The top 150 players in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing Journalを発行するSYS-CON社が発表したCloud Computing業界のトップ150社のリスト。

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A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to half as many again - testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites cited. As ever we encourage software engineers, developers, IT operations managers, and new/growing companies in every case to "suck it and see" by downloading or otherwise sampling the offering in question for themselves.

(Omissions to this Top 150 list should be sent to cloud (at) sys-con.com, and we will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this expanded round-up.)

3Leaf Systems - Describes itself as a provider of "next-generation server solutions to enable cloud computing." Specifically, 3Leaf offers to help companies "achieve a terabyte of DRAM at dramatically low cost" based on low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU and memory for an entire server farm.

3PAR - Recently announced its "Cloud-Agile" program, a new partnership initiative "to promote the adoption of cloud computing and cloud-based services offered by leading providers with infrastructures powered by 3PAR Utility Storage."

3Tera - Offering what it calls "Cloud Computing Without Compromise," 3Tera enables the provision and deployment of "scalable clustered applications in minutes from anywhere in the world." The company currently has partners and is running in datacenters in seven countries (United States, Japan, Singapore, Argentina, United Kingdom, Netherlands and Serbia) on four continents (North America, South America, Asia, and Europe), with additional resources in South America and Australia soon to be available as well.

10Gen - Co-founded by Dwight Merriman, who also co-founded DoubleClick and served as its CTO for ten years, 10gen is a commercial entity offering "innovative platform technology" around  the Mongo database - an open source document-oriented database "which makes data storage for web (and other) applications fast and easy."

Adaptivity - Adaptivity provides integrated solutions that automate IT Delivery optimization across enterprise computing environments. Those behind the company built the largest private cloud while at Wachovia and are today building clouds with Unisys. Adaptivity sees the Cloud Computing opportunity from a much broader perspective. "IaaS type resources managed externally from the enterprise do provide value; however, the larger opportunity is enabling enterprises to change how they deliver and consume IT resources," says CEO Tony Bishop in a Q&A with Cloud Computing Journal.

Agathon Group - A dedicated grid environment that allows charitable and non-profit campaigns to scale on demand.

Akamai - Akamai claims to have been optimizing the cloud for over ten years, building a global computing platform "that helps make cloud computing a reality." Services for cloud optimization are now a vital part of the company's total offering, and go well beyond Content Delivery Network (CDN) cache-based technologies - marking Akamai's transition from CDN to full-fledged Cloud Computing player.

Amazon EC2 - When Amazon introduced its virtual computing environment, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2, "to enable you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days," it single-handedly brought Cloud Computing to the very forefront of public awareness by using Web services to provide what it called "resizeable compute capacity in the cloud." EC2 runs within Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters and allows customers to pay only for what they use. See also S3.

Apache Hadoop -

Appirio - Offers services and products to accelerate the adoption of on-demand solutions, and recently secured $5.6 million of financing in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital.

Appistry - As a company that positions itself boldly "At the convergence of Grid Computing, Virtualization and SOA" Appistry offers a grid-based application platform that makes it very easy to scale-out CPU- and data-intensive applications across a virtualized grid of commodity servers. Unlike traditional grid products based on legacy scheduler technology, the company's robust "fabric" architecture has no single point of failure and "is well suited for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications."

AppNexus

Apprenda - The true power of software-based computing was realized when software developers could stop focusing on interfacing directly with hardware, and instead focus on the ingenuity of their software, say the founders of Apprenda - the company behind SaaSGrid, an operating system for building and deploying Software as a Service applications, and a platform for conducting Software as a Service business.

Appzero - Pioneer of virtual application appliances (VAA) which decouple an application from the operating system (OS) and its underlying infrastructure." The resultant virtual application appliance contains an application with its dependencies, but with zero operating system (zeOS) component," says the company. The aim of VAAs is to enable enterprises to provision server based applications to any machine in the data center in a matter of seconds or move an application from the data center to the cloud (D2C).

Aptana - Aptana has recently beta-released Aptana Cloud, which it says "is architected to complement Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Joyent and others." Targeted at rapid development, in particular web applications that need to scale rapidly (think Facebook applications etc.), Aptana cloud plugs into the Aptana IDE.

Arjuna - Describing its Agility offering as an "on-ramp to the Cloud [that] allows the IT department to begin to experiment with cloud computing in a gradual, incremental way, without any need for disruption to existing service," Arjuna is positioned to help IT towards a world in which internal IT infrastructure can over time be increasingly subsumed into the cloud.

Asankya -

AT&T - AT&T broke into the cloud business in August 2008 with the global launch of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting - described as "a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses."

Azure - see Microsoft

Bluewolf - A leading provider of on-demand software deployment services, Bluewolf offers remote database management and recently announced its "Arcade" cloud storage offering that allows users to economically store a virtually unlimited number of files of all sizes through the Salesforce interface.

Boomi - Creator of AtomSphere, which the company calls "the industry's first integration platform-as-a-service." It is a pure SaaS integration platform that does not require software or appliances.

Box-Net

Booz Allen Hamilton - Management consultancies are also now part of the Cloud ecosystem by dint of their wide range of offerings aimed at all aspects of the phenomenon, and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) in particular has positioned itself in the forefront the federal government's Cloud Computing initiative. According to its special Cloud Computing website. "Booz Allen is prepared to support all elements of government defense and civilian missions and migration efforts to "the cloud." ... Booz Allen is also developing new economic analysis—addressing all cost categories for a variety of potential cloud uses—to help agencies "make the case" for migrating to the cloud."

CA - Bought the key assets - software assets and engineering team - of Cloud Computing player Cassatt in June 2009.

Callidus On-Demand SPM - see Callidus Software

Callidus Software - This leading provider of Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions has launched Callidus On-Demand SPM, "a scalable, secure, subscriber-based model that does not require additional IT resources."

Cassatt - [UPDATE: Cassatt is no more. Its key assets were sold to CA in June 2009.] As early as 2004 Cassatt, led by visionary CEO Bill Coleman (the 'B' in BEA Systems), was outlining a roadmap to deliver on the promise of automating IT operations for on-demand computing. Its angle, Cloud Computing-wise: a focus not on public or external clouds but on 'Internal Clouds' since external cloud computing but may be ruled out due to lack of SLA control, security, and compliance, whereas Cassatt contends there is an alternative: an internal Utility Computing architecture yielding the same simplicity and economies-of-scale as an external PaaS cloud.

Cisco - By virtue of its recent acquisitions, most significantly WebEx and PostPath, Cisco is firmly on its way to joining the Cloud Crowd. "We are believers in the cloud-based delivery model for certain types of services in particular inter-company collaboration services, and that is why we got WebEx and now PostPath," Charles Carmel, Cisco's vice president of corporate development, told Red Herring in August 2008.

Citrix

Cloud9 Analytics - Offers what is calls "the industry's first truly on-demand analytics platform" - the brainchild of CTO Scott Weiner, who views the Cloud as the ultimate data warehouse in the sky.

CloudBerry Lab - Established in 2008 by a group of experienced IT professionals with the mission "to help organizations in adopting Cloud computing technologies by closing the gap between Cloud vendors propositions and consumer needs through development of innovative low-cost solutions" - flagship product: CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3.

Cloudera - Recently co-founded by former Googler Christophe Bisciglia and others, Cloudera help its customers install, configure and run Hadoop for large-scale data processing and analysis.

Cloudscale - Cloudscale's unique patent-pending cloud dataflow technology "automatically provides the parallelism and scalability required to handle anything from one-off personal analytics agents up to the most demanding live analytics applications required by the world's leading organizations in business, web, science and government."

Cloudswitch - Fast-growing cloud computing company backed by Matrix Partners, Atlas Venture and Commonwealth Capital Ventures, currently in stealth mode. CloudSwitch is developing what it describes as "an innovative software appliance that delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely so enterprises can dramatically reduce cost and improve responsiveness to the business."

Cloudworks - The goal of Cloudworks is to allow small and mid-market companies to outsource all of their computers, software, and data. Completely web-based, it works like Salesforce or Hotmail - a company's employees can log in through a web browser to access their desktop, server, software, files, email...everything.

Coghead - [Closed its doors February 2009.]

