Roger Strukhoff is Executive Director of the Tau Institute 
I've written before about an ongoing software development project with which I've been recently involved. Its complexities continue to challenge a development team with architects, programmers, and project managers in Chicago, Silicon Valley, and the Philippines.
But we're able to k...May. 24, 2013 06:58 AM EDT Reads: 367
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has revealed her latest surprise, announcing that the company “is now committed to great journalism.”
“With almost 150 million unique visitors per month, our company is the most dominant media presence in the world,” she said. “It's time for us to commit to s...
I like to organize part of my life around Cloud Expo, coming up again in New York June 10-13. One new tradition is to published our updated Tau Index results at the event. We will be doing this in New York again this year.
We published our original Tau Index results in conjunction w...
The recent meteor blast over the skies of Russia served a reminder that humanity lives in a constant state of mortal peril. Surely, we can be serious, even as we make fatuous references to movies like “Airplane” along the way.
Despite our solar system's occasional warnings of poten...
I had inquiries this week about our research in two separate but similar places: Panama and Jordan.
How are they similar? Both have relatively small populations but central locations in major regions of the world, and both seem to be poised to emerge as leaders in their regions and...
The roles of information technology in economic and societal development are clear. Better use of IT (or ICT as it's called in much of the world) increases productivity, which increases economic growth. This holds true whether in manufacturing, along supply chains, throughout research ...
As I continue to meander through the early stages of our software-development project, I've encountered a large measure of scope creep. Scope jog or scope sprint might be a more accurate term. What started as a modest, internal workflow project has been intertwined with a more ambitiou...
The bloviations of a wacko CEO in the US against French workers provided some comic fodder this week. Making fun of the French is a bit of a national sport in the US, and the expected barbed retorts have come back from France this week.
More seriously, the “dirigiste” approach to go...
Who are the world’s ICT leaders? What separates them from the pack? Where are the emerging ICT stars? Why are they important? How can you go “beyond the BRICs” in your analysis?
These are questions we've been working to answer over the past two years, with original research that loo...
I'm developing software – yikes. I first came to this industry in the 1980s as a non-geek music major, and was forced to learn how to run a Unix-based box from Callan Data Systems that I fondly called The Antichrist.
All these years later, I'm still a non-geek, albeit one who has l...
“Despite the lock-in...it’s really not about the money but about the features and the product offering.” So states a blogpost I just read from a company that is dissatisfied with one major cloud vendor and is moving to another.
Yet cloud vendor lock-in -- what I like to call Vendor...
“Jones, we need an RDBMS strategy implemented immediately!! Oh, and, what's an RDBMS?”
Thus read the caption to a New Yorker cartoon many years ago, in which a CEO was berating a subordinate.
The same cartoon could run today, with the words “Cloud Computing,” “Big Data,” or “SDN...
The days are growing longer as I sit in a second-floor office in northern Illinois, but barely. A rare clear, but very cold day is ending shortly after 4pm as a bright orange sun sets in the southwest outside my frosted window.
The year ends tomorrow. So may Congressional negotiati...
No, I don't see black helicopters in the sky. And I don't believe in global conspiracies – I think we humans are far too inept at operating anything complex over the long haul – and at keeping secrets – to somehow build vast, global ruling structures.
But I remain highly concerned a...
As the last productive week of the year nears its end, time to think about what was important this year and what will be important next year. The first winter storm of the season is blowing into my northern Illinois location as I contemplate things, reminding me that I should have boug...
I've been in London this week, meeting with several people and organizations about cloud computing and its potential to drive the global economy by bringing efficiencies to IT – in short, about its potential to be “green.”
The topic of green quickly devolved into an asinine politica...
I'm headed to London this week, to talk to people about the future of cloud computing. Although innovation and progress today spread more uniformly throughout the world more quickly than in the past, there are still some severe discrepancies in technology adoption.
For example, the...
I listened to remarks on CSPAN from the very controversial Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's current Foreign Minister, during his recent appearance at a forum in Washington, DC.
He said he believed that if people focused on economic development in the Palestinian Territories enough to gi...
I switched over to the Opera browser the other day on my main work computer. The Oslo-based Opera Software has only been able to grab about 2% of the browser market, but at least this number has remained fairly steady for almost a decade. It may gain momentum in the mobile space as the...
Eucalyptus was originally known as one of the key open-source contenders in the battle for private cloud computing customers. Later, it became known as the company that broke with the pack to become compatible with AWS public cloud services, thus becoming a player in the world of hybri...
