Treff LaPlante

Too often, discussions about "cloud computing" are met with skepticism and inside jokes that it is more about marketing than it is about delivering real value.  In his excellent analysis of why Cloud Computing is disruptive, Ric Telford over at IBM disagree's.  He talks about a number of key factors that create a disruptive technology, which he defines as the ability to rapidly displace existing technologies.  He mentions things like ease of use, empowerment and efficiency.  He alludes to dramatic productivity gains and cost reductions, and he uses real examples. I am particularly a fan of the "empowerment" aspect.  I think the power of empowerment can't be fully understood or understated.  My uneducated feeling is that much of the economic gains of the 90's had to do with productivity increase that resulted from the rise of the PC and common tools like word proces... (more)

How Cool is the Cloud?

Seven years ago we set out to build a technology that would solve the immense problems faced by business in adoption of technology. If you are not familiar with those problems, you need to familiarize with the now canonical Standish Groups’ Chaos Report, which among other things documents only a 32% rate of software projects completing successfully. During our journey, we encountered many cool things. From the beginning, we were early adopters of the LAMP stack; Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Further, we were able to leverage all sorts of open-source tools like WYSIWYG controls, ... (more)

Cloud Computing Adoption - Part 1 of 5

When my friend who works at an electronics retail store emphatically affirmed he knew what cloud computing was, it made me both nervous and excited. Cloud computing is becoming a ubiquitous concept. It has mass-market implications for the technology industry, and it is advancing at speeds rarely seen with any major technological evolution. As a business leader, do you know why cloud computing is important to you? What parts of your business should you be migrating to the cloud? Do you know what you don't know about cloud computing? First, cloud computing is about reducing complexity.... (more)

Saas-Based Time and Cost Reductions in the Cloud

In the past four weeks I've discussed the benefits of cloud computing and its core components. My goal was to reveal the key value drivers of the cloud so you could better understand and evaluate ROI opportunities. I described two of the three core components of cloud computing,infrastructure and platform, each delivered as a service. But, in the end, your users will not work smarter or more efficiently because of either infrastructure or platforms (save software developers or IT staff); employees will be more effective because of the third core component, software delivered as a... (more)

Does the cloud change age-old build-or-buy dilemma?

Historically, when an organization needed software, it had two basic paths: buy something already built and use it as-is or build from scratch. Both paths have been fraught with peril, as witnessed by the 2009 CHAOS report that showed only 32 percent of projects being successfully completed and nearly one in four projects cancelled before completion. The problem with deploying pre-built software is that it is rigid and inflexible. Software builders didn't anticipate the processes your organization developed to meet customer needs and be successful. What's more, they had no plans to... (more)