CohesiveFT - As the provider of what it calls 'Elastic Server On-Demand' - aimed at "enabling customers to build and manage applications for virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing," CohesiveFT's Elastic Server Platform allows users to assemble and deploy servers to Cloud Computing Platforms "in minutes." The company likes to think of Elastic Server as a Great Enabler, "allowing you to package your apps for prime time, and do it all by yourself."

Cordys - The Process Factory by Cordys is a simple, reliable and secure solution for anyone to create MashApps business processes from the Cloud - simply by mixing and matching standard business applications such as Google apps and commercially available services. MashApps can be made in minutes, without any coding. This tool has the capability to do for cloud application development environments what Visual Basic did for Windows - fast, easy, and efficient to develop and deploy bespoke applications.

Cumulux - Cumulux is a Cloud solution provider offering products and services that "help enterprises harness the benefits of the cloud." Cumulux' flagship product, Hybrid Axis "helps enterprises extend their current investments to the cloud by integrating traditional and cloud based applications." Cumulux also offers services like cloud assessments, "rapid prototyping to help enterprises take the right steps towards cloud adoption."

Dataline - Provides cloud computing advice and expertise to the larger FSIs (i.e. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, etc) and bundles commercial cloud computing offerings in a way that meets Federal customer requirements. Although not a product vendor, the role this company fills as a mid-level Federal System Integrator is crucial to the adoption of these technologies by the public sector.

Dell

Desktoptwo - This "Cloud desktop" offering from Sun Global Partner Sapotek describes itself as "your home in the cloud" and already claims to have users in 120 countries and a vibrant community.

ElasticHosts

Elastic Compute Cloud - see Amazon EC2

Elastic Drive - see Enomaly

Elastra - Styling itself as a provider of "Elastic Computing," Elastra offers to "design, deploy & manage database and application infrastructure in the Cloud in minutes - all with the click of a button." Dedicated to providing companies building applications with a way to radically innovate the way they develop their products and deliver them on IT infrastructure, Elastra's aim is to help a company "unlock the value of cloud computing by using virtualized hardware environments with cloud-provisioned database and infrastructure software that are easily configurable and do not require scripting, respond elastically to changing load and are delivered in the cloud with meter-based pricing."

EMC - When creating a Cloud Computing division within the company in February 2008, EMC CEO Joe Tucci delared that 85 percent of data will be managed in what he called "big, safe information repositories in the Internet 'sky,' so to speak. We're [talking] cloud computing..."

Engine Yard - As a company dedicated to "furthering innovation in Ruby, Rails and cloud computing," Engine Yard offers Rails-focused 24/7 operations support on top of great infrastructure to companies in search of a smooth path from 100 users to 100,000 users. In July 2008 the company closed $15 million of Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which included participation from Amazon.com.

ENKI - The company aim is "to allow you to focus on delivering your application to your customers while we handle the operations side: providing computing as a reliable service."

Enomaly - see Enomalism

Enomalism - Founded in November 2005 by Enomaly Inc, Enomalism - a so-called "Elastic Computing" platform - focuses on "solving the cost and complexity for enterprises that run large technical server infrastructures." Enomalism's flavor of cloud computing simplifies IT management as well as increases efficiencies of system resources. "IT administrators no longer need to install software and manually set up all the systems, but may instead use management software do this. Resources are used more efficiently because computers can be consolidated to achieve more tasks. This ensures that underutilized systems do not sit idle."

Eucalyptus

eVapt - Claims to enable "usage based monetization (instant SaaS metering) for SaaS and Cloud Computing vendors."

EyeOS -

FlexiScale - The brainchild of CEO Tony Lucas, FlexiScale is a flexible, scalable, automated hosting platform ("Cloud Computing On-Demand").

Force.com - see Salesforce.com

Fortress ITX

G.ho.st

GigaSpaces - Founded in 2000, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia, GigaSpaces allows businesses and developers "to predictably scale on-line systems under any peak demand, guarantee real-time performance under any data processing load and seamlessly leverage the economies of scale offered by virtual computing environments such as clouds and grids."

GoGrid/ServPath - Launched in 2006 as ServePath's latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, "delivers true 'Control in the Cloud' by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting." In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

Google - Without a doubt 'the elephant in the cloud' - According to this well-researched article, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing.

gOS - Founded in early 2007, Good OS is an operating system software company based in Silicon Valley, California, USA and Taipei, Taiwan. Its mission is: "to enable cloud computing through software."

Grid Dynamics - Yechnology consultancy that helps customers "architect, design and deliver business systems that handle peak loads, scale on demand and always stay up - using the latest advances in grid and cloud computing."

Hadoop - See Apache Hadoop

Heroku - According to the San Francisco-based company's founders, "Heroku means never thinking about hosting or servers again." In May 2008 they raised a $3 million round of funding for their online deployment system for Ruby on Rails apps. Heroku is a Y! Combinator start-up.

Hosting.com

HP

Hyperic - Founded in 2004, Hyperic provides complete, easy-to-use monitoring and management software for all types of web applications, including hosting it in the cloud via its CloudStatus dashboard currently in beta.

IBM - IBM approaches cloud computing "from the inside out" as it describes it. This means that Big Blue's focus is on building the most secure, efficient and resilient infrastructure for today's organizations, and building the cloud experience as part of that infrastructure. With more than a dozen Blue Cloud Computing Centers worldwide, IBM provides cloud services, ready for use, designed to assist organizations in proving a cloud experience for their constituents. In addition, IBM is the premier company to help build an organization's private cloud, or leverage any of the many IT services that are today provided by IBM through cloud computing, like Capacity on Demand, or the IBM Information Protection Services.

iCloud

IMOD - see Kaavo

Intel - Intel believes in Open Cloud Standards and one commentator believes there is a strong correlation between how fast cloud computing can proliferate and how well Intel plays its role to lead the open cloud solutions at IaaS and PaaS layers.

Interoute - Europe's largest and most advanced fibre optic network, the Interoute platform operates as effectively Europe's largest privately owned cloud.

iTricity

Joyent - The Joyent platform, which "enables teams to effectively communicate and collaborate with email, calendaring, contacts, file sharing, and other shared applications," already serves billions of Web pages every month and helped LinkedIn scale to 1 billion page views per month. Self-described as an "On-Demand Computing" provider, Joyent has developed, built and scaled some of the earliest Ruby on Rails applications – and as a result, developed a world-class infrastructure, a methodology around how to deploy and scale (both up and down) Rails applications.

JumpBox - Describes itself as a supplier of "Instant Infrastructure." Specifically, it is a ready-to-deploy virtual computer that contains a pre-configured instance of an application.

Juniper Networks -

Kaavo - provides a platform for managing distributed applications in the clouds. Kaavo's core product, Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD), "makes it easier for individuals and businesses to implement on-demand infrastructure and middleware and run secure and scalable web services and applications." The Kaavo philosophy is that taking a top down application-centric approach of managing infrastructure and middleware makes it easy to fully automate application lifecycle management.

Kadient -

Keynote Systems - Long a player in the SaaS space, in 2009 Keynote opened its cloud infrastructure and offered any Web team free access to KITE (Keynote Internet Testing Environment), its product for testing and analyzing the performance of Web applications across the Internet cloud. With a Web application's performance depending on a variety of clouds' infrastructures, ad servers and other third party content, potential pitfalls grow exponentially and Keynote contends understandably that "it's more important than ever for Internet companies to test and measure applications to ensure a superior end user experience." With KITE, companies have free access to Keynote's cloud infrastructure and a tool to test and monitor their applications from cities all over the world.

Layered Technologies - Offers virtualization and cloud computing systems.

LinkedIn - see Joyent

LongJump - The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution that LongJump offers is described by the company as "an on-demand platform for creating and delivering business applications to manage data, streamline collaborative processes and provide actionable analysis." The company claims that the LongJump platform has "extensive features around security access, data analysis and visualization, and process automation – all on the web."

Meeza - Qatar-based, Meeza is currently the main Cloud Services Provider within Middle East North Africa region.

Mezeo Software - Houston-based, privately funded software solution provider that has created what it calls "the industry's first deployable, white label cloud storage platform, enabling service providers to quickly and efficiently enter the cloud storage market" (Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform).

Microsoft - According to this recent article - "Microsoft's Cloud Vision is Coming Together" - Redmond's Cloud Platform vision is coming together. "Look for more information at PDC2008!" writes Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelist John C. Stame.

