With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and st...

If you're like me, you rely on a host of cloud applications to get your job done each day. While the convenience and familiarity of apps built for the web is great, I can't help but notice the difference between each user interface (UI) I use. Currently, all cloud-based ERP software ve...

The term cloud computing was first coined in 2007. Enterprise Cloud Computing seems to have emerged as a term in 2009. It’s now 2012 and many are trying to ride the wave of Enterprise cloud computing or private cloud into the future. In a short four years, we’ve seen this phenomena of ...

In my last article, I called on providers to find a unique Viewpoint, "Viewpoint is a framing of the market in the context of your uniqueness. The uniqueness of your team, your capabilities, and your vision. Some call viewpoint thought leadership, some vision with a capital V, and ...

We have to be careful that we don’t make change an end in itself. We have to remember that change is a means to the end of getting something we want that is different from what we have. In the enterprise context, that something has been labeled in different ways. One is “alignment,” ...

Led by cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) pioneer Eric Maass, Lighthouse Security Group on Wednesday announced expanded operations to support the launch of the next generation of its Lighthouse Gateway platform. According to Maass, CTO, Lighthouse Security Group, “Light...

Virtualization vs. private cloud has confused many IT pros. Are they the same? Or different? In what way and how? We have already virtualized most of my computing resources, is a private cloud still relevant to us? This 2-part series is to answer these quesstions. Lately, many IT shop...

What do salesforce.com and Mashery have in common? They are multi-tenant software as a service leaders - both built with billions of APIs - for the Cloud, by the Cloud. The implications this year: API Strategy in 2012 cuts across mobile, social, and cloud. Winning with API's tran...

Coach Kevin Kelley has figured it out, don't punt. Since 2007, he's won three Arkansas State Championships and over 90% of his games, and he's never punted. Every day, sales and marketing teams in Cloud organizations, that could easily move the trial or experience to the front of the m...

Designing an enterprise architecture is much like building a house. It's better not to leave things to chance. To build a house right, you need a blueprint that details what is to be built, where, why and how based on the home owner's requirements (including cost). As the story goes, ...

Is cloud a positive or negative when it comes to cyber security? And what of hybrid models that combine public and private cloud activities, how is security impacted in those cases? For some, any move to the cloud -- at least the public cloud -- means a higher risk for security. For ...

Global enterprises and growing businesses are harnessing IT to add branch offices, remote sites and enabling mobile users. Simultaneously, they are decreasing the IT administrative footprint, boosting productivity, working with greater efficiency, and improving the bottom line. IT init...

In two separate recent announcements, HP has affirmed its goal of being the neutral supplier of choice for all things cloud. Last week, HP delivered HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) Content Pack 10, bringing with the ability to better manage cloud instances across t...

This week, I've been at The Open Group Conference in San Francisco. The theme was Enterprise Transformation which, in simple terms, means changing how your business works to take advantage of the latest developments in IT. Evidence of these developments is all around. For example, whe...

CumuLogic is a cloud computing company founded by Sun Microsystems’ alumni. The company has developed a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software that makes it easier and faster to develop and deploy Java applications (apps) in the cloud. By automating the management of the runtime en...

Enterprises AND software companies seeking competitive advantage through IT innovation should be aware of this technology shift and actively defining strategies for capitalizing on it. The principles behind Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) were established long before the Internet...

Good data management, analytics, and helping to shape the goals of the business are keys to transforming the enterprise through impactful enterprise architecture (EA). Coming from the siloed past in IT, companies are now moving to business service-driven processes across various resou...

As companies increasingly adopt more and more SaaS/Cloud based applications, as more and more data are cloud-based, and as social networking data becomes increasingly critical to sales, marketing and customer satisfaction applications, the "old style" integration stacks that were origi...

You want the ability to deploy, update, and repair your entire application infrastructure using nothing but pre-defined, automated procedures. Ideally, you want to automatically provision your entire environment from bare-metal (hardware with no operating systems – or anything else – i...

