Google Voice broke my will – I’m cloud blogging now

Hapy Cloud Blogging

I feel kind of dirty that I’m another  ”Cloud Blogger” now.  But to just to be clear, I design and build “clouds” for a living, unlike some bloggers and analysts out in the wild.  I also think of Cloud as any managed service that you rent or subscribe to, rather than the second coming of  Jesus taking the form as some holy virtualized-SOA-matrix-Grid thing with utility pricing, fanatical support and security you can trust.

Anyway, have you heard the news about Google Voice yet?  It can create transcripts of voice mail, allows you to listen to voice mail as it’s being left (old school answering machine feature here), allows 1 number to aggregate your many phone numbers, variable messages or responses are possible based on who is calling you, free long distance in the US, and many more features.  It rocks and is the start of a whole new era in cloud services for small business.  I’m not here to give you a definitive run-down of Google Voice, but I am here to start evangelizing about the benefits of utilizing cloud services for the VAST majority of our your small business, home-based business or for your home IT needs.  Google Voice was the final straw to break my back.  Now I have to start prophesizing to the world’s small businesses to move their IT services to the cloud or perish….like companies that used to manufacture buggy whips.

I’m a big Google Apps user, a VMware vExpert, a VMware Certified Professional, recreational web developer and project lead for a VMware as a Service product in development.  As you can tell, I have a lot of cloud ideas and experiences floating around in my head.  I need to dump them to the intertubes so I can sleep better at night and get rid of these weird dreams I’ve been having.  :)   I’m also going to depart from a virtualization only mindset and will be moving to discussing the best holistic solutions that bring value to small businesses.

Here’s a sneak peak of the topics I’ll delve into periodically:

• Google –  Apps, Voice, blah, blah,….
• VMware as a Service and vCloud
• App Development for the Cloud – Google App Engine, EC2, vCloud, …
• Securing the cloud
• Cloud community news and happenings  

Please don’t tell my mother that I’m cloud blogging.  Some things are better kept secret.

UPDATE: Posting some new text to test syndacation to other blog.  Sorry for wasting your time.