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Q&A: CIO Ross Philo On 'Post Office' In Your Home
In a tough business environment, the U.S. Postal Service is delivering new capabilities for home PCs and smartphones and new services for high-volume mailers, says its top IT executive.
Amazon Serves Up MySQL
Amazon's newest cloud offering: MySQL 5.1 in the cloud, also known as Amazon RDS. And there's worry that it'll turn out to be a bad thing for MySQL in the long run, although that might not hold true for other open source repurposed in the same way.
Benioff Discloses All In 'Behind the Cloud' Except...
Five copies of "Behind the Cloud" have arrived at my desk, two intended for fellow IW staffers and three for me, an embarrassment of riches. It's Marc Benioff's book on how Salesforce.com was created and built into a successful company. I am reading it avidly… but some disclosures will apparently have to wait for the sequel.
TV Web Site Opts For Cloud Servers
To handle extreme spikes in Web traffic, a popular television show's servers were ditched in favor of Rackspace cloud hosting.
Four Possible Reasons Why L.A. Chose Google Over Microsoft
The Los Angeles City Council has chosen Google over Microsoft for 30,000 city employees' email accounts. What better place than Tinseltown for this tech industry drama to play out, with one councilman even delivering a choice line about whether cloud computing could push the city off the edge of a cliff (a drama AND an action film). But we're still waiting for an ending that answers this question: Why Google over Microsoft?
Innovation, Not Cost, New Cloud Battle Cry
Maybe folks are simply trying to talk themselves out of the recession (which would be a good thing in itself), but it seems like the conversation around cloud computing is shifting from cost-cutting to unleashing innovation.
Global CIO: Why Are Microsoft, Oracle, And HP Bashing IBM?
Mark Hurd, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer have all recently taken some fairly empty shots at IBM. But if Big Blue is such a loser, why do those three CEOs keep talking about it?
Is Cloud Bigger Than The Advent Of The Personal Computer?
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, says "the cloud" is a phenomenon that is bigger than the advent of the PC. I think he's almost got it right. Cloud is bigger than the PC Revolution, but it's big in part because it incorporates and extends the PC revolution to Internet server clusters. The cloud owes more to the PC than Eric acknowledges.
White House Uses Open Source To Open Government
The Whitehouse.gov site now runs the open source Drupal content management system, which includes social networking tools that can be used for communications and participatory government.
Global CIO: Hewlett-Packard CEO Hurd's Strategy: The Infrastructure Company
Promising that HP can combine massive scale and innovation, CEO Hurd says it will separate itself from IBM and others by having a complete end-to-end line of hardware, software, and services.
Practical Analysis: Data Center Wars Escalate As Cisco Retrenches
Data center virtualization cries out for new servers and networking. Cisco overengineered its first offerings; round two is looking better.
Alternative IT
Cloud Computing. SaaS. They're such over-used marketing words that they've become the butt of jokes (Larry Ellison on YouTube, anyone?). But hopefully the hype machine hasn't generated too much noise to drown out the fact that there have been some significant, permanent changes in how CIOs view software. At InformationWeek, we call it Alternative IT.
Nvidia Launches 3D Rendering For Cloud Computing Providers
The server delivers photo-quality 3D images to any broadband-connected PC running a web browser.
Avoid Trap Of Proprietary Cloud Tooling: Use Simple API
What's the first thing you should do if you're thinking of developing software for cloud computing? At ZendCon, Zend Technologies user group yesterday, three members of a five member panel answered the same way: adopt Simple Cloud API, the open source cloud services interface.
CIA Invests In Social Media Monitoring Technology
Investment arm In-Q-Tel is funding Visible Technologies, making its online brand analysis capabilities available to U.S. intelligence agencies.
A 'Bill Of Rights' For SaaS Customers
Analyst R "Ray" Wang is a tireless and well-respected customer advocate in the world of enterprise software. Now Wang is bringing his advocacy over to the SaaS side with his recently published "Customer Bill of Rights" for SaaS. I share with you some of the highlights.
Government Technologist: Energy's $32 Million Cloud Experiment
The Department of Energy has embarked on an ambitious project to see how cloud computing can be used by scientists at its national labs. Is it taking on too much, too soon?
T-Mobile Data Loss Falsely Reflects on Cloud Computing
Hopefully you don't have a T-Mobile Sidekick. If you do, you'll be disheartened to learn that your contact data could be gone after a SANS upgrade that went sideways... So, let's see, data was lost. It was remote data. So, cloud computing failed again, correct?... We need to get smarter here.
How Did T-Mobile Suddenly Recover Unrecoverable Data?
Microsoft today said it had recovered most of affected Sidekick customers' lost data. But this past weekend, like a doctor issuing a terminal prognosis, T-Mobile told affected customers that their data "almost certainly has been lost." So, what changed between then and now?
Photo Gallery: Google's Scenic Oregon Data Center
One of Google's newest data centers is nestled among the mountains, canyons, and waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge.
