Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

I wrote about Tweet4Yourtee recently and reviewed another of their shirts. Here we have version two, emblazoned with the same Twitter handle (of course). You too can have a fully customized self-aggrandizing t-shirt – just visit their site, pull out your credit card and it’ll be in the mail. So.. what’s to like (and not)?

Hot

• White T shirts are good
• Saves people being embarrassed asking who I am
• 100% Cotton (why would you do anything else?)
• My hometown heros – Wellington to the World!
• Nice use of the Twitter API on their website

Not

• Made in Bangladesh – need I say more?

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I wrote almost a couple of years ago now about MYOB’s (see disclosure statement) first foray into the world of SaaS. I wasn’t overly impressed, saying at the time that:

MYOB has the experience, the money and the clout to bring a product to market with the features that users need. Under this measure MYOB has failed, if it’s true that this has been a five year project, BBO is a failure.

Since then lots has happened – MYOB has been sold to a private equity firm. The product head for BBO, Stuart Bale was poached by (and subsequently let go from) Xero and meanwhile BBO has pretty much stood derelict and orphaned.

Come April MYOB are going to it again and will be releasing their MYOB Live Accounts product. The Sydney Morning Herald have trumpeted about the move but, as is often the way with traditional media, haven’t understood some of the subtleties that give a story context. They also quote MYOB’s CTO saying that the product is built on Microsoft Azure however I have it from a source within MYOB that this is not in fact the case.

So what can we expect form this product? An MYOB reseller newsletter that came across my desk this week gave some minor details – pricing around NZD35, a pared down offering focused on sole traders and the like and leveraging heavily the automatic bank feeds that are Xero’s main differentiator.

I’d expect to see, similar to the previous MYOB SaaS product, an offering that serves the invoicing and expenses parts of the business with little on the “richer” parts of the desktop offering (inventory, financial reporting etc). I’d also expect MYOB to leverage the excellent relationships it has with banks in Australia and New Zealand in order to cut a blow into Xero’s self-proclaimed position as “thought-leader” in this particular space.

I can’t imagine it having any real impact on that other Australasian SaaS vendor Saasu – of the three, the Saasu product is the most fully featured and I’d imagine MYOB’s product would come in well below this in terms of functionality.

Watch this space for a more detailed review once I’ve seen the product.

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Coming from a manufacturing background, and having an understanding of the pressures and imperatives facing manufacturing, I’ve long been excited by Ponoko’s attempts (more on ‘em here) to reinvent manufacturing. The other day I received a note from HubCast who’s seeking to do something similar for printing. According to their PR. HubCast:

changes the way premium-quality print is bought, sold and delivered. HubCast completely automates printing with a simple cloud application that delivers premium print production, competitive pricing, global reach, and the speed of next-day delivery around the world.

Essentially HubCast is both cloud content storage and distributed outputting of that content. The idea is that:

users can upload and maintain an unlimited number of files to a library on the cloud…. File verification in HubCast Professional ensures that each file uploaded to the library is press-ready, guaranteeing easy and confident reordering…[and enables] printing with a simple cloud application that delivers print production, competitive pricing, global reach, and the speed of next-day delivery around the world

Sounds good huh? In essence it’s cloud storage meeting the ability to output material anywhere in the world and HubCast have coined the term “cloud printing” to describe what their service is. From his introductory blog post, founder Toby LaVigne says:

Cloud Printing. What?! Is Guttenberg printing from above?… Not exactly.

Imagine this; you go online to your cloud printing account(think Amazon or Expedia). And you upload a high resolution pdf file, select a quantity, choose your stock and pick a delivery destination and hit “submit”.

You just printed in the cloud, and you did it in seconds, on your time, from anywhere, to anywhere with the click of a mouse.

Cloud computing is bringing to print what it has already brought to services like travel, banking and enterprise applications.

• Lower overall costs
• Smaller environmental impact (with less paper waste)
• Substantial time savings

The HubCast service sounds good, and the site looks nice – it is however a little unfortunate that it lacks a fair amount of what can only be seen as the basic information. The FAQ page for pricing for example is substantial but nowhere does it actually indicate the pricing to output a document.

