Cloud and Enterprise IT

Investing in the Cloud

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 16, 2012 / Leave a comment

The cloud is growing. Over the next 15 years enterprises will spend billions of dollars finding ways to leverage commodity compute (IaaS/PaaS), flexible platforms that support very specific demand (PaaS), and software that automates non-differentiating practices (SaaS). Almost everyone in IT knows this, the question is, “How do I make...
Windows 8: What’s the Best That Could Happen?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 29, 2012 / Leave a comment

Microsoft launched their new Windows 8 operating system. It appears from all of the reviews that this change is more like Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 (When you were like, “woah, what’s this whole Start menu thing?”) than it is like Windows XP to Windows 7 (When you were like,...
Enterprise Software Startups Make a Comeback

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ June 20, 2012 / Leave a comment

“Venture capitalists placed $2 billion with IT startups in the first quarter of this year, according to a survey by Dow Jones VentureSource, a 14% increase from the first quarter of 2011. Meanwhile, investors put 76% less investment in consumer internet companies. Software companies attracted the most funding, $1.3 billion,...
The Way I See the “Talent War” in Pittsburgh

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 10, 2012 / Leave a comment

There have been a number of interesting articles in the past few weeks about the “talent war” that tech companies in Pittsburgh are fighting. There was one (actually from last year, but I recently saw a link to it) about Pikimal addressing a shortage of developers by finding strong candidates...
Zynga’s Hybrid Cloud

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 9, 2012 / Leave a comment

There are two things I thought I’d share about the story I read in iWeed this morning about Zynga’s hybrid (internal/Amazon) cloud: In the hype about cloud it’s easily to lose track of just how immature we are so far. The fact that with all the cloud options out there in...
Amazon, The Cloud Supermarket, and Other Ways to Eat

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 7, 2012 / Leave a comment

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post on Amazon’s Toolkit Strategy. I wrestled with whether Amazon should still be considered infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or whether they were providing so many services that it was easier to think of them as Platform as a Service. I ended up...
File System For the Cloud

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ May 1, 2012 / Leave a comment

Once in a while something comes along and you’re like CRAP, why didn’t I see that coming. Box.com being the NAS of the web (not just for their apps but for ANYONE’s) is frickin brilliant. Releasing their API isn’t just storage as a service, it’s something more than that. It’s...
Amazon’s Toolkit Strategy

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 16, 2012 / Leave a comment

Amazon announced the other day that they were releasing a product called CloudSearch. It’s yet another new product within the AWS portfolio, a portfolio that is getting so full of features that it is beginning become difficult to categorize. Traditionally there have three types of cloud services; Infrastructure as a...
Sunny Days?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 9, 2012 / Leave a comment

One of my primary investment theses at the moment is that the cloud is not only growing, but that we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible. That’s why when I read that Amazon’s S3 growth has declined slightly, I was surprised. To be clear, it’s not like S3...
The Truth Behind Amazon EC2′s April Fools

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ April 2, 2012 / Leave a comment

Let’s face it. Sometimes you just need a local server. Perhaps your office is too cold, or you have the urge to pull the cover off and reseat the memory. Or, you might have some data on floppy disks that you simply cannot live without. Because we will leave no...