Devious Device – SLA Measurement

Today’s devious device is a playbook page that’s intentionally left blank. Omitting meaningful measurement from IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or leaving them to the discretion of the vendor can effectively nullify their effect along with service credits of 2%-5% of your monthly bill for a single violation up to 50% or more for serious / repeat violations

And They All Wore Blazers and Blue Jeans: The Digital Music Forum

Thanks to Marty Lafferty and the Distributed Computing Industry Association for inviting me to speak at the Digital Music Forum East last week. I spoke on a panel discussing digital music access “from the cloud” and via peer-to-peer technology.

IT Services Vendor Reviews – Can You Believe It?

Like many, I look for reviews of products and services on the internet in order to help my buying decisions. And like many, I often find that there seem to be crazy rantings of people that populate otherwise stellar reviews for products and services of all types.

Where do these rantings come from? The screen shot below tells a pretty clear story

IT Outsourcing Risk – Consequential Damages

In fairness to sellers of IT services, large buyers are not averse to a few power plays of their own and sometimes steamroll smaller or independent providers with onerous contract clauses. One of the most costly (if rare) provisions in relationships where the balance is tipped to the buyer is consequential damages — or the payment of fees / service credits scaled to the buyer’s business impact as opposed to the cost of the service itself.

Managed Services Vendor Playbook – Currency Risk

One of the newer trends that came about as the dollar has weakened in the last few years is the prevalence of currency adjustment clauses in contracts with a remote / offshore component.  These are typically buried in some appendix along with CPI adjustments (which are a nuisance in their own right) and expose buyers to unforeseen currency risk that vendors are much better equipped to handle.  

So, do you know how much a rupee is worth in US$? 

CDN Pricing at Penny A Gig

Content Delivery Network (CDN) industry watchers recently reported seeing pricing of $.01 per GB of data transferred.  What does this mean? Let’s translate into plain language.  A DVD holds about 4GB (Gigabytes) of data. So you can imagine a DVD with a very long movie, all kinds of extra scenes and goodies, would be require about  4GB of data.

Perspectives on Green Grid Virtualization Whitepaper

In the recent Green Grid White Paper, “Impact of Virtualization on Data Center Physical Infrastructure“, there’s an interesting discussion about the impact of virtualization on data center density, capacity, and power waste.  However, most of the findings apply to in-house environments where the same entity that virtualizes has to deal with right-sizing the UPS, building a floor layout, etc.  But in the world of outsourced data centers, most of the time the responsibility resides outside of your business, and the implications shift accordingly.  Specifically

The Coming Clouds and Storm

Those who live where it snows are all too familiar with the crazed weather forecasting phenomenon. Recently there were reports of 18-36” of snow where I live. Stores were emptied out, gas stations and lines, and everyone hunkered down for what turned out to be a dusting of snow followed by sunny days – no clouds at all. Why do weather forecasters do this? I’ve always assumed it was to generate increased amounts of viewership in order to sell more TV advertising. I wonder if the marketing for cloud computing operates in the same way.

Lions Can’t Survive on Plastics: Should Eat Bits Instead

The pending bankruptcy of MGM studios seems strange at a time when mega blockbuster films continue to defy the “old media industry” trend and bring in vast sums of money. What happened to the studio that owns James Bond, pending feature The Hobbit, and The Pink Panther? It got caught up in a downdraft created by being too closely reliant on revenue from the old forms of distribution, and not restructuring properly to focus on ownership of content in a world of fast changing technology.

Apple Anti-Punditry and The Future of Computing

In 1997 I walked into Apple Computer to meet with a guy named Dave Singer in the QuickTime group. I was pitching Apple on partnering with the company where I was working at the time, VDOnet. We had invented an adaptive video streaming technology that would change to fit the bandwidth of the user viewing the video, scaling from the ubiquitous 28.8kbps modem connection to “broadband” 512kbps. This offering was part of the first generation of Internet video servers.

Dave listened to our pitch, and responded with these exact words, “We don’t think there is a future in streaming video, but we do think there is a future in streaming MIDI”. MIDI is the language used to communicate musical notes between one device and another – such as between a computer and a synthesizer or drum machine.

Does it sound like he was wrong? Think again.