I don’t know about counterintuitive, but there was a great piece of insight that Sam Zell, the real estate mogul from Chicago, said to me that really made me rethink what a big organization is really about. He said, as an entrepreneur, [he needs] as much information as possible. In a big corporation, people use information as currency. So they trade it. The more information a person has, the more power that person has in a big organization.

I don’t know about counterintuitive, but there was a great piece of insight that Sam Zell, the real estate mogul from Chicago, said to me that really made me rethink what a big organization is really about. He said, as an entrepreneur, [he needs] as much information as possible. In a big corporation, people use information as currency. So they trade it. The more information a person has, the more power that person has in a big organization.

In the context of covering Cisco’s “InterCloud” announcement, the following is quoted: The Cisco Intercloud will be built upon industry-leading Cisco cloud technologies and leverage OpenStack for its open standards-based global infrastructure. We’ll support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud. You see that notion frequently now-a-days, the idea of OpenStack being part of a cloud. As I recall, Oracle said they had (would have?) OpenStack compatibility.

In the context of covering Cisco’s “InterCloud” announcement, the following is quoted: The Cisco Intercloud will be built upon industry-leading Cisco cloud technologies and leverage OpenStack for its open standards-based global infrastructure. We’ll support any workload, on any hypervisor and interoperate with any cloud. You see that notion frequently now-a-days, the idea of OpenStack being part of a cloud. As I recall, Oracle said they had (would have?) OpenStack compatibility.

Buried in this piece on Cisco doing some public cloud stuff is this little description about how the shift to public cloud creates a strategic threat to incumbent vendors: Cloud computing represented an interesting opportunity to equipment companies like Cisco, as it aggregated the market down to fewer buyers. There are approximately 1,500 to 2,000 infrastructure providers worldwide verses millions of businesses; reducing the buyers to a handful would lower the cost of sales.

Buried in this piece on Cisco doing some public cloud stuff is this little description about how the shift to public cloud creates a strategic threat to incumbent vendors: Cloud computing represented an interesting opportunity to equipment companies like Cisco, as it aggregated the market down to fewer buyers. There are approximately 1,500 to 2,000 infrastructure providers worldwide verses millions of businesses; reducing the buyers to a handful would lower the cost of sales.

The truth is, IBM has little choice but to focus on cloud infrastructure and applications and big data. IBM does not sell an X86 operating system, as do Microsoft and Red Hat do, although it does have WebSphere middleware and DB2 databases that some enterprise customers want. Moreover, the current strategy of exiting the commodity hardware business that represents the dominate platform in use by corporations the world over is, ironically as well as sadly, IBM’s only option as the world’s largest provider of IT services and one of the world’s largest and certainly most profitable system software makers.

The truth is, IBM has little choice but to focus on cloud infrastructure and applications and big data. IBM does not sell an X86 operating system, as do Microsoft and Red Hat do, although it does have WebSphere middleware and DB2 databases that some enterprise customers want. Moreover, the current strategy of exiting the commodity hardware business that represents the dominate platform in use by corporations the world over is, ironically as well as sadly, IBM’s only option as the world’s largest provider of IT services and one of the world’s largest and certainly most profitable system software makers.

For me, it was a bunch of numbers. You can convince a bunch of VCs with numbers. The churn was low. The revenue was up. Talking to the customers, the sentiment was that this could grow within their companies. There was a huge market with cloud-based file sharing with both consumers but also enterprises. And, on pivoting to “enterprise”: In 2007, the consumer market was still the target at Box.

For me, it was a bunch of numbers. You can convince a bunch of VCs with numbers. The churn was low. The revenue was up. Talking to the customers, the sentiment was that this could grow within their companies. There was a huge market with cloud-based file sharing with both consumers but also enterprises. And, on pivoting to “enterprise”: In 2007, the consumer market was still the target at Box.