June 13, 2011
Volume XXXV, Issue 6
OTT Video Will Grow to $20 Billion Industry by 2016
Excerpted from Video News Report by Troy Dreier
Over-the-top (OTT) video, meaning video streamed from online sources to living rooms via connected boxes, Blu-ray Players, and TVs, will count 1.3 billion subscribers by 2016 and will see revenues of up to $20 billion. That's according to two new reports from ABI Research.
Currently, Netflix is leading the way for OTT revenues. The research credits Netflix with getting viewers to embrace long-form streamed video on their TVs. Following Netflix are Apple iTunes and Hulu, which each claim 15% of the current market.
Looking forward, the studies see OTT delivery having a strong impact on how consumers watch TV.
"Content discovery is just one example of the rapidly changing environment, with traditional program guides being supplemented by search and recommendations," says Jason Blackwell, Practice Director at ABI Research.
The pull of the OTT market will be so strong, that even traditional online video sites will move to the living room.
"Over time, more viewing of YouTube and historically Internet-based platforms will shift to the living room, opening up significant advertising revenues. This trend will be accelerated based on YouTube's recently announced increase in VoD content," notes Senior Analyst Sam Rosen.
The reports are targeted at video operators and outlines strategies for future growth. Titled "Over the Top (OTT) and Through the Middle (TTM) Video" and "Broadband Video to Connected CE and Mobile Devices," they're available for purchase from ABI Research.
The Rise of Cloud Computing
Excerpted from The Epoch Times Report by James Grundvig
The cloud is about economies of scale. There are a few large players that have this ability to scale," said Ben Fried, CIO of Google. He then added with emphasis, "Even the financial services firms on Wall Street can't do the cloud."
In a keynote interview at the first annual Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit, Fried went on to explain how cloud computing will empower companies, supply chains, and entire industries to "build by necessity."
Whether information will be stored and accessed on a public or community cloud (off premises), a private cloud (on premises), or a hybrid cloud-a combination of the two-will depend on the needs of the client, firms, or groups of end-users.
Thus, flexibility with the power and capacity to scale is another attribute that will determine how cloud computing will transform businesses, small and large, as we know it today. "Dreamworks uses rendering farms at HP," said Geoff Tudor, Chief Cloud Strategist at Hewlett-Packard, in an ensuing panel discussion on "Operating in the Cloud."
He was referring to the Hollywood studio storing and accessing graphics and animated plates offsite in HP's cloud. "Mobility is key. The past few years we have seen a proliferation of devices and apps," Tudor stated. "And yet, there will be a single control point for either an interior or exterior cloud."
The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) defines the cloud computing as "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." The term was derived from the cloud symbol used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.
Another way to look at the cloud as a datacenter is the cyclical process of water, in which water is knowledge or data. Water evaporates off the surface and rises to form clouds-data being stored in a giant system-and it falls again as precipitation, when data is either accessed or downloaded off the cloud.
Like the clouds in the sky with millions of variations, there are only seven different types of clouds.
For now, companies with big cloud servers that have the capacity to scale are Amazon, Microsoft, Google, HP, and IBM. Other firms, such as Verizon, are building their cloud infrastructure through acquisitions.
"The move to cloud-based services will drop costs," stated David Thompson, CIO of Symantec Corp., in his panel discussion with other industry peers. "The environment will be complex, hybrid mix of technologies. Companies will plan these IT migrations and technology services from in-house to the cloud. Transformation has happened before. It will happen again. But I see five areas of concern," he said.
The first is "data spillage," when information meant to stay in-house spills out to a public cloud. The next he pointed out, "Is a full breach by hacker groups."
Thompson was also concerned that "complete infrastructure will create additional costs." Then he postulated about lawsuits: "How do we get third parties involved with all this data."
His fifth issue was with the loss of information. He said, "Converting data costs millions of dollars. To move all the information of an intellectual property pool in a public domain costs tons of money. But to store it in the cloud temporarily as systems were upgraded, costs Northman Grumman only $245. The mission was accomplished. But at what trade-off?"
Please click here for the rest of this report.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We hope to see you personally this Friday June 17th, as more than 500 of the most influential decision-makers in the media, entertainment, and technology industries gather at the brand new Renaissance Arlington Capital View Hotel near Washington, DC for the 8th Annual Digital Media Conference (DMC).
The Washington Post has called the annual conference "a confab of powerful communicators in the region." This year, event organizer Digital Media Wire (DMW) has lined up nearly 100 senior speakers who will present 4 keynotes, 18 panels, and 3 research reports. For the first time, there will also be two small, intensive workshops the day before the conference that will be limited to 30 attendees. One will be on Gamification and the other on Transmedia.
