The Great Debate UK
from Business Traveller:
Travelling through the cloud on a tablet
John McHugh, VP and Chief Marketing Officer, Brocade
As technology and business travel become ever more inextricably connected, I talk to a man whose life is a symbiosis of both worlds
John McHugh, VP and Chief Marketing Officer of networking infrastructure firm Brocade, proudly sits on both sides of the buyer-seller fence. On one hand, a WiFi-less or WiFi-jammed hotel will not be seeing his custom again in a hurry; on the other, his company offers hotels WiFi deployment.
He knows how tricky it is to design a network where, from “6am to 8.01am and 8pm to midnight” every business traveller downloads their email, watches streamed media or lets their kids use the Xbox.
“Hotels don’t want to spent a lot of money and invest in a lot of infrastructure if they don’t have to; they’re trying to get by on the absolute bare minimum so the system is normally massively oversubscribed at the very time when the user wants to use it.”
The future of computing is in the cloud
-Piers Linney is a self made entrepreneur and former City investment banker. He is currently Joint-Chief Executive Officer at Outsourcery, a leading communications and hosted IT company. The opinions expressed are his own.-
“Cloud computing” can sound like a very amorphous concept, perhaps even conjuring up images of important business data floating around in the skies above us. It often raises questions about control and security. But the reality is a lot more down to earth and it is quite simply the future of computing and the way in which businesses will consume pooled resources of software and hardware.
Heads in the Cloud? Forecasting the future of enterprise IT
- Joe Baguley is Chief Technology Officer, Europe, for Quest Software. The opinions expressed are his own. -
‘Cloud computing’ essentially describes an approach whereby IT resources are provided as services via the internet. Instead of purchasing physical servers, databases, middleware and applications separately, organisations will be able to order these services over the internet in ‘virtual’ form, as demand dictates.
from Commentaries:
Twitter backlash foretold
Technology market research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," its effort to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon. It's just one of an annual phalanx of reports that handicap some 1,650 technologies or trends in 79 different categories for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.
Jackie Fenn, the report's lead analyst and author of the 2008 book "Mastering the Hype Cycle," delivers the main verdict:
from The Great Debate:
Computer industry hopes lie in the clouds
-- Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --
No one can easily define it.
But the next phase of the computer revolution is busy being born out of the ashes of the current economic crisis. The new approach delivers computing power as a service over the Web, like an electric utility, instead of making customers buy computers they manage themselves.
It goes by the hazy term of "cloud computing."
Forget your tidy distinctions between hardware and software, networking and storage, the Web and the desktop. Most disappear as they merge into the cloud.
