Imperfect substitutes
HP’s PDAs and phones never received management attention. How do I know? Because they relied on off-the-shelf components for everything including software. It indicated that the value to be offered was in “leveraging” (there’s that word again) their brand and distribution. The value of HP was not to build something great–something that required blood, sweat [...]
Hadoop Distributions And Kids’ Soccer
The big players are moving in for a piece of the Big Data action. IBM, EMC, and NetApp have stepped up their messaging, in part to prevent startup upstarts like Cloudera from cornering the Apache Hadoop distribution market. They are all elbowing one another to get closest to “pure Apache” while still “adding value.” Numerous [...]
Citrix buys Cloud.com – Brief Note
Citrix announced the acquisition of Cloud.com this morning hoping to flesh out its long-running cloud road-map. This Brief Note covers what this means for Citrix and provides some background. Summary There’s some clear motivations for Citrix: Filling whitespace – Citrix has long spoken about cloud computing, but they’ve yet to make a big splash on [...]
A Tale of Two Cities: SugarCRM – From Open Source to Open
I’ve always been a fan of SugarCRM – but a critical fan. One who griped because he loved. I’ve liked the quality of the platform and the products. I’ve liked the staff and management team. I’ve liked much of the outwardly facing attitude of the company to the public. But despite the company’s ardent claims, [...]
VMWare Cloud Foundry – Quick Analysis and Press Pass
“We believe the current [platform clouds, such as Azure and App Engine] are incomplete,” [VMware senior director of cloud and application services Jerry] Chen says. “There is no one platform that is multi-cloud – private and public – and no one cloud is architected, out of the gate, to be extensible to many different frameworks [...]
FaceBook open sources building an energy efficient data center
Back in 2006 I was the co-founder of a Data Centre in Cork called Cork Internet eXchange. We decided, when building it out, that we would design and build it as a hyper energy-efficient data centre. At the time, I was also heavily involved in social media, so I had the crazy idea, well, [...]
Red Hat the Master Packager: Open Source and the $1bn annual runrate company
A core research thesis for me is that the best packager in any tech wave wins, and wins big. The number one position in a market, with all the network dominance that implies, goes to the best packager, not the best inventor. Packaging is where you cross the chasm- where geek stuff goes mainstream. Tim [...]
Your very own OpenStack Cloud – Quick Analysis
Rackspace announces a support plan for OpenStack, while Dell, Rackspace, and Opscode announce an OpenStack installer for quick cloud building.
What if You Had an Uber Game Console and an Industrial Graphics Workstation in Your Browser?
Adobe has just released its first public “Incubator” (I think that’s early Beta) version of a new Flash player with Molehill API’s. It represents a whole new level of graphics performance inside your browser. Imagine being able to run Game Console quality games directly from the browser. What’s different about Molehill is it directly accesses [...]
Beyond Jeopardy! with IBM Watson – Quick Analysis
Seeing a computer play two humans at Jeopardy! is a lot more entertaining than I thought it’d be. I’d been ignoring most of the hoopla around Watson figuring it for a big, effective PR campaign on IBM’s part. It is that for certain, and good on them for doing it. I’ve been more interested in [...]
