Gregor Petri

It’s the time of year to look at what was and contemplate on what will be. In Gartner the latter process has been formalized through the series of predict documents we publish towards the end of the year. Since a few years we precede these individual documents with a top predictions note that this year was titled “Plan for a Disruptive, but Constructive future” (press release). An important theme of this year’s predict was the rise of digital business, but also some of the darker sides of this. My section spoke about how – in the 2020 timeframe - the labor reduction effect of digitalization may cause social unrest and a quest for new economic models in several mature economies. Early signals of such movements may be larger-scale versions of Occupy Wall Street-type movements and increasing replacement of traditional paid jobs with bartering-based systems and increase... (more)

Connecting the Dots in Enterprise Cloud

Conventional wisdom is that the fastest connection between two points- for example between today and tomorrow - is a straight line. But just like in aviation this is not necessarily true in cloud computing. First because cloud computing is not one thing (not one dot on the map) it is a conglomerate of many different types of services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS) each with its own characteristics and following its own timeline. This makes it very difficult (if even useful) to get organizations to agree on a cloud strategy. A colleague of mine once compared it to leading five blindfol... (more)

Cloud Predictions Beyond 2011-12: The Need for a Cloud Abstraction Model

If the cloud is to fulfill on its promise we need to start thinking of it as a cloud, not as an aggregation of its components (such as VMs etc.) As mentioned in a previous post I‘ll use some of my upcoming posts to highlight some cloud computing "megatrends" that I believe are happening - or need to happen – beyond 2011. One of these would be the creation of an “abstraction model” that can be used to think about (and eventually manage) the cloud.  A nice setup to this was done by Jen-Pierre Garbani of Forrester, who in a recent post at Computerworld ... (more)

Cloud, Are We There Yet?

The Washington Post recently ran an article by Andrea Peterson on RIM (now BlackBerry), with a chart they called "The decline of blackberry in one chart". But more than the story of BlackBerry this chart rang home for me the enormous dynamics of a relative new industry. As their chart showed the four mobile vendors that together had about hundred percent market share in 2005 barely managed to hold on to 20% by 2013. In only 8 years they went from hero to zero, and were replaced by platforms that were introduced in 2007 (Apple) and 2009 (Android). I don't cover mobile platforms s... (more)

Why the Cloud May Require You to Learn Multiple Words for Snow

Cloud is at the center of a convergence trend that is impacting people across all of ICT. This convergence is breaking down the walls that separated the traditional silos of IT, networking, storage and security. But with this breaking down of the walls we also need to better understand the subtleties of each other's domains in more details. A famous urban legend is that Eskimos have many words for snow, as it makes sense to - if you spend your whole day in snow - to distinguish the subtle and not so subtle differences. Similar in IT, where others simply refer to IT as IT, the peo... (more)