The DCIA is honored to be working with DMW to present a very special CONTENT IN THE CLOUD session at DMC.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD will examine issues now affecting the adoption of technology solutions based on cloud computing for processing, storage, distribution, monetization, and analytics associated with high-value entertainment content delivery over public and private broadband networks.
As part of both the Digital Media and Law & Policy Tracks, CONTENT IN THE CLOUD will explore both the leading business issues and key legal considerations related to cloud computing solutions for content distribution.
Featured speakers will include David Dudas, Vice President of Product Management at Sorenson Media; Sean Jennings, Vice President of Solutions Architecture at Virtustream; Kshitij Kumar, Senior Vice President of Mobile Video at Concurrent; Kurt Smith, Group Vice President of Sales for Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS); David Steinberg, CEO of SnappCloud; Mike West, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of GenosTV and the Genos Corporation; and Charles Worthington, Manager of Altman Vilandrie & Company.
David Dudas is Vice President of Product Management at Sorenson Media, where he is responsible for defining and executing the online and desktop product strategies. He has more than 15 years experience developing consumer and enterprise product lines, including expertise in hosted digital media platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS). Prior to Sorenson Media, David was Co-Founder and CTO at Eyespot, which launched the world's first web-browser-based video editing application, filed for five patents, and won numerous industry awards.
Sean Jennings is Vice President of Solutions Architecture at Virtustream. Sean has over 20 years of experience enabling commercial and government enterprises of all sizes gain efficiencies and competitive advantage through the design and deployment of creative, forward looking IT solutions. At Virtustream, he is focused on initiatives around virtualization and cloud computing and the ongoing architecture of the xStream platform and the integrated suite of software tools and professional services associated with it.
Kshitij Kumar is Senior Vice President of Mobile Video at Concurrent. Acquired by Concurrent in 2010, TellyTopia, where Kshitij served as CEO, was a visionary start-up bringing online content to the cable TV and broadcasting industries. Truly a multinational executive, Kshitij previously held leadership, business, and software development positions at C-COR and Lantern Communications in the USA, Lantern Canada, Nortel Networks in Canada, and C-DoT in India.
Kurt Smith is Group Vice President of Sales for Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS), overseeing the division's client acquisition, globally. Kurt's organization consists of worldwide sales professionals including industry partners and architects, all with vertical expertise. In his previous position as Senior Manager of Business Development within Deloitte Consulting's Media and Entertainment practice, Kurt was responsible for delivering strategic sales and support for Deloitte's largest media customers throughout North America.
David Steinberg is the CEO of SnappCloud. SnappCloud is a "cloud and app broker" that delivers distribution to thousands of cloud services and app developers through large PC and platform OEMs. David has over 30 years of high technology leadership experience in sales, operations, technology and executive management. He is a leader in cloud and app marketing and sales; most recently, he was CEO of one of the most successful cloud companies through its founding and sale to Symantec for $124 million in 2008.
Mike West is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of GenosTV and the Genos Corporation. He is a graduate of The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, holding Masters and Bachelors degrees in Electrical and Natural Sciences. He has 25 US patents issued with several more in process, plus numerous other inventions and publications. Mike held a broad range of technical leadership positions in engineering, architecture, R&D, strategy, business development and client consulting during 28 years at IBM, both in the UK and the US.
Charles Worthington is a Manager with Altman Vilandrie & Company. Charles' areas of expertise include emerging technologies and services such as OTT video, cloud computing, mobile applications and targeted digital advertising. In 2009, Charles took a leave of absence from AV&Co. to serve a term appointment at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) where he helped develop the National Broadband Plan, released in March of 2010. Charles received his B.A. from Harvard University in Social Studies.
In addition to CONTENT IN THE CLOUD - featured on both the Digital Media and Law & Policy Tracks, DMC will feature Research Presentations - top digital media trends; Investing in Digital Media - VCs speak; What's Next in Mobile Apps; Social TV - the conversation is now; The State of Online Advertising; and many additional valuable sessions.
To register now, please click here. Share wisely, and take care.
The Many Flavors of Distributed Computing
Excerpted from Processor Report by Julie Knudson
Distributed computing has been around for decades, but its adoption is increasing thanks to changing business needs, tight IT budgets, and the emergence of cloud computing. We've put together a primer on distributed computing and how it can benefit your enterprise.
Distributed computing takes several forms. In one model, computers at multiple locations cooperate over a network as part of an overall system. Another form is parallel computing, where a single application is distributed across multiple computers. The goal is to make that application run faster so it can scale its performance and workload capabilities.
Cloud computing is a more recent model that makes a set of computers available as a service, typically on demand and not dedicated to a given institution or user. Distributed computing allows large numbers of users to have access to data and applications and to ensure that each user has a uniform experience when it comes to performance and responsiveness of the application.
