by Lydia Leong | May 29, 2009 | Comments Off
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 [...]
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by Lydia Leong | May 11, 2009 | Comments Off
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 [...]
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by Lydia Leong | April 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
One of the ongoing refrains of the analyst job is listening to clients gripe, day in and day out, about the things they don’t like about their vendors. Sometimes these things are niggling annoyances. Sometimes, though, these things are rage-inducing, or, in clients who tend to take everything calmly in stride, at least a distinct [...]
by Lydia Leong | April 6, 2009 | 2 Comments
A recent interview of some Twitter developers, on Twitter’s use of Scala has touched off a fair amount of controversy in the Ruby community, and prompting Todd Hoff of the High Scalability to muse on an interesting statement: At some point, the cost of servers outweighs the cost of programmers. We all know that the [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: appdev, people, scalability
by Lydia Leong | February 18, 2009 | Comments Off
Too many service providers (and companies in general) use “discipline” as an excuse for “lack of agility”. Discipline does not mean appointing a committee to study the problem for the next year. Exercising caution and prudence does not mean failing to act. Laying a solid foundation does not mean standing around doing the equivalent of [...]
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by Lydia Leong | February 12, 2009 | Comments Off
A client recently asked me what my Clifton Strengths are. I couldn’t remember at the time, but I’ve dug out old 1.0 results from back in 2006… Ideation. People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. Strategic. People strong in the Strategic theme [...]
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Category: Analyst Life Tags: people
by Lydia Leong | February 11, 2009 | Comments Off
Back in 2005, my colleague Monica Basso and I wrote a research note titled, “Wide Array of Communications Overwhelms Users“. In it, we pointed out that the proliferation of communication mechanisms and the complex intermixing of personal and business communications would become increasingly unmanageable. Until a few months ago, Gartner had a policy that disallowed [...]
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Category: Analyst Life Tags: networking, people
by Lydia Leong | February 9, 2009 | Comments Off
Joel Spolsky has two UI design principles: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to. These ought to be core principles of cloud UI design, and, in fact, most cloud infrastructure providers do seem to earnestly [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, people
by Lydia Leong | February 6, 2009 | Comments Off
We’re in the midst of a fascinating discontinuity in IT purchasing patterns. Even the dot-com crash didn’t cause this kind of disruption. Practically everyone is scrambling to save money immediately, and some organizations are looking at long-term belt-tightening. The most obvious immediate impact is that buyer tolerance for paying a premium is rapidly diminishing. Quality [...]
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by Lydia Leong | January 22, 2009 | 2 Comments
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 [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: Cloud, people
