LeanITmanager

The Mobile Proof Presence (MPOP) checkin game is white-hot and set to explode. In a relatively short amount of time, most people (with an iPhone, at least)  know what a “checkin” is and the most popular checkin platform (Foursquare) is adding 15,000 people per day! Foursquare is chasing 2 Million users, each opting-in to broadcast the details of their location-based interactions with real businesses in the context of their larger trusted social networks. This is no longer a fad. This is real and could finally be the legitimizing “lift” mobile advertising has long been looking for. Thanks to checkins, realtime social network updates are no longer just static, general “What you are doing?” posts. They now convey “What are you doing, where are you, and who are you there with.” While this has certainly been a fast-moving location-based social media phenomenon, the real... (more)

Private Clouds: Old Wine in a New Bottle

I recently read a Bank of America Merrill Lynch report about cloud computing, and they described private clouds as "old wine in a new bottle." I think they nailed it! The report points out that a typical private cloud set-up looks much the same as the infrastructure components currently found in a corporate data center, with virtualization added to the mix. While the virtualization provides somewhat better server utilization, the elasticity and efficiency available in the public cloud has private clouds beat by a mile. In short, the term "private cloud" is usually just a buzzword... (more)

The Internet as a Data Center

I read about CA World in Las Vegas this week, and the description of the cloud by one company executive, Dr Ajei Gopal, executive vice-president of products and technology, really caught my eye and struck a bell. In a story on the event, Gopal was quoted as describing how the typical IT department will be transformed and made – more so than ever – into a management function benefitting the entire organization: “The cloud will change everything. Instead of being a monolithic supplier of technology services to the business, the IT department becomes the manager of a dynamic supply... (more)

The Problem with Storage Growth is That No One is Minding the Store

In late 2008, IDC predicted more than 61% Annual Growth Rate for unstructured data in traditional data centers through 2012. The numbers appear to hold up thus far, perhaps were even conservative. This was one of the first reports to include the growth from cloud storage providers in their numbers, and that particular group was showing a much higher rate of growth – understandable since they have to turn up the storage they’re going to resell. The update to this document titled World Wide Enterprise Systems Storage Forecast published in April of this year shows that even in light... (more)

Why IT Needs to Take Control of Public Cloud Computing

IT organizations that fail to provide guidance for and governance over public cloud computing usage will be unhappy with the results… While it is highly unlikely that business users will “control their own destiny” by provisioning servers in cloud computing environments that doesn’t mean they won’t be involved. In fact it’s likely that IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud computing environments will be leveraged by business users to avoid the hassles they perceive (and oft times actually do) exist in their quest to deploy a given business application. It’s just that they won... (more)