In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded rou... (more)

Commentary: Sun’s Oracle Merger

Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer With only the ‘you may now kiss the bride’ custom to follow, the Oracle/Sun marriage (or dare I say Sun/Oracle) is now finally complete. After months of legal wrangling which has caused nothing but embarrassment and dwindled Sun’s stature within the market sphere, reports also came out that half of Sun's 27,000 staff will be made redundant. Thus initial indications are clear that Oracle, known for its past agnosticism to open source has an eye for the merger being based on maximizing profit. In the meantime Sun’s competitors are probably smiling wryly as the delay of the merger played into their immediate interests but what threats and challenges does this partnership now pose to the once great open source vendor which did so much for developing the tech and e-commerce industry. One thing which Oracle will most probably do is addres... (more)

How to Monetize the OpenStack Wave

After OpenStack was announced at OSCON in the summer of 2010, the degree of momentum behind this new open source platform has been nothing short of spectacular. Startups and enterprises alike have placed their strategic bets to monetize the OpenStack wave in various ways. As an ecosystem insider and one of the founding sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation, I wanted to offer my views on how various organizations are looking to skin this cat. I'd like to focus on three of the many efforts currently underway. These three, in particular, happen to be the most vocal about their position and represent three distinct strategy camps. They are Nebula with its OpenStack appliance; Piston with its PentOS cloud operating system; and Dell's Crowbar, an OpenStack installer. While all these approaches appear radically different on the surface, all three ultimately offer the same e... (more)

Cloud Expo New York: Best CIO Practices Shared from SHI’s Customers

Cloud Expo New York $500 Savings here! In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Richard Taggart, CTO of SHI, will share a collection of best Information Technology Practices and Innovation Programs that have been proven to work in real life situations. These practices are some of the best ideas taken from SHI's database of customer submissions. These programs include those designed to solve business to technology alignment issues, technology effectiveness, and new ways to stimulate true innovation in IT. Taggart is the former SVP and Corporate CIO of the Walt Disney Company. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities ! Speaker Bio: Rich Taggart is CTO at SHI. He has over 25 years of experience in a variety of roles in IT and management. Prior to joining SHI, he was the Senior Vice President and Corporate CIO at the Walt Disney Company in Burb... (more)

VMware’s Genius: Doing Something Old

Virtualization Magazine on Ulitzer Here's my premise:  high impact, culture-bending technological innovations - however different they may be one from another - conform to a predictable template of evolution.  It goes something like this: 1.       Break-thru - The point of entry at which a technology breaks onto the market scene doing something old in a dramatically new way.  The break-thru vendor, frequently a modest sized venture or start-up, faces the uphill struggle to educate, and otherwise evangelize its would-be market.  It is an expensive, labor-intensive phase in which there the potential rewards are as high as the risk of failure.  Early adopters assume the risk of pioneering to gain substantial advantages in costs and/or performance. Greg O'Connor at the AppZero booth during 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, at Santa Clara Convention Cen... (more)

Opinion: Who Made Amazon the Judge of What's Legal on the Web?

[This post originally appeared on Joseph Galarneau's blog and is republished here in Cloud Computing Journal (www.CloudComputingJournal.com) by kind permission of the author.] When you visit Newsweek.com, the words you read started their journey milliseconds earlier from an Amazon.com datacenter somewhere in northern Virginia. And if you visited Wikileaks.org earlier this week, the bytes comprising leaked U.S. embassy cables would have traveled a similar path from Amazon servers based in northern California or Ireland. While WikiLeaks and Newsweek are very different organizations, we both relied on the 21st century equivalent of the printing press – cloud computing – to distribute our information. Amazon shut off WikiLeaks servers Wednesday, citing the company’s violation of Amazon rules, coincidentally at the same time government officials called for similar action... (more)

Infrastructure Was Then, Private Cloud Is Now and Beyond

Seven years of research with 15,000 data points, as shown below, provides overwhelming evidence that there is a noticeable increase in efficiency with a significant reduction of TCO by moving IT from Basic intothe  Rationalized stage in the IO (Infrastructure Optimization) model. And cloud, or more specifically private cloud computing, offers a roadmap to facilitate enterprise IT transforming from Basic or Standardized into Rationalized. A transition from a traditional infrastructure-focused deployment model into a cloud-ready, cloud-enabled, and service-centric delivery vehicle in enterprise IT is imminent, if not already happening. Building a private cloud is the next step for enterprise IT. Microsoft private cloud solutions are based on  Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (or Hyper-V Server 2008 R2) and System Center 2012 to fundamentally prepare enterprise IT with a te... (more)

Roberto Medrano's API and Internet of Things Blog | @ThingsExpo @SOASoftwareInc [#API #IoT]

Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, had reached 30,000 page views on his home page – RobertoMedrano.SYS-CON.com – on the SYS-CON family of online magazines, which includes Cloud Computing Journal, Internet of Things Journal, Big Data Journal, and SOA World Magazine. His blog posts cover a variety of IT topics including the API economy, the Internet of Things, and building cloud-based apps using SOA. He is a recognized executive in the information technology fields of SOA, internet security, governance, and compliance. He has extensive experience with both start-ups and large companies, having been involved at the beginning of four IT industries: EDA, Open Systems, Computer Security and now SOA. Bookmark Roberto Medrano's Blog Home Page ▸ Here Prior to joining SOA Software, he was CEO of PoliVec, a leader in security policy. Before joining Po... (more)

i-Technology Viewpoint: SUNset?

Related Links: Sun and Microsoft's Interoperability Efforts Delayed Once More IBM Exec Slams Sun's JavaOne/SunNetwork Merger Plans Sun Microsystems famously grew from start-up mode to $1 billion in annual sales without spending one cent on advertising its products. It established early on a reputation for good performance, good pricing, and the latest in a software environment that appealed to technically oriented users who were writing software, designing bridges, and taking over Wall Street with what was then a new category of "technical workstations." The tall, sage figure of company co-founder and software genius Bill Joy was ubiquitous at relevant trade shows during the early days, giving a human face to this upstart company that eventually drove numerous larger firms out of this part of the business. Co-genius and hardware guru Andy B... (more)

The i-Technology Right Stuff

Related Links: Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes Who's Missing from SYS-CON's i-Technology Top Twenty?" Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final "cut" to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to our final twenty, not (yet) to arrange those twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see end up in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote or votes. To access the Further Details of each nominee just click on their name. Happy voting!   In alphabetical order the nominees are:   Tim Berner... (more)

VIP Tutorial - Using a Web Services Framework to Build SOA Applications

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has quickly taken centre stage as the primary development style of the next decade and beyond. Businesses of all types are preparing for the SOA revolution that promises consistency of process, reduction in duplicate work, ease of maintenance, service reusability and broad interoperability. The Web Services Framework (WSF) is the foundation that can deliver on the promise of SOA. Come learn about the components of an SOA including the core WSF standards. Attend this free Novell tutorial and learn about the future of SOA-style development, including legacy system enablement, platform interoperability, open source in SOA and building composite applications that leverage SOA services using Novell exteNd. In this session, we will create SOA application logic that orchestrates legacy services, JBoss4 Web services and MS.Net Web service... (more)