Designed to help Sun ISV’s and other third parties with developing SaaS applications, a number of Sun partners including AT&T and Endeavors have launched SaaS solution on Solaris since the programs inception.

With the recent development and interest in Ubuntu, Hp Unix and AIX cloud computing platforms, Suns Solaris offering rounds out the major Unix and Linux distributions.

There are a number of new events scheduled at this years conference including new cloud computing workshops and an open enterprise study.

The popular Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad returns in 2009 and a strong group of Enterprise 2.0 developers and entrepreneurs have made it to the round of 8. The comunity will choose 4 finalists to present at the conference based on each firms 2 minute product video.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference organizers at TechWeb have offered 1 free conference pass valued at $2200 that I will give away to one of the OnDemand Beat’s readers.

The pass will go to the first reader who can answer either via twitter to @ondemandbeat or via a comment to this post the answer to the following question:

“Who were the 5 finalists in the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference LaunchPad?”

If you do not win the Free Conference Pass you can still save 30% on conference registration or get a free Pavillion Pass by using code CNAPEB22 on the conference registration page.

Overview Of File Based Access On Sun Cloud Storage Service

Getting Started With File Based Access On The Sun Cloud

This is part one of a two part series on customer experiences with SAP’s Business ByDesign. 2 years in the making; Business ByDesign (BBD) is currently on Feature Pack 1.11 (Feature Pack 2.0 is due to be released soon) and there are approximately 100 customers live in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

During the recent  Sapphire 09 conference in Orlando, I had opportunity to meet with SAP Business ByDesign Senior executives in addition to a number of Business ByDesign Charter Customers.

One of the more recent Charter Customers is OneVision Solutions; headquartered in Irving, Texas. OneVision Solutions specializes in the consultation, sales, and implementation of advanced videoconferencing communication solutions, training and services. OneVision Solution’s revenue has increased exponentially since its inception in 2004 and the company is expanding rapidly into new territories and markets across the United States.

OneVision Solutions CFO Brent Walters discussed his firms reasons for selecting SAP’s Business ByDesign and his experience to date with utilizing an On Demand ERP solution:

OnDemand Beat - “What other integrated On Demand Financial Suites did OneVision explore before selecting Business ByDesign”

Brent Walters - “We didn’t have any other On Demand Financial Suites on the table, only an on premise ERP solution, which would have worked and provided the majority of our requirements, however, fell short on cost, maintenance, flexibility, reporting, etc….”

OnDemand Beat - “Was the evaluation process the same as for a traditional packaged ERP solution (with on site visits and mapping of functionality from the legacy system to the new system) or was the process more streamlined for Business ByDesign?”

Brent Walters- “Pre-sales with BBD went very smoothly and was a very collaborative approach between OneVision Solutions and the Business Solutions Manager. I think it was very beneficial to have the BBD Project Manager involved from day one, that way the direction of the solution was known by all of the key players.”

OnDemand Beat - “How long did it take for OneVision to implement Business ByDesign?”

Brent Walters - We did a 60% full ERP solution in 2 months, which required approximately 25 to 50% of my time and one other employee of OneVision Solutions, so we were still able to run the day to day operations.”

OnDemand Beat - “At the Sapphire conference you mentioned that OneVision has saved 35% on implementation and hardware costs and projects 45% annual savings on annual maintenance and labor costs using Business ByDesign versus packaged ERP. As your usage of Business ByDesign increases over time do you anticipate your firms annual savings will increase to more than 45%?”

Brent Walters- ” Most definitely, simply because the packaged ERP option was for 4 licenses or 8 concurrent users, with BBD, we have 25 licenses, so when we bring all of the sales staff into BBD we have the capacity with no additional cost, compared to having to purchase additional licenses for the packaged ERP. Also, once we roll out the sales functionality to the sales staff, we will terminate our contract with SalesForce.com, therefore, providing additional savings to the bottom line.”

OnDemand Beat - “What core features of Business ByDesign is OneVision using at this point?”

Brent Walters- “We are currently using CRM (50% for sales), FIN (100% for financials), SRM (100% for purchasing) and HRM (50% for Human Resources). Once we convert over to Feature Pack 2.0 in BBD, we will use the SCM for the drop ship functionality and more of the CRM for services.”

OnDemand Beat - “Were there any major extensions that OneVision had to implement to go live with Business ByDesign?”

Brent Walters - “I wouldn’t say that we had any considerable extensions or work around issues, with the exception of implementing our  drop ship processes into the current BBD system.”

OnDemand Beat - “How does having an integrated On Demand ERP system improve your close process?”

Brent Walters- ” The close process was pretty much nailed down in our prior system and we have been able to implement our processes with little issues, so we are still closing within 2 to 3 days.”

OnDemand Beat - “Has it been easier with Business ByDesign to create custom reports and if so are those done in house at this point?”

Brent Walters - “There really is no need for “custom reports” since the reporting function is setup in a cube environment, we are able to move information around quite easily and retrieve valuable information from the existing reports.”

OnDemand Beat - “You mentioned that ERP is not a cure all and that there are still a few spreadsheets and workarounds in place at OneVision. What is some of the functionality that OneVision plans to roll out in the future to address the remaining workarounds and spreadsheets?”

Brent Walters - “Once we convert to BBD Feature Pack 2.0, the spreadsheets will go away, because the drop ship functionality will provide the visibility that is currently being done in the offline spreadsheets.”

OnDemand Beat - “What advice would you have for other financial and company executives who are evaluating and implementing On Demand ERP solutions?”

Brent Walters - “Understand your current processes and have a good idea as to where you want to go with an ERP solution, otherwise it is easy to run down a rabbit hole and become boxed in to a solution that won’t work.”

