In the simplest terms, a key outcome of virtualization that the virtual engine software layer divides either hardware or software into more pieces than originally existed. Instead of one operating system running, the same hardware can run several concurrently. For example, these can even be of different flavors such as Linux and Windows running on the same Intel hardware. Where it gets interesting is that each additional system running doesn't divide computing power in half, like you might expect. Instead, an overall gain in system utilization is found in this approach. This "unused" power frees computing resources without the need to procure new hardware.

Since it is new, there are inevitable questions an IT leader will receive when explaining this to non-technical members of your team - a.k.a management.

A Quick Primer

Here's a short list of resources that give an overview of the technical underpinnings of virtualization:

• How to explain virtualization to your friends by RWW's Tim Hastings.


• History of Virtualization hosted by VMware.


• Virtual machine as defined by Wikipedia.

The Impact Question

Does virtualization it have a performance or operational impact to the systems?

Yes, there is some impact to performance when running a virtual layer on software or hardware. However it is much less of an impact than the cost of buying a new system. VMware's cost analysis summary breaks down the increased system utilization like this:

• Expected increased utilization rates from 5-15%. In some cases up to 80%.


• Deferred datacenter construction costs by $1,000 per square foot ( IDC's Datacenter Trends Survey, 2007).


• Attain 50-70% higher VM density per host than is possible with commodity offerings.


• Achieve 20-30% lower cost-per-application.

Below is a visualization of some of the data-center expense reduction opportunities from a virtual environment.

Perhaps one of the most important areas for consideration is how virtualization not only extends the investment in hardware, but also allows an IT department to be ready to ramp up more systems when needed, without waiting to procure more hardware.

Virtualization is becoming mainstream, and it is worth the fight to earn the right to deploy and operate a virtual environment. Virtualization is a nice gateway into cloud computing services and it prepares a team for new processes and tools. One benefit we've seen is that IT teams can use virtualization to get ready for and configure new projects quickly.

Is it free? No. Is it magic? Yes. Especially for the non-technical business executive. You'll soon receive new questions, such as "How did you get that new system setup so quickly?" It will remain up to you, the IT leader, to decide whether you want to share the secrets up your sleeve.

Do you have an interesting story explaining how virtual environments work in your company? Share it with us in the comments.

Photo credit: pokpok313

The proposition for doctors is simple: The U.S. federal government has proposed incentives to move to electronic systems. A doctor can qualify for $44,000 or $66,000 in federal stimulus dollars for completing the migration in the next several years.

A mix of traditional vendors, startups, and specialists are working to meet the demand from doctors needing to transition. And even though there are specific definitions for what constitutes an EMR solution, each doctor faces a complex solution.

According to Howard, his company has found that the average size of an office is less than nine doctors - which means that in many cases, a very busy doctor is also a part-time CTO.

The business of health care these days requires that a lot of paper is generated - a lot of it by fax - and all of which must be protected by compliance regulations such as HIPAA. Other technology challenges include having older browser technology, no Internet connection, no wireless access. or not having a digital camera. When technology investments are made, there is a desire to get extreme value out of them.

Practice Fusion's Dell-based hardware system bundles a heavy duty scanner and printer, as well as a camera for digitizing visual records. Integrating these devices seamlessly with the cloud applications is one area where vendors will need to create tight integration with the PC.

Below is an example of a what a doctor sees when adding patient immunization information into Practice Fusion. The system is a great example of where a broad set of available data can be powerful to patients, doctors, and communities. And an example of how small businesses need a deep connection between local hardware and cloud applications. (More Practice Fusion product images can be viewed at the companies Flickr account.)

Rackspace isn't shy about its model and expertise. The company has refined the hosting experience into an energetic art form. It even has a name for that passion: "fanatical support." It's this focus on customers that is partially behind the two-pronged approach in the U.K. In all likelihood, Rackspace would probably prefer the Xen powered public cloud infrastructure by itself, but the company needs to support VMware in order to reach those customers that it also hosts.

