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The Dealmaker Media has published a list of their favorite Cloud, SaaS, and Tech bloggers . Once again I am happy to report that I made the cut. I am also glad to see my fellow bloggers Krishnan and Zoli on this list who are the driving force behind Cloudave . I was on a similar list of top cloud, virtualization, and SaaS bloggers that they had published in the past. Under The Radar is one of the best conferences that I go to. This is the best place for disruptive start-ups to pitch an get noticed. They make a great attempt to connect entrepreneurs with investors and blogger like me. I have blogged about the disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups as well as the disruptive start-ups in the categories of NoSQL and virtualization . Most of these start-ups have either had a good exit or have been doing well. The best example so far is Heroku's $212M exit . I met the Heroku founders at Under The Radar a couple of years back. I am looking forward to soaking up even more in...

One of the things that I love to do: keep meeting the entrepreneurs to better understand the market and the challenges that they face. Recently, I met an entrepreneur that I highly admire. His company has SaaS components that other ISVs would OEM. Let's say, you are an ISV that would OEM his components and his company goes out of business. What are your options? We had a great conversation on SaaS escrow. Turns out that there is no real good solution. There are a few SaaS escrow solutions that ensure that the customers get their data back, if the company were to go out of business, and they also offer partial business continuity solutions. However, they won't be useful in this case. One thing that he mentioned got stuck in my mind. He said, during his on-premise days (sigh!), the companies that OEMed his software wished that he goes out of business. The ISVs had his software working anyways and they won't have to pay him anymore. The same story is very different in the clou...

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra officially launched the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy today. While this is clearly not new news, the document does state the government's position in a very succint manner. By using the cloud computing model for IT services, we will be able to reduce our data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30% (which contributes to the estimated $20 billion of IT spending that could be migrated to cloud computing solutions). Cloud computing can complement data center consolidation efforts by shifting workloads and applications to infrastructures owned and operated by third parties. The shift to cloud computing can help to mitigate the fragmented data, application, and infrastructure silo issues associated with federated organizational and funding models by focusing on IT services as a utility. Cloud computing can accelerate data center consolidation efforts by reducing the number of applications hosted within government-owned data centers. Cloud comp...

Recently, Geospatial Intelligence Forum Magazine asked me for my thoughts on the role of cloud computing in the future of geospatial intelligence.My response was recently published in their December 2010 print issue and online . "In my opinion, Cloud computing is the future of geospatial intelligence. Through the processing, exploitation and dissemination process, GEOINT links data about a specific place to a specific time. The goal of this linkage is to create actionable information, and success is often a matter of having sufficient information technology resources. While cloud computing is not a revolution in technology, it does represent a step change in how IT resources are provisioned, accessed, manipulated and consumed. If leveraged properly, this new approach will greatly enhance our ability to create actionable GEOINT. Cloud computing also represents an inevitable transition that some have likened to the Industrial Revolution. During that time, society developed from an...

I have been answering quite a few questions on Quora . The most recent one was " What are 5 tips to becoming an influencer on Twitter? " This post is a version of my answer on Quora. Being an "influencer" means different things to different people, but I would attempt to describe this in the most general sense. Be unique: Twitter has very low signal to noise ratio. You don't get others' attention if you cannot differentiate yourself and your contribution. Be passionate about the topics that you care for and work hard to craft high quality tweets. Go through a brutal qualifying process to discard the weak draft tweets and post the ones that are of the highest quality. Treat your Twitter account as your personal brand and think what makes any brand stand out. As Seth Godin would say, be the purple cow. Be a great blogger: Let's not forget that Twitter is still a form of blogging; a microblogging. Ask yourself what makes a great blogger? Apply those quali...

 My sincere appreciation to John Baker for the eTechSuccess: Patterns of Success interview. John and I worked together IBM as part of the Wireless Emerging Business Organization. His team and mine collaborated often in the delivery of customer solutions around the world. Through his current company, eTechSuccess , John offers his clients assistance in business development, program management, and solution analysis/design for emerging technologies. He also reviews existing software processes and/or help set up new processes to effectively implement the chosen technologies. John has a proven record of successfully using emerging technologies to solve real world business problems. In the interview, john and i have a wide ranging discussion on the importance of cloud computing to government. As John has so eloquently put it: "Over the years the technology has changed but the experience of successfully delivering an application into production based on a new idea or platform or produ...

This post is co-authored by Manish Garg and Chirag Mehta Drupal is widely recognized as a great content management system, but we strongly believe that Drupal offers a lot more than that – a framework, a platform, and a set of technology – to build and run enterprise applications, specifically on the cloud. This post is an attempt to explore the benefits and potential of Drupal on the cloud. Elasticity One of the last things the customers should worry about their websites is the performance degradation due to sudden spike in the traffic. For years, the customers had to size their servers to meet the peak demand. They overpaid, and still failed to deliver on promise, at peak load. Cloud solves this elasticity problem really well, and if you are using Drupal, you automatically get the elasticity benefits, since Drupal’s modularized architecture - user management, web services, caching etc. - is designed for scale-up and scale-down on the cloud for elastic load. PaaS If Heroku’s $212 mi...