Web APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are quickly becoming the de facto integration model for IT systems. Key promises of web APIs (e.g., reducing development cycles within an organisation, fostering collaboration within the partner ecosystem, or monetising APIs from external use...

Today’s Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play the role of business-level artefacts, which provide the means to enable new business models and modes of efficiency. This could be interacting with customers over new mobility and social channels, reaching new customers through...

Indeed cloud providers strive to offer high reliability for their services, but part of this promise supposes that tenants use the services correctly. Large scale cloud failures do happen and services can be interrupted.  Tenants that do not properly architect...

The 2007 New York Times Bestseller, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Naseem Nicholas Taleb covers events characterised as 1) being outliers beyond normal expectation, 2) having extreme impact, and 3) being able to be rationalised...

For many cloud-enabled applications, multi-tenancy is a key design decision. There is a spectrum of choices from which to pick.  Gartner includes seven different models ranging from “Isolated Tenancy” (aka sharing nothing) to “Shared Everything.” And really, it’s not one-size-fits-all....

Many of today’s cloud services are one-size-fits-all, offering little or no customisation. In fact, this standardisation is part of the secret sauce: offer a few services and do them really well. But “standard” does not mean that customers need to...

Collaboration has become a first-tier concern for enterprises looking to transform their organisations. There are now several powerful social collaboration suites on the market, but to take collaboration to the next level, organisations need to reassess their specific needs.Most collaboration...

Cloudy days are here, but in the most positive sense. After the hype we are gradually witnessing a healthy adoption of cloud computing. However, as cloud can refer to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS platforms, the degree of adoption among these...

What if work could be more like our favourite games? This question has been inspiring growing interest in bringing "gamification" to the workplace, which means using games and game mechanics to help shape workplace behaviour. The idea that businesses might...

A number of commentators, including Accenture, rightly point out that the advent of so-called "Big Data" technologies doesn’t change the need for our trusty relational databases and our well-curated data warehouses. Quite the contrary - the increasing availability and usability...