Morgan Stanley -

MorphExchange

Netsuite

Ning

Nirvanix - Provider of an enterprise cloud offering that offers companies with more than 5TBs of data a highly scalable storage and delivery platform, Nirvanix has already raised more than $18 million in funding from world-class investors including Intel Capital. The company's customers include Fortune 50, media and entertainment and innovative Web 2.0 customers.

Novell - The recently-announced Novell Cloud Security Service "enables cloud service providers and Software-as-a-Service vendors to ensure their offerings meet the strict security and compliance standards required by global businesses."

OpenNebula - OpenNebula is a widely used open-source tool for the efficient, dynamic and scalable management of VMs within datacenters (private clouds) involving a large amount of virtual and physical servers. It supports Xen, KVM and on-demand access to Amazon EC2. The tool is being used as core component in several cloud projects, such as RESERVOIR.

OpSource - Delivers a complete Web operations solution for software as a service and web companies. Its OpSource Cloud is currently in private beta, aimed at providing every user with a "Virtual Private Cloud" within the public cloud.

Oracle - The world's largest business software company believes that Private Clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can mitigate concerns about security, quality of service, integration, compliance, lock-in, and long term costs of public clouds by giving the enterprise greater control.

OTOY

Parallels - Founded in 1999, Parallels optimizes computing by providing virtualization and automation software to businesses and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Parallels is working closely with a network of ISVs and service providers to enable them to build their cloud computing and software-as-a-service offerings, meeting the needs of end-user organizations of all size. Parallels technology is also used by large enterprises creating their own in-house clouds.

ParaScale - "Cloud storage" involves clustering tens to hundreds of servers together to act as one giant file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput for a variety of applications. ParaScale's software "enables the enterprise or service provider to build enormous storage pools on commodity hardware at an affordable cost."

Penguin Computing - Penguin has launched an HPC cloud called Penguin on Demand (POD). Penguin is targeting researchers, scientists and engineers who need surge capacity for time-critical analyses or can't afford their own HPC cluster.

Platform Computing - Founded in 1992, Platform is a pioneer and global leader in HPC (high-performance computing) and takes the view that there is an intersection between grid computing and cloud computing in that both cloud and grid propose an architecture that masks the complexity of managing thousands of commodity servers from their users.

Q-layer

Qrimp

Quantivo - Claims to be "revolutionizing the Business Intelligence (BI) world by combining Cloud Computing with an innovative and patented 'Affinity Analytics' technology." Company recently won the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal's prestigious Emerging Technology Award in the Cloud Computing category.

Quickbase

Rackspace - Market-leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing services, Rackspace Hosting is "changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT." Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, "integrating the industry's best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable." Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning "Fanatical Support," furthering the company's mission to be one of the world's greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine's 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 43 on the list. Rackspace's portfolio of hosted IT services includes Managed Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Email and Apps.

Red Hat - RH believes that its consistent dedication to open source and open standards will further the success of a strong cloud ecosystem. "By bringing together thousands of Red Hat-certified applications, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization we aim to deliver the next generation of computing architectures, today," says a company spokesman.

Reservoir

Rhomobile - Rhomobile provides RhoHub, which is describes as "the world's first Development-as-a-Service for Mobile." RhoHub provides a cloud-based service for both smartphone app development and hosting of mobile applications.

RightScale - RightScale offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables organizations "to easily deploy and manage business critical applications across multiple clouds with complete control and portability." The RightScale Cloud Management Platform is delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and is available in a range of editions, froma free Developer Edition to Enterprise Editions.

Rollbase

rPath - Founded in 2005, rPath helps organizations "realize the promise and avoid the perils" of cloud computing, "rPath's Cloud Computing Adoption Model provides a pragmatic, actionable, step-by-step framework for achieving measurable benefits now, while laying the foundation for the strategic benefits of a cloud infrastructure over time."

S3 -

SalesForce.com - has a toolkit for cloud computing development, Force.com.

Savvis - Provider of Savvis Cloud Compute, a "right-sized computing environment" launched in February 2009.

ServePath/GoGrid - Launched in 2006 as ServePath's latest growth opportunity, GoGrid, claims the company, "delivers true 'Control in the Cloud' by combining many of the familiar features of dedicated server or managed hosting with the flexibility and scalability of cloud server hosting." In other words, with GoGrid customers can grow production servers in real time to meet demand without affecting their uptime. Provisioning and de-provisioning of servers is all done via the Internet.

SIMtone - Durham, NC based SIMtone has developed and commercialized a 'Universal Cloud Computing Platform' that allows network operators and businesses "to host, manage and quickly provision any cloud-hosted services, and ubiquitously deliver them to zero-touch terminals that can be standalone, low cost hardware appliances, or software terminals usable via browsers or on PCs, thin clients and mobile devices."

Skytap - Seattle-based Skytap's goal is "to make serving up virtual machines over the internet as ubiquitous as delivering HTML to a browser." Its initial product offering, Skytap Virtual Lab, is a hosted, on-demand service for virtual lab automation and management.

SLA@SOI - SLA@SOI's vision is "to create a business-ready service-oriented infrastructure that will empower the service economy in a flexible and dependable way."

SmugMug - Founded 5 years ago, SmuMug calls itself "the ultimate in photosharing" since it offers unlimited storage and stores backup copies of each photo in multiple datacenters. With more than 315,000 paying customers already, and 288,000,000 photos, SmugMug is a QED of cloud computing.

SOASTA - No one who heard SOASTA speak at AJAXWorld in 2007 about best practices in AJAX testing will be surprised to hear that Web testing is also at the heart of its CloudTest offering, a Cloud-based testing solution "built on the cloud to enable application testing in the cloud."

StrikeIron IronCloud

Sun - In July 2008, David Douglas was named Senior Vice President of Network.com, Sun's offering based on the Sun Grid project. Douglas is now the head of Sun's overall cloud computing initiative and his group now reports directly to Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz. ""We continue to see huge potential in the cloud space," commented Douglas as the news of his appointment was announced.

Terremark - Offering 'Enterprise Cloud' services that "let you control a resource pool of processing, storage and networking and allow you to deploy server capacity on demand," Terremark as years of experience managing complex, mission critical infrastructures and applications for leading companies around the world.

The GridLayer - see Layered Technologies

ThinkGrid -

Unisys -The Unisys cloud computing strategy enables clients to choose the type of data center computing services that best meet their business objectives, from self-managed, automated IT infrastructures to Unisys-managed cloud services. Using Unisys services and technologies, organizations can create a private cloud within their data centers, a public cloud through secure Unisys-managed cloud solutions, or a hybrid cloud solution combining the best of both private and Unisys-managed cloud services.

Univa UD - Univa UD is a leader and innovator in software solutions for cloud enablement. The company's software suite includes infrastructure management and service governance for cloud and HPC environments and spans all 3 cloud scenarios: public, private and hybrid. "With Univa products, companies can build private internal compute clouds, create clusters in a public cloud, or span the two by cloudbursting from an internal to external environment on demand."

vCloud - see VMware

Vertica - Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud is "an on-demand version of Vertica's blazingly fast, grid-enabled columnar database hosted on Amazon's EC2."

Virtual Workspaces

VMware - A virtualization leader and pioneer, VMware has effectively delivered the technology that makes today's clouds possible. With the pervasive presence of VMware in many accounts, enterprises are leveraging their virtualization infrastructure to build internal clouds, and leverage technology like VMotion to flex resources for DR or test and development to external clouds, as needed. Its vCloud initiative, says the company, "offers users of all sizes this robust and reliable platform, support for any application on or off site, and choice from over 100 service providers worldwide who deliver the cloud on VMware."

WorkXpress - PaaS pioneer WorkXpress released v 2.0 of its flagship customizable software platform in April 2009. "WorkXpress 2.0 is the world's most functional PaaS (Platform as a Service)" claimed the Company in an accompanying statement.

Yahoo!

Zetta - Provider of what it describes as "best-in-class NAS storage in the cloud." Zetta's founders are the team who commercialized the web as the leaders of Netscape.

