This is a question that I sought out to find an answer for in early 2012 when I became full time CTO at Cloudera. I did a bunch of online research and talked to a number of enterprise software CTOs whom I look up to (listed at end). I summarize my findings by answering four core questions: What is the CTO Mission? How to measure the CTO? How should the CTO split his/her time internally vs externally? What are the specific responsibilities of the CTO towards the main constituents inside…

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You’ve probably seen that some URLs start with “http://”, while other start with “https://”. Https is usually part of your banks or your favorite web shops URL, right? What does that “s” after http mean and why some websites have it while others don’t? In this case “s” stands for Secure and it means that communication with that website is secured, i.e. safe. What stands behind https is technology called Secure Socket Layer, better known by its acronym SSL. Who need SSL and why? SSL is used for safe transfer…

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Drones from Globe UAV GmbH use the high-speed 4G LTE wireless Internet. Control data and live video feeds are transmitted in real time. The wireless LTE standard supports data transmissions of up to 100 MBit/s. In highly populated areas this high speed network has hardly any gaps. In the countryside on the other hand, high speed surfing is not standard at all. For Globe UAV GmbH’s drones this means that they are mostly deployed in cities since the control data and live video feed that they can transmit bi-directionally in…

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Private or public? Both cloud types offer benefits and both have enjoyed significant growth over the last few years. Yet, what’s the best bet for your business: The virtually limitless resources of public cloud stacks, or the close-to-home control of private alternatives? Here’s a look at some critical differences between public and private clouds. Infrastructure As noted by Business 2 Community, the biggest difference between public and private clouds comes down to hosting. Public clouds are hosted on shared server infrastructure, which means multiple “tenants” all sharing the same physical space. Servers…

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Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly. Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful. They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus…

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