How can the United States improve its technology standing in the world? For that matter, how can any country do this?
These are among the questions we've undertaken with our ongoing research at The Tau Institute, which I founded earlier this year with the sponsorship of Cloud Comput...
We've produced our initial report for sale by The Tau Institute. It's priced at $895, with a $200 discount if you mention “Cloud Computing Journal” when you order. You can visit our website or tweet me if you're interested.
But this is not a sales pitch. The report is just part of o...
So here we go again. Serious violence, if not outright war, is imminent in Gaza and Israel. This time, Hamas has rockets that can travel to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, upping the ante a few notches.
Violence is a lot uglier up close than as seen on TV, whether delivered by land, sea, p...
The Holland Pavilion has been one of the highlights of recent Cloud Expo shows, including the most recent conference and exhibition in Santa Clara, CA.
A group of entrepreneurial companies in the cloud and social media spaces were present at the show last week, including a Utrecht-...
A friend of mine is visiting Cairo, Egypt at the moment. As he descended into the chaos of the street in front of his hotel, he said he felt as if he was back in India, or Jamaica.
There are many chaotic, deafening streets in the world. I spent time on many of them during a recent t...
Much of my writing on cloud computing over the past couple of years has been in near-panic mode. The US economy refused to bounce back, it seemed millions of jobs were lost forever, and the US seemed to be at the start of a long decline into obscurity.
Then hey, the United States m...
Oracle was notable for its absence at the recent Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. Previously a headliner, the company may be threatened by the emergence and aggressive marketing of all of the Openstack folks, if I'm reading between the lines properly.
Oracle is widely reviled – and I don'...
Walking around Cloud Expo in Santa Clara yesterday, sitting in on various sessions, grabbing conversations with old friends and new acquaintances, I learned a few things:
The technologists are still ahead of the customers. Although AWS has been around since 2006, the impression here...
Arrived at Cloud Expo for its opening in Santa Clara, and pleasantly surprised to see JETRO on the exhibitor's program. This is the Japan External Trade Organization, a group that held a lot of sway in the 70s and 80s, when Americans thought Japan was going to take over the US economy....
I'm looking forward to Cloud Expo in Santa Clara next week.
Last year I flew from Manila, Philippines to be in attendance and announce the initial results of the Tau Index research that I'd been conducting with partners in Asia. This year, my flight will be only from Chicago, even ...
I enjoyed reading Nicholas Carr's “The Big Switch” when it came out a few years ago. It compared cloud services to water and electricity, and set me on course to write about cloud computing and its potential on a regular basis.
Now, as I consult with three different software develo...
A few big industry changes happened this week. Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface are now part of our world; the two Apple executives who were committed to, respectively, poor customer service in Apple's stores and an even poorer Maps product are no longer part of our world.
The Surfa...
I was busy this past week, visiting several small midwestern cities within driving distance of my location in Northern Illinois, talking to businesspeople and academics about cloud computing and big data.
One visit was to the School of Information Technology at Illinois State Unive...
I read a story by one respected writer who said that “cloud computing” will equal “computing” within five years. A day later, I saw a story by another respected writer who said that cloudwashing and a lack of standards means that most enterprises don't yet even had a cloud-computing st...
We've added Syria to the list of countries in our research at the Tau Institute, making it the 100th country included in our listings and rankings. The human tragedy there cannot be overstated, and this may seem a poor time to be discussing how its ICT infrastructure ranks among its pe...
A disturbing new law called the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 was recently passed by both houses of the Philippines Congress and signed into law by President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. It's disturbing because it theoretically allows criminal prosecution for people making “libelou...
A new Forrester report says “the clock is ticking” for OpenStack, because “have been relatively few enterprise-ready OpenStack-powered products on the market.” The report was quoted as such in a leading tech publication, which had also reported, just five weeks ago, that SUSE had just...
I apparently like hitting myself on the head with a hammer, as I'm once again reviewing estimates of global cloud-computing spending and growth.
It's difficult enough to get insightful estimates of IT spending in general – the most valid number seems to be about $3.6 trillion (comi...
Good government makes for wealthy countries. This may seem to be self-evident, but is it true?
One way to address the question is to look at the Corruption Perceptions Index, produced by Transparency International, and which we incorporate into our algorithm in the research we've be...
I met up with SoftLayer Chief Scientist Nathan Day a few weeks ago, while attending VMworld in San Francisco. The Dallas-based company was founded in 2005 and provides hosted and cloud-computing services to a wide variety of 25,000+ customers. It employs Citrix CloudPlatform (powered b...
