Stories about: Paradigm

One of the most interesting things we encounter when my consulting company works with clients is their reaction to the infrastructure architectures of cloud providers. When we explain that they achieve robustness by keeping multiple copies of data on commodity hardware, rather than the traditional model of investing in expensive hardware to improve device robustness, we observe a visceral shudder in people.

Established vendors weighed in on cloud computing at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices on Friday afternoon, citing it as a dramatic shift but offering caution as well.

Back in 1991, before the Internet was a big deal, Ohio State University technologist Jerry Martin signalled the nascent Internet's value with an official standards document entitled "There's gold in them thar networks!" (RFC1290) Although simmering as an academic tool for years, the Internet had not yet triggered a significant paradigm shift for commercial computing. Martin's formal proclamation was an early push to business, which eventually embraced Internet commerce wholeheartedly.

As long as there have been CIOs, there have been people claiming that IT executives get fired a lot more than any of their C level colleagues. In the early '90s, some sharp-witted observer quipped that CIO was coming to stand for "Career Is Over." Conventional wisdom held that the average tenure of a CIO was 2.5 years (it seems that Paul Strassmann may have been the originator of this data point); in fact, as little as a few years ago people were still citing that number, which hadn't been true since at least the mid-90s - if it ever was true at all. It began to feel like some overworked Rodney Dangerfield skit.

In 2003, after endless rounds of political maneuvering and countless agitations against the privatization of major airports in India, the Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport became part of a global fraternity of airports run by private stakeholders. The airport is India's busiest, with 22.2 million passengers and 480 tons of cargo passing through its doors in 2006-2007.

Cloud:

Gas tops US$4 per gallon. Crude is trading at all-time highs-above US$140 a barrel. And oil and gas companies are booking fat profits. In May, Exxon Mobil reported US$10.9 billion in profits for its latest quarter, just short of its record-breaking US$11.7 billion the quarter before.

Contrary to the general belief that enterprises will leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) on a pay-per-use model and shy away from managing applications in-house, Microsoft's GM of Marketing and Operations, Tarun Gulati says that both the software and web-hosted services will co-exist. He thinks that CIOs will choose a combinations of both - instead of opting for either one.

Effective CIOs of the future will be those who ensure the entire organization is engaged in setting the IT agenda, managing the priorities for IT and ensuring that the operational use of IT is sustaining the organization appropriately

Facebook will roll out a dramatic redesign of its member profile interface next month and much attention is being paid to the details and to how end users and developers will react.