Roger Strukhoff

There was a time during the height of the dot-com boom when executives in Silicon Valley believed that Washington, DC was irrelevant. As two generations of entrepreneurs strived to build The New Economy, it was laughable to think that the ancient dunderheads back in our nation's capital had any notion about - or right to tamper with - what was going on in the tech world. This was the era of the Clinton Administration, a time when the President himself had declared that "the era of big government is over." Defend the shores, deliver the mail, and otherwise stay the hell out of the way - this was the thinking in the tech world during the bubble. Clinton's years were peaceful from the perspective of people living in the US. A few targeted attacks here and there, with even the major, US-backed military action by NATO in Serbia having little effect in day-to-day American... (more)

Thinking Global as Cloud Expo Approaches

A randon news thread: If Apple were part of the Dow, the DJIA would be at 15,000. Michelle Bachmann is no longer a Swiss citizen. President Obama approves of gay marriage and federal intrusion into our workplaces, if not our bedrooms. Sony is down, JP Morgan is down, oil is down, and hiring is down. Cloud computing is up. Austerity is not popular. Facebook/Instagram may be off. In the few weeks left before the next Cloud Expo, I sit and contemplate the odd mosaic of the state of the world. I won't comment on the endless violence everywhere; it must be part of the human condition... (more)

LogicMonitor Takes SaaS-based Approach

It's 11pm - do you know where your data are? This venerable public-service announcement could serve as a slogan for LogicMonitor, which partners with the likes of NetApp, VMware, Dell, HP, and Citrix to deliver SaaS-based monitoring software. Case in point: company CEO Kevin McGibben points out that during a big Amazon reboot earlier this year,"if you didn't have notification tools in place for that reboot and if (Amazon's) monitoring was in that cloud, then you weren't notified at the time." Furthermore, he points out that "interdependencies in the entire stack were affected" by... (more)

SoftLayer Targets GPUs in the Cloud

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are taking center stage in SoftLayer's latest high-performance computing (HPC) strategy in the cloud, as the company now offers HPC servers with NVIDIA GPUs starting at US$879 per month for an entry-level configuration of one GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 500GB of storage. Dallas-based SoftLayer is targeting traditional scientific environments - think oil & gas and other seismic applications - along with other numerical analyses, data mining, as well as "advertising agencies and web-design shops looking to develop interactive games, applications, and 3D co... (more)

Startup Mania Comes to Cebu City

Enthusiastic startup communities continue to emerge in the Philippines. Last fall, I reported on an event known as "Startup Weekend Manila." Now a vibrant event has concluded in Cebu City, the country's second-largest metro area. Startup Weekend Cebu produced some 20 software ideas over the course of 54 hours, at an event hosted by the University of the Philippines Cebu. The first-place team demonstrated a mobile app called "WaitKnowMore," which addresses the problem of insanely long waiting lines in the Philippines; no doubt the idea could be useful in many other places as well. ... (more)