The end of 2009 was extraordinarily busy, and that’s meant that, shamefully, I haven’t posted to my blog in ages. I aim to try to return to near-daily posting in 2010, but this means creating time in my schedule to think and research and write, rather than being entirely consumed by client inquiry.

December was Gartner’s data center conference, where I spent most of a week in back-to-back meetings, punctuated by a cloud computing end-user roundtable, a cloud computing town hall, and my talk on getting data center space. Attendance at the conference is skewed heavily towards large enterprises, but one of the most fascinating bits that emerged out of the week was the number of people walking around with emails from their CEO saying that they had to investigate this cloud computing thing, and whose major goals for the conference included figuring out how the heck they were going to reply to that email.

My cloud computing webinar is now available for replay — it’s a lightweight introduction to the subject. Ironically, when I started working at Gartner, I was terrified of public speaking, and much more comfortable doing talks over the phone. Now, I’m used to having live audiences and public speaking is just another routine day on the job… but speaking into the dead silence of an ATC is a little unnerving. (I once spent ten minutes giving a presentation to dead air, not realizing that the phone bridge had gone dead.) There were tons of great questions asked by the audience, far more than could possibly be answered in the Q&A time, but I’m taking the input and using it to figure out how to decide what I should be writing this year.

Q4 2009, by and large, continued my Q3 inquiry trends. Tons of colocation inquiries — but colocation is often giving way to leasing, now, and local/regional players are prominent in nearly every deal (and winning a lot of the deals). Relatively quiet on the CDN front, but this has to be put in context — Gartner’s analysts took over 1300 inquiries on enterprise video during 2009, and these days I’m pretty likely to look at a client’s needs and tell them they need someone like Kontiki or Ignite, not a traditional Internet CDN. And cloud, cloud, cloud is very much on everyone’s radar screen, with Asia suddenly becoming hot. Traditional dedicated hosting is dying at a remarkable pace; it’s unusual to see new deals that aren’t virtualized.

I’ll be writing on all this and more in the new year.