Jeff Vance

What’s going on with virtualization? The once hot technology’s invasion of the data center is slowing down, at least according to recent studies from Gartner and IDC. Gartner reported in October that “virtualization is still in its infancy,” noting that “only 16% of workloads are running in virtual machines today.” Meanwhile, IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server […]

Every few months, rumors spread about an impending acquisition of Salesforce.com (CRM). Google, Oracle, and Microsofthave all been named as potential suitors, yet Salesforce.com keeps plowing ahead and denying that their end game is to be absorbed by a technology behemoth. “They deserve a lot of credit for being a pioneer of SaaS, or to […]

Research firm ABI just released a new mobile cloud computing report predicting that there will be nearly one billion end users accessing the “mobile cloud” by 2014. I tend to be a skeptic when it comes to analyst reports. After all, if they don’t predict billion-dollar markets, no one will buy their reports. That said, […]

As an e-commerce organization that had to prepare for seasonal traffic spikes, Amazon.com was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the cloud computing movement. “They kind of backed into being a cloud provider,” said Jeffrey Breen, CTO, Yankee Group. “They had all of this excess capacity because of their core business: e-commerce.” Amazon had to […]

With cloud computing and SaaS making forays into the enterprise, is the data center as we know it dead? Obviously, data centers will still exist in some form, but will these soon be confined to large service providers and Fortune 500 companies? According to a recent report recent report from the University of California at […]

It’s a question the many in the tech industry are aksing: Will Desktop Virtualization and the Rise of Netbooks Kill the PC? The short answer is no. Laptops and PCs will have their place for some time to come, though in a role that will only get more and more limited as time goes on. […]

Recessions nearly always lead to a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. For most tech watchers, the recent IBM-Sun dance came as no surprise. Even though the deal is on hold for now, many analysts believe a deal may yet get done. Maybe not with IBM, but Sun needs help. As Brain Babineau, senior analyst with […]

When it comes to the competition, VMware should be worried about Microsoft, right? That’s what common sense tells us – but common sense also tricked people for centuries into thinking the world is flat. Sure, Hyper-V is an improvement over the downright awful Virtual Server, but it doesn’t match what VMware offers. In fact, Hyper-V’s […]

While virtualization is clearly one of the bright spots for IT during the recession, it’s getting perilously close to being overhyped. Vendors have moved beyond servers and are pitching virtualization as an enabling tool for everything from thin computing to cloud computing to SaaS. Yet as any good salesperson knows, what you want to do […]

The past year was a busy one for virtualization. VMware experienced a management shakeup and introduced its Data Center OS initiative. Microsoft released the first real products in its virtualization suite and started hyping its cloud platform, Windows Azure. Citrix, Red Hat and Sun all tried to keep pace via acquisitions, and virtualization started to […]