Jason Bloomberg

Remember the heady dot.com days circa 1999? We thought we were reinventing business, forming a New Economy, revolutionizing the essential nature of commerce. In our dreams! By late 2001 the bubble had burst, and what we thought was a new paradigm for business—the World Wide Web—turned out to be little more than a new marketing channel. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not trying to disparage the power and importance of the Web. After all, the Web, and the Internet in general, have deeply affected so many aspects of business today. It’s hard to remember the time when you had to talk to a teller to use a bank or a stockbroker to trade stocks! But we were wrong that the Web was a revolution. It wasn’t a paradigm shift. Fundamentally, the rise of the Internet was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Not wanting to succumb to this delusion again, ZapThink has long held that th... (more)

Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things

Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist ... (more)

Why Public Clouds Are More Secure than Private Clouds

Conventional wisdom would have you believe that Public Clouds are inherently insecure, and that the only way to meet your organization’s stringent security requirements in the Cloud is to implement your own Private Cloud. Conventional wisdom, you say? Unfortunately, there is precious little wisdom available of any kind when it comes to Cloud Computing, let alone the conventional type! In fact, large software and hardware vendors are largely responsible for the whole “Public Cloud is insecure” canard, introducing fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) into the marketplace. After all,... (more)

Deconstructing Agile

Every specialization has its own jargon, and IT is no different—but many times it seems that techies love to co-opt regular English words and give them new meanings. Not only does this practice lead to confusion in conversations with non-techies, but even the techies often lose sight of the difference between their geek-context definition and the real world definition that “normal” people use. In our Licensed ZapThink Architect course, for example, we spend far too long defining Service. This word has far too many meanings, even in the world of IT—and most of them have little to... (more)

Avoiding Unexpected Cloud Economics Pitfalls

Anybody who is considering a move to the Cloud knows that the greatest economic motivation for Cloud Computing is the pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-need utility computing benefit, right? Deal with spikes in demand much more cost-effectively, the public Cloud service providers gush, since we can spread the load over many customers and pass the savings from our economies of scale on to you. The utility benefit is also a central premise of Private Clouds. Build a Private Cloud for your enterprise, the vendors promise, and you can achieve the same economies of scale as Public Clo... (more)