Thomas Bittman

At this week’s Gartner Symposium in Orlando, there was a noticeable shift in the end user discussions regarding virtualization and cloud computing, and a few surprises:
1) In my presentation on server virtualization on Monday, before I started, I asked the audience how many of them considered private cloud computing to be a core strategy [...]

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Tomorrow I leave for Orlando for our annual all-up IT conference of the year in Orlando, Florida. Attendees see this conference as a one-stop week-long update on all IT industry trends, an opportunity to network with thousands of their peers (including more than a thousand CIOs), and an opportunity to have face-to-face one-on-ones (as opposed [...]

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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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I was discussing cloud computing with a client today, trying to find a good market analogy to position how cloud computing would evolve.
The electricity utility example doesn’t work. Neither does the water utility. There are two reasons: (1) Computing is a rapidly evolving technology, and (2) Service requirements vary widely for computing. Electricity [...]

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Few organizations that I talk to seem to understand the strategic ramifications of server virtualization. They tend to think about cost-cutting – virtualization simply as a form of efficient consolidation. We’ve surveyed our clients – those starting out on virtualization say they are doing it to save money. They are thinking tactically.
Hey, there’s nothing [...]

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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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Is it a private cloud service, or a public cloud service? It’s not quite so binary. I first explored this in my post Virtual Cloud Privacy is Gray a few months ago. There are two relative dimensions that determine how “private” or how “public” a cloud service really is:

Service Control/Ownership: There are two ends of [...]

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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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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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