Scott Morrison

Earlier today CNET published an interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the Netscape founder and influential VC outlines his personal vision for where tech is heading in the near future. His new tagline, from a piece he wrote for the New York Times, is “software is eating the world”, a blunt reference to how software increasingly appears out of nowhere to utterly consume a traditional practice or business model—be this in commerce, the social realm, or just about everywhere. Andreessen asserts that this affect will only accelerate in the future because of the explosion we are experiencing in mobile computing: Most of the people in the world still don’t have a personal computer, whereas in three to five years, most people in the world will have a smartphone…. If you’ve got a smartphone, then I can build a business in any domain or category and serve you as a custome... (more)

Clouds Down Under

When I was young I was fascinated with the idea that the Coriolis effect—the concept in physics that explains why hurricanes rotate in the opposing direction in the southern and northern hemispheres—could similarly be applied to common phenomenon like water disappearing down a bathtub drain. On my first trip to Cape Town many years ago I couldn’t wait to try this out, only to realize in my hotel bathroom that I had never actually got around to checking what direction water drains in the northern hemisphere before I left. So much for the considered rigor of science. It turns out ... (more)

Clouds on a Plane: VMware’s Micro Cloud Foundry Brings PaaS to My Laptop

On the eve of this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, VMware announced that Micro Cloud Foundry is finally available for general distribution. This new offering is a completely self-contained instantiation of the company’s Cloud Foundry PaaS solution, which I wrote about earlier this spring. Micro Cloud Foundry comes packaged as a virtual machine, easily distributable on a USB key (as they proved at today’s session on this topic at VMworld), or as a quick download. The distribution is designed to run locally on your laptop without any external dependencies. This allows devel... (more)

Cloud Security Alliance Introduces The Security, Trust and Assurance Registry

As a vendor of security products, I see a lot of Requests for Proposal (RFPs). More often than not these consist of an Excel spreadsheet with dozens—sometimes even hundreds—of questions ranging from how our products address business concerns to security minutia that only a high-geek can understand. RFPs are a lot of work for any vendor to respond to, but they are an important part of the selling process and we always take them seriously. RFPs are also a tremendous amount of work for the customer to prepare, so it’s not surprising that they vary greatly in sophistication. I’ve al... (more)

Gartner AADI 2011 Presenation Video: API Management, Governance & OAuth

I delivered a talk all about API governance at last week’s Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) summit in Las Vegas. I was the lunch time entertainment on Wednesday. The session was packed—in fact, a large number of people were turned away because we ran out of place settings. Fortunately, a video of the session is now available, so if you were not able to attend, you can now watch it online. In this talk I explore how governance is changing in the API world. I even do a live OAuth demonstration using people, instead of computers. Unlike the class... (more)