According to CumuLogic, Soby was CA’s VP of Cloud Consulting, responsible for the business operations of that entire unit, which he built from scratch leveraging technology and assets from 4Base Technology and Hyperformix. Before that, Soby spent 10 years as a systems integrator, consulting on projects including the original launch of Apple iTunes.

Meanwhile, new CTO Albers, currently serving as head of Interactive Technology Strategies, will lend his experience in web-scale applications and the cloud to CumuLogic’s technical initiatives. At the Walt Disney Company, Albers apparently grew the House of Mouse’s online, mobile and gaming business to $2.5 billion. Prior to that, Albers had his hand in the digital music business, serving as senior vice president and CTO of MusicNet, which assisted with the launch of Microsoft Zune, AOL Music and more big-name services.

It’s interesting that Soby and Albers have some experience with the digital music business. I’m wondering if this is mere coincidence, or if CumuLogic will exhibit a focus — conscious or otherwise — on serving the needs of cloud developers creating web-scale media applications. Maybe I’m reading too much into this.

Regardless, enough industry veterans are signing on with PaaS providers that it seems that TalkinCloud isn’t the only one who’s identified it as an emerging market in 2012. We’ll keep an eye out, so as ever, keep an eye on TalkinCloud.

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• Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Gets ISO 27001 Certification
• Salesforce.com’s Byron Sebastian: 2011 is the Year of PaaS

Basically, Joyent is extending its API and management to enStratus’ cloud management platform. The net effect is users on the enStratus platform can launch and deploy services on the Joyent Cloud, giving deeper monitoring and the ability to enforce policy for resource utilization and cost management, according to the press release. That goes for users deploying Joyent Cloud services alone, just as it does for those taking advantage of any of the cloud providers enStratus supports.

“Joyent Cloud delivers performance, transparency and reliability to enterprises in fast-growing verticals like online games and mobile communications, so we are excited to partner with them to help their customers better manage their cloud deployments with enStratus,” said enStratus CEO David Bagley in a prepared statement.

To get more specific about the features enStratus brings to Joyent Cloud deployments: administrators get access to role-based security controls, integrated infrastructure scaling automation using standard tools such as Chef or Puppet, the ability to assign billing codes to a customer or project and cap costs, and an enStratus API that enables the extension in any way an enterprise requires.

The last time we heard from Joyent, the company had received an influx on $85 million in new VC funding. Meanwhile, enStratus took on a new VP in the form of “cloud guru” Bernard Golden. It seems that the two on-the-grow cloud companies see a mutually beneficially future together.

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• ‘Cloud Guru’ Bernard Golden Takes on VP Role at enStratus
• Amazon Web Services Launches Cloud Workflow Service
• ScaleXtreme Versus Cloud Server Patching Headaches
• HP Launches Cloud Management for Multivendor Environments
• DynamicOps Bolsters Cloud Automation with VM Reconfiguration

The press release indicates that Dimension Data sees its role in the marketplace as providing a complete, end-to-end set of services for enterprises at the start and in the midst of their cloud journey alike. That’s why Dimension Data is offering cloud integration and professional planning and deployment services in addition to public cloud services and managed hosting.

To be more specific, Dimension Data is offering a range of cloud solutions, including a cloud computing platform that can be hosted in the public cloud, on a customer’s site with management provided by Dimension Data, on dedicated hardware in a Dimension Data facility or, most relevantly for TalkinCloud readers, rebranded and in a service provider’s own data center. This announcement also includes cloud managed services, managed hosting and backup and disaster recovery.

Okay, so that’s a pretty comprehensive list of solutions. But it’s nothing anyone can’t get from other cloud service providers. What really sets Dimension Data’s cloud apart, according to the company, is integrated cloud management, provisioning automation the form of Dimension Data CloudControl, control over hardware-based networking, and that aforementioned global availability. It also offers an apparently competitive SLA and a self-service provider and a common architecture around public and private deployments to support hybrid environments.

Last time we heard from Dimension Data’s leadership, the provider was signaling a deeper commitment to the cloud services market. This announcement seems to signal the follow-through. I’m glad for that mention of service provider partnerships, too, as it seems to indicate that Dimension Data isn’t moving away from the channel relationships developed by OpSource.

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As a quick refresher, Micro Cloud Foundry is a tool for developers that runs a complete Cloud Foundry PaaS environment within a virtual machine on a single computer. Whatever changes you make on the microscale are guaranteed to work on a larger-scale Cloud Foundry deployment, but with the convenience of not having to do all your coding in the public cloud.

