Shades of the Blitz! Cloud Wars Loom over Washington

Cloud Computing No Responses »
Sep 172009

For its next trick, the unquenchable, super-ambitious Google is gonna try taking over the US government.

On Tuesday, after the first federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled Apps.gov, a thinly populated, GSA-managed, almost completely salesforce.com- and Google-dominated web store where federal agencies are supposed to go to get GSA-sanctioned cloud applications and “coming soon” infrastructure services as well as free software like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, Google said that by next year it would have a government-specific version of Google Apps that meet security requirements and complies with the Federal Information security Management Act (FISMA) and such.

It’s also working on a government cloud, set for debut in 2010, that promises to keep the data inside the United States of America operated by people with security clearances.

Then there’s Google for the Public Sector, the company’s own shop for tools and advice on exploiting Google Earth, Google Maps and YouTube.

The company is currently working on FISMA certification for Google Apps and is reportedly close; its government data centers will be next. The validation could really rev its engines.

According to a blog by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, GSA CIO Casey Coleman figures 45% of federal computing could go to the cloud, which means that Amazon and Microsoft and IBM, at least, which didn’t seem to make the Apps.gov cut, are gonna want a piece of this action.

You can count on it there are going to be cloud wars over Washington.

Google’s widgetry will be targeted at all levels of government: federal, state and local so they’ll have to try to standardize on stuff like background checks.

So far Google doesn’t have any takers, though it’s supposed to be talking to government folk, and pricing is still up in the air, or at least hasn’t been discussed publicly, and issues like privacy and security haven’t really been completely worked out.

However, the cloud-bewitched Obama administration has mandated that agencies adopt certain cloud services by 2011 in an effort to save money. According to Kundra, “We spend over $77 billion on information technology. We serve over 300 million customers across the country with our 10,000 systems. But what we’ve been doing is building data center after data center and frankly it has driven the costs across the board and has led to a doubling of energy consumption.”

The cloud, as opposed to the current fashion of agencies having their own systems, in some cases many systems, is supposed to make government procurement more efficient and cheaper. It’s unclear what agencies that already have software-as-a-service system are supposed to do.

The White House is supposed to seek funding for pilot cloud projects in next year’s budget that define what existing workloads can be offloaded and what new services can be built on the cloud. The programs are expected to see lightweight applications rolled out to users.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:16 pm

Microsoft Rips Secret ‘Cloudnapping’ Manifesto

Cloud Computing, Microsoft No Responses »
Mar 262009

Microsoft has emitted a squeal of protest much like a stuck pig over a secret “Open Cloud Manifesto” that it says is quietly being handed around the industry seeking signoffs.

It doesn’t identify the author or authors of this manifesto – one would guess organized by IBM given some recent whispers coming from its direction – but figures its supporters are going to reveal themselves soon enough and is warning against them.

See, apparently Microsoft wasn’t asked to contribute to drafting the manifesto, which evidently lays down “principles and guidelines for interoperability in cloud computing.”

It says in a blog written by product management director Steven Matin, “We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto.”

And apparently the manifesto is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition with no room for Microsoft to maneuver.

According to Martin,“What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience.

“Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed ‘as is,’ without modifications or additional input.”

Not that Microsoft doesn’t “love the concept.”

“We strongly support an open, collaborative discussion with customers, analysts and other vendors regarding the direction and principles of cloud computing,” he says.

The trouble is that while “large parts of the draft manifesto are sensible. Other parts arguably reflect the authors’ biases. Still other parts are too ambiguous to know exactly what the authors intended.”

Like the pot calling the kettle black, he says, “It appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an ‘open’ process. An open Manifesto emerging from a closed process is at least mildly ironic.”

Martin thinks such a thing “should be created, from its inception, through an open mechanism like a Wiki, for public debate and comment, all available through a Creative Commons license” to ensure that the work is “open, transparent and complete.”

He also thinks that any standards effort shouldn’t be vendor-dominated and that “while principles can be agreed upon relatively soon, the relevant standards may take some time to develop and coalesce as the cloud computing industry matures.”

“After all,” he argues, “what we are really seeking are ideas that have been broadly developed, meet a test of open, logical review and reflect principles on which the broad community agrees. This would help avoid biases toward one technology over another, and expand the opportunities for innovation.”

Arguing for the “freedom to develop” innovations that would lower cost and increase utility, he says “freezing the state of cloud computing at any time and (especially now) before it has significant industry and customer experience across a wide range of technologies would severely hamper that innovation. At the same time, we strongly believe that interoperability (achieved in many different ways) and consensus-based standards will be valuable in allowing the market to develop in an open, dynamic way in response to different customer needs.”

For the whole rant see http://blogs.msdn.com/stevemar/archive/2009/03/26/moving-toward-an-open-process-on-cloud-computing-interoperability.aspx.

Posted by rhall2091 at 6:56 pm

Cisco Pushes ‘City-as-a-Service’

Cisco, Cloud Computing No Responses »
Feb 122009

Cisco has taken a piece of a really ambitious grid-turned-cloud company in Oz called Majitek that intends to turn all the devices and systems in an entire city into money-making utility services.

This, it appears, is “intelligent urbanization,” especially in emerging markets, and is supposed to make for better city management, better quality of life and real economic development.

Cisco claims that it represents a “major market transition” and “whole new multibillion-dollar industry” considering that 500 million people will move to cities in the next five years and 60% of world’s population will be living in cities 10 years from now.

So it has just kicked off a global initiative to make the network “the fourth utility.”

Cisco figures it can capitalize on this mass migration and will focus initially on sustainable solutions for public safety and security, transportation, buildings, energy, healthcare and education.