I spoke with CEO Toby LaVigne with a real world example of needing to output some material. My example (somewhat far fetched I’ll agree) saw me needing to print a document from here in New Zealand and get copies to clients in Mozambique, Iraq, Cayman Islands, Haiti and Antarctica, his answer was reasonable:

…we focus on delivering our service in the top 100 GDP markets worldwide.  Not a stroke of brilliance on our part, it’s simply where most of the need and business is.  Our perspective is driven by HubCast service delivery.  We want to be able to support business in as much of the world as possible in as short an amount of time as possible.  Strictly speaking, the number of countries we print in is less relevant than the number of countries we can deliver to reliably – next day, 5-day, etc. Your specific examples are unique.  Antarctica and Iraq we are taking a pass on for now.  Mozambique, Haiti, and the Caymans are next-day service.  And, of course you can order from NZ

Which is pretty good – to be honest I’ll accept that Antarctica and Iraq are pretty much “edge cases” but the ability to output from my location and have copies in three locations as different as Mozambique, the Caymans and Haiti the next day is pretty powerful.

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Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Automated Managed Hosting, and Hybrid Hosting Services to be Available 24/7 through Easy-to-use Storefront

The launches are coming thick and fast at Cloud Connect here in Santa Clara. StrataScale is right now announcing the addition of three new cloud offerings. In addition to its physical Automated Managed Hosting service, StrataScale has developed  their own public and private virtualized clouds. The company also unveiled a Hybrid Hosting solution that allows customers to integrate physical managed servers and virtualized cloud servers on-the-fly in the same secure network and optionally cross connected with existing co-location infrastructure. StrataScale’s cloud offerings live on servers housed in parent company RagingWire 220,000 square foot data center offering 99.999% availability and N+2 redundancy.

StrataScale Vice President of Marketing, Dave Geada, gave me a demo of their offering and more importantly their new self-service storefront. I am of the belief that cloud services are becoming more and more commoditized – there are two ways to differentiate – one is by price while the other is by value add. The likes of Microsoft and Amazon will always be able to beat the smaller players on price, so companies like StrataScale need to compete on service.

In their case, StrataScale are making life easy for customers to provision – they’ve got a nice self-service storefront but at the same provide good one-on-one customer support. On the storefront customers can automatically scale up or down and add new computers and IT components without speaking to a sales representative. All systems are automated on the storefront, including physical managed servers, public virtual servers and private virtual servers

As for the technical details both public and private Cloud offerings deliver hypervisor based virtual machine instances running CentOS, Red Hat Linux, or Microsoft Windows. Hybrid Cloud customers can run Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Automated Managed Hosting servers all on the same network, managed through the StrataScale portal. The new offerings will be available after April 1 – pricing details below.

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It’s Cloud Connect week – which means that every Cloud vendor under the sun is launching new products or services. Not wanting to be left out, Appistry today announced the availability for beta testing of Appistry CloudIQ Storage. CloudIQ Storage is a play for data intensive applications in the cloud - beta clients are running highly sensitive, big data applications for government security and intelligence, using a combination of private and hybrid cloud setups.

CloudIQ Storage may be used as a stand-alone cloud storage system or in conjunction with Appistry CloudIQ Engine to enable what Appistry is calling Computational Storage. Computational storage unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and intelligently locating application processing on the machines containing the relevant data. As a result, computational storage allows for the delivery of data-intensive applications more cheaply than otherwise.

Some relevant details:

• Special CloudIQ Storage “editions” will address the unique storage requirements of particular communities.
• The first of these, Hadoop Edition, offers plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), part of the popular Apache Hadoop open source framework.
• The HDFS architecture is built around a single metadata repository, called the NameNode. Because the NameNode is not easily clustered, it represents a single point of failure and a bottleneck for the entire system. CloudIQ Storage has no single point of failure and no centralized bottleneck, making it more suitable for mission-critical deployment.
• Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition ships with HDFS drivers, enabling it to be easily deployed in place of HDFS for applications where reliability and throughput are key considerations.

It’s an interesting play that brings file-based storage down a few notches in the cost rankings while overcoming data access issues by co-locating processing and data storage. Finally it brings a smart approach to application workloads, moving them closer to the data on which they work. CEO of Appistry, Kevin Haar talks it up saying:

Storage is an integral component of today's data-centric applications. It’s no surprise then that traditional approaches to storage are often to blame for the high cost and inferior performance of many a mission-critical application… With Appistry CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance.

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Image via Wikipedia

Recently, there was a discussion on Twitter about the fate of small webhosts. I thought I will expand my thoughts here in this post. Traditional web hosting ecosystems is huge with big hosts offering enterprise level managed hosting to a college kid having a reseller account to sell hosting space to friends and family. As we move ahead with cloud based hosting, the natural question is about the fate of such small hosts. In this post, we will take a look at what is in store for them.

