John Cowan

This is Part III in a series by 6fusion Co-founder and CEO John Cowan on the emerging trend of Cloud Brokerage and the impact it will have on the technology industry and markets. Be sure to check out Part I of the series here and Part II here. The feedback and fallout from Part II of this post has been quite interesting.  I thought for sure the bulk of the flack I would have to take would be from the cloud vendor incumbents I said would be relegated to the world of retail cloud business.  But since I posted my perspective I’ve found myself digging in to the nature of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the Cloud Brokerage industry. For those of you keeping score at home, I said the market for cloud brokerage is more that 10 times the market for cloud computing software and related services. Yes, 10 times. And it is because this market is so big that cloud broke... (more)

Why 6fusion’s Cloud Resource Meter Launch Matters

By the time this blog post hits the airwaves, 6fusion will have launched it’s second major software product in the first 45 days of 2012. For those of you that run start up software companies, you know what kind of pace it means. To be perfectly transparent, things are, well, nucking futs inside our little company. The product we launched simultaneously at VMworld Partner Exchange in Las Vegas and Cloud Connect in Santa Clara is called 6fusion Cloud Resource Meter (for VMware vSphere) – more on the vSphere part later. I wanted to take a few written words to explain a few things a... (more)

From Rain to Sunshine: Back from London and Headed to Miami, Las Vegas and Santa Clara

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Rob Bissett Lots going on at 6fusion and it’s all good – last week, we were in London for Cloud Expo Europe and Cloud Camp London. We previewed our new UC6 IaaS federation platform at Cloud Expo Europe and John Cowan spoke on Equinix’s “Home of Cloud” panel.  The show was well attended – in fact they exceeded their expectations by a fair amount.  Europe is very cloud focused right now.  We heard a lot of feedback around the various options out there and several themes came to the forefront – data residency, and utility metering – both of which 6fusio... (more)

6 things I think I think for IaaS in 2012

 By John Cowan, Co-Founder and CEO of 6fusion Time sure goes by in a flash, doesn’t it?   Its that time of year again. Time for the requisite prognostication for the year ahead in the IaaS business! Most pundits seem to think their slate gets cleaned at this time of year and they get to make a new set of blanket assessments for the year ahead.  I don’t think it works quite like that.  The 6 things I think I thought (or is it I thought I think??) for 2011 are still largely what I believe today, but some things have set a more or less aggressive course.  Other things I was admitt... (more)

Part IV: Evolve (Again) or Die

By John Cowan, CEO Tiffani Bova from Gartner recently published a major research report looking at the impact of the cloud on the channel and vice versa.  One of Gartner’s principal conclusions goes like this: If traditional channel partners don’t react quickly enough to the changes in the market, they will be replaced by other channel partners in their accounts. I think Gartner made an understatement here.   I think this is a more appropriate conclusion: VARs and MSPs must evolve to embrace the cloud or they will perish.   I’ve never really been good at the FUD propaganda.  I’m... (more)