“We intend to compete aggressively in the commodity infrastructure-as-a-service marketplace,” he said. “We’re not going to have that alone … our intention is to sell our customers IaaS and the same customer a highly differentiated platform-as-a-service which will let us get better margins and a highly differentiated suite of applications for the cloud.” Oracle's cloud plans

Last week I was in an online panel with Flexiant and ThinkGrid talking doling out advice for service providers who want to go cloud. Rather than the usual vendor/analyst dynamic, we managed to get an end-user, as it were, on as well, Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid. The result was a fun discussion: we focused a tremendous amount of getting not only the proper, differentiation and asset-advantaging strategy in place, but also starting small and working iteratively to learn what will work, you know, Lean Startup style.

Last week I was in an online panel with Flexiant and ThinkGrid talking doling out advice for service providers who want to go cloud. Rather than the usual vendor/analyst dynamic, we managed to get an end-user, as it were, on as well, Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid. The result was a fun discussion: we focused a tremendous amount of getting not only the proper, differentiation and asset-advantaging strategy in place, but also starting small and working iteratively to learn what will work, you know, Lean Startup style.

To speed up development of custom written applications, of course. OpenStack on Wall Street - Developers

To speed up development of custom written applications, of course. OpenStack on Wall Street - Developers

To speed up development of custom written applications, of course. OpenStack on Wall Street - Developers

Good wrap-up so far: It’s a long list of news but I’m left wondering how substantive it will actually be for Dell as a company. I understand their new strategy of being a neutral player and offering a plethora of cloud services – but all these announcements run the risk of creating mass confusion for the customer base – with Dell’s sales force having to articulate a value proposition that differentiates between all these different partnerships, customers could well be left scratching their heads.

Good wrap-up so far: It’s a long list of news but I’m left wondering how substantive it will actually be for Dell as a company. I understand their new strategy of being a neutral player and offering a plethora of cloud services – but all these announcements run the risk of creating mass confusion for the customer base – with Dell’s sales force having to articulate a value proposition that differentiates between all these different partnerships, customers could well be left scratching their heads.

Good wrap-up so far: It’s a long list of news but I’m left wondering how substantive it will actually be for Dell as a company. I understand their new strategy of being a neutral player and offering a plethora of cloud services – but all these announcements run the risk of creating mass confusion for the customer base – with Dell’s sales force having to articulate a value proposition that differentiates between all these different partnerships, customers could well be left scratching their heads.

[F]ourteen years ago it was wildly controversial. Indeed, it was so controversial that whole books were published describing how this couldn’t possibly work, and how all the proponents were knuckle-dragging, money-grubbing, nitwits who never wrote a line of code in their lives and…. Extreme Programming, 14 years later