Thomas Bittman

It seems like some hard lines have been drawn in the market over cloud computing versus on-premises computing. On the one hand, the proponents of cloud computing are promoting a massive shift of software development toward cloud platforms, designing for multitenancy and massive scale. No more software packages – just buy software as a service. [...]

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Summer’s almost over – time for less sun and more clouds!
I’ve gotten a lot of client questions recently about how to get started building their private clouds. Their vendors are at their doorstep hawking private cloud computing. Clients are asking about what technologies to use, which vendors to choose, how to build one, etc. I [...]

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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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Instead, it’s a stepping stone. It’s about embracing cloud concepts earlier, and about enabling the flexibility to use public cloud computing services as soon as they meet requirements. Getting some of the benefits of cloud computing, but contained within the enterprise.
I had a busy week along the west coast, meeting individually with fifteen different [...]

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One interesting question that cloud computing raises is the importance of customer intimacy between IT and its business customers. Improving the relationship between IT and the business has always been considered a major goal – aligning IT and business strategies, integrating IT and business processes, ensuring IT people understand the business and vice versa. [...]

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My last blog entry caused quite a ruckus. While the term “private cloud” has been in use for at least a year, there are still semantic, moral and religious issues with the term. I respect the issues, but I have also found the anti-private-cloud zealots to be a minority. In the past week alone, I [...]

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There’s an argument over whether the term “cloud” can be used to describe the changes taking place in internal IT architectures. How silly! Regardless of the term, there is a major trend playing out over the next few years where internal IT providers want to make fundamental changes so that they behave and provide similar [...]

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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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More than half of large enterprise data center executives expect to get some IT services from the cloud within two years.
During Gartner’s Data Center Conference in Las Vegas last week, we used electronic polling to survey the attendees on various topics. I asked several questions during my keynote. More than 1,600 attended the session, [...]

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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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