The Subject Matter Expert (SME) Content Paradox and Pulling Teeth

When it comes to creating quality content assets for high-tech companies at scale, we have noticed the following paradox in the marketplace:

  • Writers know how to write but they don’t have hands-on, intimate knowledge of the technology.
  • The SME live and breathe the technology, but they don’t know how to effectively and engagingly write about it.

Of course there are exceptional individuals who are both knowledgeable and good writers but, let’s face it, they are few and far between—and, if you find one, worth his weight in gold.
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Dear Google, Your Cloud Is Great, but..Here Is a Little Feedback

gcplogoAs a developer with fifteen years of experience in IT, I’ve dedicated the past five years to working with the cloud. I’ve been involved with cloud services from AWS cloud (since 2010) and Azure. A bit over nine months ago, I started working almost exclusively with Google Cloud (GCD) and Google Compute Engine as part of a consulting project I led. The project involved building a backend for a high performance web application. At first, the customer thought to use their own data center, which I discouraged. Then, Google approached them and offered a package that included free support and better pricing for their services, which the customer agreed to take.
I’ve been working on this project for a few months now and in many ways, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has been great to work with. However, it’s the first time that I’ve seen such great challenges compared to my experience working with other clouds. It feels like these challenges stem from Google’s isolated development culture, with their “my way or the highway” approach. In this article I would like to address these thoughts and provide you with a few suggestions.
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Surviving in the Public IaaS Cloud Market

bezoswernerIf we look at market growth rates and the concentration of power within a handful of providers, using the terminology coined by Geoffrey Moore, it could easily be argued that the public IaaS cloud market is in the tornado and approaching Main Street. Despite a lack of publicly available market share data, for many in the industry, it seems like a two or three-player race, with one clear “gorilla”: Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In this article I will attempt to briefly characterize the competitive positioning of the key players in the public IaaS market, and highlight some of the alternative strategies used by other providers to carve their own niches. The question that needs to be kept in mind is, can anyone else survive in the face of the steep competition presented by the two or three American mega-clouds?
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The Cloud Enables IoT – a Perfect Match and the Microsoft (Azure) Hackathon

IoT has been the hottest topic and buzz word within the technological community in recent years. While some of us think of IoT and the cloud as interdependent, the dependency is actually one directional. IoT cannot function without the infrastructure and countless possibilities that the cloud facilitates.

Being a cloud blogger, and the founder of IamOnDemand, I often get invited to key events related to cloud technologies. A few weeks ago, I was invited by Microsoft and ironSource to cover their joint IoT Hackathon, which hosted more than 50 developers from companies such as Mellanox, eBay, and mean.io. The Hackathon featured some of the newest Microsoft Azure cloud services features, including Microsoft’s events ingest cloud service, Azure Event Hubs; their new analytics data tool, Stream Analytics; Azure HDInsight ,Azure Machine Learning; and additional cloud related features and tools.

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What Cloud 2015 Holds: My Predictions and Hopes for Enterprises

2014: A Reflection

t_F091CD55-1AEA-52CA-98B9-FC2558B77CF72014 has been a pivotal year in the enterprise tech world. Enterprise IT has begun to fully understand the cloud, and the development of a mutual understanding has grown. The cloud is, in turn, adjusting more and more to the features and traditional needs of enterprise  IT.

My perspective on next year is guided mostly by experiences I had this year (2014) at the AWS re:Invent conference. This huge cloud festival was the platform from which AWS publicly introduced the cloud as a means for creating today’s enterprise data center. Whether for native cloud web-scale applications or for enterprises of all shapes and sizes, the cloud is considered to be today’s best way to increase efficiency as well as flexibility in any IT environment. It is important to note that market saturation is still not here, however it’s just a matter of time until the cloud is used by everyone, covering a significant portion of the world of IT.

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Amazon, Microsoft and Google: The Cloud Leading Trio

The Cloud Leading TrioFollowing several discussions with fellow bloggers and industry executives, I found it quite fitting that the natural cloud leaders are the top software and web giants: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. While Amazon’s AWS is The public cloud today Google recently reported that it is doubling its office space near Seattle, just miles from the campuses of Amazon and Microsoft, in order to expand its cloud technology team and engineers. Over two years prior to these Google’s expansion news, Microsoft reported that 90% of its R&D investment was earmarked for cloud technology. Last month they finally announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support auto-scaling. For these reasons and more, the following points will strengthen the trivial perception that cloud technologies should and will prosper in the hands of this software giant trio.
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