NASA's Next Mission: The Tweetup
The space agency plans to host 100 Twitter users at Kennedy Space Center for next month's launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
Benioff, Dell Link Arms: Here Comes Hybrid Cloud
Marc Benioff set aside his duties as master of ceremonies at the death of software Tuesday and announced on-demand applications and on-premises applications could work together. His venue was a Yerba Buena Center theater in San Francisco next to Oracle OpenWorld. He still took a swipe at enterprise software, but his talk was titled, "The Best of Both Worlds."
The Drama That Didn't Happen At Oracle Open World
So Marc Benioff treaded onto Larry Ellison's turf at Oracle Open World yesterday and acknowledged that sometimes, customers use both Oracle and Salesforce.com. Well, unless you're completely gullible to the attention-loving drama kings of the software industry, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Cloud and traditional computing will forever coexist in an IT architecture world that is far more grey than black and white, and both Larry and Marc know it.
Hitachi Data Systems Reaches For The Cloud
HDS announces a move into public and private cloud storage, primarily through rebranding
Dell: IT Can Create $200 Billion In Efficiencies
Virtualization could take a large chunk out of the $1.2 trillion spent on IT in North America each year, Michael Dell said at OracleWorld.
Wikipedia, Now In A Dedicated Mobile Device
Thinking inside the box, Openmoko has put Wikipedia into its very own reading hardware.
T-Mobile, Microsoft Promise $100 Gift Card For Lost Data
But most customers will see their data restored, the two companies hope.
Swarm: Open Source Web App Scaling
A new open source project called Swarm bills itself as "a transparently scalable distributed programming language." It's been written to tackle one of the thorniest problems of today's cloud-centric world: How do you create applications that can scale up and out without driving yourself nuts?
Who Do You Blame For Cloud Computing Failures?
Think of the one million T-Mobile Sidekick customers that may have lost important data last week. Think of the dozens of CIOs that anxiously waited for Workday to restore its SaaS service on Sept 24. Cloud computing has created a new era of accountability, and we must demand that tech vendors work harder than ever to prove their trustworthiness.
EMC Offers Help In Oracle Virtualizaton
The storage vendor is offering what it considers optimized use of tiered storage in virtual Oracle environments.
Is Workday's 15-Hour SaaS Outage Acceptable?
On Sept. 24, Workday's SaaS service for human resources, financial applications and payroll was down for 15 hours. That's right, not 15 minutes, not 1.5 hours, but 15 hours. Google Gmail is down for 90 minutes, as it's as if the world has come to an end. So it begs the question: Is 15 hours' downtime for core applications such as accounting and HR acceptable?
Morgan Stanley Escapes New E-mail Trial
Court says bank's evidentiary foul-up irrelevant to final outcome in Perelman case.
The Conversation With Gates And Ballmer That Sparked Microsoft's Cloud Strategy
Microsoft's march toward cloud computing is fascinating to watch. Next year, Microsoft will take the most successful desktop software package of all time-Office-and offer it online to businesses, somewhat similar to the Google Apps model. Microsoft's VP of Online recently shared with me some thoughts on Microsoft's strategy-and the conversation he had with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer that led to Office Web Apps 2010 and other decisions.
Old Media, Not Internet, Driving Healthcare Debate: White House Advisor
The healthcare debate in the America has been driven by cable news and other old media, rather than new technologies, according to White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod, adding that cable news networks focused on a small number of angry people at town hall meetings in August, and ignored the larger debate.
Top Federal Contracts To Exceed $180 Billion In 2010
A new report estimates that the top 20 federal contracts, many laden with IT purchases, will be worth 50% more than last year's contracts.
LotusLive iNotes: A Necessary Move For IBM
IBM released a $3-a-month, online subscription email service this week, called LotusLive iNotes, and really, it had no choice but to get very aggressive on the SaaS front. I know of at least two big company CIOs that recently left Notes and migrated to Google Gmail or Microsoft Exchange online, after considering upgrades to both on-premises Notes and the existing Notes subscription service that starts at $8 a month.
IBM Launches iNotes In The Cloud, More To Come?
IBM is wading into online email service, a space where Google, Yahoo and Microsoft already have big presences. Is IBM staging a kamikaze run, giving itself one more place where Lotus Notes will show it's got difficulty competing? Is there a method to this madness? Why does IBM have its head in the clouds?
Amazon's Three Steps To Cloud Computing
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is preparing a paper that summarizes his views on how large companies can adopt cloud services. Here's a sneak peek at his soon-to-be-published report.
SaaS Horror Stories Are Starting to Appear
My fellow cloud guy and twitter buddy, James Urquhart of Cisco, and I were kicking around the notion that few cloud horror stories have yet to emerge. I've seen a few, but most of those who have issues with cloud computing are reluctant to go on record with their problems. Here's an exception...
Federal Stimulus-Tracking Site To Open APIs
Among the next steps for the recently revamped Recovery.gov are improved search, mapping, and mobile access, and open APIs.
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