My next book: The Cloud at Your Service

When I have not been training for swimming and biking, doing my day job at BAE, my little Rocketvox startup nights and weekends, and promoting Who Says I Can’t as well as speaking about it, I (along with my co-author Arthur Mateos) have been working hard at my next “technical” book called The Cloud at Your Service. It’s coming out in August from Manning and they have a way now to subscribe to it and allow access to it as chapters become ready. The first draft of the entire book is done but as chapters go through final edit they are released on the early experience site at http://www.mapping.com/rosenberg. So what is the cloud and what’s the book about? Here is a bit about the book drawn from the preface:

Cloud computing, if used properly, is technology with tremendous promise and potential opportunity for businesses of all sizes.  Yet, it is a challenge for IT and business executives today to get a clear understanding of this technology while being overloaded by hype and often-inaccurate information peddled by self-serving statements from vendors and analysts.

How do you clear up the confusion, get past the fear, uncertainty and doubt, and really understand how and when the cloud best serves your organization’s goals and needs?

IT organizations face numerous challenges today and operate in an environment with increasingly larger workloads while simultaneously under severe budgetary and headcount constraints. This is why we believe it is a survival imperative to be able to appropriately harness the cloud as a potential new power tool for the IT toolbox,

Hype is more extreme this time than with previous IT fads or disruptions simply because the industry is so much bigger and there are consequently that many more new vendors chasing what is to them the next shiny new opportunity. Consequently hype is getting way ahead of reality which is making it next to impossible for responsible IT managers and business decision makers to get a clear understanding of what the cloud really means, what it might do for them, when it is practical, and what their future with the cloud looks like. But don’t overreact in the negative to this hype and dismiss what has enormous potential benefits for your business. We aim to help cut through all this fog and help you make these critical decisions based on facts and our informed unbiased recommendations and predictions.