Successful Cloud Is Not Commodity

There seems to be a trend of providers abandoning the commodity public cloud market. We saw HP exit its Helion Public Cloud, and more recently, Verizon shut down one of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) products. At the same time, we see Amazon and Microsoft heavily committed to public cloud and making a lot of …

Winds of Change: What Does Horizon 6 Mean for Microsoft and Citrix?

At first glance, it looks like VMware’s recently announced Horizon 6 platform is an admission by VMware that applications, rather than desktops, do matter, and that Citrix has been on the right track all along. Certainly, XenApp has been a thorn in the side of many VMware View implementations through the years, allowing people to …

Expand Your Thinking When Architecting in the Cloud

I have been building solutions on AWS since 2008, and even though that sounds like a long time, I have still only scratched the surface of what is possible in the cloud. Every few weeks I get another “Aha” moment when I see problems solved with cloud architectures that would be either too hard, not …

AWS re:Invent 2013 Recap — Taking On the Enterprise

This week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) held its second annual re:Invent conference. For the past two days, Amazon has been announcing a wide variety of feature enhancements to existing services as well as publicizing new services. Even before these announcements, AWS was so far ahead of their competition in features, customers, and rate of innovation that comparing competitors’ offerings to AWS was almost comical.

VDI vs RDSH: Squabbling Siblings or Embattled Enemies?

Before you even get to the entertaining “Citrix vs VMware vs Other” quasi-religious debate, there will be a VDI vs RDSH altercation. It can altercate for days. Ultimately, no business question gets asked, nor decision made, as technical stags lock antlers.