Larry Carvalho

At the quarterly meeting of the cloud standards customer council held on December 13, 2011, Fireclay Tile presented their story on using Salesforce as a cornerstone of their success in leveraging cloud technology during challenging times. The presenter was Eric Edelson, the VP and owner of Fireclay Tile, not anyone from Information Technology (IT).  That is because at Fireclay Tile, there is no IT department!  All IT work is managed by line of business and delivered by cloud service providers.  Fireclay Tile pays by usage and hires appropriate integration providers to modify their package to suit their needs and buy add-ons from Salesforce AppExchange. The presentation was on standard benefits that companies get from cloud technology. However, the “large enterprise vendor” audience challenged the presenter with standard objections typically raised by big companies: h... (more)

Start-ups Leveraging the Cloud

A lot has been talked about upcoming information technology delivery trends and its effect on the innovative start-up solutions.  Mark Andreessen recently commented that Facebook would not have been viable as a company without leveraging these new technologies to deliver their product.  While a lot of attention is paid to huge success stories like Facebook, a small start-up in Cincinnati called CoupSmart has leveraged a whole different approach to combine mobile and social networking capabilities to deliver a unique solution. The recent deal environment filled with daily deal si... (more)

Open Source + Cloud

HP and Microsoft fall under the category of major enterprise technology providers along with Cisco, IBM, Oracle, SAP and VMWare/EMC. With an eye on projected cloud computing revenue growth, they are all looking at ways to expand their cloud computing presence in order to avoid being overtaken by this transformational change. These two companies made announcements recently that caught my attention (but there are more): HP announced the purchase of Vertica followed by embracing OpenStack and CloudFoundry as part of their cloud offerings. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others announce... (more)

Integrated Solutions – 2004 vs 2011

Back in 2004, I worked for IBM, which offered end-to-end solutions that few other technology vendors could provide.  An automotive customer in Australia had a myriad of disjointed processes connecting them with their end users and wanted to achieve tangible cost savings by improving operational effectiveness. To accomplish these goals, the client wanted to deliver services to their dealers, suppliers and fleet customers through a single portal interface. This was going to be achieved through the integration of information, people and processes to help maintain more effective re... (more)

How to Market Cloud Computing Solutions

Cloud Expo Europe €550 Savings here! Cloud Expo West $800 Savings here! Got back Friday after a week in the East coast attending the Cloud Expo and meeting with customers/partners. I roamed around the exhibits and found one vendor area that was always packed - Microsoft.  Folks were attracted to the huge honking collection of hardware placed right in middle of their exhibit space. Now Microsoft is not a hardware vendor - but they seem to have partnered with others to bring this and show their might.  It also needed a special drop of electricity into the hall - 400V or so using a ... (more)