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Article: Microsoft 2011: Cloud Strategy Revisited |
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January 26 2011
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2010 was a tumultuous year for Microsoft's cloud leadership. First, there was the departure of Ray Ozzie who was the brains behind Azure - the most comprehensive cloud platform around. Then came the somewhat unexpected announcement that Bob Muglia would be leaving the company in 2011. A 23-year Microsoft veteran, Muglia was in charge of the $15 billion Windows and SQL Server division. The group included Azure and its a profit of $5.5 billion for the year ending June 2010.
Experts debated: What do the back-to-back exits of two of the most respected executives portend for Microsoft's cloud future? How will giant Microsoft compete and keep giving the cloud upstarts a run for their money? I spoke with Microsoft's GM of Azure to get the straight story (see below.)
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Article: Five Cloud Trends for 2011 - and Beyond |
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January 12 2011
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There's no doubt that cloud computing is re-energizing the technology industry. A look at what 2011 holds for the software industry finds the cloud behind just about every driver of software innovation.
But what specific developments will shape the cloud itself? Based on my primary research, executive interviews and close monitoring of vendor developments during 2010, I predict five major trends will shape the cloud space during the coming year.
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Article: The Cloud Year in Review - 2010 |
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January 05 2011
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What a year 2010 turned out to be for the technology industry! It doesn't matter that we still don't agree on just what cloud computing actually means, the fact remains we have accelerated at a blinding pace towards the industrialization of Information Technology and to the services and utility consumption model. (Click here to scan the most popular posts from the past year.) The change is reverberating in every corner of the technology industry, impacting every layer of the technology stack, and disrupting everything from business models and channel relationships to established cultural norms.
The furious pace of innovation, colossal investments, and acquisitions sprees this year proves beyond any shadow of doubt that 2010 was the inflection point for the industry. Here is just a sampling of some proof points which took place and shaped the cloud market during 2010:
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Article: Hybrid Cloud Storage: In Conversation with Ian Howells, CMO of StorSimple |
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December 07 2010
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StorSimple is a Silicon Valley based start-up focused on application-optimized cloud storage for Microsoft Server applications. StorSimple's investors include Ignition Partners, Index Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Redpoint Ventures. Following a $13 million Series B funding recently, Ian Howells joined the company as their Chief Marketing. Howells is an industry veteran with 25 years of experience at leading companies such as Ingres, Documentum, SeeBeyond and Alfresco. He is responsible for the StorSimple marketing strategy and operational activities globally.
StorSimple's approach appears to be a hybrid cloud storage strategy that promises to bring the benefits of the cloud to on-premises applications without forcing the migration of applications into the cloud or switch users to new unfamiliar applications. I spoke with Ian Howells about the drivers of the cloud storage market and in particular about how hybrid cloud storage plays a role in the evolution of the cloud.
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Article: The Cloud Disruptive Innovation: Managing the Business Transformation |
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November 17 2010
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Some innovations are evolutionary and bring about incremental improvements—sometimes even transformational improvements—in productivity, quality, competitive positioning, and market share. Other innovations impact—if rarely—an entire industry and business ecosystem with the disastrous potential of dislodging well-managed and successful companies who are leaders in their markets. In his book The Innovator's Solution, author Clayton Christensen defines a "Disruptive Innovation" as follows:
"An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumer's access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill."
We have seen several disruptive innovations in the past 100 years:
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Article: Do you need a cloud strategy - Part III |
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November 03 2010
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In Part I of "Do You Need a Cloud Strategy?", I described three inter-related steps that you will need to think through to develop a business-focused enterprise cloud strategy and in Part II, I discussed how to plan and implement your cloud computing strategy and roadmap through the lens of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA). Now, in this blog post, I will discuss how you should think about the "Sacred Cow" issues such as security, privacy, and governance as you lay out your cloud strategy.
Our research study, "Leaders in the Cloud," found a broad range of attitudes about security, privacy, and governance. Every respondent we talked to viewed these issues through the lenses of their business goals and rewards, perceived or real risks, and the level of risk tolerance, value, and sensitivity of their information assets and data, as well as regulatory concerns. Like any new technology, cloud computing creates new risks and new opportunities. The topics of security, privacy and governance are major concerns for nearly every company, and our survey clearly shows that these concerns are the top barriers to adoption.
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Article: Hybrid Cloud: Best of Both Worlds |
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October 15 2010
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In a typical enterprise today, one finds a heterogeneous mix of modern platforms and legacy platforms of many vintages. With the emergence of a variety of cloud service models (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS) and an array of deployment models (private, public, and community), we will most likely see a heterogeneous mix of cloud environments in the enterprise of the future. Furthermore, cloud computing may be a great fit for some applications and workloads, but there will always be some data, processes, and applications that will remain on-premises for reasons of regulatory compliance, mission-critical or classified data, control, and cost.
