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How Cloud Computing Could Change the Role of the CIO

Cloud computing is at the top of conference agendas and a common buzz word online, so it should come as no surprise that it is also on the minds of many IT executives. And as more and more enterprise IT departments move to the cloud, many are beginning to wonder how this will affect the traditional role of the CIO.

The role of the CIO will change if the IT department shifts from a service provider to a utility model, with usage-based metering. This will result in a shift in core tasks from developing applications and user interfaces and result in a new set of tasks involving the definition of service-level agreements, selecting cloud management tools and understanding customer service. The role of the CIO could shift to become more like an independent business manager running a public service.

Usage-Based
The CIO used to be involved in strategic technology planning for the organization and was likely making strategic decisions, such as when to upgrade Microsoft Office and Windows and which strategic vendor to use for hardware. But this changes when an organization implements a cloud architecture, as new tasks and skills come into play. Some of the traditional roles of the CIO remain, while the CIO is also required to play a new role as a cloud manager. This requires providing the tools and computing power to meet the changing needs of users in a quicker, more efficient manner. This may also include setting up a private cloud, in which users have access to consistent, repeatable services from a services portal available via standard Internet protocols.

Earlier this year, an InformationWeek article revealed that a survey of IT executives found that, when stating the top reasons for moving to cloud computing, cutting costs was nearly just as important to respondents as faster response to end users. The same survey found that although 58 percent of respondents were making the move to the cloud, most were taking a slow approach to do so.

The Future Lies in the Cloud
With that said, a Mashable post citing a different cloud computing survey predicts that by 2011, a vast majority of computing will take place in the cloud. Although this survey seemed to focus more on the consumer side of things, most IT executives see a future in the cloud. The CIO job will adapt and change as this transition occurs, and will function more as a logistical manager.

As cloud services move outside the firewall, understanding how the vendor is providing the services your company needs will become increasingly important. As will understanding that your company’s information is safe and secure wherever it is stored.

To learn more about the cloud, and how it can help your organization, contact Nubifer today.

2011: 04/13
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
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Cloud Computing’s Popularity with SMB’s

There is no simple answer as to whether or not 2010 was the year small business IT finally adopted cloud computing once and for all. On behalf of Microsoft, 7th Sense Research recently conducted a study on cloud computing in small business computing environments and found that 29% of SMBs view the cloud as an opportunity for small business IT to be more strategic. The study also found that 27% of SMBs have bought into cloud computing because it integrates with existing technology investments, while 12% of SMBs have used the cloud to start a new business.

Despite those figures, overall, small businesses are largely unfamiliar with cloud computing. Josh Waldo, director of SMB Marketing at Microsoft reveals, “Roughly 20 percent of SMBs claim to know what cloud technology is.”

The numbers just don’t match up, but Waldo points out that just because people may not identify with the term cloud computing doesn’t mean they aren’t using the technology. Take Gmail or Hotmail, for example: They are both prime examples of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) form of cloud computing and are extremely popular—without their many users even realizing they are using cloud technology when checking their inbox.

“People might not understand what cloud is. But they are using it. They’re using it in their private life. In some cases they’re using it in their work life. But they might not necessarily identify it with the term cloud,” says Waldo.

He believes that the lack of familiarity SMB’s have with cloud computing can be an opportunity for Microsoft, Zoho and other providers of small business technology. Says Waldo, “For Microsoft, what that means is that this gives us a big opportunity to really educate SMB’s about cloud technologies and how they can benefit their business. Our goal is really going to be to help SMB’s evolve how they think about technology.”

According to Waldo, the benefits for small businesses that embrace the cloud are potentially huge: “First, SMBs can get enterprise-class technology at a fraction of the price, where you’re not purchasing on-premises technology that’s going to cost you an enormous amount upfront. Second, it really allows companies, whether you’re a development shop and you’re building software, or you’re an end customer—like a financial or insurance firm—to focus on your business rather than your IT requirements.”

By outsourcing data-center needs, for example, small business IT can eliminate building out capacity to handle potential strikes in data or transaction processing, because they buy the processing power they need when they need it. This leads to another key benefit of cloud computing: elasticity and the expectation of mobility. Waldo defines elasticity as the capability to scale up or down rapidly, based on need. While that includes processing power, it also means being able to add new users from a seasonal workforce—without having to deal with per-seat licensing associated with traditional desktop software.

When it comes to the expectation of mobility, Waldo says that today’s notebook, smartphone and tablet-totting employees want to make their work more flexible by making it mobile. SMB’s can let employees access the information and applications they need while on the go by exposing core applications as SaaS via the cloud.

Embracing Cloud Computing
Waldo recommends that SMB’s that have decided to embrace the cloud by adding cloud computing to their small business technology portfolio seek expert advice. “We really think it’s important that SMB’s choose carefully. And if they’re uncertain, they should work with a third party or a consultant or a value added reseller or some type of agent who understands the various elements of cloud technology and [who] can advise clients,” he says.

According to Chad Collins, CEO of Nubifer.com, a provider of turn-key cloud automation solutions, the first thing a small business should consider is which problem it is trying to solve: “The most important thing is that the cloud really isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s about solving problems. It should be about scalability, elasticity and economies of scale.” Collins adds, “What our enterprise clients are asking for is the ability to create virtual environments, run applications without code changes or rewrites and, most importantly, to be able to collaborate and share using single sign-on interface.

Collins says that the person responsible for small business IT should ask a range of questions when considering a cloud services provider. Among the most important is: Does the cloud provider allow you to run existing applications without any code rewrites or changes to code? Microsoft’s research reveals that 27% of SMBs have already bought into cloud services because it integrates with existing technology, while another 36% would be encouraged to but into the cloud because of that fact. “Being able to migrate custom applications over to the cloud without rewrites is not only a huge cost saver but also a huge time saver for SMBs,” says Collins.

Another important question is whether the cloud provider offers granular user access and user-based permissions based on roles. Can you measure value on a per user basis? Can you auto-suspend resources by setting parameters on usage to avoid overuse of the cloud? The latter is important because although cloud services can result in immense cost savings, their pay-as-you-go nature can yield a large tab if used inefficiently.

Collins recommends paying special attention to the level of responsive support offered by a cloud provider. “I think for SMBs it’s really important. Having to log a Web form and then wait 24 to 48 hours for support can be really frustrating,” he says, adding that the provider should guarantee that a support team would respond in mere hours. Agreeing with Collins, Waldo points out that a service-level agreement with a high-availability and 24 hour support is key.

To discover how the power of cloud computing can benefit your SMB, please visit Nubifer.com.

2011: 03/23
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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DoD Business Applications and the Cloud

The current cloud spending is less than 5% of total IT spending, but with an optimistic 25% growth rate, cloud computing is poised to become one of the dominant types for organizing information systems—which is why it is important for the Department of Defense Business Mission to begin organizing the path to cloud operations in order to migrate from its current low performance/high cost environment.

The DoD Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 IT cost of the Business Mission—excluding payroll costs for uniformed and civilian personnel—is $5.2 billion, in addition to 1/3 of the costs of the communications and computing infrastructure tacking on an additional $5.4 billion to total costs.

The average IT budgets of the largest US corporate organizations are exceeded by the scope of DoD Business Applications by a multiple of three. As a result, DoD Business Operations need to think about its future IT directions as operating a secure and private cloud that is managed organically by the DoD Business Mission in order to squeeze the cost benefits out of the cloud.

There are many forms of cloud computing, ranging from Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but when it comes to the Department of Defense, offerings that can offer support of over 2,000 applications need apply. Business Operations cannot be linked to “public” clouds that are proprietary.

The DoD, for example, can’t rely on the largest cloud service like the Amazon Elastic Cloud, which offers computing capacity completely managed by the customer and is thus a “public cloud.” Because compute processing is purchased on demand, Amazon is an IaaS service. Once your applications are placed in the proprietary Amazon cloud, however, it is difficult to transfer the workload into a different environment.

Google, however, offers a PaaS service as a public cloud (read: accessible to all) via the Google App Engine. Google allows developers to build, host and run web applications on Google’s mature infrastructure with its own operating system; Google only provides a few Google-managed applications.

Salesforce.com’s enterprise level computing currently operates at $1.4 billion revenue rate per year, with 2 million subscribers signed up for SaaS application services running in a proprietary PaaS environment. Because Salesforce offers only proprietary solutions and can’t be considered by DoD, although Salesforce’s recent partnership with VMware might change all that.

Other cloud providers offer IaaS services, but they all leave it to customers to manage their own applications; they qualify for DoD applications provided that would meet open source and security criteria.

Open Platform and Open Source
Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform offers a PaaS environment for developers to create cloud applications and offers services running in Microsoft’s data centers on a proprietary .Net environment. These preferentially .Net applications are integrated into a Microsoft controlled software environment but can be defined as a “closed” platform.

Currently, DoD Business Mission applications are running largely in a Microsoft .Net environment. What remains to be seen is if DoD will pursue cloud migration into a multi-vendor “open platform” and “open source” programming environment or continue sticking to a restrictive Microsoft .Net?

The largest share of the DoD IT budget goes towards the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which has advocated the adoption of the open source SourceForge library in April 2009 for unclassified programs. DISA’s Forge.mil program enables collaborative software development and cross-program sharing of software, system components ad services in support of network-centric operations and warfare. Forge.mil is modeled from concepts proven in open-source software development and represents a collection of screened software components and is used by thousands of developers. Forge.mil takes advantage of a large library of tested software projects and its components are continuously evaluated by thousands of contributors (including some from firms like IBM, Oracle and HP although not from Microsoft, which controls its own library of codes).

OSS is defined as software for which the human-readable source code is available for use, study, reuse, modification, enhancement and redistribution by the users of that software by a DoD Memorandum of October 16, 2009 by the Acting DoD Chief Information Officer on “Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS).” OSS meets the definition of “commercial computer software” and will thus be given preference in building systems. DoD has began the process of adoption of open course computer code with the announcement of Forge.mil.

Implications
Due to the emigration of business applications, a reorientation of systems development technologies in favor of running on “private clouds”—while taking advantage of “open source” techniques—is necessary in order to save the most. The technologies currently offered for the construction of “private” clouds will help to achieve the complete separation of the platforms on which applications run, from the applications themselves. The simplification that can be achieved through the sharing of “open” source code from the Forge.mil library makes delivering cloud solutions cheaper, quicker and more readily available.

For more information regarding the DoD and open source cloud platforms, please visit nubifer.com today.

2011: 03/17
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Security
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BPOS to be Enhanced with Office Web Apps

Although the software giant has yet to reveal a specific timeline for the integration, Microsoft announced plans in October to add Office Web Apps to its hosted Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). This integration will give Microsoft a much-needed edge, and keep BPOS ahead of rivals like Google Apps. Google Apps offers office productivity applications as part of their broader cloud-based collaboration and communication suites.

Described by Microsoft officials as “online companions” to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, Office Web Apps offers hosted versions of Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that feature the use-ability found in the on-premise Microsoft Office suite. The software company says they are aiming to let users “access, view and edit” documents via a the Internet.

With about 20 million users, Office We Apps is currently available free for individual consumers as part of the Windows Live online services. Office Web apps is also a component to the free Live@EDU collaboration and communication suite for educational institutions. Office Web Apps can also be accessed by organizations that own the on-premise versions of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

It has been widely reported that the absence of Office Web Apps from BPOS has not hindered the adoption of that collaboration and communication suite for businesses (which features Exchange Online, Office SharePoint Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting).

According to industry analysts, BPOS licenses have more than tripled since the start of 2010, but it is unknown how many BPOS seats have been sold overall. Microsoft stated recently that there are 40 million paid seats of Microsoft Online Services—of which BPOS is a part of. In October, Microsoft announced a number of big customer wins for BPOS, such as DuPont (58,000 end users), Volvo (18,000 end users), Australia’s Spotless Group, Godiva and Sunoco.

Industry analysts have observed that the familiarity of Microsoft’s software interfaces and tools (because it is present in many enterprises), as well as the links between Microsoft’s cloud and on-premise software, will be an advantage for the company.

Gartner explains, “I’d expect to see a growing opportunity for companies looking to move to a more cost-effective collaboration environment to consider Microsoft in the mix because of its experience in delivering enterprise collaboration.”

Analysts have also seen that Microsoft’s sales-teams are being aggressive about spreading the word about BPOS and promoting it as part of the renewing of enterprise contracts. A Gartner analyst has been quoted as saying, “Microsoft has tapped a deep root of demand for cloud services with BPOS.”

Additionally, Microsoft announced new customers, including several California State University schools, the University of Montana, Northern Kentucky University, the College of DuPage, Washington University in St. Louis and Aston University in the U.K., for Live@EDU. Live@EDU now features more than 10,000 academic institutions with over 11 million end users. Live@EDU includes Office Web Apps, Windows Live Sky Drive and Outlook Live.

For more information regarding BPOS contract a Nubifer representative today. Nubifer is a Microsoft Certified Partner.

2010: 12/09
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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Microsoft
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Confidence in Cloud Computing Expected to Surge Economic Growth

The dynamic and flexible nature of cloud computing, software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service may help organizations in their recovery from the current economic downturn, according to more than two thirds of IT decision leaders and makers who participated in a recent annual study by Vanson Bourne, an International Research Firm. Vanson Bourne surveyed over 600 IT and business decision makers across the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore. Of the countries sampled, Singapore is leading the shift to the cloud, with 76 percent of responding enterprises using some form of cloud computing. The U.S. follows with 66 percent, with the U.K. at 57 percent.

This two year study about Cloud Computing reveals that IT decision makers are very confident in cloud computing’s ability to deliver within budget and offer CapEx savings. Commercial and public sector respondents also predict cloud use will help decrease overall IT budgets by an average of 15 Percent, with others expecting savings as much as 40 Percent.

“Scalability, interoperability and pay-as-you-go elasticity are moving many of our clients toward cloud computing,” said Chad Collins, CEO at Nubifer Inc., a strategic Cloud and SaaS consulting firm. “However, it’s important, primarily for our enterprise clients, to work with a Cloud provider that not only delivers cost savings, but also effectively integrates technologies, applications and infrastructure on a global scale.”

A lack of access to IT capacity is clearly labeled as an obstacle to business progress, with 76 percent of business decision makers reporting they have been prevented from developing or piloting projects due to the cost or constraints within IT. For 55 percent of respondents, this remains an issue.

Confidence in cloud continues to trend upward — 96 percent of IT decision makers are as confident or more confident in cloud computing being enterprise ready now than they were in 2009. In addition, 70 percent of IT decision makers are using or plan to be using an enterprise-grade cloud solution within the next two years.

The ability to scale resources up and down in order to manage fluctuating business demand was the most cited benefit influencing cloud adoption in the U.S. (30 percent) and Singapore (42 percent). The top factor driving U.K. adoption is lower cost of total ownership (41 percent).

Security concerns remain a key barrier to cloud adoption, with 52 percent of respondents who do not leverage a cloud solution citing security of sensitive data as a concern. Yet 73 percent of all respondents want cloud providers to fully manage security or to fully manage security while allowing configuration change requests from the client.

Seventy-nine percent of IT decision makers see cloud as a straight forward way to integrate with corporate systems. For more information on how to leverage a cloud solution inside your environment, contact a Nubifer.com representative today.

2010: 08/17
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
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Taking a Closer Look at the Power of Microsoft Windows Azure AppFabric

Microsoft’s Windows Azure runs Windows applications and stores advanced applications, services and data in the cloud. This baseline understanding of Windows Azure, coupled with the practicality of using computers in the cloud makes leveraging the acres of Internet-accessible servers on offer today an obvious choice. Especially when the alternate option of buying and maintaining your own space in data centers and hardware deployed to those data centers can quickly become costly. For some applications, both code and data might live in the cloud, where the systems they use are managed and maintained by someone else. On-premise applications—which run inside an organization—might store data in the cloud or rely on other cloud infrastructure services. Ultimately, making use of the cloud’s capabilities provides a variety of advantages.

Windows Azure applications and on-premises applications can access the Windows Azure storage service using a REST-ful approach. The storage service allows storing binary large objects (blobs), provides queues for communication between components of Windows Azure application, and also offers a form of tables with a simple query language. The Windows Azure platform also provides SQL Azure for applications that need traditional relational storage. An application using the Windows Azure platform is free to use any combination of these storage options.

One obvious need between applications hosted in the cloud and hosted on-premise is communication between applications. Windows Azure AppFabric provides a Service Bus for bi-directional application connectivity and Access Control for federated claims-based access control.

Service Bus for Azure AppFabric

The primary feature of the Service Bus is message “relaying” to and from the Windows Azure cloud to your software running on-premise, bypassing any firewalls, network address translation (NAT) or other network obstacles. The Service Bus can also help negotiate direct connections between applications. Meanwhile, the Access Control feature provides a claims-based access control mechanism for applications, making federation easier to tackle and allowing your applications to trust identities provided by other systems.

A .NET developer SDK is available that simplifies integrating these services into your on-premises .NET applications. The SDK integrates seamlessly with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and other Microsoft technologies to build on pre-existing skill sets as much as possible. These SDKs have been designed to provide a first-class .NET developer experience, but it is important to point out that they each provide interfaces based on industry standard protocols. Thus, making it possible for applications running on any platform to integrate with them through REST, SOAP and WS-protocols.

SDKs for Java and Ruby are currently available for download. Combining them with the underlying Windows Azure platform service produces a powerful, cloud-based environment for developers.

Access Control for the Azure AppFabric

Over the last decade, the industry has been moving toward an identity solution based on claims. A claims-based identity model allows the common features of authentication and authorization to be factored out of your code, at which point such logic can then be centralized into external services that are written and maintained by subject matter experts in security and identity. This is beneficial to all parties involved.

Access Control is a cloud-based service that does exactly that. Rather than writing your own customer user account and role database, customers can let AC orchestrate the authentication and most of the user authorization. With a single code base in your application, customers can authorize access to both enterprise clients and simple clients. Enterprise clients can leverage ADFS V2 to allow users to authenticate using their Active Directory logon credentials, while simple clients can establish a shared secret with AC to authenticate directly with AC.

