Alex Williams

Alex Williams is an editor for SiliconAngle and lives a charmed life in Portland, Or.

Latest from Alex Williams

Google I/O Essentials for the CIO

It’s Google’s focus on products and services anyone can use that makes its enterprise story more accessible and easier to understand. Here are five examples of Google’s take on enterprise technologies we saw at Google I/O this year: Google Compute Engine is the most important enterprise news from Google this year. It serves as a ...

Amazon Web Services Faces Another Outage and the Critics Go Wild

Amazon Web Services (AWS) faced another outage today. This time caused by an electrical storm. And of course, the critics went wild. It;’s now pretty much a media event every time AWS has an outage. AWS keeps pretty quiet about the outages, letting its service health dashboard tell the story. Here’s what’s to report when ...

The Launch List: The Partners Aligning with Google Compute Engine

Here’s the initial list of partners aligning with Google for its news infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Opscode will offer its Chef tools with Google Compute Engine for infrastructure automation. This means server provisioning, configuration management and the delivery of infrastructure and applications. Opscode says it will leveraging its knife plugin for Google Compute Engine, ...

Why Google Needs Its Own Unique Kind of Cloud

At Google I/O today it became readily apparent why a specialized infrastructure is as much about extending into the enterprise market as it is about Google needing a way to support its application ecosystem and its developer community. In many ways, Google’s situation mirrors what we see in the market with infrastructure providers, application developers ...

Google Job Posting Gives Clues About New AWS-Style Cloud Service

We know little from Google about a new Amazon Web Services stye cloud that GigaOm says is likely to be unveiled at Google I/O. But a picture does emerge when you look through the job boards. Google is hiring several people that could work on any internal infrastructure. But one posting in particular looks a ...

The Real Skinny About Amazon Web Services New Partner Network

Amazon Web Services launched its partner network this morning. Without boring you with the details, let me just get to what really matters about this news. It simply means that AWS is making it a little bit easier for people to build apps or use the ones in the new AWS App Marketplace. It means that AWS ...

UK Royal Society: Open Data is the Key to the Second Scientific Revolution

The UK Royal Society is a fellowship of the world’s most brilliant scientists. Founded in 1660, its members have included Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. Distinguished thinkers Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Tim Berners-Lee are current members of the society. It is arguably the most prestigious scientific community in the world. And ...

Dell’s Quest for Quest

Dell is making a $2.32 billion bid for Quest. It tops a $2.2 billion offer from private equity firms Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital. That puts Quest’s value at $27.50 per share. A counter bid is expected from Insight and Vector. In May, Quest decided to go private when it received a bid for ...

Did Microsoft Just Blow Up the Channel?

Microsoft blew up the channel this week.  They changed their business model. With Microsoft Surface, they now compete with the channel. And that’s a good thing. But do the channel partners have any choice? No way. They have to sell Windows. What OS wold they adopt instead?  Will Dell go Linux? That was Leo Laporte’s ...

An Open API Debate: Pragmatism v. Federation

The open API debate burst into the GigaOM Structure conference this morning with a theme emerging that represents the paradox of today’s open systems. It’s now more about the pragmatists’ view of connected systems, versus the advocates for federation and distributed power across a number of players that “shift the monopoly from the service providers ...