25 most recent entries:
EC2 comes out of beta (Oct 23 2008 20:51 GMT)
Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service, the virtual processing companion piece to its Simple Storage Service (S3), is officially coming out of beta status today, a transition heralded with the introduction of a reasonable Service Level Agreement, open-beta Windows support, and the promise of new features to come in the next year including automatic load balancing, scaling, and improved monitoring and management tools. The announcement is widely seen as a pre-emptive move to steal the thunder from the expected upcoming introduction of Microsoft's own cloud-based processing service, but it's also a nicely timed move to gain inroads with enterprise IT during an especially vulnerable moment.
A Macbook for your Enterprise notebook (Oct 23 2008 17:32 GMT)
© Apple Now that Apple has released their up-gunned Macbook models, to all appropriate fanfare, I am wondering if they will get a second look from corporate IT as a viable alternative for mobile users. To be fair, Mossberg's review (linked above) recommends them to consumers and students, and I am not retreating from my own position that Apple has a long way to go before it can be taken as a serious option in most traditional enterprise environments. But let's stuff tradition for a bit and consider utility and sex appeal...
More reasons I'm ready to be stoked about Windows 7 (Oct 22 2008 10:26 GMT)
Earlier this week I linked to a post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog called "A View from the Bottom" by Larry Osterman, a Microsoft veteran whose own blog is a pretty good read if you are a development type. Osterman's post for the Engineering Windows 7 blog is all about organization, however, and it's a great read for CIOs or anyone overseeing software development projects. Engineering 7 is a very authentic and unvarnished attempt to drum up some positive buzz for 7, started by Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan in an effort I applaud.
The Future of Exchange (Oct 22 2008 05:47 GMT)
First, the title is probably more profound than the post that follows... sorry, I was just trying to sucker you in, I admit it. This is really just a quick link to some gossip without even any intelligent speculation to go with it. Second, sorry I'm on another string of Microsoft-centric posts again...
Is Microsoft showing Google the legislative ropes? (Oct 20 2008 17:15 GMT)
There is an article in the Seattle Times this morning discussing the ongoing regulatory fight over the Yahoo-Google deal, a fight which the reporter points out would probably never have happened without some outside instigation, since the arrangement is merely as business deal rather than a corporate merger. The suspected instigator, of course, is Microsoft, a company well-versed by hard experience with the necessity of managing its profile in Washington (DC... the "other Washington" as we like to call it out here in Seattle) and lining the right pockets to ensure legislators or regulators don't stand overmuch in its way in the corridors of power. The implication in the article is that older, wiser Microsoft is schooling Google in the pickup basketball game sense of the phrase, using their experience and wiles to run circles around the naive and arrogant younger company.
Seven sounding good (Oct 20 2008 10:46 GMT)
It's always easiest to notice new information which tends to support your existing beliefs or which somehow validates prior decisions or recommendations, and maybe that is why I am seeing so many things these days that make me happy to have recommended to most clients that they skip implementing Windows Vista in favor of waiting for a good look at Windows 7. But when even Vista's biggest cheerleader, Steve Ballmer, publicly acknowledges the viability of the position, I get warm fuzzies (and clients who will call again when they need advice). But it'
Yahoo back on the menu for Microsoft? (Oct 17 2008 05:44 GMT)
At a new, low, low price, no less! Actually the company denies that it is interested in Yahoo again, even as it works to derail the Yahoo/Google partnership. But Ben Romano at the Seattle Times has a fairly convincing take on why Ballmer's speculation at ITXpo, running contrary to the company's stated position, are nonetheless a better picture of the ultimate goals of the business.
Gartner's top 10 technologies to watch (Oct 17 2008 04:43 GMT)
It's that time of year again; Gartner's annual ITXpo is underway in Orlando and the juicy tidbits are coming out from those bloggers lucky enough to be in attendance. I am not among them.
CAN SaaS pricing drop by half? (Oct 16 2008 16:41 GMT)
Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Dino Ablakovic So suggests Forrester, as reported by ReadWriteWeb, which has them suggesting that some Enterprise 2.0 web applications are in for a shake-up which may cause their pricing to fall over half the current rate. The article calls out blogs, wikis, and social networking software (what are blogs and wikis?) in particular as items subject to commoditization and pricing pressure. Mashups escape the trend, forecast to increase in price over the next five years.
Run it like a startup (Oct 14 2008 17:09 GMT)
You may already have seen this, but then again you may not have, if you aren't much concerned with startups or venture capitalists (and let's hope for your sake that you are not right now!) so I thought I would throw up a link. Last week, a presentation that noted venture capital firm Sequoia Capital put on for startups it is funding to spell out some of the current issues facing the economy and methods for surviving them leaked out.
So it's just going to be "Seven" (Oct 14 2008 03:52 GMT)
Well, "Windows Seven" if you want to spell it all out, but I imagine most people won't. I like it. Another breathy attempt to be trendy like "Vista" would have just been a bit too much at this point. 7 is utilitarian;
Keeping the CIO relevant (Oct 13 2008 17:35 GMT)
Just when CIOs didn't need any more threats to their autonomy and importance, tightening budgets as a result of the global financial crisis are piling on and causing a sudden reversal in what had been some relatively rosy prospects for the profession... or at least in pundits opinions thereof. First, from Gartner, we hear that CFOs are likely to start gaining ground on the governance ladder and supervising CIOs more and more commonly. This probably isn'
Amazon S3 forges on (Oct 10 2008 00:57 GMT)
Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) started out the year plagued with widely publicized outages and provoked a significant dither in the blogosphere over the future of SaaS and cloud-based services in general, but none of that has stopped it from undertaking impressive growth in the past quarter, and lowering storage rates in the bargain. Starting in November, S3 will adopt a tiered pricing model which will retain the current $0.15/GB rate for under 50TB of storage, but then trend downward through a series of steps to a low-end price of $0.12/GB for anything over 500TB.
