Larry Carvalho

HP and Microsoft fall under the category of major enterprise technology providers along with Cisco, IBM, Oracle, SAP and VMWare/EMC. With an eye on projected cloud computing revenue growth, they are all looking at ways to expand their cloud computing presence in order to avoid being overtaken by this transformational change. These two companies made announcements recently that caught my attention (but there are more): HP announced the purchase of Vertica followed by embracing OpenStack and CloudFoundry as part of their cloud offerings. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others announced their support of Hadoop These announcements give open source offerings and enterprise technology providers end-to-end stack support. Open source gives HP a less expensive way of moving into the software market outside the systems management domain. While many customers are wary of open sour... (more)

Start-ups Leveraging the Cloud

A lot has been talked about upcoming information technology delivery trends and its effect on the innovative start-up solutions.  Mark Andreessen recently commented that Facebook would not have been viable as a company without leveraging these new technologies to deliver their product.  While a lot of attention is paid to huge success stories like Facebook, a small start-up in Cincinnati called CoupSmart has leveraged a whole different approach to combine mobile and social networking capabilities to deliver a unique solution. The recent deal environment filled with daily deal si... (more)

Integrated Solutions – 2004 vs 2011

Back in 2004, I worked for IBM, which offered end-to-end solutions that few other technology vendors could provide.  An automotive customer in Australia had a myriad of disjointed processes connecting them with their end users and wanted to achieve tangible cost savings by improving operational effectiveness. To accomplish these goals, the client wanted to deliver services to their dealers, suppliers and fleet customers through a single portal interface. This was going to be achieved through the integration of information, people and processes to help maintain more effective re... (more)

Upcoming in June: A Packed Few Days of Cloudy Information

Just 20 days more for a Cloud Workshop in Boston, but I am already looking forward to the days after this workshop! Cloud Computing has been maturing rapidly and the next obvious step is for customers to leverage this technology. As a result, Dave Nielsen and myself have put together a series of workshops to help customers bring in their application for evaluation for cloud applicability. If you are interested in using cloud technology at your organization or for your customers, the workshop in Boston on June 2 will help you understand various characteristics of an application t... (more)

Do Not Pass on PaaS

During my Cloud Computing Bootcamp presentations a lot of discussion was around picking the right vendors to develop solutions on the cloud.  Several vendors in this space have skills in certain areas but are not strong in all areas to make available an end to end solution. Platform as a Service (PaaS) requires a robust tool-set that has to go through a stringent selection process before someone picks it as their platform to build strong solutions on.  The folks selecting it usually know the risks associated with picking a wrong platform. That is why I picked the title of this b... (more)