The cloud world will definitely be harsh on most of the smaller webhosts. There is no doubt about it. However, it doesn’t mean that we will see a world where there will be a consolidation of handful of monopoly cloud infrastructure players, which is a shortsighted idea. There are many constraints to such thinking along with other mundane reasons for a more federated ecosystem.

Two weeks back, I wrote a post about an European cloud infrastructure provider, ScaleUp Technologies, and I wrote about how one of the traditional webhost, Internet4you, has morphed part of their datacenter resources to offer cloud based services using 3Tera’s Applogic platform. Recently, I spoke with VMOps, a company developing software stack that helps service providers set up Infrastructure as a service easily. Their software stack comes with three components.

• A retooled multi-tenant hypervisor that supports dynamic resource provisioning and complete isolation of CPU, memory, storage and network resources for virtual servers.
• A management tool that helps service providers to package their offerings, setup and manage users and, also, an integrated billing solution.
• An easy to use self-service interface for end-users with necessary API to allow them to control the launching of applications in the cloud.

Companies like Reliacloud and Cloud Central have already tapped into the VMOps stack to offer IaaS offerings. I will dig deep into VMOps in the future but software like the ones offered by VMOps and 3Tera shows tremendous potential for smaller webhosts to jump straight into the cloud bandwagon. These software will help webhosts who have their own datacenters to reposition themselves as a cloud provider.

What about the shared webhosting providers who either rent a dedicated server or use a reseller accounts? A big chunk of them will eventually vanish to the pressures of market forces. However, there are still opportunities for these smaller hosts in the cloud world. They could add value on top of these cloud offerings and then resell it to low end users like some of the small businesses. For example, they could add some management layer and a customer support layer on top of raw EC2 instances and sell them to individual and small businesses who neither want to manage these EC2 instances or don’t know how to manage them. As I pointed out in my post about Blackmesh and the future of small webhosts, customers want support. They want to talk to a human beings and get personalized support. Then, there is the idea of regional clouds where some of the customers (somewhere in the long tail) want to do business with a cloud provider who has operations nearby. Now add the regulatory requirements and other factors based on diverse needs of the users, I see huge opportunities for smaller level players.

Yes, cloud era is going to drastically reduce the number of cloud infrastructure players. Yes, most of these smaller webhosts are going to shut down their business and go away. However, we will still see a vibrant federated cloud ecosystem and we will see software tools that will enable some of these small players to reposition themselves to play the cloud game. The future is in an open, federated cloud ecosystem.

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Earlier today Lance Wiggs pointed out a piece Fed Farmers had written that looks set to get the backs up of the uber-powerful US lobby groups. Lance has done a great job of dissecting the piece which, in essence, harkens back to a punch up in a rural primary school which, I suspect is a good analogy to use.

You see Federated Farmers is primarily about extending the status quo – lobbying for the protections of (in their eyes) the god-given right of New Zealand farmers to use the land as they see fit. And it seems, just like on the rugby paddock, when things go bad they resort to a good old-fashioned punch up.

My only contact with Fed Farmers was a few months ago during the initial discussions around the proposal to introduce factory farming in the Mackenzie Country. At the time I was interested in a number of Twitter and blog comments to a post I wrote lamenting the short sightedness of Fed Farmers’ approach.

After a little bit of digging I found out that the posts, written in a neutral tone but a little defensive of Fed Farmers approach, were in fact written by a Fed Farmers media person, under a false name and identity. I pointed out to the person at the time that:

noms de plume and dodgy cover stories are a bad look in social media land.. especially when your name comes up as the fedfarm media advisor….

Over at DiversityAnalysis we’ve just published a new report – right in time for the Cloud Connect event in San Jose next week. Krish and I wanted to write a very basic report tailored for mid to late adopters as a guide to the pitfalls and problems involved in a move to the cloud (especially cloud software) and the questions to ask prospective vendors to ensure all those risks are mitigated.

We were stoked that Intacct saw the value of what we were doing and decided to support us in the writing of the report – it was something we wanted to do anyway, Intacct support just made it all the easier.

Our report articulated a number of questions to ask when evaluating cloud applications – these questions fall into several distinct groupings:

• Business requirement questions
• The reliability questions
• The availability questions
• The upgrades, maintenance and outages questions
• The security questions
• The privacy questions
• The data ownership questions
• The integration questions
• The customization questions

We’re pretty pleased with the report – feel free to check it out here.

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