Gregor Petri

Statistics matter, not only in business, but increasingly also in our social life - well, at least in our social media life. Some of the statistics I noticed this week were round numbers, like 1000. With 1000 representing both the number now showing under "followers" in Twitter and the revenue number for research (that's excluding events, consulting and other items) we grew to in 2011. And on my blog I saw - a bit to my surprise - it has been a full 10 weeks since my last post! That's however more a case of blogger's block than writer's block, as I did (co-)author the round number of 10 research notes since joining this summer. To catch up, I am including below a short overview of the topics these research notes covered (Gartner clients only) and that I likely will explore further in the future - both in research and using (social) media. So what topics did these... (more)

Shedding Light on Cloud Computing - A Free Primer

Cloud Computing is the most discussed IT innovation of recent times. This Primer provides a structured overview of what Cloud Computing is and what the potential benefits and risks are. In addition it explores how Cloud Computing will impact IT management and IT's role in the organization as a service provider. It also looks at the risks of Cloud Computing. Risk is consistently cited by CIOs and CFOs as the largest obstacle of cloud computing for their organizations. In this primer we consider the risks in areas such as availability, privacy and regulatory compliance. The bookle... (more)

Cloud in One Hundred Days (and Nights)

This week the Gartner Symposium visited an unexpectedly sunny Barcelona. This year’s theme for the Gartner Symposium is  "Re-imagine IT" and how the forces of Cloud, Social, Information (incl. big data) and Mobile are forming a nexus (Websters: a connected group or series) of change, see the bottom of this post for a link to the on-line replays. While here I ran into a former colleague who reminded me that this is also around day 100 in my new role as analyst. And although I am all too aware that being an analysts is not even remotely like running a country, this seems as good a ... (more)

Can the Real Cloud Market Size Please Stand Up?

It seems like every week another sizing of the cloud market is published, and – maybe as to be expected - none of them seem to agree. Let’s have a look at who is saying what, and whether we are comparing apples to apples, or apples and oranges. We will start by looking at SaaS. The most recent numbers from IDC claim that SaaS revenue will grow 5 times faster than traditional packaged software. This would mean little if traditional packaged software is expected to no longer grow (five times zero would still be zero). Joe McKendrick at ZDNet took IDC’s numbers and extrapolated from t... (more)

How Lean Is Your Cloud?

Delivering IT services can be in many ways be compared to manufacturing processes, and over the years the concept of an “IT factory” has become a popular way of explaining best practices in IT operations. In this tradition Cloud Computing can be seen as the logical next step, converting the traditional IT factory into a modern IT Supply Chain (see also the recent whitepaper by Sam Somashekar). The ambition to model IT after manufacturing is understandable. The enormous efficiency improvements gained from innovations in manufacturing management have enabled the economic growth and... (more)