this is more a note to myself that these are on my TODO list.

Speaker Presentation Files: Web 2.0 Summit 2009

Enjoy,

/Paul

As someone that follows the SaaS space quite a lot, it is good to see an industry association forming in Europe that focuses on the SaaS and Cloud Service Community, as I reckon a lot of folks would only know US based SaaS and Cloud providers.

/Paul

As reported by many folks, over at the LinkedIn blog, they are reporting now they have 50 Millon Professionals Worldwide using LinkedIn .

There is a lots of coverage which you can see more about this milestone over at Techmeme, see link, but also there is an interesting tidbit over at ReadWriteWeb.com (link), 

“Update: Adam Nash, Vice President, Search & Platform Products at LinkedIn, says things are set to improve in the future. Below in comments he writes: "Marshall, I think you'll be quite happy with our plans for improvements to our APIs. Stay tuned." Fantastic! Let's see what you've got, Adam.”

With over 50 million users and a very targeted focus on the professional audience, there is certainly lots of possibilities.

/Paul

[via GigaOm, at link] [Source material from Forrester at link]

Currently I think this is a fair picture and reflects the levels of uncertainly and confusion in the market right now.

Irrespective of the size of organisation, when they step beyond the cursory glance of the IAAS space is still seems to be too hard to parse - without bringing out the old chestnut of TCO (Total Costs Of Ownership) and getting bogged down in that great concept that has gotten abused, tortured and over exposed too often over the last 10 years. 

Overall I think this highlights many of the challenges and issues that need to be addressed by the cloud computing space, as there needs to be a more targeted and tiered offering for the IaaS (and PaaS and SaaS) delivery/commercial/business/development models and the customer segments and target markets that actually would be able to realise value from them.

For example in the IaaS space, just saying that you charge by the “sip” and start at only 10 cents an hour is just not a good approach when it is easy to find folks that offer the same services (if not better for 5-7 cents an hour and quite possibly better) and when much of that is a becoming more and more a commodity - and perhaps offered by tier 1 and tier 2 managed hosting providers in your region and with the growing trend that this seems to be expanding over the next 6-12 months.

Now I don’t think it is the fault of the IaaS providers, as they are completely transparent on their pricing and it just seems to be a broader mass broadcasting a set of concepts that are not a good fit for every scenario and not every customer needs. Maybe in certain cases in IaaS, we are talking about advanced data centre automation and perhaps in others we are talking about mass storage, networking and the advanced elastic capability (scale out, spin up/down) of machine instances to meet a demand.

So it is fair to say I think there is a very broader discussion that needs to take place in the industry. Please don’t get me wrong, I am hugely pro cloud computing, but the last 12-18 months have seen it consume any form of commercial relationship in which software is delivered over a network and that is just the wrong way to look at it and neither does justice to the companies that have outsourced for years, companies that provide managed hosting services, companies that provide VPS (virtual private server) services and those that currently and in the future provide platform solutions for rapid application development (aka PaaS).

For sure the space is changing quickly, but the cloud computing term is a conceptual term that right now is just too overloaded in my view!

At the end of the day, I reckon us technologists are all still talking about making money, saving money or being compliant, but hey that is just my own view.

So I guess it is fair to say, Yes, I am a +1 for the days when we talked about IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Ciao,

/Paul

via dvorak.org

[via Dennis Howlett, see link. Original/Source article at link]

/Paul

As timing/luck would have it, there are memes and there are memes!!!

So I just happened to kick off my little thought/blog experiment “via a Random Thoughts” moniker and kick it off about social media marketing madness……… and then…. this happens…….!?!?!?

(btw, I will be moving this blog series onto other topics, as I think the point has been illustrated for now! and certainly want to x-light the highs and not just the lows, plus some others hopefully helpful bits and pieces)

But…….

Personally, I think this video about a Windows 7 launch party is fairly cringe worthy

[via TechGear/TechCrunch]

/Paul

via the Cloud Ave blog I thought I would share.

