Thomas Bittman

I’m sure I could come up with more than four, but let’s throw a few out there that I continue to hear from people trying to understand the phenomenon. Don’t misunderstand my intention here – I believe cloud computing will be huge, especially for commodity services, especially for small businesses and start-ups, especially for new [...]

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But cloud computing doesn’t need a revolution – capitalism will lead the evolution of cloud computing.
With only a few word changes, the opening of the Communist Manifesto could be easily inserted into the Open Cloud Manifesto, announced March 30, 2009: 
“A spectre is haunting the cloud – the spectre of openness and standards. Amazon, Google, Microsoft [...]

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Cisco’s public blog recently announced an architectural approach they call “Unified Computing”. There’s been a lot of speculation about Cisco moving into the blade server business and so forth. I think Cisco just made clear that in their view the network may be at the center of IT, but “unifying” it with computing and storage [...]

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What’s private? What’s public? What’s in-between? We’ve been talking quite a bit lately at Gartner about variations of isolation in a cloud computing architecture. It’s not black and white – it’s gray (aren’t all clouds?).
Private cloud computing requires that the enterprise have dedicated data centers and everything inside.
Public cloud computing assumes that [...]

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What a crazy and exhilarating week in Las Vegas!
I delivered the keynote at Gartner’s 27th annual Data Center Conference this week. Here are four major points I made. Later I’ll post some key take-aways from hours and hours of conversations – lots of great insights from conversations between our analysts and more than 1,800 attendees [...]

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Is Azure a hopeful name? An azure sky implies cloudless, doesn’t it?
No question, Microsoft would like cloud computing to go away. Selling gazillions of copies of Windows and Office, not to mention mere zillions of Windows Server and Server products has been a nice business. This whole cloud idea is ruining their bright, clear, sunny [...]

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My head has been in the clouds for the past week or so – I’ve literally been working full-time on cloud computing. Cloud services are popping up right and left, and more are coming. Some of these are not cloud by our definition. But what about the ones that fit the definition, but barely? From [...]

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At VMworld today, VMware announced two strategic shifts that are as important as they are unsurprising. One pits VMware firmly against powerhouses IBM, HP and Microsoft in the competition for infrastructure control. The other extends VMware’s virtualization story into cloud computing. Are they overreaching?
The first, “Virtual Data Center Operating System”, is what Gartner defined as [...]

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