Edge of the Cloud » Cloud Adoption

WSJ.com – change is accelerating (and in the API market as well)

Chet Kapoor — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:15:01 +0000

Interesting article in the wsj.com recently. Authors argue that the pace of change is quickening- with compelling examples of entire industries – recorded music business and the newspaper business (and soon network television and book publishing) – that have been rearranged in only a few years.

Lots of parallels to draw with what is happening with cloud computing and the API economy.

Faster computation: Cloud computing is crushing the time to provision servers from weeks to minutes, and converting prohibitive capital investment into low operating expense.

Quicker Access: Metcalfe’s law is working in APIs… as companies like TrueCredit.com open their apps and make it very quick/easy to consume their services; the value of what they provide grows quickly with each new connection.

Shorter decision cycles: If you are running a business, assume that your biggest competitors are working on opening APIs to their data and apps. You don’t want read about their API announcement and at that moment be behind. Else you are the next Chicago Tribune.

Favorite part – they ask the question - “how do we control this increasingly out-of-control, interlinked world?

Answer? “online surge-protectors to stop run-ups and panics” and “better analytics” – exactly how we describe Sonoa API Management

Open Source vs. Cloud Computing – Who cares ??

Chet Kapoor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:09:42 +0000

Lots has been written about open source and cloud computing recently. Dion Hincfliffe recently wrote on a Cloud Computing and open source face off. James Urquhart generally does a great job on focusing on the customer. His recently post on Three debates that will benefit cloud computing started out well, talking about smb vs enterprise and private vs. public clouds, then totally lost the customer focus on oss vs. proprietary.

Why should customers care ??

As a consumer, I have no idea what tools or fabrication process was used to build my car. The percentage of people that want that level of detail is very small. I think the same is true for cloud customers. Do they know what language the EC2 load balancers were written in, I don’t think so. Nor do they care. Different vendors will take different approaches. Like everything else, all that customers will care about is what are they getting and how much does it cost ?

Open Source is great for innovation and interoperability (de facto standards). Enterprises started adopting OSS because it was “accessable”. Much easier to get a copy of MySQL then a copy of Oracle to start a pilot. Same was true for JBoss vs. weblogic/websphere. Enterprises have successfully used open source for pricing pressure w/ existing vendors. Open Source has a GREAT future. It is mainstream, it has and always be part of our the technology fabric.

Staying nimble – enterprise cloud adoption

Chet Kapoor — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:45:25 +0000

Dion Hinchcliffe wrote recently on the ways in which cloud computing will change business. Though he recognizes the challenges to adoption in terms of trust around security and vendor lock-in, there’s clear potential in the enterprise – driving new revenue streams, outsourcing IT services, and the reconciliation of traditional SOA with the cloud and other IT models, among others.

Another big benefit to enterprise cloud adoption will be a survival of the fittest among business – you really do need to start the move to the cloud to stay a viable business in today’s climate where the slightest edge means everything.