The extensibility of Access Control allows for easy integration of authentication and authorization through many identity providers without the need for refactoring code. As Access Control evolves, support for authentication against Facebook Connect, Google Accounts, and Windows Live ID can be quickly added to an application. To reiterate: over time, it will be easy to authorize access to more and more users without having to change the code base.

When using AC, the user must obtain a security token from AC in order to log in; this token is similar to a signed email message from AC to your service with a set of claims about the user’s identity. AC doesn’t issue a token unless the user first provides his or her identity by either authenticating with AC directly or by presenting a security token from another trusted issuer (such as ADFS) that has authenticated that user. So by the time the user presents a token to the service, assuming it is validated, it is safe to trust the claims in the token and begin processing the user’s request.

Single sign-on is easier to achieve under this model, so a customer’s service is no longer responsible for:

• Authenticating users
• Storing user accounts and passwords
• Calling to enterprise directories to look up user identity details
• Integrating with identity systems from other platforms or companies
• Delegation of authentication (a.k.a. federation) with other security realms

Under this model, a customer’s service can make identity-related decisions based on claims about the user made by a trusted issuer like AC. This could be anything from simple service personalization with the user’s first name, to authorizing the user to access higher-valued features and resources in the customer’s service.

Standards

Due to the fact that single sign-on and claims-based identity have been evolving since 2000, there are a myriad of ways of doing it. There are competing standards for token formats as well as competing standards for the protocols used to request those tokens and send them to services. This fact is what makes AC so useful, because over time, as it evolves to support a broader range of these standards, your service will benefit from broader access to clients without having to know the details of these standards, much less worry about trying to implement them correctly.

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) was the first standard. SAML specified an XML format for tokens (SAML tokens) in addition to protocols for performing Web App/Service single sign-on (SAML tokens are sometimes referred to inside Microsoft as SAMLP–for the SAML protocol suite). WS-Federation and related WS-* specifications also define a set of protocols for Web App/Service single sign-on, but they do not restrict the token format to SAML, although it is practically the most common format used today.

To Summarize

The Service Bus and Access Control constituents of the Windows Azure platform provide key building block services that are vital for building cloud-based or cloud-aware applications. Service Bus enables customer to connect existing on-premises applications with new investments being built for the cloud. Those cloud assets will be able to easily communicate with on-premises services through the network traversal capabilities, which are provided through Service Bus relay.

Overall, the Windows Azure platform represents a comprehensive Microsoft strategy designed to make it easy for Microsoft developers to realize the opportunities inherent to cloud computing. The Service Bus and Access Control offer a key component of the platform strategy, designed specifically to aid .NET developers in making the transition to the cloud. These services provide cloud-centric building blocks and infrastructure in the areas of secure application connectivity and federated access control.

For more information on the Service Bus & Access Control, please contact a Nubifer representative or visit these Microsoft sponsored links:

• An Introduction to Windows Azure platform AppFabric for Developers (this paper)
o http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150833

• A Developer’s Guide to Service Bus in Windows Azure platform AppFabric
o http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150834

• A Developer’s Guide to Access Control in Windows Azure platform AppFabric
o http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=150835

• Windows Azure platform
o http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

• Service Bus and Access Control portal
o http://netservices.azure.com/

2010: 08/13
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Nubifer
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Rackspace Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA and Other Industry Leaders on OpenStack Project

On July 19, Rackspace Hosting, a specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, announced the launch of OpenStack^TM, an open-source cloud platform designed to advance the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace is donating the code that fuels its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project, which will additionally incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. NASA and Rackspace plan on collaborating on joint technology development and leveraging the efforts of open-source software developers on a global scale.

NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT Chris C. Kemp said of the announcement, “Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand. To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”

OpenStack is poised to feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store that is based on Rackspace Cloud Files (currently available at OpenStack.org). A scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology are the next components planned for release, anticipated to be available sometime in late 2010. Organizations using these components would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving large government projects and tens of thousands of customers.

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies. We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres,” Lew Moorman, President and CSO at Rackspace, said at the time of the announcement.

Both organizations have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, while Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among service providers and enterprises. Rackspace hosted an OpenStack Design Summit in Austin, Texas from July 13 to 16, in which over 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members teamed up to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. Among the more than 25 companies represented at the Design Summit were Autonomic Resources, AMD, Cloud.com, Citrix, Dell, FathomDB, Intel, Limelight, Zuora, Zenoss, Riptano and Spiceworks.

“OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability. As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products,” said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems.

Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General manager of Server Platforms, Dell, added, “We believe in offering customers choice in cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency. OpenStack on Dell is a great option to create open source enterprise cloud solutions.”

2010: 08/03
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
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Dell and Microsoft Partner Up with the Windows Azure Platform Appliance

Dell and Microsoft announced a strategic partnership in which Dell will adopt the Windows Azure platform appliance as part of its Dell Services Cloud to develop and deliver next-generation cloud services at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference on July 12. With the Windows Azure platform, Dell will be able to deliver private and public cloud services for its enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers. Additionally, Dell will develop a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance for enterprise organizations to run in their data-centers.

So what does this mean exactly? By implementing the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance to host public and private clouds for its customers, Dell will leverage its vertical industry expertise in offering solutions for the speedy delivery of flexible application hosting and IT operations. In addition, Dell Services will produce application migration, advisory migration and integration and implementation services.

Microsoft and Dell will work together to develop a Windows Azure platform appliance for large enterprise, public and hosting customers to deploy to their own data centers. The resulting appliance will leverage infrastructure from Dell combined with the Windows Azure platform.

This partnership shows that both Dell and Microsoft recognize that more organizations can reap the benefits of the flexibility and efficiency of the Windows Azure platform. Both companies understand that cloud computing allows IT to increase responsiveness to business needs and also delivers significant efficiencies in infrastructure costs. The result will be an appliance to power a Dell Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Cloud.

The announcement with Dell occurred on the same day that Microsoft announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance, a turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to run in their own data centers. Initial partners (like Dell) and customers using the appliance in their data centers will have the scale-out application platform and data center efficiency of Windows Azure and SQL Azure that Microsoft currently provides.

Since the launch of the Windows Azure platform, Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) has been working with Microsoft to built out and power the platform. Dell will use the insight gained as a primary infrastructure partner for the Windows Azure platform to make certain that the Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance is optimized for power and space to save ongoing operating costs and performance of large-scale cloud services.

A top provider of cloud computing infrastructure, Dell’s client roster boasts 20 of the 25 most heavily-trafficked Internet sites and four of the top global search engines. The company has been custom-designing infrastructure solutions for the top global cloud service providers and hyperscale data center operations for the past three years and has developed an expertise about the specific needs of organizations in hosting, HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, energy, social networking, energy, SaaS, plus public and private cloud builders in that time.

Speaking about the partnership with Microsoft, president of Dell Services Peter Altabef said, “Organizations are looking for innovative ways to use IT to increase their responsiveness to business needs and drive greater efficiency. With the Microsoft partnership and the Windows Azure platform appliance, Dell is expanding its cloud services capabilities to help customers reduce their total costs and increase their ability to succeed. The addition of the Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance marks an important expansion of Dell’s leadership as a top provider of cloud computing infrastructure.”

Dell Services delivers vertically-focused cloud solutions with the combined experience of Dell and Perot Systems. Currently, Dell Services delivers managed and Software-as-a-Service support to over 10,000 customers across the globe. Additionally, Dell boasts a comprehensive suite of services designed to help customers leverage public and private cloud models. With the new Dell PaaS powered by the Windows Azure platform appliance, Dell will be able to offer customers an expanded suite of services including transformational services to help organizations move applications into the cloud and cloud-based hosting.

Summarizing the goal of the partnership with Dell, Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft Server and Tools said at the Microsoft Windows Partner Conference on July 12, “Microsoft and Dell have been building, implementing and operating massive cloud operations for years. Now we are extending our longstanding partnership to help usher in the new era of cloud computing, by giving customers and partners the ability to deploy Windows Azure platform in their datacenters.”

2010: 07/26
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Zuora Releases Z-Commerce

The first external service (SaaS) that actually understands the complex billing models of the cloud providers (which account for monthly subscription fees as well as automated metering, pricing and billing for products, bundles and highly individualized/specific configurations) arrived in mid-June in the form of Zuora’s Z-Commerce. An upgrade to Zuora’s billing and payment service that is built for cloud providers, Z-Commerce is a major development. With Z-Commerce, storage-as-a-service is able to charge for terabytes of storage used, or IP address usage, or data transfer charges. Cloud providers can also structure a per CPU instance charge or per application use charge and it can take complexities like peak usage into account. Zuora has provided 20 pre-configured templates for the billing and payment models that cloud providers use.

What makes this development so interesting that that Zuora is using what they are calling the “subscription economy” for the underlying rationale for their success: 125 customers, 75 employees and profitability.

Tien Tzou, the CEO of Zuora (also the former Chief Strategy Officer of Salesforce.com, described subscription economy below:

“The business model of the 21st century is a fundamentally different business model.

The 21st century world needs a whole new set of operational systems — ones that match the customer centric business model that is now necessary to succeed.

The business model of the 20th century was built around manufacturing. You built products at the lowest possible cost, and you find buyers for that product.

They key metrics were all around inventory, cost of goods sold, product life cycles, etc. But over the last 30 years, we’ve been moving away from a manufacturing economy to a services economy. Away from an economy based on tangible goods, to an economy based on intangible ideas and experiences.

What is important now is the customer — of understanding customer needs, and building services & experiences that fulfill those customer needs. Hence the rise of CRM.

But our financial and operational systems have not yet evolved! What we need today are operational systems built around the customer, and around the services you offer to your customers.

You need systems that allow you to design different services, offered under different price plans that customers can choose from based on their specific needs. So the phone companies have 450 minute plans, prepaid plans, unlimited plans, family plans, and more. Salesforce has Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition, and Group Edition, and PRM Edition, and more. Amazon has Amazon Prime. ZipCar has their Occasional Driving Plan and their Extra Value Plans.

You need systems that track customer lifecycles — things such as monthly customer value, customer lifetime value, customer churn, customer share of wallet, conversion rates, up sell rates, adoption levels.

You need systems that measure how much of your service your customers are consuming. By the minute? By the gigabyte? By the mile? By the user? By the view? And you need to establish an ongoing, recurring billing relationship with your customers, that maps to your ongoing service relationship, that allows you to monetize your customer interactions based on the relationship that the customer opted into.

The 21st century world needs a whole new set of operational systems — ones that match the customer centric business model that is now necessary to succeed.”

To summarize, what he is saying is that the model for future business isn’t the purchase of goods and services, but rather a price provided to a customer for an ongoing relationship to the company. Under this model, the customer is able to structure the relationship in a way which provides them with what they need to accomplish the job (s) that the company can help them with (which can be a variety of services, products, tools and structured experiences).

This is also interesting because your business is measuring the customer’s commitments to you and the other way around in operation terms, even as the business model is shifting to more interactions than ever before. If you are looking at traditional CRM metrics like CLV, churn, share of wallet, adoption rates and more, as they apply to a business model that has continued to evolve away from pure transactions, Tien is saying that the payment/billing, to him, is the financial infrastructure for this new customer-centered economic model (i.e. the subscription model).

Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research Group, LLC commented on this on his blog recently, pointing out that a subscription model does not guarantee a business will be successful. What does have significant bearing on the success of failure of a business is how well the business manages it or has it managed (i.e. by Zuora).

This can be applied to the subscription economy. Zuora is highlighting what they have predicted: that companies are increasingly moving their business models to subscription based pricing. This is the same model that supports free software and hardware, which charges customers by the month. How it is managed is another can of worms, but for now Zuora has done a service by recognizing that the customer-driven companies are realizing that the customers are willing to pay for the aggregate capabilities of the company in an ongoing way—as long as the company continues to support the customer’s needs in solving problems that arise. To learn more about cloud computing and the subscription model, contact a Nubifer.com representative.

2010: 07/14
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Don’t Underestimate a Small Start in Cloud Computing

Although many predict that cloud computing will forever alter the economics and strategic direction of corporate IT, it is likely that the impact of the cloud will continue to be largely from small projects. Some users and analysts say that these small projects, which do not project complex, enterprise-class, computing-on-demand services, are what to look out for.

David Tapper, outsourcing and offshoring analyst for IDC says, “What we’re seeing is a lot of companies using Google (GOOG) Apps, Salesforce and other SaaS apps, and sometimes platform-as-a-service providers, to support specific applications. A lot of those services are aimed at consumers, but they’re just as relevant in business environments, and they’re starting to make it obvious that a lot of IT functions are generic enough that you don’t need to build them yourself.” New enterprise offerings from Microsoft, such as Microsoft BPOS, have also shown up on the scene with powerful SaaS features to offer businesses.

According to Tapper, the largest representation of mini-cloud computing is small- and mid-sized businesses using commercial versions of Google Mail, Google Apps and similar ad hoc or low-cost cloud-based applications. With that said, larger companies are doing the exact same thing. “Large companies will have users whose data are confidential or who need certain functions, but for most of them, Google Apps is secure enough. We do hear about some very large cloud contracts, so there is serious work going on. They’re not the rule though,” says Tapper.

First Steps into the Cloud

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 71 percent of the “technology stakeholders and critics” believe that most people will do their work from a range of computing devices using Internet-basd applications as their primary tools by 2020.

Respondents were picked from technology and analyst companies for their technical savvy and as a whole believe cloud computing will dominate information transactions by the end of the decade. The June report states that cloud computing will be adopted because of its ability to provide new functions quickly, cheaply and from anywhere the user wishes to work.

Chris Wolf, analyst at Gartner, Inc.’s Burton Group, thinks that while this isn’t unreasonable, it may be a little too optimistic. Wolf says that even fairly large companies sometimes use commercial versions of Google Mail or instant messaging, but it is a different story when it comes to applications requiring more fine tuning, porting, communications middleware or other heavy work to run on public clouds, or data that has to be protected and documented.

Says Wolf, “We see a lot of things going to clouds that aren’t particularly sensitive–training workloads, dev and test environments, SaaS apps; we’re starting to hear complaints about things that fall outside of IT completely, like rogue projects on cloud services. Until there are some standards for security and compliance, most enterprises will continue to move pretty slowly putting critical workloads in those environments. Right now all the security providers are rolling their own and it’s up to the security auditors to say if you’re in compliance with whatever rules govern that data.”

Small, focused projects using cloud technologies are becoming more common, in addition to the use of commercial cloud-based services, says Tapper.

For example, Beth Israel Deaconnes Hospital in Boston elevated a set of VMware (VMW) physical and virtual servers into a cloud-like environment to create an interface to its patient-records and accounting systems, enabling hundreds of IT-starved physician offices to link up with the use of just one browser.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art started using workgroup-on-demand computing systems from CloudSoft Corp. last year. This allowed the museum to create online workspaces for short-term projects that would otherwise have required real or virtual servers and storage on-site.

Cloud computing will make it clear to both IT and business management that some IT functions are just generic when they’re homegrown as when rented, in about a decade or so. Says Tapper, “Productivity apps are the same for the people at the top as the people at the bottom. Why buy it and make IT spend 80 percent of its time maintaining essentially generic technology?” Contact Nubifer.com to learn more…

2010: 07/06
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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Cloud Computing in 2010

A recent research study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released on June 11 found that most people expect to “access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote server networks, rather than depending primarily on tools and information housed on their individual, personal computers” by 2010. This means that the term “cloud computing” will likely be referred to as simply “computing” ten years down the line.

The report points out that we are currently on that path when it comes to social networking, thanks to sites like Twitter and Facebook. We also communicate in the cloud using services like Yahoo Mail and Gmail, shop in the cloud on sites like Amazon and eBay, listen to music in the cloud on Pandora, share pictures in the cloud on Flickr and watch videos on cloud sites like Hulu and YouTube.

The more advanced among us are even using services like Google Docs, Scribd or Docs.com to create, share or store documents in the cloud. With that said, it will be some time before desktop computing falls away completely.

The report says: “Some respondents observed that putting all or most of faith in remotely accessible tools and data puts a lot of trust in the humans and devices controlling the clouds and exercising gate keeping functions over access to that data. They expressed concerns that cloud dominance by a small number of large firms may constrict the Internet’s openness and its capability to inspire innovation—that people are giving up some degree of choice and control in exchange for streamlines simplicity. A number of people said cloud computing presents difficult security problems and further exposes private information to governments, corporations, thieves, opportunists, and human and machine error.”

For more information on the current state of Cloud Computing, contact Nubifer today.

2010: 06/30
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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The Impact of Leveraging a Cloud Delivery Model

In a recent discussion about the positive shift in the Cloud Computing discourse towards actionable steps as opposed to philosophical rants in definitions, .NET Developer’s Journal issued a list of five things not to do. The first mistake among the list of five (which included #2. assuming server virtualization is enough; #3 not understanding service dependencies; #4 leveraging traditional monitoring; #5 not understanding internal/external costs), was not understanding the business value. Failing to understand the business impact of leveraging a Cloud delivery model for a given application or service is a crucial mistake, but it can be avoided.

When evaluating a Cloud delivery option, it is important to first define the service. Consider: is it new to you or are you considering porting an existing service? On one hand, if new, there is a lower financial bar to justify a cloud model, but on the downside is a lack of historical perspective on consumption trends to aid an evaluating financial considerations or performance.

Assuming you choose a new service, the next step is to address why you are looking at Cloud, which may require some to be honest about their reasons. Possible reasons for looking at cloud include: your business requires a highly scalable solution; your data center is out of capacity; you anticipate this to be a short-lived service; you need to collaborate with a business partner on neutral territory; your business has capital constraints.

