Lydia Leong

While I’ve been out of the office, Google has made some significant announcements. My colleague Ray Valdes has been writing about Google Wave and its secret sauce. I highly encourage you to go read his blog.
Google and Salesforce.com continue to build on their partnership. In April, they unveiled Salesforce for Google Apps. Now, they’re introducing [...]

[Read more →]

The cloud industry is young. Amazon’s EC2 service dates back just to October 2007, and just about everything related to public cloud infrastructure post-dates that point. Your typical cloud start-up is at most 18 months old, and in most cases, less than a year old. It has a handful of developers, some interesting tech, plenty [...]

[Read more →]

Catching up on some commentary…
Amazon recently introduced three new features: monitoring, load-balancing, and auto-scaling. (As usual, Werner Vogels has further explanation, and RightScale has a detailed examination.)
The monitoring service, called CloudWatch, provides utilization metrics for your running EC2 instances. This is a premium service on top of the regular EC2 fee; it costs 1.5 cents [...]

[Read more →]

I have been crazily, insanely busy, and my frequency of blog posting has suffered for it. On the plus side, I’ve been busy because a huge number of people — users, vendors, investors — want to talk about cloud.
I’ve seen enough questions about VMware investing $20 million in Terremark that I figured I’d write a [...]

[Read more →]

John Treadway of Cloud Bzz asked my colleague Ben Pring, at our Outsourcing Summit, about how we derived our cloud forecast. Ben’s answer is apparently causing a bit of concern. I figured it might be useful for me to respond publicly, since I’m one of the authors of the forecast.
The full forecast document (clients only, [...]

[Read more →]

A Fortune 1000 technology vendor installed a new IP phone system last year. There was one problem: By IT department policy, that company does not change any defaults associated with hardware or software purchased from a vendor. In this case, the IP phones defaulted to no ring tone. So the phone does not ring audibly [...]

[Read more →]

If you need more RAM, and you have to call your service provider, they’ve got to order the RAM, wait until they receive it, and then put it in a physical server, before you actually get more memory, and then they bill you on a one-off basis for buying and installing the RAM, you’re not [...]

[Read more →]

I’m seeing an increasing number of IT buyers try to negotiate “out clauses” in their contracts — clauses that let them arbitrarily terminate their services, or which allow them to do so based on certain economy-related business conditions.
People are doing this because they’re afraid of the future. If, for instance, they launch a service [...]

[Read more →]

Excerpt: Click here to read the original. (This is shortened, more than excerpted; see the original to get a full context.)
Lack of clear guidelines around user-generated content, coupled with poor customer communications, is a dangerous combination, and it’s one that people across many industries can learn from.
One of NCsoft’s (SEO:036570) veteran properties, five-year-old massively multiplayer [...]

[Read more →]