The Seamless Enterprise

A recent 2010 survey by the Yankee Group showed that enterprises are now the fastest adopters of the cloud. In less than a decade Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com went from unknown ideas to global market powers. In even less time LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter changed the world.  According to the Executive Guide to Cloud Computing, these organizations rode the power of the cloud to dominance. “With roots in supercomputing and many other technical disciplines, cloud computing unleashed an entirely new economic reality: technology-enabled enterprises built on low-cost, flexible, and limitless technical infrastructures”. (more…)

As I explore cloud computing more and more, I am surprised by the number of companies that do not see mobility as being integral to cloud solutions. According to McGuire’s Law, the value of a product increases with its mobility. It makes no sense, for instance, to build a next-generation Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application in the cloud without rich mobile functions. Ideally, the SaaS platform is open enough that even new phones, with no specific SaaS application written for them, still work well. (more…)

The economic downturn was the catalyst that changed enterprise behavior patterns says Forrester in a recent webcast with Cisco. The business climate and economy created the perfect storm. Add in the increased pace of technology with fewer internal IT resources, and IT organizations were propelled into the managed services world to keep up with technology and business needs. Forrester noted a 13% uptake on managed services even during the recession.

What new trends have emerged from this great recession?

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So last week, in my post called “The Pendulum Swings Toward the Cloud,” I talked about how even caches of cloud-based elements could exist in the LAN of the future to cut down on the round-trip time into and out of the cloud. Really, this issue can’t be over-emphasized. I have used the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications over a network, and I don’t think many executives appreciate the extent to which latency makes or breaks a SaaS application.  (more…)