I have been talking to a lot of prospective cloud management start-ups lately, and a theme I am hearing repeatedly is that SMB is the great untapped opportunity. Most are hoping to be the RightScale for the SMB market by providing them with super simple web-based interfaces to clouds like EC2. What I’ve been telling them, is that unless they define SMB the way IBM does (when I was last working at IBM in 2005, eBay was classified as SMB), Cloud for SMB is a ship that has already sailed… Read More→
Archive for July 2008
Thursday,
July
3rd,
2008
At Structure08 last week, Bitcurrent and GigaOm introduced Briefings. These 20- to 30-page reports look at a particular industry or technology in detail, combining what we learn while reporting on the space with research and internal discussion.
The first briefing focuses on cloud computing, which was the topic of much of Structure08. If you’re trying to come up to speed on cloud computing quickly — whether as an investor, an entrepreneur, or an IT professional — we hope this format of background, landscape, and industry direction will fit the bill.
Wednesday,
July
2nd,
2008
I wrote a piece a while back about how centralized computing makes a cloud a big target. I didn’t want to get into the biological origins of this stuff, but one commenter was right: Monoculture is a precursor to extinction.
In university (which seems a long, long time ago) I wrote my thesis on evolutionary theory and product life cycles. Admittedly, not a screamingly fun topic, but it did give me a chance to read up on the Burgess Shale and other such things.
Now comes word that Amazon’s EC2, by virtue of the independence it affords hosters, is being used by bad guys for nefarious misdeeds (thanks to Rachel Chalmers of The 451 for pointing it out.) This provides an additional risk: Many of the Internet’s defense mechanisms involve black-holing specific hosters when the sites they’re operating do bad things.
Of course, when you’re hosting many applications, having one of them get blacklisted can be a nuisance for all the others. What’s interesting is the back-pressure we’re seeing arise against the popularity of cloud computing: At Structure, we debated the fear of lock-in; Stacey has a great piece on enterprise obstacles to adoption; and here, we’re seeing the downside of on-demand, easy-access platforms.
In other words, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that doesn’t just apply to dinosaurs.
Comments (1)
Categories : Uncategorized
Proudly powered by WordPress