It looks like the Cloud Wars are well and truly on, with Google announcing major price drops, AWS following suit, and Microsoft joining in with drops in Azure pricing to match those of AWS. It got me to wondering about how this might end up. Google has been in the… Read More
Today I’m going to step through why a focus on costs is a dumb thing for IT to do. Or any business, for that matter. In my consulting work, in conversations at trade shows, and just generally, IT management have a frustrating tendency to focus on costs. “Doing more with less”… Read More
Over lunch with a colleague yesterday, I accidentally coined a new term that I’m rather amused by: Eye of Sauron Management. You’ve probably experienced it yourself: upper management are fixated on some particular area of the business, or a specific project. It consumes their attention, and so everywhere else just… Read More
I was catching up on some reading backlog over the weekend, and noticed a parallel I’d not seen before: The IT industry right now is quite similar to industry in the USA in the 1970s. Similar in several interesting ways. Firstly, American companies in the ’70s had grown fat and… Read More
Simon Sharwood (@ssharwood) is APAC editor for The Register and a regular at the Melbourne VMUG User Conference. We spoke about “What Hath VMware Wrought” and what automation and cloud means for IT pros and their future career prospects. He shared his thoughts on what it all means, and we… Read More
In an attempt to revive a tradition I’ve long abandoned, this post is a personal reflection on the year that was: 2013. Thinking on the past and expressing gratitude for good things that have happened makes you happier, according to research summarised in Professor Richard Wiseman’s book 59 seconds. It’s… Read More
I’m on a mission, apparently. The mission is to completely transform IT from a secretive cabal of techno-wizards pursuing their own ends into a collaborative business function that acts as a catalyst. I didn’t choose it so much as it chose me, and it hasn’t been without some personal cost.… Read More
Solarwinds did a fantastic job, and are another example of a company that really understands their marketing strategy and their brand. Denny LeCompte clearly explains how Solarwinds is different before even three minutes had elapsed in his presentation. They’re not dealing with the bleeding edge problems of Fortune 50 companies.… Read More
There’s so much good stuff to talk about with Infinio, I’m almost at a loss for where to begin. Infinio Accelerator I’ll start with the product Infinio have launched: their NAS accelerator for virtual machines. It’s so obviously a good thing I’m amazed it doesn’t already exist. I mean, think… Read More
Veeam, like Nutanix, are Tech Field Day veterans, so I expect a smooth presentation. I’ve heard a bit about Veeam for some years now, though not in great detail. What I heard was generally glowing praise for its capabilities in backing up VMware environments. Unencumbered by issues of backwards-compatibility, or… Read More
