Oracle was notable for its absence at the recent Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. Previously a headliner, the company may be threatened by the emergence and aggressive marketing of all of the Openstack folks, if I’m reading between the lines properly.

Oracle is widely reviled – and I don’t think that’s too strong a word – by open-source vendors and others in the cloud industry for its alleged cloudwashing activities. Who hasn’t chortled at the famous clip of Larry Ellison mocking cloud a few years ago, only to watch him subsequently pour his company’s old wine into new cloudish bottles?

All kidding aside, this is no time for a petulant Oracle. All of the IT megavendors have made major moves to the cloud. Many of them have done it through OpenStack, including IBM, HP, Cisco, and Dell. Microsoft has gone directly into the hardware business with its Surface tablet as part of its strategy. SAP recently updated its Hana cloud-computing initiative.

Oracle’s cloud strategy, for better or worse, does and will have a big influence on the cloud-computing industry. This is the nature of a company that claims a locked-in presence at 98% of Fortune 500 companies. Whether its efforts are cynical, uncloudish, and anathemic to true innovation is a matter that should be available for as much public view as possible.

We are in the early stages of one of the great change cycles in the history of computing, and for one, I’d like to see Oracle competing openly (so to speak) as often as possible. It’s a pity I wasn’t able to do so while roaming the halls of the Santa Clara Convention Center last week.

read more

Since ZapThink wrote our ZapFlash on Cloud Brokerages in April 2011, the Cloud Brokerage marketplace has exploded. Or at the very least, the noise level involving such Brokerages has reached a fever pitch, which the vendors in the space want you to think is the sound of an exploding market anyway. Regardless of your level of cynicism, however, there’s no question that Cloud Brokerages are a hot topic. But as with so many new markets, confusion reigns—in large part because such Brokerages come in so many different flavors. That being said, this market also suffers from rampant Cloudwashing, which refers to vendors (and service providers) who stick the “Cloud” label on existing offerings to take advantage of the Cloud hype. Let’s see if we can separate the steak from the sizzle and delineate how Cloud Brokerages are actually supposed to work.

read more

This morning, Chaucer, our relatively new Sheltie puppy, took off with my slippers. I found one lying in his favorite spot almost immediately, but the other had gone missing. I wandered about the house with one slipper in hand while he hid in his kennel, knowing I was angry but not quite understanding why. It made me ponder the state of computing today, and where we’re headed, because it made me ponder years ago with our last dog, doing exactly the same thing. One was a Shih Tzu, the other is a Sheltie, but puppies chew on slippers with rawhide ties, doesn’t matter the breed or how many years in between.

read more

Recent research from Symform has shown that software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues to be the most mature cloud market, but platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is lacking by comparison.

The survey of over 500 respondents showed that nearly four in five (79%) companies surveyed in the cloud were using SaaS, yet nearly half (48%) of companies in the cloud were not planning on utilising PaaS at any time during the next 12 months.

This correlates with recent Gartner market trends research, whereby SaaS continued to cannibalise on-premise CRM solutions. Half of the respondents in the Gartner survey cited lower total cost of ownership (TCO) as the primary driver for SaaS adoption.

Security in the cloud – updated

There were various aspects of cloud security touched upon in the report. In terms of general cloud security policy, there was an interesting range of responses.

The majority of respondents (35%) said that they allowed some cloud based applications …

Joe Dignan, Chief Analyst, Public Sector Technology, Ovum

“Strategic partnership” is an overused phrase. The reasons for the schism between the rhetoric of strategic partnerships and their flawed reality can be summed up by the disconnection between how the corporate function of an IT company formulates its go-to-market strategy and how it incentivizes its field sales team. Equally, the schism can be seen between the public sector’s inability to accept the fact that the private sector has to make a profit, and its belief that it must not tell the private sector anything in case it takes unfair advantage of the information.

Head office staff spend an inordinate amount of time and effort formulating strategic value propositions, negotiating at a senior level with global partners on partner solution plans, and taking those plans through their leadership function. They then engage with customers to explain the value propositions, their strategic …

User expectations with respect to performance are always a concern for IT. Whether it’s monitoring performance or responding to a fire drill because an application is «slow», IT is ultimately responsible for maintaining the consistent levels of performance expected by end-users – whether internal or external.
Virtualization and cloud computing introduce a variety of challenges for operations whose primary focus is performance. From lack of visibility to lack of control, dealing with performance issues is getting more and more difficult.

read more

Also this year cloud computing was a large topic at Gartner’s annual symposium in Barcelona. It shared the limelight with the other three forces of the Nexus (Social, Mobile and Information) but managed to pop into most conversations and presentations.

For those who missed it – and for attendees that did not manage to be in all parallel sessions at once – video recordings can now be accessed at gartnereventsondemand.com (highlights available after registration of email, full sessions for registered attendees).

Personally I did a couple of dozen 1on1’s, seven larger sessions (presentations, roundtable’s and clinics) and met with several more people over breakfast and dinner. With breakfasts at the time most Americans are accustomed to and dinners taking place according to local tradition, you can imagine these were pretty lengthy days. Not that we noticed, because the 1on1 rooms (unlike last year) had no daylight. Luckily we managed to get some fresh air as we popped over to the special CSP (Communication Service Provider) track that was running across the street.

read more

Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, announced that Christian Nelson joins as vice president of finance bringing more than 15 years experience in finance and accounting.
Most recently, he was senior director of finance and controller for Alimera Sciences, where he assisted in the sale of $72 million of common stock in an initial public offering (IPO) in 2010 (NASDAQ: ALIM).
Before that, he was director of finance EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) and corporate controller at JBoss, which was acquired in 2006 by Red Hat for $420 million.
Nelson has worked in finance and accounting roles of other Atlanta-area companies, and began his career in the audit practice of Arthur Andersen where his clients included Georgia Power, Savannah Electric and Power, and SouthernLINC Wireless.

read more