We are a few years into this whole Cloud thing now and I’m surprised by how people still talk about it as a Cure All, some sort of silver bullet, conflating Cloud as a Service Delivery model with all sorts of things like collaboration, increased productivity, analytics – analytics?!, and a new model for application

There’s been a lot of interest in converged infrastructure platforms by IT organizations, and these can be a great foundation for a cloud infrastructure across the enterprise.  However, our experience working with clients on realizing their converged infrastructure suggests that you need to think about this not just as a technology deployment, but also a

How do successful customers push past the initial phase of the journey to the cloud? Here’s my take on it.

Go Big or Go Home, seems trite, but it is applicable to IT transformation. Companies that are successfully adopting cloud technologies are taking a transformation approach, not a technical project approach. The larger the scale of the program the more traction they are getting across the enterprise, business and IT. For too long virtualization has

Steve Herrod’s super session was one of the things I enjoyed most about this year’s VMworld.  Not only were the technologies and ideas that were introduced inspiring and where I was hoping to see VMware head but there was real passion for making content accessible evident throughout the entire presentation. VMworld coming so soon after the

I took time out a few weeks back to attend Edward Tufte’s One-Day Course on “Presenting Data and Information” and learned several new things and had several ideas reinforced by the methods and examples that Edward used.  One of my favorite things that Edward brought up was encapsulated in this quote: “These are largely solved

I’ve been interviewing several people to lead up the Virtualization group of my organization lately and one of the candidates asked me an excellent question, “Well, what do you mean by Virtualization?”.  Very good question, am I talking about VMware, the hypervisor, virtualized infrastructure, what?  Apparently I’m in a heretical mood these days because my

I’m about to commit a bit of cloud heresy as a technology guy writing about cloud and claiming that it’s really not all about hypervisors, automation and orchestration.  Sure, you need a measure of these components in order to be able to deliver on the cloud vision and model efficiently, but does that really solve

With apologies to Chuck Hollis at EMC and James Governor at RedMonk I decided to take a crack at this whole “Why Applications are like fish and Data is like Wine” meme by extending it to posit that Information is like Cognac. Now, I’m not usually one to kick a dead horse but I think

IDC Released their 2011 Digital Universe Study and the results are pretty amazing: data is doubling every two years!  This is the fifth year that the IDC has released this study and each year I continue to be surprised by the results, just when I think things have started to reach terminal velocity around data

Recently there’s been some chatter about the role of automation in Security and whether it is appropriate or not as a business strategy much less a security strategy.  Jeffrey Carr states that EMC’s wrong that automation is an efficiency and security necessity and that you shouldn’t automate because “An automated solution will never stop a customized