Does your desktop belong in the cloud?

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Brian Byrne, the founder of MeshIP, tells about the benefits of running desktops in the cloud. For the same reasons that cloud computing makes sense for web servers, there are compelling reasons to run your personal productivity and desktop tools in the cloud as well. Brian’s company offers a VDI hosted solution which allows centralized management and backups. Running your desktop in the cloud might not be cheaper than buying a low cost PC for your desk, but when you add in the reliability improvements and IT management savings, the advantages of desktop hosting in the cloud are substantial.

You can find more about Byrne’s company here:
http://www.meship.com/

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Not all .NET roads lead to Microsoft

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast Troy Hunt, a software architect and Microsoft MVP for developer security, talks about his great experience using the AppHarbor Platform as a Service to host his .NET applications. He has looked at Microsoft’s Azure PaaS but found the requirements to rewrite his .NET apps to be prohibitive. Moreover, the AppHarbor integration with GitHub offers source control management that Troy hasn’t seen anywhere else.

The .NET PaaS takes away all the pain of having to manage servers. There is no going back to traditional hosting on virtual machines for Troy.

You can find Troy’s blog here:

http://troyhunt.com

You can find Troy’s app that tests the security of .NET web sites here:

http://asafaweb.com/

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Is Vendor Lock-in Unavoidable When Building An App?

In our continuing series of SEP group Practical Software podcast interviews, Bishop Greg, an expert in Model Driven software projects at Inegranova, talks about how organizations building their own internal applications are increasingly finding themselves locked into particular vendors and technology stacks similar to the ‘80s and ‘90s when people were building applications on custom systems from companies like DEC and IBM. In Greg’s experience these lock-ins can be avoided by working at high level models which can be easily transposed onto varying underlying technology stacks without too much trouble. One example Greg gives is a customer of his who swiftly moved a custom app to support Web Sphere and DB2.

Maybe every organization has to bite the bullet and take a dependency on specific technologies at some point. For example, trying to build a cross-platform mobile app can sometimes wind up with software that is mediocre, not really taking advantage of any of the key features on individual mobile devices.

How do you think technology lock-in should be avoided?

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RavenDB – the NoSQL database for the rest of us

RavenDB – the NoSQL database for the rest of us

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Oren Eini, a software developer and avid blogger, tells about his passion of bringing NoSQL database technology to Windows that led him to become a major contributor to the Open Source RavenDB project. While the NoSQL database offerings on Linux are pioneering a lot of great ideas they are inflexible and extremely difficult to configure and use. RavenDB is different. Almost anyone can get RavenDB up and running quickly and it doesn’t require an immersion in esoteric configuration settings to tune.

Since RavenDB uses simple REST APIs it can be used by any applications, whether they are on Linux or Windows. RavenDB runs well on cloud infrastructure services like Amazon Web Services and is also available in a dedicated service.

You can read more about Oren’s ideas at his blog (where he writes under a pseudonym).
http://ayende.com/blog

You can read about RavenDB here:
http://ravendb.net/

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The most common mistakes in selling a cloud service

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Peter Cohen, the founder ofSaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors, explains how selecting the right technologies for a cloud service requires a good dose of business and marketing acumen to succeed. Picking the right technology or platform to build a cloud service is just one piece of the puzzle.

Peter has seen wanna-be internet businesses make all manner of rookie mistakes such as under spending on marketing (who knew) and selling on cost alone (you’re dead if your only differentiator  is price). Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for success as a cloud service. Good marketing and pricing strategies will vary based on the specific business. Just make sure you are flexible and measure, measure, measure, results of everything you do.

You can find out more of Peter’s SaaS marketing ideas at his web site:
http://www.saasmarketingstrategy.com

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Shadow IT and the cloud – Déjà vu all over again

In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Brian Gracely, Director of solutions at EMC and host of the CloudCast podcast, reminisces on how cloud computing is filling the same role of empowering users as the PC and LANs did back in the ’80s and ’90s. With this phenomena of “shadow IT” developers and small departments are able to take advantage of cloud services and completely bypass traditional IT departments. All this empowerment does come with risks. Putting critical data on insecure cloud services with little traceability can come back to haunt you. There is still value in involving IT with cloud projects. Of course, forward thinking IT departments should show their users that they bring value to their cloud initiatives if they don’t want to see themselves shut out of even grass roots initiatives.

Brian also cautions that you shouldn’t expect cloud services to suddenly reduce bottom line costs. The cloud may offer unprecendented flexibility and start up velocity but they aren’t always as cheap as you think.

You can read check out Brian’s blog here:
http://www.cloudsofchange.com/

His cloud computing podcast show is here:
http://www.thecloudcast.net/

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