Pat Matthews, VP and GM for cloud at Rackspace told us that there's an evolving conversation happening with companies that host infrastructure and their move to cloud solutions. He says there's a growing need to connect cloud infrastructure to hosted infrastructure - and that some of Rackspace's customers are becoming the first customers of the new venture.

The VMware solution is designed to support hybrid hosting solutions that combine the best features of cloud computing and managed hosting. It's expected that VMware's vCloud will help Rackspace enter into the market with enterprise-optimized cloud services that meet existing private cloud or virtualization deployments.

Rackspace's public cloud services use the Xen hypervisor. The company seems proud of the work it has done to leverage Xen in providing a powerful and cost-effective cloud infrastructure that is offered as a full suite of APIs. Rackspace is letting customers automate provisioning (and de-provisioning) cloud resources into their applications, for example as a practical tool optimized for customers.

Launching Cloud in UK Market

Rackspace plans to launch the offering in the U.K. at the end of the year. The company's existing cloud infrastructure grew last year by 125% and it's that pattern of current hosting partners becoming cloud customers that was a key reason in it investing in the U.K.

Disclosure: Rackspace is a sponsor of ReadWriteWeb.

According to the HHS, the program is "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health." At today's event a number organizations are demonstrating a preview of their work with the data, including Google, Microsoft and GE.

First Results

• Google: The company imported the public data into Google Fusion Tables where it can be explored and visualized.
• Microsoft Bing: "Using community health data, Bing has created new features that allow easier selection of hospitals based on patient quality of care ratings and new ways to assess potential areas to live based on a combination of community health measures and access to goods and services."
• The Network of Care for Healthy Communities: A Web portal combined with community health data provides officials with policy information, local services, best practices and evaluation tools that can spur local action.
• Community Clash: Created by MeYou Health, "Community Clash is an online card game that engages you in a discovery of your community's health and well-being status and how it compares to other communities in a head-to-head clash. Community Clash gets personal, prompting each player to compare his or her own Well-Being Score and encourage social comparison with friends through Facebook integration."

Opportunities

• Data mashups: Sharing information across data sets and regions will create multiple opportunities. Will there be a management system in place to fix or enhance data sets and their underlying models as needed?


• Services engine: There are a mix of CSV, XML, map data, and other sources available in the data set. Will the sets be offered as APIs and how it will be leveraged across different parties?


• Missing gaps: Will the community health data initiative spawn new areas of research funding?


• Public and private: What will be the focus of private companies that offer services based on this initiative? Will it attract VCs and investors outside of the public sphere?

Survey Results

The Citrix team has shared an overview of the preliminary results.

• While 84% of organizations will support personal iPads, 50% expect their organization to purchase the device for them.


• 80% will purchase and use the iPad for business.


• The high level of adoption of the mobile device illustrates the confidence IT has that they can provide secure, safe access to company data and virtual desktops.


• Support, according to respondents, for the use of personal iPads for work will open the door for more Bring Your Own Computer programs


• The largest perceived benefits include the mobility to work remotely without interruption, greatly improving productivity for even the most remote workers.

Considerations

Realizing that the audience being surveyed is more likely to be interested in iPad due to self selection, it is still interesting the high level of support within business for the new device.

Here are a few additional thoughts about iPad's momentum in the enteprise.

• Cost is a factor of volume. One of the big surprises of the iPad launch was the price offered by Apple for the device. For the functionality offered (especially as it gets closer to parity), it's a revolution in IT budgeting to consider this low-cost option for a hardware solution. The big win for Apple in the enterprise is going to be made on volume. If the company is successful, as it seems it will be, in continuing to have a "low SKU" approach to the market, it will continue to gain advantage through volume alone.
• "Bring your own computer." In a way, this phenomenon is a big change. If Apple makes it acceptable, "Bring your own phone" may be close behind. This may break the logjam we see now where enterprises hand out corporate phones, yet consumers buy their own and carry them with them in the office (and then negotiate with IT for access to apps, for example).
• Mobility as the killer enterprise app. The iPad with 3G has an unlimited data plan option that may be too good to pass up for IT managers who want to deploy mobile solutions or support the mobile workforce.
• iTunes for corporate assets. The opportunity to deliver corporate content as subscriptions, podcasts, and video libraries could be a new wrapper on corporate assets. The ability to easily catalog resources is one thing that big intranets and internal corporate networks have been challenged with in the past. Perhaps the structure of a library approach will also target enterprise employees and reduce the friction in content distribution.

It's amazing to see the growth of momentum for iPad in business computing. This survey suggests the dynamics of iPad seem to be trending in Apple's favor. It's still a long way off before we see it create a large dent in enterprise laptop or desktop sales, but this movement is creating a new set of opportunities - and problems - in the enterprise.

"Facebook is not a solved problem," he said, and we agree.

People are Biggest Group

Zuckerberg shared how the site has changed over time, and he demonstrated several new privacy controls aimed at tightening sharing for users. Many things have changed in the short time that Facebook has been around: user sharing behaviors, platforms, government interaction, and regional expectations.

The company has big challenges, which it's learning about in real-time as the population of the site grows. Here are a few issues we see the company needing to address as the user base continues to increase.

• Managing interests vs. pages. The company has evolved towards full pages being the shared items rather than lists or selections. This feels a lot more like the the Web as a whole, but is also harder to decode.
• Considering the business needs of the company, it is ironic to hear Facebook cite communication as the primary issue in the privacy backlash. It's certainly something that's also being considered in the product and the corporate model. Perhaps the briefing today was a step in the direction of more open communication on all levels of the company. "Lot of changes at the same time, we didn't communicate as well as we need to," Zuckerberg said today.
• Change is actually hard. Granular controls are double edge sword. If it's too hard to use, "controls" end up being anything but that. That's the rub in fixing a problem that needs constant attention and tuning.
• Does the concept of privacy in data portability that Facebook wants to support change the value user data to advertising? Zuckerberg presented that case today. We'll have to wait and see to find out more about how opening the systems (including sharing) does or doesn't give Facebook more control.

One last thing mentioned today was that the company thinks of revenue second, and user experience first. This was presented as a unique opportunity fore the company in its ability to achieve such a high growth rate so quickly. In a way, this seems to be the hardest thing for users to put into context.

What would you do if you ran Facebook for a day?

In reviewing this integration and observing the momentum of the ecosystem we see another clear example of the advantage in being both first in a new platform - and going native into it. This seems especially true in the cloud as it is positioned for massive growth.

Cloud and the Environment

Carbon is a building block of life.

It is also being looked at seriously (especially in Europe) as a new currency that counts the cost of doing business.

The effort to reduce the carbon emissions going into the atmosphere is becoming a critical discussion in terms of both the future - and the present quarter.

As legislation and credits have been established, accounting for these transactions has become a natural extension to managing the business.

Cloud Apps - Platform for Carbon

The process of carbon management includes a process of measurement, planning, and executing change. Cloud Apps has delivered a carbon platform for activating a program, this technology lives on the Force.com platform.

Counting and monitoring the use of physical assets touches concept we cover in the ReadWriteWeb called the Internet of Things. In this case, monitors of activity can push data of real world changes directly into a decision management solution to make decisions.

In this context, it seems like SalesForce Chatter platform will be a important piece of this puzzle, as information an processes continue to merge, basic communications and escalations will be a key part of making real-time decisions.

FinancialForce - Native Matters

FinancialForce is the first native accounting package on Force.com platform. We spoke with CEO, Jeremy Roche, and found that he described FinancialForce as "speaking SalesForce natively".

The company shares product feature screenshots on how the product maps workflows and generates reports on the state of the business. Shown here is a view of cash flow for the organization.

The natural expansion of the SalesForce platform shows us several things that seem key to a thriving business environment. In particular, this partnership shows off the case of specialization of services that are complementary and worthwhile to business leadership.

Perhaps it is too soon, but here's one vote for Marc Benioff getting a nudge for the Nobel Prize.

It's one thing to build a case in Powerpoint, entirely another to command a platform.

Have you counted your carbon today?

Photo credit: otodo

We caught up with Vish Ramarao, anti-spam guru at Yahoo, to learn how the company was able to achieve these results and whether it is possible to outsmart spammers using more capable filters.

The Study

Here are the statistics supplied by the Yahoo team.

"The Fraunhofer Institute, an independent research firm, found that Yahoo! Mail users saw the least amount of spam out of the five providers tested, with nearly 40% less spam than Hotmail and 55% less spam than Gmail - meaning Gmail users in the study saw more than twice as much spam as Yahoo! Mail users."

It is noted that Yahoo spam filtering processes reduce 99% of the spam for the 300 million account holders, adding up to over 120 billion blocked spam messages per month.

Spam is Polymorphic - Algorithms Need A Grid To Keep Up

Ramarao shared with us the approach that Yahoo has implemented that consists of analyzing both historical in present data to find spam patterns.

What we learned is that spam delivery is increasingly complex. Spammers are increasingly turning to "reputation bots" that help fight negative reports from users. The spammers have organized their systems to break the filtering routines, black lists, and reputation mechanics that have been employed to date.

Yahoo turned to building a better knowledge base, or in this case a broader and more available information set. By enabling the Map Reduce functionality of Hadoop, the company is able to perform ad hoc queries across broader grid of header data on email to find patterns previously not possible in the filtering process.

The Yahoo mail team recently shared more of the details of their process to use Hadoop and other companion big data technologies to fight the ever changing stream of spam.

The good news is that this approach is providing a new generation of data intelligence tools that can be tuned for real-time algorithms to find patterns previously undetected in the spam arms race.

Map Reducing the raw data provides a path to preparing the data for the real challenges seen in finding patterns in spam. The Yahoo team also shared their insights that this type of approach may also be useful in other security data models, where access to high volumes of data (e.g. logs) may have been impossible in the past but can now be optimized for real time analysis.

What do you think? Will techniques like Map Reduce unleash other good things in our information saturated world?

What we see is that like the parent companies, the partnership has a bit of genius embedded in the way it offers more tools and choice to developers for scaling, experience, and speed to market.

Integration

One of the things offered in this partnership is the ability to use Google Apps Cloud as a target for the cloud.

In many ways, mobile is the killer app for apps in the cloud. It is where the most notible change is happening - for the better - in opening up services to more form factors.

Spring is a lead Java development pattern that is used by a large number of enterprise Java developers. With this partnership, Google is bringing its widget library to SpringSource and developers.

One of the innovations in the Spring community is SpringRoo, a tool that helps quickly ramp up a data-driven environment. Shown here is VMware and Google's view of the power of using Spring along with Google's presentation widgets to get apps started in hours, delivered in days, and deployed in weeks.

What is new in Google Apps for Business: Buy, Buy, Build

The company is offering the opportunity for application developers to plug into the Google Apps Engine. This adds an ability to include local applications in the shared services in the Google Cloud, and for administers to provision both enterprise applications as well as Google and Google Marketplace to users.

New features for the Google Apps for Business include features for managing applications.

Here, Google shares the landscape of the App Engine and the core premise of having scaling infrastructure on demand.

Google shared its pricing model for the preview. The cap on application provisioning costs is a particularly innovative approach to getting attention in the enterprise.

The Google App Engine for Business roadmap is here.

What do you think: Is Google helping make your work better?

Disclosure: VMWare is a sponsor of the ReadWriteCloud channel.

Its successful product release in March put the company on the map as a defining leader in the noSQL approach to data persistence. The company has already gained Zynga as a customer of its beta version of Memcached, and has announced its plans to provide elastic data infrastructure as an approach to scaling applications in the cloud.

Along with the new funding, industry veteran Bob Wiederhold has joined the company.

In Wiederhold's first blog post as CEO, "Simply Transformational," he shares the attitude for the company in a word: simplicity.

If the company can make scaling high-performance Web applications in cloud infrastructures easier, a big opportunity exists for them to scale a portion of the persistence data market.

Scaling Out: noSQL Approach

Here is the company's presentation (along with Q&A) from the presentation at Under the Radar.

In this demonstration, the company shares the places where the noSQL works well - and its vision for moving beyond Memcached for scaling both within and beyond the walls of the data center.

