Lydia Leong

My colleague Tom Austin has posted a call for Google to be more transparent about enterprise usage of Google Apps. This was triggered by a TechCrunch article on Google’s reduction of the number of free users for a given Google Apps account.
I’ve been wondering how many businesses use Google Apps almost exclusively for messaging, and [...]

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I’ve just put out a new research report called The Changing Colocation and Data Center Market. Macroeconomic factors have driven major changes in both the supply and demand picture for data center construction, leasing, and colocation, in the last quarter of 2008, continuing into this year. The economic environment has brought about abrupt shift in [...]

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The New York Times article about Cisco getting into the server market is a very interesting read, as is Cisco’s own blog post announcing something they call “Unified Computing“.
My colleague Tom Bittman has a thoughtful blog post on the topic, writing: What is apparent is that the comfortable sandboxes in which different IT vendors sat [...]

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I’ve received various queries from people, particularly analyst relations folks at vendors, trying to understand what I cover, especially as it relates to cloud computing, so I figured I’d devote a blog post to explaining.
Gartner analysts do not really have “official coverage areas” defined by titles, and our coverage shifts dynamically based on client needs [...]

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Excerpt: Click here to read the original.
It’s Inauguration Day, but I am on the road, so I am watching TV from my hotel room rather than braving the crowds in DC. Like many analysts, I travel a lot. Moreover, I go to a hodgepodge of destinations, making it difficult to accumulate frequent flyer miles on [...]

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Do your processes help or hinder your employees’ ability to deliver great service to customers? When an employee makes an exception to keep a customer happy, is that rewarded or does the employee feel obliged to hide that from his manager? When you design a process, which is more important: Ensuring that nobody can be [...]

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Excerpt: Click here to read the original.
The market for browser-based massively-multiplayer games supports a cottage industry of small companies with a handful of developers, backed by an artist or two, who crank out a reasonably nice living for themselves without ever competing with the big-time.

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My colleague Nick Gall pointed out an article in the ACM Queue that I’d missed: Improving Performance on the Internet, by Akamai’s chief scientist, Tom Leighton.
There is certainly some amount of marketing spin in that article, but it is nonetheless a very good read. If you are looking for a primer on why there are [...]

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In this year of super-tight IT budgets and focus on stretching what you’ve got rather than replacing it with something new, Micro Focus is bringing COBOL to the cloud.
Most vendor “support for EC2″ announcements are nothing more than hype. Amazon’s EC2 is a Xen-virtualized environment. It supports the operating systems that run in that [...]

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Another news round-up, themed around “competitive fracas”.
Joyent buys Reasonably Smart. Cloud hoster Joyent has picked up Reasonably Smart, a tiny start-up with an APaaS offering based, unusually enough, on JavaScript and the Git version-control system. GigaOM has an analysis; I’ll probably post my take later, once I get a better idea of exactly what Reasonably [...]

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