All of the previously listed reasons are good reasons to consider a Cloud option, yet if you are considering this option because it takes weeks, months even, to get a new server in production; your Operation team is lacking credibility when it comes to maintaining a highly available service; or your internal cost allocation models are appalling—you may need to reconsider. In these cases, there may be some in-house improvements that need to be made before exploring a Cloud option.

An important lesson to consider is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you necessarily should, and this is easily applicable in this situation. Many firms have had disastrous results in the past when they exposed legacy internal applications to the Internet. The following questions must be answered when thinking about moving applications/services to the Cloud:

· Does the application consume or generate data with jurisdictional requirements?

· Will your company face fines or a public relations scandal is there is a security breach/data loss?

· What part of your business value chain is exposed if the service runs poorly? (And are there critical systems that rely on it?)

· What if the application/service doesn’t run at all? (Will you be left stranded or are there alternatives that will allow the business to remain functioning?)

Embracing Cloud services—public or private—comes with tremendous benefits, yet a constant dialogue about the business value of the service in question is required to reap the rewards. To discuss the benefits of adopting a hybrid On-Prem/Cloud solution contact Nubifer today.

2010: 06/28
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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What Cloud APIs Reveal about the Budding Cloud Market

Although Cloud Computing remains hard to define, one of its essential characteristics is pragmatic access to virtually unlimited network, compute and storage resources. The foundation of a cloud is a solid Application Programming Interface (API), despite the fact that many users access cloud computing through consoles and third-party applications.

CloudSwitch works with several cloud providers and thus is able to interact with a variety of cloud APIs (both active and about-to-be-released versions). CloudSwitch has come up with some impressions after working with both the APIs and those implementing them.

First, clouds remain different in spite of constant discussion about standards. Cloud APIs have to cover more than start/stop/delete a server, and once the API crosses into provisioning the infrastructure (network ranges, storage capacity, geography, accounts, etc.), it all starts to get interesting.

Second, a very strong infrastructure is required for a cloud to function as it should. The infrastructure must be good enough to sell to others when it comes to public clouds. Key elements of the cloud API can inform you about the infrastructure, what tradeoffs the cloud provider has made and the impact of end users, if you are attuned to what to look out for.

Third, APIs are evolving fast, like cloud capabilities. New API calls and expansion of existing functions as cloud providers add new capabilities and features are now a reality. On balance, we are discussing on-the-horizon services and with cloud providers and what form their API is poised to take. This is a perfect opportunity to leverage the experience and work of companies like CloudSwitch as a means to integrate these new capabilities into a coherent data model.

When you look at the functions beyond simple virtual machine control, an API can give you an indication of what is happening in the cloud. Some like to take a peek at the network and storage APIs in order to understand how the cloud is built. Take Amazon, for example. In Amazon, the base network design is that each virtual server receives both a public and private IP address. These addresses are assigned from a pool based on the location of the machine within the infrastructure. Even though there are two IP addresses, however, the public one is just routed (or NAT’ed) to the private address. You only have a single network interface to your server—which is simply and scalable architecture for the cloud provider for support—with Amazon. The server will cause problems for applications requiring at least two NICs, such as some cluster applications.

Terremark’s cloud offering is in stark contrast to Amazon’s. IP addresses are defined by the provider so they can route traffic to your servers, like Amazon, but Terremark allocates a range for your use when you first sign up (while Amazon uses a generic pool of addresses). This can been seen as a positive because there is better control of the assignment of networking address, but on the flip side is potential scaling issues because you only have a limited number of addresses to work with. Additionally, you can assign up to four NIC’s to each server in Terremark’s Enterprise cloud (which allows you to create more complex network topologies and support applications requiring multiple networks for proper operation).

One important thing to consider is that with the Terremark model, servers only have internal addresses. There is no default public NAT address for each server, as with Amazon. Instead, Terremark has created a front-end load balancer that can be used to connect a public IP address to a specified set of servers by protocol and port. You must first create an “Internal Service” (in the language of Terremark) that defines a public IP/Port/Protocol for each protocol and port. Next, assign a server and port to the Service, which will create a connection. You can add more than one server to each public IP/Port/Protocol group since this is a load balancer. Amazon does have a load balancer function as well, and although it isn’t required to connect public addresses to your cloud servers, it does support connecting multiple servers to a single public IP address.

When it comes down to it, the APIs and the feature sets they define tell a lot about the capabilities and design of a cloud infrastructure. The end user features, flexibility and scalability of the whole service will be impacted by decisions made at the infrastructure level (such as network address allocation, virtual device support and load balancers). It is important to look down to the API level when considering what cloud environment you want because it helps you to better understand how the cloud providers’ infrastructure decisions will impact your deployments.

Although building a cloud is complicated, it can provide a powerful resource when implemented correctly. Cloud with different “sweet spots” emerge when cloud providers choose key components and a base architecture for their service. You can span these different clouds and put the right application in the right environment with CloudSwitch. To schedule a time to discuss how Cloud Computing can help your enterprise, contact Nubifer today.

2010: 06/21
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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App Engine and VMware Plans Show Google’s Enterprise Focus

Google opened its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco on May 19 with the announcement of its new version of the Google App Engine, Google App Engine for Business. This was a strategic announcement, as it shows Google is focused on demonstrating its enterprise chops. Google also highlighted its partnership with VMware to bring enterprise Java developers to the cloud.

Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google said via a blog post: “… we’re announcing Google App Engine for Business, which offers new features that enable companies to build internal applications on the same reliable, scalable and secure infrastructure that we at Google use for our own apps. For greater cloud portability, we’re also teaming up with VMware to make it easier for companies to build rich web apps and deploy them to the cloud of their choice or on-premise. In just one click, users of the new versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application to Google App Engine for Business, a VMware environment or other infrastructure, such as Amazon EC2.”

Enterprise organizations can build and maintain their own applications on the same scalable infrastructure that powers Google Applications with Google App Engine for Business. Additionally, Google App Engine for Business has added management and support features that are tailored for each unique enterprise. New capabilities with this platform include: the ability to manage all the apps in an organization in one place; premium developer support; simply pricing based on users and applications; a 99.9 percent uptime service-level agreement (SLA); access to premium features such as cloud-based SQL and SSL (coming later this year).

Kevin Gibbs, technical lead and manager of the Google App Engine project said during the May 18 Google I/O keynote that “managing all the apps at your company” is a prevalent issue for enterprise Web developers. Google sought to address this concern through its Google App Engine hosting platform but discovered it needed to shore it up to support enterprises. Said Gibbs, “Google App Engine for Business is built from the ground up around solving the problems that enterprises face.”

Product management director for developer technology at Google Eric Tholome told eWEEK that Google App Engine for Business allows developers to use standards-based technology (like Java, the Eclipse IDE, Google Web Toolkit GWT and Python) to create applications that run on the platform. Google App Engine for Business also delivers dynamic scaling, flat-rate pricing and consistent availability to users.

Gibbs revealed that Google will be doling out the features in Google App Engine for Business throughout the rest of 2010, with Google’s May 19 announcement acting as a preview of the platform. The platform includes an Enterprise Administration Console, a company-based console which allows users to see, manage and set security policies for all applications in their domain. The company’s road map states that features like support, the SLA, billing, hosted SQL and custom domain SSL will come at a later date.

Gibbs said that pricing for Google App Engine for Business will be $8 per month per user for each application with the maximum being $1,000 per application per month.

Google also announced a series of technology collaboration with VMware. The goal of these is to deliver solutions that make enterprise software developers more efficient at building, deploying and managing applications within all types of cloud environments.

President and CEO of VMware Paul Maritz said, “Companies are actively looking to move toward cloud computing. They are certainly attracted by the economic advantages associated with cloud, but increasingly are focused on the business agility and innovation promised by cloud computing. VMware and Google are aligning to reassure our mutual important to both companies. We will work to ensure that modern applications can run smoothly within the firewalls of a company’s data center or out in the public cloud environment.”

Google is essentially trying to pick up speed in the enterprise, with Java developers using the popular Spring Framework (stemming from VMware’s SpringSource division). Recently, VMware did a similar partnership with Salesforce.com.

Maritz continued to say to the audience at Google I/O, “More than half of the new lines of Java code written are written in the context of Spring. We’re providing the back-end to add to what Google provides on the front end. We have integrated the Spring Framework with Google Web Toolkit to offer an end-to-end environment.”

Google and VMware are teaming up in multiple ways to make cloud applications more productive, portable and flexible. These collaborations will enable Java developers to build rich Web applications, use Google and VMware performance tools on cloud apps and subsequently deploy Spring Java applications on Google App Engine.

Google’s Gundotra explained, “Developers are looking for faster ways to build and run great Web applications, and businesses want platforms that are open and flexible. By working with VMware to bring cloud portability to the enterprise, we are making it easy for developers to deploy rich Java applications in the environments of their choice.”

Google’s support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine are part of a shared vision to make building, running and managing applications for the cloud easier and in a way that renders the applications portable across clouds. Developers can build SpringSource Tool Suite using the Eclipse-based SpringSource and have the flexibility to choose to deploy their applications in their current private VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud partner clouds or directly to Google App Engine.

Google and VMware are also collaborating to combine the speed of development of Spring Roo–a next-generation rapid application development tool–with the power of the Google Web Toolkit to create rich browser apps. These GWT-powered applications can create a compelling end-user experience on computers and smartphones by leveraging modern browser technologies like HTML5 and AJAX.

With the goal of enabling end-to-end performance visibility of cloud applications built using Spring and Google Web Toolkit, the companies are collaborating to more tightly integrate VMware’s Spring Insight performance tracing technology within the SpringSource tc Server application server with Google’s Speed Tracer technology.

Speaking about the Google/VMware partnership, vice president at Nucleus Research Rebecca Wettemann told eWEEK, “In short, this is a necessary step for Google to stay relevant in the enterprise cloud space. One concern we have heard from those who have been slow to adopt the cloud is being ‘trapped on a proprietary platform.’ This enables developers to use existing skills to build and deploy cloud apps and then take advantage of the economies of the cloud. Obviously, this is similar to Salesforce.com’s recent announcement about its partnership with VMware–we’ll be watching to see how enterprises adopt both. To date, Salesforce.com has been better at getting enterprise developers to develop business apps for its cloud platform.”

For his part, Frank Gillett, an analyst with Forrester Research, describes the Google/VMware more as “revolutionary” and the Salesforce.com/VMware partnership to create VMforce as “evolutionary.”

“Java developers now have a full Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] place to go rather than have to provide that platform for themselves,” said Gillett of the new Google/VMware partnership. He added, however, “What’s interesting is that IBM, Oracle and SAP have not come out with their own Java cloud platforms. I think we’ll see VMware make another deal or two with other service providers. And we’ll see more enterprises application-focused offerings from Oracle, SAP and IBM.”

Google’s recent enterprise moves show that the company is set on gaining more of the enterprise market by enabling enterprise organizations to buy applications from others through the Google Apps Marketplace (and the recently announced Chrome Web Store), buy from Google with Google Apps for Business or build their own enterprise applications with Google App Engine for Business. Nubifer Inc. is leading Research and Consulting firm specializing in Cloud Computing and Software as a Service.

2010: 06/16
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EMC CEO Joe Tucci Predicts Many Clouds in the Future

EMC isn’t alone in focusing on cloud computing during the EMC World 2010 show, as IT vendors, analysts and the like are buzzing about the cloud. But according to EMC CEO Joe Tucci, the storage giant has a new prediction for the future of cloud computing. During his keynote speech on May 10, and a subsequent discussion with reporters and analysts, Tucci said that EMC’s vision of the future varies from others because it sees many private clouds. This exists in stark contrast with the vision of only a few vendors—like Google, Amazon and Microsoft—offering massive public clouds.

“There won’t be four, five or six giant cloud providers. At the end of the day, you’ll have tens of thousands of private clouds and hundreds of public clouds,” said Tucci.

EMC plans on taking on the role of helping businesses move to private cloud environments, where IT administrators have the ability to view multiple data centers as a single pool of resources. These enterprises with their public clouds will also work with public cloud environments, according to Tucci.

The increased complexity and costs of current data centers serve as a catalyst for the demand for cloud computing models. Tucci says that this explosion of data—which comes from multiple sources, including the growth of mobile device users, medical imaging advancements, increased access to broadband and smart devices—is poised to grow further. “Obviously, we need a new approach, because … infrastructures are too complex and too costly. Enter the cloud. This is the new approach,” Tucci said.

According to Tucci, clouds will be based mainly on x86 architectures, feature converged networks and federated resources and will be dynamic, secure, flexible, cost efficient and reliable. These clouds will also be accessible via multiple devices, a growing need due to the ever-increasing use of mobile devices.

EMC’s May 10 announcements were focused on the push for the private cloud, including the introduction of the VPlex appliances and an expanded networking strategy. Said Tucci, “Our mission is to be your guide and to help you on this journey to the private cloud.”

Tucci said that because of the high level of performance in x86 processors from Intel and Advances Micro Devices, he isn’t predicting a long-term future for other architectures in cloud computing. Tucci used Intel’s eight-core Xeon 7500 “Nehalem EX” processors, which can offer up to 1 terabyte of storage, with systems OEMs prepping to unveil servers with as many as eight processors as an example.

Speaking about the overall growth of x86 processor shipments and revenues, Tucci said that RISC architectures and mainframes will continue to slip: “What I’m saying is, we’re convinced, and everything, that EMC does, and everything Cisco does, will be x86-based. Yes, we’re placing a bet on x86, and we’re going to an all-x86 world.” EMC is currently in the midst of a three-year process of migrating to a private cloud environment. This will include abandoning platforms like Solaris and moving to an all-x86 environment. For more information, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 06/03
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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New Cloud-Focused Linux Flavor: Peppermint

A new cloud-focused Linux flavor is in town: Peppermint. The Peppermint OS is currently a small, private beta which will open up to more testers in early to late May. Aimed at the cloud, the Peppermint OS is described on its home page as: “Cloud/Web application-centric, sleek, user friendly and insanely fast! Peppermint was designed for enhances mobility, efficiency and ease of use. While other operating systems are taking 10 minutes to load, you are already connected, communicating and getting things done. And, unlike other operating systems, Peppermint is ready to use out of the box.”

The Peppermint team announced the closed beta of the new operating system in a blog post on April 14, saying that the operating system is “designed specifically for mobility.” The description of the technology on Launchpad describes Peppermint as “a fork of Lubuntu with an emphasis on cloud apps and using many configuration files sources from Linux Mint. Peppermint uses Mozilla Prism to create single site browsers for easily accessing many popular Web applications outside of the primary Web applications outside of the primary browser. Peppermint uses the LXDE desktop environment and focuses on being easy for new Linux users to find their way around in.”

Lubuntu is described by the Lubuntu project as a lighter, faster and energy-saving modification of Ubuntu using LXDE (the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). Kendall Weaver and Shane Remington, a pair of developers in North Carolina, make up the core Peppermint team. Weaver is the maintainer for the Lunix Mint Fluxbox and LXDE editions as well as the lead software developer for Astral IX Media in Asheville, NC and the director of operations for Western Carolina Produce in Hendersonville, NC. Based in Asheville, NC, Remington is the project manager and lead Web developer for Astral IX Media and, according to the Peppermint site, “provides the Peppermint OS project support with Web development, marketing, social network integration and product development.” For more information please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 05/10
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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Microsoft and Intuit Pair Up to Push Cloud Apps

Despite being competitors, Microsoft and Intuit announced plans to pair up to encourage small businesses to develop cloud apps for the Windows Azure platform in early January 2010.

Intuit is offering a free, beta software development kit (SDK) for Azure and citing Azure as a “preferred platform” for cloud app deployment on the Intuit Partner Platform as part of its collaboration with Microsoft. This marriage opens up the Microsoft partner network to Intuit’s platform and also grants developers on the Intuit cloud platform access to Azure and its tool kit.

As a result of this collaboration, developers will be encouraged to use Azure to make software applications that integrate with Intuit’s massively popular bookkeeping program, QuickBooks. The companies announced that the tools will be made available to Intuit partners via the Intuit App Center.

Microsoft will make parts of its Online Business Productivity Suite (such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online) available for purchase via the Intuit app Center as well.

The agreement occurred just weeks before Microsoft began monetizing the Windows Azure platform (on February 1)—when developers who had been using the Azure beta free of charge began paying for use of the platform.

According to a spokesperson for Microsoft, the Intuit beta Azure SDK will remain free, with the timing for stripping the beta tag “unclear.”

Designed to automatically manage and scale applications hosted on Microsoft’s public cloud, Azure is Microsoft’s latest Platform-as-a-Service. Azure will serve as a competitor for similar offerings like Force.com and Google App Engine. Contact a Nubifer representative to see how the Intuit – Microsoft partnership can work for your business.

2010: 05/05
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Public vs. Private Options in the Cloud

The demand for cloud computing is perpetually increasing, which means that business and technology managers need to clear up any questions they have about the differences between public and private clouds—and quickly at that.

The St. Louis-based United Seating and Mobility is one company that faced the common dilemma of choosing between a public or private cloud. The company—which sells specialized wheelchairs at 30 locations in 12 states—initially used phones and email to stay up to date on vendor contracts and other matters before monitoring these developments with off-the-shelf applications on its own servers. Finally, United Seating and Mobility decided to move to the public cloud.

United Seating and Mobility’s director of operations Michael DeHart tells Baseline Magazine of the move, “The off-the-shelf applications didn’t collaborate. You’d log on to all of the apps and try to remember which one needed which password.” Staffers across the nation now share the information seamlessly via the enhanced tools available in the public cloud.

Another example illustrating the difference between the public and private cloud is the Cleveland Cavaliers. The NBA team uses a private cloud to run its arena’s website. Going private allowed for increased one-on-one interaction with the cloud provider partner while simultaneously giving the franchise more resources to handle increased traffic to the site. Traffic on the area site has been known to spike when, for example, the team makes the playoffs or a major artist is coming to the venue. “When you’ve booked Miley Cyrus you’d better be ready,” says the Cleveland Cavaliers director of web services Jeff Lillibridge.

