Okay, the ubiquitous use of the term ‘cloud’ or ‘cloud computing’ is already getting annoying. It seems practically every other marketing offer, industry analyst and sales exec is adopting this nebulous term as if it has specific meaning to them. Very quickly this is squeezing the last drop out of what meaning there was to the term. I am drenched in a deluge of offers and admonitions to get ‘into the cloud’.  It’s enough to make you wish for a cloudless day.  Already the backlash has begun - just search on ‘cloud computing’ to see the griping.

The silver lining?  However the term is used, business models that allow you to subscribe to software are of great benefit to us, the consumer. (more…)

 

Ben Kepes penned a nice summary of the Office 2.0 conference and one complaint I liked is that the session on going 100% SaaS still focused a bit too much on justifying “why SaaS”.  This has been nagging at me as well lately - all the chatter about whether or not 100% SaaS makes sense, and whether or not there are 7 myths about SaaS, etc.

The Vision Thing

All the time spent debating positions which are already clear does take time away from the “vision thing”.  In fact I suppose we are in a bit of our own “silly season” in this debate about how to provision IT!  So here is the vision in my view: we are now in a position to run a reasonably sized business in many industries without building a data center and without traditional “outsourcing” of IT for that business. (more…)

 

Semantics and Euphemisms

George Carlin laments the softening of our language through excessive euphemisms in his final tome and notes as an example that many things which previously were “free” are now “complimentary” - allowing the requester to retain a bit of dignity, instead of sounding like a “mooch“. With all the talk about free open source, commercial open source, enterprise or business class open source, some basics could be lost in the semantics. However you name it, the core term open source software implies a way of building and licensing software. Sometimes the software rises from a team of unpaid developers, and other times it comes from corporations paying for the development.

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Choice is Complete

Last year I switched from buying CD’s to downloading singles, therefore I have only occasionally acquired a complete “album” of music from one artist. Of the top 20 bands in my collection last year, more than three-quarters of these were cases where I downloaded one or two single tracks. The risk is that by doing this we might miss the summary effect of a complete work. This week we went to see the band “Sea Wolf” live and discovered that their debut album, “Leaves in the River”, is one of these cases. Like the new release by “Coldplay“, this one deserves a listen from start to finish.

A Second Look

At Ingres we are now taking a second look at our own digital face to our customers, the Ingres community, and Ingres Service Network. The capabilities we offer are all built utilizing open source tools and utilities. To render these sites as a more complete whole, we just signed up with Tricipher to provide a single sign-on solution for our web properties. (more…)

 

The past…

For years we in IT have been procuring and installing software and building onsite solutions with our internal resources. We did this based on a series of vendor compatibility matrices - pouring over specifications for operating systems, databases, application and web servers, along with other associated software infrastructure, and following these in exacting detail in order to end up with a supportable solution. We’ve kept all those bits up to date to stay on a certified code stack. Of course at the end of the day what mattered was that the business application or functional utility built on top of all that infrastructure ran reliably and was supported by the vendor.

A Better way…

I believe there are better ways to manage this complexity and an important avenue for this is to rely directly on vendors who have the proven ability to deliver a complete stack of software for a chosen solution. This is why I am so excited by our deployment of open source software “appliances” and “community bundles”, such as the Ingres Icebreaker appliance. (more…)

 

Career Is Over?

When talking about our 100% SaaS / Open Source strategy at Ingres, I am often asked, “what will that mean for your future as a CIO” or “how do you maintain control of technology at the company” using this model. The first thing I let them know is that CIO means “Career Is Over” – then I try to smile.

Enablement & Alignment vs. Control

First things first. Control is overrated. The role of the “evolved” CIO is to focus on strategy, innovation, and enablement rather than worrying only about operational efficiency. Sure we have policies, governance, and security measures, and we need to assure the company’s information assets are protected. But we count on people to follow the policies, and we put technology in place to assure no harm is done. (more…)