Gregor Petri

Tune into: Decentralization More than with previous technological (r)evolutions a side effect of cloud computing seems to be an increase in the degree of centralization and concentration, not just within company organizations, but particularly in the wider commercial market. This is the most obvious with Software as a Service, where providers such as Airbnb, Uber, but also earlier cloud services such as LinkedIn and Google Search quickly established a ‘winner takes all’ distribution of market share and thus market power. And also in Infrastructure as a Service, we see an quickly diminishing  number of suppliers still having the illusion that they can keep up with the gorilla in this market. My first scientific encounter with centralization and decentralization was during the early eighties of the last century – when Prof. Gert Nielen – one of the founders of the t... (more)

Tune into the Cloud: Closer | @CloudExpo #IoT #M2M #DigitalTransformation

Tune into: Ecosystem Platforms During 2016 cloud computing celebrated its tenth anniversary. Therefore, at the beginning of 2017, we’ll briefly look at what the next decade may bring. Also this brings to a close the version of Tune into the Cloud that was published monthly in the Dutch print publication Cloudworks, the magazine where we started this series. On your tenth birthday, as fresh teenager, you’re normally not yet an adolescent – a.k.a, a beginning adult – and you may not be seated at the adult table yet. But there are exceptions. Sometimes things just move faster. Jus... (more)

Cloud Computing Becomes Cool Computing?

In December InformationWeek’s Bob Evans started a contest asking their readership to come up with a better name for “Cloud Computing”. Reason was that the CEO’s of both HP and IBM recently expressed some discontent with the current name. Something about “Cloudy not being clear enough”. Not clear enough for what, for justifying really large invoices? And then we are not even mentioning Oracle’s CEO, who has been on a contra-Cloud quest for ages. The overwhelming majority of the 500 names the contestants submitted were acronyms, which make you wonder whether IT is truly beyond salv... (more)

End of Outsourcing, Death of the Web, Self Managing Clouds? Not So Fast, Just Yet

Sure, it may all happen, but expect a similar timeframe as for the paperless office Predicting the future is a lot more fun than analyzing the past, but as Mel Brooks might say “A funny thing happened on the way to the future; it changed from what we expected.” And there have been plenty of predictions recently. For starters, Wired Magazine announced  the death of the (browser based) web, predicting it will be replaced by dedicated locally installed desktop or mobile applications – those things we now call “Apps.” As you can imagine, this article prompted a large response by blogge... (more)

Vivek Kundra’s Decision Framework for Cloud Computing Migration

In my last blog, a cloud of two speeds, I mentioned Vivek Kundra's very readable cloud strategy and the industry stimulus effect this approach can have on the emerging cloud industry. By presenting his strategy not simply as a way to cut costs and reduce budgets, but as a way to get more value from existing IT investments, he enlisted IT as an ally to his plans, instead of a potential opponent. Section two of the strategy - summarised below - is a pragmatic 3 step approach and check-list for migrating services to the cloud, which can also be valuable for organizations outside the... (more)