Today's market conditions make distributed computing more attractive. "Businesses have more data volume than ever, the data that they have is more complex than ever, and the data they have changes more rapidly than it ever has," says William Bain, PhD, Founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software. "Your ability to solve business problems and manipulate large, complex, fast-changing data is one of your competitive advantages. You have to have that to compete effectively."
The computational resources available through distributed computing are a cost-effective solution.
Tight IT budgets have also driven customers to look for new resources. Development projects in particular make good use of cloud-based distributed computing when funding is lean.
"The economy part of it comes into play when IT feels the pressure to do large-scale testing on a one-time or short-term basis," says Vick Vaishnavi, CEO of Aveksa. Purchasing hardware for this sort of testing often isn't feasible.
Understanding your enterprise's needs and resources should be at the top of the list. "What companies need to do is have enough expertise onsite to evaluate the opportunity to migrate functions to the cloud, especially companies that have elastic computing needs," Bain says.
"They need to be actively evaluating how their mission-critical functions can be partially or fully migrated to the cloud by taking into account both the technical issues involved in doing that and also the economic benefit." He advises data centers to weigh the cost of accessing the cloud as an on-demand resource against having dedicated hardware.
Vaishnavi's advice is for IT groups to evaluate their security pictures. "The operations side and the security side should sit down and put their heads together," he says.
"They need to figure out how to migrate applications into the cloud, but more importantly how to put in the access governance that's needed around those applications." P
For Apple's iCloud, the Sky's the Limit
Excerpted from Knowledge at Wharton Report
Apple's iCloud begins a new era of cloud wars, in which companies like Amazon and Google vie for what may be a one-time, land-rush opportunity to attract new customers and cement their loyalty. Once a consumer stores their music, photos, and other files with a service, it can create a high level of "stickiness."
More directly, Apple's move offers a compelling new level of convenience for gadget users. For those using strictly Apple products, at least, there will be no more relentless synchronizing of gadgets - smart-phones, tablets, laptops - to keep music, photos, files, and applications up-to-date on each. Since everything will simply sync wirelessly to a central server warehouse, updating one device becomes an instant update of every other device upon connection.
"It's about time," says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader. Imagine if when you went to pick up your car at the repair shop the mechanic handed you a wrench and asked if you wouldn't mind cranking on those last few bolts yourself. It's almost as if we've been "brainwashed" into doing the tedious upkeep in synchronizing our electronic devices ourselves. Or, as Apple's Steve Jobs put it in making the iCloud announcement: "Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy."
For Fader, "This signals a whole new ballgame for everyone with a vested interest in music, ranging from Apple's direct competitors - most notably Google and Amazon - to up-and-comers such as Pandora and Spotify."
Apple's announcement Monday came a few weeks after Amazon announced its new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, which allow customers to store music and other content remotely on Amazon's servers. In early May, Google launched its own cloud music-management service called Music Beta. Like Amazon and Apple, Google wants to manage music libraries and deliver them through the cloud. Many observers expect Facebook to jump into the market, too.
There is one big difference with Apple's service, however: Consumers can "match" their entire music collection via the Internet with Apple's catalog of more than 18 million songs. iTunes Match will scan every song in users' libraries and match them with an Apple duplicate copy already stored on Apple's servers (in the cloud). That eliminates the need to tediously upload a whole music collection, often song by song. Apple alone can do this because of existing agreements with four major record labels. Apple will charge users $24.99 per year for the service, and the record companies earn 70% of that fee.
Some analysts point out that by distributing those revenues to recording companies, Apple in effect will allow them to recoup some fees for songs that had been copied or shared among users without authorization.
"It will be fascinating to see how all of these firms will start changing their strategies and tactics to compete in the cloud, but the clear winner is the consumer - who will have a far better music consumption experience than ever before," Fader says.
The move by Apple comes at a time when increasing attention is being devoted to the cloud by corporations that also want to simplify the process of endlessly updating applications that reside on computers and other devices. One of the biggest challenges in that effort involves security.
For more information on the future of remote music storage and players, including insight into the Amazon and Google strategies, see this Knowledge@Wharton story: With Its New Music Storage and Player, Can Amazon Deliver in the Cloud?
Octoshape Wins 2011 Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award
Octoshape Aps has won the Red Herring's Top 100 Europe award, which recognizes those private technology companies that are harnessing the power of innovation to shape and revolutionize their respective industries.
"It was an honor to be selected along with many of our talented peers in Amsterdam this year," said Michael Koehn Milland, CEO of Octoshape. "Our consecutive selections as a finalist and a winner are really a credit to our innovative technologies and expert team."
Since 1996, Red Herring has recognized the year's most promising European private technology ventures and has become a mark of distinction for promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.
