Amy Wohl

For a company born out of a headline-grabbing clash of wills between two industry titans - one practically beloved by his users, the other, well, not so much - a company set up to pioneer the latest disruptive distribution scheme, a model likely to change the face of the software industry forever, and use chi-chi infrastructure like Linux, Java, MySQL and Tomcat, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield's Workday start-up sure has been a quiet little thing. So unlike the mouthy Salesforce.com. So when we found out that industry analyst Amy Wohl was going that way we asked her to report back. Here's what she says. When I first heard (in 2006) that David Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft, was going to start a SaaS company to build a full-blown ERP portfolio I was excited. I felt that software-as-a-service, a game changer if ever there was one, was finally coming of age now... (more)

Cloud Computing Defined

Early Bird Savings at Cloud Expo (September 12, 2008) - Originally, Cloud Computing was a vague term for a very vague and distant future in which computing would occur in a few remote locations without the need for very much human intervention. Infinite computing resources would be available for any need at costs approaching zero. Certainly, users would not need to know or care about how the computers, their software, or the network functioned. In the real world, physical computing progressed differently. We cycled between periods when computing was more centralized (and seemed m... (more)

McKinsey Got It Wrong: Cloud Computing is for Enterprises

This week I spent several days at the Uptime Institute's Symposium 2009, a conference where facilities management meets IT.  The focus for this year's conference was onGreen.  I spoke several times, moderatig a panel on outsourcing versus cloud computing, and giving a mini-keynote on SaaS and Cloud Computing. At that conference, McKinsey announced a report on Cloud computing, claiming that the economics only made sense for small and medium sized companies but not for enterprises with their own data centers.  The analysis then compared the cost of using Amazon's service with the c... (more)