John Cowan

My watered down translation of Long Tail theory is simply the notion that the aggregate sum of stuff buyers take in small, infrequent quantities will invariably outstrip the aggregate sum of the most popular counterparts. Research evidence is beginning to corroborate what we saw some three years ago: There is a Long Tail in Cloud Computing. Consider some well accepted research points from IDC and others of late: The Cloud Computing market will hit USD $42 Billion by 2012 Of that, more than 50% will comprise business process applications (the stuff we all use daily to run companies big and small) So, I can infer then that some $20 Billion will comprise the 2012 feed bag from which all the little cloud computing piggies will line up at the trough to consume. Not a bad market, from 10,000 feet away. But here's the thing. The cloud computing market is already becoming pre... (more)

Implications of the Twitter Hack for the IT Channel

One of the biggest industry news stories in recent memory happened this past week when Twitter’s back office was ‘hacked’, causing an information leak of epic proportions. When the story broke many read in stunned amazement. What I found in most of the blogs and stories I read following TechCrunch publishing the confidential documents was just like an eye-witness account to a horrific train wreck. There were plenty of stories about the shock and horror of it all. But there were very few stories that got past that and began to deal with the real questions. In my mind, here is a r... (more)

Enterprise Customer Uses 6fusion Profiler to Drive Cloud Strategy

I’ve been off the radar in recent weeks as things around 6fusion have been busy, but few weeks ago we blogged about the Profiler application we’ve been working on. I’ve just come up for a bit of air on the project but while I was in the thick of things we unearthed an interesting sample of real life, multi-faceted, cloud impact. I thought it was worth sharing and my IT Director friend at the company I’m about to tell you about said it was ok to share a tidbit with the world (Special thanks, S.). Before I get into some of the details of this post, let me give you a little snapsho... (more)

ConnectWise Outage a Cautionary Tale for Channel

For folks living in the IT Channel world it was impossible to miss the headline-grabbing news about the big ConnectWise cloud failure late last month.  I have only very limited knowledge of the outage itself from a handful of upset customers and unfortunately the various pundits and reporters that covered the story painted very sketchy details at best.  Having said that, what really matters is that a significant number of IT Service Providers lost access to their mission critical operations application for an extended period.   For the uninitiated, ConnectWise provides an integ... (more)

3 Universal Truths about Enabling the IaaS Market

There has been quite a bit of chatter on the web lately about cloud service providers, the IaaS market, private vs public cloud, etc etc. With Cisco taking a head first dive into the business of IaaS enablement and the subsequent publishing of the ROI calculator I felt compelled to share some insight from 6fusion beyond my quick blog post the other day. 6fusion has been helping data center providers create utility computing nodes for about 5 years. Not a lot of time in the big picture, but a heck of a lot of time in the cloud service provider industry for sure. We give our techn... (more)