Last week saw a few thousand devoted OpenStack community members flock to Boston to take part in the bi-annual OpenStack Summit. This summit marks a major turning point for the initiative. Since we all congregated in Barcelona last year,…
When I first met Irish monitoring vendor Corvil a few months ago, I was immediately struck they were the antithesis of a Silicon Valley startup—they demonstrated a deeper reverence for the history of the industry and their founders than…
There were dozens of announcements at Microsoft’s Build conference last week, but perhaps one caused the most angst among the cloud cognoscenti. I’m referring to the upcoming general availability of Azure Stack. Microsoft’s offering will let organizations leverage the…
I live my life in two worlds. The most visible world, at least to this audience, involves spending lots of time in Silicon Valley and the U.S. generally and conversing with the technology illuminati—those who “get” technology, the cloud…
It’s fair to say that no one has been covering Xero longer than I have. I first talked to its co-founder and CEO, Rod Drury, long before the company launched a product. Trawling back through my emails and I…
There has been much talk in recent years about the democratization of the financial services space. The thinking goes that for too long power (and, more importantly, wealth) has been concentrated in the hands of a few, and that…
Maybe I haven’t shown Adobe enough love in the past year. For whatever reason, the company reached out to me and offered an exclusive insight into news coming up at its Summit EMEA, and the chance to sit down…
I was happy when Hewlett-Packard (as it was known then) acquired the Stackato PaaS from ActiveState, a Canadian developer tool company. Of course there was some self-interest there, I was an adviser to ActiveState and was actually involved in…
The security space is one area where there are a massive number of vendors all offering to solve particular discrete problems. That is all well and good if you have a singular, discrete problem to solve, but what happens…
One criticism that I have never heard leveled at enterprise software vendor SAP is that it over simplifies things. Quite the opposite. In fact, SAP is well known for being a seriously complicated set of applications that offers huge…
