If you find yourself on the road as often as I do (every other week) and most of your traveling is done abroad (Japan, Korea, Philippines last week), you will want to optimize your mobile setup for portability, connectivity, and affordability. I tried quite a few combinations of countless devices, and I learned a few things along the way. Here is the setup that I am quickly converging toward. [Continue…]

As a frequent traveler (300,000 miles last year), I am always looking for ways to shave some pounds off the gear I am carrying, without sacrificing convenience or performance. That’s the reason why I recently switched from a MacBook Pro 13” (4.5 pounds) to a MacBook Air (3.0 pounds). But with the iPad (1.5 pounds) around the corner, I am starting to reconsider my options. Granted, the iPad cannot replace a laptop, but what about pairing it with a super lightweight netbook like the Sony VAIO X (1.6 pounds)? At just 3.1 pounds, the combination would only be 0.1 pounds heavier than a MacBook Air, would roughly cost the same amount of money, and would give me a lot more bang for the bucks. Let’s take a closer look… [Continue…]

Apple is set to release its much anticipated tablet in half an hour. While I am waiting for it like everybody else, here are my thoughts for what this device should be. A couple of years ago, I described its form in much details. Today, I am much more interested by its function. In a nutshell, I want this tablet to give me access to any media ever created, anytime, anywhere. I want access to every movie ever shot, every music ever recorded, every book ever published, every article ever written. I want it now, in bright colors, animated, in stereo, and eventually in 3D. I want it at home and on the go. I want it in my pocket with a small screen (iPhone), in my jacket with a midsize display, and in my briefcase with as big a screen as I can carry.

Yesterday, on my way from Incheon to Seoul, the cab driver was listening to Queen’s I want it all. Here is what Freddie Mercury could have said about Apple’s Tablet: “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all, and I want it now.”

Today, let’s start with the beginning: Intalio|Cloud’s home page. As with any web-based application, the home page is where most users spend the majority of their time, therefore making it user friendly is absolutely critical. While I learned over the years how to customize Salesforce.com’s home page, I always found its customization tools difficult to use. I also found myself wishing that it made more extensive use of AJAX technologies in order to improve the overall user experience. Fortunately, Intalio|Cloud goes a long way toward fulfilling those wishes. [Continue…]

With this post, I am starting a new series of articles on Intalio|Cloud, focusing on practical use cases. As I am in the process of migrating my personal Salesforce.com instance to Intalio|CRM (powered by Intalio|Cloud), I am discovering lots of features that I did not know about. Along the way, I am literally falling in love with this platform. Today, we’ll take a closer look at Intalio|Mashup. [Continue…]

Like any new IT trend, Cloud Computing gets its fair share of hype, and with it comes a multitude of vendors that use the terms in ways it was never intended for, therefore making it devoid of any sense. When pushed to the extreme, a simple server connected to a network seems to qualify as a cloud, thereby allowing pundits such as Larry Ellison to deride the concept to no end. Yet Cloud Computing is much more than a passing fad. It is a major step forward in the development of distributed computing, and one that will reshape the IT industry for years to come. But for it to happen, we must agree on a clear definition of the concept, and the less technical it is, the better. Let us introduce one that focuses exclusively on the business benefits of cloud computing. [Continue…]

In 1943, Thomas J. Watson, then President of International Business Machines (IBM), allegedly said “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Today, industry pundits make similar flawed predictions, claiming that all the market needs is maybe five clouds: Amazon Web Services, Force.com, Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and whatever IBM comes up with. However you define Cloud Computing, this revolutionary step in the 50 year-long evolution of distributed computing (kudos to Daryl Plummer) goes far beyond the few public clouds available today. And while simple principles of economy of scales will most likely limit the number of general purpose public clouds, most of the action will take place on private and virtual private clouds, served from private and virtual private networks. [Continue…]

If you want to learn more about Intalio’s private cloud offering, meet me there:

Additional stops in the U.S. might be added soon.

Earlier this week, I attended a very interesting CEO roundtable organized by VMware. Around 40 VMware customers and partners (including Intalio) sat down with Paul Maritz (VMware’s CEO) for an hour of discussions about virtualization and cloud computing. Listening to customers, I developed a better understanding of the challenges lying ahead for Private Cloud Computing, and the critical role to be played by Open Source software in this radical transformation of the IT landscape. [Continue…]

Intalio recently sold Intalio|Cloud (the Managed On-Premises version) to two major customers in Japan, and we’re expecting a first deal in Singapore sometime in Q4 this year. We’re now working on our go-to-market strategy for the U.S. and EMEA, and are developing various marketing materials to support it, using this presentation as baseline. As part of this effort, we need some third-party validated data on corporate IT. Some of it might be found in analyst reports, some in white papers published by vendors, and some could be derived from verifiable anecdotal evidence. Wherever it comes from, we’re looking for it and have decided to crowd-source its gathering. [Continue…]