Winners were selected based on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration.
Streaming media innovator Octoshape provides the enabling technology required for content owners to deliver online video over best-effort public networks to the largest audiences and with the highest-quality viewing experience.
The company is writing the next chapter of content delivery for IPTV services over the Internet. The Octoshape approach is more scalable, flexible and affordable than traditional CDN schemes, while providing feature-rich, high-quality viewing to the largest of audiences.
Netflix Now as Big as a Mid-Size Cable Net
Excerpted from Media Daily News by Joe Mandese
Netflix's online streaming service is rapidly emerging as an important gateway for accessing television programming, according to a tracking study revealed by a top broadcast network executive Tuesday during the most recent edition of MPG's Collaborative Alliance meeting in New York City.
The executive, CBS research chief Dave Poltrack, used the term "phenomenon" several times to describe the rapid adoption of Netflix, especially among an important segment of the TV audience known as early adopters of next generation media platforms.
The research, which was part of a series of focus group studies CBS conducted in its Las Vegas testing facility, Television City, indicates that 43% of the early adopters - what Poltrack terms "fully connected" TV viewers who already subscribe to digital TV and broadband services, now subscribe to Netflix.
"Last summer, that number wasn't even large enough to have put it down as one of the choices" CBS asked its focus group respondents, he said, adding, "This is a real phenomenon."
Poltrack contrasted Netflix's remarkable growth with rather tepid adoption rates of other so-called "over-the-top (OTT)" TV streaming platforms, such as GoogleTV, Boxee, and AppleTV, but said that video game platforms such as Microsoft's Xbox, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PS3 have become a major means of streaming TV programming, and that many of those platform users are actually doing so via Netflix.
Poltrack estimated that the size of Netflix's prime-time streaming audience is about the same as a "mid-size cable network," and is growing fast.
Poltrack indicated the rapid uptake of Netflix is even more remarkable considering that the video rental and streaming service still does not offer many top TV shows for streaming, and he suggested that it might grow even more rapidly as it strikes content deals to do so.
"They don't have the content, but they certainly have the right ideas," he told the standing-room-only Collaborative Alliance audience.
Despite the fast growth of platforms like Netflix and online streaming service Hulu, and even Google's vaunted YouTube, eMarketer chief Geoff Ramsey presented data indicating that conventional TV viewing remains the dominant platform for consuming video content, especially full-length TV shows and movies.
Ramsey sought to dispel false reports and industry speculation that online video streaming is challenging television's dominance as a source of video programming. Based on an analysis of fresh eMarketer data, aggregated from a variety of leading industry sources, Ramsey said that the average amount of time Americans spend with online video still is nearly half of TV's: two hours and 35 minutes vs. four hours and 24 minutes for TV, on average.
While the majority of American consumers now stream online video, he said that the amount of time they spend doing so still pales relative to television.
However, he said the behavior of American video consumers is shifting from "video snacking" of online video content to viewing of full-length movies and TV shows, making it an alternative channel to conventional TV platforms, especially for millennials, many of whom now use online streaming as their primary source for video content.
Overall, Ramsey estimated that an "eight percentage point" gap exists between the amount of time American consumers spend watching video online, and the share of advertising dollars allocated to it, but he said online video advertising is growing rapidly - more than 50% per year currently.
File Sharing Is Still Surging - Then Again, So Is Everything Else
Excerpted from Digital Music News Report
Maybe the boom-boom days of file-sharing increases are over, but swapping volumes are still gaining in the double-digits. Then again, so is everything else, including on-demand video and audio, illegal locker sharing, and for that matter, mobile media consumption. In fact, on-demand video is now beating file-sharing growth volumes, according to Cisco's just-published Visual Networking Index (VNI).
This is the latest attempt to measure the dizzying surge of Internet and mobile traffic, and the broader numbers are staggering. Cisco says that IP traffic has grown eight-fold over the past 5 years, and will grow fourfold by 2015.
That is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32% between 2010 and 2015, a surge we're experiencing in real-time. "In 2015, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross global IP networks every 5 minutes," Cisco found.
This is a huge pie that keeps growing, though as of 2010, file-swapping (which spans everything from LimeWire-style swapping to BitTorrent trading) was no longer the largest bandwidth hog. Instead, on-demand video will account for 50% of Internet traffic by 2012, and easily outsize file-swapping by 2015.
That sort of surge was recently reaffirmed by YouTube, which reported that 48 hours of video are now being uploaded every minute. "It would take over 5 years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every second in 2015," Cisco asserts.
And music? Cisco didn't specifically break out music volumes, though content like music videos are a massive source of traffic on destinations like YouTube. The same is true on file-swapping channels, though huge file-based competition comes from formats like games, adult video, and full-length videos.
