Author: Andi

Andi Mann is an accomplished digital business executive with extensive global expertise as a strategist, technologist, innovator, marketer, communicator, and thought leader. For over 25 years and across five continents, Andi has built success with Fortune 500 corporations, technology vendors, governments, and as a leading research analyst and business consultant. Andi is a sought-after commentator on business technology - published in USA Today, New York Times, Forbes, CIO, and Wall Street Journal; presented at Gartner ITxpo, VMworld, CA World, Interop, Cloud Expo, SAPPHIRE, and Citrix Synergy; participated and hosted interviews for radio, television, webcasts, podcasts, and live events; and more. Andi has been named to Business Insider's Top Thought-Provoking Enterprise Tech Execs, Huffington Post's Top 100 Cloud Computing Experts, Gathering Clouds Top 5 Cloud Experts - Who’s Who in Cloud, SAP's Top 50 Cloud Computing Influencers, and in research firm ITSMA's Best Practices in B2B Thought Leadership. Andi is co-author of the popular handbook, 'Visible Ops – Private Cloud'; and most recently, 'The Innovative CIO'. He blogs at 'Andi Mann – Übergeek' (http://pleasediscuss.com/andimann), and tweets as @AndiMann. Outside work Andi is an avid sports fan who loves cycling, skiing, basketball, and rugby; he also enjoys cooking, eating, travelling, art, photography, and gaming.

New Cloud Reference Architecture From NIST

So, here is something interesting I discovered today, courtesy of a tweet from Christian Reilly (@ReillyUSA) – the US federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), today released Version 1 of their Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (PDF).…

CIOZone.com Virtualization Video Discussion – Moving Past Virtual Stall

At VMworld 2010, I had the great pleasure to record a video interview with Roger Green, Executive Editor at CIOZone.com. We chatted for about 20 minutes in total (in 2 parts) about virtualization, the issues of virtual stall (including both…

Risk and Reward in the Cloud

Another day, another public cloud failure. Sometime on Friday December 10, 2010, claims content delivery network (CDN) provider SimpleCDN, two of its major upstream infrastructure providers, SoftLayer and Hosting Services, summarily terminated service for much of SimpleCDN’s infrastructure in Dallas,…

Public Cloud Computing is NOT For Everyone

Without pointing any fingers, there seems to be a persistent refrain from some public cloud computing proponents that says, ‘If you are running your own IT, then you are doing it wrong’. This attitude fails to account for the magnitude…

The Cost of Innovation in Virtualization and Cloud?

I was pointed the other day to a chart on the Business Insider ‘Chart of the Day’ (@chartoftheday) showing the R&D expenditures for a handful of tech companies, evidence of Apple’s supposedly superior ‘innovation’ compared to four apparently randomly chosen…

Mainframe as an Enterprise Desktop Virtualization Server?

In my last blog, I talked about the idea of a ‘software mainframe’, and how – if that term really means anything – IBM could actually be a serious threat to VMware (and the Virtual Computing Environment coalition of VMware/Cisco/EMC)…