The new version — 1.2, to be more exact– brings the kind of Java debugger that developers have been using locally for ages now. “The user can set break points in the source code, suspend and resume running applications, view the application stack and perform code stepping operations,” so says the Cloud Foundry blog entry. Debugging occurs either via the command line or by way of the integrated SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

As for the new runtimes: It brings Java 6, Ruby 1.8, Ruby 1.9, Node.js .4 and the newly available Node.js .6 runtimes up to parity with the CloudFoundry.com public service, while doing the same for the MongoDB, MySQL, Postgresql, RabbitMQ and Redis services. That blog entry has more technical detail for those so minded.

Cloud Foundry’s platform agnosticism and openness has won it a fair share of fans in the cloud ISV world. I can’t really see anybody being unhappy with what VMware’s team has brought to the table this time around.

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• Salesforce.com’s Byron Sebastian: 2011 is the Year of PaaS

One of the most recent moves involves Red Hat MRG Grid on Amazon Web Services. The effort involves Red Hat Cloud Access, which allows Red Hat customers to move their subscriptions between traditional on-premise servers and off-premise clouds hosted by Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Providers, such as Amazon Web Services.

Red Hat has been working closely with Amazon Web Services for about two years. As the Linux company recently noted: Red Hat initially extended its Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions into the cloud with Red Hat Cloud Access in April 2010.

Meanwhile, Red Hat Storage (previously known as Gluster) recently connected the dots between on-premises storage systems and Amazon Web Services.

Rewind a couple of weeks, and Amazon Web Services introduced Premium Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. AWS customers using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) can experience seamless support through experts at Amazon backed by SUSE, according to a statement from SUSE.

For its part, Canonical continues to promote Ubuntu for public and private cloud initiatives. Canonical hit the road with Amazon in 2011, appearing at multiple Amazon Web Services Cloud Summits — hosted in New York, London and San Francisco.

Where Cloud Integrators Fit In

For channel partners and cloud integrators, the Linux-to-Amazon connections offer potential business opportunities.

No doubt, thousands of customers are seeking to augment their on-premise storage systems with off-premise backup and disaster recovery services. In some scenarios, it sounds like many Linux-based systems can now be extended or completely re-deployed on Amazon’s public cloud.

Still, Amazon isn’t exactly known for customer support, especially when it comes to channel partners. While Amazon Web Services has a good reputation for reliability, many channel partners and cloud integrators demand deep support relationships, including real-time phone support with dedicated cloud admins who can assist during an emergency. At this point, I’m not sure if Amazon Web Services can answer such calls for help.

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• Canonical Supporting Ubuntu On Public Clouds
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As Microsoft acknowledges, SkyDrive as it exists today is little more than a website where users can put up and take down files – a far cry from the kind of file syncing and versioning that more beloved offerings like Dropbox and Box have slowly made standard.

But with the integration of its little-hailed Live Mesh syncing solution, a fully Metro-enabled app that integrates with Windows Explorer, and the ability to fetch your local hard drive’s files from anywhere via SkyDrive.com, Microsoft is making a play at turning SkyDrive into a serious cloud contender. Apparently, the SkyDrive smartphone apps for Apple iOS were just the first step towards creating this ecosystem.

Microsoft’s blog is extremely wordy on this topic, and goes into probably too much depth about all the ways the company has rethought its approach to cloud storage with regard to SkyDrive and Windows 8. But the real moral of the story here is that Microsoft is positioning this revamped cloud storage as faster, less performance-intensive, and completely open to developers (including for apps that both retrieve data from and store data back to the SkyDrive cloud).

From where I’m standing, this seems like a smart move, and one that should have cloud storage vendors start to sweat a little bit. Microsoft Windows 8′s market dominance seems all but assured, at least on the desktop (the jury’s still out on tablet penetration). If SkyDrive can really bring it when it matters, Microsoft may have cornered a huge portion of the cloud storage market.

Of course, Apple’s trying something similar with OS X Mountain Lion and iCloud, so let’s see whose cloud vision resonates with the masses when Microsoft Windows 8 releases its community preview on or before February 29th.

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Amazon Web Services, the web services arm of Amazon.com, is extending its reach to workflow management with the launch of Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), targeted at coordinating processing steps in an application and managing the distributed execution state.

