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What caught my eye today. I expect quite a flurry around Interop and other meetings going on in the US and Europe regarding cloud computing.
10 Cloud Computing Companies to Watch
It's not that there haven't been lots of "companies to watch", but CIO Magazine's list strikes me as ... odd.
AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service
This is no mean feat. AT&T's offer sounds pretty solid, and if they're telling the story straight, this is a real 'have-it-your-way' offer for everyone from the enterprise to the SMB.
Synaptic Storage as a Service is a virtualized on-demand storehouse that easily scales up and down to any size your enterprise needs and allows you to pay only for the storage you use.
Nimsoft acquires selected assets from Cittio
The Cittio website says that they're in the process of winding-up and dissolving the company. So, in a relatively short span of time ... Tidal gets bought by Cisco, Hyperic is absorbed by SpringSource, and now Cittio. Given the timing of the downturn and the likely course for a number of VCs, I suppose we should expect to see more acquisitions, asset sales and wind-ups in coming 2 - 3 months.
Nimsoft Inc., the Big 4 alternative for IT performance and availability monitoring solutions, today announced that it had acquired the Intellectual Property assets of Cittio Inc., a former provider of automated network and systems monitoring software. Financial details were not disclosed. The purchase, which includes extended capabilities in the areas of layer2/layer3 network discovery, topology mapping and root cause analysis, will enable Nimsoft to rapidly deliver these advanced capabilities within its core products, further strengthening its ability to monitor the performance and availability of an organization's entire physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure.
Citrix C3 - Where are the partners?
At its annual customer get together, Citrix Synergy 2009, the company fulfilled our prediction of the true value of its XenSource acquisition in 2007 – an enabling technology for Presentation Server (now XenApp) and its desktop virtualization efforts (now XenDesktop). By adding these capabilities to its C3 platform for Internet service providers (ISPs) it has significantly differentiated its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) play from VMware vCloud, 3Tera AppLogic, and the other platform efforts in the market today. Instead of an ISP getting a relatively generic IaaS platform, they now get a robust set of service offerings – IaaS, Windows application hosting (somewhat of a SaaS offering) and desktop as a service.
But the announcement left me a little concerned when it wasn’t coupled with a list of brand name ISPs who have signed on to deliver this service to enterprise customers. Anyone out there? Perusal of Citrix’ C3 web site and Citrix Service Provider partner pages offer no insights either (Ingram Micro? Softcat? ExpressData? Not exactly ISPs). The technology without the partners looks a little incomplete. Citrix has started a timeclock on the credibility of this effort that it will need to fulfill soon.
New rPath CEO Torto charged with growing company
Raleigh software maker rPath, which has raised $25.5 million since being started by two former Red Hat executives in 2005, has hired Michael Torto as CEO.
Torto brings a decade of CEO experience in the software industry to rPath, which downsized earlier this year at about the same time that company co-founder Billy Marshall stepped down as CEO.
Happy Mothers Day!
... It is a framework on which to build, use, and deploy an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution. Companies may use it to build public or private clouds.
It can be used as a simple proxy between two IaaS management APIs, as a library for IaaS management frontends, or as a complete IaaS solution. It is protocol agnostic, meaning that it can provide various frontend and backend IaaS management APIs for a wide range of compatibility with existing public and private virtual infrastructures.
Nova Spivak (the father of Twine) has an excellent post on how the Web, or rather it's use by the consumers of the Web, has morphed. I've had many of the the same thoughts about the way in which Web usage (and the value of the web) has changed to be more than a hyperlinked collection of information nodes that the end user 'navigates' in a form of active, directed exploration. The earliest Web explorers set out to traverse the linkages, which remained fairly static. Now, with the rate of new linkages, new sources and the rapid revision of existing structures, the Web is so immense and so plastic that our efforts are focused on the nature of the new, the rates of change and managing both the volume and complexity.
From the very early days of the Web, we've seen attempts to create the means by which information "comes to you." I think of the excitement I felt when using some of the earliest publish-subscribe services that delivered content by email, the streaming "tickers", and eventually the RSS feed and the feed reader. The Stream, however, is a different beast. Consider Twitter and other micro-blog offerings that seem most popularly associated with "social media." In some sense, the microblog is the analog of the "dumb network", where the application of filters and searches and selective attention is made NOT at the source (the publisher) and NOT only at the sink, but in combination (i.e., a easily modified subscription to multiple sources, plus the late-binding application of filters by the recipient and consumer).
Nova poses a few excellent questions in this post, and it's kicked off a number of worthwhile, Sunday-morning reflections and ideas. Welcome to the Age of Stream.
Is the Stream What Comes After the Web
... One of the most difficult challenges will be how to know what to pay attention to in the Stream: Information and conversation flow by so quickly that we can barely keep up with the present, let alone the past. How will know what to focus on, what we just have to read, and what to ignore or perhaps read later?
Recently many sites have emerged that attempt to show what is trending up in real-time, for example by measuring how many retweets various URLs are getting in Twitter. But these services only show the huge and most popular trends. What about all the important stuff that's not trending up massively? Will people even notice things that are not widely RT'd or "liked"? Does popularity equal importance of content? ...
John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison on why you need to reconfigure the company around your people.
