by Tony Greenberg

A friend of mine in the research industry used to give out little post-it-notes to trainee analysts that said “be wrong boldly.” Her reasoning – if you are bold and right, you will be hailed as a prophet. If you’re wrong, most likely the crowd will have moved on by the time your prediction fizzles. But accountability for our past advice is a core value here at RampRate, so we have to see how we did on our 2011 predictions – and see just how well our crystal ball was working. By our count, we have 4 hits, 2 partial hits, 1 miss, and 3 TBDs that won’t be known until later. What do you think?

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2011 was a very busy year for us at RampRate. I’ve spent nearly 20 years, on many sides, of the technology business and I enjoy reflecting across large swaths of time to see if there are patterns, lessons, and advice, so let’s see what we get from 2011.

Cloud Computing Won’t Whisk Us Away to Oz

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The key question is cloud service is the right fit for your specific jobs, whether today or in a few years, and what you should do to prepare.

by Alex Veytsel, Steve Lerner and Tony Greenberg
As published by Microsoft TechNet 

In the 10+ years that RampRate has advised buyers of IT infrastructure services, few technology options have been as polarizing as “the cloud.”  In some organizations, a public cloud deployment is viewed as an immature technology if not a passing fad, with any cloud outage eliciting a chorus of “I told you so.” In others, it is a panacea that appears at the end of every strategic roadmap for every application.

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Most legacy applications have implicit assumptions about operating systems, hardware, geography, latency, throughput, scalability, governance, access rights, monitoring and other aspects that must be carefully addressed before deploying to the public cloud.

by Alex Veytsel, Steve Lerner and Tony Greenberg
as published by Microsoft TechNet 

When faced with the many opportunities afforded by a cloud infrastructure—on-demand scale, potential cost reductions, elimination of complex maintenance processes, etc.—the decision to build a new application in a public cloud is often a no-brainer, especially for the buyer with the mindset of prioritizing agility and speed-to-market over customization and the perceived security/reliability advantages of internal infrastructure.

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Last week Google formally launched its Page Speed Service, the latest in a long line of Content Delivery Network (CDN) services from dozens of vendors from big and small to hit the market over the last 15 years. In the case of Google though, I see a few novel changes that could not only materially affect but outright wreck the marketplace for CDN.

Google has offered free CDN services for video, via YouTube and Google Video, for many years now. Although we take YouTube for granted these days, it wasn’t too long ago that posting video on the internet required a lot of time, focus, and money. Life was very complicated before one could shoot a video on a smartphone and automatically upload it to YouTube. A videographer with a high quality camera would have to be hired, the resulting tape would have to be digitized, edited, and encoded (and potentially transcoded into one or more specific proprietary formats), and a streaming video hosting company would have to be found, negotiated with, and a lawyer engaged to review a contract. YouTube and smart phones have cleaned up that mess and made a single elegant process- but it only applies to video.

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