“Whether automating business processes for finance or insurance applications, building sophisticated data analytics applications, or managing cloud infrastructure services, Amazon SWF reliably coordinates all of the processing steps within an application,” Amazon’s official blog entry says.

Distilling the Amazon SWF fact sheet down to the basics, AWS is built to enable administrators to track an application state across distributed components, enabling the relatively easy implementation of complex application flows without the need to learn a new programming language (or so Amazon promises). It also includes the AWS Flow Framework, designed to help developers build event-driven and asynchronous programs aspects directly into applications.

The end-goal is total control over when and how application tasks are scheduled and executed. Amazon.com CTO and Amazon Web Services czar Werner Vogels goes into much deeper detail on Amazon SWF’s technical vision in a blog entry, for those who want a deeper dive.

Amazon includes 1,000 workflow executions, 10,000 “tasks, timers, signals, and markers” and 30,000 workflow-days (a workflow-day is the 24 hour period an execution is left open or retained in Amazon SWF) in the free Amazon Web Services usage tier. After that, the per-usage cost works out to be $0.10 per 1,000 workflow execution starts, $0.05 per 10,000 workflow executions completed and $0.05 per 10,000 retained workflow executions, with $0.25 per 10,000 tasks/timers/etc.

Frankly — and I’m sure my inbox will fill up with vendors claiming the contrary as soon as this story goes live — this sounds unlike any other application management solution I’ve come across yet. Amazon Web Services certainly has its detractors, but the fact of the matter is that its sheer scale puts it in a very good position to keep maturing its platform, sometimes with new solutions that developers didn’t even know they wanted.

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SavePoint can back this data up to a local drive or to the cloud storage provider of your choice, according to the press release. Benefits include the ability to access your critical data in the event of an Office 365 outage (like that would ever happen, right?), the ability to delete archived SharePoint content in the cloud and save it on cheaper local storage, and enablement to retain files longer than Office 365 ordinarily would – for the sake of compliance.

It’s worth noting that while MetaVis is unsurprisingly focused on the new hotness that is Microsoft Office 365, it also works with hosted SharePoint 2007/2010 deployments, with the same benefits and the same pricing starting at $495/site (and yes, it’s open to reseller partners). This isn’t the first Office 365 archiving solution we’ve seen, but it might be the only one I know of with that kind of SharePoint laser focus.

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Simply set up a schedule or perform a scan on demand, and ScaleXtreme can determine which physical, virtual or cloud Windows or Linux servers need patching, according to the press release. The patches in question can either be applied right then and there, or else scheduled for a planned server maintenance window, boosting flexibility.

“We make it easy for customers to bring long-running, stateful servers into the public cloud, where they can be managed like any other server in the enterprise. Customers can also use our solutions to manage their internal physical and virtual servers on demand, from the cloud,” said ScaleXtreme CEO and co-founder Nand Mulchandani in the press release.

Intriguingly, ScaleXtreme is just giving this away, as the functionality is included in the free ScaleXtreme Xpress product. But the company recently launched a channel program, and this sounds like it could be another one of those metaphorical cloud aspirins that eliminates headaches for the service provider.

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Before we take a look at a few notable winners, it’s our standard disclaimer: We maintain the Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index to analyze cloud computing hype vs. real-world performance. We don’t offer specific financial advice, and whether you buy, sell or hold is up to you and you alone.

The biggest winner of the week was Rackspace Hosting (RAX), which jumped 9.11 percent to $52.93/share after its Q4 2011 financials beat analyst expectations for revenue at $264.6 million, while meeting the same for earnings per share (EPS) at $0.14.

The only other member of the index that came close was VMware (VMW), which shot up 4.90 percent to $99.11/share as the week’s VMware Partner Exchange generated plenty of buzz around the virtualization specialist. It seems a little bit of virtualization hype spilled over from VMware’s event into Citrix (CTXS), which went up 4.63 percent to $74.77/share despite not making any moves of its own.

None of the 20 companies we track posted a loss really worth discussing this go-round. But I did want to single out cloud storage provider Carbonite (CARB), which sunk 2.8 percent to $9.71 percent/share. As one of the newest members of the Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index, I’ve notice that Carbonite has rarely broken above the $10/share mark in the two months or so we’ve been tracking it.

That’s all there is this week. The Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index is already up 18.41 percent since January 1st. We will update the index again after financial markets close this coming Friday.

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