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Article: Do you need a cloud strategy - Part II |
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October 08 2010
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In Part I of "Do You Need a Cloud Strategy?", I described three inter-related steps that you will need to think through to develop a business-focused enterprise cloud strategy. In this post, I will discuss how to plan and implement your cloud computing strategy and roadmap through the lens of Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA).
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a holistic management discipline and a way of planning, controlling, and aligning your IT organization with the needs of the business. Notionally, it includes everything from how you manage your services, data, and applications, to how you manage governance and people. Service-Oriented-Architecture (SOA) is a subordinate concept to EA that adds an element of agility to the architecture. In essence, SOA defines a service abstraction layer on top of the infrastructure and platform layers and allows you to deal with system changes much more effectively in response to emerging business needs without having to constantly re-architect and re-design these systems.
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Article: Is Force.com Your Key to the Cloud? |
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September 25 2010
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Before you start questioning whether the application can be developed in Force.com you need to figure out if you will survive a move to the Cloud. The worst thing you can do is to spend a year's worth of time and money and then dump the entire effort.
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Article: Cloud Adoption: The Difference Between Small and & Large Companies |
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September 24 2010
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The US Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy defines a small business for research purposes as an independent business having fewer than 500 employees. Small businesses represent 99.9 percent of the 29.6 million businesses (includ¬ing both employers and non-employers) in the United States. They generate more than half the nonfarm private U.S. GDP and create an incredible 64 percent net new jobs over the last 15 years. Significantly, they hire 40 percent of all high-tech workers. Although specific statistics may differ in Europe and Asia, the fact remains that small businesses represent a significant percentage of the economies abroad as well.
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Article: Cloud Technology Best Practices From the Field - Part II |
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September 22 2010
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In Part I of this series, I shared a few best practices that I have collected from my work with cloud leaders in the field. These best practices are drawn from real-world case studies of companies who are actively implementing cloud projects within their organizations. These best practices and lessons learned will provide you guidelines that are potentially applicable to your situation and can help mitigate the many risks and challenges associated with adoption of cloud in your enterprise.
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Article: Cloud Technology Best Practices From the Field - Part I |
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September 19 2010
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The structure, culture, and skills of an organization are closely tied to its enterprise architecture and choice of technologies, whether they are internal or cloud-based. As pointed out in our Leaders in the Cloud research study, corporations will migrate to the cloud incrementally. The migration path to a successful cloud adoption is strewn with many technical challenges and pitfalls. In this series, I will share with you best practices that I have collected from my work with cloud leaders in the field. These best practices will mitigate the many risks and challenges associated with adoption of cloud in your enterprise.
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Article: OpenStack: Will it Prevent the Cloud Mono Culture? |
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August 24 2010
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This article provides insights into evolution of cloud standards and how OpenStack can position itself to be the open source, open standards based alternative for proprietary stacks like Amazon, Microsoft etc. Randy Bias of CloudScaling.com shared his perspectives on where OpenStack is going.
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Article: Channel Strategies for the Cloud |
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August 17 2010
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Cloud companies have gained successes on the back of the cost savings, rapid innovation, and easy to use value propositions compared to their on-premise predecessors. But for them to really create a massive exodus of companies towards the cloud, they have to engage with the Channel. Because the opportunities for large implementations/upgrades might be dwindling, the pure-play SI vendors need to re-focus on subject matter expertise, high touch value-added services that still need to be delivered. Channel partners now have an opportunity to go up the value chain instead of low-end activities like hardware upgrades, helpdesk, maintenance and so on.
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Article: Do You Need a Cloud Strategy? |
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August 10 2010
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Recently, a client I was helping with a cloud effort asked me the question, "Do I need a cloud strategy?" That prompted me to share in this blog post series what I have learnt about cloud strategies from my work with my clients and from the insights gathered interviewing forty CIOs and tech executives (see our recently completed cloud research report for details). What I'm generally finding is that individual business units and departments in mid-tier and large enterprises are using cloud services in isolated pockets to solve specific and tactical problems and for the most part they are getting quick and successful results.
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Article: The Evolution of Platform-as-a-Service and Microsoft Azure |
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August 03 2010
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I spoke with Microsoft's Matt Thompson about the evolution of Platform-as-a-Service and Microsoft's cloud strategy. Matt explained what is exactly meant by Microsoft's "Services plus Software" and Steve Ballmer's "We are all the in cloud" messages. He shared valuable information about current and future product-line strategies and roadmaps and how they align with Microsoft's overall cloud vision.
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Report: Leaders in the Cloud Research Study Survey Findings  |
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March 19 2010
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The Sand Hill Group’s new study “Leaders in the Cloud” conducted in-depth interviews with forty CIOs and tech leaders and surveyed more than 500 IT executives. The combination of these two research efforts provides unparalleled insight into customer perceptions of cloud computing, current and planned cloud initiatives, adoption drivers, business and technological benefits. The following pages contain a summary of selected findings from the survey of IT executives.
The “Leaders in the Cloud” report also contains more than a dozen use cases from a diverse group of industries which demonstrate the real business value being achieved, as well as the latest best practices and lessons learned from real-world cloud projects.
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Content
