OnDemand Beat » Microsoft Windows Azure

Review of The New Polymath

Ameed Taylor — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:45:02 +0000

Vinnie Mirchandani’s new book; The New Polymath, is full of profiles and case studies that illustrate how the New Polymath’s within many industries are creating disruptive innovation to leapfrog their competition and introduce innovation to their respective industries and customers.

The book’s chapters on Technology and Cloud Computing profile innovations of technology vendors. In particular, Mirchandani uses many examples from the Cloud Computing industry. Calling Cloud Computing the convergence of Marc Benioff’s “Democratization of Technology” with Marc Manos’ “Industrialization of Technology” Mirchandani cites diverse case studies from Japan Post Network to Salesforce.com in the New Polymath to prove his point.

One profile focuses on how Netsuite uses its shared cloud infrastructure to quickly adjust its business based on market conditions and to benchmark against its competitors. Netsuite hopes to use its collected customer metrics to create Business Process Outsourcing Partnerships that will allow its customers to monitor business process metrics that up to now have been extremely difficult to gather.

In yet another example of the innovation inherent within the cloud, Mirchandani cites Cloud Computing poster child Appirio. Appirio has not owned any servers since its inception and runs all of its operations from lead generation to payroll in the cloud. Unlike its competitors Appirrio only used 2% of its revenue on internal IT versus the industry average of 7%. This type of advantage allowed Appirio to utilize more of its venture funding and initial revenue’s for R&D and customers activities thus allowing the company to grow from 5 to 200 employees without an IT department.

Like the Cloud Computing vendors; who are Polymath’s for bringing disparate technologies together for customers, Mirchandani deftly brings together disparate examples in an engaging book that provides readers a guidepost in how to also become a Polymath.

IBM rolls out Beta Cloud to Developers

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:42:29 +0000

IBM last month rolled out its Beta Cloud to the general public. The Beta Cloud is IBM’s dynamically provisioned runtime environment that includes tools to develop and test application code on IBM software.

With this new offering on the market it will be interesting to see who dominates amongst Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Force.com as the environment of choice for Cloud development.

The following video shows developers how to create environments on the Beta Cloud.

V2 of Cloud Computing Use Cases Published

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:51:43 +0000

Version 2 of the Computing Use Cases White Paper has just been published. V2 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases focuses on developer roles and what is necessary for Open API’s to work with Cloud Computing.

V2 of the Use Cases series follows the release of the the initial Cloud Computing Use Cases document in August 2009 that focused on requirements that need to be standardized in a cloud environment to ensure integration, portability and interoperability.

The Cloud Computing Use Cases Group is now soliciting input on V3 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases series and has identified the topics of Moving to the Cloud, Security in Cloud Computing and SLA’s for Cloud Computing as potential focuses of V3.

Microsoft Makes Windows Azure Push

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:23:46 +0000

Microsoft has recently made a strong push into consolidating mind share amongst Cloud Developers with a relaunched Windows Azure Platform developer portal and targeted adverts on LinkedIn and other social networking sites.

Microsoft technical strategist Steve Marx outlines the Windows Azure Platform for developers in the following video.