An excellent post from Alistair Croll today ‘Private Clouds Are A Fix, Not The Future’. Today we see companies moving low risk, dynamic workloads to the cloud, but as Alistair points out, in the not-so-distant-future, we’ll see a large chunk of IT capacity moving to providers than can provide more agility and cost savings than internal [...]
Read the rest of this entry »I saw an interesting article today in Information Week (click here to view) discussing how to respond to execs when they ask what your cloud strategy is. We’re seeing many companies come to us after a CEO and/or CIO has pushed their teams to think how cloud computing can be used in their organization. A good [...]
Read the rest of this entry »2010 Cloud Computing Predictions: The Year of Realism
The buzz around cloud computing reached fever pitch this year, culminating in Gartner placing cloud computing at the peak of its hype cycle in July. We saw controversy around the Open Cloud Manifesto, the federal government getting into cloud computing with apps.gov, and almost every IT vendor trying to put a cloud [...]
Lots of enterprises are evaluating external clouds, such as Skytap and Amazon EC2, to off-load their dynamic IT workloads. Top candidates include dev/test, IT prototyping and application migration environments. These can account for 35% or more of IT infrastructure and offer immediate opportunities for cost savings because (1) they are often underutilized due to uneven [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Today we announced the release of innovative new capabilities that enable users to collaborate over the Web using cloud-based virtual data centers (VDCs). In the same way solutions such as SharePoint and WebEx enable teams to collaborate on documents, Skytap enables teams to collaborate on complex IT environments to deliver business initiatives faster and more [...]
Read the rest of this entry »We often get the question about how Skytap stacks up against ‘Infrastructure-as-a-Service’ vendors. We’ve put together a quick summary of Skytap vs. Amazon EC2 vs. Azure vs. Rackspace so you can see how different we are, esp. for dynamic IT environments and labs. Although Azure technically isn’t a ‘IaaS’ vendor, many folks are starting to consider [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Today we announced that numerous software vendors, including Acresso, HP, OpenText, and SchemaLogic, have collectively delivered over 100,000 software demos and proof of concepts (POCs) to their customers using Skytap’s cloud platform. Similar to hosting an online meeting, Skytap allows customers to view a demo or complete a POC engagement whether they are in the same [...]
Read the rest of this entry »The Open Cloud Manifesto was released today to a flurry of comment and criticism from the media, including GigaOm, eWeek, ZDnet, and others. This comes after last week’s post from Microsoft, complaining about the closed nature of the manifesto’s development. Although few can argue with any of the broad principles in the document (including us), [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions, today announced it completed a $7 million Series B round of funding from Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Washington Research Foundation. The funds will be used to bolster the company’s product development, sales and marketing efforts.
See the full press release here.
We attended CloudCamp Seattle on Saturday and participated in the first CloudCamp unconference to visit the emerald city.
Seattle is home to an impressive list of cloud computing companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google’s seattle campus), as well as a growing list of emerging startups (Decho, Skytap, and a plethora of SaaS companies). This makes Seattle a [...]
