Technology Advancements, New Patterns, And Customer Successes in the Spotlight On June 15, 2011, the first ever analyst report 100% focused on Data Virtualization was published by a research team led by Brian Hopkins of Forrester Research. The report, entitled Data Virtualization Reaches Critical Mass: Technology Advancements, New Patterns, And Customer Successes Make This Enterprise Technology Both A Short- And Long-Term Solution by Brian Hopkins with Alex Cullen, Mike Gilpin, Boris Evelson, Gene Leganza, and Mackenzie Cahill, examines a range of data virtualization topics and provides a number of adoption recommendations. Defining Data Virtualization Forrester's earlier seminal research on Information-as-a-Service (IaaS) sets the stage for this new report. In it they make the following distinction between data virtualization and Iaas: "Data virtualization is a te... (more)

Virtualization – The Engine that Enables Cloud Computing

"Most cloud environments - public, private, or hybrid - run on virtualized infrastructure that share CPU, memory and storage between applications," noted Bryan Semple, Chief Marketing Officer at VKernel in this exclusive Q&A; with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "These shared resource environments behave a lot like mainframes and hence require the same level of capacity planning," concluded Semple. Cloud Computing Journal: A very general question first, about Cloud Computing itself: Surely we've heard all of this before in various forms and guises - grid computing / u... (more)

New Business Monetization Network Models – Google+ vs Facebook

A number of interesting issues have come to light in the recent announcement of Google+ intention to move into social networking in direct competition with Facebook. "Getting It" It may be that Google finally "gets it" with the idea of "circles" and "sparks" as a way of understanding social network segmentation that is superior to Facebook. Specifically the ability to segment different friendship groups into separate conversations is not just a grouping of relationship data but a fundamental "wakeup call" that this is how virtual communities actually work. It's often been surpri... (more)

The Big Win: Stop Playing Small-Ball with Your Cloud Strategy

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley $800 Savings here! Many enterprises are struggling to develop a cloud computing strategy. Cloud computing seems like it ought to be a game-changing technology, but so often when the initial proof of concept is finished, it appears to have simply rearranged the deckchairs within a titanic IT department. The problem is we have been trained through decades of IT implementation to focus on certain metrics. Unfortunately, those are the wrong ones. Consequently, when it comes to cloud computing, most of us are playing "small-ball." To graduate to the big leagu... (more)

The Business Case for Private Cloud

The tone at last week's Cloud Expo in New York was markedly different from years past. It seemed like the wild-eyed optimism, rhetorical discourse and scholarly air of attendees caught in the honeymoon period of cloud computing had been replaced with a focused and pragmatic frenzy as attendees worked the presentation and show room floors looking for the answers to the types of tough questions that only get asked when projects loom menacingly close and budgets get assigned. In other words, after years of talk with little real action many enterprises seemed ready at last to do some... (more)