A new report says there's little stopping Europe catching up to the US in cloud computing. The study, carried out by the London School of Economics and Political Science and commissioned by Microsoft, looked at the projected economic impact of cloud computing on the aerospace and smart...

Most CEOs I talk to have a jaded, if not skeptical view of marketing. While they recognize the importance of marketing to their long term success, they have a hard time understanding and measuring how well marketing is doing. And while more mature organizations have a good handle on ve...

“How resilient are the cloud computing solutions being sold today?” This appears to be a question not asked often enough by those who are immediately lured by the hyped positives of the concept before there is enough data to substantiate the claims made by the vendors as well as the do...

Service Oriented Architecture: Service Oriented Architecture is the first attempt in aligning the IT with the business and this is now almost a default architecture for all the new applications created in today's enterprise. Definition of SOA emphasizes the following, Service-Oriented ...

fast-moving industry discussion panel at the 9th International Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, November 7-10, Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan was joined by Dr. Rich Wolski, CTO and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc.; Sheng Liang, CTO Clo...

Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are driving the need for a better, holistic approach to IT support and remediation. Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, par...

The SaaS/on-premises tension sets up a complex series of challenges for the ISV including questions of business models, maintenance of multiple product versions, and updating of software to name a few issues. With apologies to last century’s poet Robert Frost, smart money may rest on t...

The topic of performance management in information technology circles has, by and large, been a relatively thorny issue at times. Part of the problem with post-deployment solutions is that code may be buggy and troublesome, functionality may not be close enough to original requirements...

If you consider the CNN Money survey it is IBM which has beaten Microsoft by a whisker. They did not consider Facebook as it is not publically traded. If you listen to Eric Schmidt, it is off course Facebook. Off course anybody from Google will consider Facebook in the list because La...

These days, activity streams seem to be popping up everywhere in enterprise tech as vendors rush to add social features to their software. Twitter and Facebook-like streams are even starting to gain traction in manufacturing software. Two of the most prominent examples of vendors incor...

Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research says adoption of enterprise architecture (EA) leads to greater efficiencies and better business agility. Ross explains how enterprise architects have helped lead the way to success...

The latest BriefingsDirect case study podcast discussion centers on how Nottingham Trent University gained strategic operational efficiency and improved IT management. We were very, very good at moving forward and doing lots and lots of things, but delivering products at the end of th...

Cloud computing has been a force in the industry for the past few years. Regardless of your feelings for it, one fact remains true ─ you have to monitor it just like any other system in your infrastructure, sometimes more so. The cloud presents a few challenges for traditional monitori...

The point to the “programmable Web” isn’t to make the Web more programmable, it’s to make software more Web-like. If we can finally free ourselves from the last vestiges of imperative, RPC-style programming, even going so far as to steer clear of functional programming, and move to a f...

We’re living in the world of ubiquitous computing. Yes, it’s finally here. After 20 years of waiting, we can all take satisfaction that the benefits ascribed to ubiquitous computing are, or will be, ours. But what does ubiquitous computing mean for citizens of this new world and for t...

Better managing virtualized IT workloads and private clouds is a top concern for IT leaders going into 2012. They may want to follow the lead of global travel and tourism giant TUI Group. The IT organization there, TUI InfoTec, has found ways to manage highly virtualized IT operations ...

B2B technology sales and marketing is being transformed, as we move from products to services, we must move from traditional evaluation based product sales to experienced based service sales, this is true in SaaS models but in many other places too. Why is it then that many SaaS provid...

Ask any technology evangelist worth their salt roughly when the ‘next big thing’ is likely to arrive and they will typically say about five-years from now. It’s a safe bet; so-called ‘paradigm shifts’ in technology tend to occur roughly every half decade – or at least they have for the...

Last year, my best predictions were based on some sort of specialized knowledge or insight, and the worst came from looking into the macro environment and making guesses. So, this year’s predictions emphasize the former approach, yet hopefully avoid sounding like claims such as "the ma...

Worldwide enterprise applications leader SAP has designed and implemented a private cloud infrastructure model that supports an internal consulting and training program. By standardizing on a VMware cloud platform, SAP has been able to slash provisioning times for multiple instances o...