Top 10 Things I Learned About Cloud Last Week

October 27, 2011
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Top 10 Things I Learned About Cloud Last Week

While travelling back from VMworld EMEA last week, I stopped at London and visited with a fantastic CA Technologies customer and partner, Logicalis UK. Logicalis UK is an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, part of a group that employs over 2,000 people worldwide, with annualized revenues in excess of $1 billion.

Logicalis is doing some amazing things to deliver both public and private hosted cloud using CA Technologies, alongside key strategic partners Cisco and NetApp. While visiting their site in the UK – just outside of London, I learned a lot about the real world of cloud service providers.

The top 10 things I learned about cloud from my visit to Logicalis UK were:

1. Cloudbursting is real & it is happening today

There is a lot of hubbub over whether or not cloudbursting...
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10 Preconditions for IT Solution Design

October 13, 2011
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10 Preconditions for IT Solution Design

With VMworld EMEA coming up next week, I am reminded of an evening at VMworld last year, and a stimulating discussion about good product design with Prabhakar Gopalan (@PGopalan), a former colleague at CA Technologies who is now with Dell.

Prabhakar is insightful to a depth few people reach, and passionate about innovative thinking. In Copenhagen he talked excitedly about a small museum he had visited called the Danish Design Centre (and yes, that is the correct spelling :) ), and what Danish design could teach us about building better software.

I visited it a couple of days later*, and one exhibit really caught my eye, with 10 ‘preconditions for good design‘ laid out in stylized writing on a plain brick wall (see photo top left). It was interesting to think...
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Real-World Applications for the Private Cloud

October 6, 2011
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Real-World Applications for the Private Cloud

Not surprisingly, since the release of my new book, Visible Ops – Private Cloud, I have been talking with a lot of people about how to deploy private cloud, where to start, what to avoid, etc. So far, the most common question has been, “What type of existing workloads are organizations putting into private cloud environments today – and what are they avoiding?”

So I thought I would jot down some of my answers, specifically related to ‘cloud-migrant’ services, as opposed to ‘cloud-native’ services – and without getting too hung up on whether the use cases are 100% cloud or not!

One recurrent use case is to provide dynamic desktop allocation, especially for education and projects use cases. A number of schools, universities, training centers, and even some larger enterprises, have adopted private cloud to allocate servers, clients,...
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The Opportunity of Social & Mobile – If Not You Then Who?

September 29, 2011
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The Opportunity of Social & Mobile – If Not You Then Who?

I was amused the other day by a line I saw on Twitter from Wall Street Journal columnist, Jason Gay (@jasonWSJ – see image at left):

“If Twitter didn’t exist, you’d have no idea what airlines your friends are currently furious at”

The humour in this pivots on the very real fact that a lot of social media and mobile technology is really quite banal. Like millions of others, I have been guilty of whining on Twitter or SMS or forums about bad experiences with airlines and grocery stores and crowds and restaurants.

Yet, the humour also pivots on the very real fact that Twitter – as with other social and mobile media – is much more than just an outlet for venting. It has literally launched revolutions and saved lives, and demonstrably improved opportunities for thousands of businesses.

So...
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A Service Taxonomy for Cloud Choices

September 22, 2011
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A Service Taxonomy for Cloud Choices

I have been talking with many CIOs for some time about strategic adoption of cloud solutions. A key step in these conversations is always the review of the portfolio of services they provide to business users, so they can choose which clouds to adopt and why.

This has led me to describe a high-level taxonomy that segments the service portfolio according to the different cloud requirements, capabilities, and approaches in different types of applications and services.…


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VMworld Wrap Up: Extending VMware for Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud

September 14, 2011
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VMworld Wrap Up: Extending VMware for Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud

I had a great time at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas this year. As I predicted in my last blog post, I met with loads of amazing people – too many to list out here, let alone in 140 on Twitter! I also saw some great technology in the solutions exchange, dropped in on some fascinating sessions, and of course enjoyed some excellent meals, drinks, and parties!

I was also very pleased to present on Extending the Value of Your VMware Solutions to Design, Deliver and Maintain Reliable, Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud Services. I certainly was not there to ‘pitch’ any CA Technologies products or solutions (after all, I know that no one wants a sales pitch at a tradeshow like VMworld). Instead, I tried to provide strategic advice to the audience on how to look at...
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Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT

September 9, 2011
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Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT

I posted a new article over at the CA Community website titled ‘Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT‘, where I talk about (obviously) the impact of consumer-driven IT:

Consumerization of IT is not a really new concept. Consumers (as employees) have been bringing their technology to the workplace for decades, like the pre-HP Palm Pilots and the pre-Google Motorola ‘mobile’ phones. However, we are now facing a new wave of consumerization, and it changing the way business operates as consumers start to drive a new approach to using and providing information technology.

Please check the entire post over at the CA Community website – ‘Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT‘


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Beyond BSM – Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Service Management!

August 19, 2011
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Beyond BSM – Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Service Management!

I have just started posting on BSM Digest on behalf of CA Technologies. You can read my first post there, Beyond BSM – Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Service Management! In it, I talk about how cloud drives an urgent need for a more flexible and dynamic management practice based on automated service operations management.…


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Microsoft’s Office 365 Hit By Outages: eWeek.com

August 19, 2011
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Microsoft’s Office 365 Hit By Outages: eWeek.com

I was quoted in eWeek this week, commenting on the Microsoft Office 365 outages:

Even such incidents, though, don’t seem to be dissuading businesses from believing in the ultimate benefits of the cloud. “Clouds will have downtime—it’s a fundamental issue,” Andi Mann, chief cloud strategy guru at CA Technologies, told eWEEK. “But you need to be ready for downtime, whether it’s your own infrastructure or cloud infrastructure. You need to understand what the risk is. It’s all just about risk management.”

In other news, I am considering getting new business cards listing my title as “Chief Cloud Strategy Guru”. What do you think?

Check the whole article here – Microsoft’s Office 365 Hit By Outages – eWeek.com…


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Why Do You *NOT* Love Going to VMworld?

August 12, 2011
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Why Do You *NOT* Love Going to VMworld?

In my last post, I asked why you love going to VMworld, and gave you a few of my reasons – like the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, and the parties.

But like any business trip, it is not all fun and games, beer and skittles, rainbows and unicorns.

So why do you *not* like going to VMworld?

Like my last post, I’ll go first. Here are some things I really do *not* love about going to VMworld – as well as some upsides to take the sting off :) :

  • Las Vegas – Moscone at San Francisco was great, but I have been to Vegas so much now that I am getting tired of it.
    • Upside: if it has to be in Vegas, I think the Venetian is the best venue...
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Why Do You Love Going to VMworld?

August 12, 2011
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Why Do You Love Going to VMworld?

I love going to VMworld. It may be my favorite conference of the year (after CA World, of course!).

If you love going to VMworld too, then I would really like to know why.

I’ll start …

For me, the best part of going to VMworld is the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, the parties, and the buzz:

  • I meet great friends, colleagues, customers, analysts, tweeps, and journalists who I hardly see during the year – even though I never seem to have enough time to see everyone I want to!
  • The labs are reportedly excellent, and it is hard to beat them for in-depth hands-on training. I’m hoping to finally attend these myself this year, if only I can find the time!
  • There are always interesting announcements, whether from VMware or their partners (like CA) with a Read more »