Zimory - A spin-off of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Zimory "enables dynamic, on-demand movement of applications automatically between servers in one or many locations, as well as creating the world's first marketplace for computing capacity." Based in Berlin, the company develops a dynamic infrastructure solution for data centers to create a modern Adaptive Cloud Infrastructure - "improving flexibility and reducing operating costs."

Zoho

Zuora - With its "Powering the Business Cloud" slogan, Zuora has planted its flag firmly atop the Cloud Billing mountain. The company describes its Z-Commerce Platform as "the first commerce platform for cloud developers."

© 2008 SYS-CON Media Inc.

Cloud Storageを分類する手法の提案。

 

HPC、Cloud、Enterprise、Applianceの4つのカテゴリーに分類

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The Cloud Quadrant

by Robin Harris on Monday, 28 September, 2009

Thinking about cloud
Amid the hype and glitz on cloud storage and computing it can be difficult to separate the essential from the transitory. The word scale is abused; APIs are debated; business models are in flux: and new varieties of cloud infrastructure are being developed or marketed every month.

To get a handle on the concept I've developed a descriptive model that may help move the conversation forward.

The essential elements of cloud are scale and management. Everything else is negotiable – including cost.

Putting those on the axes of a graph gives a simple visual picture of the scale and management environment.

Scale is reasonably self-explanatory: single namespace; single management domain; reasonable upward performance increment per incremental dollar investment.

Management is perhaps more complex. Researchers at IBM have long championed the idea of autonomic — self managing — systems. At the highest level cloud systems require an autonomic management paradigm: there's just too much gear and too many failures for people to fix. The infrastructure must be self healing, load balancing, and fault and disaster tolerant.

These are qualitative not quantitative metrics. However it is worth exploring why the other quadrants are named as they are.

• Appliance. This quadrant shares many of the same self management capabilities of the cloud but on a smaller scale. Today we see these systems popular with large volume imaging applications in medical and media production.
• Enterprise. Enterprises don't have the luxury of a few primary application types. They need systems that adapt to a wide variety of legacy application requirements. In addition they face considerable regulatory and legal constraints that make tuning the storage infrastructure imperative.
• High-Performance Computing. HPC systems need to be highly tunable to meet specialized application requirements. When an application takes days or weeks to run even on few extra percentage points of performance out of the system translates into hours or days saved.

Vendors on the quad
In the second chart I've made a first-order approximation of where various systems set on the cloud quadrant. These positions are not cast in concrete or even, at this point, Jell-O. Nor should readers assume that any quadrant is superior to any other in a marketing or technical sense.

I ask readers and vendors for their help in creating a more comprehensive cloud quadrant. There are vendors that I know I left out and other vendors who may feel that they are scalability or management capabilities are wrongly estimated.

I expect to do more work on this in the weeks ahead. It may prove helpful in sorting out some of the currently not well differentiated scalable storage and compute markets.

The StorageMojo take
There is no doubt that Internet-based storage and computing represents a major paradigm shift, not unlike that of PC networks in the 80s and client server computing. In all of these shifts the imagined long-term benefits have far outweighed the immediate and very real costs.

But cloud computing is different: it is the first pay-as-you-go infrastructure. Every user can look at the price tag and make an economic decision based on real costs. In the 80s it took years for good data on the costs and benefits of PC networks to emerge. Good thing too, since CFOs would have screamed.

Tens of thousands of companies and individuals are adopting cloud today based on benefits they see and costs they pay. Yes, there is much hype around cloud computing. But the customers are voting with their dollars and that tells us there is a real economic advantage in cloud computing as well.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

Related posts:

1. Cloud storage is a component The cloud
2. Private clouds won't fly Massive ec
3. Clouds over Berkeley: the RADLab reviews cloud computing pt. 1 Cloud comp
4. Cloud, sand and scale And commer
5. Clouds over Berkeley: the RADLab reviews cloud computing pt. 2 In our las

Moving Legacy Applications to the Amazon Cloud

企業内のアプリケーションをAmazon EC2に移植するツールを提供するベンダ。

Queplix社

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Enterprises can rewrite legacy applications and move them to the Amazon cloud with a new product from a vendor called Queplix.

Cloud Computing Definitions and Solutions

Queplix recently announced QueCloud, an upgrade to a previous product that helped companies move old applications into virtualized servers based on VMware or Xen. Starting in Q4, QueCloud will support deployment of existing applications to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud.

The target market includes companies that have invested loads of money into legacy applications that are so old they aren't supported by the software vendor, says Queplix CTO and founder Steve Yaskin. Converting PeopleSoft or Siebel applications is one possibility.

"We take legacy systems and move them into the cloud," Yaskin says. "The end result is a brand new application that looks, behaves and maintains workflows just like the old legacy system but there's essentially nothing left from the legacy system. We're not using its code."

Slideshow: Products of the week 

The process takes a couple of weeks and has a few steps. A crawler searches through the database to extract information such as business entities, metadata, user IDs and permissions, and builds new user interface screens. Second, a designer module allows administrators to customize the look and feel of the system and perhaps make improvements over the original user interface. Finally, QueCloud deploys the workload to Amazon as an application that will seem almost identical to users, but code has been replaced by Java code.

"It looks, feels and behaves just like the old legacy systems, but it's running from the cloud," Yaskin says.

The rewritten application for the cloud will support advanced features such as search, auditing, data compliance, and automatic alerts for security breaches, he says.

The price would likely limit QueCloud to large enterprises. Yaskin says the cost ranges from $150,000 to nearly $1 million depending on the nature of the legacy system and how many applications the customer wants to convert. The price can still be much less than the support fees enterprises pay to maintain out-of-date systems, according to Yaskin.

Cloud hype is deafening -- and will only get worse

Once deployed to the cloud, the software would be supported by Queplix and the underlying infrastructure would be supported by the cloud vendor.

Queplix has about a dozen customers with big names such as John Deere, Avaya, Citrix, Home Depot, HP, Honda and Sony Ericsson. Customers have used Queplix technology to convert legacy apps into virtualized environments, but have not yet moved any production applications into the cloud, Yaskin says. Some of them are piloting cloud deployments, however.

Queplix, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., was founded in 2004 but is still "operating as a startup," according to Yaskin. The company just closed a $1.5 million Series A financing round from Javelin Venture Partners to expand its push into the cloud and enterprise search markets. In March, the company unveiled a search product called QueSearch based on the same crawler technology used in QueCloud.

Mozy Inks Deal to Bring Cloud-based Backup to China

EMCのクラウドストレージ事業である、MozyがChina Telecomとパートナーシップを組み、中国市場向けのサービスを開始する、と発表。  アジア進出が促進される気配。

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Mozy, the online backup service from EMC-owned Decho, and broadband provider China Telecom said today they've forged a partnership to bring cloud-based services to China, opening up another revenue stream for China's largest broadband provider. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

The two will offer a cloud-based online backup service, called eYun, that uses Mozy's technology to help Chinese web users manage and protect their personal information in case of a computer crash or virus attack. China, with over 330 million users, has the world's largest Internet market. China Telecom isn't the first broadband provider to offer online backup services; Verizon and Comcast released similar offerings earlier this year. But they typically carry a higher price tag than those from pure-play online backup companies like Mozy and Carbonite.

Shades of the Blitz! Cloud Wars Loom Over Washington

Googleが米国政府向けのクラウド事業に本格的に力を入れていく、と表明している。

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For its next trick, the unquenchable, super-ambitious Google is gonna try taking over the US government.

On Tuesday, after the first federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled Apps.gov, a thinly populated, GSA-managed, almost completely salesforce.com- and Google-dominated web store where federal agencies are supposed to go to get GSA-sanctioned cloud applications and "coming soon" infrastructure services as well as free software like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, Google said that by next year it would have a government-specific version of Google Apps that meet security requirements and complies with the Federal Information security Management Act (FISMA) and such.

It's also working on a government cloud, set for debut in 2010, that promises to keep the data inside the United States of America operated by people with security clearances.

Then there's Google for the Public Sector, the company's own shop for tools and advice on exploiting Google Earth, Google Maps and YouTube.

The company is currently working on FISMA certification for Google Apps and is reportedly close; its government data centers will be next. The validation could really rev its engines.

According to a blog by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, GSA CIO Casey Coleman figures 45% of federal computing could go to the cloud, which means that Amazon and Microsoft and IBM, at least, which didn't seem to make the Apps.gov cut, are gonna want a piece of this action.

You can count on it there are going to be cloud wars over Washington.

Google's widgetry will be targeted at all levels of government: federal, state and local so they'll have to try to standardize on stuff like background checks.

So far Google doesn't have any takers, though it's supposed to be talking to government folk, and pricing is still up in the air, or at least hasn't been discussed publicly, and issues like privacy and security haven't really been completely worked out.

However, the cloud-bewitched Obama administration has mandated that agencies adopt certain cloud services by 2011 in an effort to save money. According to Kundra, "We spend over $77 billion on information technology. We serve over 300 million customers across the country with our 10,000 systems. But what we've been doing is building data center after data center and frankly it has driven the costs across the board and has led to a doubling of energy consumption."

The cloud, as opposed to the current fashion of agencies having their own systems, in some cases many systems, is supposed to make government procurement more efficient and cheaper. It's unclear what agencies that already have software-as-a-service system are supposed to do.

The White House is supposed to seek funding for pilot cloud projects in next year's budget that define what existing workloads can be offloaded and what new services can be built on the cloud. The programs are expected to see lightweight applications rolled out to users.

Savvis Team Up With Reflex to Deliver a Secure Cloud

Savvis社が自社の新しいCloud Computing事業を発表したが、Reflex Systems社とのパートナーシップを通して、Reflex Virtualization Management Centerという製品を採用した事が発表されている。 

 

同製品はSavvis Project Cloudのセキュリティ強化に寄与する機能を提供する、との事。

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Savvis (www.savvis.net), an outsourced Internet infrastructure services provider for enterprises, has selected Reflex Virtualization Management Center (www.reflexsystems.com/products/vmc) from software developer Reflex Systems (www.reflexsystems.com) to secure Savvis' next-generation cloud infrastructure solutions, dubbed "Project Spirit."

Savvis recently previewed its Project Spirit at VMworld, showing a cloud platform that the company says will power the industry's first enterprise-class virtual private data center with multi-tiered service capabilities.

 

Reflex VMC will provide Savvis Project Spirit Cloud customers with an enterprise virtual firewall, which performs virtual machine to virtual machine blocking via kernel-level technology based on VMsafe partner program from virtualization solutions provider VMware (www.vmware.com). Furthermore, Reflex VMC will enable joint customers to manage policies in the virtual environment through an API designed cloud interface.

 

Savvis selected Reflex VMC based on the solution's depth of security and breadth of system management capabilities, which have traditionally been barriers for enterprises planning to adopt external cloud strategies. 

"The dynamic nature of Cloud infrastructure demands innovative solutions to meet the unique security and management challenges that the environment presents," Savvis security and virtualization technologies vice president Ken Owens said in a statement. "Reflex VMC meets the challenge and provides this functionality at the core of the infrastructure, giving us the security and management solutions we need without impacting performance."

Extending beyond the simple application deployment designs available in many cloud service offerings today, Project Spirit focuses on complete virtual data center provisioning, according to Savvis, making it the industry's most feature-rich cloud delivery platform for enterprises. It expects to launch the new offering in beta within the year.

"We're pleased to provide enabling virtual security and management technologies through Reflex VMC to assist Savvis in serving their enterprise cloud customers," Reflex Systems chief executive officer Pete Privateer said in a statement. "Reflex VMC provides proven innovation and award-winning features that ensure success for organizations implementing cloud infrastructure strategies."

Reflex, Savvis and VMware will be presenting "Enabling Cloud Computing for your Enterprise," a joint webinar on Tuesday, October 6, at 2pm ET (11am PT).

Report: Yahoo Seeks Buyer for Hosting Unit

Yahooが自社の新しいコンシューマ主体の事業戦略に合致しない事業をいづれは売却する、という噂どおり、自社のSmall Businessホスティング事業を$350M〜$500Mの価格で売りに出した。

 

これを機に、ホスティング事業者の市場のM&A活動が活発化する可能性も示唆されている。 

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Does web hosting knit together neatly with news, search and advertising sales in a business plan for an Internet portal? That's a question that has come up frequently in recent years as Yahoo has gone through several phases of redefinition, prompting speculation that the company would eventually divest its large web hosting operation.

It looks like "eventually" has arrived. Reuters reports that Yahoo is seeking to sell its Yahoo Small Business hosting service, and is seeking a sale price of $350 million to $500 million. The move is part of a broader strategic refocusing that also includes a major marketing campaign that is expected to be unveiled today by CEO Carol Bartz. The company is said to be selling off assets that don't reflect its new consumer focus.

Yahoo Small Business operates one of the largest U.S. shared hosting hosts, with about 2.2 million sites, according to recent data. That includes its online store, one of the leading turnkey e-commerce offerings for small businesses. That base of e-commerce customers is a valuable asset at a time when profit margins are being squeezed and pundits see cloud computing emerging as a competitive threat.

New Simple Cloud Storage API Launched

PHP/Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid と Nirvanix が共同で、クラウドコンピューティング上のプログラミングAPIの共通しようを発表した。

PHPを軸にしたAPIで、クラウド上でRESTやSOAP等の上位レイヤーのAPIを開発するのが主たる用途。 

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New Simple Cloud Storage API Launched

PHP/Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix have launched a new low level cloud API for PHP called the "Simple Cloud API". The API can best be described as low level storage focused API (An API for other API's). In a sense it's a way to create other higher level programmatic API interfaces such as REST or SOAP using an easy, yet portable PHP programming environment. It allows you to easily interact with a variety of cloud interfaces including support for File Storage, Document Storage, and Simple Queue services. The API is not a web service; it is an API that exposes common operations in application services offered by different vendors, making it easier for PHP developers to build 'cloud native' applications.

According to the website, "The Simple Cloud API is here to bring cloud technologies to PHP and the PHP philosophy to the cloud. With it, developers can start writing scalable and highly available applications that are still portable. If you're looking for code to start playing around with immediately, you'll find the first file storage, document storage, and simple queue interfaces."

Interestingly the goal of API is not be a standard, but instead to foster an open source community that makes it easier for developers to use cloud application services by abstracting insignificant API differences. Another goal of this initiative is to define interfaces to be implemented as a new Zend Framework component called 'Zend_Cloud'. The Zend Framework will provide a repository of php appplication to host code for the Zend_Cloud.

Check out the project at http://www.simplecloud.org

Cloud Sprawl Too? Oh No!

Cloud Sprawlと呼ばれるCLoud COmputingを過度に導入した際に発生する問題について言及

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It seems like the enterprise bugaboo of the decade is about to strike again. We've heard of server sprawl and then virtual sprawl -- now get ready for cloud sprawl.

But before I get too facetious, let me say that this is a potentially serious problem that can place a great deal of enterprise data at risk.

As described by Jamie Erbes, CTO of HP's Software and Solutions division, cloud sprawl is an outgrowth of what many enterprises are already experiencing with SaaS. With users across multiple divisions increasingly turning to the cloud for their computing needs, critical data could wind up lost once the project, or even the users themselves, are no longer active. She describes it as a shadow sourcing problem, which can best be addressed by updating policy procedures and deploying more cloud-aware management systems. Hopefully, both of these remedies will be forthcoming from HP.

Other organizations are starting to wake up to cloud sprawl as well. Over at Accenture Technology Labs, the focus is on making the internal architecture more like the external cloud, according to Director of Development Joseph F. Tobolski. In this way, management capabilities can extend across compute resources wherever they reside, while the enterprise maintains the flexibility and scalability that business conditions require.

Another player is newcomer Xangati, which recently released the AppMonitor suite that aims to improve virtual machine conflicts and sprawl issues without traditional agents or system probes. Although its approach is proprietary, the company claims it can resolve performance issues in half the time of traditional systems, and can even operate as virtualization and cloud services shift formerly static data architectures in new directions.

One of the reasons why cloud sprawl has stayed under the radar for so long is that much of the discussion has centered around "the cloud," according to The Channel Insider's Lawrence Walsh. But the fact is that there are likely to be many clouds, each of which will require unique browser sessions and credentials for various services. That means organizations could find themselves deluged with service contracts, SLAs and conflicting performance metrics.

Clearly, one way that cloud service and infrastructure providers could alleviate this problem is provide a means to purge their systems of inactive data on a regular basis, with adequate notification to the client that this is being done, of course. But even then, it will add another management burden to IT because they will be the ones to have to figure out what the data is and whether it is worth saving.

Ultimately, though, the cloud takes the problem of sprawl to a whole new level. Physical or virtual resources can be easily consolidated with the comfort that data is being preserved in-house. The cloud moves that data somewhere else, and it may not be quite so easy to get it back once the job is done.

ConnectWise Acquires ConnexIT

Professional Service Automationの技術をもつSaaSベンダ、ConnectWise社が、同事業のCoreConnex社を買収、と発表。 

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TAMPA, Fla., Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- ConnectWise, the leading SaaS provider of professional service automation (PSA) applications, today announced it has acquired the PSA assets of CoreConnex Inc., a provider of business intelligence and systems to VARs, MSPs and IT service companies. ConnectWise increases its user base and adds even more functionality to its impressive product line consisting of sales force automation, scheduling, service management, invoicing and reporting tools.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090304/FL78680LOGO )

In the competitive category of Professional Service Automation (PSA), both ConnectWise and CoreConnex have earned awards and customer loyalty. ConnectWise, founded in 1982, has more than 30,000 customers worldwide and is the well-established leader in its market. CoreConnex was established in 2005 and partners with numerous MSP and CRM providers that deliver business platforms using a cloud/SaaS model.

"Despite the most challenging economic times in recent memory, ConnectWise has grown exponentially in the past few quarters. Acquisitions that add to our market share, community, knowledge and support network make good business sense for us at this time," said Arnie Bellini, ConnectWise CEO. "CoreConnex offers technology, business and human resources that will bring value to ConnectWise users and their bottom lines and we will continue to investigate other potential acquisitions, including companies like AutoTask."

"The trend in our industry is toward greater consolidation, interoperability and cooperation, and ConnectWise has recognized this and leveraged its position as the recognized dominant player," said Frank Coker, president and CEO of CoreConnex. "We look forward to the next steps in this agreement and to the future development of complementary technologies that serve our combined customer base."

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

About ConnectWise

ConnectWise is the leading SaaS provider of professional service automation (PSA) applications designed exclusively for technology consultants, integrators and developers. More than 30,000 IT solution providers rely on ConnectWise to more efficiently integrate key business operations across their enterprises, from business development and project management to client services and billing. ConnectWise technology enables IT companies to drive greater accountability, operational efficiency, profitability, and tighter systems integration. Visit http://www.connectwise.com for more information or call 813-463-4760.

    CONTACT AGENCY:     Mark Smith     JPR Communications     818-884-8282     marks@jprcom.com     Skype: jprmark 

SOURCE ConnectWise

Internal external private public hybrid virtual cloud

Rightscale社の考えているPrivate Cloudの概念の説明。

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Internal external private public hybrid virtual cloud

I'd like an external private hybrid cloud, dry, with whole milk, please!

Enterprises rise to the cloud, terminology takes off… As if we didn't have enough cloud confusion already. But after some thinking it's not all bad news, some of the terms do make sense. While many of the benefits associated with the cloud are independent of cloud type – internal, external, private, public – the type of cloud does determine regulatory compliance, security and financial benefits. The cloud end-user mostly shouldn't have to care, but to IT these are important considerations.

Note that I'm exclusively talking about infrastructure clouds (IaaS) here, like Amazon EC2, so all this is orthogonal to the the SaaS, vs. Platform cloud (PaaS), vs. Infrastructure Cloud (IaaS) terminology axis.

Many of the benefits of the cloud to central IT are independent of the exact nature of the cloud:

• Automation increases reliability and system administrators' efficiency
• Self provisioning by end users reduces IT menial labor
• Cost reduction by homogenizing and simplifying the infrastructure

But when we get to regulatory, security and financial benefits internal/external and public/private cloud types come into play. Let me try to define:

• An internal cloud is located in the enterprise datacenter and it owns the assets which are capitalized
• An external cloud is located at a service provider and charges are expensed
• A private cloud is dedicated to an organization, it's "single tenant" in that sense (but that's a tricky nomenclature because a private cloud may be used by many internal tenants within the organization)
• A public cloud is shared across many organizations that don't even know about each other

Several combinations of the above make sense and here are some example:

• An internal private cloud could be a Eucalyptus or (future) vCloud implementation in the datacenter of a large enterprise
• An external private cloud could be a service provider, like perhaps IBM dedicating a number of racks in their facilities for a cloud they operate on an enterprise's behalf
• An external public cloud is what the cloud started as with Amazon EC2 and now emulated by others like RackSpace
• An internal public cloud doesn't make much sense to me, but I'm sure we'll see some, perhaps it can make sense for renting out unused capacity, who knows…

This nomenclature turns out to be useful in teasing out the benefits of these various types of clouds. For public vs. private clouds the two main distinguishing factors are isolation and elasticity. In a private cloud it is easier to draw a hard boundary around the servers, the storage, and the network used by an organization's cloud resources. This may have advantages from a security compliance and audit point of view. On the flip side, public clouds will tend to have more elasticity than private clouds because of the increased scale and ability to balance across more disparate types of uses. The elasticity is a very important cloud characteristic because it underlies a number of the end-user benefits.

Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an interesting in-between the strict public and private definitions. The VPC provides increased isolation between a VPC's resources and those of other users, but Amazon isn't very clear on the exact nature of this increased isolation. At the same time the VPC does not compromise elasticity and cost-effectiveness, which is very important. Werner Vogels argues that without the elasticity it's not a cloud.

The three main distinguishing benefits of internal vs. external clouds are about control, the nature of the costs and cloud locations. By outsourcing the cloud infrastructure to a service provider the typical cap-ex costs of computing infrastructure can be turned into variable costs that scale relative to the actual use of resources. As more and more service providers offer clouds across the globe it is also increasingly easy to place compute resources where they are needed, whether for latency reasons or for regulatory purposes. Internal clouds are bound to where the enterprise has or can summon physical resources.

That leaves the word 'hybrid'. At RightScale we've been using it to denote hybrid cloud uses where an organization makes use of different types of clouds, which is something we believe will be very common. Given the large application portfolios in many enterprises some will undoubtedly be good candidates for credit-card based self-provisioning in external public clouds while others will remain under close scrutiny of IT in internal private clouds for a long time. This type of hybrid use is where the RightScale service is very effective at providing a seamless experience across the many clouds.

While all the concerns around the internal / external / private / public nature of a cloud is interesting, it is important not to loose track of the fact that a cloud is a means, not an end. The most important thing is to deliver the benefits of the cloud to its end users, those who will launch servers in the cloud and use the cloud on a daily basis. In the enterprise space this includes many constituencies across the organization outside of central IT thanks to the fact that the cloud moves the provisioning closer to the end user. Developers can launch dev servers in the cloud when they need them and shut them down again when they're done. Test engineers can launch whole clusters for test runs and they go away automatically at the end of the run. Operations engineers can set up staging systems for short periods to engineer the roll out of the next release. Marketing support engineers can launch demo systems for events or important prospects, and in general the various business units are in more direct control of their compute resources. All these users are outside of central IT.

The cloud end user benefits I see in the enterprise settings:

• Self-provisioning by end users so they can decide when, what, and how much.
• Increased flexibility and reduced planning thanks to the on-demand nature of the cloud
• Reduced costs thanks to fewer idle servers and economies of scale and commoditization
• Increased operational efficiency thanks to more automation from management platforms like RightScale

It's important to note that none of the end-user benefits are directly related to whether it's a private, public, internal, or external cloud. End users should care about the elasticity and on-demand nature of the cloud as well as the automation offered by cloud management services like RightScale.

Well, while writing this rather long blog entry the different terms have actually started to grow on me. They do make sense in the right context. But what I am left with is the worry that everything cloud is becoming yet more complex when one of the fundamental benefits of the cloud is simplicity and standardization. The need to simplify IT was also one of the top messages delivered by VMware CEO Paul Maritz at VMworld this year. We have to continue simplifying and standardizing clouds and cloud application architectures at the same time as the forces of enterprise IT try to pull it all in thousand different directions.

