Posts Tagged ‘ Twitter ’

The Opportunity of Social & Mobile – If Not You Then Who?

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 the question is – is your business taking advantage of…

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Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT

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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Vendor FUD: How Should Vendors, Enterprises, and Influencers React?

Vendor FUD: How Should Vendors, Enterprises, and Influencers React?

I, along with many others, witnessed this week (or was it last week?) a public squabble between two well-known vendors in the virtualization market. Of course, this is nothing new. The whole world has been watching as Adobe attacked Apple (and Apple responded) over Flash support on the iPad. Before that, of course, America was regaled by the amusing Verizon campaign attacking AT&T (‘There’s a map for that’). Last year the gloves were well and truly off between VMware and Microsoft over Hyper-V bluescreens. Apple and Microsoft were at it last year when both ran their ‘I’m a PC’ ads (each side taking very different interpretations), and they were at it again just this week. Now, a lot of these ‘fights’ seem to be what is referred to in rugby circles as ‘handbags at 10 paces’ – a long-distance squabble with a lot of pushing and posturing and preening, but…

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Myopic View of DevOps Misses the Mark

Myopic View of DevOps Misses the Mark

I am hearing a lot about the rise of a concept called “devops” – a mashup of “development” and “operations”. I am not at all an expert in this area, but from what I can tell, devops is aimed at streamlining rapidly iterative application delivery to allow for greater development and business agility. Devops aims to achieve this by breaking down the barriers – human, process, and technology – between application development and system operations. Interestingly, the concept is new enough that, as I write this, there is not even an entry for it in Wikipedia yet. I did find a blog by Damon Edwards (on Twitter – @damonedwards) very useful though, as he explains the age-old disconnects between application developers “throwing software over the wall”, and ops who are painfully resistant to change. James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart ) blogged very recently on the concept too , and again provided some…

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On My Leaving EMA to Join CA

On My Leaving EMA to Join CA

For those who have asked, and others who may care to know – the rumours are indeed true. After many happy years leading the fantastic systems and storage management team at one of the very best IT industry analyst and consulting firms, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), I have moved on to take up an exciting new opportunity.

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In Cloud Computing, Downtime is Endemic – But Does it Matter?

In Cloud Computing, Downtime is Endemic – But Does it Matter?

There is a perennial debate in cloud computing about whether a failure of one cloud service provider can be more generalized to a “failure of cloud computing”. It is an important question because availability is a key decision factor in choosing between private and public cloud, and between public cloud providers. The most recent example of such failures is the power outage at IaaS provider Rackspace’s London facility, but of course, we have seen this before from many public cloud providers – including Rackspace in particular, and not just once. SaaS provider Salesforce.com (and its PaaS arm, Force.com) has also had one outage already this year, an event that is far from unusual, and nothing new. Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, GoGrid, RIM, Twitter, Paypal and many others have also had substantial (and often repeated) outages.

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Why Blog, Why Now?

Someone recently asked me why I was starting a blog, and why I was doing it now. Anyone who knows me, knows that I had for a long time steered away from Social Media – blogs, Twitter, etc. – for a number of reasons. But I am of the increasing belief that many of my reasons were, are at least are becoming, invalid. For example:

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