Thomas Bittman

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Entries Categorized as 'Cloud'


Mark Twain and the Open Virtualization Alliance

by Tom Bittman  |  May 19, 2011  |  1 Comment

On May 17, 2011, HP, IBM, Intel and Red Hat (as governing members) joined BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems and Suse to announce the “Open Virtualization Alliance”, or OVA (which means “eggs” in Latin, right?). Their stated purposes include “increase overall awareness” of KVM, “accelerate the emergence of an ecosystem” around KVM, and so on. Sure, [...]

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Category: Cloud Future of Infrastructure Virtualization     Tags: , ,

How Cloud Computing Reboots the Channel

by Tom Bittman  |  April 7, 2011  |  6 Comments

In the past two months I’ve spoken to an audience of channel partners, had 6-7 lunch roundtables with channel partners in the U.S. and Canada, and I’ve met with a few channel partners in Europe. Two things are becoming increasingly clear to me: the channel will be critical in broader adoption of cloud computing (and [...]

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Category: Cloud     Tags: , ,

Going Laptopless

by Tom Bittman  |  April 5, 2011  |  1 Comment

I’m a knowledge worker. I’m in Copenhagen, on business. My laptop is in Connecticut. And I’m OK with that. Now let me preface this by saying as an analyst, I don’t cover client computing, or PCs or tablet computers. I’m writing this as Joe Knowledge Worker. Even so, I’m going to avoid using product brand [...]

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Category: Cloud Education Future of Infrastructure Industry Analyst     Tags: ,

The End of Server Growth?

by Tom Bittman  |  February 11, 2011  |  4 Comments

Will virtualization, multicore, and cloud computing trends send x86 architecture server and processor volumes down for the next decade? It certainly is a realistic scenario – and perhaps the most likely. At Gartner, we spend a lot of time trying to understand future scenarios, the likelihood of each, indicators that a scenario is likely to [...]

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Category: Cloud Virtualization     Tags: , ,

Embracing the Blur

by Tom Bittman  |  February 9, 2011  |  3 Comments

We’re having an interesting discussion inside of Gartner (due credit to Neil MacDonald, Lydia Leong, Cameron Haight and David Cearley for the ideas in this post – I hope they post further on this). The concepts here aren’t new. For example, in 2004, I talked about “the walls coming down” between business, the data center [...]

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Category: Agility Cloud Education Future of Infrastructure Virtualization     Tags: ,

Economies of Fail

by Tom Bittman  |  December 7, 2010  |  1 Comment

Interesting discussions here at Gartner’s Data Center Conference in Las Vegas. While discussing the importance of economies of scale to cloud providers, I pointed out that economies of scale is a double-edged sword. While enterprises tend to have many (often hundreds, or even thousands) IT services that they provide, cloud providers tend to have only [...]

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Category: Cloud     Tags: ,

Virtualization Then & Now: Symposium 2009-2010

by Tom Bittman  |  October 18, 2010  |  15 Comments

My first presentation at Symposium 2010 was “Server Virtualization: From Virtual Machines to Private Clouds.” Attendance was crazy – the large room was packed, people were standing at the back, and apparently a few dozen were turned away at the door. This proves that server virtualization is not only a hot topic, it’s getting hotter [...]

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Category: Cloud Virtualization     Tags: , , , , , ,

The Buzz at Gartner’s Symposium 2010: Cloud!

by Tom Bittman  |  October 18, 2010  |  Submit a Comment

Gartner’s Symposium this year is a blow-out – more than 7,500 attendees, and more than 1,600 CIOs. That means a very busy week of presentations and one-on-ones. As an analyst, what I always find interesting is “the buzz”. You get a real good sense of what’s hot based on one-on-one load, and one-on-one topics. I [...]

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Category: Cloud Virtualization     Tags: , , ,

IT Operations: From Day-Care to University

by Tom Bittman  |  May 24, 2010  |  1 Comment

After spending the day discussing IT operations, here are some musings on the future of IT ops. Traditionally, IT ops has been responsible for managing operationally "dumb" applications. These legacy applications are like infants – they need constant care and feeding. They can’t take care of themselves, and they rely entirely on others to survive. [...]

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Category: Cloud Future of Infrastructure     Tags: , ,

Clarifying Private Cloud Computing

by Tom Bittman  |  May 18, 2010  |  22 Comments

I continue to talk with clients who understand the concept of private cloud computing, they think they know it when they see it, but they can’t quite explain it in words. A year ago I described The Spectrum of Private to Public Cloud Services, but I didn’t put that in the form of a definition. [...]

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Category: Cloud     Tags: ,