This Tuesday’s TechCrunch Geek n Rolla event included a presentation by Joe Drumgoole, “get of of my cloud.” It probably steered between too technical for non-tech folks and not technical enough for the techies. Launching a start up on a cloud infrastructure makes good economic sense – it’s a success-based cost model. The same holds true for start up projects inside of larger businesses.

However, Joe advised some caution, per transaction costs can kill you (this is ironic given that the concept of “Free” – so popular with the Web 2.0 world – is based on infinitely low transaction costs). Remember, with cloud computing, you can’t touch the hardware or see it, so monitoring is more important, he mentioned Nagios and Monitis which are great packages for doing just that. [more...]

Today was CloudForce in London – SalesForce.com’s big event, which is touring the world, and touted as “your chance to get the insight you need to take advantage of cloud computing and salesforce.com applications in 2009.” And that’s probably where the problem starts. There wasn’t much cloud on show, at least not cloud computing as I understand it.

They had me in the palm of their hand. I was waiting to be wowed. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s highly energetic Chairman and CEO took to the stage and had at it like a fervent preacher, although one who’d slightly forgotten his gospel, having to glance down at his autocue as he stumbled over customer and competitor names, but that didn’t dim his obvious passion for what SaleForce.com had to offer. [more...]

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a London SharePoint user group meeting at Microsoft’s offices in Victoria London. Michael Noel of Convergent Computing gave an excellent overview of building the perfect SharePoint farm.

Michael is one of the authors of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Unleashed, and well know for his SharePoint expertise. He did a walkthrough of build process, from best practices perspective, covering small deployments with all SharePoint roles and SQL server on the same server, though SharePoint roles on a a single box, with SQL server on separate box, to a fully redundant set up with multiple query servers and an index server. That set up requires 5 servers, and is the smallest redundant farm configuration. [more...]

Recently I met up with Christopher Barrow at Avaya’s Guildford offices to talk through Avaya’s latest moves, and the evolving world of communications enabled business processes. Chris is an Avaya old hand, having been with the company through its many iterations, most recently as Product Marketing Manager for Avaya in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. We talked about the state of collaboration technology, from the use of solutions like Sharepoint to managing with mobiles in the enterprise. [more...]

A little while back Britannic Technologies held their 5th Annual Convergence Summit. The wonderful surroundings of Mercedes-Benz World, in Surrey, provided a high tech back drop to a very high tech day. There were a number of guest speakers and I’ll call out some noteworthy points they made: [more...]