Our report on Amazon WorkSpaces is up. The full report is available for 451 research clients, but here’s the 451 Take. When it comes to making things cheap, few companies have the zeal and credibility of Amazon. While new, mostly non-Microsoft devices are rapidly changing and fragmenting the end-user device market, there’s still a palpable need to support existing Windows applications. DaaS seems like a viable ‘green screen’ strategy for supporting these corporate applications on new devices.

Our report on Amazon WorkSpaces is up. The full report is available for 451 research clients, but here’s the 451 Take. When it comes to making things cheap, few companies have the zeal and credibility of Amazon. While new, mostly non-Microsoft devices are rapidly changing and fragmenting the end-user device market, there’s still a palpable need to support existing Windows applications. DaaS seems like a viable ‘green screen’ strategy for supporting these corporate applications on new devices.

With these changes Microsoft has shifted its emphasis from Windows developers building Windows apps via Windows Azure to all developers building all apps via Microsoft Azure – an important distinction and one likely to grow more apparent over the coming months. It sounds like Build is a nice conference with some dramatic changes from previous Microsoft policy (strong ties to Windows and NIH). To be fair, many bits and pieces on Microsoft have long been “heterogenous,” it just wasn’t emphasized too much as a big deal.

With these changes Microsoft has shifted its emphasis from Windows developers building Windows apps via Windows Azure to all developers building all apps via Microsoft Azure – an important distinction and one likely to grow more apparent over the coming months. It sounds like Build is a nice conference with some dramatic changes from previous Microsoft policy (strong ties to Windows and NIH). To be fair, many bits and pieces on Microsoft have long been “heterogenous,” it just wasn’t emphasized too much as a big deal.

I’m guessing from the article it’s from Gartner…or maybe this ABI Research reference: Google’s Chromebooks – manufactured by Samsung, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Acer – topped 2.1 million unit sales in 2013 and are expected to climb to 11 million annually by 2019. This surge matches the interest we saw in a joint study with Spiceworks. While the overall shipments are low relative to the behemoths of iOS/Android and Windows, there’s growth in Chromebook land.

I’m guessing from the article it’s from Gartner…or maybe this ABI Research reference: Google’s Chromebooks – manufactured by Samsung, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Acer – topped 2.1 million unit sales in 2013 and are expected to climb to 11 million annually by 2019. This surge matches the interest we saw in a joint study with Spiceworks. While the overall shipments are low relative to the behemoths of iOS/Android and Windows, there’s growth in Chromebook land.

I put up a short, “analyst note” on Boundary’s funding today, which 451 clients can read in full. Tracking from our last report on them in November 2013, they’ve increased both customer count and average deal size, so good for them. I always found it hard to find the market sizing for “systems management delivered over public cloud” (or “IT Management as a Service”/ITMaaS) market when I was at Dell looking at that.

I put up a short, “analyst note” on Boundary’s funding today, which 451 clients can read in full. Tracking from our last report on them in November 2013, they’ve increased both customer count and average deal size, so good for them. I always found it hard to find the market sizing for “systems management delivered over public cloud” (or “IT Management as a Service”/ITMaaS) market when I was at Dell looking at that.