The Cloud Is Out There… But Is It the Same to Everybody?

Steven Hill

Summary Bullets:

• Tech vendors have been sending mixed and confusing messages to consumers about the cloud at every level.
• Surely, there must be a better way of marketing cloud offerings that separates consumer cloud services from IT cloud initiatives.

My position about the cloud from day one had nothing to do with hyping the ‘wonder’ of the cloud, focusing instead on the broader philosophical changes that cloud technologies bring to IT in general: for example, the elegance and simplicity of choosing whatever resources you need from a tidy little menu and having them available on demand.  Reducing spin-up times from weeks to minutes, now that’s magic.  I come from a computing background of building everything from scratch, because I am an old nerd and that was pretty much the only way to get things done, so I cannot help but be a rabid fan of elegance and simplicity.  Of course, that degree of simplicity always has a price and we are paying that now in the form of competing standards and inconsistent terminology, making it difficult for IT managers and consumers alike to understand their options.  Instead of making the conversation easier, this makes it more complex.

Mixing the Perfect Big Data Elixir for IT Professionals in 2014

Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:
• How should enterprise IT go about supporting and maybe even driving data and analytics projects in 2014?
• Familiarity with the likes of YARN, NoSQL, Python, ETL among many tools and tactics will help IT succeed with big data both this year and in the years to come

Welcome to 2014. Time for a fresh start and of course a look at how the enterprise data and analytics market will evolve as the new year unfolds. Frankly, you don’t have to look very far on the ol’ interweb to see numerous predictions and prognostications from yours truly and many, many others. Here’s a short list for those keeping score at home: