Dmitry Sotnikov

Microsoft’s TechNet EDGE posted a video with quite detailed discussion of Systems Management as a Service concept, example of such a service (Quest OnDemand), how it uses Windows Azure as the underlying technology, the security model behind it, and so on. Obviously a demo is in t... (more)

Here’s a 3 minute video which Windows Azure team shot when they caught me in the hallway after one of the days at the Microsoft PDC conference last November. It is short but hopefully provides look into why we are using Azure and building our Quest OnDemand Systems-Management-a... (more)

This Wednesday was probably the first day on the (potentially long) path to Adobe Flash decline: the most popular video site out there – YouTube – started offering videos in Flash-less mode for browsers which support HTML 5 and h.264 video codec. This means that today the option... (more)

Quest Session at Cloud Expo A new (free!) service became publicly available on Quest OnDemand - Quest Site Administrator for SharePoint Reports. This is a great free service which provides some pretty neat reports on your intranet SharePoint environment. You go to the site and i... (more)

Security at Cloud Expo Security and data protection are key concerns for any cloud solution. I truly believe that this is also one aspect that you cannot just improve over time. No matter how agile you are security needs to be there by design. Unfortunately most cloud vendors/Saa... (more)

Azure Session at Cloud Expo 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... (more)

Ben Riga posted a video recording with a fairly detailed discussion we had at Microsoft PDC about Quest OnDemand (Quest’s Systems Management as a Service offering). One thing I could not help noticing is how the UI of the service itself changed between this shooting in November ... (more)

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 t... (more)

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 con... (more)

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 Exchang... (more)

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 Ma... (more)

There are two cloud-related sessions in the “community” section of Microsoft TechEd Europe 2009 and you need to vote for them here if you are attending the conference (and obviously if you want them in the agenda). Basically, both are on cloud computing: one for developers and the ... (more)

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 e... (more)

In the brave new world of enterprise applications going to the web do we need an identity directory spawning the internet, and if so, will email address system become the de-facto global identity system? Global directories are obviously not new. There were efforts like X.400 and ... (more)

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... (more)

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... (more)

It’s probably about time for me to provide a quick overview of what we at Quest Software are doing in the cloud computing area. There are two main “cloud” directions for us: Using the cloud for our own offerings. Enabling public and private clouds. 1. Using Clouds Using Cloud means... (more)

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 ... (more)

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 m... (more)

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 ... (more)