I came to the realization a few years ago the industry is a cycle. If you watch the location of computation, you can watch it move, from the datacenter, to the personal computer, back to the server farm, and I think we will see it start to spread out into the mesh within the next few years. With the cost of low powered devices like the iphone or handhelds start to surpass that of low end desktop pcs, in speed and storage capacity. The computation will be back in the leaf nodes again, with the server farms used for storage and deep searching.

My 2 cents,
Bradford Knowlton

No longer will it be Oracle versus SAP, perhaps a customer will get the best application from company A, the best application from company B and all data will become integrated and work seamlessly (with a sprinkling of pixie dust).

At that point maybe IBM will collaborate with other software vendors (with a sprinkling of pixie dust) instead of buying them and stifling innovation?

I look forward to more interesting postings like this one. Does Your Blog have a newsletter I can subscribe to for new posts?

Don’t be fooled by IBM….the world hasn’t changed for them. It’s just that the cloud concept that’s now in can hide the mainframe better than any other recent trend…

In addition, the real economics of Could Computing is not well understood and currently there is a fair bit of Hype and emotions attached to it.

To add to this, a lot of issues that are not easy to sort out for example, licenses, data security, intellectual property and the depended connectivity contracts and Service levels…etc could present some interesting challenges.

But, what bugs me most is the “Real economics of Cloud Computing” from the major infrastructure Vendors perspective as this would most definitely cannibalise their market, and what would drive them to support this as the ubiquitous solution?

I’m not against Cloud Computing but feel that some caution is required before we “throw the baby out with the bath water”

There are a couple of other interesting parts of the deal that you did not mention.

1.) 55% of 3Com revenue is in China. How much this deal helps HP in China is not to be overlooked.

2.) I wonder how the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition VCE and it’s vBlock or vLocks (see http://vaa.ulitzer.com/node/1188479) will deal with coordinating sales forces. People are people and who sells the lock-in is much more then a commission split. The egos at VMC (VMware + EMC for those following the bouncing 3 letter acronyms) and Cisco sales forces are how I should say big or huge or even larger then that.

3.) Jack started the whole thing when he decide to get into the sever business. HP basically had a gun to its head. I thought for sure that HP was going to buy Juniper.

4.) The fear of the world ending or the next great depression is over. It is play to win time and that means breaking out the check book and buying some long term competitive advantage. The bankers and the lawyers are smiling again. What a difference 200 days makes.

GregO CEO Appzero.
http://www.appzero.com
http://www.twitter.com/gregoryjoconnor
vaa.ulitzer.com

And as much as I was trying to filter and not listen to the conversation going on next to me (you’ll see from my site why that was really, really hard to do), really liked what I couldn’t help overhearing.

Congratulations on getting the book published!

There has been a lot of buzz that Dev/Test workloads are cloud ready. In reality, they face the same challenge that you lay out for other applications- how do you determine which are the best for the cloud?

This is especially important since most enterprise Dev/Test requires a combination of cloud, physical and virtual compute resources and the integration and orchestration of dozens of tools in the tool chain For those that are interested, I try to address how to determine which Dev/Test workloads are cloud ready in the following post. http://tinyurl.com/ykqjanh

Currently, if you want to buy an ERP system you would run a beauty parade of vendors and technically evaluate the system on functionality and performance.

The cloud changes all this as you can ‘patch’ applications together to support your business processes. But you are moving into an area where you will not have a great degree of control over service delivery.

As the cloud becomes real new management roles will have to be created and these roles will use new tools.

Will the Cloud Information Officer be a common title in a few years? Judith mentions service management vendors becoming ‘king of the hill’ – they probably will. Their tools will give the Cloud Information Officer masses of reports on levels of service.

But, if the service to our end-users fails or the performance is poor, who do we call? The ERP vendor? Whoever is runninng our cloud services? Google?

Where will accountability lie and how will problems get resolved quickly?

Let’s say somebody (disgruntled ex-employee, a competitor, or just some random human) decides to point a huge botnet of hosts at your cloud based app. (if they are smart they’ll slowly ramp up traffic rather than hit you a tsunami) Traffic looks legit, but doesn’t do anything besides chew up compute cycles. Your provider auto-scales your resources as designed. Meanwhile your real costs just go up and up. Soon you are paying huge invoices to your cloud provider and getting nothing in return as revenue.