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We are standing on the threshold of a new transition in information technology and communications; a radical departure from current practice that promises to bring us new levels of efficiency at a vastly reduced cost. Cloud computing is full of potential, bursting with opportunity and ...
Henry David Thoreau once wrote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation". Much the same can be said of the multitude of users struggling with open source reporting and analysis tools like Mondrian or Jaspersoft. The difference, of course, if that those folks happen to be prett...
It’s Thursday morning, you’re the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, and you just called your executives into the conference room for the exciting news. The board of directors has approved the acquisition of a key competitor, and you’re looking for a call-to-action to get everyon...
Disaster strikes. Your primary place of business is destroyed by a fire tomorrow, are you prepared to recover? According to the historical statistics, fires permanently close 44 percent of the businesses that are affected. Business continuity planning is the creation and validation of ...
Diffie makes a good point: taken as a whole, the benefits of commodity air travel are so high that it allows us to ignore the not insignificant negatives (I gripe as much as anyone when I travel, but this doesn’t stop me from using the service). In the long term, will the convenience o...
Some of the concerns I've heard repeatedly is the potential barriers to entry for participation in this type of association. The last thing this association should be is an inclusive club for a few select technology vendors and insiders. It needs to be available to all and should foste...
Back in the old good days of enterprise software, we did not need to worry about our customers. We delivered bits on DVDs – it was up to the customers to struggle with installation, integration, management, customization and other aspects of software operations. We collected all ...
Everyone wants to lower their capital expenditures and increase operational efficiency - it's a sign of the times. The economy of the past 12 - 18 months has forced all organizations to do more with less and become more efficient. While everyone can identify with the request to do more...
If the trend of the first six months of 2009 holds, the overall number of M&A deals this year will have plunged to a level last witnessed in 2004. That is the painful truth, according to a report published today by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Conventional M&A strategies must be ...

Some of the key things to think about when putting your application on the cloud are discussed below. Cloud computing is relatively new, and best practice is still being established. However we can learn from earlier technologies and concepts such as utility com...

Like everything else in the cloud, software as a service (SaaS) is most commonly delivered in a Web browser and paid for based on usage; the more you use software, the more it tends to cost. However, the economic benefits of SaaS really fall into two categories. The first category is t...
On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry repr...
As enterprise interest in cloud computing offerings and concepts continues to increase, the number of solutions in both the public and private cloud spaces increases as well. Theres been much debate over public versus private cloud, even to the point of debating whether there can be su...
Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a...
You may wonder whether it’s too early to make the call given the lack of interoperability standards, security concerns, and common definition of cloud computing. Well, the IPTV space shares many of the same similarities – emerging technology, emerging standards, emerging adoption, var...
Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution. As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of y...
The debate has raged for some time now about the exact definition of a 5GL. One might argue that there also is still some debate going on about what exactly is a Platform as a Service PaaS. Throw together two semi-ambiguous industry-specific buzzwords and what do you get? Well, for ...
RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica have joined together to deliver a complete business intelligence solution in the cloud. Jaspersoft’s kicking in the compute-intensive BI software, Talend the open source data integration software, and Vertica the analytic database management s...
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) presents a challenge to software marketing people like none other in recent history. On the one hand, SOA has been the top enterprise software bandwagon to jump on for the last four years or so, but on the other hand, many vendors have struggled to t...
Loose coupling presents architectural challenges that are at the heart of planning and implementing the SOA infrastructure. Building the Service abstraction presents a simplified representation to the business but requires additional efforts under the covers to make that abstraction a ...
I’ve written a good bit here about the various ways Microsoft and Citrix overlap in the hypervisor space, ranging from topics like shared code base through competition for the desktop space. To me, these two players have always been the underdogs battling for the right to go head-to-he...
The mantra heard most often in business these days is "Do More With Less." For many businesses, cutting costs while trying to grow—or even sustain their place in the market—is easier said than done. What could help many businesses is gaining access to some of that $787 Billion in Feder...