I was very surprised and gratified last Wednesday to find how many of you had all been kind enough to vote again this year for the CTOblog in the annual Computer Weekly competition, I was even more surprised to find against a strong field of nominations that we won!. So many thanks to all of you who voted, Ron and I really appreciate it, and it makes it easier to try to keep up the …

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Back around 1990 I remember my amazement at learning that Iceland had the largest router network of any European business or government, at around 50 routers. There was a pretty sensible explanation for this, given the low density of the population and the quick realisation that a step change in the country’s economy as well as social and cultural life could be achieved through improving digital communications. Oddly I don’t remember the operating speed for …

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Currently my life is full of puzzled people from various sections of the IT community asking for enlightenment on ‘cloud technology’. Their puzzlement usually stems from the simple fact that they can’t make a whole lot of sense about when, and where, they would gain by deploying cloud technology in their current operations. A barrage of questions then follows, mostly about their doubts over security and reliability if they were to take important legacy systems …

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I’ve wanted to do a post on the growing recognition of a shift towards ‘externalisation’ or ‘edge’ based systems – if you can call them systems at all – but couldn’t quite think of a topical reason to raise the subject. There’s a saying in London that you wait forever for a big red bus to turn up and then three come along at once! (Funnily enough there is mathematical proof for why this happens, …

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Every now and then you hear something that really makes you think! Well, it happened to me when I had Cisco, EMC, and VMware, talk me through their V-Block technology. It’s the launch product for their Virtual Computing Environment coalition, or VCE for short. Not heard of it? Well it’s only being launched today, November 3rd, and I think you certainly will be hearing about it as I expect it to make quite a splash …

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It’s been an interesting, but exhausting week. I have been at Oracle Open World in San Francisco, SAP TechHead in Phoenix and for further contrast last week, I was at Cordys Cordial Cloudburst in the Netherlands. As a result, I have seen the way that two major players, in the past, positioned as direct competitors in the ERP space, have been talking to their existing customers and – in the case of Cordys – how …

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