Rich Bruklis

I am guessing that Vivek Kundra, the US Government's new CIO and a strong advocate of Cloud Computing, is sending Barak Obama and Ray LaHood, the US Transportation Secretary, an email saying "I told ya so". Why? The "Cash for Clunkers" auto stimulus program's web site clunked due to the popularity of the program. First of all, what is Cash for Clunkers? A US Government program created to stimulate the sales of newer automobiles which also enabled the removal of older, less efficient (lower MPG), higher polluting cars from US roadways. The program will end in less than 24 hours and will be feather in the President's cap. As many as 475K new vehicles were sold under this program. The results so far - the auto industry is pleased with higher sales and reduced inventories; the dealers are mostly pleased with increased sales albeit many are waiting for their government p... (more)

The Cloud Its Benefits and Its Threats

I am very intrigued by the following quote from Dave Powers at Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant and makers of Prozac®, Cymbalta®, Cialis® and dozens of other medicines. Their IT challenge was daunting - purchase 64 compute nodes and storage, assemble, and perform their critical testing. The choices were a large capital expense layout with high-cost management or look to a new method to conquer the task. Lilly turned to Cloud Computing and specifically Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Their  comment below is the epitome of Cloud Computing. Lilly's project is fairly typical... (more)

In case you missed the JVC story

Thanks to Jeff Schneider ... JVC to Move to the Cloud: Will spend $27.4 million more or less (2.6 billion yen) so IBM can lift it into an outsourced cloud http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=58149256&gid=1911277&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fnews%2Egoogle%2Ecom%2Fnews%2Furl%3Ffd%3DR%26sa%3DT%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fau%2Esys-con%2Ecom%252Fnode%252F1066343%26usg%3DAFQjCNHfNp8qc4AC8dkvs5Dmql4PnoXsVw&urlhash=ntIv&trk=news_discuss I'm not just a happy IBM employee. I'm a happy IBM shareholder. Have a better day, Bill (more substantive post coming soon)Bill Freedman bfree@us.ibm.com ... (more)

Bringing cloud metrics down to earth

Hmmm, I don't know how much of these numbers in front of me I'm allowed to share. A lot of it is IBM-confidential. But I'll try to walk the thin line. It's public knowledge that IBM is a player in the cloud computing space. It's also public knowledge that IBM is not a huge player. And it's an easy guess that IBM wishes it had a bigger slice of the pie. Given all that, you could infer -- correctly -- that IBM is cooking up some ideas that it expects to vault it over the competition. And for any more about that, you'll have to wait for the announcement. Still ... I can tell you to expe... (more)

The cloud's "skinny straw": How to not be the sucker

My IBM colleague Mark May flagged this interesting article for me, by open source guru Bernard Golden for CIO magazine online: http://www.cio.com/article/499137/The_Skinny_Straw_Cloud_Computing_s_Bottleneck_and_How_to_Address_It The crux of Golden's argument is that cloud computing moves the IT bottleneck from memory tonetwork bandwidth. That is, as you migrate to a cloud solution, it becomes someone else's problem to refresh the hardware, so you'll always have up-to-date hardware that can effectively run all your applications (or else, presumably, you've got someone to sue). The bot... (more)