Blog

March 14, 2017 Nicky Stewart

Gearing up for G-Cloud 9: advice for winning digital business in government

The UK government is one of the most digitally advanced in the world. It also has significant challenges: Brexit, the need to transform itself for the benefit of citizen and taxpayer alike, delivering better and more with significantly less. Historically, government has not been seen as an easy market, either to break into, or to Read more

March 14, 2017 Bill Mew

Lock-in starts to surpass security as main cloud concern

While the advantages of cloud are increasingly obvious, the main pitfalls often aren’t quite as well understood. It often appears from analyst reports and articles in the press that almost all workloads are now moving to the cloud. Initially the main barrier to cloud adoption was security, but recent evidence indicates that public cloud is Read more

January 10, 2017 Simon Hansford

Sleep Walking to Oblivion: the potential local societal impact of global cloud domination

Much is made of the success of silicon roundabout and the thriving ecosystem of the start-ups in neighbouring Shoreditch. Few of the youngsters working there though will recall ICL, the company that was once the UK’s tech giant – just as Bull was in France. National champions like ICL and Bull found it hard to Read more

January 10, 2017 Bill Mew

2017: the year that the #Private / #Hybrid #Cloud bubble finally burst and more such predictions

Soon the battle may well be between generalist and specialist public clouds. Many pundits will be offering safe, but obvious cloud market predictions. I wanted to offer a few that challenge current thinking in much of the market: 1) the private cloud bubble will finally burst, 2) without private cloud, hybrid cloud strategies will be Read more

January 10, 2017 Bill Mew

Partnering with AWS, Russian Roulette, Lion Taming and Other Dangerous Hobbies!

Years working for IBM’s Business Partner Organisation taught me not only to respect IBM’s own community of 120,000 business partners, but the wider channel community as a whole. Partners vary in size and nature from the large SIs and distributors to small ISVs and MSPs (we like acronyms in this business). What motivates them all Read more

December 5, 2016 Nicky Stewart

Having your cake and eating it

To say that 2016 has been an interesting year is putting it mildly. As the year draws to its end, the tensions between national security and individual privacy rights have yet again been thrown into stark relief. Over in the US, amendments to Rule 41, which sets out US federal search and seizure rules relating Read more

November 17, 2016 Nicky Stewart

Being open about lock-in

20th October 2016 By Nicky Stewart Who would argue with the concept of an open and transparent government? Some have, notably Andrea Di Maio (Gartner), who in 2010 made the case against open government, arguing that the wisdom of the crowd (buoyed up by masses of out of context information) might destabilise volatile situations, or Read more