Bob Gourley

Cloud Computing is one of the many things enterprise CIOs, CTOs and other engineers will master in delivering capability.  I believe in the power of new Cloud Computing technologies and concepts and think we should all continue our focus there. I have said, and still say, the same thing about design approaches like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  The constructs, methods and models of SOA are good practices that result in good designs for enterprises. It is smart to separate data from application logic and smart to enable agility and mashups the way good SOA design does. But a key problem with SOA was the hype associated with it. Everyone started using the term the way they wanted to.  And every IT vendor came out with their definition of SOA.  And every system integrator tried to sell us buckets of their SOA.  And every trade journal ran SOA articles.  And too... (more)

How Platfora Is Transforming Hadoop

When talking with the less-technical people in your enterprise, which may include end users and many others on the leadership team, it always pays to have non technical expressions to describe new capabilities. Here are some thoughts on Platfora that may be of use in discussions like that. Here is how to describe Platfora to a non-technical person: Platfora gives users a better ability to interact with information. They can ask their own questions, follow their own theories, run their own “what-if” scenarios, and ask unbounded questions in iterative ways over their data. To a us... (more)

Chrome Netbook OS; Tablet PCs; LBS; Open Source

2010 will undoubtedly be a year of technology innovation. In 2009, Twitter revolutionized the way we get news, it brought us closer to those who were a part of the news, almost making traditional media irrelevant. I don’t know who (or what) will be the Twitter of 2010, but below are a few predictions for the coming year. Google’s Chrome Netbook OS will be a hit. Their OS will mostly be dependent on a Google Account. A Google Account opens up their full Google Apps suite, which includes email, calendar, word processing, and MS Office like functions. Google’s renditions of their c... (more)

Don’t forget to register for FOSE 2013

By Ryan Kamauff FOSE is the nation’s premier event for government technology professionals who need tools, resources, and best practices to transition to the cloud, mitigate cybersecurity threats, and achieve the goals of the DGS while managing uncertainty and the critical need to make it all happen on-time and on-budget. “The heavy impact of sequestration and across the board budget cuts has put stress on agency training opportunities,” said Mike Eason, Vice President, Public Sector Events, 1105 Media, Inc. “We are responding by offering high-level training and educational pro... (more)

Join Me at the 1st Government IT Conference & Expo 6 Oct

I hope to see you at the SYS-CON sponsored Gov IT Conference and Expo 6 Oct 2009. I’ll be there to learn from some great practitioners and IT providers. See: http://govitexpo.com for more. I’ll also spend time during the day attending the day thinking through everything I’ve ever written and learned about Cloud Computing and Federal IT and hope to bring that to bear in my interactions with Jeremy Geelan, Terry Woloszyn and Barry X Lynn at the end of conference panel on Cloud Computing and Federal IT. Jeremy will focus this panel on the future and I’m sure this action-oriented pa... (more)