CEO of GoGrid: IT economy to shrink (big time) over next 10 years

September 3, 2009

The CEO and founder of GoGrid, John Keagy, made an interesting assertion at Cloud World/Open Source World: over the next decade, the IT economy will shrink from $1.5 trillion to $500 billion.  I thought this was an interesting statement so I followed up with him after his talk and we sat down for a quick interview:

Some of the things John talks about:

  • GoGrid plays in the Infrastructure on demand space and has been doing so since 2002.
  • They work with partners in the layers above infrastructure and don’t have plans to venture north.
  • The IT economy shrinkage will be driven by automation and reduced capex (commodity hardware is a big component of this)
  • Right now its hardly a competitive market in the IaaS space (“its GoGrid and a bookstore”) so you can expect to see prices drop as the competition heats up.
  • If you’re not doing your test and development and QA in the cloud, your not engaging in best practices.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Storage in the Cloud — talking to Zmanda’s CEO

August 27, 2009

I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference.  At that time we did an audio interview.  Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”

This is the fourth out of nine interviews I conducted earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World.

Some of the things Chander talks about:

  • Thanks to open source and the cloud, Zmanda is able to provide “radically simple to use and cost effective” back-up software.
  • Zmanda had its roots in a project out the University of Maryland back in ’91.
  • How Chander got the idea to build a business around this project.
  • How the cloud is a good fit for secondary and tertiary storage.
  • Cloud storage is often people’s first foray into the cloud.  One reason is the ease of billing.
  • Why a publisher moved their storage to the cloud.

But wait there’s more…

Stay tuned for five more interviews from Cloud World/Open Source World coming soon to this URL:

Michael Crandell — CEO of Right Scale
Ken Oestreich — VP of product marketing at Egenera
John Keagy — CEO of GoGrid
James Staten — Analyst covering cloud computing at Forrester
Luke Kanies — Founder of Reductive Labs, maker of Puppet

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

The Cloudy Wisdom of James Urquhart

August 20, 2009

James Urquhart of Cisco and author of “The Wisdom of Clouds” blog on Cnet, gave a talk last week at Cloud World entitled, “Virtualization to Cloud.”  I wanted to capture some of the topics he talked about and learn a bit more so I grabbed him for a podcast after he got off stage.  Here is the result…

Some of the topics James tackles:

  • Whereas four months ago the question was  “What is cloud”  the conversation has recently shifted to “how can I replicate some of the success stories that I’ve heard about?”
  • One effect of the cloud is that has greatly lowered the VC capital that start-ups require to get set up and going.
  • Internal IT needs to realize they are no longer delivering a product but are delivering a service.   To be of value to the business they don’t have to wire servers, they can help them through the process of getting the right compute power for each app.
  • Regulatory and industry standards will  be what dicates the speed of the evolution of the cloud, not technology.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Back from Cloud World with a Bunch of Interviews

August 17, 2009

Last week I headed out to San Francisco to attend the event formerly known as Linux World.  This year the annual fete was renamed “OpenSource World” and combined with a few other events to form: “OpenSource World/Next Generation DataCenter/Cloud World/North American Bass Fishing World” (ok, Im joking about the last one).

Trans America, a flatiron and Armani.

Trans America, a flatiron and Armani.

Dell kicked it off

The opening day keynote was provided by Dell.  In all honesty, it wasn’t our best effort.  It was particularly tricky since the speaker who was supposed to deliver the presentation had a medical emergency and Judy Chavis, director for business development and global alliances at Dell  had to step up and pinch hit at the 11th hour.  Here are two pieces written about the keynote, one more positive than the other.

Chinatown, Clouds and Cable Car

Chinatown, Clouds and Cable Car

Not exactly jam packed

I’ve been to Linux World a couple of times before and this year’s show, despite the amalgamation, was much smaller.  Those who came to talk to customers or generate leads must have been dissapointed since there seemed to be hardly any around.  That being said, I found it a great event to network and talk to various cloud players in the industry.  I was even able to record nine video podcasts that I will be posting over the next few weeks.
Coming attractions

So stay tuned for conversations with the following folks:
Brian Aker — Lead architect for Drizzle
James Urquhart — Big cloud thinker from Cisco
Michael Crandell — CEO of Right Scale
Ken Oestreich — VP of product marketing at Egenera
John Keagy — CEO of GoGrid
James Staten — Analyst covering cloud computing at Forrester
Luke Kanies — Founder of Reductive Labs, maker of Puppet
Chander Kant — CEO of Zmanda
Jonathan Bryce — Founder of the Rackspace cloud
Yerba Buena, the Metreon and the Marriott

Yerba Buena, the Metreon and the Marriott

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George