Entellium fallout (Oct 09 2008 15:23 GMT)
Last week when Entellium's CEO, Paul Johnston, and Senior VP Parrish Jones unexpectedly stepped down and the company subsequently began to lay off staff, many of us wondered (despite the inevitable reassurances to the contrary) if we were going to see the first significant failure of a SaaS business and the subsequent ghastly fallout among customers who may lose both their software and their information in one fell swoop. Considering the state of the market and the thin margins in the business, it seemed like this was the first of many economically driven SaaS business failures. It turns out it was something more sinister. Johnston and Jones are looking at federal wire fraud charges from the wrong side of the prison bars today, facing up to 20 years and $250,000 fines for "overstating" Entellium'
Do old applications lead to train wrecks? (Oct 08 2008 14:30 GMT)
Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, David Parsons I don't mean literal train wrecks... sorry, I suppose that's a rather tasteless metaphor at the moment. But it'
It's business, not friendship (Oct 08 2008 07:20 GMT)
I don't know of many companies which don't work very hard to establish a sort of amicable brand identity with potential customers, and Google is no different. But there is a danger in taking these marketing messages at face value, and it's not simply that you might begin to think of these companies as your friends, but equally that you might start to see them as your enemies.
Microsoft's Cloud OS (Oct 06 2008 21:34 GMT)
Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Nadezda Firsova Ever since Ballmer spilled the beans on the upcoming unveiling of Microsoft's "Cloud Operating System" scheduled to take place at this month's PDC (Professional Developer's Conference) in LA, I've been poking around for more hints on exactly what that is and how it will fit into the existing broad range of services offered under that label.
Another major manufacturer moves to circumvent Vista (Oct 04 2008 18:18 GMT)
I posted a couple weeks ago about an effort at Hewlett-Packard to develop a lightweight, battery-conscious operating system to enable users to access some of their most commonly used applications without having to boot up into Vista, a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that seemed hardly worth the trouble. Now it appears that Dell is moving the same direction, developing a Linux based subsystem for new laptops dubbed "Latitude ON" which will allow rapid access to common applications, outside the main operating system on the laptop, which promises multi-day battery life in the bargain. At this point, few details are available regarding either the HP or the Dell effort, but if those "frequently used applications" include a web browser and an e-mail client... I imagine a lot of people will start weighing the pretty bells and whistles against the increased battery life, and spending a lot of time not using Vista at all. Enough of that, and they'
Mixed messages on the economy (Oct 04 2008 03:18 GMT)
Microsoft released this statement from General Counsel Brad Smith on the economic bailout package passed and enacted today: Congressional passage of the financial recovery package is a critically important step to bringing back economic stability in the U.S. and around the globe. This crisis affects more than just the U.
And you thought you had pilfering problems (Oct 02 2008 22:30 GMT)
It's a fair bet that whatever issues you may have with employees taking home the odd stick of RAM or spare mouse, it hasn't added up to this saga at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC: a single system administrator, over a ten year period, walked off with almost twenty thousand separate pieces of equipment, totalling some $120,000 in value. It'
Leveraging for search (Oct 02 2008 16:11 GMT)
When I first mentioned Microsoft's foray into healthcare information systems, brought on by the purchase of a system called Azyxxi which was purchased from Medstar Health in 2006 and has since been rebranded "Amalga" (I'm sure this was subject to much focus testing, but to me it's trading one incomprehensible name for another... I suppose "amalga" is supposed to evoke "amalgamation" and other coherent thoughts, but we'
Amazon EC2 does Windows (Oct 02 2008 06:30 GMT)
Quite a few interesting things happening even outside the gymnastics going on in the markets these days, but most of them I won't get to until sometime tomorrow. I did want to highlight Amazon's announcement today, and CTO Werner Vogels' accompanying blog entry, that the company will be offering a Windows platform on the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service some time before the end of the year.
Who says IT is at fault in the financial crisis? (Sep 30 2008 16:29 GMT)
I certainly hope we don't see many more articles in this vein coming out, which suggest that Information Technology may bear some of the blame for the current market crisis. The post, by the usually completely level-headed John Halamka, CIO and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, reads more like a jealous and petty gotcha for financial services IT departments. "Since 1998, I've often been told that Healthcare IT needs to take a lesson from the financial folks about doing IT right," Halamka says, before going on smugly to speculate that perhaps Healthcare IT isn'
IT jobs in a down market (Sep 30 2008 03:18 GMT)
As it seems inevitable that we are going to have a significantly down market at this point (previous prognostications over the sustainability of IT in recession or low growth economy are obviously right out the window), it seems like a good time to comment on the likely progression of IT in a down market. This is a topic for writers with more wisdom and better schooling in economics than I. My largest experience with difficult markets was the dot-com bust, which wasn't ever really much of a bust for competent IT staff, and this is clearly a whole new world of hurt for everyone, not just the tech industry. CIO Magazine has an article focusing on the outcomes of the meltdown in the financial sector;
Pretending to be relevant for the troops (Sep 27 2008 23:24 GMT)
Some CIOs, born geeks, don't have this problem, but others, from less technical backgrounds, from time to time find themselves lacking in "street cred" when they get out and mingle with the techs in their employ. For those of you who have been having difficulty discussing the multi-threading aspects of Google Chrome over Twitter on your iPhones, Baseline Magazine has you covered with "Face Saving Tools For Managers." Go get your geek on. See full article.
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