Despite choosing different versions of the cloud, both United Seating and Mobility and the Cleveland Cavaliers have noticed that few enterprise managers will be able to avoid the topic of private verses public clouds. According to research firm IDC, worldwide cloud services revenue will reach $44.2 billion in 2013, compared to $17.4 billion last year.

Business and technology professionals remain stumped about what private and public clouds are despite the increased demand for worldwide cloud services. Examples of public clouds include Google AppEngine, IBM’s Blue Cloud, LotusLive Engage and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). A public cloud is a shared technology resource used on an as-needed basis and available via the Internet while a private cloud is created specifically for the use of one organization.

Enhanced by virtualization technologies, both concepts are making way for an “evergreen” approach to IT in which enterprises can obtain technologies when they need them without purchasing and maintaining a host of in-house services.

Bob Zukis, national leader of IT strategy for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says, “It all stems from the legacy model of ‘build it and forget about it.’ Changes taking place in the industry are making it much more efficient and effective to provision what IT needs. So ‘build it and forget about it’ no longer meets the needs of the business. Whether you’re going with a public or private cloud, you’re pursuing a way to increase your technological resources in a more efficient flexible way.”

In addition to being evergreen, this movement is also green-friendly. Says Frost and Sullivan’s Vanessa Alvarez, “Cloud computing allows for resources and paying only for what they use. When an application is not utilizing resources, those resources can be moved to another application that needs them, enabling maximum resource efficiencies. If additional capacity or resources are no longer needed, virtual servers can be powered down or shut off.”

Organizations continue to struggle to choose between private versus public clouds. On one hand, private clouds offer security and increased flexibility compared to traditional legacy systems, but they have a higher barrier of entry compared to public clouds. In contrast, private cloud services require that an enterprise IT manager handle technology standardization, virtualization and operations automation in addition to operations support and business support systems.

“With public clouds, you provision your organization very quickly, by increasing service, storage and other computing needs, “says Zukis. “A private cloud takes a lot more time because you’re essentially rearchitecting your legacy environment.” Although public clouds don’t require this organizational shift and are thus faster and more convenient, they fail to provide the same amount of transparency as private clouds. Says Zukis, “It’s not always clear what you’re buying off the shelf with public clouds.”

Assessing the Value of Security

Another major issue in the cloud debate is security. All organizations value security but each has to decide between balance between cost and convenience, on one hand, and data security, on the other. Some organizations might have a higher threshold for potential violations than others and thus require a need-for-speed strategy.

Head of strategic sales and marketing at NIIT Technologies Aninda Bose, who has analyzed both cloud structures through her job and also in her position with nonprofit research organization Project Management Institute, states that the public cloud is the better option for an enterprise dealing with high-transaction/low-security or low data value. An example illustrating this is a local government office, which needs to tell a citizen that their car registration is up for renewal and simply needs to give the citizen a renewal date—a perfect situation for public cloud hosting.

Examples better suited for the private cloud model due to the sensitivity of their data include a federal agency, financial institution or health care provider. Mark White, principal with Deloitte Consulting, explains, “Accounting treatments and taxation applications are not yet fully tested for public cloud services. So enterprises with significant risk from information exposure may want to focus on the private cloud approach. This caution is most relevant for systems that process, manage and report key customer, financial or intelligence information. It’s less important for ‘edge’ systems, such as salesforce automation and Web order-entry applications.”

Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based medical-practice company The Orthopedic Institute is very data-dependent and concluded that the private cloud structure best fit its needs—specifically because the company must comply with strict rules for protecting patient information laid out by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

IT Director David Vrooman explains that The Orthopedic Institute was seeking to change it domain name from Orth-I.com but after exploring possibilities with the exclusive provider of .md domains MaxMD it determines that MaxMd could also provide private cloud services for highly secured, encrypted email transmissions. Moreover, the cost of entry was less than doing it in-house. “We didn’t want to use one of our servers for this because it would have amounted to a $20,000 startup cost. By going with a private cloud option, we launched this at one-fifth of that expense—and it only took an afternoon to get it started, ” says Vrooman. “It would have taken at least a week for my staff and me to get this done. And because MaxMD has taken over the email encryption, I’m not getting up at 3am to find out what’s wrong with the server.”

Some industry experts warn that traditional views about security and cloud computing may be changing, however, and that includes organizations which are dependent on highly secured data. CPA2Biz, the New York-based American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, wanted to provide its 350,000 members with access to the latest software tools for its business resources-providing subsidiary. CPA2Biz worked with Intacct to create a public cloud model for its CPA members. The program was launched in April and since then concerns have about security have been addressed and hundreds of firms are supporting approximately 2,000 clients through the public cloud services offered through CPA2Biz.

“Only those in the largest of member organizations would be able to consider a private cloud system. Plus, we don’t believe there are security advantages to a private cloud system,” says vice president of corporate alliances at CPA2Biz Michael Cerami. “We’ve selected partners who operate highly secure public cloud environments. This allows us to provide our members with great collaborative tools that enable them to work proactively with their clients in real time.”

The Choice

Going back to United Seating and Mobility, the organization was interested in the public cloud structure because it isn’t dependent on high-volume, automated sales. The company uses IMB’s LotusLive Engage for online meetings, file-sharing and project-management tasks.

DeHart estimates that it would have taken up a server and a half had it done this in house saying, “Being on the public cloud allows us to avoid this entirely. It’s a leasing-versus-owning concept—an operational expense versus a capital one. And the Software-as-a-Service offerings are better than what we could get off the shelf. We certainly can’t use this cloud to work with any sensitive health data. But we can run much of our business operations on it, freeing up our IT people to focus on email, uptime and cell phone services.”

Now, take the Cleveland Cavaliers. They opted for private cloud services to support the website for their venue, Quicken Loans Arena, aka “the Q.” Fans can search for information about upcoming events on TheQArena.com and are directed to a business called Veritix is they want to buy tickets. The arena site acts as a traffic conduit for Veritiix, thus a private cloud was the best option and the team partnered with Hosted Solutions. Since the current NBA season began last fall, the site’s page views and visits have seen an increase of over 60 percent and the number of unique visitors has increased by 55 percent. The team avoids uncertainly about who is minding the data by employing Hosted Solutions.

The private cloud also enables the team to manage site traffic that can jump significantly in the case of a last-second, playoff-determining shot, for example. “The need to scale was significant but we didn’t want to oversee our own dedicated hosting,” says Lillibridge. “It would have been more expensive, and we would have had the headache of managing our own servers. We needed dedicated services that would avoid this, while allowing our capacity to increase during peak times and decrease when we don’t have a lot of traffic.”

There is no clear cut answer for whether the private or public cloud is better, rather companies needs to assess their own individual requirements for sped, security, resources and scalability. To learn more about which Cloud option is right for your enterprise, contact a Nubifer representative today.

2010: 04/28
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
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A Guide to Windows® Azure Platform Billing

Understanding billing for Windows® Azure Platform can be a bit daunting, so here is a brief guide, including useful definitions and explanations.

The Microsoft ® Online Customer Service Portal (MCOP) limits one Account Owner Windows Live ID (WLID) per MOCP account, and the Account Owner has the ability to create and manage subscriptions, view billing and usage data and specify the Service Administrator for each subscription. While this is convenient for smaller companies, large corporations may need to create multiple subscriptions in order to design an effective account structure that will able to support and also reflect their market strategy. Although the Service Administrator (Service Admin WLID) manages deployments, they cannot create subscriptions.

The Account Administrator can create one or more subscriptions for each individual MOCP account and for each subscription, the Account Administrator can specify a different WLID as the Service Administrator. It is also important to note that the Service Administrator WLID can be the same or different as the Account Owner and is the person actually using the Windows ® Azure Platform. Once a subscription is created in the Microsoft ® Online Customer Service Portal (MOPC), a Project appears in the Windows ® Azure portal.

The relationship between components is clearly displayed in the diagram below:

Projects:

Up to twenty services can be allocated by one project. Resources in the Project are shared between all of the Services created and the resources are divided into Compute Instances/Cores and Storage accounts.

The Project will have 20 Small Compute Instances that you can utilize, by default. These Small Compute Instances could be a variety of combinations of VM sizes as long as the total number of Cores across all deployed services within the Project doesn’t exceed 20.

To increase the number of Cores, simply contact Microsoft ® Online Services customer support to verify the billing account and provide the requested Small Compute Instances/Cores (subject to a possible credit check). You also have the ability to design how you want to have the Cores allocated, although be default the available resources are counted as number of Small Compute Instances. See the conversion on Compute Instances below:

Compute Instance Size	CPU	Memory	Instance Storage
Small	1.6 GHz	1.75 GB	225 GB
Medium	2 x 1.6 GHz	3.5 GB	490 GB
Large	4 x 1.6 GHz	7 GB	1,000 GB
Extra large	8 x 1.6 GHz	14 GB	2,040 GB

Table 1: Compute Instances Comparison

The compute Instances are shared between all the running services in the project—including Production and Stage Environments. This allows you to have multiple Services with different number of Compute Instances (up to the number of maximum available for that Project).

5 Storage accounts are available per Project, although you can request to increase this up to 20 Storage accounts per Project by contacting Microsoft ® Online Services customer support. You will need to purchase a new subscription if you need more than 20 Storage accounts.

Services:

A total of 20 Services per project are permitted. Services are where applications are deployed; each Service provides two environments: Production and Staging. This is visible when you create a service in the Windows ® Azure portal.

A maximum number of five roles per application are permitted within a Service; this includes any combinations of different web and worker roles on the same configuration file up to a maximum of 5. Each role can have any number of VMS, see below:

The Service has two roles in this example, and each role has a specific worker role. Web Role, web tier, handles the Web interface, while the Worker Role, business tier, handles the business logic. Each role can have any number of VMs/Cores up to the maximum available on the project.

If this service is deployed from the Azure ® resources perspective, the following resources will be used:

1 x Service

- Web Role = 3 Small Compute Nodes (3 x Small VMs)

- Worker Role = 4 Small Compute Nodes (2 x Medium VMs)

- 2 Roles used

Total resources left on the Project:

- Services (20 -1) = 19

- Small Compute Nodes (20 – 7) = 13 small compute instances

- Storage accounts = 5

For more information regarding the Windows Azure pricing model, please contact a Nubifer representative.

2010: 04/26
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud Platform EC2 Gets Windows Server Customers from Microsoft

Amazon has launched an initiative for Microsoft customers to bring their Windows Server licenses to Amazons EC2, Elastic Compute Cloud Platform. This initiative is in tandem with a brand new Microsoft pilot program which allows Windows Server customers with an EA (Enterprise Agreement) with Microsoft to bring their licenses to Amazon EC2. Peter DeSantis, general manager of EC2 at Amazon, said in a recent interview with eWEEK that these customers will pay Amazon’s Linux On-Demand or Reserved Instance rates and thus save between 35 to 50 percent, depending on the type of customer and instance.

Also in his interview with eWEEK, DeSantis said that Amazon customers have sought support for Windows Server and Amazon has delivered support for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Customers with EA agreements with Microsoft began to ask if those agreements could be applied to EC2 instances, thus the new pilot program. Amazon announced the new initiative on March 24 and began enrolling customers instantaneously. According to DeSantis, enrollment will continue through September 12, 2010.

Amazon sent out a notice announcing the program and stated the following criteria as requirements laid out by Microsoft to participate in the pilot: your company must be based or have legal entity in the United States; your company must have an existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that doesn’t expire within 12 months of your entry into the Pilot; you must already have purchased Software Assurance from Microsoft for your EA Windows Server licenses; you must be an Enterprise customer (this does not include Academic Government institutions).

eWEEK revealed some of the fine print for the project released by Amazon:

“Once enrolled, you can move your Enterprise Agreement Windows Server Standard, Windows Server Enterprise, or Windows Server Datacenter edition licenses to Amazon EC2 for 1 year. Each of your Windows Server Standard licenses will let you launch one EC2 instance. Each of your Windows Server Enterprise or Windows Server Datacenter licenses will let you launch up to four EC2 instances. In either case, you can use any of the EC2 instance types. The licenses you bring to EC2 can only be moved between EC2 and your on-premises machines every 90 days. You can use your licenses in the US East (Northern Virginia) or US West (Northern California) Regions. You will still be responsible for maintaining your Client Access Licenses and External Connector licenses appropriately.” To learn more about Microsoft’s and Amazon’s Cloud offerings visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 04/23
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
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ERP and CRM Integration Via Business Intelligence for the Cloud

The masterminds behind Crystal Reports are unveiling a new business intelligence cloud offering being sold through channel partners. Not only do solution providers get an ongoing annuity on the sale, but they can perform the integration work to link the cloud-based BI to the data source (whichever ERP/CRM solution it is, such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP or something else).

Traditional VARs gaging the potential of the cloud business model may have a difficult time seeing how much money per user per month will be enough for a business to reap the benefit of the cloud. Indicee executives Mark Cunningham, CEP, and Craig Todd, director of partnerships, understand the businesses are accustomed to the big sale upfront and ongoing services after that sale. Cunningham and Todd were both part of the team that created the Crystal Reports business intelligence software–which sold to Seagate before becoming part of SAP–and decided to bring their technology expertise into the cloud.

Although Cunningham and Todd knew that business was moving into the cloud and that their expertise had revealed that channel partners are the ideal way to connect with end customers, they just didn’t know how to merge those two ideas. Said Todd to Channel Insider, “The biggest single difference in what SaaS is removes those boxes. It has initially been seen as a threat by some of our partners.”

“A lot of VARs are worried about being disintermediated. Their expertise in installing software is no longer required.But the ones we’ve been working with the last few months see it as an opportunity,” continued Todd.

Arxis Technology in Simi Valley, California, an ERP, CRM and BI specialist, is one such partner. The 25-person company has two offices in California as well as offices in Chicago and Phoenix. Director of sales and marketing Mark Severance told Channel Insider that whether the customer is deploying on-premises solutions or in the cloud solutions the revenue comes out even. “The biggest thing people are having a hard time with is that you are used to the big upfront sale. But, honestly, from our perspective, if you have great products and do a great job taking care of the customer, then there’s a business model for that you do,” explains Severance.

Severance said that the annuity part of the business (in which Arxis receives a commission per user per month on an ongoing basis) will eventually make up for the lack of large upfront sale. Additionally, Arxis can offer the integration and implementation services which customers need, which means setting up the BI solution’s data sources, whether they may be Salesforce.com or an internal CRM or ERP solution.

Arxis continues to offer traditional on-premises CRM and ERP software sales and implementation; the biggest vendor Arxis works with currently is Sage. Arxis offers a BI solution from Business Objects in on-premises and cloud form and recently added Indicee’s cloud-based BI solution for a variety of reasons. One major reason is that some customers are unable to afford an on-premises-based BI solution and thus a cloud-based solution is more economically accessible.

Severance further pointed out that most of computing is making the transition into the cloud. While companies used to feel safe having their server in-house, they now want to be able to access there data whenever, wherever they are, from whichever device they are using.

Indicee’s Cunningham and Todd also pointed out that VARs can provide their end customers with training services as well as services like change management. Said Todd, “There’s an exciting opportunity here for traditional VARs. This creates a platform that allows partners to focus on the V and A in the VAR–the value add.”

Pricing at Indicee starts at $69 per user per month, with a five-user pack priced at $150 per month. The VAR cut generally is a 20 percent commission on sales of five packs or more, calculated monthly and paid out quarterly, but Todd noted that it is dependent on how much work the VAR is completing to get the customer.

Gartner predicts sales of $150 million by 2013. Cunningham notes that SaaS is poised for growth and that if solution providers are seeking to enter the cloud, business intelligence is a lucrative starting point, even with its required integrative work. To learn more about CRM Applications in the Cloud, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 04/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
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The Role of Multitenancy in the Cloud

The debate over whether or not multitenancy is a prerequisite for cloud computing wages on. While those pondering the use of cloud apps might think they are removed from this debate, they might want to think again, because multitenancy is the clearest path to getting more from a cloud app while spending less.

Those in the multitenancy camp, so to say, point out that there is only a slight only difference between two subscription-based cloud apps is that one is multitenant and the other is single-tenant. The multitenant option will offer more value over time while lowering a customer’s costs and the higher degree of multitenancy—i.e. the more a cloud provider’s infrastructure and resources are shared—the lower the customer cost.

At the root of the debate is revenue and cost economics of cloud services. Revenues for most cloud app providers come from selling monthly or annual per-seat subscriptions. These bring in just a portion of the annual revenue that would be generated by an on-premise software license with comparable functionality. The challenge for selling software subscriptions comes from reducing operating costs to be able to manage with less. If this is not achieved, the provider may have to do more than an on-premise vendor does—like run multiple infrastructures, maintain multiple versions, perform upgrades and maintain customer-specific code—with less money. The answer to this conundrum is multitenancy. Multitenancy extends the cost of infrastructure and labor across the customer base. Customers sharing resources down to the database schema is perfect for scaling.

As the provider adds customers, and those customers benefit from this scaling up, the economies of scale improve. The cloud app provider is able to grow and innovate more as costs decrease and in turn value increases. Over time customers can expect to see more value (like in the form of increased functionality), even if costs don’t lower. For more information of Multitenancy, visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 04/14
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
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Microsoft and Citrix Come to a Desktop Virtualization Agreement

On March 18, Microsoft announced a partnership with Citrix Systems which seeks to promote the pair of companies’ end-to-end virtualization packages for businesses. One aspect of the broad-based partnership sees Microsoft and Citrix aggressively offering customers of rival VMware View the option of trading in 500 licenses with no additional cost. This highly aggressive facet of the recent alliance between Microsoft and Citrix highlights the perpetually increasing competitive nature of the entire virtualization industry.

Also during the company’s March 18 announcement, Microsoft put a number of changes in place in its virtualization policy. One such change which was instituted was making virtual desktop access rights a Windows Client Software Assurance benefit. Beginning on July 1, Software Assurance clients will no longer need to buy a separate license in order to access Windows in a virtual environment.

Windows Client Software Assurance and Virtual Desktop Access license customers will be able to access virtualized Windows and Office applications beginning on July 1 as well. These applications will be accessible through non-corporate network devices, like home PCs. Under Microsoft’s agreement with Citrix, Windows XP Mode will no longer require hardware virtualization technology and assets like Citrix XenDesktop’s HDC technology will be able to be applied to the capabilities of the Microsoft RemoteFX platform.

In an interview with eWEEK one day before the March 18 announcement, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s management and Services Division, said, “What we’re bringing to the market together is this end-to-end experience with a simple and consistent interface for the end user. It’s comprehensive, and it leverages what customers already have. If you take a look at the assets that our companies already have in virtualization, it’s the most comprehensive group of assets on the market.”

Together, Microsoft and Citrix are trying to fire a broadside into rival VMware with the “rescue for VMware VDI” promotion. The promotion allows VMware View customers to trade in up to 500 licenses for no additional cost. New Microsoft-Citrix customers also receive about 50 percent off the estimated retail price for virtual desktop infrastructure through another promotion.

In its media portrayal, Microsoft emphasized the announcement as a value proposition. “Two infrastructures are more expensive than one infrastructure,” said Anderson before adding, “When customers see the chance to consolidate multiple infrastructures into one, it’s a chance to manage virtual and hardware desktop so it’s truly one infrastructure. It enables administrators to do everything through system center. And reducing infrastructure reduces cost.”

The partnership with Citrix comes on the heels of another Microsoft virtualization initiative, which arrived on February 22. Microsoft unveiled two business-focused virtualization applications, App-V 4.6 and MED-V 1.0 SP1 Release Candidate designed to better integrate proprietary applications into business’ evolving IT infrastructure APP-V 4.6 extends 64-bit support for Microsoft’s application virtualization product to streaming applications. MED-V 1.o SP1 RC allows applications which require Internet Explorer 6—or that otherwise cannot be supported on Windows 7—to run in a managed virtual desktop environment. For more information about Cloud Computing, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 04/12
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
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Microsoft’s CEO Says Company is Playing All Its Hands in the Cloud

During a recent speech at the University of Washington, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer spoke about his company’s future plans: and they primarily take place in the cloud! Citing services and platforms like Windows® Phone 7 Series and Xbox Live, Ballmer spoke about cloud-centric objectives. While Microsoft faces competition from Google and others when it comes to cloud-based initiatives, everyone is wondering how Microsoft will alter its desktop-centered products like the Windows franchise to remain ahead of the pack.

During his March 4 speech at the University of Washington, Ballmer stated that Microsoft’s primary focus in the future will be in the cloud and applications derived from the cloud. This may come as somewhat of a surprise, as Microsoft’s fortune largely comes from desktop-based software like Microsoft® Windows and Microsoft® Office, but Ballmer said, “We shipped Windows 7, which had a lot that’s not cloud-based. Out inspiration now starts with the cloud Windows Phone, Xbox, Windows Azure and SQL Azure … this is the best bet for our company.”

While speaking in front of a screen displaying a large cloud logo with the words “We’re all in,” Ballmer continued to say, “Companies like ours, can they move and dial in and focus and embrace? That’s where we’re programmed. You shouldn’t get into this industry if you don’t want things to chance. The field of endeavor keeps moving forward.”

When discussing Microsoft’s cloud initiatives, Ballmer spoke about the creation of a cloud-based Office that would allow workers to collaborate and communicate. He also referenced cloud-ported entertainment (via Xbox Live) and the creation of something he dubbed “smarter services” which would be capable of quickly integrating new hard- and software that could interact with the cloud smoothly. Ballmer spoke about Microsoft’s cloud-based development platform, Microsoft® Azure, and mentioned Azure Ocean, a University of Washington project which reportedly collects the world’s oceanographic data.

Microsoft’s most recent smartphone operating system, Windows® Phone 7 Series, was cited by Ballmer as one of the company’s cloud-centric smarter devices. “Earlier [Microsoft] phones were designed for voice and legacy [applications],” said the Microsoft CEO before adding that Microsoft® 7 Phone Series was created to “put people, places, content, commerce all front and center for the users with a different point of view that some other phones.”

Citing the reciprocal need of search and Bing Maps to draw in information from users in order to “learn” and define their actions, Ballmer placed the cloud at an even playing field. While Bing Maps has started integrating Flickr images into its Streetside feature—thus presenting an eye-level view of an environment—Microsoft is experimenting with putting Streetside cameras on bikes and pedestrians instead of on the roofs of cars to offer even more views to users. Search engines like Bing take history information ported to them by users and gauge user intent. Ballmer suggested that the “ability of the cloud to learn from all of the data that’s out there, and learn from me about what I’m interested in” is one of the cloud’s most basic and important dimensions.

When it comes to competition in the cloud, Microsoft faces the most in consumer applications. Ballmer praised Apple’s App Store, calling it “a very nice job,” but knows that Microsoft has a ways to go in terms of catching up to Apple’s cloud-based monetization of intellectual property like movies and music. As for Google, the company has a lead in the search engine market in the U.S. and its Google Apps cloud-based productivity has been making inroads with businesses and government. Google recently announced plans for a dedicated federal cloud computing system sometime later in 2010. This announcement likely propelled Microsoft’s February 24 announcement Business Productivity Online Suites Federal. The online-services cloud for the U.S. government comes equipped with strict security reinforcements.

Overall, Ballmer’s speech at the University of Washington furthered the notion that Microsoft is poised to focus its competitive energies in the cloud more and more. The industry will be waiting to see what this will mean for the traditionally desktop-centric Windows franchise, Microsoft’s flagship product; especially since news recently surfaced suggesting Microsoft is currently developing Windows 8. For more information on Windows Azure please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 04/07
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
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CA Augments Cloud Business with Nimsoft Buy

CA has announced plans to purchase Nimsoft for $350 million, thus furthering its bolstering of cloud computing capabilities. CA’s series of cloud-related acquisitions already includes Cassatt, NetQS, Oblicore and 3Tera.

On March 10, CA officials announced the $350 million, all-cash acquisition of Nimsoft, revealing that the deal is predicted to close by the end of the March. Nimsoft is the fifth cloud-centric company CA has purchased in the past year, showing CA’s continued aggressive move to build up its cloud computing capabilities.

With the acquisition of Nimsoft, CA gains IT performance and availability monitoring solutions for highly virtualized data centers and cloud computing environments as well as greater traction in key areas like midmarket companies and emerging global markets. CA refers to midmarket companies as emerging enterprises: companies with revenues between $300 million and $2 billion.

CA CEO Bill McCraken said in a conference with analysts and journalists that the deal is about Nimsoft’s technology and customers—of which the company has 800 scattered in over 30 countries. “We want to reach new customers, and we want to reach them in a way we haven’t been able to do here at CA, even after a couple of tries,” said McCraken.

McCraken said that the emerging enterprise space will account for approximately a quarter of the software spending in CA’s market by 2010. Cloud computing for business is provided by MSPs and McCracken said that the cloud is poised to play a major role in emerging economies.

Executive vice president for CA’s Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line Chris O’Malley said via a conference call, “We are looking to build up that off-shore revenue.”

In addition to a variety of public cloud computing environments, Nimsoft’s monitoring and reporting products are used with on-demand offerings like Google Apps for Business, Amazon Web Services, Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), the Rackspace Cloud and Salesforce.com. CA also reports that Nimsoft’s monitoring and reporting products are used by customers for internal applications, databases, and physical and virtual data centers.

MSPs are granted high visibility into customers’ business applications in internal and external infrastructures with Nimsoft’s Unified Monitoring Solution. Nimsoft president and CEO Gary Read and McCracken said that Nimsoft’s technology is created with a high level of automation in order to make it easy to use for MSPs.

Read will become senior vice president and general manager of CA’s Nimsoft business unit when the deal with Nimsoft is finalized. Read said that combining his company—which is 12 years old—with Nimsoft makes sense. Although Nimsoft had done well, Read worried that the company would struggle to stay up to speed with the market changes. Nimsoft will be able to continue with innovation while scale its products easily once part of CA. Most Nimsoft employees are expected to remain with the company once the deal with CA is complete.

CA has acquired Cassatt, NetQS and Oblicore in less than a year and is in the midst of purchasing 3Tera. Each company pushed Ca further into the cloud and Nimsoft will add to CA’s capabilities in the cloud. In McCraken’s words, acquisitions like the current purchase of Nimsoft serve to “accelerate CA’s market leadership.” To learn more about Cloud Computing, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 04/05
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
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Looking Back at the Changing Face of the Software Industry from 2004 and Beyond

Bill Gates may have made a whole lot of predictions about the future of software in the first edition of his 1995 book The Road Ahead, but even the founder of Microsoft couldn’t image the magnitude of the impact of the Internet.

Within a few years, the Web altered everything. As old software companies faded away—unable to adjust to the new paradigm—new ones cropped up in their place. Although many of these new companies weren’t able to survive the dot-com bust, they did make an impact on the software industry as a whole. The way in which companies coped with the industry in flux back then can be easily applied to the way companies are adopting the cloud computing model in 2010.

Driven by emerging business needs, new customer demands and market forces, the way software was developed and the vendors that deliver it were greatly altered in the mid-2000s. Said Microsoft’s platform strategy general manager Charles Fitzgerald in 2004, “There’s an argument that almost every company is in the software business in one way or another.” Fitzgerald added that although American Express and eBay aren’t commonly thought of as being in the software business, they are. “If you participate in the information economy, you will be a software company. If you’re in a customer-facing business, software is the way you’re going to differentiate yourself,” he explained.

The fact of the matter is that the industry that provided much of the software in 2004-05 was poised to change dramatically in the years that followed. The industry will continue to enter periodic waves of consolidation and expansions, and the industry consensus is that it will remain in consolidation mode for the next couple of years. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, predicted that within a few years the software market will be dominated by just a few companies: Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Adobe and SAP.

Ellison wasn’t alone in his predictions, as some software buyers, like Mani Shabrang, head of technology deployment and research and development in Dow Chemical Co.’s business-intelligence center, agreed with him. “The number of software vendors will definitely get smaller and smaller,” said Shabrang in 2004. Another variable to consider, brought up by Shabrang, was that vendors of new types of software would emerge as vendors of mature software categories (like enterprise resource planning) consolidate. Shabrang predicted that a new generation of tools for visualizing data and intelligent software that recognizes the tone and meaning of written prose (in addition to mining text) would pop up as well.

Another group believed that there will be just as many software vendors in the future as there were back then. Danny Sabbah, chief technology officer of IBM’s software group, said that new companies would develop higher-level applications, thus leaving the markets for infrastructure software, middlewear and even core applications such as ERP to a few major companies.

CEO of business-intelligence software vendor Information Builders Inc. Gerald Cohen said, “Roughly every two or three years, new software categories appear. As long as there’s a venture-capital industry, there will be new categories of software.”

So what would the next application be? No one knew, although emerging service-oriented architecture technology was poised to lay the foundation for a new generation of software applications. The software of the future was predicted to be made up components, many of which would be developed in-house by the business requiring them. This is in contrast to what was the model back in 2004, in which vendors developed ever-larger applications that often took months to install.

According to Sabbah, software would likely switch from integrating business processes within a company to integrating these processes between companies. For example, applications might link ordering, invoicing, and inventory-management tasks up and down a supply chain within an industry in the not-so-distant future.

Another looming question was what the predominant operating system and underlying new applications would be. Microsoft ® Windows and Linux distributions would continue to compete, that much was sure, and the battle only got fiercer when Microsoft unveiled its next-generation Longhorn client and server in 2006-07, respectively.

Even in 2004, industry prognosticators knew that larger and more-complex systems weren’t going anywhere. The question was, how would the process of developing software be managed, especially as geographically disbursed programmers and offshore developers were doing an increasing amount of development work? The challenged awaiting users of the complex applications they create also needed to be addressed.

IBM’s Sabbah had this to say about the future of software, “The real challenge of our industry is to build software that is [easy to use] and simple to deploy but not simplistic.”

As shown by the growth of companies which provide software on a hosted basis, like Salesforce.com, it became increasingly important to pay attention to changes in vendor-buyer relationships and how software functionality was delivered.

Co-founder and CEO of business-intelligence and data-analysis software vendor SAS Institute Inc. Jim Goodnight wasn’t worried by these potential changes, instead placing his focus on that new opportunities awaited him and his company. In 2004 Goodnight said, “The IT industry needs to jeep a fairly shortened horizon. Our horizon is about two years. We make it a practice not to have these big five-year plans. If you do, you’re going to get about halfway through, and the world if going to change.” In 2010 Goodnight’s words still ring true. For more information regarding the changing Software landscape, please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 03/29
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Microsoft and IBM Compete for Space in the Cloud as Google Apps Turns 3

Google may have been celebrating the third birthday of Google Apps Premier Edition on February 22, but Microsoft and IBM want a piece of the cake, errr cloud, too. EWeek.com reports that Google is trying to dislodge legacy on-premises installations from Microsoft and IBM while simultaneously fending off SaaS solutions from said companies. In addition, Google has to fend off offerings from Cisco Systems and startups like Zoho and MinTouch, to name a few. Despite the up-and-comers, Google, Microsoft and IBM are the main three companies competing for pre-eminence in the market for cloud collaborative software.

Three year ago, Google launched its Google Apps Premier Edition, marking a bold gamble on the future of collaborative software. Back then, and perhaps even still, the collaborative software market was controlled by Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft and IBM have over 650 million customers for their Microsoft ® Office, Sharepoint and IBM Lotus suite combined. These suits are licensed as “on-premises” software which customers install and maintain on their own servers.

When Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE), it served as a departure from this on-premises model by offering collaboration software hosted on Google’s servers and delivered via the Web. We now know this method as cloud computing.

Until the introduction of GAPE, Google Apps was available in a free standard edition (which included Gmail, Google Docs word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software), but with GAPE Google meant to make a profit. For just $50 per user per year, companies could provide their knowledge workers with GAPE, which featured the aforementioned apps as well as additional storage, security and, most importantly, 24/7 support.

Google Apps now has over two million business customers–of all shapes and sizes–and is designed to appeal to both small companies desiring low-cost collaboration software but are lacking the resources to manage it and large enterprises desiring to eliminate the cost of managing collaboration applications on their own. At the time, Microsoft and IBM were not aggressively exploring this new cloud approach.

Fast-forward to 2009. Microsoft and IBM had released hosted collaboration solutions (Microsoft ® Business Productivity Office Suite and LotusLive respectively) to keep Google Apps from being lonely in the cloud.

On the third birthday of GAPE, Google has its work cut out for it. Google is trying to dislodge legacy on-premises installations from Microsoft and IBM while fending of SaaS solutions from Microsoft, IBM, Zoho, Mindtouch and the list goes on.

Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise President, states that while Google spent 2007 and 2008 debating the benefits of the cloud, the release of Microsoft and IBM products validated the market. EWeek.com quotes Girouard as saying, “We now have all major competitors in our industry in full agreement that the cloud is worth going to. We view this as a good thing. If you have all of the major vendors suggesting you look at the cloud, the consideration of our solutions is going to rise dramatically.”

For his part, Ron Markezich, corporate vice president of Microsoft Online Services, thinks that there is room for everyone in the cloud because customer needs vary by perspective. Said Markezich to EWeek.com, “Customers are all in different situations. Whether a customer wants to go 100 percent to the cloud or if they want to go to the cloud in a measured approach in a period of years, we want to make sure we can bet on Microsoft to serve their needs. No one else has credible services that are adopted by some of the larger companies in the world.”

Microsoft’s counter to Google Apps is Microsoft’s ® Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). It includes Microsoft ® Exchange Online with Microsoft ® Exchange Hosted Filtering, Microsoft ® SharePoint Online, Microsoft ® Office Communications Online and Microsoft ® Office Living Meeting. Microsoft also offers the Business Productivity Online Deskless Worker Suite (which includes Exchange Online Deskless Worker for email, calendars and global address lists, antivirus and anti-spam filters) and Microsoft ® Outlook Web Access Light (for access to company email) for companies with either tighter budgets or those in need of lower cost email and collaboration software. Sharepoint Online Deskless Worker provides easy access to SharePoint portals, team sites and search functionality.

The standard version of BPOS costs $1 user per month or $120 per user per year while BPOS Deskless Worker Suite is $4 per user per month or $36 per user per year. Users may also license single apps as stand-alone services from $2 to $5 per user per month, which serves as a departure from Google’s one-price-for-the-year GAPE package.

The same code base is used by Microsoft for its BPOS package, on-premises versions of Exchange and SharePoint, thus making legacy customers’ transition into the cloud easier should they decide to migrate to BPOS. Microsoft thinks that this increases the likelihood that customers will remain with Microsoft rather than switching to Google Apps or IBM Lotus.

At Lotusphere 2008, IBM offered a hint at its cloud computing goals with Bluehouse, a SaaS extranet targeted toward small- to mid-size business. The product evolved as LotusLive Engage, a general business collaboration solution with social networking capabilities from IBM’s LotusLive Connections suite, at Lotusphere 2009. In the later half of 2009, the company sought to fill the void left open by the absence of email, by introducing the company’s hosted email solution LotusLive iNotes. iNotes costs $3 per user per month and $36 per user per year. Additionally, IBM offers LotusLive Connections, a hosted social networking solution, as well as the aforementioned LotusLive Engage.

Vice president of online collaboration for IBM Sean Pouelly told EWeek.com that IBM is banking on companies using email to adopt their social networking services saying, “It’s unusual that they just buy one of the services.” Currently over 18 million paid seats use hosted versions of IBM’s Lotus software.

IBM’s efforts in the cloud began to really get attention when the company scored Panasonic as a customer late last year. In its first year of implementing LotusLive iNotes, the consumer electronics maker plans on migrating over 100,000 users from Lotus Notes, Exchange and Panasonic’s proprietary email solution to LotusLive.