Panelists on Federal IT Panel Think Fed Cloud Is Inevitable
Casey Coleman and other Federal Panelists at the Association for Federal Information Resources Mgt Conference make case that next big push for Cloud Services will come from federal sector.

Cloud Computing For K-12
Pete Reilly thinks that Private Clouds are a perfect match for the K-12 community.

Enterprise 2.0 Still Confusing 3 Years After McAfee
Fast Forward Contributor Yuri Alkin examines why the term Enterprise 2.0 is still so confusing in the year 3AM (After McAfee)

Case Studies May Help End Enterprise 2.0 Confusion
Oliver Marks and Stowe Boyd are seeking Enterprise 2.0 adoption case studies to determine uptake of E20 and will choose one case history for presentation at the upcoming E20 conference.

IBM announced its new WebSphere CloudBurst Cloud Computing Appliance this week at the Impact 09 conference in Las Vegas

WebSphere CloudBurst is a hardware appliance based on IBM’s DataPower SOA appliance server that allows companies to run virtual images that can be used in a private cloud environment. Shipped with the new IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, (WASVI) CloudBurst is optimized for use with virtualized hardware environments like VmWare.

Designed primarily to be used for private cloud deployments behind the firewall, IBM is also marketing the CloudBurst Appliance to SAAS and Cloud service providers who need an off the shelf cloud solution that offers easy and rapid deployment in a data center environment. CloudBurst ships with a number of preconfigured VmWare ESX virtual images with standardized configurations based on IBM WebSphere best practices. The virtual images are composed of WebSphere components, an IBM HTTP server and Linux.

The Virtual Images and Scripts (called patterns) are deployed and managed via a familiar drag and drop Web 2.0 console.

The patterns are designed to appeal to a wide range of users and vary from a basic single server topology suitable for a SMB client to a very large cluster of servers more attuned to a SAAS service providers needs. Users can customize the seeded patterns with custom scripts or by cloning seeded patterns via the CloudBurst console.

Custom patterns are stored on the CloudBurst Appliance and are also managed via the CloudBurst console.

The CloudBurst console also allows administrators to setup users and security and to manage and monitor the appliance and deployed cloud.

The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance will be available in June 2009 and will be priced starting at $45,000 USD. Initially only VMware ESX Server file formats will be supported but IBM expects to support other formats in the near future.

WebSphere CloudBurst is being touted as the first appliance based cloud solution on the market and should gain traction amongst SMB customers and service providers alike. But IBM should expect competition in this space fairly quickly from the likes of Cisco-VMware, HP, Oracle-Sun and perhaps even from the Open Source arena as the barriers to entry for such solutions are relatively low assuming a compelling combination of software and hardware in a reasonably priced appliance.

To experience the full benefit of Ed’s presentation I would highly recommend downloading the actual Adobe .pdf that has extensive hyperlinks to topics Ed covers in the presentation.

But be forewarned that the pdf is a 35 MB download

Are Cloud Computing Security Standards More Than an Afterthought?
Good Article on CIO.com that talks about the nascent efforts on developing cloud computing security standards.

What is Cloud Computing ?? What ISN’T cloud computing??
If you can skip past the marketing in the article,you will find one of the better definitions of Cloud Computing.

Enterprise 2.0 and Blogging should be First Practiced In House
Gil Yehuda captures a few good reasons why Blogging and Enterprise 2.0 efforts should always be practiced behind the firewall prior to releasing content to a public stage.

Do Multi-Tenant Architecures Save Costs and Should Customers Care?
Sinclair Schuller; over on SaasBlogs, provides a few key counterpoints to the recent conversations amongst bloggers and analysts about the purported cost savings of Multi-Tenant Architectures.

Can The Semantic Web Be CrowdSourced?
Finding Semantic Metadata on the web is still extremely rare. To help further adoption of the Semantic Web Aleksander Kmetec proposes using Crowdsourcing methods to build the linked data cloud.

Written to take advantage of the Intel Xeon 5500 “Nehalem” chipset; vSphere has about 150 new features compared to ESX. vSphere has an incredible (in my opinion) amount of partner support on its rollout and VMware CEO Paul Maritz was joined on stage by John Chambers, Michael Dell and HP’s John Mouton at the product launch.

Touted as the industry’s first cloud operating system, vSphere’s feature set is very robust. Created to appeal to both SMB and Fortune 100 clients, vSphere supports both application and infrastructure services. On the application side vSphere handles availability, security and scalability. Availability and security have always been sticking points in the typical virtualized environment and vSphere handles these challenges with firewall, intrusion prevention and detection services while larger sites and institutions should be able to utilize Dynamic Resource Sizing for scalability.

Via a number of partner solutions, vSphere has support for storage, network and compute infrastructure services. Cisco Systems is using vNetwork as a foundation for the Cisco Nexus 1000V soft switch, which works via an API with vSphere. And to date 25 VMware partners have built storage solutions to support vStorage new thin provisioning functionality.

The launch event was also used to detail out the vCloud initiative; VMware’s ecosystem of cloud service providers and application providers. To date over 1000 application providers have certified Web2.0, SaaS, Linux and Windows applications to run as vApp applications in the VMware Cloud.

A  key advantage that VMware has with vSphere compared to competing virtualization solutions is that the VMware team is wholly focused on virtualization (and at this point cloud computing) This gives VMware quite a leg up in terms of product support staff, adoption of industry virtualization standards like Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and with R&D effort for point and major new releases of the product.

Priced starting at $999 for a 3 server “package” for its SMB focused VSphere Essentials up to $3,495 per CPU for its Enterprise Plus product, vSphere is a big step forward in the cloud computing industry and in future articles I will delve into a bit more detail about vNetwork and vStorage solutions partners are building for vSphere.