Kate's Comment

The recent launch of Apple’s iCloud service has done much to bring mainstream attention and acceptance to the concept of cloud storage and syncing. But unless they adapt an open cloud standard they are facing an uphill struggle to attract business users. Here’s why.

We’ve been running all our business systems over the ‘net for years (including instant messaging, email, document management, project management & collaboration) by using open source software. Both Nick & I are huge fans of open source, so I thought I’d share why and how we use it within Memset.

One of the areas on which we reached clear agreement in the G-Cloud and App Store phase 2 was the definition the layers of the stack, infrastructure, platform and software, and their corresponding scalable, standardised counterparts: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). Pleasingly, our delinations were very similar to prior work from two decades ago by IBM, except that ours incorporate virtualisation.

Following my involvement with the UK Cabinet Office’s G-Cloud and App Store programme I’m updating my definition of Cloud Computing, and also incorporating the NIST definition. My answer is “Cloud = Grid + (Utility * N)”, and here is how I arrived there…

Twitter has been valued at $1bn, but is that really sane? Time to get out my trusty calculator and offer a rather different assessment…

On 10th February I took part in a panel session at the 2009 Intellect Annual Regent Conference “Keeping ahead of changing markets”. The event took place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel in London, was attended by top executives from the high-tech industry and was chaired by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, who I left speechless at one point!

I was recently asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the differences between traditional IT infrastructure outsourcing and “Cloud Computing”. When you get down to it, there are only really three differences between the two, but that does not stop Cloud being a significant threat to the old-guard of IT consultancies.

Twitter recently announced that they would be removing replies to people you do not follow from the timeline. In my view, and that of just about everyone I know and follow, that is highly undesirable and eliminates a large part of what was unique about Twitter. Now it has taken a giant leap back in time to IRC-days.

This post has now been superseded by my updated

People keep going around and around in circles on the debate of whether you should replace servers and desktops sooner rather than later when you take into account the improvements in energy efficiency in recent years combined with the embedded energy cost of manufacture of computers. So, I decided to get out my calculator and made some interesting conclusions. Materials,…