by Lydia Leong | January 13, 2009 | Comments Off
My colleague Thomas Otter is encouraging us to support Ada Lovelace day — an effort to have a day of bloggers showcasing role-model women in technology, on March 24th. His comments lead me to muse upon how incredibly male-dominated the IT industry is, especially in the segment that I watch — IT operations. At Gartner’s [...]
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by Lydia Leong | January 12, 2009 | 1 Comment
In the greater blogosphere, as well as amongst the cloud analysts across the various research firms, there’s been an ongoing debate over the question, “Does a cloud have to have an API to be a cloud?” Going beyond that question, though, there are two camps of cloud users emerging — those who prefer the GUI [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, people
by Lydia Leong | January 11, 2009 | Comments Off
Excerpt: Click here to read the original. At Gartner, we generally do not do hands-on testing of products, with the exception of some folks who cover consumer devices and the like. Yet, the self-service nature of cloud computing makes it trivially cheap to do testing of these services, and without needing to involve the vendor. [...]
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Category: Analyst Life Tags: excerpt, Gartner, hands-on, research
by Lydia Leong | January 10, 2009 | Comments Off
Excerpt: Click here to read the original. The newly-released beta of Amazon’s management console is reasonably friendly, but it is not going to let your grandma run her own data center. I took a bit of a tour today. Although the interface is currently buggy, and finding docs on AWS continues to be a bit [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud, excerpt, hands-on
by Lydia Leong | January 9, 2009 | Comments Off
A handful of quick news-ish takes: Amazon has released the beta of its EC2 management console. This brings point-and-click friendliness to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure service. A quick glance through the interface makes it clear that effort was made to make it easy to use, beginning with big colorful buttons. My expectation is that a lot [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, CDN, net neutrality, news
by Lydia Leong | January 9, 2009 | Comments Off
People occasionally ask me why busy, highly-skilled, highly-compensated programmers freely donate their time to open-source projects. In the past, I’ve nattered about the satisfaction of sharing with the community, the pleasure of programming as a hobby even if you do it for your day job, the “just make it work” attitude that often prevails among [...]
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Category: Industry Tags: book, open source, science
by Lydia Leong | January 8, 2009 | Comments Off
If you deal with pricing, or for that matter, marketing or sales in general, and you’re going to read one related book this year, read Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely. (I mentioned an article by him in a previous post on the impact of transparent pricing for CDNs, [...]
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by Lydia Leong | January 7, 2009 | Comments Off
Today, Sun announced the acquisition of Q-Layer, a Belgium-based start-up of about two dozen people. Q-Layer is a virtualization orchestration vendor, with a focus that seems similar to 3Tera. For a similar acquisition parallel, look at Dune Technologies, acquired by VMware in late 2007. When people say “orchestrate virtual resources”, usually what they mean is, [...]
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by Lydia Leong | January 6, 2009 | 1 Comment
I recently finished reading Punching In, a book by Alex Frankel. It’s about his experience working as a front-line employee in a variety of companies, from UPS to Apple. The book is focused upon corporate culture, the indoctrination of customer-facing employees, and how such employees influence the customer experience. And that got me thinking. Culture [...]
Category: Industry Tags: book, CDN, customers, hosting, people
by Lydia Leong | January 5, 2009 | Comments Off
I thought I’d start off the New Year with a FAQ: “How do I get to talk to you about what my company is offering?” This is closely related to one of the questions that I get most frequently at conferences and networking events: “How do I get on an analyst’s radar screen?” The answer [...]
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Category: Analyst Life Tags: Gartner, research