A detailed file-sharing volume graph, plus the broader report are here.
Digital Media Site Xunlei Files for IPO
Excerpted from Penn Olson Report by Rick Martin
Chinese digital media company Xunlei Ltd has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) with the SEC, according to a Reuters report. The company, which operates Xunlei.com, hopes to raise up to $200 million.
Xunlei has been grouped among common P2P BitTorrent clients in the past. According to Wikipedia, it uses something called P2SP, which is not "a P2P tool in its essence."
Xunlei has come under fire over the years, having been sued by six Hollywood studios back in 2008. The company was also sued by China's primary television station CCTV for infringing on its Olympic broadcast copyright.
The website's video section, Xunlei Kankan, claims that it obeys copyright laws.
We have reported recently about the efforts of sites like Youku and Tudou to clean up their act with regards to infringing content. It appears that both are making pushes to create original video to offer on their respective platforms.
The announcement of Xunlei's IPO comes on the heels of fellow Chinese Internet company Renren, which IPO'd last month. Xunlei is the latest of a flurry of web properties emerging from the country into the international spotlight. Here's a recent CCTV video report about this trend.
RightScale Brings Zynga-like Hybrid Clouds to the Masses
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Derrick Harris
Cloud-management platform provider RightScale is launching a new service to help customers manage private and hybrid clouds similar to what RightScale customer Zynga does with its vaunted Z Cloud infrastructure. Hybrid cloud computing appears to be the end-game for many companies' cloud strategies right now, and RightScale's new MyCloud service might represent an ideal way of thinking about the model.
RightScale's new offering provides the proverbial single pane of glass through which to manage private-cloud infrastructure based on either Eucalyptus Systems or Cloud.com as well as public cloud-based resources that are managed via RightScale. And although Zynga built its RightScale-based cloud setup from scratch, RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said it offers what might be the ideal model for doing hybrid cloud computing. Rather than focusing on simple cloudbursting, which Crandell calls "naive" in certain situations, Zynga honed in on standardization as a focus of its cloud efforts.
By utilizing standard server templates, Zynga is able to stage, test and launch games in Amazon EC2, then easily migrate them to its private cloud when the time comes by launching a cluster of identically configured servers in-house. Last week, RightScale opened its MultiCloud Marketplace, which is like an app store for infrastructure configurations that features a wide range of templates for everything from web servers to Hadoop clusters. With MyCloud, users can now create their own Zynga-like experience by utilizing Marketplace templates on private cloud infrastructure as well as in the public cloud.
Another use case for MyCloud, Crandell said, might be to spread different components of an application architectures across both public and private resources. Depending on bandwidth costs and the need for high-speed interconnects, it might make sense for certain parts (e.g., an on-demand processing engine) to run in the public cloud while others remain on premise.
Crandell will be present at Structure 2011, being held June 22nd-23rd in San Francisco, CA to discuss the future of cloud application platforms and what issues they'll need to address as mainstream interest picks up. MyCloud is currently available for free through an early access program, although more-functional, and paid, Standard and Enterprise versions are on the way.
iTransmission - BitTorrent Client for iPhone, iPad
Excerpted from ZeroPaid Report by Jared Moya
BitTorrent users often want to download content on the go, and iPhone and iPad owners have to look no further than iTransmission to make it happen.
iTransmission is a native iOS BitTorrent client that works on both the iPhone and the iPad, the former requiring iOS 4.0 and above, the latter iOS 3.2 and above. Earlier versions might work, but the developers warn that they "may suffer severely in performance."
Currently it supports following features: Adding tasks from both torrent URLs and magnets; Transmission's web interface; automatic port mapping (UPnP) for users behind routers; choosing which network interface (Cellular network or WiFi) to use; connection and speed limits; and attractive UI.
The best feature, in my opinion, is being able to choose which network you want to use to download content, especially considering most wireless carriers already have, or in the process of putting, bandwidth caps with overage fees in place.
iTransmission could come in awfully handy if you're waiting in an airport and want to have something to watch during your flight. It could also be useful for grabbing songs or albums for your iPhone.
Stay tuned.
Cloud Tipped to Transform Global Markets
Excerpted from Sydney Morning Herald Report by Nicole Stevens
The operation of global markets will be irrevocably transformed by the growth of cloud computing, an Internet researcher says.
Professor Mike Nelson, a visiting Internet researcher from Georgetown University in Washington, in the United States, and a former advisor to President Barack Obama, also says cloud computing will improve security for Internet users.
Nelson says Australian businesses are "well positioned" to take advantage of cloud computing, which he says is "the next stage of globalization".
"This is just as important as the world wide web," Nelson said.
"It is not just a fad. It is not going to affect five to ten per cent of companies. This is changing the whole game."
