The extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions has prompted nearly every major hardware and software vendor to offer their own IaaS, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions as well. This has put tremendous pressure on traditional hosting companies, communications service providers (CSPs), and Value-Added Resellers (VARs) to respond with their own offerings in this increasingly competitive marketplace.

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a full-day analyst briefing and attend the kickoff session of Parallels’ 2011 Partner Summit. [Disclosure: Parallels paid my travel expenses to attend the event.] This year’s Summit built on the momentum of last year’s conference by unveiling numerous enhancements to its portfolio of Cloud enablement solutions, including:

Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure
Hosted PBX
Microsoft System Center Hyper-V Cloud
Microsoft Office 365 Syndication

Parallels also promised to make an increased investment in its Application Packaging Standardization (APS) Program to permit greater portability of Cloud services.

What I especially liked about this year’s … Read More »

A friend at AT&T, Joe Weinman, continues to pump out thoughtful blog posts regarding the rapid evolution of the cloud computing industry. His latest post on GigaOm entitled, “6 Half-Truths About the Cloud”, includes a link to a previous post which offers “10 Reasons Why Telcos Will Dominate Enterprise Cloud Computing “.

I was drawn to his previous post because Joe added a link in today’s post for his definition of “CLOUD” – Common, Location-independent, Online Utility provisioned on-Demand.

But, I was also compelled to respond to Joe’s suggestion that the telcos are in the best position to capitalize on the growing demand among enterprises for cloud computing services.

I was originally attracted to the technology industry in 1982 not because I was a geeky engineer but because I was a MBA student looking for a hot new market opportunity and saw the impending divestiture of AT&T as … Read More »