About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

James serves Infrastructure & Operations and CIO Professionals, providing insights and best-practice use of cloud computing (IaaS, public and private clouds, cloud storage services and related cloud technologies and services). As the content lead for Forrester's Cloud Computing Playbook, he further advises IT leadership on cloud economics, cloud outsourcing (strategic rightsourcing), IT cloud readiness and business and developer engagement on cloud.
James is the author of best-practice analysis on maturing your virtualization and cloud practices, building a cloud computing consumption strategy, and optimizing web infrastructures for blazing-fast performance.
James has more than 25 years' experience in the industry, having served as a reseller, vendor strategist, chief marketing officer, journalist, and analyst for companies including Autodesk, Azul Systems, Gartner, Rockwell International, and Sun Microsystems.
He is a frequent speaker at industry, corporate, educational, and Wall Street events and has guest lectured at leading business schools. James has been named a top cloud computing analyst each of the last four years by leading industry associations including Web Hosting Industry Review (2009) Apollo Research (2010-11) and fWired (2012). He is also the 2011 recipient of the Forrester Bill Bluestein Award, given to the analyst whose body of work continually inspires our clients and guides their decisions to be great.
Working out of Silicon Valley, James holds a master's degree from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree from the University of North Texas.
IBM has been talking a good cloud game for the last year or so. They have clearly demonstrated that they understand what cloud computing is, what customers want from it and have put forth a variety...
Sometimes you can only coax a reluctant partner and I&O customer community for so long before you feel you have to take matters into your own hands. That is exactly what VMware has decided to do to...
Wouldn't it be nice if your employees actually asked you this question before they went off and signed up for a cloud service or deployed a new app to a cloud platform? If they did ask, would you...
In typical Microsoft fashion, they don't catch a new trend right with the first iteration but they keep at it and eventually strike the right tone and in more cases than not, get good enough. And...
We're in the process of building out a transformational infrastructure road map for our IT and business executives. What are some best practices for such an infrastructure road map?
The number one challenge in cloud computing today is determining what it really is, what categories of services exist within the definition and business model and how ready these options are for...
Everyone understands that cloud computing provides pay per use access to resources and the ability to elastically scale up an application as its traffic increases. Those are values that turn on cloud...
Curious about where we are in the development of the cloud computing market? Here is my opening keynote from the 2012 SV Forum in Santa Clara, CA....
Today's move by Citrix to put its CloudStack IaaS solution into the Apache Foundation says more about the state of the cloud market than it does about OpenStack. As our Fall 2011 Forrsights...
Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems announced that its Project Blackbox was now a commercially shipping product. I have to confess that when they first told me about this effort I saw it as a nice...
The year 2012 brought a significant amount of growth in enterprise use of cloud services but did it fulfill our expectations? With just five weeks left in the year, it’s time to reflect on our...
Yesterday’s announcement of a partnership between Dell and Egenera has done something unique in the business development world -- increased the credibility of both players who were lagging in overall...
What is the opportunity for Microsoft partners (or other VARs, SIs, ISVs and technologists) in the emerging cloud computing space? Don't think of cloud as a threat but as an opportunity to...
Mark this date. While it isn't an anniversary of anything significant in the past, it is a day where our beloved cloud computing market showed significant signs of maturing. Major announcements...
At its Professional Developers Conference this week, Microsoft made the long-awaited debut of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution, under the guise of the “VM-role”...
TIBCO's acquisition of DataSynapse for a reported $28 million gives the company a development team and mature products with which to expand its financial-services revenue and flesh out its TIBCO...
Whenever a company changes the name of their major product you often have to wonder what level of change they are trying to signal. In the case of VMware which changed ESX to vSphere yesterday, the...
About six months ago in this blog I accused IBM of “cloud-washing” its solutions and services when it launched its Project Blue Cloud marketing campaign. Its aim with this effort was to lure...
Hot on the heels of Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark comes today’s $3.2 billion purchase of Savvis by CenturyLink, signaling that the rush to be an enterprise cloud leader is on. It...
An interesting development is happening in the hosting market that is a blend of technology innovation and business model proliferation. It has been well established in the Internet services market...
A startup, who wishes to remain anonymous, is delivering an innovative new business service from an IaaS cloud and most of the time pays next to nothing to do this. This isn't a story about...
As the end of 2012 approaches there is one clear takeaway about the cloud computing market — enterprise use has arrived. Cloud use is no longer solely hiding in the shadows, IT...
We've known for a while that cloud computing is important to IBM. It seems nearly every division has an effort in some aspect of the opportunity. And marketing has done its best to make it all look...
Well if you're going to make a dramatic about face from total dismissal of cloud computing, this is a relatively credible way to do it. Following up on its announcement of a serious cloud future...
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is great, but many of our enterprise clients want those cloud services and values delivered on premise, behind their firewall, which may feel more comfortable for protecting...