Alex Williams
Latest from Alex Williams
The Cloud is Not Cool Anymore and That’s a Good Thing for the CIO
The cloud is not cool anymore. It no longer has the aura of something cosmic. It’s mainstream. That’s evident in a few ways: Citing the 2012 Future of Cloud Survey, sponsored by North Bridge Venture Partners, Barb Darrow points out that users accept that mission-critical apps will go the way of the cloud. Software-as-a-Service is more widely ...
Bromium Raises $26 Million and Emerges from Stealth with a “Microvisor” That Takes the Human Factor into Consideration
Bromium’s Simon Crosby has done a masterful job in the past year of marketing a startup without revealing what it is. For months, the buzz grew to such an extent that Bromium even won an award for “Startup of the Year.” Today, the company is having its coming out party with the unveiling of its ...
The Spring of Convergence
What a spring season. We saw more news about converged infrastructure than any time before. That makes it an appropriate time to do a recap of the market. For reference, I am turning to Wikibon’s Stuart Miniman, who wrote a post last week about the convergence market and where it is right now. To start, ...
Dell’s New Linux Laptop Built For Developers Will Query Github Repositories for Profiles
Dell’s new Linux laptop built for developers will query github repositories for profiles that are shared and extended among people using the open-source laptops. In a blog post update about “Project Sputnik,” Dell’s Barton George writes that Canonical, is now heavily supporting the project to develop an open-source laptop. The two companies, which have been collaborating ...
NetApp Needs Some Missing Pieces To Keep Pace
NetApp has gone from an underdog in the market to one of the big players. They have kept with innovations to some extent through leadership with unified storage and new reference architectures. But to keep pace in the big data world, NetApp needs to fill in some pieces. With its analyst meeting this week, questions ...
Linus Torvalds to Nvidia: “F**K You!”
Linus Torvalds is definitely one of the toughest characters you will find in the tech world. Linux would not be what it is today without Torvalds and the passion he brings to the open-source movement. In this video recorded Thursday, Torvalds is at the Aalto University Center for Entrepreneurship in Otaniemi, Finland, responding to a ...
Microsoft’s Yammer Acquisition Points to the State of the CRM Market
The news that Microsoft is buying Yammer points to the state of the CRM market and how social is becoming a core function in the architecture of modern, mission critical applications. It’s a scary scenario for Microsoft and a host of legacy vendors that still seem bent on protecting their mainstream solutions. This is not just ...
The Future of PaaS
This afternoon at Deploycon I am moderating a panel: “The Future of PaaS.” I asked the panelists and others at the conference how they view the future of platform-as-a-service. Here is a smattering of what people had to say: Pervasive CTO Michael Hoskins set the tone with his keynote. His picture is of a PaaS becoming ...
Convergence v. Divergence or the Web Way v. the Old Way
Yael McGuire works with Facebook on the Open Compute Project. He made a point in a session today at the Intel Forecast event that is worth exploring. His remarks illustrate the difference between companies like Facebook and EMC and how they view the ways data center infrastructure should be treated. McGuire countered the view about ...
The Cloud is Not About Technology, It’s About Business
The cloud is not about technology, it’s about business. It’s about re-allocating your existing infrastructure to meet your business needs. Once you know your business goals then you can begin defining how your infrastructure is realigned. This is tbe big shift in thinking that we are seeing at events like Intel Forecast, hosted today by ...