Suddenly in the last few weeks, I have received from multiple prospective customers a copy of the Federal Cloud Computing RFI which the government posted a month ago on its purchasing website (the deadline has passed, by the way.)  It's a long, complex set of questions for cloud computing providers that covers Infrastructure as a Service characteristics and standards compliance.   Clearly the people who wrote knew what they were doing, but it's also pretty clear that n... Read Full Story

Dave Durkee recently attended the Federal Cloud Computing Summit in Washington, in which a number of Cloud Computing vendors met with Vivek Kundra, the national CIO, and the CIOs of various government agencies.   We'll have a blog article about some of his impressions (he was very impressed with the government's desire to learn about and use Cloud Computing) at a later point.  The definition of Cloud Computing that the discussion centered on was surprisingly complete, ... Read Full Story

I keep reading articles about how Cloud Computing is "high performance," especially from vendors and their partners who are eager to sell it.   Unfortunately, these discussions don't typically define what "high performance" is.  For example, today's excellent article on Cloud at Network World gave performance only a cursory discussion at the end.  Many people assume that today's microprocessors are so powerful that today's Clouds can h... Read Full Story

Yesterday I drove up to San Francisco in the middle of a record-setting heatwave to attend a dockside party thrown by Zuora, a billing-automation SaaS startup.  They were celebrating signing their 100th customer, as well as signing Sun, who hopes to compete with ENKI in the Cloud Computing arena sometime soon, using their recent aquisition of QLayer.  I was there to look at their software, but also to talk to the people.  Schmoozing about in the heat, I met a few bright-eye... Read Full Story

These were the amazing words I heard today from Larry Halff, founder of Ma.golia.com.  I was submitting a blog article today and decided to check out the little link sharing icons our website puts below each article to submit it to link sharing sites.  I tried to go to ma.gnolia.com, one of my favorites.  To my surprise, it was gone, though their cute flower logo was still visible.  Instead there was a web site with a painful story of file loss and implosion of the site, ... Read Full Story

Since announcing automatic allocation and scaling of cloud resources in January, ENKI has been selling and providing customers with the ability to have their applications monitored by our monitoring system, and automatically have additional resources added and removed from their virtual private data centers to conform to varying loads and to save them money.  I wanted to share an update on this with you and show you some pictures! Customers who can benefit from this must have an appl... Read Full Story

I wanted to share my thoughts on ENKI can assure our startup customers success with the operation of their live sites, and hence their enterprises.  It's what we were originally founded to do, and I'm seeing from our current customer base that the world of startups still desperately needs the experience, process, and tools that we bring to the table to assure that software deploys reliably to your live site and runs successfully. Going back to basics, lets talk a bit about ... Read Full Story

PaaS, or Platform-as-a-Service, is increasingly being proposed as a way for startups to get to market quickly.  But is it economical and practical?  I read an excellent blog post today about that, which raised questions about cost of deploying with PaaS, though it didn't answer the hard question, which is what it costs to run a SaaS service without PaaS.  (Which is actually really hard to answer!)  But in keeping with the topic of discussion, I think the article miss... Read Full Story

PaaS, or Platform-as-a-Service, is increasingly being proposed as a way for startups to get to market quickly.  But is it economical and practical?  I read an excellent blog post today about that, which raised questions about cost of deploying with PaaS, though it didn't answer the hard question, which is what it costs to run a SaaS service without PaaS.  (Which is actually really hard to answer!)  But in keeping with the topic of discussion, I think the article miss... Read Full Story

I ran across a nifty slide presentation from Jon Collins today, which showed how early the Cloud market is, and how little adoption has been made of it by business in general.  As a partner in ENKI, I gulped when I saw the small adoption percentages.  Then I realized that in hundred-billion-plus IT industry, these percentages are still a multibillion dollar market that is growing fast from near-zero a few years ago.  No wonder Cloud Computing is so hyped and oversold, with ho... Read Full Story