Greg O'Connor

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the darling of today's real world, enterprise-impacting cloud computing use cases. Industry analysts and research firms are tripping over each other extolling mega-CAGR for SaaS, with the 451 Group going so far as attributing 75% of PaaS spending for use cases that are attached to SaaS deployments. In its 2011 research report "Cloud Computing Takes Off," Morgan Stanley is bullish on the future of PaaS stating, "The low capex requirements, robust cloud enablement and rapidly improving developer toolsets are significantly lowering the barriers to entry for new application development [emphasis mine] - both in terms of cost and time to market. Great.  So the future is bright for new application development heading to the cloud. What about ISVs who have existing applications? Driven to the margin-eroding SaaS model, ISVs frequently find t... (more)

Occupy Cloud! Movement Set to Occupy Cloud Expo

As Occupy Wall Street went global mixing grievance with entitlement, the movement quickly became the melting pot for all things protest-able. Taking to the streets with euros, dollars, and yens taped across their mouths demonstrators marched, camped, and otherwise deplored the unfairness of reality. "But, who will speak up for production enterprise applications?" I thought.  "The reality is that 99% of production enterprise applications are still earth-bound ... not on the cloud. Those greedy, lightweight dev/test use cases are monopolizing the cloud." The paradigm-busting, wor... (more)

In the Cloud the App Is Free, But That Bucket of Nuts Will Cost You

This week my kids and a bucket of nuts acted out a good allegory for enterprise IT and user cloud provisioning - a cautionary tale. It started with a call from our bank letting us know that our credit card was under suspicion of fraud. Apparently, $134.26 worth of iTunes store activity had been charged to our account in the past 24 hours. The bank had correctly guessed that these purchases were news to us, with ‘us' being the adults in the house. And, if not news to each one of the five kids we call ‘ours,' it was also nothing any of them felt like claiming. One family meeting d... (more)

The Elastic Enterprise Extends IT Operations to the Cloud ….. Today

We were all there at the beginning when, "The Internet changed everything," morphed into the paradigm buster we now call "The Cloud." As an industry, we watched Amazon (AWS) break the $100M revenue mark in 2008; scanned Gartner's first cloud computing vendor list in 2009; and heard Microsoft declare itself "all in" in 2010. The cloud-as-infrastructure journey from promise to powerhouse has been at once exciting and disappointing. Exciting for obvious reasons and disappointing because the reality of cloud usage has largely remained the purview of development. To date, the predomi... (more)

Misunderstanding Server Application Virtualization Made Simple

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is, “How is AppZero different than App-V?”  Until somewhat recently the answer was pretty simple, “App-V virtualizes desktop applications; AppZero virtualizes server applications.”  Desktop …… big boy apps. We had a hallelujah moment here when Microsoft announced that App-V would be handling server applications.   After all, with Microsoft throwing its hat in our ring, they’ll also be throwing their marketing machine in right along with it.  Good news for us.  Right? Not so fast... Perception shapes vision.  I remember as a kid in ... (more)