After two decades of hype and struggle, unified communications (UC) is finally starting to make sense. I recently interviewed about a dozen customers of Microsoft's offerings and they were all very pleased with IM, presence, Web conferencing, IP telephony and the rest. Now UC is moving to the cloud, primarily through Microsoft's Office 365, which includes a hosted version of Lync, Redmond's latest UC tool.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/20115 comments
Longtime software integration player Talend is now moving its middleware to the cloud. The Talend Cloud can stitch together apps on-premise, in pure public clouds, private clouds or hybrids. Talend claims it can also join data and apps even as you move all this off-site and onto service provider networks, and keep it all secure.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/20111 comments
I remember when Iridium first came to the fore. The whole idea was to build a global network of satellite communications. Although Arthur C. Clarke invented the concept over a half-century ago, Iridium was still leading-edge stuff.
Now the company is harnessing its network of 66 birds circling the stratosphere to let those in need be found.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/20110 comments
There are many ways to approach the cloud. You can be all in, go partway or ignore the whole thing. And whether you go all in or partway, you still need to decide on an architecture.
Two main choices are building your own cloud -- what they call a private cloud -- or buying a public cloud service. The problem with this nomenclature is a public cloud should not be public. How can data be secured if it is truly public? Access to the public (remote) cloud should only be granted to trusted users. Done right, a public cloud is just as private as a private cloud. So how about we change our terms to "in-house cloud" and "remote cloud"?
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/14/20113 comments
The cloud, in part, evolved from virtualization. Server virtualization makes massive server farms act as a utility. And client virtualization makes in-house and remote servers act as a sort of cloud. The processing is separate from the client, and if constructed right, is adaptable the way a cloud should be.
This is all justification for why I'm covering Microsoft's newest thin client tool. Windows Thin PC is now solid enough that CDs are being pressed and downloads readied.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/14/20112 comments
Fujitsu just announced a new cloud service based on Microsoft Azure. The service will use Microsoft's Azure appliance, making it faster and easier to start offering services. HP and Dell have also committed to building similar services, but they apparently won't beat Fujitsu to market.
Clearly, not all Microsoft software is perfect, but in talking to partners and customers, Azure is looking pretty good.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/14/20110 comments
Office 365 isn't just a cloud version of Microsoft Office. It is actually a mega-suite: Besides getting all the Office apps, you can get software from the server side such as SharePoint, Exchange, SQL Server and Lync (the unified communications suite).
We've looked at the pricing and it ain't bad. As long as your WAN connections are robust, this is a usable and affordable approach to equipping end-user PCs.
Now in late beta test, Microsoft has confirmed the mega-suite will ship on June 28, the same day the Treaty of Versailles was signed.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/07/20112 comments
This week, Apple announced the widely anticipated iCloud, a relatively free service where all your tunes, photos, docs and such are in the cloud. Is it cool? I guess. Does it give Apple more control over you and the entire music biz? You bet.
Here's how it works. You sign up, presumably giving Apple enough information that it knows who you are and how to reach you. Then you get 5 free gigs to do with as you please. The exception here is that anything you bought from Apple doesn't count against the 5 GB limit. The cool part is all this stuff is stored centrally so you can sync all your Apple devices, getting at the content through a Mac, iPad or iPhone.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/07/20115 comments
If you care about patching your computers, you must have heard of Shavlik Technologies. In fact, Microsoft OEMed Shavlik's patch product and made it part of the Redmond arsenal years ago.
Recently, company founder Mark Shavlik has been telling me about moving patches and other wares to the cloud. This way, you can secure and manage your computers without managing the whole mess in-house.
VMware apparently caught wind of all this and wanted in. Last month, VMware bought its way in by picking up Shavlik, or at least promising to.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/06/20115 comments
Customers have several concerns about the cloud. To my mind, data security, data protection, and uptime are probably the top three. We've recently seen outages from Amazon, VMware (this was a beta service that went down) and Microsoft's online version of Exchange. Clearly, we have a ways to go with uptime.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/24/20112 comments
A few months ago, I asked readers to talk about their cloud plans and how cloud adoption will change the nature of IT work. I talked to over a dozen of you, and the results were mixed. Many old schoolers -- and old school isn't always bad -- believe the cloud will kill off a good many IT jobs, particularly admins who run our servers.
Cloud believers believe new jobs will be created. And as applications move to the cloud and admin jobs retreat, IT can and should become more strategic and less tactical.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/24/20115 comments
Author, instructor and all around smart guy Don Jones is taking an interest in the cloud and, with his years of IT experience, wonders just how new all this cloud stuff is. In a recent column, he questioned the term cloud in general.
Now Don is taking on the notion of private clouds. It may be that many call a private cloud what is really just a plain, old datacenter. To Jones, a private cloud has the same characteristics of an external cloud -- capacity and services are provided as they are demanded, the resources are virtualized so they serve as a pool, and charge-backs are based on actual use.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 05/24/20111 comments