Posted in cloud computing

RightScale Blog / Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:21:37 GMT

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US Federal Government Launches Apps.Gov

米国政府機関、GSA(General Services Agency) がスタートした政府初のCloud Computingサイト。 

 

非常に使いやすいインタフェースが評価を受けている一方、新規ベンダーが登録する手順がまだ明確になっていない、という事と、現在GoogleとSalesforceが殆どを占めている状況がどれだけ続くのか、というところが気になる。

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US Federal Government Launches Apps.Gov

Big news on the federal government cloud computing initiative front today with the launch of Apps.Gov. The site outlines several cloud service areas including business Apps, Productivity Apps, Cloud IT Services and Social Media Apps. What I found most interesting was upon first glance the vast majority of the services offered were from salesforce.com and a few from Google. Searches for Microsoft, IBM and Amazon resulted in no results. Also notable is the social media section which includes a few interesting choices including Scribd and SlideShare, yet none the major social media players are included.

As an infrastructure guy, the coming soon section for Cloud IT Services was particularly intriguing outling several cloud related infrastructure services that will be coming in the near future. Those outlined include;

Cloud storage
Get scalable storage of your data on the cloud rather than on your own dedicated servers.

Software development
Software development tools available on the cloud.

Virtual machines
The processing power that you need for your website or application on the cloud.

Web hosting
Hosting of your web applications on the cloud - 24x7.

One question I had was how these cloud computing services are provisioned using Apps.gov. The FAQ sheds a little more light on this saying: "A strategic assessment as to how your agency can benefit by using cloud computing services should be conducted. Browse Apps.gov to view the cloud services that are available. Services will continuously be added to Apps.gov. Business and Productivity applications (various cloud software as a service) and Cloud IT Infrastructure as a Service (cloud storage, hosting, and virtual machines) in most cases are offered as a monthly or even hourly use service. Billing for these services is typically monthly, based upon use, and may require close monitoring of your monthly purchase card spending limits. Since cloud offerings under Business and Productivity Applications as well as Cloud IT Services are products and services currently offered under GSA Multiple Award Schedule contracts, ordering activities are to use the procedures in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 8.405-1 where a Statement of Work (SOW) is not required. Ordering activities shall use the procedures in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 8.405-2 when ordering Schedule contract services requiring a Statement of Work."

Notably lacking on the site was how to get your cloud service included in the App Store, let's hope that this App Store will soon be opened up to a broader group, because it currently looks like a Salesforce / Google store.

Red Hat Unveils DeltaCloud Interoperability Broker

RedHat社が発表した、DeltaCloud Interoperability Frameworkと呼ばれる、Cloud間の共通インタフェース戦略についての内容

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Red Hat Unveils DeltaCloud Interoperability Broker

Earlier today, Red Hat announced a new DeltaCloud Interoperability API Framework with the goal of enabling an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts, and applications which can interoperate across the public and private clouds. The open source project is built using Ruby as described as a cloud broker. The broker comes complete with drivers that map the API to both public clouds like EC2, and private virtualized clouds based on VMWare and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM. (Think of it like Red Hat's Libvirt project for cloud service providers)

Deltacloud gives you:

REST API (simple, any-platform access)

Support for EC2, RHEV-M; VMWare ESX, RackSpace coming soon

Backward compatibility across versions, providing long-term stability for scripts, tools and applications

One level up, Deltacloud Portal provides a web UI in front of the Deltacloud API. With Deltacloud Portal, your users can:

View image status and stats across clouds, all in one place

Migrate instances from one cloud to another

Manage images locally and provision them on any cloud

Check out the project at deltacloud.org
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My comments to Red Hat is -- very nicely done. I am looking forward to digging further.

SaaS 70 ? Nextgen Certification for On-demand companies

SAS７０と呼ばれる、SaaSに関わるコンプライアンスについての分析記事

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SaaS 70 – Nextgen Certification for On-demand companies

"A certified lunatic is certified nonetheless" (Dani, 2009).

I was asked by one of my readers (note the plural) to include a chapter on SAS 70 in my upcoming book on SaaS Service Operations. I must admit that I was not sure if he was advocating SAS 70 or he wanted me to discuss certifications for SaaS, since I am not a fan of the former but a promoter of the latter.

Confusion is defining the SaaS market when it comes to certification.
Enterprise IT personnel certainly do not know what questions to ask, so they generate these long RFPs that are very similar to the on-premise RFPs, and they slap on top of it security questions that make their CSO officer feel important with a multitude of acronyms that are either relevant or not. Most on-demand ISVs wouldn't know how to define a 'certified' SaaS either.

The good news is that the customer base is demanding assurances. While a few years back, the concerns were mostly security and mostly compared to on-premise solutions, the market is maturing and now there are a myriad on-demand solutions for every vertical or horizontal aspect of applications.
So how does an IT professional distinguish between the good and better solutions? How can she judge whether the SaaS provider will stand up to its SLAs, whether the data is secured and operational procedures exist and are followed?

SAS 70
The truth is, there are no authoritative answers to these questions nowadays. With a glowing lack of SaaS certification the only default out there is SAS 70.

Statement on Auditing Standards No.70 (SAS 70) is an internationally recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) in 1992. It is used to report on the "processing of transactions by service organizations", which can be done by completing either a Type I or a Type II audit. A SAS 70 Type I is known as "reporting on controls placed in operation", while a SAS 70 Type II is known as "reporting on controls placed in operation" and "tests of operating effectiveness" (http://www.sas70.us.com/what-is/definition-of-sas70.php)

(Disclosure: I have not undergone a SAS 70 audit in the companies I worked for. My knowledge is based on reading and sharing other companies' experiences)

What's good about SAS 70
The fact that SaaS companies want to take the extra (expensive) step to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack, shows a level of maturity and seriousness about their business. SAS 70 requires that you have a set of practices and that you are following them.
This in itself is a big step forward for most SaaS companies – they actually have a set of defined practices.
Sorry, only two short paragraphs on the benefits.

The shortcomings of SAS 70
This audit was not defined for SaaS. It was developed in 1992, years before even ASPs were in vogue. It is a general audit for service organizations and covers a wide range of businesses, from credit processing, to medical insurance and data processing.
There are no specifics for an on-demand software company. Heck, there are no specifics for a software company either.

Please note the language "A SAS 70 audit helps companies meet regulatory compliance…", and "a SAS 70 audit provides an additional layer of accountability…"
Nowhere does is state that it certifies the company at any level, other than the fact that the audit was done.
It reminds me of cosmetic advertizing "makes your skin feel younger" – how very scientific.
There are no recommendations, no standards to meet, no right or wrong. It merely states that you have practices (good or bad) in place, and that you are following them.

As mentioned, the mere fact that there are defined practices exhibits a level of maturity, so I do not belittle the exercise, but there are no provisions in SAS 70 to avoid documenting your bad practices and following them through.

SaaS 70
There is a dire need for a certification program for SaaS companies as the domain matures and SaaS becomes a major component of IT.
IT wants to know that you are a competent service operator, that you are running a tight shop and that the service will be around next Thanksgiving.
I am suggesting a certification program, currently named SaaS 70 (to demonstrate my famous wit), which includes three elements:

• Service Operational Maturity – Has the company defined and implemented practices and procedures for running a robust operation, to ensure that SLAs are met? This would include Change Mgmt, Release Mgmt, Incident mgmt, Event Mgmt, Availability Mgmt, On-boarding, de-provisioning, integration, data retention, etc.

• Security – covering all aspects of password policies, data separation, vulnerability testing, virus protection, privacy, etc.

• Service Continuity – examining the financial viability of the company and what plans are in place to continue providing the service even if the ISV goes belly-up.

Within each component the company will score a level of maturity beyond a pass/fail that comprises coverage, depth, documentation, and tools. And, of course, the report will include recommendations for improvement and scaling up the maturity ladder.

Only with such a specific, SaaS-centric, verifiable and accountable program, will the consumer of these on-demand services know that a company can or cannot meet their expectations.

VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

VMWareとAmazonの競合状況が激化。 それぞれの現在のポジションと、今後の予測についての記事

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VMware vs. Amazon … ROUND ONE … FIGHT!

More and more it's becoming apparent that VMware and Amazon are headed for a serious collision.  Amazon is eager to capture more of the enterprise business market, VMware's bread and butter.  Meanwhile, VMware is actively supporting a new crop of Amazon competitors with its recent vCloud Express release.  More importantly, what perhaps neither have realized or, at least as far I can tell Amazon hasn't realized, is that the battle isn't ultimately about so-called 'public' or 'private' clouds[1], but about standards, de facto or otherwise.