Cloud computing was a game-changer for world markets, as it wipes out cost-barriers to entry, Nelson said.
"We are going to have hyper-competition in more and more markets.
"Little companies can enter the market and play against the big players and other small players... These companies will be based all around the world."
Cloud computing allows organizations to outsource their computer requirements over networks to IT specialists, at a lower cost than working in-house.
To date, the three big players offering cloud computing services are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, Nelson said.
Nelson said Australia had the right human resources to tap into cloud computing, but would need adequate broadband infrastructure to take advantage of developments.
"You need broadband infrastructure, it has got to be both wired and wireless to make that happen," Mr Nelson said.
"You have to be connected to the cloud, before you can use the cloud."
Cloud computing could also go some way to resolving credit card and identity theft that has plagued online retailers and banks around the world.
"If you are a large company with 500 different branch offices... you are going to be as vulnerable as your least competent IT manager," Nelson said.
"If instead you are plugging into a cloud that is run by CSC, IBM, or Amazon, you are working with some of the best engineers in the planet who are incredibly motivated to make sure that their system works."
Nelson made the comments following a presentation at AMP's Amplify festival in Sydney on Monday.
App Engine: Google's Deepest Secrets as a Service
Excerpted from The Register Report by Cade Metz
Google will never open source its back end. You'll never run the Google File System or Google MapReduce or Google BigTable on your own servers. Except on the rarest of occasions, the company won't even discuss the famously distributed software that underpins its sweeping collection of web services.
But if you like, you can still run your own applications atop GFS and MapReduce and BigTable. With Google App Engine - the "platform cloud" the company floated in the spring of 2008 - anyone can hoist code onto Google's live infrastructure. App Engine aims to share the company's distributed computing expertise by way of an online service.
"Google has built up this infrastructure - a lot of distributed software, internal processes - for building-out and scaling applications. We don't have the luxury of slowly ramping something up: when we launch something, we have to get it out there and scale it very, very quickly," Google App Engine product manager Sean Lynch recently told The Register.
"We decided we could take a lot of this infrastructure and expose it in a way that would let third-party developers use it - leverage the knowledge and techniques we have built up - to basically simplify the entire process of building their own web apps: building them, managing them once they're up there, and scaling them once they take off."
For some coders, it's an appealing proposition, not only because the Google back end has a reputation few others can match - a reputation fueled in part by the company's reluctance to discuss particulars - but also because App Engine completely removes the need to run your own infrastructure. As a platform cloud, App Engine goes several steps beyond an "infrastructure cloud" a la Amazon EC2 . It doesn't give you raw virtual machines. It gives you APIs, and once you code to these APIs, the service takes care of the rest.
"When you're one guy trying to run a startup, you have to do absolutely everything. I've done everything from managing machines to writing code to marketing," says Jeff Schnitzer, a former senior engineer in EA's online games division who's now using App Engine to build an online-dating application. "That's one of the reasons why I've been drawn to App Engine. It eliminates entire classes of job descriptions, from sys admin to DBA."
The rub is that in order to benefit from this automation, you have to play by a strict Google rulebook. All applications must be built with Python, Java, or one of a handful of other supported languages, including Google's new-age Go programming language, which was just added to the list. And even within these languages, there are limits on the libraries and frameworks you can use, the way you handle data, and the duration of your processes.
Google is loosening some restrictions as the service matures. But inherently, App Engine requires a change of mindset. "You have to throw away a lot of what you know and basically write for Google's model: small instances, faster start, completely new data storage. It's a completely different beast," says Matt Cooper, a developer and entrepreneur who just recently started using the service. And because Google jealously guards the secrets of its infrastructure, anyone who builds an application atop App Engine will face additional hurdles if they ever decide to move the app elsewhere.
All of which makes Google App Engine a particularly fascinating case study. Much like in other markets, Google is promising you an added payoff if you seriously change the way you've done things in the past - and if you put a hefty amount of trust on its servers. Many have already embraced the proposition - App Engine serves more than a billion and a half page views a day, and 100,000 coders access the online console each month - but it's yet to be seen whether the service has a future in the mainstream.
Please click here for the rest of this report.
The Cloud: The Next Big Thing?
Excerpted from The Irish Times Report by Una Mullally
Cloud computing is the next big thing, apparently - but what is it, and why should we care?
It's the buzz-phrase that's turning into a reality. Everyone's talking about cloud computing, but what exactly is it, what does it mean for individuals and businesses, and why is Ireland becoming a hub for it?
Cloud computing is the provisioning of services and resources - from software to applications and more - over a wireless network or "cloud", rather than physically on your device.
Instead of installing software, you can use those available in the cloud to process and store data and access programs when you need them.
