Brian Prentice

Yesterday’s announcement of Microsoft Azure was largely a statement of Microsoft’s commitment to their Software + Services strategy. There’s more work to be done but it’s hard to deny that Microsoft isn’t taking the cloud seriously.
But the more Microsoft addresses the technology underpinning their cloud efforts the more pressing the questions on their cloud economics [...]

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A consistent theme that appears in any discussion around Software as a Service (SaaS) is the extent to which these products are brought into organization by business users rather than IT departments. Based on my interactions with clients this is clearly the situation in a majority of cases – and this is consistently confirmed to [...]

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I had an interesting conversation with Lee Bryant of HeadShift yesterday. They’re a professional services organization focusing on the deployment of social software solutions.
Something that I found to be particularly noteworthy was that only 20% of their consultants are technology-related. The other 80% are actually trained in sociology and anthropology. The blend of their staff [...]

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear an interesting presentation from Andrew Stevens, Managing Partner of IBM’s Global Business Service in Asia Pacific on the future of services in the IT industry.
One point that Stevens made was the the current challenge most IT services organizations face is how to globally integrate delivery. Inherent in that [...]

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Was it just me? Did anyone else notice that the defining experience of the credit boom was the mind-numbingly boring dinner conversation? Surely I wasn’t the only one enduring story after story of the latest home renovation, valuations of investment property portfolios, the status of junior’s private school enrolment and the relative merits of 4×4 [...]

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I was pouring over the transcripts of Steve Ballmer’s interview at the Churchill Club last week when I ran across this answer in relation to Microsoft’s position in the mobile phone market:
“…if you go out five or ten years, this year there are about 125 million smart phones sold. I think if you go out [...]

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