Friday 03 September 2010
I would never go back to the [traditional] software model. Someone would have to make a very compelling argument for me to even consider it,” said Molly Fuller, president of Hands On Gourmet in San Francisco. Fuller said she struggled for a year with an on-premise software suite designed for catering companies before abandoning her investment in Caterease and switching to Salesforce.com’s hosted customer relationship management (CRM) products. Fuller said hosted services were attractive because they were available everywhere and because they were maintenance-free. She said she uses Salesforce.com to generate menus and logistics for the $1.5 million business, and the online interface allows Hands On Gourmet’s roving squads of chef-instructors, who host cooking classes for corporate events, to get instructions fairly easily. The on-demand pricing made it easy for Hands On Gourmet to switch to Salesforce.com, Fuller said. Although she wouldn’t go back, Fuller said, she didn’t regret her initial use of an in-house product. “I didn’t feel burned by it; I just chalked it up to a lesson.
Corefino’s entire business is in the cloud. CEO Karen Watts said her firm used IBM to host its servers. Corefino’s Web portal serves customers in China and employees in India and elsewhere. Watts said that vendors were as eager as her customers to slough off infrastructure costs to hosters and cloud providers. Market research firm IDC estimated that SaaS spending will jump more than $1.2 billion in 2009 and predicted that it would be close to $20 billion by 2012. Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, said that spending on cloud technologies, primarily SaaS, was rising five times faster than any other IT spending by companies.
The July 27th Migration Workshop is a free session that provides participants with access to valuable tools and knowledge about upgrading from commercial cluster schedulers such as Platform LSF to a more cost-effective and complete environment. This workshop includes a detailed discussion of the differences between schedulers, a look at the benefits of core optimization, how to efficiently manage the migration, and how migrating puts organizations in a better position to leverage both private and public cloud computing. This workshop is the fourth in a series of similar events which have taken place in Tokyo, Japan, Austin, Texas and Santa Clara, CA.
Univa UD is a leader and innovator in application and infrastructure enablement software for dynamic IT environments, including cloud computing. Univa understands the challenges and benefits of cloud computing and provides the evolutionary path and comprehensive set of products to get companies there – all without having to ‘rip and replace’ their legacy IT investments. For over a decade, Univa has delivered proven, award-winning technology to hundreds of market-leading companies. Our lightweight infrastructure products are fast and easy to deploy, ensuring better time to value for our customers, and our leading application service governance product intelligently automates resource provisioning based on application SLAs. With a focus on making business easier for our customers, Univa is advancing the vision and practice of dynamic IT
Google’s engineering vice president and developer evangelist, said on Friday at the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco that the future of the mobile industry lies in web-based applications, rather than native software coded to run on specific smartphone operating systems. eople want something that works and is a seamless experience. Google likes web apps, they invest in web apps, and all apps are part of a model of gather data about consumers. Cloud computing is interesting to me for data, but not for apps. Watch people leave Google Apps in droves the first time the cloud is hacked or worse, is down for a day or two.
And speaking technically, Zachary pointed out that there will always be fundamental challenges with coding apps purely for the web: Not all hardware will be optimized to run the software. Different phones possess different screen resolutions, for example, meaning some apps would load better on certain phones than others. And other than that, a web-based app can’t take full advantage of a specific phone’s powers if it’s coded to work in a cross-platform environment.
At its annual partner conference in New Orleans on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled pricing details and launch plans for Windows Azure, the “cloud” operating system that Mr Ozzie hopes will become the online analogue to Windows on the personal computer – a platform that supports applications on the internet. Speaking last month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the man who took on Bill Gates’s mantle as the company’s top technology visionary confessed Microsoft, when he arrived, was not ready for the challenges of the internet: “The PC was still at the centre of how people thought about everything. It was a bit scary. Part of his response was to bring together a small team of developers to work on Azure, treating it as a separate start-up.
Building the massive computing platform on which Azure depends, and refining it to run internet services with high efficiency and reliability, has ac counted for much of the development effort. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief strategist, says there are now more than 1m servers in the company’s datacentres, making the Microsoft “cloud” one of the world’s biggest pieces of computing infrastructure. Even Mr Ozzie concedes that Amazon has set the pace in this new market although with technology giants such as IBM and Google also eyeing up the territory, the stakes are going up fast.
If you’re tapped into cloud networks to offload–and scale–some of your computing needs, you probably think that you’re paying for only what you use. But just like your cell phone plan and attorney’s rate might charge you for a full increment of time when you roll over the billing period, you might save money by nibbling at cloud services on an hourly basis. SoftLayer’s CloudLayer is great for short bursts of cloud computing needs, scaling to about $.20 to $.80 per hour, depending on your storage and processor requirements. You can initially tap into a virtual server in about 5 minutes, and you can run typical cloud services, with support for SQL Server and access to storage from any platform.
If you’d rather be billed on a monthly plan–no long-term commitment needed–you can choose dedicated hardware instead of virtual machines. Visit the CloudLayer overview to see if its other specifications fit your needs. But if you only need cloud systems once in a while, savings could add up with hourly billing. Zack Stern is building a new business from San Francisco, where he frequently contributes to PC World.