Cisco’s chief globalization office Wim Elfrink is telling governments that a city of five million can add $15 billion in revenues and some 375,000 jobs over the next 20 years with intelligent urbanization.

It’s apparently talk like that’s gotten Cisco a memorandum of understanding with the city of Incheon in Korea to work on so-called “u-City” technologies and a pilot program with one of the states in India to use the city of Bengaluru as something of a Petri dish. Tata Consultancy Services will build a new practice to push the Cisco widgetry.

Anyway, getting back to Majitek, Cisco just went in on a $7.5 million B round in the Australian outfit whose other investor is Pierce & Pierce, an equity house.

Majitek is supposed to work with Cisco’s Globalization Center in Bangalore to refine its software platform for the real estate sector as well as transportation, smart grid and safety and security.

The company says its Service Delivery Platform can enable next-generation telecom companies, utilities and managed service providers to deliver any digital service to any digital device over any digital network, all managed through a single customer account and paid on a single bill.

Majitek is already taking its widgetry to Dubai and into the so-called connected real estate market. ‘

Dubai, it appears, is the epicenter of a multi-trillion-dollar Middle Eastern property industry and the company has just hired a new CEO, Bernie Devine, a property industry veteran with experience in Dubai who has designed and implemented operational infrastructures for developers of large buildings, campuses, gated communities and entirely new cities – mostly recently the iconic Palm Jumeirah, the man-made island in Dubai.

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago Cisco closed on another acquisition that will feature in its intelligent urbanization drive.

Richards-Zeta Intelligence has the middleware to translate building infrastructure data from power systems into an IT-friendly format that integrates with existing applications over the network.

Cisco’s already got or soon will have the Catalyst switches that can measure, report and reduce the energy consumption of IP devices such as phones, printers, laptops, video surveillance and wireless access points.

Buildings switches are due early next year – lights, elevators, air conditioning, heating, fire alarms, employee access systems – all with a low-carbon “EnergyWise” intent.

Cisco’s also got a couple of video surveillance acquisitions to throw into the mix.

Posted by rhall2091 at 8:56 pm

Gmail Inches Toward Offline Support

Cloud Computing, Google No Responses »
Jan 292009

Eighteen months or so after Google Gears debuted, a period of time scarred by several major Gmail outages, Google’s cloud-accessible-only e-mail is finally getting invested with offline support.

English-speaking US and UK Gmail users who want to test the new skill can now catch up with the rest of the world.

Google calls the feature “early experimental,” but then Gmail is still in beta two years after its general release.

Although Google has been using the widgetry internally “for quite a while,” it warns that there still may be “some kinks that haven’t been completely ironed out yet.” It’s looking for feedback.

Once the feature is turned on, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of the user’s mail. As long as a connection to the network is maintained, that cache is synchronized with Gmail’s servers. When Internet connection is lost, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode and uses the data stored on the user’s hard drive instead of sending the messages across the network. Any messages a user sends while offline go to his outbox and get sent when Gmail detects a connection. There’s a “flaky connection mode” for when the user’s on an unreliable or slow connection. Google says it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background. It’s striving for the same user experience on- and offline.

Posted by rhall2091 at 8:27 pm

Ingres Standardizes on Salesforce CRM

Cloud Computing No Responses »
Jan 122009

Ingres, the open source database company, is using Salesforce CRM. Apparently, it’s been using it for the last couple of months.

It integrated Salesforce CRM with the Intacct financial management system from the Force.com AppExchange. It says it gives its sales, marketing and finance staff across five continents access to a single source of information. Ingres said Salesforce partner Demand Solutions Group helped with the deployment and customization.

Ingres used Intacct to integrate its financials with Salesforce. It says the Intacct SaaS solution shares data with Salesforce CRM so finance has visibility into the sales pipeline, contract status and other critical information, and sales can view account status and accounts receivables details.

Ingres also tapped into AppExchange to deploy Vtrenz for additional marketing automation capabilities and Xactly for sales compensation.

It said when it needed a custom opportunity form for the business development team to feed information into Salesforce CRM it simply built one using Force.com platform.

CIO Doug Harr says Ingres doesn’t have to worry as much about its infrastructure.

Posted by rhall2091 at 10:28 pm

EMC Buys SourceLabs Pieces for its Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Computing No Responses »
Jan 082009

For reasons it won’t explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs – what exactly it won’t say – and hired some of its people – who exactly it won’t comment on – for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. That’s the unit that’ll be run by Harel Kodesh, the ex-Microsoft veteran EMC just hired a couple of weeks ago out of Amdocs, the telecom billing, CRM and order management ISV and outsourcer.

SourceLabs, which had Microsoft connections despite its open source bent, continues to operate as a standalone business, EMC said. However, SourceLabs CEO Byron Sebastian and its chief architect Will Pugh will apparently be joining EMC. What remains will still have SWiK.net, the open source project dedicated to documenting open source software, although a published report had the company trying to sell that too lately.

Blogs that don’t bother checking have EMC buying all of SourceLabs (close but no cigar) and sticking it in its newfangled Decho operation where Mozy, its cloud backup service, now lives, making them wrong on both counts.

EMC described the purchase as “very small.”

SourceLabs got $10.5 million from Madrona Venture Group, Ignition Partners and Index Venture in two rounds in 2004 and 2006.

Its stock in trade has been solving Linux and Java problems by automating diagnostics and troubleshooting complements of a knowledge base as well as management software for large open source environments, something a cloud infrastructure can surely use, especially if it was going to take on Amazon.

Posted by rhall2091 at 10:26 pm
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