But how, exactly, does talent get better faster? Workers develop not through formal training programs but by trying new things, by experimenting with what they do in their jobs and how they do it , and by tackling real problems with other talented people with different backgrounds and skills—people who are just as likely to work for other companies, in other locales, as they are to be working in the same company. Talented employees develop best by participating in talent networks—the largely invisible matrix structures, made up of knowledge flows, that run within firms and, with increasing frequency, between and across them.
Recently, Phil Wainewrite took Microsoft to task with respect to their advocacy of hybrid clouds ... meaning that he thought they were being self-serving by maintaining that the enterprise required on-premise software as well as infrastructure, platform and applications "in the cloud." In this piece, however, he modifies the definitions so as to recognize a hybrid solution that makes sense.
Hybrid cloud or half-hearted kludge
...
What we’re looking at here, then, is a local unit that supplements a cloud service in the interests of a better user experience and more economic resource usage. It’s a pragmatic response to the reality of having a large number of users at a single site, in which case you may as well extend the cloud to the site. It’s the same principle as implementing Gears to offload part of an application’s processing load to local clients (or, more ambitiously, Google’s experiments with its Native Client). Why not move that part of the cloud service closer to the client if it makes the service faster and more scalable? So long as it’s an optional feature rather than a requirement, it’s fully consistent with a cloud philosophy. ...
Virtualization continues to pose management challenges
Sigh.
A majority of IT departments are deploying virtualization, but still most don't feel comfortable with the tools and technologies they have in place to manage application performance or troubleshoot problems in the virtual environment, according to recent survey results. ...
The vendor, which asked about virtualization in its State of the Network Global Study 2009, discovered that respondents might not be able to invest in tools to manage these advanced environments, considering 73% were being asked to do more with fewer resources. More than half of those polled that are tightening budgets said such actions can lead to IT degradation and failures, and 65% haven’t experienced layoffs in this economic climate. ...
Digging deeper, when asked what the primary troubleshooting problem was, 78% said identifying the problem source. A distant second (37%) identified monitoring bandwidth consumption as a problem area, while 36% pointed to measuring latency on applications as a concern. About one-fourth reported that handling user complaints challenged them most when managing application performance and 16% cited managing application patches as their primary problem. ...
Citrix Expands C3 Cloud Computing Platform and Program
Following up to the initial debut of Citrix C3 last Fall, the company states that it is now enhancing the C3 platform with the addition of Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop, enabling service providers to deliver Windows applications and desktops as a service. Central to this added functionality is the new Citrix Service Provider (CSP) program which is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end users. In addition, the company avers that Citrix C3 has been updated to include new scalable, secure, multi-tenant virtual switch and application delivery controller capabilities. ...
Exploring cloud interoperability, part 1
But what exactly is cloud interoperability, and what exactly are each of these efforts addressing? Where are the standards going to be created, or (perhaps more importantly) where is the technology going to come from?
I thought it would be useful to give my current understanding of the space, and to give you my 100,000-foot view of the cloud interoperability landscape today.
Publishers Nurture Rivals to Kindle
Some newspaper and magazine companies, feeling let down by the Kindle electronic reader from Amazon.com Inc., are pushing for alternatives.
A few publishers are forging alliances with consumer-electronics firms to support e-readers that meet their needs. Chief among their complaints about the Amazon portable reading gadget is the way Amazon acts as a middleman with subscribers and controls pricing. In addition, the layout isn't conducive to advertising.
Is OCCI the HTTP of Cloud Computing?
The Web is built on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), a client-server protocol that simply allows client user agents to retrieve and manipulate resources stored on a server. It follows that a single protocol could prove similarly critical for Cloud Computing, but what would that protocol look like?
Happy Cinco de Mayo!!
Hackers Break Into Virginia Health Professions Database, Demand Ransom
Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.
Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file.
Hitachi Data Systems Enables Integrated Server-to-Storage Virtualization
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT : ) and the only provider of Services Oriented Storage Solutions, today announced a new end-to-end server-to-storage virtualization initiative to drive efficiencies across virtualized environments. To support this strategy, Hitachi Data Systems also announced two important business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for virtual environments...
US needs 'digital warfare force'
The BBC seems to have 'picked up' this theme. First there appeared a story about creating a botnet as an offensive weapon, posited by an un-official source (an ex-USAF officer). Now this story. This has the feel of a 'drum beat'. Someone, somewhere is going to break a story, or someone is letting out an 'official' version of a story. I noted the last line of the story: 'The US administration is due imminently to publish the results of a 60-day review on cyber-security ordered by President Obama.'
The US has set up specialised detachments dealing with IT problems
The head of America's National Security Agency says that America needs to build a digital warfare force for the future, according to reports.
Lt Gen Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, outlined his views in a report for the House Armed Services subcommittee.
A report on the Open Rights Group event held recently in London, at which Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross discussed privacy in an age of electronic visibility.
... This was perhaps one of the key take away points of the evening - the contemporary concept of privacy hasn’t been around that long, being mostly a middle class 20th century contrivance, so should we be really all that shocked/bothered that the concept is being changed as new social norms emerge?
From Adventures in Open Source, and open letter to MSFT, HP, IBM and ORCL with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. The unfortunate aspect of this letter is that it seems to actually be a 'course of last resort' for small ISVs who have labored to create proprietary software and have failed to gain traction.
Think of it as “fauxpen source“. Take some product that is pretty much end of life, sanitize it a bit and release it as open source. Call everything else “enterprise extensions”. Update your website and suddenly you are an open source company. Or, you can just acquire an open source company (I’m looking at you, Oracle) and be assured of a piece of the coming windfall.