"I use the explanation of electricity," says Paul Rellis, Managing Director of Microsoft in Ireland. "Years ago every organization had its own generator and produced its own electricity, but then big companies, governments, and semi-states created an electricity grid, transformed lives and created a huge industry. Cloud computing acts in the same way. Today, everyone has their own technology, but cloud computing is about pooling it altogether and providing it over the Internet at a very high quality utility speed."
The cloud becomes a utility like water or gas that individuals, businesses and the public sector can use. In theory, you could have minimal programs on any device - just an operating system and a web browser - and everything else can be accessed via the cloud.
A few things have coincided to bring cloud computing to the fore in Ireland. First off, it's central to the Government's technology development plans. At the end of May, Cork Institute of Technology announced Ireland's first undergraduate and Master's courses in cloud computing.
Yesterday, Dell announced that some of the 140 new jobs it is creating will be in its first cloud research and development center in Dublin. The center aims to develop the architecture of cloud computing, research how the next generation of the technology can work, develop new concepts around it and examine how these innovations can be delivered.
"We performed a site assessment and chose Dublin," says Steve McKenna, Executive Director of Dell's services Solutions Group. "We already had a well established presence here. A lot of our tech support is driven out of Dublin, and the complementary skill sets, availability of resourcing and getting those skills relatively quickly is the real success story. The guys who came over from the US were blown away with the range of talent available in the market, so they decided to go and do the whole thing in Dublin."
Nowadays, there is no such thing as a technological shift without Apple, who on Monday announced its own foray into cloud computing, iCloud.
iCloud is Apple's cloud that will allow you to store photos, music, documents and apps remotely and access them with all of your devices.
Security is the number one underlying concern with the cloud. Dell says "huge advances" are being made in overcoming security issues. Recent hacks of the Sony PlayStation network created a nightmare scenario, so getting security right is a priority for developers.
Cloud Computing: Architectural and Policy Implications
Excerpted from Law Professors Blog Report by Daniel Sokol
Cloud computing has emerged as perhaps the hottest development in information technology (IT). Despite all of the attention that it has garnered, existing analyses focus almost exclusively on the issues that surround data privacy without exploring cloud computing's architectural and policy implications.
This article offers an initial exploratory analysis in that direction. It begins by introducing key cloud computing concepts, such as service-oriented architectures, thin clients, and virtualization, and discusses the leading delivery models and deployment strategies that are being pursued by cloud computing providers.
It next analyzes the economics of cloud computing in terms of reducing costs, transforming capital expenditures into operating expenditures, aggregating demand, increasing reliability, and reducing latency.
It then discusses the architectural implications of cloud computing for access networking (focusing on bandwidth, reliability, quality of service, and ubiquity) and data center interconnectivity (focusing on bandwidth, reliability, security and privacy, control over routing policies, standardization, and metering and payment).
It closes by offering a few observations on the impact of cloud computing on the industry structure for data centers, server-related technologies, router-based technologies, and access networks, as well as its implications for regulation.
Please click here for the full report.
User Alliance Wants Cloud Interoperability
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Charles Babcock
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) , a vendor neutral group with a steering committee composed of Lockheed Martin, China Life, Deutsche Bank, CapGemini, the Australia National Bank, and other powerful users, has issued requirements for eight cloud use cases.
"We have outlined specific innovations in security, automation, common management, and service transparency required for widespread adoption of cloud services," wrote Adrian Kunzle, Managing Director and Global Head of Engineering at JP Morgan Chase, a steering committee member, in a blog Tuesday in support of the requirements.
He left little doubt how they should be used: "We are advocating our members to begin immediate use of these documents in their planning and procurement of cloud solutions," he added.
The alliance is addressing head on the problem of public clouds defining standard servers, workload formats, SLAs and security measures each in its own way, with no common metric allowing one to be compared to the other. In addition, with each cloud selecting one virtual machine format to support, using the format makes for a barrier to exiting one cloud and using another.
A half measure in addressing the issue has already been supplied by the DMTF standards body with its vendor-neutral Open Virtualization Format for cloud workloads. Workloads converted into the OVF "migration" format can be recognized in clouds using different hypervisors. But in each case, the cloud will convert the neutral format into its own preferred virtual machine format before running it. With OVF, workloads can check into the cloud, but like visitors to the Hotel California, they can't leave.
"Moving workloads is not that easy, not without a lot expensive software to help you do it. OVF is starting to help but at a very basic level," said Jason Waxman, Intel's most frequent spokesman on cloud issues, in an interview. He is general manager of High Density Servers in Intel's Server Platforms Group.
The ODCA was established seven months ago to counter vendor lock-in and speed public cloud development. Intel was an instigator of the organization and remains a background technical advisor, but it doesn't sit on the steering committee or vote on decisions. If the cloud market grows faster, it is likely to benefit Intel, since the public clouds built to date have been based on its x86 chip architecture, not Oracle's Sparc or IBM's Power chips.
