Author: Barton George
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Dude, I’m going to Dell!
Monday morning I’m starting a new gig. I will be joining Dell as their cloud computing evangelist. So what’s that mean? As the cloud computing evangelist I will act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (not sure if the sash is provided or if I have to supply my own). I will also…
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Tim Bray’s Law of Explanation
Earlier this summer, XML co-inventor and director of Web Technologies at Sun, Tim Bray was asked to give a convocation speech at his Alma Mater. The whole speech is excellent, but the part that particularly resonated with me was his “Law of Explanation” The first half says “When you’re explaining something to somebody and they…
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3 Reasons Public Clouds will Dominate: Developers, Developers, Developers
In a post at the end of last month, Frank Gens of IDC explained that, cloud concerns notwithstanding, within a few years the Public Cloud will be a humongous source of IT services. The reason for the popularity of the public cloud will be the same reason any platform is successful: the apps. And who’s…
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Internal Clouds? We don’t need no Stinking Internal Clouds
The other day, I came across an entry on CIO.com discussing a recent Forrester report. The report, snappily entitled “Conventional Wisom is Wrong About Cloud IAAS,” details the results of a recent survey administered to small and large enterprises located in the Europe and North America. The survey’s key findings were: Confirmation of a strong…
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Rackspace goes down (2X), their President steps up
If you’ve been following the cloud space at all you’ll know that hosting provider Rackspace recently lost power twice within a span of 10 days. As NetworkWorld explained: Power outages on June 29 and July 7 hit Rackspace’s 144,000-square-foot data center in the Dallas suburb of Grapevine. Rackspace operates nine data centers worldwide for about…
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Volume Servers: It’s the Software Stupid
Earlier this week I read an interesting entry from former Sun compadre Ken Oestreich. Ken’s piece entitled, “Why (and How) Low-Cost Servers Will Dominate — Or, why high-end servers will be obviated by software…” explains: The age of high-end, super-redundant, high-reliability servers is slowly coming to an end. They’re being replaced by volume servers and…
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How to Community
The concept of community is one that has been around for quite a while (see image at left). Originally at least partially defined as a group that shared a common physical location, this term over the last decade, with the help of the Internet, has vastly expanded to include virtual communities. (Obviously other media before…
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Lifeguard Stands and Palm Trees in…Chicago!?
Last month my daughter and I traveled to Chicago for my cousin’s wedding. We had two full days — one gorgeous, warm and sunny and one overcast and bone chilling – so is Chicago, or so I’m told. The first day we hit the zoo which was a great time and then made our way…
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Stephen O’Grady on Red Monk — The Un-Analysts
Last week at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston I caught with Stephen O’Grady, co-founder of analyst firm Red Monk. I’ve always been very impressed with this boutique firm whose influence on their clients and other analysts, seems inversely proportional to their size (they are now up to a whopping four analysts). I’ve split our chat in…
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Thanks to Tim Bray I’m an Honourary Cheeky Brit
I was quite chuffed to find that my first freelance piece for The Register was featured on the front page. The piece is a 17 minute podcast and accompanying intro article that covers the conversation I had with XML co-developer and really smart guy, Tim Bray. Tim was a great interview. Not only is he…
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James Duncan: From Reasonably Smart to Joyent
I’m attending Enterprise 2.0 here in Boston and although it’s relatively small, I’m finding it pretty interesting. Case in point, James Duncan, Joyent‘s Director of platform strategy. James is staffing Joyent’s pod at the event and an hour ago I dragged him away for a quick podcast. Some of the topics James tackles: How James…
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RightScale Part 2: Why the cloud? Apple Fanboys and Server Suffrage
Tuesday I listened in on the RighScale webinar: How to Build Scalable Websites in the Cloud. This is part two of my thoughts and notes from the event. (Note: it doesn’t look like it’s been posted yet but it should be available here soon). As I discussed last time, RightScale acts as a management platform…
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RightScale part 1: Mickos joins and control moves up the stack
Yesterday I attended a webinar that RightScale put on entitled: How to Build Scalable Websites in the Cloud. It was basically a welcome to RightScale, welcome to the cloud presentation but overall interesting and credible. The presenters were their CEO, their head of marketing and a mini team of techies. Below is part one of…
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My Presentation and Interview from Cloud Camp
My blogging has been a bit anemic lately. We had our big Blueprint launch in the middle of last month accompanied by the post launch clean up of all the stuff I had designated as “get to it after the launch.” And then there was strep throat and visiting relatives…blah…blah..blah. So here I am back…
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Got 3 minutes? See what Blueprint’s all about
A little over two weeks ago the latest Blueprint update, the Spring ’09 release, was loosed upon the world. We took the opportunity of the launch, which included launches for our other products and services, to overhaul our web pages. In the specific case of Blueprint we created new pages for Overview, Features, Resources and…
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Production, Operations Mgt and BPM at Texas State
Dave Angelow, adjunct professor at Texas State University just finished teaching a semester long course in Production and Operations Management. The course, which focuses on the supply chain and value chain as well as some production methods, is a core requirement in the school of management. I talked with Dave to hear how the course…
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“Accessing outside ideas is no longer optional”
The week before last I attended the APQC’s Knowledge Management (KM) Conference in Houston. A lot of the discussions focused on web 2.0 technologies as ways of transferring and sharing knowledge and process throughout organizations — wiki’s, blogs, chat and social networks came up a lot. The conference also had a great line up of…
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Process Improvement is Everbody’s Business – Blueprint Spring ’09 goes Live!
One of the advantages of a cloud-based application is that product improvements can be streamed to customers in frequent and regular intervals. In the case of Blueprint we tend to put out a new release every 6-8 weeks. But just because the updates come regularly doesn’t mean that they’re all equal, some releases are bigger…
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Call Center outsourcer uses Process Mapping to help it emerge from Chapter 11
PRC, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, manages 14 domestic call centers and a handful of centers offshore. In January of last year this 25-year-old company declared bankruptcy. Six months later, after a massive restructuring they emerged from Chapter 11. One of the efforts that helped in this restructuring and which continues today is an effort…