Blog posts by Craig Burton

One of my favorite movies released in 2012 was Cloud Atlas. This is not necessarily an easy movie to watch or explain. That is not the point I bring it up. In one of the films many timelines, there is a post-apocalyptic setting where civilization is very primitive. In this primitive civilization, the two main groups are an islands main inhabitants—goat herders—and “Prescients” that are very advanced and seemingly from a different planet. Twice a year the goat herders and the prescients meet to barter and exchange information. The goat herders are extremely curious about the...

CA Technologies acquires Layer 7, MuleSoft acquires Programmable Web, 3Scale gets funding It is clear that the API Economy is kicking into gear in a big way. Last week, Intel announced its acquisition of Mashery, this week, CA Technologies announced its acquisition of Layer7 , MuleSoft announced its acquisition of ProgrammableWeb and 3Scale closed a round of funding for 4.2M. Money is flooding into the API Economy as the importance of APIs only heightens. Expect this trend to continue. The upside of this flurry of activity is the focus being given to the API Economy. But...

From partnership to acquisition Let there be no confusion. Intel is a hardware company. It makes microchips. This is its core business. History shows that companies do best when they stick to their roots. There are exceptions. At the same time, Intel has always dabbled in software at some level. Mostly in products that support the chip architecture. Compilers, development tools and debuggers. From time to time, however, Intel ventures into the software business with more serious intentions. Back in 1991, Intel acquired LAN Systems in attempt to get more serious into the LAN utility...

When things go bad, it goes really bad At KuppingerCole we use Office365 extensively to manage our documents and keep track of document development and distribution. On April 9, 2013, Microsoft released a normal sized Tuesday update to Windows and Office products. The only thing is, this time the update completely broke the functionality of Office 365 and Office 2013. Trying to open a document stored in SharePoint would result in a recursive dialogue box asking for you to authenticate to the SharePoint server. Same thing would happen when trying to upload a document. Excel and...

Identity Management is a universal problem When I pay my electric bill I usually just call the power company and give them my credit card. This month I decided that I should go set up auto payments on the web site and be done with it. So I opened the power company web site and attempted to login. Clearly the site recognized me, the login name I usually use was being recognized, but I just could not remember my password. I tried all of the normal passwords I use and none of them were working. So I attempted to retrieve my password, it gave me an option of having the password reset...

Securing BYOD With the rapidly emerging cloud-mobile-social Troika coupled with the API Economy, there are so many questions about how to design systems that can allow application access to internal information and resources via APIs that will not compromise the integrity of enterprise assets. And on the other hand, how do we prevent inappropriate personal information from propagating inappropriately as personal data stores and information is processed and accessed? Indeed, I have read so many articles lately that predict utter catastrophe from the inevitable smart phone and tablet...

Introduction Making an API is hard. It is also a tough question. A small company out of England has figured out how to let anyone make an API with just: Dropbox A Spreadsheet A Datownia SaaS account Datownia One of the activities I practice to keep up with what is happening in the world of APIs is to subscribe to the ProgrammableWeb’s newsletter. Every week the newsletter contains the latest APIs that have been added to the rapidly increasing list. While I seldom can get through the whole list, I inevitably find one or two new APIs that are really interesting....

Introduction The three biggest trends impacting computing today are what I call the Computing Troika. Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing and Social Computing. There is a fourth trend that is on par with each of the Troika movements. The API Economy. Finally there is the question of the role of standards in these trends. First, here is my definition of Cloud Computing—and its opposite—Non-cloud Computing. Cloud Computing Cloud Computing involves offering network computing services with the following three characteristics: IT Virtualization Multi-tenancy Service...

Intro Starting at the EIC 2012 I have been talking and presenting a lot about The API Economy. The API Economy has become a strategic topic for organizations. As one can expect with a hot topic, there are many opinions and views on the matter. Therefore there a many comments, blog posts and articles written about The API Economy. Needless to say it is tough to keep track of everything being said or to track any given thread. I should start off by saying the questions asked by this blog post are appropriate and need to be answered. The DataBanker thread An interesting thread that I...

The Intersection of Policies, Standards & Best Practices for Robust Public Sector Cloud Deployments Introduction Last week I was invited to attend the 2012 International Oasis Cloud Symposium. I was very impressed. The attendance was not large—in fact—the organizers limited the number of attendees to 125 people. I was not able to attend the first day, but the second day was lively with many interesting presentations and discussions. I won’t go over the complete agenda, if you want to it can be located in PDF format here. Overall I would say every presentation given was...