When it comes down to it, customers have different reasons for choosing Google, Microsoft or IBM. All three companies have major plans for 2010, and each company has a competitive edge. For more information regarding Cloud Computing please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 03/25
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Google Apps
Hosting-as-a-Service
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Microsoft
Software-as-a-Service
Windows Azure
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The Main Infrastructure Components of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is perhaps the most-used buzz word in the tech world right now, but to understand cloud computing is to be able to point out its main infrastructure components in comparison to older models.

So what is cloud computing? It is an emerging computing model that allows users to gain access to their applications from virtually anywhere by using any connected device they have access to. The cloud infrastructure supporting the applications is made transparent to users by a user-centric interface. Applications live in massively scalable data centers where computational resources are able to be dynamically provisioned and shared in order to achieve significant economies of scale. The management costs of bringing more IT resources into the cloud can be significantly decreased due to a strong service management platform.

Cloud computing can be viewed simultaneously as a business delivery model and an infrastructure management methodology. As a business delivery model, it provides a user experience through which hardware, software and network resources are optimally leveraged in order to provide innovative services on the web. Servers are provisioned in adherence with the logical requirements of the service using advanced, automated tools. The cloud enables program administrators and service creators to use these services via a web-based interference that abstracts away the complex nature of the underlying dynamic infrastructure.

IT organizations can manage large numbers of highly virtualized resources as a single large resource thanks to the infrastructure management methodology. Additionally, it allows IT organizations to greatly increase their data center resources without ramping up the number of people typically required to maintain that increase. A cloud will thus enable organizations currently using traditional infrastructures to consume IT resources in the data center in new, exciting, and previously-unavailable ways.

Companies with traditional data center management practices know that it can be time-intensive to make IT resources available to an end user because of the many steps it involves. These include procuring hardware, locating raised floor space, not to mention sufficient power and cooling, allocating administrators to install operating systems, middleware and software, provisioning the network and securing the environment. Companies have discovered that this process can take two to three months, if not more, while IT organizations re-provisioning existing hardware resources find that it takes weeks to finish.

This problem is solved by the cloud—as the cloud implements automation, business workflows and resource abstraction that permits a user to look at a catalog of IT services, add them to a shopping cart and subsequently submit the order. Once the order is approved by an administrator, the cloud handles the rest. In this way, the process cuts down on the time usually required to make those resources available to the customer from long months to mere minutes.

Additionally, the cloud provides a user interface that allows the user and the IT administrator to manage the provisioned resources through the life cycle of the service request very easily. Once a user’s resources have been delivered by the cloud, the user can track the order (which usually consists of a variable of servers and software); view the health of those resources; add additional servers; change the installed software; remove servers; increase or decrease the allocated processing power, storage or memory; start, stop and restart servers. Yes, really. These self-service functions are able to be performed 24 hours a day and take just minutes to perform. This is in stark contrast to a non-cloud environment, in which it would take hours or even days to have hardware or software configurations changed to have a server restarted. For more information regarding Infrastructure components for a Cloud ecosystem please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 03/23
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
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Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
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Heightening Cloud Security in Your Enterprise

The responsibility of securing corporate information in the cloud falls upon the enterprise, and enterprises, as cloud consumers, can greatly improve cloud security. Currently, if there is a breach in security, the enterprise is responsible. eWeek Knowledge Center contributor Matthew Gardiner reveals six ways in which enterprises can improve cloud security essentially by thinking as a cloud provider. Once an enterprise has improved security within their cloud computing model, it can fully reap the benefits from the cloud.

Cloud security is a shared responsibility between cloud providers and enterprises, although the dividing line between the two is currently, well, cloudy. The dividing line between cloud providers and enterprises is dependent on the type of cloud model–ranging from Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

SaaS approaches what can be though of as a security black box, in which application security activities are largely invisible to the enterprise. IaaS, in which an enterprise is principally responsible for the security of the application, data and other levels of the infrastructure stack, sits at the other end of the spectrum.

The following six steps outline what enterprises can do to improve security in a cloud computing model and thus reap the full benefits from the cloud:

1. Learn from your current internal private clouds and the security systems and processes constructed around them

Medium to large enterprises have been setting up internal clouds for the past ten years, so while many of them didn’t refer to them as clouds, most enterprises have internal clouds already. These clouds were often referred to as shared services, like authentication services, database services, provisioning services or enterprise data centers.

2. Assess the importance and risk of your multiple IT-enabled business processes

Although the potential cost savings resulting from a transition into the cloud can be calculated rather easily, conducting a “risk vs. reward” calculation is difficult without having a basic understanding of the risk side of the equation. Because this is entirely dependent on the business context of the business process, the cloud providers cannot conduct this analysis for enterprises. The obvious first candidates for the cloud are low Service-Level Agreement (SLA) applications with relatively high cost. The potential regulatory impacts need to be considered as well, because some data and services aren’t allowed by regulators to move off-site or out of the state or country.

3. Analyze different cloud models and categories

There are general differences between different cloud models (public, private, hybrid) and cloud categories (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) that directly relate to security control and responsibility, thus enterprises need to analyze both.

Enterprises must have both an opinion and policy for these cloud approaches within the context of their organizations and the risk profile of their own businesses.

4. Apply your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design and security principles to the cloud

The cloud can be seen as an expansion of SOA, as most organizations have been using SOA principles in their application development organizations for several years. In this way, the cloud can be seen as service orientation taken to its next logical step. Combined with centralized security policy administration and decision making, the SOA security principles of highly distributed security enforcement apply directly to the cloud. The principles can simply be transfered to the cloud rather than reinventing the system when switching your focus from SOA to the cloud.

5. Think like a cloud provider

Rather than thinking of your enterprise as a cloud consumer, think as a cloud provider. Your organization is part of a value chain in which you supply services to your customers and partners. If you are able to equate the risk/reward balance so that you profitably consume cloud services, you can apply that way of thinking to guide your entry as a cloud provider within your ecosystem. This will in turn help your organization better comprehend what is happening within the realm of cloud providers.

6. Get to know and start using Web security standards sooner than later

The Web security industry has been working on securing and managing cross-domain systems for quite some time, and useful security standards to secure cloud services have emerged as a result. These standards–which include Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPLM), Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) and Web Services-Security WS-Security)–must be adopted for security systems to be effective in the increasingly cloud-connected world.

Ensuring that security professionals be viewed as rational advocates of the cloud is an important requirement for enterprises when it comes to improving the security of cloud services. When properly balanced and business-driven, technologists can serve as positive forces in the risk/reward dialogue and also help increase the probability of increasing cloud security for their enterprise. To learn more about Cloud Security please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 03/19
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Media Streaming Added to Amazon CloudFront

Amazon Web Services LLC unveiled media streaming for its content delivery service, Amazon CloudFront, on December 16, 2009. The brand new feature enables streaming delivery of audio and video content, thus providing an alternative to progressive download where end users download a full media file.

According to Amazon officials, Amazon CloudFront streams content from a worldwide network of 14 edge locations, which ensures low latencies and also offers cost-effective delivery. Like all Amazon Web Services, Amazon CloudFront requires no up-front investment, minimum fees or long-term contracts and uses the pay-what-you-use model.

General manager of Amazon CloudFront Tal Saraf said in a statement released in conjunction with the company’s announcement, “Many customers have told us that an on-demand streaming media service with low latency, high performance and reliability has been out of reach—it was technically complex and required sales negotiations and up-front commitments. We’re excited to add streaming functionality to Amazon CloudFront that is so easy, customers of any size can start streaming content in minutes.”

Amazon reports that viewers literally watch the bytes as they are delivered because content is delivered to end users in real time. In addition to giving the end user more control over their viewing experience, streaming also lowers costs for content owners by reducing the amount of data transferred when end users fail to watch the whole video.

Users only need to store the original copy of their media objects in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) in order to stream content with Amazon CloudFront, and then enable those files for distribution in Amazon CloudFront with a simple command using the AWS Management Console or the Amazon CloudFront API. Amazon officials said that end users requesting streaming content are automatically routed to the CloudFront edge location best suited to serve the stream, thus end users can get the highest bit rate, lowest latency and highest-quality stream possible. Due to multiple levels of redundancy built into Amazon CloudFront, customers’ streams are served reliably and with high quality.

Daniel Rhodes of video sharing website Vidly said in a statement, “In the five minutes it took us to implement Amazon CloudFront’s streaming service, Vidly was able to both cut costs and offer additional features that significantly improved the in-video experience for our worldwide audience. Without any upfront capital, we are able to side-step the purchase and administration of streaming servers while still getting all the same benefits. Amazon CloudFront brings all the benefits together in such a great tightly integrated way with Amazon’s other services we use and is reliably distributed worldwide, all with barely any work on our part.”

LongTail Video had added support for Amazon CloudFront Streaming to their popular open source video player, JW Player. “There was a great fit between the JW player and Amazon CloudFront streaming: both focus on making it as easy as possible for anyone to incorporate high quality video into Websites,” said LongTail Video co-founder Jeroen “JW” Wijering.

Using Adobe’s Flash Media Server 3.5.3 (FMS), Amazon CloudFront lets developers take advantage of many features of FMS. Customers can decide to deliver their content via the Flash standard Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) or using its encrypted version, RTMPE (for added security). Customers can also use advanced features like dynamic bit rate streaming (which automatically adjusts the bit rate of the stream plated to the end user based on the quality of the user’s connection). Currently supporting on-demand media, Amazon CloudFront streaming support for live events is slated for 2010. For more information regarding Cloud Hosting options please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 03/18
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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The Effects of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) on ISVs

Over the past decade, the ascent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has allowed Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to develop new applications hosted and delivered on the Web. Until recently, however, any ISV creating a SaaS offering has been required to create its own hosting and service delivery infrastructure. With the rise of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) over the past two years, this has all changed. As the online equivalent of conventional computing platforms, PaaS provides an immediate infrastructure on which an ISV can quickly build and deliver a SaaS application.

Many ISVs are hesitant to bind their fate to an emerging platform provider, yet those that have taken a leap of faith and adopted PaaS early on have reaped the benefits, seeing dramatic reductions in development costs and timescales. PaaS supercharges SaaS by lowering barriers to entry and foreshortening time-to-market, this quickening the pace of innovation and intensifying competition.

The nature of ISVs will forever be altered by the advent of PaaS, not only ISVs who choose to introduce SaaS offerings but those who remain tethered to conventionally-licenses, customer-operated software products. The ways in which PaaS alters the competitive landscape across a variety of parameters:

Dramatically quicker cycles of innovation

By implementing the iterative, continuous improvement upgrade model of SaaS, PaaS allows developers to monitor and subsequently respond to customer usage and feedback and quickly incorporate the latest functionality into their own applications.

Lowered price points

Developers’ costs are cut down across multiple dimensions by the shared, pay-as-you-go, elastic infrastructure of PaaS. This results in greatly reduced development and operations costs.

Multiplicity of players from reduced barriers to entry

Large numbers of market entrants are attracted to the low costs of starting on a PaaS provider’s infrastructure. These entrants would not otherwise be able to fund their own infrastructure and thanks to a PaaS are able to significantly increase innovation and competition.

New business models, propositions, partner channels and routes to market

New ways of offering products and bringing them to market, many of them highly disruptive to established models, are created by the “as-a-service” model.

It is important for ISVs to understand and evaluate that PaaS is different than other platforms in order for them to remain in control of their own destiny. PaaS is a new kind of platform, the dynamics of which are different than conventional software platforms. Developers need to be weary of assessing PaaS alternatives on the basis of criteria that are not valid when applied to PaaS. For more information on Platform as a Service please visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 03/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Hosting-as-a-Service
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Nubifer Cloud:Portal

Reducing capital expenditure for hardware supporting your software is a no-brainer, and Nubifer Cloud:Portal allows you to leverage the computing power and scalability of the top-tier cloud platforms. A powerful suite of core portal technologies, interfaces, database schematics and service-oriented architecture libraries, Cloud:Portal comes in several configuration options and you are sure to find the right fit for your enterprise.

Nubifer understands that certain clients requiring custom on-premise and cloud-hosted portals may also require different application layers and data layer configurations. For this reason, Nubifer leverages RAD development techniques to create robust, scalable programming code in ASP.NET (C#), ASP, PHP, Java Servlets, JSP and ColdFusion and Perl. Nubifer also supports a myriad of data formats and database platform types, cloud SOA and architectures such as SQL Server (and Express), Microsoft ® Access, MYSQL, Oracle and more.

Nubifer Cloud:Portal Provides Enterprise Grade Solutions

Your new Nubifer Cloud:Portal is created by Nubifer’s professional services team through customizing and enhancing one or more combinations. In addition, a wide range of cloud modules are compatible and can be added as “plug-in” modules to extend your portal system.

The following Options in Portal types are available:

· Online Store

· Task Management System

· Employee Directory

· Bug / Task Tracker

· Forum / Message Board

· Wizard Driven Registration Forms

· Time Sheet Manager

· Blog / RSS Engine Manager

· Calendar Management System

· Events Management

· Custom Modules to Match Business Needs

At its most basic, the cloud is a nebulous infrastructure owned and operated by an outside party that accepts and runs workloads created by customers. Nubifer Cloud:Portal is compatible with cloud platforms and APIs like Google APIs for Google Applications and Windows® Azure, and also runs on standard hosting platforms.

Cloud Portal boasts several attractive portal management features. Multi-level Administrative User Account Management lets you manage accounts securely, search by account and create and edit all accounts. Public Links and Articles Manager allows to you create, edit or archive new articles, search indexed and features the Dynamic Links manager. Through “My Account” User Management, users can manage their own account and upload and submit custom files and information. The Advanced Security feature enables session-based authentication and customized logic.

That’s not all! There are other great features association with Nubifer Cloud Portal. Calendar and Events lets you add and edit; calendars can be user specific or group organization specific and events can be tied to calendar events. The system features dynamic styles because it supports custom styles sheets dynamically triggered by user choice or by configuration settings, which is great for co-branding or the multi-host look and feel. Web Service XML APIs for 3^rd party integration feature SOA architecture, are web service enables and are interoperable with the top-tier cloud computing platforms by exposing and consuming XML APIs. Lastly, submission forms, email and database submission is another important feature. Submission forms trigger send mail functionality and are manageable by Portal Admins.

Cloud Portal employs R.I.A. Reporting such as User Reports, Search BY Category Reports, Transaction Details Reports, Simple Report and Timesheet Report through Flex and Flash Reports.

Companies using Cloud Portal are delivered a “version release” code base for their independent endeavors. These companies leveraging Nubifer’s professional portal service have access, ownership and full rights to the “code instance” delivered as the final release version of their customized cloud portal. This type of licensing gives companies a competitive edge by being the sole proprietor of their licenses copy of the cloud portal.

Enterprise companies leverage the Rapid and Rich offering delivered by out portal code models and methodologies. As a result, companies enjoy the value of rapid prototyping and application enhancement with faster to market functionality in their portals.

Nubifer Cloud:Portal technology is designed to facilitate and support your business model today and in the future, by expanding as your company evolves. Within our process for portal development, we define and design the architecture, develop and enhance the portal code and deliver and deploy to your public or private environment. Please visit nubifer.com to learn more about our proprietary offering, Cloud:Portal.

2010: 03/04
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud:Link
Hosting-as-a-Service
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Nubifer
Platform-as-a-Service
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Security in the Cloud

One major concern has loomed over companies considering a transition into the cloud: security. The “S” word has affected the cloud more than other types of hosted environments, but most concerns about security are not based on reality.

Three factors about cloud security:

1. Cloud security is almost identical to internal security, and the security tools used to protect your data in the cloud are the same ones you use each day. The only difference is that the cloud is a multi-tenant environment with multiple companies sharing the same cloud service provider.

2. Security issues within the cloud can be address with the very same security tools you currently have in place. While security tools are important, they should not be perceived as a hindrance when making the transition into the cloud. Over time, the commodity nature of IT will require that you transition your technologies to the cloud in order to remain financially competitive. This is why it is important to start addressing security measures now in order to prepare for the future.

3. As long as you choose a quality cloud provider, your security within the cloud will be as good—perhaps even better!—than your current security. The level of security within in the cloud is designed for the most risky client in the cloud, and thus you will receive that same security whatever your level of risk.

Internal or External IT?

Prior to asking questions about security within the cloud, you need to ask what exactly should move into the cloud in the first place, such as commodities. Back when companies first began taking advantage of IT, the initial businesses to computerize their organization’s processes had significant gains over competitors. As the IT field grew, however, the initial competitive benefits of computerization began to wane, and computerization thus became a requirement in order to simply remain relevant. As such, there is an increasing amount of IT operating as a commodity.

Cloud computing essentially allows business to offload commodity technologies and free up resources and time to concentrate on the core business. For example, a company manufacturing paper products requires a certain amount of IT to run its business and also make it competitive. The company also runs a large quantity of commodity IT; this commodity technology takes time, money, energy and people away from the company’s business of producing paper products at a price that rivals competitors. This is where cloud computing comes in.

The commodity IT analysis form helps you determine what parts of your IT can be moved externally by helping you list out all of the functions that your IT organization performs and decide if you think of this activity as a commodity, or not.

Internal IT Security

Some think that internal IT no longer helps businesses set themselves apart from other businesses. The devaluing of IT leads to many companies failing to adequately fund required budgets to operate a first-class IT infrastructure. In addition, there is an increasing number of security mandates from external and internal courses means that IT can’t always fund and operate as required.

Another problem involves specialization and its effect on business function, as businesses exist as specialized entities. When looking at funding and maintaining a non-core part of the business, IT faces a problem. For example, an automotive maker avoids starting a food production company even though it could feed its employees that way because that is not its core business. It is unlikely that the automotive manufacturer’s IT department will be as successful as its manufacturing business. On balance, a business with IT as its only product line or service should be more successful as providing IT. Thus if the automotive maker isn’t going to operate as a best-in-class IT business, why would its security be expected to be best-in-class? A company with IT as its business is the best choice for securing your data because the quality of its product and its market success depends on its security being effective.

Factors to consider when picking a cloud provider:

Cloud providers have internal and external threats that can be accepted or mitigated, like internal IT, and these challenges are all manageable:

Security assessment: Most organizations usually relax their level of security over time, and as a way to combat this, the cloud provider must perform regular security assessments. The subsequent security report must be given to each client immediately after it is performed so the client knows the current state over their security in the cloud.

Multi-tenancy: The cloud provider should design its security to ensure that it meets the needs of its higher-risk clients, and in turn all clients will reap the rewards of this.

Shared Risk: The cloud service provider will not be the cloud operator in many instances, but the cloud service provider may nonetheless be providing a value-added service in addition to another cloud provider’s service. Take a Software-as-a-Service provider, for example. The SaaS provider needs infrastructure, and it may make more sense to get that infrastructure from an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider as opposed to building it on its own. Within this kind of multi-tier service provider, the risk of security issues are shared by each part because the risk affects all parties involved at various layers. The architecture used by the main cloud provider must be addressed and that information taken into account when assessing the client’s total risk mitigation plan.

Distributed Data Centers: Due to the fact that providers can offer an environment that is geographically distributed, a cloud computing environment should be less prone to disasters–in theory. In reality, many organizations sign up for cloud computing services that are not geographically distributed, this they should require that their provider have a working and regularly-tested disaster recovery plan (including SLAs).

Staff Security Screening: As with other types of organizations, contractors are often hired to work for cloud providers, and these contractors should be subject to a full background investigation.

Physical Security: When choosing a cloud security provider, physical external threats should be analyzed carefully. Some important questions to ask are: Do all of the cloud provider’s facilities have the same levels of security? Is your organization being offered the most secure facility with no guarantee that your data will actually reside there?

Policies: Cloud providers are not exempt from suffering from data leaks or security incidents, which is why cloud providers need to have incident response policies and procedures for each client that they feed into their overall incident response plan.

Data Leakage: One of the greatest organizational risks from a security standpoint is data leakage. As such, the cloud provider must have the ability to map its policy to the secure mandate you must comply with and talk about the issues at hand.

Coding: In-house software used by all cloud providers may contain application bugs. For this reason, each client should make sure that the cloud provider follows secure coding practices. All code should additionally be written using a standard methodology that is documented and can also be demonstrated to the customer.

In conclusion, security remains a major concern, but it is important to understand that the technology used to secure your organization within the cloud isn’t untested or new. Security questions within the cloud represent the logical progression to outsourcing of commodity services to some of the same IT providers that you have been confidently using for years already. Moving IT elements into the cloud is simply a natural progression in the overall IT evolution. Visit nubifer.com for more information regarding the ever-changing environment of Cloud security.

2010: 03/02
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Survey Reveals Developers Concentrating on Hybrid Cloud in 2010

According to a survey of application developers conducted by Evans Data, over 60 percent of IT shops polled have plans to adopt a hybrid cloud model in 2010. The results for the poll, released on January 12, 2010, indicate that 61 percent of over 400 participating developers stated that some portion of their companies’ IT resources will transition into the public cloud within the next year.

The hybrid cloud is set to dominate the IT landscape in 2010 because of those surveyed, over 87 percent of the developers said that half or less of their resources will move. A statement obtained by eWeek.com quotes CEO of Evans Data Janel Garvin as saying, “The hybrid Cloud presents a very reasonable model, which is easy to assimilate and provides a gateway to Cloud computing without the need to commit all resources or surrender all control and security to an outside vendor. Security and government compliance are primary obstacles to public cloud adoption, but a hybrid model allows for selective implementation so these barriers can be avoided.”

Evans Data conducted its survey over November and December of last year as a way to examine timelines for public and private cloud adoption, ways in which to collaborate and develop within the cloud, obstacles and benefits of cloud development, architectures and tools for cloud, development, virtualization in the private data center and other aspects of cloud computing. The survey also concluded that 64 percent of developers surveyed expect their clod apps to venture into mobile devices in the near future as well.

Additional information about the future of cloud computing revealed by Evans Data’s poll revealed that the preferred database for use in the public cloud is MySQL, preferred by over 55 percent of developers. Following by Microsoft and IBM, VMware was also revealed to be the preferred hypervisor vendor or user in a virtualized private cloud. To learn more please visit nubfer.com.

2010: 02/25
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
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Maximizing Effectiveness in the Cloud

At its most basic, the cloud is a nebulous infrastructure owned and operated by an outside party that accepts and runs workloads created by customers. When thinking about the cloud in this way, the basic question concerning cloud computing becomes, “Can I run all of my applications in the cloud?” If you answer “no” to that question, then ask yourself, “What divisions of my data can safely be run in the cloud?” When assessing how to include cloud computing in your architecture, one way to maximize your effectiveness in the cloud is to see how you can effectively complement your existing architectures.

The current cloud tools strive to manage provisioning and a level of mobility management, with security and audit capabilities on the horizon, in addition to the ability to move the same virtual machine in and out of the cloud. This is where virtualization, a new data center which includes a range of challenges for traditional data center management tools, comes into play. Identity, mobility and data separation are a few obvious sues for virtualization.

1. Identity

Server identity becomes crucial when you can make 20 identical copies of an existing server and then distribute them around the environment with just a click of a mouse. In this way, the traditional identity based on physicality doesn’t measure up.

2. Mobility

While physical servers are stationary, VMs are designed to be mobile, and tracking and tracing them throughout their life cycles is an important part of maintaining and proving control and compliance.

3. Data separation

Resources are shared between host servers and the virtual servers running on them, thus portions of the host’s hardware (like the processor and memory) are allocated to each virtual server. There have not been any breaches of isolation between virtual servers yet, but this may not last.

These challenges are highlighted by cloud governance. While these three issues are currently managed and controlled by someone outside of the IT department, additional challenges that are specific to the cloud now exist. Some of them include life cycle management, access control, integrity and cloud-created VMS.

1. Life cycle management

How is a workload’s life cycle managed once it has been transferred to the cloud?

2. Access control

Who was given access to the application and its data while it was in the cloud?

3. Integrity

Did its integrity remain while it was in the cloud, or was it altered?

4. Cloud-created VMS

Clouds generate their own workloads and subsequently transfer them into the data center. These so-called “virtual appliances” are being downloaded into data centers each day and identity, integrity and configuration need to be managed and controlled there.

Cloud computing has the potential to increase the flexibility and responsiveness of your IT organization and there are things you can do to be pragmatic about the evolution of cloud computing. They include understanding what is needed in the cloud, gaining experience with “internal clouds” and testing external clouds.

1. Understanding that is needed to play in the cloud

The term “internal clouds” has resulted from the use of virtualization in the data center. It is important to discuss with auditors how virtualization is impacting their requirements and new requirements and new policies may subsequently be added to your internal audit checklists.

2. Gaining experience with “internal clouds”

It is important to be able to efficiently implement and enforce the policies with the right automation and control systems. It becomes easier to practice that in the cloud once you have established what you need internally.

3. Testing external clouds

The use of low-priority workloads help provide a better understanding of what is needed for life cycle management as well as establish what role external cloud infrastructures may play in your overall business architecture.

Essentially, you must be able to manage, control and audit your own internal virtual environment in order to be able to do so with an external cloud environment. Please visit nubifer.com to learn more on maximizing officing effectiveness in the cloud.

2010: 02/23
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
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Scaling Storage and Analysis of Data Using Distributed Data Grids

One of the most important new methods for overcoming performance bottlenecks for a large class of applications is data parallel programming on a distributed data grid. This method is predicted to have important applications in cloud computing over the next couple years, and eWeek Knowledge Center contributor William L. Bain describes ways in which a distributed data grid can be used to implement powerful, Java-based applications for parallel data analysis.

In current Information Age, companies must store and analyze a large amount of business data. Companies that have the ability to efficiently search data for important patterns will have a competitive edge over others. An e-commerce Web site, for example, needs to be able to monitor online shopping carts in order to see which products are selling faster than others. Another example is a financial services company, which needs to hone its equity trading strategy as it optimizes its response to rapidly changing market conditions.

Businesses facing these challenges have turned to distributed data grids (also called distributed caches) in order to scale their ability to manage rapidly changing data and sort through data to identify patterns and trends that require a quick response. A few key advantages are offered by distributed data grids.

Distributed data grids store memory instead of on a disk for quick access. Additionally, they run seamlessly across various servers to scale performance. Lastly, they provide a quick, easy-to-use platform for running “what if” analyses on the data they store. They can take performance to a level unable to be matches by stand-alone database serves by breaking the sequential bottleneck.

Three simple steps for building a fast, scalable data storage and analysis solution:

1. Store rapidly changing business data directly in a distributed data grid rather than on a database server

Distributed data grids are designed to plug directly into the business logic of today’s enterprise application and services. They match the in-memory view of data already used by business logic by storing data as collections of objects rather than relational database tables. Because of this, distributed data grids are easy to integrate into existing applications using simple APIs (which are available for most modern languages like Java, C# and C++).

Distributed data grids run on server farms, thus their storage capacity and throughput scale just by adding more grid servers. A distributed data grid’s ability to store and quickly access large quantities of data can expand beyond a stand-alone database server when hosted on a large server farm or in the cloud.

2. Integrate the distributed data grid with database servers in an overall storage strategy

Distributed data grids are used to complement, not replace data servers, which are the authoritative repositories for transactional data and long-term storage. With an e-commerce Web site, for example, a distributed data grid would hold shopping carts to efficiently manage a large workload of online shopping traffic. A back-end database server would meanwhile store completed transactions, inventory and customer records.

Carefully separating application code used for business logic from other code used for data access is an important factor to integrating a distributed data grid into an enterprise application’s overall strategy. Distributed data grids naturally fit into business logic, which manages data as objects. This code is where rapid access to data is required and also where distributed data grids provide the greatest benefit. The data access layer, in contract, usually focuses on converting objects into a relational form for storage in database servers (or vice versa).

A distributed data grid can be integrated with a database server so that it can automatically access data from the database server if it is missing from the distributed data grid. This is incredibly useful for certain types of data such as product or customer information (stored in the database server and retrieved when needed by the application). Most types of rapidly changing, business logic data, however, can be stored solely in a distributed data grid without ever being written out to a database server.

3. Analyze grid-based data by using simple analysis codes as well as the MapReduce programming pattern

After a collection of objects, such as a Web site’s shopping carts, has been hosted in a distributed data grid, it is important to be able to scan this data for patterns and trends. Researchers have developed a two-step method called MapReduce for analyzing large volumes of data in parallel.

As the first step, each object in the collection is analyzed for a pattern of interest by writing and running a simple algorithm that assesses each object one at a time. This algorithm is run in parallel on all objects to analyze all of the data quickly. The results that were generated by running this algorithm are next combined to determine an overall result (which will hopefully identify an important trend).

Take an e-commerce developer, for example. The developer could write a simple code which analyzes each shopping cart to rate which product categories are generating the most interest. This code could be run on all shopping carts throughout the day in order to identify important shopping trends.

Using this MapReduce programming pattern, distributed data grids offer an ideal platform for analyzing data. Distributed data grids store data as memory-based objects, and thus the analysis code is easy to write and debug as a simple “in-memory” code. Programmers don’t need to learn parallel programming techniques nor understand how the grid works. Distributed data grids also provide the infrastructure needed to automatically run this analysis code on all grid servers in parallel and then combine the results. By using a distributed data grid, the net result is that the application developer can easily and quickly harness the full scalability of the grid to quickly discover data patterns and trends that are important to the success of an enterprise. For more information, please visit www.nubifer.com.

2010: 02/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Answers to Your Questions on Cloud Connectors

Jeffrey Schwartz and Michael Desmond, both editors of Redmond Developer News, recently sat down with corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, Robert Wahbe, at the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) to talk about Microsoft Azure and its potential impact on the developer ecosystem at Microsoft. Responsible for managing Microsoft’s engineering teams that deliver the company’s Web services and modeling platforms, Wahbe is a major advocate of the Azure Services Platform and offers insight into how to build applications that exist within the world of Software-as-a-Service, or as Microsoft calls it, Software plus Services (S + S).

When asked how much of Windows Azure is based on Hyper-V and how much is an entirely new set of technologies, Wahbe answered, “Windows Azure is a natural evolution of our platform. We think it’s going to have a long-term radical impact with customers, partners and developers, but it’s a natural evolution.” Wahbe continued to explain how Azure brings current technologies (i.e. the server, desktop, etc.) into the cloud and is fundamentally built out of Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework.

Wahbe also referenced the PDC keynote of Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, in which Ozzie discussed how most applications are not initially created with the idea of scale-out. Explained Wahbe, expanding upon Ozzie’s points, “The notion of stateless front-ends being able to scale out, both across the data center and across data centers requires that you make sure you have the right architectural base. Microsoft will be trying hard to make sure we have the patterns and practices available to developers to get those models [so that they] can be brought onto the premises.”

As an example, Wahbe created a hypothetical situation in which Visual Studio and .NET Framework can be used to build an ASP.NET app, which in turn can either be deployed locally or to Windows Azure. The only extra step taken when deploying to Windows Azure is to specify additional metadata, such as what kind of SLA you are looking for or how many instances you are going to run on. As explained by Wahbe, the Metadata is an .XML file and as an example of an executable model, Microsoft is easily able to understand that model. “You can write those models in ‘Oslo’ using the DSL written in ‘M,’ targeting Windows Azure in those models,” concludes Wahbe.

Wahbe answered a firm “yes” when asked if there is a natural fit for application developed in Oslo, saying that it works because Oslo is “about helping you write applications more productively,” also adding that you can write any kind of application—including cloud. Although new challenges undoubtedly face development shops, the basic process of writing and deploying code remains the same. According to Wahbe, Microsoft Azure simply provides a new deployment target at a basic level.

As for the differences, developers are going to need to learn a new set of services. An example used by Wahbe is if two businesses were going to connect through a business-to-business messaging app; technology like Windows Communication Foundation can make this as easy process. With the integration of Microsoft Azure, questions about the pros and cons of using the Azure platform and the service bus (which is part of .NET services) will have to be evaluated. Azure “provides you with an out-of-the-box, Internet-scale, pub-sub solution that traverses firewalls,” according to Wahbe. And what could be bad about that?

When asked if developers should expect new development interfaces or plug-ins to Visual Studio, Wahbe answered, “You’re going to see some very natural extensions of what’s in Visual Studio today. For example, you’ll see new project types. I wouldn’t call that a new tool … I’d call it a fairly natural extension to the existing tools.” Additionally, Wahbe expressed Microsoft’s desire to deliver tools to developers as soon as possible. “We want to get a CTP [community technology preview] out early and engage in that conversation. Now we can get this thing out broadly, get the feedback, and I think for me, that’s the most powerful way to develop a platform,” explained Wahbe of the importance of developers’ using and subsequently critiquing Azure.

When asked about the possibility of competitors like Amazon and Google gaining early share due to the ambiguous time frame of Azure, Wahbe’s responded serenely, “The place to start with Amazon is [that] they’re a partner. So they’ve licensed Windows, they’ve licensed SQL, and we have shared partners. What Amazon is doing, like traditional hosters, is they’re taking a lot of the complexity out for our mutual customers around hardware. The heavy lifting that a developer has to do to tale that and then build a scale-out service in the cloud and across data centers—that’s left to the developer.” Wahbe detailed how Microsoft has base computing and base storage—the foundation of Windows Azure—as well as higher-level services such as the database in the cloud. According to Wahbe, developers no longer have to build an Internet-scale pub-sub system, nor do they have to find a new way to do social networking and contacts nor have reporting services created themselves.

In discussing the impact that cloud connecting will have on the cost of development and the management of development processes, Wahbe said, “We think we’re removing complexities out of all layers of the stack by doing this in the cloud for you … we’ll automatically do all of the configuration so you can get load-balancing across all of your instances. We’ll make sure that the data is replicated both for efficiency and also for reliability, both across an individual data center and across multiple data centers. So we think that be doing that, you can now focus much more on what your app is and less on all that application infrastructure.” Wahbe predicts that it will be simpler for developers to build applications with the adoption of Microsoft Azure. For more information on Cloud Connectors, contact a Nubifer representative today.

2010: 02/14
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Breaking Down the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing

Following in the footsteps of industry buzz words like utility computing, clustering and virtualization, cloud computing is on the tips of everyone’s tongues lately. Cloud computing does have its own unique meaning, although it shares overlapping ideas with distributed, utility and grid computing. The reason for the conceptual intersections partly stems from the evolving technological usages, changes and implementations in recent years.

The waning general interest in grid, utility and distributed computing coupled with marketing and service offerings from large corporations like Amazon, Google and IBM drive the increased interest in cloud computing in the past year. Google search trends confirm that the term cloud computing has only been in use for about one year. Some suggest that the term ‘cloud computing’ likely comes in part from the use of an image of a cloud representing the Internet or a huge network. While what lies in the cloud remains somewhat ambiguous, the cloud is relied upon to send and receive data.

Allied with an abstract notion of the cloud, cloud computing replaces servers, routers and data pipes with services. While the fundamental hard- and software of networking remains in place, applications are built through higher level service capabilities, data and compute resources, with cloud computing. How the service is managed, implemented and what types of technology are used are not of importance to the user, as the access to the service and confidence in the reliability of meeting application requirements are the only things that matter.

At its core, cloud computing is distributed computing. Using the resource from multiple services (possibly from multiple locations as well), an application is built. As opposed to relying on the cloud for available resources, the endpoint to access the services is usually still required at this point and is also known as Software as a Service, or SaaS. A grid of computers typically lies behind the service interface, provides the resources, and is typically hosted by one company, which makes it easier to support and maintain. Although definitions of a grid vary, it is commonly described as a uniform environment of hard- and software. Utility computing is in place when a user starts paying for the services and resources utilized.

