How Amazon cashes in on its Cloud

I had a very interesting conversation with Jeff Barr, the senior web services evangelist at Amazon. I have known Jeff for almost 15 years. In those days Jeff was one of the architects at a company called Visix, an early graphical development environment that was ahead of its time. Visix’s software development environment [...]

The Desktop as a Service: Can Desktone be a Focal Point?

I have been thinking a lot about the evolution of virtualization lately and so I was intrigued when a company I had never heard of called Desktone asked to come in for a briefing. When I heard that the company specialized on desktop virtualization I was intrigued. I was even more interested when [...]

Lotus: the next generation

So, here I am at Lotusphere. Whoever invested Disneyworld should be sent for many years of therapy. It is not a happy place. But I digress. Lotus is at a interesting transition in its history. I have a warm feeling for Lotus. I was first introduced to Lotus Notes in 1988 [...]

Top 10 Predictions: Innovation, ROI, Cloud Computing and more…

I love the end of the year. I get to sneak out of the office for a few days and stay off of airplanes. I also have a chance to look ahead to the new year. I like making predictions. Sometimes, I am years ahead of the market; other times I am able to hit [...]

Should the SaaS customer beware and be educated?

I had a long talk the other day with a customer who had just decided to implement SAP’s Business by Design hosted solution. The company (it wouldn’t be fair to him to name the company) is about $150 million in revenue and made the decision to move away from a home grew, inefficient system [...]

EMC’s Innovation Journey: from storage to information centric computing

Today I am at EMC’s annual analyst meeting. Just like IBM, EMC’s theme is innovation. EMC is on an interesting journey from its roots in storage managment. EMC has been on a journey for a number of years with acquisitions in information and content management (Documentum and eRoom) and security (RSA, Verid), management [...]

Five things I learned at IBM’s Software Group Industry Analyst Meeting

Every year at about this time I attend IBM Software Group IT Industry Analyst meeting. This meeting is attended by about 90 industry analysts and about three times that number of IBM software group leaders, managers, and support staff. It is quite the event! While I can’t possibly talk about everything I [...]

An evening with Salesforce.com

I was invited to a dinner with some of the management team last night. This was the third year in a row that the company had held a little get together for key customers, IT analysts, and members of the press. In previous years, CEO, Marc Benioff himself to lead the festivities. [...]

SOA and Unintended Market Consequences

Now, I have been around the software world for longer than I would like to admit (I would be giving away my age if I told you). I have watched many trends come and go. The one consistent pattern that I see is the slow progression over the last 20 years towards distributed computing. [...]

The Future of Enterprise Software: who gets the power?

I recently attended an industry conference called Software 2007 and was struck by the different approaches articulated and advocated by three very different industry leaders. What stood out from the conference and from the discussions by the leaders of these three companies were the dramatic changes happening [...]