Survey Results, is IT optimistic or pessimistic about Cloud?

June 11, 2011

Last week at Cloud Expo in New York, Dell commissioned an independent third party, Marketing Solutions Corporation, to conduct a survey of IT professionals who were attending the show.  The survey, which excluded IT members of technology providers, posed a series of cloud related questions and asked the IT professionals to answer both from their point of view and from the point of view of  their non-technical senior management.

The results are in

Not surprisingly, the 223 IT respondents were split with 47% seeing cloud as an extension of long-term trends toward  remote networks and virtualization while 37% believed it was a radically new way to think about their own IT function.  When answering how they thought senior managers would view the cloud, 37% felt management saw cloud computing as having “immense potential.”

Interestingly, while 66% of the respondents said their IT department would both advocate and benefit from cloud-based solutions, most didn’t expect similar support or optimism from other departments.  The next closest function was customer service which only 26% of the respondents felt would see cloud with equal optimism and marketing and sales with 25%.

To learn more about the survey and the conclusions drawn, see the release that went out Friday.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to RightScale about “myCloud” and their work with Zynga

June 9, 2011

Earlier this week at CloudExpo, I talked to both Peder Ulander of Cloud.com and Rich Wolski of Eucalyptus about their involvement with RightScale‘s myCloud solution.  Yesterday I thought I would go straight to the source so I got a hold of RightScale’s VP of business development, Josh Fraser.

Besides the myCloud announcement, Josh also told me about their work with Zynga.  Zynga, as detailed in a recent InformationWeek article, has a hybrid cloud model.  Zynga uses the Amazon public cloud to test new games and then if the game is a hit and when its demand has leveled off, they pull it back into their Z-cloud private cloud.  RightScale manages across the two clouds.

Some of the ground Josh covers

  • What is RightScale
  • [0:26] Their myCloud announcement, widening their focus beyond public clouds to include private and hybrid.  Who they’re partnering with, what myCloud is composed of and their free version.
  • [2:38] Working with Zynga, managing across both Zynga’s private Z-cloud and the public cloud they use at Amazon.
  • [4:09] Working with Amdocs who is running enterprise grade workloads in a private cloud managed by RightScale.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud.com on OpenStack and powering RightScale’s myCloud

June 7, 2011

Last night at Cloud Expo, I got some time with Cloud.com‘s CMO Peder Ulander to learn how they are working with two key partners, OpenStack and RightScale.  Peder told me how OpenStack is a key relationship for Cloud.com and gave me a quick overview of today’s announcement that Cloud.com is powering RightScale’s myCloud Private Cloud offering:


Some of the ground Peder covers:

  • Open Stack:  The development work Cloud.com is doing on OpenStack; their work on a Swift implementation; and how Cloud.com and OpenStack might play together going foward
  • [1:25] RightScale:  The myCloud announcement and the advantages it brings to enterprises.  How the two companies are doing joint development and joint marketing.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Expo: Cloud.com, what’s it all about?

June 6, 2011

Tonight at the opening reception for Cloud Expo, I ran into Peder Ulander, CMO of Cloud.com.  We found a quiet spot off the show floor and I got him to tell all about Cloud.com, where they’ve been and where they’re going.

Some of the ground Peder covers

  • What is cloud.com, where does it play in the cloud ecosystem and what does it help customers do?
  • [01:22] Who are some of Cloud.com’s customers (hint: Nokia, Zynga, Korean Telecom…) and in what industries are they in?
  • [03:25] Where did the idea for cloud.com come from and what experience did the founders leverage in creating it?

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Expo: Boomi case study — Enterprise Community Housing

June 6, 2011

Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTO Rick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.”  Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration.  The most compelling part of the talk, however came from Pradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer.  Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.

After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:

Some of the ground Pradip covers:

  • Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
  • Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis.  How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
  • Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized.  The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Expo: Talking to Rick Nucci, Boomi CTO

June 6, 2011

Today, day one of the Cloud Computing Expo kicked off here at the Javits center in New York city.  The event began with a keynote delivered by Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services.  Dell is the Diamond sponsor at the event and Steve talked about finding the real business value in cloud computing and the business of “Yes, now“.

Another of today’s speaker was the founder and CTO of Boomi, Rick Nucci.  Boomi provides a SaaS-based cloud integration offering and was acquired by Dell about six months ago.  After Rick finished his session I grabbed some time with him to learn more Boomi.

Some of the ground Rick covers:

  • What Boomi is and how it got started in the integration space back in 2000.
  • [01:05] How Boomi’s integration offering evolved from a traditional middleware approach to cloud-based.
  • [02:51] How being acquired by Dell has changed how Boomi run’s its business and serves its customers.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell & the Cloud: Where we’ve been, Where we’re going

December 18, 2009

They say turn around is fair play.  Kevin Hazard of the Planet recently took this literally.  No sooner had I finished interviewing him at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara then he turned around and pointed his camera at me.  He got me talking about the cloud and what the heck Dell’s doing in it.

Some of the topics I tackle:

  • What I do as Dell’s Cloud Evangelist.
  • Where Dell plays in the cloud:
    • Cloud based services providing IT management as a service.
    • Building these capabilities through the acquisition of four companies over the last two years:  MessageOne, ASAP, Everdream and Silverback.
    • Creating custom servers as well as providing data center design and implementation for some of the world’s largest “hyper-scale” customers e.g. Microsoft’s Azure and three out of the top five search engines in the U.S.
  • What’s next:  building on this experience to offer integrated cloud solutions for setting up private and public clouds.  Combining Dell hardware and services with best of breed software — all coming from/supported by Dell.
  • My thoughts on Public vs. Private clouds and how we will end up with a mix of computing models.

Extra Credit Reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

3tera’s CEO and Chairman: Barry Lynn

December 7, 2009

Last but not least from the videos I took last month at Cloud Expo is the interview I conducted with Barry Lynn of  3tera.  At a high level Barry positions his company as a software company that offers a turnkey cloud platform.  See what else he has to say:

Some of the topics Barry Tackles

  • 3tera sell’s their flagship product AppLogic three ways
    • License it to people who want to run private clouds behind their firewalls [competitors: VMware, people building it themselves]
    • License it to service providers who want to offer public cloud services but don’t want to build their own cloud (there are 30 SP’s worldwide offering clouds on the 3Tera platform) e.g. KDDI [competitors: people who build it themselves]
    • Virtual private data center business where people can lease a data center.  They do this with DC partners [competitors: any service provider]
  • What they are doing with KDDI and their “KDDI cloud server” (hint: they are provisioning stacks e.g. ruby, .net, java…)
  • What’s coming up
    • Their App store is in beta and will be in production in Q1 of next year (ISVs publishing to the 3tera cloud).
    • Cloudware release: their orchestration and management layer will be offered separately next year and can be used on top of anyone’s virtualization, computing fabric or cloud engine.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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