Dimension Data’s acquisition of OpSource marks the end of an era and illustrates how the Cloud Computing competitive landscape is expanding to encompass every type of tech vendor and service provider.

Although it is only a fraction of the size and has only a fraction of the brand equity of Salesforce.com, OpSource has had a disproportionate impact on the growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market and broader Cloud movement.

The company’s CEO, Treb Ryan, has been a tireless evangelist for the business value of SaaS and now the Cloud. He and his staff have invested heavily in educating and facilitating the industry’s growth through an endless stream of webcasts and whitepapers, and founding the industry’s most important annual gathering, the SaaS Summit, now known as “All About the Cloud” and managed by the SIIA.

Rather than simply offer a set of hosting services, OpSource put together … Read More »

Plenty of has been written about last week’s disruption of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) which took hundreds of organizations offline, including many rapidly growing start-ups and evolving aspects of enterprise operations.

(The best I’ve read summarizing the questions raised and lessons to be learned as a result of the AWS outage was by my friend Phil Wainewright.)

After suggesting at the beginning of last week that recent issues surrounding Google could derail the rapid growth of Cloud Computing services, it is obvious that Amazon’s problems must be added to the list of sobering events which will certainly cause many entrepreneurs and enterprise decision-makers alike to re-think their Cloud strategies and deployment tactics.

Google’s support issues, combined with Amazon’s service availability problems, clearly make real two of the three greatest fears which IT and business decision-makers face when considering the widening array of Cloud alternatives. The third primal fear … Read More »

Time Warner Cable’s planned acquisition of NaviSite not only intensifies the M&A activity in the managed hosting arena that was ignited last week by Verizon’s purchase of Terremark, it also shows how the corporate and consumer web services markets are converging.

As Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s Chairman and CEO, stated in the company announcement, “Our commercial services business is a key growth driver for the company and one in which we continue to see great opportunity.”

Thirty years ago, I was wrapping up a full-time MBA program at Boston College and was fascinated by an article in Data Communications Magazine about the impending diversiture of AT&T and the prospect of new players entering the enterprise data services market. In particular, the article suggested that the rapidly evolving cable companies of that time could capitalize on this opportunity. I pitched a Boston-based … Read More »

Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, announced last night, clearly indicates that the company is committed to becoming a major player in the rapidly evolving and expanding Cloud Computing marketplace. It will also trigger a new round of similar acquisitions in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment of the Cloud Computing arena.

Verizon’s decision to acquire Terremark was a “classic make/buy” choice, according to the company’s executives during their telebriefing this morning. The acquisition accelerates Verizon’s move to the Cloud by leveraging Terremark’s proven capabilities. Terremark offers enterprise-class IaaS solutions which fit well into Verizon’s portfolio and target market. Terremark also has excess hosting capacity in its Miami and Culpepper facilities, and now has the additional financial resources and channels to market to fuel more rapid growth.

Verizon will allow Terremark to retain its brand and independent operations. In fact, Verizon executives suggested that they may move … Read More »

Two announcements on the same day this week vividly illustrated the scalability and ubiquity of today’s Cloud Computing phenomenon. They also showed the diversity of users seeking to take advantage of Cloud Computing services.

The first was Amazon’s announcement that it is offering a free usage tier of its Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer services for new users for a full year. 

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)  innovative and groundbreaking approach to packaging, pricing and delivering computing power has been the primary impetus and standard bearer of the Cloud Computing movement. Its commodity and even spot-pricing techniques have captured the attention of entrepreneurs and enterprises alike.

UBS Securities estimates that Amazon will generate $500 million in 2010 and $750 million in 2011, making it the largest Cloud vendor by far with minimal marketing effort. Yet, this still only … Read More »

Verizon unveiled a new cloud computing offering yesterday, the latest in its series of “Computing as a Service” (CaaS) packages, aimed at small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

The real target of the announcement is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has pioneered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) frontier that has redefined the way computing power is packaged and delivered to the marketplace.

Although AWS hasn’t threatened to enter the telecom business, like Google, its success in the cloud computing market has raised the bar for telcos who have been laboring in the hosting business for many years.

AWS’s claim to fame in the cloud computing arena has been the hyper-elasticity and minuscule price-points of its IaaS solutions, which are bolstered by a myriad of third-party tools vendors. These services have primarily appealed to tech-savvy users, large and small, willing to cobble together these on-demand, online resources to meet their situational computing needs.

Verizon is … Read More »

Years ago, I considered the week leading into Labor Day as the final hurrah of the Summer and tried to preserve it for an end of season vacation to cap off the warm weather months in New England. Then my kids became school age and schools started kicking off before the holiday weekend. (Don’t get me started on this silly practice.)

Now, the tech industry is also making a habit of getting back into stride for the new Fall season before the dog days of August are behind us. One of the important annual venues for kicking off the new season of activity is VMworld.

This year’s event is generating plenty of news, especially regarding cloud-oriented acquisitions and alliances. Here’s a quick sampling:

VMware Acquires Integrien and TriCipher 
Verizon and VMware to Launch Enterprise-Class Hybrid Cloud Solution 
BlueLock Introduces VMware vCloud Datacenter Service with CloudConnector 
EMC Transforms … Read More »

Yesterday, Verizon Business introduced an on-demand, “cloud-based” Computing-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution that will be an important indicator of whether telcos can succeed in the cloud.

Anyone who has followed my writings knows that my roots are in the telecom industry, having helped to launch IDC’s Communications Industry Research program in 1983 at the time of the AT&T divestiture.

I’ve watched the telecommunications giants make many failed efforts to penetrate the data center. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they tried their hand at systems integration and IT outsourcing.  In the late 1990s, they aggressively provisioned fiber optic cables and built out showcase network operations centers (NOCs) to exploit the Internet explosion and capitalize on the over-hyped demand for managed services which never fully materialized.

After the telecom industry shakeout at the beginning of this decade, the telcos bought their way into the Application Service Provider (ASP) market. Verizon acquired Digex and Totality via MCI, and AT&T … 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 »