Lydia Leong

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Lydia Leong header image 4

Entries from June 2009

Does this describe your IT project plan?

June 30th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Does this picture describe your IT project plan? Evidence indicates that it is illustrative of a significant percentage of the plans of the clients that I speak with, once I probe beneath the glossy surface of false confidence.

[Read more →]

Tags: Analyst Life

I’m thinking about using Amazon, IBM, or Rackspace…

June 29th, 2009 · 5 Comments

At Gartner, much of our coverage of the cloud system infrastructure services market (i.e., Amazon, GoGrid, Joyent, etc.) is an outgrowth of our coverage of the hosting market. Hosting is certainly not the only common use case for cloud, but it is the use case that is driving much of the revenue right now, a [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Does Procurement know what you care about?

June 26th, 2009 · 3 Comments

In many enterprises, IT folks decide what they want to buy and who they want to buy it from, but Procurement negotiates the contract, manages the relationship, and has significant influence on renewals. Right now, especially, purchasing folks have a lot of influence, because they’re often now the ones who go out and shop for [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Industry

How not to use a Magic Quadrant

June 25th, 2009 · 3 Comments

The Web hosting Magic Quadrant is currently in editing, the culmination of a six-month process (despite my strenuous efforts to keep it to four months). Many, many client conversations, reference calls, and vendor discussions later, we arrive at the demonstration of a constant challenge: the user tendency to misinterpret the Magic Quadrant, and the correlating [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Industry

ICANN and DNS

June 24th, 2009 · 1 Comment

ICANN has been on the soapbox on the topic of DNS recently, encouraging DNSSEC adoption, and taking a stand against top-level domain (TLD) redirection of DNS inquiries.
The DNS error resolution market — usually manifesting itself as the display of an advertising-festooned Web page when a user tries to browse to a non-existent domain — has [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Overpromising

June 22nd, 2009 · No Comments

I’ve turned one of my earlier blog entries, Smoke-and-mirrors and cloud software into a full-blown research note: “Software on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud: How to Tell Hype From Reality” (clients only). It’s a Q&A for your software vendor, if they suggest that you deploy their solution on EC2, or if you want to do so [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

Job-based vs. request-based computing

June 18th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Companies are adopting cloud systems infrastructure services in two different ways: job-based “batch processing”, non-interactive computing; and request-based, real-time-response, interactive computing. The two have distinct requirements, but much as in the olden days of time-sharing, they can potentially share the same infrastructure.
Job-based computing is usually of a number-crunching nature — scientific or high-performance computing. This [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

“Enterprise class” cloud

June 16th, 2009 · 3 Comments

There seems to be an endless parade of hosting companies eager to explain to me that they have an “enterprise class” cloud offering. (Cloud systems infrastructure services, to be precise; I continue to be careless in my shorthand on this blog, although all of us here at Gartner are trying to get into the habit [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Infrastructure

What makes for an effective MQ briefing?

June 10th, 2009 · No Comments

My colleague Ted Chamberlin and I are currently finalizing the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting. This year, we’ve nearly doubled the number of providers on the MQ, adding a bunch of cloud providers who offer hosting services (i.e., providers who are cloud system infrastructure service providers, and who aren’t pure storage or backup).
The [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Industry

Wading into the waters of cloud adoption

June 9th, 2009 · 1 Comment

I’ve been pondering the dot write-ups that I need to do for Gartner’s upcoming Cloud Computing hype cycle, as well as my forthcoming Magic Quadrant on Web Hosting (which now includes a bunch of cloud-based providers), and contemplating this thought:
We are at the start of an adoption curve for cloud computing. Getting from here, [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Industry