And of course for some good commentary on the topic, see the same blog entry at Why Getting Social Is Necessary (But Not Sufficient) For Business.

/Paul

ps

doing more reading these days and thought i would pass it on….

via link

“Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.”

Interesting times ahead, with competitive pricing, more choice, API’s submitted to open standards bodies and over 1000 providers already signed up to provide solutions - and of course, VMWare is still the no. 1 virtualisation player.

/Paul

a pretty good list of vendors shaping the emerging cloud.

I cannot think of anyone that would need to be included, can you?

/Paul

Courtesy of Vinnie Mirchandani via @dahowlett (link) I see that Gartner has issued its latest Hype Cycle for emerging technologies.

Seeing a snapshot on a perspective on things and seeing an order on things is good once in a while - and no harm and even un-hyping it is a bit fractal when you think about it.

I reckon the hype cycle shows no surprises, but hey that is just my view.

But I think my mom sees its this way

Courtesy of Euan Semple. (via @dahowlett @link)

/Paul

Congrats to all of the epicenter 2009 crew, as they launch their site/portal for the epicenter 2009 conference – The Irish Software Show.

See http://epicenter.ie/ for more details,

/Paul

Found via link, with hopefully more to come.

Enjoy,

Paul

Interesting times ahead, with Rackspace releasing its Cloud Servers API.

/Paul

As always, David Chappell has written an excellent whitepaper, which covers Windows Azure and the Azure services platform and why ISV’s should care.

One of the key sections of the paper (and IMHO applies to all consumers/developers of the Azure Platform) is towards the end and is an important aspect of Azure that stands out from other Cloud Computing providers/platforms right now:

“Windows Azure is also a cloud platform, but even though it uses (and charges via) VMs, it differs in important ways from platforms that offer VMs on demand. With a purely VM-based platform, the situation is in some ways much like hosting: You have complete control, including administrative access to your VMs, but you also bear full responsibility for configuring and managing those VMs and the software they contain. With Windows Azure, you supply only a Windows application, along with instructions about how many instances to run. The platform itself takes care of everything else, including updating system software when required.

Another important difference is in how relational data is handled. With typical VM-based platforms, you can run a relational database in a VM, just as you’d run the same database on premises or at a hoster. This certainly works, but it requires installing, maintaining, and administering this database yourself. Ensuring reliability can also be challenging, since typical shared-disk clusters often aren’t possible. In the Azure world, an application can instead use SQL Azure Database. As described earlier, this technology provides a Microsoft-managed relational store that writes all data multiple times for reliability. Once again, you lose the ability to have total control but gain simplicity and built-in reliability. “

When it comes to Cloud Computing there are many aspects that need to be considered outside of the "instant on” and developer “self service” aspects we have seen todate.

For example, a common aspect that I currently believe is not highlighted enough is the effort required to create redundancy in a system, the sometimes lack of system tooling and the hand-rolling that needs to take place to update system software.

While at the moment the space is very fragmented, with every provider filling out the needs in a unique and different way, papers such as McKinsey’s clearing the air on cloud computing - while perhaps flawed - are a start on mapping out the complexity in the differences, how to map the people, process and technology aspects and the many aspects that need to be factored into the costs.

With the Cloud Computing meme currently being mapped out as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS it will be interesting to see if this will continue?

/Paul

ps and update

here is one of the slide decks from the Microsoft parnter conference which has some useful slides that you may find useful

update: more information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx

[via @windowsazure blog and techcrunch.com, see link and link]

“Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 and we hope you will continue building on the Community Technology Preview (CTP) at no cost today.

Upon commercial availability we will offer Windows Azure through a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.

Windows Azure:

• Compute @ $0.12 / hour
• Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
• Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

• Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99
• Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99

.NET Services:

• Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB “

So far the pricing looks comparable to Amazon et. al. but the devil is in the details, Ghz per compute hour, RAM, tooling etc…..

I can see some interesting tables of features and pricing comparisons being made in the coming weeks!!

/Paul

[via Mary Jo Foley] Microsoft Silverlight 3 available for download

/Paul