employees use the tools of their choice. And high-tech companies as a group are, almost by definition, far closer to technology adoption's leading edge.

Which raises the question of whether all the personal gadgets from smartphones to tablets to laptops that appear to be an increasingly integral … Read more

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--That this week's O'Reilly Strata data conference was sold out says a lot about this corner of tech. It's hot. Like cloud computing, big data is all the rage, even if, like cloud computing, it's not so much a single thing but an intersection of technologies, market needs, and critical mass.

One of several themes that kept popping up this week was data vs. models.

In 2008, Wired's Chris Anderson wrote a provocative article titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." His thesis was … Read more