The problem with being an early adopter of new technologies is that leading edge can quickly turn into bleeding edge. In other words, brand new products are often buggy, and early adopters aren’t much different form guinea pigs. Technology enthusiasts like to fancy themselves as explorers of new frontiers, not disposable lab animals. So when new technologies actually work, it’s hard not to be excited about them. [Continue…]

Mashups are great, but the more components are integrated into a single mashup, the more single points of failure are created along the way. I experienced this recently with the piping of my blog feeds to Twitter. Blogs were written using WordPress, syndicated through FeedBurner (now owned by Google), harvested by TwitterFeed, and re-syndicated to Twitter. Somewhere in the process, delays would be created, one day long for posts on IT|Redux, and over a week long for posts on ghalimi.name. Since I control both the source (my WordPress account) and the target (my Twitter account), there wasn’t much need for FeedBurner in the middle, so I recently got rid of it. Let’s see if this fixes the problem.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have started to use Twitter to push some updates on Intalio, my traveling, and some elements of my personal life. My Twitter feed is available at @ghalimi, and syndicates feeds for both IT|Redux (professional blog) and ghalimi.name (personal blog). This feed is also displayed on IT|Redux’s right column. Moving forward, I will use IT|Redux for longer articles, mainly focused on Cloud Computing.

It’s 8pm local time, I just came back from a delicious teppanyaki dinner in Ebisu, and I am sitting on my hotel room’s balcony, on the 11th floor of the Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo. From my MacBook Pro’s speakers, Gábor Szabó is playing The Sorcerer, and I am enjoying the cool breeze of an early rainy season. It’s my 16th trip to Japan, and over the years, I have learned a few things that might be useful to people traveling there for the first time, especially when traveling for business purposes. [Continue…]

Following Intalio’s presentation in London yesterday, Aditya Tuli wrote a critical yet constructive post commenting on the announcements we made recently. I have to agree with most of Aditya’s points, and would like to take advantage of this opportunity to clarify a couple of items. First, Intalio|Cloud is indeed targetted at larger organizations, especially the Managed On-Premises option, mainly because this product was designed in partnership with our larger customers. That being said, Intalio|Cloud is also available to much smaller teams, with the On Demand option. Second, we said very little about Intalio|BPM Community Edition indeed, and I will make sure to cover it in more details today in Helsinki, tomorrow in Brussels, and later this week in Paris and Frankfurt. Furthermore, we remain fully committed to our community, and have just put the final touches on Intalio|BPM Developer Edition, which will be formally released on June 16. Aditya, many thanks for your feedback and support. I very much look forward to your comments in Intalio|BPM and Intalio|CRM once you find some time to play with them.

We just signed our first two Intalio|Cloud Managed On-Premises customers. More soon…

We just released a screencast showing how to model and execute a process from a spreadsheet! This is what we call a Process Table, and it’s part of the new release of Intalio|CRM to be available on June 2nd. Congratulations to Antoine and his team for this amazing piece of work, direct result of our Dogfood Project, and first creation of what will soon be called Intalio Labs.

Keep an eye on JavaOne, for we might announce something cool then…

As many of my readers know, I love computers. At any given point in time I use a couple of desktops and three or four laptops. But I have a real fascination for larger systems, which is why I studied parallel computing in graduate school. Today, I fulfilled one my dreams: building a really large machine. We just published some more details about the Intalio|Cloud Appliance Model C1 Mark I, including a full list of components, and detailed specifications. This is a superlative computer in every possible way, with the most cutting edge hardware and software money can buy. Serial Number 00000001 is standing proud in our new data-center (the same as Facebook’s), waiting for us to put some serious load onto it (our on-demand offering is currently hosted on Amazon EC2).

Here is what the Mark I gives you:

We’re now working on the Mark II model, which will break the Petabyte barrier.

When announcing a new product or a new strategy, some things usually get lost in translation, either because you did not get a chance to personally brief the journalist or analyst who wrote a piece on your announcement, or because the story just wasn’t solid enough. To my surprise, none of that happened with the launch of Intalio|BPM, Intalio|CRM, and Intalio|Cloud last week. While we released four new products (including a hardware appliance) and laid out a fairly complex story, everybody got it, down to the most subtle details of our business model (managed on-premises). Some of the best articles came from Brenon Daly, James Taylor, and Phil Wainewright.

It looks like we hit a chord…