Last week I had lunch with Walter Scott, CEO of GFI Software. Walter is a colorful character. He leaves his Ferrari at his house in Florida, his 8-foot Bourget chopper at his home in Massachusetts, and I'm not sure what he drives when he's at the company headquarters in Malta. And his most recent last cool vehicle, a whopping Ford F-650 pickup, is somewhere in the Middle East presumably being driven by an oil sheik.
The last big GFI news was the acquisition of Sunbelt Software out of Clearwater, Florida, which may explain the Ferrari 340 parked in the Sunshine State. Sunbelt was kicking some Symantec butt with Vipre, an anti-virus/anti-malware tool. Former Sunbelt CEO Alex Eckelberry always called Vipre the Porsche of anti-virus. It doesn't have every feature; instead it is lean, mean, and high performance. I thought this was CEO hype until I asked his customers. They agreed, feeling Symantec was bloated and Vipre wasn't.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/17/20123 comments
The cloud has won many types of customers. Consumers love their Gmail and Hotmail, leftwingers their Huffington, right wingers their Drudge, sales types live in Saleforce, and Lync is setting the world of unified communication astir.
Meanwhile personal backup with services like Carbonite is revolutionized. Enough bacon has been saved to keep Homer Simpson fed for years.
IT, though, is still wary of using the cloud for hardcore disaster recovery. If they can't see their disaster recovery systems, or know their disks are held in some underground cavern, they just don't feel safe.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/10/20125 comments
Some of you reading this may be a CIO. Some may play that role, but not have the exact title. Others may be a few notches below. But it doesn't hurt for all of us to, at least at times, put on the CIO thinking cap.
So when it comes to imagining a full cloud strategy, here are some things David S. Linthicum, founder of Blue Mountain Labs, himself a CTO, advises.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 07/10/20122 comments
As largely expected, Microsoft bought Yammer, a social media player. This is not like Bing, which is 100% going up against Google. While Yammer does compete against Facebook for consumers, let's face it -- that ship really has sailed.
I think Microsoft bought Yammer far more because it can be used for enterprise social networking. Those steeped in the Microsoft product line may remember that Microsoft, through Lync and other tools, already offers social networking, but this requires lots of software licenses and even more IT elbow grease. Yammer is much more quick and dirty. Redmond can upsell you later.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/20122 comments
Only the richest companies seem to offer public cloud services, or at least make a big name for themselves. Just think of the words Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. So it stands to reason it takes more than a few bucks to build a private cloud. After all, these elastic, self-provisioning capacity-on-demand, always-on utilities are built on highly virtualized orchestrated servers. While that is a mouthful, that's what private clouds in essence are all about.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/26/20125 comments
Microsoft MVP and long time author and trainer and consultant Don Jones is as bothered as I am about the misuse of the term cloud. First it was just cloud. Now private cloud is bandied about expecting we all know what the speaker means when the speaker doesn't always know what the speaker means.
That's why sometimes I takes to define the term before I use it, which can consume several paragraphs (which would be great if I were paid by the word and you would all bear with me).
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/20120 comments
Azure is moving down the stack. Originally a Platform as a Service (PaaS) tool which is more or less a full stack to run your apps, just one level below Software as a Service (SaaS). Most companies move up to higher levels of sophistication. With Azure, Microsoft is moving down, broadening the service into Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS are the basic building blocks, servers and virtual machines upon which you place things. This means you really have to build everything from scratch to run on the thing.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/20122 comments
There's no quicker route to an IT pink slip than losing your company's data. That's why backup and disaster recovery decisions are so important. Make a mistake and you may find yourself flipping burgers next to your kid's high school classmates.
Cloud backup and disaster recovery providers are facing a huge trust gap. If you have trouble trusting devices you can see or those trucks that cart away your optical disks and hide them in caves, how on earth can you place your job future in the hands of something as amorphous as the cloud?
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/20120 comments
I've had a bit of a struggle with the definition of a private cloud because vendors, like with just about any other buzz word, often toss the phrase around without knowing or caring about its true meaning.
To me, a private cloud should have all the attributes of the kind of cloud owned by an Amazon or Rackspace. It should be a true utility, meaning that one needn't worry about capacity or backup. It should just work no matter what workloads are thrown at it. That means it is elastic, automatically absorbing spikes in demand.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/12/20121 comments
Though not quite Wizard of Oz caliber, Red Hat is working the open source levers into a pretty good position in the cloud world. Working off the Apache DeltaCloud project, Red Hat built a management platform it calls CloudForms. Got all that?
CloudForms, an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) management tool, is hybrid in a couple ways. First, it works with public and private clouds, and pulls them together into managed hybrid clouds. It also hybrid in that fact that it manages heterogeneous cloud systems while at the same time providing access to enterprise apps in a way that maintains existing IT security and compliance provisions.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/12/20120 comments
Amazon has a pretty nifty service, AWS VM Import, which, as the name implies, lets you bring virtual machines from on-premises into Amazon EC2. Problem is, as the name implies, it only lets you import.
Now you can export VMs back to your premises. Equally slick. As you might have guessed, the service is called VM Export Service for Amazon EC2.
Posted by Doug Barney on 06/05/20121 comments
French concern eXo believes there is a gap in social intranet offerings. Some are purely consumer-oriented public services like Facebook and lack the discipline for enterprise use. Other enterprise tools are hard to set up and take too long to establish, especially for ad hoc use.
eXo thinks it has the perfect middle ground with its Java-based eXo Cloud Workspaces. This tool is designed to let users build their own social intranets equipped with shared calendars, shared documents, wikis and access to all this through popular mobile devices (otherwise known as iPhone/iPads and Android phones and tablets. Windows, someday you'll have your day).
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Posted by Doug Barney on 06/05/20122 comments