David Strom

The OpenStack project has over the past few months consolidated its lead and is headed in a positive direction. Mid-October saw the OpenStack Summit conference in San Diego, and there have been a series of big customer wins and deployments. Indeed, the fall season has been like a coming-out party for the open-source cloud-management solution, with more maturing services announced from partners. To be sure, anyone contemplating a move to it should carefully consider some of the alternatives, too. But with so much news around the project, it’s worth noting which areas are currently looking up for OpenStack and what to consider when using it. You can read my report (with a subscription) on GigaOmPro here. ... (more)

Network World: Web-based conferencing comes of age

As more people telecommute, having a reliable way to connect via desktop video conferencing takes on greater importance. And for employees working in the office, Web-based meetings are a less expensive and less time consuming alternative to business travel. Web-based conferencing services aren’t new, but they have been getting better, easier to use and less expensive. The options range from one-on-one desktop screen sharing to group video chats to large-scale presentations such as Webinars or “virtual conferences.” We looked at eight desktop conferencing services, a mix of market... (more)

Tell Your Children to Learn Hadoop

I spent some time last week with several vendors and users of Hadoop, the formless data repository that is the current favorite of many dot coms and the darling of the data nerds. It was instructive. Moms and Dads, tell your kids to start learning this technology now. The younger the better. I still know relatively little about the Hadoop ecosystem, but it is a big tent and getting bigger. To grok it, you have to cast aside several long-held tech assumptions. First, that you know what you are looking for when you build your databases: Hadoop encourages pack rats to store every log... (more)

The dark side of Google

In the past several years, Google has become more evil. Despite its goal of purity and widely-heralded philosophy at its founding, it has become just another corporation trying to make a buck. While it employs some of the best and brightest engineering talent, it has taken over the Internet in ways that even a monopolist such as Microsoft can only admire from the sidelines. What happened? It was a gradual evolution and just being better than its competitors, but also being such a big presence in so many places around the Internet too. Let me count the Googles in my own life. Fir... (more)

Is AOL Still Relevant?

While Yahoo has gotten lots of attention in the past week with its latest CEO switchover, we now turn to another early Internet pioneer AOL. The company has a new version of their Web-based email software to add to the good news around its quarterly earnings announcement and stock price, which briefly reached a yearly high this week. Ironically, it was because of one of their lowest rates of decline in revenues that prompted the rally. AOL had a good year because of selling more than a billion bucks worth of patents to Microsoft. Had they not made that deal, they would have lost ... (more)