Tom Leyden

Big Data is Big, but it also causes a lot of confusion. Big Data is used for anything related storage these days, so people don’t know anymore what it exactly is. Is it Hadoop? Is it analytics? It doesn’t need to be that complicated though. There are two kinds of Big Data: Big Data (for analytics) and Big Unstructured Data. Big Data for analytics is a paradigm that became popular in the previous decade. A lot of innovation was done for research projects. New technology enabled researchers in many different domains to capture data in a way they had never been able to do before. In agriculture, for example, ploughs would get sensors that would send little bits of information to a central system (over satellite). Every couple of feet these sensors would measure what’s in the ground (minerals for example), how humid the ground is etc. Based on that, large agriculture c... (more)

Is iPaaS the Next Thing?

Is iPaaS the next thing? Gartner recently launched iPaaS, Integration Platform as a Service. iPaaS is defined as “a platform for building and deploying applications within the cloud and between the cloud and enterprise”. It enables developers to create integration flows that connect applications that run in the cloud or on-premise, and to deploy them without installing or managing any hardware or middleware. iPaas delivers where PaaS came short: where most PaaS offerings are limiting developers to one single cloud platform, iPaaS is designed to give access to a choice of platfo... (more)

Part 1: Why Cloud Storage

A visitor to this blog was asking my opinion on cloud storage vs. traditional storage (“storage storage” was the exact wording for the latter). There are probably as many opinions about this topic as there are cloud storage marketers – and probably even a lot more –  but that doesn’t keep me from giving mine. Since it was taking me a bit too long to write this article (time was the problem, not content), I’ve decided to write this out in multiple parts. In this first part I’ll give my idea on why we are moving to cloud storage. The fundamental concept of digital storage has not ... (more)

CloudCamping with Webhosters

Last Thursday there was another European CloudCamp. The first one in Europe mainland since Barcelona in December. Not that there is no interest in doing more events, we just want to ensure good content. And the content was good if you ask me: close to 15 different companies contributed to the program, a full room during most of the day (yes, it was a full day) and lively discussion on topics that had not been discussed enough in the past. We kicked off the day with an interactive keynote by Kristof De Spiegeleer, who spent good part of his time on the recent Sun Cloud announcement... (more)

CloudCamp WHD

Boy, I’m swamped! Maybe I underestimated the workload of my new position combined with the CloudCamp activities. Casualty number one seems to be the blog. I’ll have to make up for that. Anyway, CloudCamp WHD looks promising: with 13 (lucky number) companies contributing with content and a sold out WHD (or as good as) this can only be a success. Here is the final program: 10.00 am  Welcome 10.05 am  Keynote (Kristof De Spiegeleer, Cloud Visionary and Director Cloud Architecture – Sun Microsystems) 10.45 am  Coffee Break 11.30 am  Panel (Tony Lucas, Robert Rosier, Matt Rechenburg,... (more)