The essence of cloud computing is accessing services and resources required to perform functions with actively changing needs. Rather than requesting access from a specific named resource or endpoint, an application or service developer uses the cloud. The events taking place within the cloud manage multiple infrastructures over multiple organizations and include one or sometimes more than one frameworks covering and uniting the infrastructures. These frameworks serve as catalysts for self-monitoring, self-healing, automatic reconfiguration, resource agreement definitions and resource registration and discovery.

While people maintain the order of hardware, operation systems and networking, the cloud is self managing and maintaining virtualization of resources. The user or application developer only reference the cloud in the process of cloud computing. A framework executing across a heterogeneous environment is a local area network, the Assimilator project offers a local cloud environment and the addition of a network overlay to begin providing an infrastructure across the Internet to further the goal of cloud computing is in the works.

Visit www.nubifer.com for more information about the future of Cloud Computing.

2010: 02/13
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
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How Microsoft Windows 7 Changed the Game for Cloud Computing … and Signaled a Wave of Competition Between Microsoft, Google and Others.

On October 22 Microsoft released the successor to Windows Vista, Windows 7, and while excitement for the operating system mounted prior to its release, many are suggesting that its arrival is a sign of the end of computing on personal computers and the beginning of computing solely in the cloud. Existing cloud services like social networking, online games and web-based email are accessible through smart-phones, browsers or other client services, and because of the availability of these services Windows 7 is Microsoft’s fist operating system to include less features.

Although Windows is not in danger of extinction, cloud computing makes its operating systems less important. Other companies are following in Microsoft’s footsteps by launching products with fewer features than even Microsoft 7. In September, Microsoft opened a pair of data centers containing half a million servers between them and subsequently issued a new version of Windows for smart-phones. Perpetually ahead of the curve, Microsoft also launched a platform for developers, the highly publicized Azure, which allows them to write and run cloud services.

In addition to changing the game for Microsoft, the growth of cloud computing also heightens competition between the computer industry. Thus far, advancements in technology have pushed computing power in the opposite direction of central hubs (as seen in the shift from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs), while power is now being inverted back to the center in some ways, with less expensive and more powerful processors and faster networks. Basically, the cloud’s data centers are outsized public mainframes. While this is occurring, the PC is being pushed aside by more compact, wireless devices like netbooks and smart-phones.

The lessened importance of the PC enables companies like Apple, Google and IBM to fill in the gap caused my Microsoft’s former monopoly. There are currently hundreds of firms offering cloud services, and more by the day, but as The Economist points out, Microsoft, Google and Apple are in their own league. Each of the three companies has its own global network of data centers and plans on offering several services while also seeking to dominate the new field by developing new software or devices. The battle between Microsoft, Google and Apple sees each company trying to one-up each other. For example, Google’s free PC operating system, Chrome OS, shows Google’s attempt to catch up to Microsoft, while Microsoft’s recent operating system for smart-phones shows Microsoft’s attempt to catch up with the Apple iPhone as all as Google’s handset operating system, Android. Did you follow all of that?

Comparing Google, Microsoft and Apple

Professor Michael Cusamano of MIT’s Sloan School of Management recently told The Economist that while there are similarities between Google, Apple and Microsoft, they are each unique enough to carve out their own spot in the cloud because they approach the trend towards cloud computing in different ways.

Google is most well known for its search service as well as other web-based applications, and has recently began diversifying, launching Android for phones and Chrome OS. In this way, it can be said that Google has been a prototype for a cloud computing company since its inception in 1998. Google’s main source of revenue is advertising, with the company controlling over 75% of search-related ads in the States (and even more on a global scale). Additionally, Google is seeking to make money from selling services to companies, announcing in October that all 35,000 employees at the pest-control-to-parcel-delivery group Rentokil Initial will be using Google’s services.

While Microsoft is commonly associated with Microsoft Office and Windows, the company’s relations to cloud computing are not as distant as one might think. Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, shows the company’s transition into the cloud, as does its web-based version of Office and the fact that Microsoft now offers many of its business software via online services. Microsoft smartly convinced Yahoo! to merge its search and a portion of its advertising business with Microsoft because consumers expect cloud services to be free, with everything paid for by ads.

As evidenced by the iPhone, the epitome of have-to-have-it, innovative bundles of hard- and software, Apple is largely known for its services outside the cloud. Online offering like the App Store, the iTunes store and MobileMe (a suite of online services), however, show that Apple’s hunger to get a piece of the cloud computing pie is growing by the day. Apple is also currently building what many have suggested is the world’s largest data center (worth a whopping $1 billion) in North Carolina.

While Apple, IBM and Microsoft previously battled for the PC in the late 1980s and early 1990s, cloud computing is an entirely different game. Why? Well, for starters, much of the cloud is based on open standards, making it easier for users to switch providers. Antitrust authorities will play into the rivalry between the companies, and so will other possible contenders, such as Amazon and Facebook, the world’s leading online retailer and social network, respectively (not to mention Zoho and a host of others). An interesting fact thrown to the debate on who will emerge victorious is the fact that all current major contenders in the cloud computing race are American, with Asian and European firms not yet showing up in cloud computing in any major way (although Nokia’s suite of online services, Ovi, is in beginning stages). Visit Nubifer.com for more information.

2010: 01/19
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Google Apps
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Worldwide SaaS Revenue to Increase 18 Percent in 2009 According to Gartner

According to the folks over at Gartner, Inc., one of the leading information technology research and advisory companies, worldwide SaaS (Software as a Service) revenue is predicted to reach $7.5 billion in 2009. If Gartner’s forecast is correct, this would show a 17.7 percent increase, as 2008 SaaS revenue totaled at $6.4 billion. Gartner also reports that the market will display significant and steady growth through 2013, at which point revenue is anticipated to extend past $14 billion for enterprise application markets.

Research director Sharon Mertz said of the projections, “The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets. The composition of the worldwide SaaS landscape is evolving as vendors continue to extend regionally, increase penetration within existing accounts and ‘greenfield’ opportunities, and offer more-vertical-specific solutions as part of their service portfolio or through partners.” Mertz continued to explain how the on-demand deployment model has flourished because of the broadening of on-demand vendors’ services through partner offerings, alliances and (recently) by offering and promoting user-application development through PaaS (Platform as a Service) capabilities. Added Mertz, “Although usage and adoption is still evolving, deployment of SaaS still varies between the enterprise application markets and within specific market segments because of buyer demand and applicability of the solution.”

Across market segments, the largest amount of SaaS revenue comes from CCC (content, communications and collaboration) and CRM (customer relationship management) markets. Gartner reports that the CCC market is generating $2.6 billion and the CRM market is generating $2.3 billion, in 2009. The CCC and CRM markets generated $2.14 billion and $1.9 billion in 2008, respectively. See Table 1 for figures.

[Insert graphic box here]

Growth in the CRM market continues to be driven by SaaS, a trend which began four year ago, as evidenced by the jump from less than $500 million and over 8 percent of the CRM market in 2005 to nearly $1.9 million in revenue and over 8 percent of the CRM market in 2008. Gartner anticipated this trend to continue, with SaaS representing nearly 24 percent of the CRM market’s total software revenue in 2009. Says Gartner’s Mertz in conclusion, highlighting the need in the marketplace filled by SaaS, “The market landscape for on-demand CRM continues to evolve as the availability and usage of SaaS solutions becomes more pervasive. The rapid adoption of SaaS and the marketplace success of salesforce.com have compelled vendors without an on-demand solution to either acquire smaller niche SaaS providers or develop the solution internationally in response to increasing buyer demand.” To receive more information contact Nubifer today.

2010: 01/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
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Will Zoho Be the Surprise Winner in the Cloud Computing Race?

With all the talk of Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon and other major companies, it might be easy to forget about Zoho—but that would be a big mistake. The small, private company offers online email, spreadsheets and processors, much like one of the giants in cloud computing, Google, and is steadily showing it shouldn’t be discounted!

Based in Pleasanton, Calif., Zoho has never accepted bank loans or venture capital yet shows revenue of over $50 million a year. While Zoho has data center and networking management tools, its fastest-growing operation is its online productivity suite, according to Zoho’s chief executive, Sridhar Vembu. The company’s position suggests that there may be a spot for Zoho among online productivity application markets seemingly dominated by a few major companies. Vembu recently told the New York Times, “For now, the wholesale shift to the Web really creates opportunities for smaller companies like us.” And he may very well be right.

Zoho has 19 online productivity and collaboration applications (including invoicing, product management and customer relationship management), thus Zoho and Microsoft only overlap with five offerings. Zoho’s focus remains on the business market, with half of the company’s distribution through partners integrating Zoho’s products into their offerings. For example, Box.net, a service for storing, backing up and sharing documents, uses Zoho as an editing tool for uploaded documents. Most of Zoho’s partners are web-based services, showing that cheap, web-based software permits these business mash-ups to occur—while traditional software would make it nearly impossible. “Today, in the cloud model, this kind of integration is economical,” explains Vembu to the New York Times.

According to Vembu, most paying customers using Zoho’s hosted applications from its website (with prices ranging from free to just $25 per month, varying on features and services) are small businesses with anywhere from 40 to 200 employees. As evidence for the transition into the cloud, the chief executive of Zoho points to the Splashtop software created by DeviceVM, a start-up company. Dell, Asus and Hewlett-Packard reportedly plan on loading Splashtop, software able to be installed directly into a PCs hardware (thus completely doing without the operating system) on some of their PCs. “It is tailor-made for us. You go right into the browser,” says Vembu, clearly pleased at the evidence that smaller companies like Zoho are making leeway in the field of cloud computing.

2010: 01/15
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
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Microsoft Azure Uncovered

Everyone is talking about Microsoft Azure, which could leave some people left in the dust wondering what exactly Azure is, how much it costs and what it means for cloud computing and Microsoft as a whole. If you are among those who have unanswered questions about Microsoft Azure, look no further: here is your guide to all things Azure.

The Basics

When cloud computing first emerged, everyone wondered if and how Microsoft would make the transition into the cloud—and Microsoft Azure is the answer. Windows Azure is a cloud operating system that is essentially Microsoft’s first big step into the cloud. Developers can build using .NET, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails and other languages on Azure. According to Windows Azure GM Doug Hauger, Microsoft plans on eventually offering an admin model, which will permit developers to have access to the virtual machine (as with traditional Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings like Amazon’s EC₂, they will have to manually allocate hardware resources). SQL Azure is Microsoft’s relational database in the cloud while .NET Services is Microsoft’s Platform-as-a-Service built on the Azure OS.

The Cost

There are three different pricing models for Azure. The first is consumption-based, in which a customer pays for what they use. The second is subscription-based, in which those committing to six months of use receive discounts. Available as of July 2010, the third is volume licensing for enterprise customers desiring to take existing Microsoft licenses into the cloud.

Azure compute costs 12 center per service hour, which is half a cent less than Amazon’s Windows-based cloud, while Azure’s storage service costs 15 cents per GB of data per moth, with an additional cent for every 10,000 transactions (movements of data within the stored material). .NET Services platform costs 15 cents for every 100,000 times the applications build on .NET Services accesses a chunk of code or tool. As for moving data, it costs 10 cents per GB of inbound data and 15 cents per GB of outbound data. For up to a 1 GB relational database, SQL Azure is $9.99, while it costs $99.99 for up to a 10 GB relational database.

The Impact on Microsoft and Cloud Computing

Although the introduction of Microsoft Windows Azure comes a bit late into the burgeoning field of cloud computing and as a Platform-as-a-Service party, Microsoft remains ahead of enterprises which the company is hoping to attract as customers. In other words, by eyeing enterprises that still remain skeptical of cloud computing, Microsoft may tap into customers not snatched up by other more established cloud computing parties. No enterprise data center runs solely on Microsoft software, which is likely why the company seems willing to test out other programming languages and welcome heterogeneous environments in Azure. Additionally, the Azure platform as has a service-level agreement that offers 99.9 percent uptime on the storage side with 99.95 percent uptime on the compute side.

As many have pointed out, Microsoft may be behind Amazon and others for the time being, but there is room for an open platform directed at enterprises, which is Azure’s niche. For more Azure related information visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 01/15
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Hosting-as-a-Service
Hybrid Cloud and On-Premise
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Launch of Azure

After months of media and technology buzz, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Azure, often described as “Windows in the Cloud,” would be launched on January 1, 2010. The software giant’s Internet-based cloud computing service is likely to alter the entire face of the ever-expanding cloud computing field.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, revealed the official launch date for Microsoft Azure at the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, held in Los Angeles. Known as an industry leader in selling packaged software like Windows operating systems and Office work programs, Microsoft is joining in on the increasing trend towards cloud computing by unveiling a program hosted on the Internet—or in the cloud.

Cloud computing is an attractive avenue for enterprise companies as well as individuals, as it eliminates the cost and time of buying, installing, updating and maintaining software on workplace machines by letting users and companies basically rent text, spreadsheet, calendar and other programs in the cloud on an as-needed basis. According to industry tracker Gartner, revenue from cloud computing will surpass 14 billion dollars annually by the end of 2013.

Speaking at the at the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, Ozzie said that the first month of Windows Azure will be free of charge, with users being billed from February on. Ozzie described Windows Azure as part of a “three screens and a cloud” future, in which software is delivered across personal computers, televisions and phones connected by cloud-based services.

“Customers want choice and flexibility in how they develop and deploy applications,” explained Ozzie before continuing to say, “We’re moving into an era of solutions that are experienced by users across PCs, phones and the Web, and that are delivered from data centers we refer to as private clouds and public clouds.”

Due to advancements in the cloud made by competitors like Amazon and Google, Microsoft has been under the microscope to make the transition into offering cloud services as of late. Google, for example, has long since established Internet-based applications like its popular Web-hosted email service, Gmail, while Internet retail giant Amazon currently offers an online application platform called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

With the launch of Microsoft Azure, competition within the cloud computing field continues to expand, while the transition into the cloud for companies becomes more achievable. To see how Adopting Windows Azure could help your organization, visit Nubifer.com.

2010: 01/04
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Hosting-as-a-Service
Microsoft
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
Uncategorized
Windows Azure
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Google’s Continued Innovation of Technology Evolution

Google has the uncanny ability to introduce non-core disruptive innovations while simultaneously defending and expanding its core, and an analysis of the concepts and framework in Clayton Christensen’s book Seeing What’s Next offers insight into how.

Recently, Google introduced free GPS on the Android phone through a strategy that can be described as “sword and shield.” This latest disruptive innovation seeks to beat a current offering serving the “overshot customers,” i.e. the ones who would stop paying for additional performance improvements that historically had called for price premium. Google essentially entered into the “GPS Market” to serve said overshot customers by using a shield: asymmetric skills and motivation in the form of Android OS, mapping data and a lack of direct revenue expectations. Subsequently, Google transformed its “shield” into a “sword” by disinteremediating the map providers and using a revenue-share agreement to incentivize the carriers.

Examples of “incremental to radical,” to use Christensen’s terms, sustaining innovations in which Google sought out the “undershot customers” are GMail and Google’s core search technology. Frustrated with the products’ limitations, these customers are willing to swap their current product for another better one, should it exist. Web-based email solutions and search engines existed before the Google-introduced ones, but those introduced by Google solved problems that were frustrating users of other products. For example, users relished in GMail’s expansive email quota (compared to the limited quota they faced before) and also enjoyed the better indexing and relevancy algorithms of the Google search engine. Although Microsoft is blatantly targeting Google with Bing, Google appears unruffled and continues to steadily, if somewhat slowly, invest in its sustainable innovation (such as with Caffeine, the next-generation search platform, Gmail labs, social searches, profiles, etc.) to continue to maintain the revenue stream out of its core business.

By spending money on lower-end disruptive innovations and not “cramming” sustaining innovation, Google managed to thrive while most companies are practically destined to fail. The issue between Google’s sustaining and disruptive innovations was even coped with by using this strategy! According to insiders at Google, the GMail team was not used to create Google Wave, a fact unbeknownst to the GMail team. If Google had added wave-like functionality to Gmail, it would have been “cramming” sustaining innovation, while innovating outside of email can potentially serve a variety of both undershot and overshot customers.

So what does this mean for AT&T? Basically, AT&T needs to watch its back and keep an eye on Google! Smartphone revenue is predicted to surpass laptop revenue in 2012, after the number of Smartphone units this year surpassed the number of laptops sold. The current number of subscribers to Comcast exceeds 7 million (eight-fold what it used to be). While Google pays a pricey phone bill for Google Voice, which has 1.4 million users (with 570,000 of them using it seven days a week) Google is dedicated to making Google Voice work—and if it does Google could potentially serve a new brand of overshot customers that want to stay connected in realtime but don’t need or want a landline.

Although some argue that Chrome OS is more disruptive, using disruptive innovation theory it can be said that Chrome OS is created for the breed of overshot customer that is frustrated with other market solutions at the same level, not for the majority of customers. Should Google currently be scheming around Chrome OS, the business plan would be an expensive one, not to mention timely and draining in its use of resources. For more information on Google’s continued innovation efforts, please visit Nubifer.com.

2009: 12/17
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Security
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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Answers to Your Questions on Cloud Connectors for Leading Platforms like Windows Azure Platform

Jeffrey Schwartz and Michael Desmond, both editors of Redmond Developer News, recently sat down with corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, Robert Wahbe, at the recent Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) to talk about Microsoft Azure and its potential impact on the developer ecosystem at Microsoft. Responsible for managing Microsoft’s engineering teams that deliver the company’s Web services and modeling platforms, Wahbe is a major advocate of the Azure Services Platform and offers insight into how to build applications that exist within the world of Software-as-a-Service, or as Microsoft calls it, Software plus Services (S + S).

2009: 07/16
CATEGORY: Cloud Compliance
Cloud Computing
Cloud Interop
Cloud Monitoring
Cloud Security
Hosting-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service
Software-as-a-Service
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