Infrastructure History & Standards
Like railways, the telephone system, or any other kind of infrastructure that supports business today, IT is quickly commoditizing and turning from a competitive advantage into a cost of doing business.  Cloud computing is an accelerator in this process.  As I've asserted before, the 'cloud' is less about technology or where the resources reside and more about a fundamental change in the way that we use and understand IT infrastructure.

I like to think of 'cloud' as a group 'A-HA!' moment, much like the one that happened with other foundational infrastructure changes.  Early in the advent of railroads, trains, track gauges, switching equipment was all custom and had little or no interoperability.  Eventually it became apparent that standards would allow greater aggregate value to all involved.  Nicholas Carr nails it in his book Does IT Matter?:

As was true with railroads and electricity and highways, it is only by becoming a shared and standardized infrastructure that IT will be able to deliver its greatest economic and social benefits, raising productivity and living standards and serving as a platform for a range of new and desirable consumer goods and services.  History reveals that IT needs to become ordinary—needs to lose its strategic importance as a differentiator of companies—if it is to fulfill its potential.

The primary point being here that market demands will essentially force standardization, one way or another.  Of course, we would all like to see open standards, but even de facto standards will work.  This is what's at stake in this battle.

The Contenders & Their Market Positions
It's interesting how two such different businesses can suddenly see themselves at odds, but with a multi-billion dollar future market in cloud computing at stake, it's not surprising that we may see all kinds of players emerge.  Looking at the relative market cap (AMZN @ 36.5B and VMW @ 15.5B) and stock performance of the two tells one story:

VMW vs. AMZN

Digging into this a bit more we can see that the story is a lot bigger than a simple tale of revenues, especially as it relates to enterprise businesses.

Amazon
Amazon (AMZN), as a whole, is roughly 10x the size of VMware (VMW) in both employees and revenue.  The vast majority of this revenue comes from Amazon's online retail business, which is consumer focused, while VMware is almost exclusively focused on large enterprise customers[2].  More telling are the recent 10-Q reports of both companies.

Amazon, unfortunately, does not provide the revenue numbers for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of their reports.  It is bundled into an 'Other' line, which includes a number of Amazon revenue streams.  Their most recent 10-Q reports the North American revenue for 'Other' as 217M for the 6 months ending June 30th, 2009.  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that AWS revenues are half of this number, but it's certainly a wild guess.  Assuming that's the case, the AWS business is a 200M annual business and undoubtedly growing rapidly.  It is very difficult to know what percentage of that revenue is large enterprise customers, but I feel safe concluding it can't be more than 25-35% total.  My conclusion is based on the fact that enterprises are slow to adopt and that most of their current use cases are almost certainly non-production ones like batch processing.

If this is true, Amazon's AWS business for enterprise is unlikely to be more than 70M annually.  This is a very impressive number given that Amazon is not traditionally an enterprise-focused business.  We should give them credit where credit is due.  By all accounts Amazon has generally had a large number of challenges shifting from it's consumer, one-size-fits-all, business model, which is certainly a put-off for large enterprise customers.

VMware
In comparison, VMW's recent 10-Q report shows a healthy 926M in revenues for the 6 months ending June 30th, 2009.  VMware's license revenues dropped pretty significantly from the year before, but annual support licenses made up for it.  Most of this is certainly attributable to the current economic climate and their enterprise customer base.  Given that VMware's customer base is largely enterprise customers, they are a roughly 2B dollar enterprise business.  About half of which is new license sales.

VMware has a long track record of providing tremendous value to enterprise customers, but by most reports, the penetration of virtualization inside the enterprise is still less than 20%.  This is due to a variety of factors, but anecdotally, it appears that virtualization and server consolidation suffers from many of the traditional issues that plague IT initiatives within the enterprise.  McKinsey's cloud report predicted that enterprises, with tremendous effort, could reach virtualization rates of 38%.

Unless perhaps cloud computing, as an operational model change, can completely change the way that IT delivers it's services.

AMZN vs. VMW in the Enterprise
So, while at a glance, Amazon is a bigger business, inside the enterprise VMware is actually a 10x bigger business with relatively low penetration of it's technology and a lot of room to grow.

Now the 100B dollar question: Will enterprise business move outside to public clouds like Amazon OR use VMware and internal private clouds to change the way that IT does business?

It's anyone's guess how this will play out in the long term, but in the short term, we're likely to see both routes taken.  While predicting the long term is outside the scope of this posting, I think the short to medium term fight ("ROUND ONE!") that will directly impact how this plays out is cloud computing standards.

The Standards Collision
It's clear from history that standards combined with infrastructure technology create a transformative opportunity.  While cloud computing has enjoyed some serious traction, we're still early on and standards have not evolved yet.  Amazon and VMware, as standards competitors, are a bit like having two different railroad track gauges.  You won't be able to run the same kind of trains on both sets of track gauge or connect railways based on either together.  Standards matter and making sure we have the same gauge rails everywhere is incredibly important to the rapid adoption of cloud computing[3].

At VMworld, VMware announced vCloud Express including the vCloud API.  The vCloud API was released under a very open license.  One that even allows building a cloud with alternative non-VMware hypervisors that provides this API.  As I mentioned at the time, it seems to me that this is going to drive de facto cloud computing standards.  In fact, VMware's announcement included five new clouds supporting the standard and one very important cloud management vendor (RightScale).  In one fell swoop, VMware provided a standard across five clouds and one vendor.  This is certainly just the beginning.  Without a doubt many more will adopt the vCloud API.  Perhaps most telling of all is that VMware's own cloud infrastructure product isn't even shipping yet.  Once it ships, it will most certainly work with existing VMware products like vSphere and every new enterprise vCloud-based installation will have the same vCloud API.

But what about Amazon's AWS APIs? Could those be a standard too?  They could be, but Amazon has been deliberately vague about the license for it's cloud APIs.  Although certain vendors support AWS APIs, like EUCALYPTUS and OpenNebula, it has not been clear what their legal status is.  This is also why AWS competitors like GoGrid and RackSpace chose to develop their own APIs, when clearly supporting AWS-compatible APIs would have been more desirable.  Will Amazon license their APIs under an open license in response to VMware?  I think the answer is obvious.  Amazon Web Services must open license their cloud APIs or it will be one of the biggest mistakes they have made to date[4].  Clearly, they will make the standard Amazon play and only do the absolute minimum necessary, which likely means an open license on EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud).

When AWS opens the EC2 API it will open the floodgates for folks like EUCALYPTUS, OpenNebula, DynamicOps, VMops, and other cloud vendors, effectively allowing them to compete against vCloud in the enterprise.

In effect, we'll have two major competing cloud standards: the vCloud API and the EC2 API.

What Happens When Worlds Collide?
So, we have VMware moving into Amazon's 'public' cloud territory by enabling AWS competitors, while Amazon is extremely likely to reciprocate by enabling VMware competitors for internal 'private' clouds.  Given that both external public and internal private clouds will see significant growth over the medium term and that there is tremendous value from joining external and internal clouds via standards, the writing is on the wall.

A standard has to win or, at least, dominate.  While Amazon is the 800lb gorilla in the public cloud computing space, VMware has a massive lead in the enterprise.  It really depends on where you think the enterprise is going to go.  Will they put more money into transforming the way IT works via internal clouds or begin to move to external clouds right away?

My bet is that enterprises are going to go for internal clouds before external clouds, at least for the majority of their sensitive and mission critical workloads.  If that's the case then vCloud looks like a good bet and Amazon looks like they could eventually be playing second fiddle as the #1 player in the #2 market.

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[1] 'Private' and 'public' can be confusing terms.  Usually people mean 'internal' clouds when they say 'private'.  But a 'private' cloud could be both 'internal' or 'external'.  I'll mostly try to talk about 'internal private' or 'external public' in this article.
[2] As many of you may know, the prevailing wisdom is that the majority of 'dollars' in IT are spent by large enterprises, not smaller businesses.
[3] Of course, it will probably turn out, like railroad track gauges, that different standards or technology are good for different use cases.
[4] There is another possibility, although seemingly improbable, that Amazon could adopt the vCloud API.

Cloudscaling / Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:00:37 GMT

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