Author Archives: Ben Kepes

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.

May 21, 2013 Posted in Business 3 Comments

The Empire Strikes Back – VMware Launches Hybrid Cloud Service

By Ben Kepes

There’s a fair few VMware folks scratching their heads today and wondering when the world changed quite so much. The company today announced its hybrid cloud solution, avialable today on an early access program. GA is slated for Q3 2013. Here’s some details: vCloud Hybrid Service Dedicated Cloud: Provides physically

Tagged amazon web services, Business, Business-to-Business, cloud computing, data center, e-commerce, Pat Gelsinger, Puppet Labs, vCloud, vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware, vSphere |

May 21, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

Arise the New Public Cloud Platform – Google is for Real

By Ben Kepes

I’ve just spent a few days at the extravaganza which is Google IO. As with previous occasions, this year’s event didn’t fail to blow away the attendees with the sheer amount of “wow” that Google manages to pull out – on so many fronts Google is doing incredible stuff. My

Tagged amazon web services, AWS, cloud computing, GCE, General Certificate of Education, google, google app engine, google compute engine |

May 20, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

SuiteWorld Wrap-up – Part Two

By Ben Kepes

Part two of my post-SuiteWorld reflections I attended NetSuite‘s global conference this year (disclosure – NetSuite contributed to my T&E to attend) and it has been interesting to reflect on a company that is unabashedly growing up. Having been at all of the previous global NetSuite events, it was impressive

Tagged Capgemini, larry ellison, Microsoft, netsuite, Qualcomm, SAP, SAP AG, zach nelson |

May 17, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

SuiteWorld Wrap-up – Part One

By Ben Kepes

My post-event thoughts from SuiteWorld are just too weighty for one post hence I’ll break up my analysis into two posts and give folks a chance to digest them over time. Here follows part one. I attended NetSuite’s global conference this year (disclosure – NetSuite contributed to my T&E to

Tagged Autodesk, Enterprise resource planning, netsuite, Product lifecycle management, SAP AG, Williams-Sonoma, WIP, zach nelson |

May 16, 2013 Posted in Business 2 Comments

EdgeSpring and the Democratization of Business Intelligence

By Ben Kepes

Making sense from the ever-increasing quantities of raw data available to us is a recurring theme in the companies I speak with. Indeed one of my theses when looking at companies is to search for fabrics that span multiple disparate systems and bring sense to them. Business Intelligence is one

Tagged Big data, Business intelligence, Crunchbase, Databases, Equinix, intacct, Netflix, Sales |

May 16, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Enterprise Development and Testing Agility with CloudShare

By Ben Kepes

One of the big value propositions for cloud infrastructure is that in greatly reduces the hurdles that developers face when setting up environments for development and testing purposes. There are two issues that often get in the way of this process – the demand for limited physical resources, and the

Tagged ALM, amazon web services, Application Lifecycle Management, Business, Business-to-Business, Cloning, cloud computing, CloudShare, CloudShare Labs, e-commerce, Software as a Service, Software development process, Team Foundation Server, Virtual private network |

May 15, 2013 Posted in Business 4 Comments

Operations is Dead, but Please Don’t Replace it with DevOps

By Ben Kepes

OK, so the title is provocative, but bear with me here. Recently I spent a mind-expanding day at DevOpsCon in Israel – I presented the first keynote, which aimed to set the scene for why DevOps is a necessary reaction to some broad organizational and technological changes. What was really

Tagged amazon web services, Cross-functional team, DevOps, Israel, Jez Humble, Platform as a service, Quality assurance, Werner Vogels |

May 13, 2013 Posted in Business 1 Comment

The Business Value of Private PaaS

By Ben Kepes

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of being involved with the second DeployCon event. DeployCon is an event that explores Platform as a Service and its place in the technology landscape going forwards. As part of the event I had the pleasure of moderating a panel which

Tagged ActiveState, Apprenda, cloud computing, CloudConnect, DeployCon, platform services, Sinclair Schuller, Software as a Service |

May 13, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

HP Updates its Cloud Management Software

By Ben Kepes

Just in case anyone didn’t realize it – the future of IT is one where organizations use a wide variety of different solutions – public and private, and spanning different operating systems and application stacks to deliver the individual requirements of end users. The acquisition last week of Enstratius by

Tagged cloud computing, Converged Cloud, Dell, Gillai, hewlett packard, IT service management, OpenStack, Saar Gillai |

May 10, 2013 Posted in Business Leave a comment

Location Based Services Not Just for Consumers – Location as an IT Service Desk Enabler

By Ben Kepes

At Interop this week I sat in a keynote where a Cisco executive explained how their location based technologies are enabling the MGM Grand resort in Las Vegas to have deeply contextualized and personalized interactions with guests in the resort. That got me thinking about location within an enterprise and,