by Lydia Leong | June 30, 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.
Category: Analyst Life Tags: humor
by Lydia Leong | June 29, 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 [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, hosting
by Lydia Leong | June 26, 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 [...]
by Lydia Leong | June 25, 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 [...]
by Lydia Leong | June 24, 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 — [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: networking
by Lydia Leong | June 22, 2009 | Comments Off
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 [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Amazon, Cloud
by Lydia Leong | June 18, 2009 | 2 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. [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud
by Lydia Leong | June 16, 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 [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, hosting
by Lydia Leong | June 10, 2009 | Comments Off
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). [...]
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by Lydia Leong | June 9, 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, [...]
