One universal language - it's here

Daring title, isn't it? Almost true though. In my last post I shed my thoughts on a global approach towards standardisation, and this blog is about a truly global language. Global, and not universal, as the aliens might be lining up to conquer this world, but conducting B2B is not one of their concerns

A few requirements:

1. All communication exchange is done via physical messages. We all know the fun game of sitting in a circle of a dozen people, where we relay to our neighbour on the left the message we heard from our neighbour on the right. Even if there are no cheaters ;-) in the circle, the message at the end is very different
from the message at the start. More importantly: when written down, even if all the people in the circle are gone, the message will still be there

JFGI - Just Fluently Globalise It

Inspired by Wayne Horkan's blog series on automated provisioning and triggered by Andrew McAfee's blog on the future I'm wondering what's happened to the initial cheery mood around automated provisioning
And what is it called anyway? Automated provisioning gets 300K hits on Google, automatic provisioning gets twice as much. I prefer the first one though, as nothing in this life is automatic

Can you cloudsource your IT if it isn't ready for automated provisioning? I don't think so, as the whole point of Clouds seems to be the great flexibility in up- or down scaling 'your stuff': SAN, NAS, OS, DB, apps, The Works

Standardisation, Alas, poor standardisation!

Well, Shakespeare may be dead but not his play on transience

What are standards? Nothing else but what is accepted by "majority vote". Being polite is a good standard, but we all know there are exceptions to that rule - to say the least. In fact, standards are dynamic. They change from time to time, adapting to current times, knowledge gained, and knowledge lost

The Roman and Greek gods were standard a few thousand years ago, but, last time I checked, they're just a thing of the past now
Bryan Larkin has a good blog on how standards can deteriorate

A plea for "no man's land" clouds

The growing interest of system integrators for Cloud computing has introduced the term private clouds. In addition, what used to be called just clouds are now called public clouds. After all, the idea of having your stuff somewhere on this globe isn't such a comforting idea to many people. And, to be honest, there's a lot more money to make by moving and operating it

I've spent some time lately thinking about outsourcing and offshoring. If it works, it's fine, but at some time contracts have to be reviewed and some other party might become the new provider of your iron or services

What happens then? Well, in short, a lot of money is spent. It's a good time to upgrade or replace