We were in between a rock and a hard place,” said Dennis Reedy, a system architect and advisor for ARL supporting contractor Altus Engineering, speaking at the JavaOne conference held earlier this month in San Francisco. The lab wanted to road-test the next version of its much-awaited modeling and simulation system, The Modular Unix-based Vulnerability Estimation Suite (MUVES). We need to field and validate the system, test the scalability, test the ability for the system to fail over. The trouble was that ARL had no servers to spare. What capacity that would be available could only be used during the off-hours, such as in the middle of the night or during weekends.
Instead, the lab uploaded the software to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), automating the build and test process through an open-source cloud management service called Elastic Grid. The software being tested is version three of MUVES, a complete rewrite of a general use modeling and simulation application that ARL has used for the past 20 years. The agency uses this software to measure how much damage bullets, bombs and other projectiles can do to vehicles, among other uses. Bowers had chalked this sluggish performance up to how the software handles persistence, specifically the large amount of material it keeps in working memory. All totaled, about 100 analysts use the software on their workstations on a regular basis.
Univa UD is a leader and innovator in application and infrastructure enablement software for dynamic IT environments, including cloud computing. Univa understands the challenges and benefits of cloud computing and provides the evolutionary path and comprehensive set of products to get companies there – all without having to ‘rip and replace’ their legacy IT investments. For over a decade, Univa has delivered proven, award-winning technology to hundreds of market-leading companies. Our lightweight infrastructure products are fast and easy to deploy, ensuring better time to value for our customers, and our leading application service governance product intelligently automates resource provisioning based on application SLAs. With a focus on making business easier for our customers, Univa is advancing the vision and practice of dynamic IT.
Experts from Sun Microsystems, eXludus and Univa UD will lead the lunchtime session, which takes place on July 27th from 12pm to 2pm. A team of industry leaders in EDA and high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud will be hosting a free workshop in San Francisco, CA coincident with the Design Automation Conference to provide expert training and best practices for users of HPC clusters. This workshop includes a detailed discussion of the differences between schedulers, a look at the benefits of core optimization, how to efficiently manage the migration, and how migrating puts organizations in a better position to leverage both private and public cloud computing.
Juniper leaders will contribute to this one-day event by engaging in sessions aimed at educating the industry about the opportunities presented by the future cloud paradigm. Specifically, Juniper executives will speak to the role of networking in cloud computing. We’re building huge Cloud Computing cities, but are we neglecting the already clogged broadband highways between them.
As internal data center networking speeds start to exceed 40 Gbps, the pipes that connect those clouds to the outside world and each other will hit their limits. This panel examines what stress fractures we may see initially, what technology can do about it, and who will ultimately pay for it. Cloud Computing is set to take off, but today’s legacy data center networks just won’t fly. Learn about next-generation networks where the simple solution lies in a simpler architecture.
Many of the services we use now will eventually be web-based or “in the cloud.” People who use services like MobileMe will increasingly see more of their data and “work” being done out there in the cloud. Last year’s event sold out, so be sure to check out the event details soon. We’d love to have you. Register here ( http://structure09.eventbrite.com/?discount=GIGAOM60) now, and we’ll give you a $60 savings on your ticket. Check out our speakers and topics here ( http://events.gigaom.com/structure/09/ ).
The GigaOM Network will be hosting the second annual Structure conference in San Francisco on June 25. The CEOs of Salesforce.com and Akamai, among dozens of other speakers, will talk about what the capabilities of platforms like MobileMe will be in the near future.
“Cloud” has proliferated as the term for Internet-based computing resources because “everyone can draw one,” according to Russ Daniels, the cloud services CTO at Hewlett-Packard, who just added CTO responsibilities at the company’s Electronic Data Systems division. But the usage is fitting because white-board users have drawn the Internet as a cloud from the beginning, Daniels said at GigaOm’s Structure conference Thursday in San Francisco. The cloud is the next generation of the Internet, making it more than an infrastructure for automating business processes or letting humans view information, he said. The Internet so far has helped to carry out established business processes within an organization, Daniels said. Cloud computing will allow people to bring technology to bear in the real activities that drive business and personal life, which are collaboration and information-sharing among people, he said. “That’s what almost all of us do almost all the time,” Daniels said.
Cloud infrastructures make data “programmatically accessible” so that a variety of applications and services can tap into that information, rather than just humans browsing it. This will allow the Internet to solve new kinds of problems, he said. P is looking at the roles of the various participants in publishing, including creators, sellers, and readers, and aims to use cloud infrastructure to connect them through data rather than through process functionality, he said. This approach takes computing beyond the constraints of specific software applications, taking data outside application silos and eliminating the need for application integration work, Daniels said.
The advent of scalable, flexible computing resources has allowed many new Internet services to bloom, said Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer and president, cloud, at Rackspace Hosting. The panelists named solid-state drives, scalable data stores and emerging programming languages such as Rails as the biggest technologies that will keep driving this forward. “We are at a very steep point in the innovation curve because the infrastructure is so readily available,” Moorman said.
