Latest News from Dmitry Sotnikov

Demo recording and reviews of Quest OnDemand

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:28:08 EST

Last week at Microsoft PDC we launched our Systems Management as a Platform offering with a few of the services going into private beta. Now you can actually see a quick demo of one of these services and read some of the media coverage. You can see the product demo if you watch the recording of Kim [...]

Quest OnDemand Goes Live

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:23:00 EST

Systems Management as a Service (is there an acronym for this yet?) is finally becoming a reality. Today at Microsoft Professional Developer Conference we have announced beta launch of Quest OnDemand our online IT management services. This is one of the projects which have been consuming most of my time for the last year so I [...]

How to Find Me at TechEd Europe

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:18:00 EST

Here’s when and where you can find me in Berlin this week: Microsoft Online Services booth (Unified Communications area) in the TLC area (3.2) I’ll be there tomorrow (Tuesday) during the evening reception – 6:15-8:00 pm. Obviously, I will be happy to answer any questions on Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, LiveMeeting, OCS Online and sign And then, both [...]

Cloud and BPOS sessions at Virtual Tradeshow

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Quest Connect is a big online conference put together by Quest, Microsoft, , Dell, NetApp, Vizioncore, Scriptlogic, Techrepublic, Oracle Magazine, Redmond Magazine, and The Code Project. The agenda is packed with a lot of useful material on Windows Server 2008 R2, AD, Identity Management, Exchange 2010, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, SharePoint, SQL, Oracle – see full agenda here – and they include some sessions specifically on cloud computing and Microsoft Online Services.

Windows 7 – Microsoft’s First Step to the Cloud

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Pundits talking about how Windows 7 is all about Microsoft competing against Apple, recovering with Vista consumer adoption disaster, or getting people off of XP, are missing one other – extremely important – part of the Windows 7 story. Windows 7 and its server counterpart – Windows Server 2008 R2 – are actually the first [...]

Attending TechEd Europe?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:45:00 EDT

Are cloud services about efficiency or negligence? About being able to outsource commodity services and concentrate on core competence or loosing control and risking getting out of compliance? Which IT services can be safely moved to the cloud and which should stay in house? Let’s get together and discuss the present and the future of Software + Services use in our companies, share success stories, lessons learned, discuss concerns and best practices.

Cloud Computing Ain’t Electricity – It’s a Supermarket

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Thanks to Nicholas Carr everyone loves to talk about Cloud Computing as electricity and how we are transitioning from own power-stations to central grid. After a lot of discussions about “the cloud”, it occurred to me recently that there is a far better model to make cloud idea easy to understand – and it is supermarket. Electricity is kind of a wrong model. Not because so many folks are now trying to get the pendulum swing back and get to solar panels and other micro-generators, but also because software and IT services are much less uniform than electrical current. There’s no single “IT utility current” you can get from your network outlet to solve all IT needs.

Email Address as the Universal Identity

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:30:00 EDT

Global directories are obviously not new. There were efforts like X.400 and like, but then we kind of got scaled back to company-wide identities instead. So most of us just use a username (or DOMAIN\username) to log into our computer at work, and do not care that this is not globally unique at all. Sounds like the internet will make us care again.

Google Apps Get Into Enterprise Provisioning Systems

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:01:00 EDT

An important milestone just got passed by Google – one of the big enterprise identity management vendors out there – Quest Software (full disclosure: I am working for the company) – has added Google Apps as a directory to which they can provision identities and access. One might argue that this is a small thing considering that Quest is by far not the first vendor to enter Google’s ecosystem. Google Solutions Marketplace lists a few hundred solutions and services around Google Apps and Enterprise Search.

Cloud Definitions: NIST, Gartner, Forrester

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Analysts should love hype – it lets them jump into a hot area and be the thought leaders who everyone has to consult to make any sense out of what is going on in the area. “Cloud” is probably the most hyped word in the industry these days and everyone has a definition of what it [...]

Quest Software and Cloud Computing

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Using Cloud means providing our products as a service. Most of these efforts are not public yet, but you can get some of the information on what is coming if you see the recording of my TechEd session. Also, Quest has one of the best virtual desktop (VDI) solutions in the market – vWorkspace. And a growing number of service providers are signing up to provide a virtual desktop service built on that system. Using the cloud for our own offerings. Enabling public and private clouds. 1. Using Clouds Using Cloud means providing our products as a service. Most of these efforts [...]

