While reading the March edition of Fortune, I came across Kiva, a philanthropic "company" that is truly brilliant. I am seldom wowed by an innovative concept or business but this has been a good week. First I stumbled across Mint (http://www.mint.com/) to manage personal finances, and now Kiva.
Using a network of Micro finance organizations, Kiva enables individuals to fund specific entrepreneurs around the world. I liked the idea so much that I have just invested in a handfull of individuals. Not only is the Kiva concept impressive, but so is their execution - everything from their homepage through loan payment is well done.
A couple of paragraphs on this blog cannot do the concept or organization justice -visit http://www.kiva.org/ to learn more and participate. You can also click the banner link on the side of this blog - it's not advertising, just a way for more people to get involved.
Become a loaner - I did.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Nicholas Carr Grades Out At A "B"
I recently read an interview with Nicholas Carr of "Does IT Matter?" fame. His general position, is that as Utility Computing takes-off, IT will become redundant.
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Nicholas-Carr-Why-IT-Will-Change/
All in all, I think that he is going for headlines rather than taking into account the distinction between "powering IT assets" versus "delivering computing resources and applications". Powering IT assets has already changed, and IT organizations already use external providers to "power" their technical operations.
Using IQ as an example, our SaaS offering is used by a variety of Fortune 1000 customers and we run it from a third-party data center. In each of the sales to these customers, an IT representative had to bless the deal, knowing full well that they are 2 degrees removed from the actual applications. From an internal perspective, our production websites are run by a specialized service provider as virtual instances. I would much prefer to have them take on the responsibility for bandwidth and HW capacity provisioning.
In each of these examples, the production assets are managed by an IT operations group. So, the staffing of these IT resource may shift somewhat from service users (i.e. business users) to service providers (i.e. grid computing providers), but they are not going away.
http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Expert-Voices/Nicholas-Carr-Why-IT-Will-Change/
All in all, I think that he is going for headlines rather than taking into account the distinction between "powering IT assets" versus "delivering computing resources and applications". Powering IT assets has already changed, and IT organizations already use external providers to "power" their technical operations.
Using IQ as an example, our SaaS offering is used by a variety of Fortune 1000 customers and we run it from a third-party data center. In each of the sales to these customers, an IT representative had to bless the deal, knowing full well that they are 2 degrees removed from the actual applications. From an internal perspective, our production websites are run by a specialized service provider as virtual instances. I would much prefer to have them take on the responsibility for bandwidth and HW capacity provisioning.
In each of these examples, the production assets are managed by an IT operations group. So, the staffing of these IT resource may shift somewhat from service users (i.e. business users) to service providers (i.e. grid computing providers), but they are not going away.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
