Monthly Archives: April 2011

April 28, 2011 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Layer 7 and Cloud Redundancy Through Brokerage

By Ben Kepes

After the recent AWS outage – much attention has been given to the need for cloud users to create redundancies across zones, data centers, regions and even providers. All of which sounds fine in theory, but gets a little tricky in practice. Skip a few days and, coincidentally, I was

Tagged , , , , , , , , |
April 27, 2011 Posted in Business 3 Comments

The Amazon Outage is OK, OK? (Well kind of)

By Ben Kepes

I’d kind of avoided posting about the recent Amazon outage – it’s an event that has had monstrous amounts written about it – some of it beyond hyperbole. Case in point; NetworkWorld says that; the Amazon outage set cloud computing back years I mean this is just plain wrong. Yes

Tagged , , , , |
April 26, 2011 Posted in Business 5 Comments

Head of Microsoft Azure Calls Out Greenbutton. The Perfect Cloud Case Study?

By Ben Kepes

A month or two ago I ran a CloudCamp in Wellington which was preceded by a presentation by a local company there, Greenbutton. The Greenbutton offering is , or at least should be, something of a poster child for a move to the cloud. Greenbutton leverages cloud processing to drive

Tagged , , , |
April 21, 2011 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Saying Yes/Saying No–On Muzzling Influencers and Oracle’s Openess

By Ben Kepes

There’s been a bit of back and forwards over the last couple of days around an influencers/analysts/bloggers event that Oracle is holding at the end of June. Basically Dennis Howlett came out claiming that Oracle had attempted to muzzle his right to tweet or blog about what is discussed at

April 21, 2011 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Vindicia and Customer Retention

By Ben Kepes

I was briefed by SaaS subscription and billing vendor Vindicia last week with an update on where they are – both from a business and a technology perspective. Vindicia, alongside other subscription and billing vendors Zuora and Aria, seems to be going great guns – Vindicia themselves are proud of

Tagged , , , |
April 20, 2011 Posted in Business Leave a comment

KashFlow gets Email Marketing. Nicely Done!

By Ben Kepes

We all know that marketing is the lifeblood for small and medium businesses. In the 15 years or so that I’ve owned and run SMBs, I’ve seen how hard it is to actually market to consumers (well, hard or expensive). Now there’s a whole new range of tools that put

Tagged , , |
April 19, 2011 Posted in Business 2 Comments

mobileAgent makes Expense Reporting Fun (Among Other Things)

By Ben Kepes

Expat Kiwi developer Nic Wise is a smart guy who’s also something of a tinkerer. One of the projects that benefitted from his tinkering is mobileAgent, a lovely little application that give iOS users the ability to do a bunch of their accounting work while on the road (so long

Tagged , , , , |
April 18, 2011 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Advice for IT Workers Threatened by the Cloud

By Ben Kepes

On my travels around the place I’m often met with resistance to cloud adoption by IT staffers. While some of this resistance is related to valid security or other issues, much is simply IT workers feeling threatened. I talked about this with focus.com who went out to their expert community

Tagged , , |
April 15, 2011 Posted in Business 3 Comments

Cloud Foundry–A Beautiful Thing for Users, Questions for Vendors

By Ben Kepes

This week’s announcement by VMware of its CloudFoundry PaaS product was an exceptionally refreshing surprise. Other have commented that it’s a rare thing for a big company to really do things right – but with CloudFoundry, VMware have ticked every box – opensource? Yes, avoids lock-in? yes, value added? yes.

Tagged , , , , , |
April 14, 2011 Posted in Business Leave a comment

ActiveEndpoints and the Tragedy of Rote Delivery

By Ben Kepes

A few weeks ago when the announcement was made of salesforce.com’s acquisition of Radian6, the trend of the consumerization of enterprise IT in general, and salesforce in particular, came up. Another aspect of this discussion is a reflection upon the increasing complexity that salesforce users face – as salesforce has

Tagged , , |

The Author

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Schedule some time to talk to me here.

More about Ben here.

Want to find me across the social web? Click below

    

Subscribe to the Blog

 Subscribe - Posts for all authors

Enter your email address and we'll send our posts to you: