September 10, 2012
Volume XL, Issue 11
SAP Sponsors CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012
The DCIA and CCA proudly announce that SAP has signed-on as a sponsor of the CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) business leadership summit taking place November 8th-9th in Santa Monica, CA.
Cloud computing changes the way you acquire and use computing resources. Whether you are considering a new implementation or extending your existing on-premise investments, SAP cloud solutions provide you the flexibility to innovate your business while paying for only what you need.
What's more, SAP's solutions are designed for rapid deployment so you can adapt to changing business needs and run better, faster. Better yet, they can be used with all types of mobile devices.
Harness innovative technologies to help you adapt to change — and generate business value — no matter what size your business. When you rely on a consistent and secure core, you can adopt new technologies designed to fit with your existing enterprise solutions quickly and cost-effectively.
SAP's scalable infrastructure and best-of-breed partner ecosystem supports businesses across 24 industries.
What are the potential benefits? Rapidly adopt new technologies and applications by using a flexible platform designed for change. Extract value from big data using industry-leading business intelligence and in-memory computing. Mobilize your workforce with secure access to business information and systems — on any device. Boost business and IT efficiency with integrated on-premise and cloud-based platforms. And take advantage of continuous innovation by tapping into the SAP ecosystem and channels.
CCW:2012 will feature three co-located conferences focusing on the impact of cloud-based solutions in the industry's fastest-moving and most strategically important areas: entertainment, broadband, and venture financing.
SAP will offer a keynote address on Cloud Data at the Entertainment Content Delivery conference within CCW:2012.
CCW:2012 registration enables delegates to participate in any session of the three conferences being presented at CCW:2012 — ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
At the end of the first full-day of co-located conferences, attendees will be transported from the conference hotel in Santa Monica to Marina del Rey Harbor where they will board a yacht for a sunset cruise and networking reception.
So register today to attend CCW:2012 and don't forget to add the Sunset Cruise to your conference registration. Registration to attend CCW:2012 includes access to all sessions, central exhibit hall with networking functions, luncheon, refreshment breaks, and conference materials. Early-bird registrations save $200.
Cloud-Based Subscriptions to Hit 500 Million
Excerpted from Home Media Magazine Report by Chris Tribbey
From major players such as Amazon, Google, and Apple to independents such as Dropbox, Barracuda, and SugarSync, the ramp-up of cloud-based content service is leading to a global subscriber base to those services of half a billion by the end of the 2012, according to a new report.
IHS iSuppli said that figure will be up from 300 million in 2011, and should spur more players to enter the market. By 2017, there could be more than 1.3 billion cloud-based service subscribers, the research firm estimates.
"In an environment where mobile devices like smart-phones and media tablets handle broadband data on a near-ceaseless basis, businesses are realizing the importance of cloud services in allowing consumers to manage, store and sync content across their devices," said Dr. Jagdish Rebello, Director for Consumer and Communications at IHS.
"And with companies casting about for new viable business models in order to monetize data traffic, cloud-based services could help lead firms into the next revolution of the wireless industry."
He pointed to Amazon's Cloud Drive and Apple's iCloud as two of the main offerings driving adoption of cloud services. However, the breadth of content being stored by consumers in the cloud — videos, music, pictures, books and more — is presenting some challenges in terms of making it easy for consumers to find and manage their content, Rebello noted.
Rebello also pointed out that most of these services are being run at a loss at the outset. The ones that stay afloat will be those that offer a mix of support for diverse devices and content while offering value-added services.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Echoing in some ways the Internet Freedom statement adopted last week at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, FL, the Democratic Party this week included language supporting Internet freedom in its platform, but also defended the Obama administration's position and requested additional cybersecurity legislation, at its convention in Charlotte, NC.
"The Obama administration has led the world to recognize and defend Internet freedom — the freedom of expression, assembly, and association online for people everywhere — through coalitions of countries and by empowering individuals with innovative technologies," it extols.
But it adds that cybersecurity legislation "would help business and government protect against risks of cyberattacks while also safeguarding the privacy rights of our citizens."
This is the first time in history that both dominant US political parties have overtly supported distributed computing technologies in their campaign agendas.
The Democrat Platform calls for an Internet that is "secure and reliable, and that is respectful of US intellectual property (IP), the free flow of information, and privacy."
It goes on to argue that the Obama administration has worked to strike a balance between preserving online IP while also allowing Internet users to enjoy online privacy.
The White House, like the DCIA along with much of the technology sector, opposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in part because the measure failed to reach that balance.
The platform also argues that using federal money to expand Internet access can boost the economy and create new opportunities.
"We will ensure that America has a 21st century digital infrastructure — robust wired and wireless broadband capability, a smarter electrical grid, and upgraded information technology (IT) infrastructure in key sectors such as health care and education," it states.
"President Obama has committed to ensuring that 98 percent of the country has access to high-speed wireless broadband Internet access. We are finding innovative ways to free-up wireless spectrum and are building a state-of-the-art nationwide, interoperable, public safety network."
Unlike the GOP version, the Democratic language does not mention reducing regulations affecting broadband network operators and, instead of criticizing the Obama administration and its Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) net neutrality initiatives, as noted above, says that Obama has "led the world" in this area.
The Obama administration has helped promote innovative technologies to empower Internet users, the platform says.
In addition, it praises the administration's efforts on cybersecurity, citing the President's review of current governmental activity in this area and backing of military preparedness.
"The very technologies that empower us to lead and create also empower individual criminal hackers, organized criminal groups, terrorist networks, and other advanced nations to disrupt the critical infrastructure that is vital to our economy, commerce, public safety, and military," the platform says. "Defending against cyberthreats requires networks that are secure, trustworthy, and resilient."
While Republicans stressed the need for less government regulation of the Internet and technology companies, trusting them to preserve users' privacy or else be punished by the market, the Democrats predictably favor more government regulation in terms of net neutrality and proactively protecting Americans' online privacy with the Internet Privacy Bill of Rights and "Do Not Track" options.
Like the Republicans, however, the Democrats say they support the current multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance and oppose new intergovernmental controls over the net.
"To preserve the Internet as a platform for commerce, debate, learning, and innovation in the 21st century, we successfully negotiated international Internet policymaking principles, support the current multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance, and oppose the extension of intergovernmental controls over the Internet," it says.
Members of Congress Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Doris Matsui (D-CA), and Jared Polis (D-CO) commended the new Internet freedom language in the Democrat platform.
Earlier in August, this group had encouraged their party to reaffirm its "staunch commitment to online free expression, to protect privacy from overbroad surveillance, to a free and open Internet, and to innovation in digital services."
David Segal, Executive Director of the digital civil liberties advocacy group Demand Progress, welcomed the "bipartisan commitment" by both parties to an open Internet.
Demand Progress led an effort to ensure that both parties included Internet freedom language in their respective party planks. But given the past attempts by politicians to pass restrictive legislation governing the Internet, Segal said, "Words are not enough."
"It is clear that the Internet community is coming of age politically, and we will be paying close attention to which party works harder to implement these new party planks," said Segal.
Finally, here's a letter from the four prominent Democratic Members of Congress, supporting the party's Internet freedom platform. Share wisely, and take care.
Scayl's "E-mail Without Limits" Mac Version Now Available
Scayl, a next-generation e-mail application capable of sending very large files, this week introduced Scayl for Mac. Scayl for Mac provides a much easier and quicker way to e-mail unlimited-sized files including Blu-ray and HD 3D videos.
"We are thrilled to give Mac users a new way to distribute movie files more easily and inexpensively than the uploading, downloading and streaming services that are currently available. It's being adopted for film editing, film festivals, and distribution," said Bill Kallman, CEO of Scayl. "Scayl's approach provides a cure to e-mail's current core problem sending very big files— one-to-one or one-to-many."
Scayl's free version of its "E-mail Without Limits" offers a secure delivery method for high-definition videos to users for immediate playback on big displays or in a user's media player. It is the first direct delivery distributed cloud service social e-mail platform that eliminates the pain of online big file side services by working seamlessly with legacy e-mail.
Scayl provides a high-performance, low-cost digital parcel service capable of delivering and receiving several massive-sized files simultaneously. Current e-mail and popular centralized client-server services include file size limits, storage, and premium distribution costs.
At NAB 2012, the world's largest Broadcasting Technology show in Las Vegas, Scayl's CEO was the keynote presenter in the Cloud Computing Conference: "When we learned about Scayl's launch plans, and considered the potential benefits of its latest release to high-value content distribution — especially high-definition and three-dimensional videos - there was no question about it. We wanted Bill to do the opening keynote of our inaugural Cloud Computing Conference at NAB," said Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA).
"Scayl was the biggest news at this year's NAB (with over 1,500 exhibitors)," said Dr. Bill Rogers, Executive Producer, Technology Today (8 million viewers). There is no learning curve on how to use Scayl because everyone knows how to send e-mail."
Start-Ups Rush to the Cloud
Excerpted from Network World Report by Brandon Butler
Having a cloud computing start-up has at some times felt like being part of the California Gold Rush, says Nand Mulchandani, CEO and co-founder of ScaleXtreme, a two-year-old company focused on easing management of multi-cloud environments.
Scads of entrepreneurs over the past few years have launched companies in an effort to grab a share of the riches they've seen companies such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and VMware reap. And why not? Forrester last year projected that the cloud computing industry will grow six-fold from $40 billion in 2010 to $241 billion by 2020.
Frank Artale, a venture capitalist at Ignition Partners, says the cloud represents the next major shift in enterprise computing, and that VCs are aggressively investing in cloud start-ups. "Initially this move to the cloud will create more complexity," he says. "Companies that can enable the use of cloud, virtual networking and storage will get lots of attention." Artale is among investors at Mulchandani's ScaleXtreme, which has raised $13.5 million.
Network World this week released its latest list of hot cloud computing start-ups, including ScaleXtreme, and these companies in total have raised more than $160 million - including one start-up that itself has raised $60 million.
Peter Sonsini, Managing Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), says investments in cloud companies are still "very robust" even though overall VC investments are down by about 20% from a decade ago.
There's been a shift in the type of cloud companies that VCs are funding, Sonsini says. The early days of cloud computing was about the infrastructure that makes the technology work. Now, investments are focused on optimizing how customers can use the cloud and better manage it.
Sonsini, for example, sits on the board as an investor in Embrane, which Sonsini says was one of the original players in the software-defined networking market that has seen increased attention ever since VMware's $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira in July. Embrane helps enterprises manage their SDN environments by virtualizing network application tools such as load balancers, firewalls and VPNs.
Out of the dozen companies featured in our hot cloud computing start-up list, most have received less than $10 million in VC funding. Part of the reality, Sonsini says, is that it simply takes less money to start a company now because entrepreneurs can leverage cloud resources.
Milind Gadekar, whose start-up CloudOn has raised about $26 million, says a decade ago he would have needed nearly double the amount of money to start his company. By leveraging Amazon Web Services' cloud, CloudOn has not needed to buy back-end infrastructure to support the company, which makes an application for accessing Microsoft Office tools on mobile devices.
Other companies are bootstrapping the operations themselves. OneOps, for example, aims to make application development and deployment easier, and the three former eBay engineers that started it have invested their own money in the project for starters.
Sonsini says after the Internet bubble of the early 2000s the VC community got too inflated with lots of new investors coming into the market and throwing around a lot of money. The contraction of recent years has somewhat right-sized the market to a level where he believes there are an appropriate amount of start-ups being funded to not saturate the market, but to still allow promising ideas to flourish.
We'll see just which ones make it big in the cloud computing realm.
DataDirect Networks (DDN) Supercharges SAS Grid Computing
DataDirect Networks (DDN), the leader in massively scalable storage, this week announced that the award-winning DDN SFA 10K-E platform with the DDN GRIDScaler parallel file system produced the fastest runtimes recorded to date by SAS Labs for a SAS Grid execution of a highly parallel model calibration workload.
SAS engineers also concluded in recent testing that DDN GRIDScaler offered the most consistent and predictable performance of any shared file system tested to date with SAS Grid Computing, supporting applications such as SAS Drug Development, SAS Warranty Analysis and SAS Enterprise Miner for fraud detection, risk management and enterprise business optimization.
The full benchmark results have been published in a SAS white paper available here.
"DDN and SAS share a common mission: to help organizations extract the greatest possible value from their data," said Jean-Luc Chatelain, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Technology at DDN. "Paired together, DDN and SAS technologies unleash the incredible potential of the Big Data era and accelerate the speed of business."
The DDN SFA 10K-E is a unified virtual server and storage appliance featuring DDN's groundbreaking In-Storage Processing technology. This virtualized environment eliminates externalized data processing systems and allows data-intensive applications to exist within the storage engine — expediting data access, minimizing latency and significantly lowering the cost and complexity of data-intensive computing.
"The DDN SFA 10K-E platform with the DDN GRIDScaler parallel file system is an excellent choice for SAS Grid deployments," said Cheryl Doninger, Senior Director, Research and Development, SAS. "IO intensive SAS Grid workloads have demonstrated excellent performance characteristics utilizing this storage appliance. The choice of shared file system and storage is a critical component of high-performance SAS Grid deployments."
SAS Grid Computing enables organizations to create a managed, shared environment to process large volumes of data and analytic programs more efficiently, making it easier and cost-effective to scale compute-intensive applications for greater complexity and more users.
Twelve Hot Cloud Companies Worth Watching Excerpted from PC World Report by Brandon Butler
While big-name players such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Verizon, and VMware sit atop the burgeoning cloud computing market, an entire ecosystem of early stage start-ups are looking to stake their claim, too.
And why not? As Ignition Partners' Frank Artale sees it, enterprises are on the precipice of the next major shift in computing and venture capital firms are "very aggressive" in looking for companies that can help customers ease their transition to the cloud.
"Initially this move will create more complexity," he says. "Companies that can enable the use of cloud, virtual networking and storage will gets lots of attention."
Our list of a dozen such cloud computing upstarts, hailing from locations as far apart as Silicon Valley and Israel, includes those leveraging mobile devices for worker productivity, integrating software-defined networking and provisioning and monitoring cloud-based services.
These companies — many of which have been able to get up and running by taking advantage of cloud services themselves — have attracted some $161 million in funding (one snared a $60 million round by itself) and are hungry for more as they look to grow their businesses.
CloudOn
Focus: Optimization of Microsoft Office apps for mobile devices
Why it's worth watching: Ask Milind Gadekar, and he'll tell you that the workforce of the future will rely even more heavily on mobile devices. But for many workers, the most popular applications they use at their jobs are not optimized to work on mobile devices. That's where CloudOn comes in.
The folks at CloudOn are aiming to make that mobile workforce more productive with their free app that's in public beta. The company specializes in optimizing Microsoft Office for use on phones and tablets across a range of mobile operating systems, including iOS and Android, all using a cloud-based service.
Cisco purchased Gadekar's first start-up, named P-Cube, which focused on network optimization for service providers, for $200 million in 2004. After heading up product marketing for the firm, Gadekar left the company three years ago to explore mobile optimization opportunities. That's when he founded CloudOn with Meir Morgenstern, who led the technical side of P-Cube and now serves as VP of Engineering for CloudOn. Within a year of founding CloudOn, Gadekar says the best thing that could have happened to the company did: Apple released its first iPad.
With the release of the tablet, employees started bringing their iPads to work, looking to get access to e-mail and their applications. "This was the exact problem we were trying to solve," Gadekar says. In January 2011, CloudOn launched a free version of its app, available in the Apple App Store. Within 12 hours it was the No. 1 app in the entire app marketplace, not just in the productivity category where the company placed it.
"Since then, it's been a complete whirlwind," Gadekar says. CloudOn has launched in 80 countries and in 70 of those it became the top downloaded app within 24 hours of launch. The app is now available on Android devices and in just over seven months it's been downloaded 1.8 million times. "People are clearly looking for ways to be more productive, to enhance their mobile experience and to have a way to be mobile-centric," Gadekar says.
CloudOn powers its application using proprietary software developed for optimizing Microsoft Office for use on a gesture-controlled mobile device. On the back end, it leverages file sharing services DropBox, Google Drive and Box, while hosting the software as a service (SaaS)-based application in the Amazon Web Services cloud. The success has fueled the company's further development. Having raised $26 million through two rounds of funding, the company is aiming to start monetizing the product early next year.
DeepField
Focus: Cloud and network mapping and performance benchmarking
Why it's worth watching: Just how well do you know your cloud? Do you know all of the service providers in the supply chain that make up your cloud service? If you're a service provider, do you know exactly what's going on in your network? DeepField claims it has the answers.
Founded in the fall of 2011 by network security experts who specialized in DDoS protections, DeepField gives customers a deep analysis of what the company calls the cloud genome. It's the exact makeup of a cloud infrastructure and the various vendors and users on the network.
DeepField installs virtual machines on the network to conduct a range of analytical functions. "This allows anyone with a large network or compute infrastructure to get a clear handle on exactly what's happening in their network," says DeepField Chief Data Scientist Naim Falandino. DeepField officials are releasing scant details of how the system works because of a patent pending on the back-end technology, but Falandino says it has the ability to conduct real-time monitoring and mapping.
The company's product is currently in public beta, but DeepField is ramping up for its general availability this fall.
As Network World's Carolyn Duffy Marsan explained in a recent profile, mapping a cloud's architecture can help network operators better understand their cloud services, more easily launch new services and improve system performance.
DeepField engineers have already used their data to yield some interesting findings. In April, for example, co-founder Craig Labovitz described how he used DeepField technology to monitor weeks of network data from several million Internet end users to find that nearly one-third of all Internet traffic is somehow connected to Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
Domo
Focus: Business intelligence software
Why we're watching: You'd think Josh James would have been thrilled to sell Omniture to Adobe in 2009 for $1.8 billion, but he had frustrations: He says it wasn't easy to get access to all the reports he needed as CEO. HR reports were in one area and file system, financial and operational reports in another.
Now James is back on the start-up scene with cloud-based business intelligence software vendor Domo looking to solve that problem.
"We're focused on helping business executives get the information they want, when they want it, how they want it," says Julie Kehoe, vice president of communications. The company remains fairly hush-hush about its technology as it continues to operate in stealth mode, but Kehoe says Domo can handle anything from sales to HR and online/offline marketing information from across an enterprise and beyond. "When we talk to customers right now, they talk about all the promises of analytics tools, but the No. 1 pain point is having all their information in one place," she says. Domo is designed to work on top of and alongside existing reporting applications, including Salesforce.com's CRM tool.
James got the company started last year by purchasing Corda, another analytics firm, and changing the name to Domo. No word yet on when the product will be released, but industry watchers expect it to be next year.
Embrane
Focus: Virtualized network appliances
Why we're watching: What's the next big thing in cloud computing? If the buzz in the network industry is any indication, it could be software-defined networking (SDN).
While SDN promises to virtualize network Layers 2/3, it does not address the upper layers, 4 through 7, and that presents an opportunity to Embrane, says John Vincenzo, vice president of marketing.
Embrane's software, which it markets as Heleos, virtualizes load balancers, firewalls, VPNs and other services, allowing the applications to be provisioned in minutes and dynamically scaled as needed. It gives the functionality of a hardware appliance in the convenience of a software package, Vincenzo says. "In the evolution of IT infrastructure, virtualization has hit the compute and storage layers, but the network has still not caught up," he says.
Embrane doesn't compete directly with SDN players such as Nicira and Big Switch, but company officials hope to position its offering as a complimentary service that can be used inside or outside an SDN environment to virtualize network applications. It could be used either as an on-premise or via the cloud.
As SDN continues to gain market clout, particularly with VMware's recent $1.2 billion Nicira acquisition, Vincenzo says Embrane is expecting a big push by enterprises to virtualize various parts of the network. If they're not ready to take the full plunge into SDN though, he says virtualizing the upper layers of the network and the applications serving it can be less daunting, but equally fruitful in achieving increased network agility. "Any enterprise that needs to rapidly deploy new applications, or manage multiple private cloud deployments could benefit from easier deployment of network applications," he says.
Garantia Data
Focus: Redis and Memcached NoSQL database optimization and management
Why we're watching: The world used to be a place of structured data, neatly organized in Excel spreadsheets showing the metrics of a business. But data today is big and unstructured, and there are increasingly popular databases used to handle such information.
Two of the most popular are Redis and Memcached, both of which are NoSQL in-memory databases, allowing them to be faster than traditional databases that store information in disk storage or flash memory. Some of today's leading Web companies use these technologies: Flickr and GitHub are among Redis users for unstructured data, while Memcached is employed by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Netflix.
But these open source databases aren't really plug-and-play ready for developers. Most notably, Redis by default is not easily scalable and Memcached does not inherently provide for high availability.
In steps Garantia, a company that attempts to ease the management of in-memory NoSQL databases. "Lean back and let us do the heavy lifting for you," pleads CEO Ofer Bengal, who co-founded the company along with CTO Yiftach Shoolman, former president and CTO of network management company Crescendo Networks, which was purchased by F5.
The key to the technology, Bengal says, is Garantia's ability to compress files while automatically sharing them, which saves memory space and ensures the fastest possible retrieval.
Garantia services currently are only offered through Amazon Web Services marketplace, but in the future Bengal hopes to attract other public cloud providers. The company also will look to expand support to other database types.
Maginatics
Focus: Enterprise storage platform
Why we're watching: Maginatics offers a file storage system that company officials say could provide a whole new way for IT administrators to exploit cloud-based resources while maintaining data security and control.
The company's MagFS file management system, which it launched at VMworld, overlays cloud or on-premise storage to create a distributed file system that can be accessed via mobile devices.
One of the impressive things about Maginatics is the cadre of talent on its executive and advisory team. CTO Jay Kistler, former VP of engineering at Yahoo, holds a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon and previously served as chief architect for platform technologies at Akamai. Chief Architect Niraj Tolia is a former senior researcher at HP Labs, while CEO Amarjit Gill sold his last company, Agnilux, to Google, and his previous one, P.A. Semi, to Apple.
The secret sauce behind MagFS is a software design that separates data and the underlying bits and bytes that make up the information, which is encrypted at the granular level. This creates a plane for controlling the data and another for transferring and accessing information. Separating the two means data security can be centrally managed by IT, while allowing for it to be accessed on a range of devices. Users download a mobile client that decrypts the data and allows it to be accessed if they have the appropriate keys, which are centrally managed by the system. "This opens up economic benefits and access to data without sacrificing security," Kistler claims.
MagFS is different from other file sharing and document management systems because it's software, not a service, like Box, DropBox or Egnyte. "Enterprise IT has become a service provider," and IT needs ways to control the data, Kistler says.
Newvem
Focus: Amazon Web Service monitoring, optimization
Why we're watching: The folks at Newvem know a thing or two about efficiency analytics.
This is the second start-up for CEO Zev Laderman and CTO Ilan Naslavsky, who got together in the mid-2000s to create Aduva, an open source analytics firm that was eventually sold to Sun Microsystems and later rolled into Oracle. This time they're focused on becoming the go-to source for analytics related to usage of the most popular cloud vendor in the market: Amazon Web Services.
Newvem has a read-only API call that sends customers' data provided by AWS into an analytics-pumping machine, which then informs customers how efficiently they're using AWS services and recommends ways they can save money. The company's product is in public beta and it's expected to be generally available this fall.
Initial prototypes of the Newvem service included analytics around the most important metric for most customers -- cost. Initial results proved fruitful: Newvem says it helped all 40 of its alpha customers spend less money by reducing the number of servers they order from AWS. Customers in total yielded a 33% savings on weekdays and a 50% savings on weekends from turning off idle servers. Further iterations of the product focused on right-sizing servers to ensure customers are ordering only the compute and storage instances they need. Newvem now focuses on four metrics: Utilization, availability, security and spend efficiency.
Once the product hits general availability, Laderman says it will be able to handle anything from individual users all the way up to organizations running tens of thousands of servers on AWS, with pricing based on utilization. Down the line, Laderman hopes to one day expand the business outside of just monitoring AWS to provide analytics of other cloud platforms, eventually being able to advise clients on which public cloud platform may be best for them based on their usage and the cloud provider's pricing.
OneOps
Focus: Application deployment, management and optimization
Why we're watching: In cloud computing when you need a new virtual machine, you can simply go to any number of providers, click a few buttons, supply your credit card information and you have a new server ready to go. Same with storage, which can be scaled based on demand. Launching applications, though, is different and not as simple, say the folks from OneOps. Their system aims to make it easier.
OneOps originated from a group of eBay engineers who found that launching applications is in many cases a painful and cumbersome process. OneOps provides continuous and full-circle lifecycle management for simple to complex applications. In the OneOps control panel developers are able to pull in various attributes that an application will need. One application may need a MongoDB, while another may need to be written in PHP, while some may be launched in an Amazon cloud and others in an OpenStack-powered cloud. OneOps allows these differentiating features of an application to be centrally managed, meaning developers can provision and launch applications as needed. Just like spinning up infrastructure services from the cloud, OneOps is taking that idea to launching applications in the cloud.
Co-founders Vitaliy Zinchenko, Kire Filipovski, and Mike Schwankl noticed the problem of application management while at eBay where Filipovski managed engineering services for the online auction site. "We were handing over applications between multiple teams just to get them launched," Filipovski says. "It can take 40 tickets to deploy a simple application." The issue gets back to a fundamental friction between development and operations teams, he says. OneOps, he hopes, increases the agility of being able to launch applications. The company uses an assembly line approach to install repeatable patterns used to create applications, allowing developers to iterate from application to application.
The founders have bootstrapped the start-up since launching it in March 2011 and releasing the product in May of this year in private beta. They're now seeking outside funding as they expand their go-to-market strategy.
Pertino Networks
Focus: Software-defined networking as a cloud-based service
Why we're watching: SDN technology is discussed mostly in the context of large enterprises and services providers, but one veteran network company exec has his own plans to bring SDN to the masses, and specifically to small and medium businesses via the cloud.
Craig Elliott — former head at network appliance company and Blue Coat Systems acquisition Packeteer Networks — was fly-fishing in New Zealand last year when former colleagues pitched him this idea: Use the cloud to deliver sophisticated networks to small and midsize businesses through a straight-forward portal.
Today's networking landscape is a box-centered world, Elliott says. Everything requires a piece of hardware. "There's a million companies selling boxes," he says, admitting that Packeteer was one of them. "If you want any sort of WAN optimization, security or another feature, basically that means you need to buy another box. That takes the mid-market and small market guys out of the picture," he says. "It's too expensive and too complicated." By using a cloud-based service and local access clients, a business can quickly provision a wide-area network, without a massive investment in hardware boxes.
Founded last year, Pertino has been operating in stealth mode, providing scant details of its plan until this past spring when it announced almost $9 million in venture financing. The team is made up of Elliott and a cadre of engineers he worked with at Packeteer, including co-founders Scott Hankins (who also spent time at NASA) and Andrew Mastracci. Pertino's product is currently in private beta, with plans to launch in early 2013.
Elliott sees a huge market opportunity given the increased reliance small businesses will have on communications and network technology and the challenges of managing a mobile workforce. Combine that with the ease and simplicity that businesses will become accustomed to with cloud-based services, and Elliott hopes his team will have a company worth watching.
ScaleXtreme
Focus: Multi-cloud monitoring and management tools
Why we're watching: As cloud computing continues to gain prominence, Nand Mulchandani doesn't believe that enterprises will be keen on putting all their eggs in the basket of one public cloud service provider. They will spread their risk and federate workloads across multiple clouds.
"Customers are building distributed data centers," says Mulchandani, CEO and Co-Founder of ScaleXtreme. "All of a sudden your servers are no longer in one location, they're potentially in multiple locations, on multiple infrastructures. But they still need to be managed."
ScaleXtreme allows customers to centrally monitor and provision public clouds from a dozen vendors, including Amazon, Azure, Citrix, Dell, Rackspace, VMware and others. Users can see how much CPU, disk storage and various other resources are being used on all of their cloud deployments at once, while monitoring downtime and ensuring security controls are up to date. ScaleXtreme can also be set up to automatically update security patches on virtual machines running on multiple clouds, and it can be configured to back up data or do audit checks of workloads running across public clouds. ScaleXtreme can also be configured to monitor multiple internal, behind-the-firewall data centers or private clouds, all through a single pane of glass.
Company co-founder and CTO Balaji Srinivasa has roots in data center automation, having served as principal product architect for BladeLogic, which was acquired by BMC in 2007 for $800 million. That automation background is seeded deep in ScaleXtreme. The technology works by installing an agent on the public cloud services that connects back to ScaleXtreme's cloud, which does the legwork. The ScaleXtreme system then is able to not only monitor the health of the clouds, but also command them based on the client's needs.
Next up for ScaleXtreme will be going beyond monitoring and provisioning and into predictive analytics. The company recently launched its first tools in that area, which give customers advice on how to provision the exact amount of resources that will be needed based on their history and the experience of other customers.
Social Dynamx
Focus: Social media analytics
Why we're watching: Gone are the days of relying solely on 1-800 customer service numbers to air grievances with companies. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks allow customers to complain, and put public pressure on companies to clean up their acts.
All of which has companies scrambling to monitor such social media activity so that they can weed through the fire hose of tweets, posts and messages.
Social Dynamx is trying to address this market with a product delivered as cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) that provides businesses and workers in contact centers with the ability to monitor, analyze and respond to consumer communications. Social Dynamx estimates that 70% of brand tweets go unanswered today, along with a whopping 95% of Facebook posts. "I literally see social media transforming what we know of in the contact center today," says President and COO Jan Ryan.
While there are a variety of other companies that provide social network monitoring, Ryan says Social Dynamx goes the extra mile to provide analytic tools on top of the stream of information it collects. Social Dynamx can be added on to social media monitoring tools, analyze information they collect and prioritize it based on the necessity of a response. "We basically filter out the noise and surface out things that are relevant, placing them in an actionable cue so you know what needs to be prioritized," Ryan says.
The company was founded by a group of enterprise collaboration and business analytics veterans, including Ryan, who was CEO of Sigma Dynamics, which Oracle acquired in 2006. Social Dynamx's CEO Mike Betzer headed up MCI's contact center operations before helping to start Social Dynamx.
The company uses Java-based software that is hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud to filter and prioritize information it gathers from the social media world. Social Dynamx works with individual customers to customize search terms, and target terms and specific vocabulary related to the company's product names, executives or services. The company even offers integration with customer relationship management (CRM) software to log communications and prioritize interactions with high-profile clients.
Stormpath
Focus: Application user management service
Why we're watching: Stormpath is trying to make more palatable one of the peskiest parts about building an application: managing user access controls and all of the various accounts, passwords and authentication.
Think about it this way: Any application that has more than one user needs a way to manage the different users' passwords, what parts of the application he or she can cannot access, as well as manage password resetting and account verification.
The problem, says co-founder and CEO Alex Salazar, is that "this stuff is hard to get right." Even for experienced developers who know how to build user access controls, it's not trivial to write code providing these features. Plus, Salazar says it's not something that is a distinguishing feature of your application, it's basically just something that applications need. Salazar points to high-profile breaches of companies like LinkedIn, Sony and eHarmony to illustrate how important user access controls can be. "If you get this stuff wrong it can be really bad."
Stormpath was born out of the vision of Salazar, a former IBM senior sales executive, and Les Hazlewood, a former enterprise architect at Bloomberg and Delta Airlines and one of the pioneers of the open source Java security framework Apache Shiro, which is a core piece of the Stormpath code. Salazar compares it to a trendy nightclub where Shiro is the bouncer standing at the door, providing the security framework, while Stormpath would be the guest list, dictating who is let in.
Stormpath is code language and framework agnostic and is priced based on the number of applications it is managing with different tiers of feature sets offered, ranging from a free version to an enterprise-grade fully supported option. Because the service is delivered through a SaaS-based model, Salazar says Stormpath is able to centrally implement the latest security patches and settings throughout the system.
Into next year, Stormpath is hoping to expand its role in the application lifecycle process beyond just developers. Stormpath hopes to extend the service to operations and IT professionals who are looking to set up user access controls within an organization. "Our goal is to help them implement a next generation user management system and help them migrate off LDAP, [Active Directory], custom systems, and home-grown scripts where they want to," he says.
Huawei: Make Biz Agile in Cloud Era
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Liu Jiayi
Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Intel, marking its resolution to provide state-of-the-art IT offerings to the market.
The collaboration will enhance engineering cooperation, provide server, storage, data center, and cloud computing products, synchronize future strategies, and shorten product development cycles, according to Ian Yang, Intel's Corporate Vice President and China President.
"Huawei is a global leader in IT innovation and rapid growth, as the leader in computing, Intel considers the cooperation with Huawei as an important strategic milestone," said President Yang. "Our joint efforts would build advanced platforms for servers, storage systems, data center, and most importantly, cloud computing devices."
"After 10 years of collaboration with Intel, Huawei understands the shared corporate value between the two companies: technology innovation," said Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei's IT product line. "Huawei has a lot of experience in communication technology and software-hardware integration. We will continue to let the demand for software lead the development of hardware, and provide our clients with reliable IT solutions."
Huawei's latest Tecal V2 server, which was launched in July, was based on Intel's Xeon E7 and E5 processors.
Huawei also launched FusionCube Converged Infrastructure. FusionCube features integrated software such as virtualization, cloud management, and distributed storage engine, and hardware such as servers, storage devices, and network devices.
The core concept was based on fusion, according to Ren Zhipeng, Vice President of the company's cloud product line. FusionCube provides an all-in-one management system, reduces expenditures like IT installation and maintenance, and optimizes the cloud platform conveniently and efficiently.
"FusionCube is based on cloud computing and it integrates computing, storage, and networking in a single device,"said Ren. "Huawei is the first in the industry to provide this kind of solution."
After breaking SPEC SFS' records with its popular storage models, Huawei provides enterprises with more choices: OceanStor HVS, Universal Distributed Storage System, and MVX Big Data Storage Solution.
According to Fan Ruiqi, President of the Huawei's IT storage line, OceanStor HVS met the highest industry standards and featured with Smart Matrix Architecture which emphasized on reliability, efficiency, and flexibility.
"HVS is the best on the market," said Fan. "It would break the SPEC's records very soon." Over 100,000 pieces of HVS's old model--the T series storage--were sold around the world, he said. "Until now, we received zero complaint and the T series have been running flawlessly for over 600 days," he added.
Jawee Sun, Marketing Director of Huawei, said as a traditional telecom technology company, this event was the first in the company's history and showcased the company's core competitiveness.
"Huawei is the only company in the world that can cover the entire terminal, networking, and the cloud," said Sun. "With over 65,000 staff and 10 percent of annual income, R&D is the vitality of this company and driving force behind innovation."
Although Huawei was still under the US government's investigation over possible spy charges, Sun remained very optimistic: "I don't worry about the North American market at all."
"Huawei recently nailed a $6 million contract with an American client, but you know I can't tell you who it was. It is true the government has a tight grip over America's big carriers, but the enterprise market in the US is huge and keeps open for Huawei. It is a win-win situation."
uTorrent Instantly Becomes the Best BitTorrent Client for Android
Excerpted from PhoneArena Report
This is one that we're pretty excited about, because the BitTorrent client options on Android have been pretty slim (though far better than any other mobile platform, where they aren't allowed at all), and uTorrent is the OG of clients, that was so good, BitTorrent bought it to be the official app.
We're not sure what you're thinking, but obviously we're not excited to do anything nefarious with uTorrent, just good things like getting Linux ISOs and such.
Anyway, uTorrent Beta was released into the Google Play Store this week, and it has already become the best option for Android users. You have all of the features you'd expect, including searching for torrents, downloading only specific files from a torrent, and even support for subscriptions.
The built in subscription is for BitTorrent Featured Content, but the UI layout is a bit strange there. It's a horizontally scrolling row of small tabs with a ton of grey space below.
Still, it is just a beta, so there are bugs and limitations. We had it crash a couple times when trying to select an item from the Featured Content list, and search is limited to a simple Google search, and not through a dedicated site. If you want to give it a try, it's available for free in the Play Store.
Cloud Computing Makes Software Piracy Obsolete
Excerpted from ReadWriteWeb Report by Brian Proffitt
The fight against file sharing has reached a new pitch as industry organizations battle file sharing as though their lives depended on it. As, in fact, they do. The foundations of the anti-piracy crusade are evaporating as the cloud undermines the very notion of software piracy.
Two cross-Atlantic trade organizations with strong anti-piracy arms joined forces this week in the latest public volley. The US-based Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) forged an alliance with its UK counterpart, the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST). The organizations will work together to combat what they call the "worldwide epidemic" of software piracy in the US and Europe.
The SIIA has been a vanguard in the fight against file sharing, litigating against suspected pirates and heading up a program to encourage whistleblowers. Its new partnership with FAST enables both organizations to more readily pursue intellectual property violations across international borders.
They picked a good time for it: Anti-piracy efforts are gaining increasing notoriety in the press, thanks to stepped-up enforcement efforts and legislation. In the US, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), has been prolific in trying to push intellectual property (IP) enforcement bills in the House, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and more recently the Intellectual Property Attache Act (IPAA). The latter bill - now apparently dead - would have given the US Patent Office more power to hunt down trademark and copyright infringement violators for software and media.
Even without an IPAA law, US intellectual property interests have successfully internationalized their anti-piracy efforts. Witness the uptick in high-visibility takedowns of file-sharing sites like Megaupload, which was seized last January, leading to the arrests of site owner Kim Dotcom and three employees in the US and New Zealand. The arrests were based on "accusations that they facilitated millions of illegal downloads of films, music and other content, costing copyright holders at least $500 million in lost revenue," according to USA Today.
(Of course, what governments and their corporate sponsors want doesn't always align with existing laws. On June 28th, the New Zealand High Court "ruled the police raid on Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom's Auckland mansion was illegal and the removal from New Zealand of cloned copies of hard drives seized was unlawful.")
BitTorrent sites, which enable the sharing of files without actually hosting the files themselves, are increasingly under attack as well. In late July, Demonoid was taken down by the Ukrainian government, reportedly at the request of Mexican authorities working with US officials.
During the last weekend in August, Cambodian authorities confirmed that they will deport Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, founder of the notorious Pirate Bay, after his arrest in that country on behalf of the Swedish government. Swedish officials convicted Warg, along with Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde and funder Carl Lundstroem, in 2009 of encouraging copyright violations. While the other three defendants had their sentences reduced on appeal, Warg skipped his appeal hearing, citing illness, and fled to Cambodia.
The recent string of successes and near-misses has ratcheted up the pressure on pirates of both media and application software. This makes the political motivation of an SIIA/FAST alliance all that more transparent: Strike while the iron (and funding) is hot.
But the anti-piracy crowd has another reason for urgency, particularly as it relates to applications. Programs like Microsoft Office are migrating from the desktop to the cloud, where software piracy will be harder to pull off. Of course, anything can be stolen, and cloud-based software services like Office 365 can be hacked with false accounts and passwords. But hacked accounts into paid services are easier to police than bootlegged CDs floating around some neighborhood vendor. They don't require elaborate international agreements and enforcement programs. Anti-piracy forces recognize that the cloud is taking the wind out of their sails, so they've switched on the engine and are moving full steam ahead.
The availability of free software services like Google Docs will also prove disruptive to piracy - you can't steal what's already freely given. As such services become more pervasive, the continued claims of "lost revenue" will lose their force.
Faced with the potential of software applications in the cloud solving a big part of the piracy problem on its own, it's little wonder the SIIA and FAST are joining forces and software anti-piracy efforts fighting as though their lives depended on it. There's no time to waste.
Coming Events of Interest
ICOMM 2012 Mobile Expo — September 14th-15th in New Delhi, India. The 7th annual ICOMM International Mobile Show is supported by Government of India, MSME, DIT, NSIC, CCPIT China and several other domestic and international associations. New technologies, new products, mobile phones, tablets, electronics goods, and business opportunities.
ITU Telecom World 2012 - October 14th-18th in Dubai, UAE. ITUTW is the most influential ICT platform for networking, knowledge exchange, and action. It features a corporate-neutral agenda where the challenges and opportunities of connecting the transformed world are up for debate; where industry experts, political influencers and thought leaders gather in one place.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
Third International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery Using Cloud and Distributed Computing Platforms - December 10th in Brussels, Belgium. Researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia, government, and industry will discuss emerging trends in cloud computing technologies, programming models, data mining, knowledge discovery, and software services.
2013 International CES - January 8th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. With more than four decades of success, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive. The International CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the $195 billion US consumer electronics industry.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD at CES - January 9th in Las Vegas, NV. Gain a deeper understanding of the impact of cloud-delivered content on specific segments and industries, including consumers, telecom, media, and CE manufacturers.
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