Lori MacVittie

Scott Bils has a post on the "Five Mistakes that Enterprise Cloud Service Providers are Making" over on Leverhawk. Points four and five were particularly interesting because it seems there's a synergistic opportunity there. Point number four from Scott: Omitting SaaS and PaaS: Cloud infrastructure service providers have little incentive to migrate customers to public cloud SaaS offerings such as Salesforce.com or Workday. For many customers, migrating legacy apps to SaaS models will be the right answer. Many enterprise cloud service providers conveniently omit this lever from their transformation story and lose customer credibility as a result. And point number five: Failing to differentiate: Many vendors position themselves as providing managed services that make cloud models ”enterprise ready.” The problem is that every other vendor is saying the exact same thin... (more)

SaaS Creating Eventually Consistent Business Model

The success of SOA, which grew out of the popular Object Oriented development paradigm, was greatly hampered by the inability of architects to enforce its central premise of reuse. But it wasn't just the lack of reusing services that caused it to fail to achieve the greatness predicted, it was the lack of adopting the idea of an authoritative source for business critical objects, i.e. data. A customer, an order, a lead, a prospect, a service call. These "business objects" within SOA were intended to represented by a single, authoritative source as a means to ultimately provide a... (more)

The Mounting Case for Cloud Access Brokers

Unifying identity and access management has been a stretch goal for IT for nearly a decade. At first it was merely the need to have a single, authoritative source of corporate identity such that risks like orphaned or unauthorized accounts could be addressed within the enterprise. But with a growing number of applications - business applications - being deployed "in the cloud", it's practically a foregone conclusion that organizations are going to need similar capabilities for those applications, as well. It's not easy, there are myriad reasons why unifying identity and access ... (more)

The Future of Hybrid Cloud

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means... An interesting and almost ancillary point was made during a recent #cloudtalk hosted by VMware vCloud with respect to the definition of "hybrid" cloud. Sure, it implies some level of integration, but how much integration is required to be considered a hybrid cloud? The way I see it, there has to be some level of integration that supports the ability to automate something - either resources or a process - in order for an architecture to be considered a hybrid cloud. A "hybrid" anything, after all, is based ... (more)

Cloud: Commoditizing End Users

Prioritization. It's something that's built into nearly every technology, particularly that which services network traffic. Rate shaping. Queuing. Coloring bits. We do a lot of interesting gyrations with technology to ensure that some user traffic and requests are more equal than others. Today we still do the same thing, but it's done in different ways. Software as a Service charges a premium for "extra" API calls, for example, and if you want access to premium content there's sure to be a paywall in front of it. But that's at the service level. It's not the same as prioritization... (more)