If you've read this blog over the past couple of years, it should be no surprise that I am a huge advocate of the theories of Clayton Christensen, author of "The Innovator's Dilemma." Christensen and his book were brought to mind this week by the cover story in Forbes about his severe health problems, his experience with the U..S healthcare system, and his prescriptions for how to fix it.
If I had to summarize my assessment of this week's CloudConnect conference, it would be this: Attention regarding cloud computing is rapidly moving toward the pragmatics of using it and away from the theories of studying it.
This week I saw two articles that captured the two visions of IT that will dominate the future. Both were interviews with senior IT leaders, one a CIO of a major technology company, the other a senior executive with a leading system integrator. One article depicted a vision of IT as a future of standardized, commodity offerings, while the other portrayed IT as a critical part of every company's business offerings. Two visions of ITs role in stark contrast to one another. Each seems to obviate the other. But is that really true? My take is that both views are true, and the CIO of the future has to push one to make room to achieve the other.
It's been an incredibly interesting, exciting, and tumultuous year for cloud computing. But, as the saying goes, "you ain't seen nothin' yet." Next year will be one in which the pedal hits the metal, resulting in enormous acceleration for cloud computing. One way to look at it is that next year will see the coming to fruition of a number of trends and initiatives that were launched this year.
If you want to understand the key driver of the cloud computing revolution, you owe it to yourself to read Microsoft's new white paper "The Economics of the Cloud." In it, authors Rolf Harms and Michael Yamartino lay out an analysis of the economics that underlie cloud computing, and demonstrate in a convincing fashion why the shift to this new technology platform is inevitable. A copy of the paper is available as a download from the blog posting by the authors, located here.
The most interesting cloud computing I saw this week was the announcement that the General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded 11 companies the opportunity to participate in the apps.gov portal, offering IaaS services.
One of the most interesting areas in technology these days is telephony, with all its flavors: voice, video, and video conferencing. And, as far as we've come, we're about to see another wave of innovation in the space.
With a tag line of "Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds," it's easy to understand that this year's US VMworld was wall-to-wall cloud computing. Nevertheless, it was striking how cloud-centric the expo floor at VMworld was. Based on my meetings, chance discussions, and floor wandering, here is my admittedly impressionistic take on the event:
I saw a fascinating interview on Forbes.com last week that implies the death of IT as we know it. In it, Michael Chui, senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, described a trend that his firm views as the way IT will be done in the future.
An article last week in Network World displayed all of the glorious promise, challenge, and contradictions of cloud computing in less than 1000 words. The article focused on the quality of support for Amazon Web Services' user forums, based on a study by a team of researchers from IBM and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I came across a very interesting <a href="http://www.ca.com/us/products/collateral.aspx?cid=235665">cloud computing security study</a> from the Ponemon Institute (sponsored by CA, but independently carried out by Ponemon). The study is based on a survey the Institute carried out, responded to by around 900 people.
I came across a link to a new report from IDC called the "2010 Digital Universe Study".
For as long as there have been computer systems, there have been system administrators.
When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.
There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.