Noticeably absent from t he ODCA membership were the major cloud suppliers, including Amazon Web Services, whose EC2 cloud is the leader in the marketplace; Rackspace, a supplier of managed services and Rackspace Cloud; and Microsoft, supplier of Azure cloud services. Rackspace is backing an alternative to standardized cloud requirements by contributing code and sponsoring the Openstack open source project, an effort to generate a widely shared software base for cloud services.
Cloud suppliers that have signed up as ODCA members include Savvis (now part of CenturyLink); Dell, which supplies cloud servers; EMC, which partners with Cisco in supplying server and storage packages through their VCE partnership; Parallels, supplier of virtual machine software for the Macintosh that allows it to run Windows applications; AT&T, provider of the Synaptic Compute Cloud; and Red Hat, supplier of the open source KVM hypervisor used in some cloud implementations. Red Hat is the only direct hypervisor supplier in the alliance; absent are Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix Systems. Marvin Wheeler, chief strategy officer of cloud supplier Terremark and chairman of ODCA, said in an interview that his firm's new owner, Verizon Business, plans to adhere to the standards expected to emanate from the ODCA's use case requirements.
Wheeler said by increasing transparency between clouds and allowing shared workloads, generally adhered to cloud standards could reduce the cost of cloud computing for users by $25 billion over within five years. ODCA's work "will accelerate cloud investment and adoption," he said.
Instead of drafting cloud standards itself, ODCA is defining use case requirements and then letting an established standards body tackle the related standards process. Those bodies include: DMTF, Oasis, the Cloud Security Association, and the TM Forum's Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC).
Sean Kelley, CIO of the Platform Services Group at Deutsche Bank and chairman of the ECLC, said the council "shares the same priorities as the Open Data Center Alliance of defining IT requirements and enabling the optimal, flexible management of a cloud ecosystem," he said in the ODCA announcement.
Membership of ODCA has expanded rapidly to 250 members, the bulk of them cloud users, Wheeler reported.
U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right
Excerpted from Wired Magazine Report by David Kravets
A United Nations report said Friday that disconnecting people from the Internet is a human rights violation and against international law.
The report railed against France and the United Kingdom, which have passed laws to remove accused copyright scofflaws from the Internet. It also protested blocking Internet access to quell political unrest.
"While blocking and filtering measures deny users access to specific content on the Internet, states have also taken measures to cut off access to the Internet entirely. The Special Rapporteur considers cutting off users from Internet access, regardless of the justification provided, including on the grounds of violating intellectual property rights law, to be disproportionate and thus a violation of article 19, paragraph 3, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."
The report continues: "The Special Rapporteur calls upon all states to ensure that Internet access is maintained at all times, including during times of political unrest. In particular, the Special Rapporteur urges States to repeal or amend existing intellectual copyright laws which permit users to be disconnected from Internet access, and to refrain from adopting such laws."
The report, by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, comes the same day an Internet-monitoring firm detected that two thirds of Syria's Internet access has abruptly gone dark, in what is likely a government response to unrest in that country.
Coming Events of Interest
The Business of Cloud Computing - June 13th-15th in San Diego, CA. Cloud Computing is the latest disruptive technology. Enterprises, large and small, are looking to cloud computing providers for savings, flexibility, and scalability. However, potential adopters of all sizes are concerned about security, data management, privacy, performance and control.
CIO Cloud Summit - June 14th-16th in Scottsdale, AZ. The summit will bring together CIOs from Fortune 1000 organizations, leading IT analysts, and innovative solution providers to network and discuss the latest cloud computing topics and trends in a relaxed, yet focused business setting.
Digital Media Conference - June 17th in Washington, DC. The DCIA presents CONTENT IN THE CLOUD as part of the digital media business issues and law & policy tracks at this eighth annual gathering of over 500 of the most influential decision-makers in the media, entertainment, and technology industries.
Cloud Leadership Forum - June 20th-21st in Santa Clara, CA. This conference's enterprise-focused agenda, prepared with the help of nearly a dozen IT executives, will bring you case studies and peer insights on how leading organizations are approaching the cloud opportunity - plus much more.
Cloud Computing World Forum - June 21st-22nd in London, England. This third annual event is free to attend and will will feature all of the key players within the cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) market providing an introduction, discussion and look into the future for the ICT industry.
TransmitCHINA Talks - September 14th-16th at the Great Wall of China. International leaders, thinkers, innovators, and creators will have an exclusive opportunity to hear a cross-section of preeminent thought leaders from some of the world's most innovative organizations in the digital and creative content ecosystem.
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