Interesting news today on the interoperability front. (Yes, I know I am obsessed) In a news conference IBM and Juniper Networks jointly demonstrated what they describe as a means of seamlessly migrating workloads over private and public clouds enabling enterprises' existing data centers to seamlessly interact with the public Internet. Also interesting is the news that IBM has created a new group called the Enterprise Initiative Group, which will focus on accelerating adoption of the cloud related technology. (Sounds like a great CCIF sponsor) The unit will be headed by Erich Clementi as general manager and he will report directly to IBM CEO Sam Palmisano. What I find most telling about this news is the technical approach that IBM and Juniper have chosen to go with. In the announcement they outlined a plan to use a hardware based virtual private lan which allows any-... (more)

Recession Survival Kit: Adopt Cloud Computing

Two days before the single largest drop in the history of the stock market, Jason Calacanis - former Weblogs Inc. co-founder (and GM of Netscape) - wrote a lengthy blog post aimed at inspiring folks at startup companies "to get focused and to save as many as possible from hitting the wall." As Calacanis reminded readers of his blog, "Great entrepreneurs build value and market-share in down markets." We recently asked a selection of the industry's brightest minds what their own advice would be in these troubled times, and assembled it into a ten-point guide for software vendors, entrepreneurs, and startups to riding out a recession. Tip #1: Prioritize Harvesting Existing Assets and Opportunities This comes from the Jeremy Chone, CTO of Nexaweb Technologies, a VC-funded software provider that offers the industry’s most comprehensive application platform for mission-crit... (more)

Why Are There No Clouds Yet in Turkey?

Cem Sertoglu's Blog I get pitched by a large number of Turkish internet startups, and none of them, not one, so far, have built their application using cloud computing. I wonder why that is. It seems to me that the cloud computing service providers like Google App Engine, AWS and 10gen, offer a solid, scalable solution. On top of this, all of the non-cloud Turkish alternatives are more expensive than their US counterparts. Yet, you read about companies like drop.io going 100% cloud and I can not name a single Turkish company following suit. Interesting. [This post appeared originally here. Republished in full by kind permission of the author. It is republished under the Creative Commons license.] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ... (more)

Semantic Cloud Abstraction

The CCIF and it's members have recently focused on creating a common cloud taxonomy and ontology. I find it's starting to sound a lot like semantics, Cloud Semantics. We are in a sense defining what cloud computing is by describing it's "components" and their relationships to one another. One that is capable of expressing cloud computing and its subsequent parts in terms of a consensus data model. So in this effort we may actually be defining a dynamic computing model that can, under certain conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn' the meaning of related cloud & infrastructure resources based on an common ontology / taxonomy. In a sense, we are talking about the Semantic Web applied to API's or more broadly, a unified cloud interface. What is the Semantic Web and why does it matter for a unified cloud interface? The Wikipedia describes the semantic web as "a ... (more)

Cloud Computing: Location is important, but not the way you think

The debate this week is on location, specifically we're back arguing over whether there exist such things as "private" clouds. Data Center Knowledge has a good recap of some of the opinions out there on the subject, and of course I have my own opinion. Location is, in fact, important to cloud computing, but probably not in the way most people are thinking right now. While everyone is concentrating on defining cloud computing based on whether it's local or remote, folks have lost sight that location is important for other reasons. It is the location of data centers that is important to cloud computing. After all, a poor choice in physical location can incur additional risk for enterprises trusting their applications to a cloud computing provider. Enterprises residing physically in high risk areas - those prone to natural disasters, primarily - understand this and oft... (more)

Salesforce Hits $1 Billion Dollars In Annual Revenues

Salesforce is now officially the first enterprise cloud computing company to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. The company announced its fourth quarter and year-end earnings. It’s quarterly revenues were up 34 percent to $290 million, bringing the total for the year to $1. 077 billion. Net income for the quarter was $13.7 million ($0.11 a share), and $43.4 million ($0.36 a share) for the year (which doesn’t sound like a lot compared to $1 billion in revenues, but it was more than double last year’s earnings). Its operating cash flow for the year was a quite healthy $230 million. Salesforce ended the year with 55,400 corporate customers, and 1.5 million individual subscribers. And it has $883 million in the bank. Salesforce expects revenues to increase by about 30 percent this fiscal year to $1.3 billion. Passing the $1 billion mark is a major milestone for both Sa... (more)

Cloud Computing Roundtable Sold Out, But It Will Be Streamed

Tomorrow’s Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can’t join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT: Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture. On Friday, the di... (more)

Email Security and Compliance Vendor Proofpoint Focuses on the Cloud at RSA Conference 2009

Proofpoint, Inc. (http://www.proofpoint.com), the leading provider of unified email security, email archiving and data loss prevention solutions, today announced that the company will be exhibiting at the RSA Conference 2009 exposition from Monday, April 20 through Thursday, April 23, 2009. Visit Proofpoint at Moscone Center in San Francisco, RSA booth #2445. Proofpoint representatives will be on hand for live demonstrations of Proofpoint's email security and email archiving solutions with a special focus on the company's Software-as-a-Service solutions. read more read more ... (more)

Sun's Public Cloud To Feature at Cloud Computing Expo Europe

SYS-CON Events announced today that Arseniy Kuznetsov, Director of Sun Cloud Computing Core Engineering at Sun Microsystems, will be presenting at the upcoming Cloud Computing Expo Europe (www.cloudexpo-europe.com) May 18-19, 2009, in Prague, Czech Republic, the first industry-leading international Cloud Computing event outside the USA. His session will be entitled “The Sun Cloud: Sun's Public Cloud Computing Service.” Kuznetsov will outline Sun's vision and strategy for cloud computing, highlighting the Sun Cloud - Sun's Public Cloud Service that leverages a broad range of Sun's innovative hardware and software technology and products. He will give an overview presentation and practical demonstrations / demos will showcase how cloud-based compute and storage resources enable users to deploy applications quickly, easily and inexpensively. About the Speaker: Arseniy ... (more)

The Semantic Web Gang Live in San Jose

One of the podcasts I've been doing for a while is the monthly Semantic Web Gang. It began whilst I was with Talis, and the company continues to support production and hosting of the show. Unlike most of my podcasts (all listed over there on the right, for those of you reading on the cloudofdata.com site), the Gang is a (virtual) round table rather than an interview. Each month, regular Gang members (and the occasional guest) get together to discuss the latest moves in the semantic technology arena. June’s Semantic Web Gang is going to be a little different, as it will be recorded - live - on the stage at this year’s Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California. Almost all of the Gang will be there, and I’m delighted to say that Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor of Read/Write Web will be joining us on stage, along with Tony Shaw of conference organisers... (more)

Infrastructure Matters: Challenges of Cloud-based Testing

An interesting thing happened on the way to testing that application from the cloud. We broke the innertubes! Pros and Cons of Application Testing in the Cloud A firm wanted to test their application and need 100 browser instances. In the old days it would have required 100 machines -- that would be a massive undertaking. Even with hardware virtualization, you would need 5 to 10 machines, and there would be some complex configuration issues. However, by putting it all in the cloud, they were able to sync up 100 virtual instances of the browsers and take them down over a weekend at a dramatic cost reduction. I won’t argue the point about needing one machine per browser instance for application testing (even though it’s not entirely accurate as plenty of tools support such requirements without requiring multiple machines – Ixia and Spirent to name just a couple of my... (more)