SaaS growing fast in Asia/Pacific

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:38:38 EDT

You’d think that after all the news of China blocking Google and other web sites Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing would be the worst software delivery model you would imagine? Customer survey on SaaS Gartner conducted in November 2008 has shown that Asia/Pacific region is getting ahead of North America and Europe in SaaS adoption. Their respondents [...]

A VM running in EC2 is not SaaS

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 05:31:45 EDT

Just because you have software packaged as a virtual machine and running in Amazon EC2 does not mean you have a “cloud” offering. As easy as it sounds in most cases when a vendor claims they have their software available as a service/cloud offering – it is just that: a virtual machine image (such as Amazon [...]

Government adoption of cloud growing

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:51:55 EDT

That’s what Gartner’s Andrea Di Maiofound in his recent report: “Government in the Cloud: Much More Than Computing“. This might surprise initially – after all Forrester just told us that public sector was lagging in the cloud computing adoption rush. However, Andrea builds up a pretty impressive case of why cloud trend is inevitable for [...]

Cloud Computing MORE popular with Enterprise than SMBs

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:00:20 EDT

Forrester’s Frank Gillet just published results of a big survey on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS – like Amazon’s compute cloud or internal cloud-like datacenter) acceptance across geographies and company sizes titled “Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong About Cloud IaaS“. As the title implies the survey has a few very interesting results. First and foremost, they found that bigger customers are [...]

Garter finds a ‘Killer App’ for Cloud Computing

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:10:51 EDT

“APaaS: A Step to a ‘Killer App’ for Cloud Computing?” is a great report by Yefim V. Natis and Eric Knipp published by Gartner last week. Yefim and Eric, as it seems to me, managed to articulate the very essence of what makes Cloud Computing so disruptive: “Easy to learn and use application development environment, with runtime [...]

My cloud interview at TechEd

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:21:39 EDT

Technet Edge posted the interview David Tesar made with me while at TechEd last month. Check it out here. Dmitry Sotnikov of Quest Software, gives us his perspective on services in the cloud and answers some of the frequently asked questions in his sessions such as: - When is the right time to move to the cloud? - [...]

Active Directory, Exchange Online, and Azure applications

Wed, 27 May 2009 14:18:17 EDT

Recording from my TEC session on IT professional view on identity management and AD-integration for Exchange Online and Windows Azure has just got posted: Enjoy! You can find other session recordings from TEC (including keynote!) here. Also, if you are based in Europe – TEC Europe in coming to Berlin in September and early bird discounts are still [...]

Gartner surveys cloud backup solutions

Fri, 22 May 2009 07:42:56 EDT

“Dataquest Insight: Cloud-Based Server Backup Services, 2Q09 Update” by Adam W. Couture is a good feature-by-feature (including pricing) comparison of a dozen of major online backup solutions for the enterprise space. Backup might initially sound like the worst cloud application you can think of: after all it involves big data transfers and most likely the data [...]

My TechEd Sessions

Thu, 07 May 2009 17:27:22 EDT

If you are at Microsoft TechEd next week there will be a few sessions I will be giving there: Birds-of-a-Feather,”Going to the Cloud: Are We Crazy?” Dmitry Sotnikov, 4:30 p.m. Tuesday May 12, room 501A – this one is IT-oriented discussion of risks and benefits of putting your IT systems into the cloud. PowerShell Ask the Experts [...]

Is McKinsey wrong on cloud ROI?

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 07:12:51 EDT

McKinsey published a report this week claiming that their research shows that for organizations with revenues above $500 million using external cloud computing resources are more expensive than using their own datacenters: $366 a month per unit for cloud compared with $150 a month for traditional datacenter. I had received quite a few emails with links [...]

IDC: System Management going SaaS

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:43:42 EDT

“Worldwide System Management SaaS 2009 Vendor Analysis: Economic Crisis Creates Opportunities” is an excellent recent report by IDC. Software as a Service started in consumer web, and then expanded into end-user-oriented business and collaboration sites (Salesforce.com, Google Apps). The question is whether the model can go from this to administrative tools so IT people can start [...]

SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo: Show Report

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:35:00 EST

Overall, very exciting times, and a great event put together by the folks at SYS-CON! There was a lot of excitement and optimism throughout the event. As someone put it: cloud computing is about 700 days old. That means that there are a lot of arguments about definitions, and where things are going, and so on. And that also gives a lot of vibe and a lot of fresh community spirit.