In his post PCs at a Crossroads Michael Friedenberg reports on IDC's measurement of the PC marketplace. From the article:"Case in point is the PC market. Market researcher IDC reports that 2009 will be the first year since 2001 where PC shipments will decline. I believe this drop is driven by a more rapid intersection of the cyclical and the systemic as the PC value proposition is challenged and then transformed. As Intel CEO Paul Otellini recently said, "We're moving from personal computers ... Read Full Story

Yesterday, Amazon introduced Amazon VPC. It enables logically isolated compute instances and a VPN tunnel to connect to internal data center resources. The architecture is straight forward and Amazon's blog post depicts is as follows.But the implications of VPC are far reaching; there are no real hurdles left to leverage Amazon's cloud except for limited and costly Internet bandwidth. Amazon's offering is morphing into a very flexible IaaS with some content delivery network features that are ... Read Full Story

I found this wonderful graphic created by Peter Laird in his blog.Peter's blog has all the descriptions of the buckets.The Public Cloud bucket is heavily underreported. There are roughly about 1200 public data centers in the US alone that are quite happy to rent you a server or cabinet. There are a host of data center market places that will connect you to a data center provider. Here are a few:Find a Data CenterData Center KnowledgeData Center MarketplaceIn particular, the telecom companies,... Read Full Story

InformationWeek's Paul McDougall reports on Windows Azure pricing and it provides confirmation that Microsoft is transitioning its boxed software business into a service business. Paul's assessment: "Azure is the latest sign that Microsoft is eyeing the Web as the primary delivery mechanism for software and services. On Monday, the company said it planned to make a version of Microsoft Office 2010 available to consumers over the Internet at no charge. It plans a similar offering for businesse... Read Full Story

Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet posted an interesting analysis of Google's Chrome OS announcement. The basic premise is that Google as a cloud information provider can subsidize a Netbook since it will get it back in cloud service revenue and a higher intangible value to its core business of collecting and characterizing customer behavior. This is much like the telecom business or the game console business, and I have heard that same story from the reps at Samsung, Nokia, Asus, and Sony. It is just... Read Full Story

Eight Ways that Cloud Computing Will Change Business is a wonderful post by Dion Hinchcliffe. The synopsis of this article is that large businesses are laggards with respect to technology adoption for the simple reason that the cost of betting on the wrong horse is too high. However, sometimes new technologies are so compelling that this wait-and-see approach is trumped. According to the article:"Cloud Computing is quickly beginning to shape up as one of these major changes and the hundreds o... Read Full Story

The cloud has evolved from the managed hosting concept. With data centers like EC-2 making it easier to provision servers on-demand, elasticity can be build into the application to scale dynamically. Microsoft Azure provides a similar, and nicely integrated, platform for the Windows application world. But how well do this clouds hold up when demand is elastic for compute intensive workloads? The short of it? Not so well.I found two papers that report on experiments that take Amazon EC-2 as IT... Read Full Story

In my continued quest to build an operational model that properly accounts for the costs of different cloud web services, I have reached back to the visual vocabulary of operational analysis. If it was good enough to build BMC Software I figured it would be good enough for this task.The following figure captures the typical resources in a modern data center. In the vocabulary of operational analysis we have servers and transactions, and the diagram depicts the read and write transactions goin... Read Full Story

Two articles that are just wonderfully expansive...http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtmlhttp://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/30283I came across these articles researching and thinking about SaaS and PaaS and what would be the best road forward for startups in that space. Salesforce may have blazed the trail but SugarCRM is doing most of what I am doing with Salesforce. Hosting SugarCRM on demand on Amazon would save me money over Salesforce. However, in the end it is no... Read Full Story

GoGrid's Michael Sheehan just published his cloud computing predictions for 2009. 1- Clouds reduce the effect of the recession.The basic argument being that since cloud computing is a more cost effective means to obtain IT services, cloud computing enables the IT budget to go further. But that would simply take money away from the IHVs and big consultancies, so a more careful study would need to be made to assert if this is zero-sum game or not. My thought here would be that the recession... Read Full Story