Gregor Petri

The public cloud infrastructure as a service market is developing quickly, also in Europe. Over the past months we saw the number of international IaaS providers setting up shop in Europe increase, and several European based providers launched new or upgraded offerings. To keep a finger on the pulse of developments we started, as part of the European Cloud IaaS coverage at Gartner, surveying pan-European providers of Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service . We are now extending the invite to participate in that survey more widely (like we recently did for the CIO survey). Especially in Europe we see cloud IaaS services being offered as an extension to existing services, this survey focuses therefore on how IaaS services fit with the overall service portfolios of providers, so it also includes short questions on adjacent offerings in areas such as PaaS, SaaS, Manag... (more)

The rise of IT-industrialization

A few days ago I attended the analyst summit of one of Europe’s large service providers and the theme of industrialization rang through very clearly in many of the presentation and interview sessions. Those of you who followed my earlier writings know that applying the lessons of modern manufacturing to today’s IT, is a topic near to my heart.  Back in 2004, long before joining Gartner, I wrote an article on IT-dustrialization in CFO magazine , followed by many blogs, later bundled in “Lean and the art of cloud computing management”. At Gartner IT services industrialization is ... (more)

The Art of Listening

One of the first tips I got when entering the workforce was "You have two ears and only one mouth for a reason!", meaning that in conversations with customers you should spend twice as much time listening as you do talking. Point was to avoid becoming like a radio with only one button: "Send". Over the years I learned that the above also applies to "new media" such as email, blogging, tweeting and podcasting. You need to use the receive button at least twice as much as the send button. Although less obvious, I am trying to maintain this ratio also as an analyst. Maybe not in every... (more)

Did the Global Summer of Cloud Start in NYC?

This 8th Expo was the third Cloud Expo I was invited to speak at and it definitely was the biggest so far. If Cloud Expo 2010 Silicon Valley in November signaled the entry of the large mainstream vendors like Oracle, Dell and Microsoft - not to mention several CA divisions - as major sponsors, then this edition was signified by the larger turn out of end-user organizations and even some coverage on mainstream news channel such as CNN. A quick audience poll on the first day revealed that about 90% of the audience is in the orientation phase, getting ready to do some serious spendi... (more)

On Cloud Lock-in, Standards, Decoupling and Why SaaS Does Not Scale

With security and legal concerns being slowly addressed by the industry, lock-in and standards are rapidly becoming the biggest concerns regarding cloud computing. If the cloud industry is to make good on its promise, these will need to somehow be addressed. Let’s examine some recent developments. Interesting to see how, just a week after my blog on “The Principles and Perils of Vendor Lock-in” *1 several vendors made announcements seemingly supporting my suggested approach. For example, after hinting at the potential benefit of decoupling SaaS and PaaS from its underlying Infrast... (more)