GigaOM » Paul Miller Archives

PRO: Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?

Paul Miller — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:00:01 +0000

“Cloud first” markets — those where companies’ first serious engagements with information technology are in the form of cloud computing — are beginning to emerge. For the BRIC economies in particular, this might mean a chance to adopt low-cost solutions that will give companies a clear competitive advantage over more established enterprises bogged down by legacy infrastructure. Many pieces are already in place, and so it is worth pondering where the real force behind our knowledge industries will wind up in the next few years.

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PRO: Smartphones help us to understand the cloud

Paul Miller — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:00:15 +0000

A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles truly drive cloud adoption. Rather, smartphones and tablets have brought the cloud discussion to the forefront, regardless, paradoxically, of whether the implementation actually relies on the cloud.

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PRO: Why the big data startup boom will likely be short-lived

Paul Miller — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:44:19 +0000

There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a lot of consolidation, these new companies’ days might be numbered.

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PRO: For UK education, private clouds may make economic sense

Paul Miller — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:00:54 +0000

Advocates of the public cloud tend to dismiss private cloud deployments within individual companies, arguing that they are too small to deliver the cost or flexibility advantages of the public cloud. But recent developments in the UK refute that argument. The University Modernization Fund’s Cloud Pilot, which aims to deliver diverse computing capabilities to every UK university while saving money, has just announced its pricing, which compares extremely favorably with current public cloud offerings.

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PRO: Building a wall: Europe’s exclusion of U.S. cloud providers has deep implications

Paul Miller — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:40:50 +0000

A long-running clash of legal approaches to the handling of personal data is coming to a head, as European countries begin to act.
In Germany, Deutsche Telekom is calling for more stringent regulation of cloud providers, and in the Netherlands a government minister suggests that U.S. companies could be [...]

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PRO: Beyond the data center: transitioning government to the cloud

Paul Miller — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:00:26 +0000

This week UK Ministry of Justice official Martin Bellamy addressed concerns that the UK government has become less enthusiastic about a government cloud, saying, ”We are expecting to be able to demonstrate that moving to a cloud model is going to allow us to save substantial amounts [...]

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PRO: Verizon’s acquisitions provide an enterprise path to the cloud

Paul Miller — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 21:44:22 +0000

At the end of last month Verizon acquired CloudSwitch, adding value to Verizon’s January acquisition of cloud data center provider Terremark. Around the world, big telecommunications providers such as AT&T, BT, Telstra and Verizon have been hard at work, diversifying and seeking new business opportunities as [...]

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PRO: Competition for the private cloud heats up

Paul Miller — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 20:00:09 +0000

Despite OpenStack’s continued growth, a combination of product updates and acquisitions from Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and VMware over the past week demonstrate that the race to become the dominant private cloud provider, as well as win over the enterprise, is far from over. Is one of [...]

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PRO: Why the patent wars will move to the cloud

Paul Miller — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:29:28 +0000

Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola this week has been widely interpreted as a bid to control the mobile phone company’s portfolio of 17,000 mobile patents. As Colin Gibbs noted last week, handset manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung and HTC appear increasingly willing to claim patent infringement in order [...]

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PRO: Big data is real, but only when you ask the right questions

Paul Miller — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:00:28 +0000

Alistair Croll’s post on O’Reilly Radar this week may have been titled “There’s no such thing as big data,” but Croll believes the exact opposite. Rather than just collecting data, he argues, you have to ask the right questions of it. Coincidentally, DJ Patil joined Greylock [...]

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How big data can offer a competitive advantage

Paul Miller — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:19:53 +0000

Our companies have strong appetites to learn more ways to leverage data as a competitive tool.

Greylock Partners’ Reid Hoffman has been talking about the primacy of data for a while now. With former LinkedIn colleague DJ Patil‘s appointment as data scientist in residence, Hoffman is taking steps to ensure that Greylock Partners’ portfolio investments maximize the potential of the data that they collect. Hoffman and others recognize that timely and effective analysis of data can offer real competitive advantage, even in mature markets like retail.

Within Greylock’s portfolio, companies such as Zipcar might analyze data to ensure that its cars are parked in optimal locations, and Cloudera could tailor the products and advice it offers in order to make it even easier for its customers to work with data at scale. This new thinking about data and data scientists illustrates the broader shift that is slowly under way, a shift from simply collecting big data toward gathering and using data in order to make businesses better informed.

For more on the value of data and how companies are harnessing it, see my latest weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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New AWS offerings may entice the enterprise

Paul Miller — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:08:10 +0000

In addition to enhancing privacy, dedicated circuits will generally result in more predictable data transfer performance and will also increase bandwidth between your data center and AWS.

Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, sees plenty in the company’s new Direct Connect product that will interest anyone considering ways to exploit cloud computing without threatening — or replacing — their existing IT investment.

Just one of three announcements from Amazon last week, Direct Connect lets customers with equipment in an Equinix data center in Virginia link it (securely, and with high bandwidth) to virtual machines running inside Amazon’s US-EAST region. Enterprise IT is used to dealing with IBM, HP, Microsoft and others. A degree of trust already exists, expectations are already managed and in many cases the enterprise may already be using an IBM or HP data center for co-location, disaster recovery or hosting. As these established providers of IT services extend their cloud ambitions, they are increasingly going to compete with Amazon for the attention of the same executives. Direct Connect gives Amazon the means to match competitors with its own hosting and co-location solutions.

To read more about whether the new AWS features will be strong enough for enterprise CIOs to place their faith in Amazon and the public cloud, see my latest weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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PRO: Amazon makes public cloud more attractive to the enterprise

Paul Miller — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 19:00:42 +0000

On Thursday Amazon announced three enhancements to its cloud computing offering. These include improvements to existing virtual private cloud and identity management solutions as well as a new option to directly connect enterprise networks to machines in Amazon’s Virginia data center, as Derrick Harris recounts and Amazon’s Jeff Barr [...]

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PRO: Big data needs to think outside the tech box

Paul Miller — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 20:00:29 +0000

Web companies like Google and Facebook gain business advantage by analyzing large volumes of rapidly changing data about their users, but they are far from alone. A recent infographic from Get Satisfaction charts the volume of data stored in 17 key industry sectors, illustrating that most [...]

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Big opportunities for big data in untapped industries

Paul Miller — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:25:29 +0000

Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing.

Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes in 2009, according to the McKinsey Global Institute survey, from which Get Satisfaction drew its numbers) than the technology sector, and there is a massive opportunity here. However, there are issues to address before providers of big data solutions such as Cloudera and Splunk can explore these possibilities. McKinsey, for example, estimates that the United States will need 140,000–190,000 more data workers than it is producing. And among the potential beneficiaries in manufacturing and elsewhere, there may not be the recognition that their data is of value, or that big data tools may be able to help them.

For more information on the opportunities offered to big data companies by non-traditional markets, and the difficulties big data providers might have in realizing them, see my latest weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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PRO: Despite growth in open source, commercial solutions still dominate

Paul Miller — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:57:17 +0000

Open-source cloud computing project OpenStack turned one this week, and cloud backup provider Backblaze freely shared detailed specifications for a storage device capable of holding 135 terabytes of data. Open-source options for everything from servers and data centers to clouds and application platforms are growing more robust. [...]

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