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Marc Holmes

The Unauthorised Autobiography of Marc Holmes

Microsoftie thinking about dialogue with developers. Brit in Seattle. Windswept and Interesting.


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Filed under: cloud

Cloud Cloud Cloud at #wpc10

It’s the Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington this week (come on, how could you not know?) which brings together the vast array of partners that make Microsoft so successful.

Both Steve and Bob talked about the cloud, and you can find a whole load of reflection in the usual tech news spaces. Bob made a lot of announcements, including the Windows Azure appliance enabling the cloud within the datacentre. This is a great post running briefly through the announcements.

Free Azure eBook from @ericnel (and a host of others)

Eric has been focussed on Azure for the past few months and his blog contains a huge amount of practical information for developers to get their heads around what the platform offers and how to get stuff done.

Most recently he worked with David to deliver a 6-week self-paced Azure learning course (quite a mouthful) – some of the immediate reflections from him you can see here.

And just yesterday, he’s released an eBook that is the work of many collaborators (not least @deepfat for his artwork). You can grab yours by following the links below. Go work that cloud!

"Cheaper" alternatives may be hazardous to your career...

I'm catching up on the blog reading this afternoon - this piece from Tim Anderson on Serena's decision to dump Google (they'd originally selected Google to replace on-premise Microsoft stack) and move to our hosted Exchange and Sharepoint services caught my eye.
 
In particular this is an interesting statement from the blog post authored by Ron Brister of Serena:

There are alternatives on the market that promise lower costs, but in our experience, this is a fallacy.  When looking at alternatives, CIOs should really evaluate the total cost of ownership as well as the impact on user productivity and satisfaction, as there can be hidden costs and higher TCO.  For instance, slow performance and/or lack of enterprise-class features (e.g., with calendaring and contact management) will torpedo the value of such a backbone system, and may get the CIO fired.
My own view: the honeymoon is over Googlies.

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