Scaling: It is The Biggest Show on Earth

One of the things that is satisfying in light of NorthScale and the growth of Memcached is how the usage pattern of the Web has changed the underlying assumptions of data architecture. Since Web applications scale in the cloud, the data layer needs to scale in the same manner too to avoid being the bottleneck.

When we look to the list of Memcached users we see many of the current leaders in scaling Web architecture such as Facebook, YouTube, and Zynga using the simple yet effective approach.

On Facebook's Open Source page, the company describes its involvement with Memcached:

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system. Memcached was not originally developed at Facebook, but we have become the largest user of the technology.

NorthScale is building its business on the premise that elastic data infrastructure is a key layer in the stack. From what we see, serving the full gambit of distributed applications will be needed in order to reach the scale-out potential of cloud computing.

Will NorthScale help evolve Memcached high-scaling Web object technology to a ubiquitous data tier used by the majority of cloud applications?

The company has integration with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, as well as increasing support for GMail. We asked the company CEO, T.A. McCann, what it was like working with Google in the apps marketplace and what it takes to bring the social Web into the daily flow of the enterprise consumer.

People Are Agile, Too

Using a cloud services architecture, Gist acts as a productivity layer inside of an inbox to bring up-to-dateness to information about a person's contacts.

From what we see, this enhanced offering shines in places like sales or marketing where keeping up with a number of outside contacts is valuable to the process of building bonds and being agile as a decision maker.

Agile is Uncertainty - That is a Good Thing

In the announcement, the company mentions collaboration with the Google team. We took the opportunity to ask McCann about the experience participating as a first-mover in the Google Apps Marketplace.

The first thing we heard was "agile" mixed with a tone of respect - lots of iterations, working hard until the end to get it right. This style of development implies lots of changes until the moment of launch, as well as rigor on the end-experience.

Overall, our dialog with McMann further impressed us on how much Google is doing to reset the terms of enterprise software.

The company - seemingly overnight (although it has been years) - is becoming an enterprise company. The opportunity it's creating by being available to administrators in this context is a new paradigm worth betting on.

What's The Gist?

Gist aggregates information from the streams of the Web (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news, and more) and connects those streams with an individual user. With Gist enabled, the user is promised an ability to get a quick snapshot of the information surrounding a contact without having to leave the inbox, in essence getting "the gist" of what is up with a contact in a quick, up-to-date snapshot.

McCann suggested we imagine it as taking the best of Google (e.g. search, real time, maps, Blogger) and re-factoring those streams to be easily viewable in the context of an email account. The company has optimized its learning algorithms on higher-level information - in other words finding the nuggets of information that are more than just a Twitter API call away - to bring unique value to the inbox experience.

GMail itself has already evolved the email experience; with Gist enabled the experience of the inbox goes further into being the command center for business communications without needing to move to the Web to find more information.

Here we see Gist toolbar (unopened) and how it tags the email to bring relevant streams related to the sender to the receiver.

To further illustrate how it works, here is a demonstration.

The major change agents of social Web and cloud computing once again knock on the enterprises door through email.

More context, less clicks. Is Gist on your company's Google Apps list?

This project enables the browser to process C and C++ in the client and interface these methods and encapsulations with HTML and JavaScript. Additionally, the project provides bridges to portable graphics and audio engines in an attempt to further configure the browser for visual processing speed.

Why Do Web Clients Need C++?

It seems particularly appealing to have the ability to have more graphics power and speed by using native libraries for C and C++. From the Chromium blog:

"... the SDK lets you write C/C++ code that works seamlessly in Chromium and gives you access to powerful APIs to build your web app."

Here, in Google's video, Henry Bridge, program manager for the SDK shares the scenario of building a video editing application and where native C++ code fits in to the web development paradigm.

This demonstration shows weaving of HTML, JavaScript, and C++ methods in peaceful co-existence. One of the nice things about the interfaces from the native SDK, showing an implementation of NPAPI that implements Open GLS 2.0.

Lower Level Virtualization, Everywhere

We took a quick look at the project comments to see what the initial reaction is from developers.

One of the themes heard from developers want Google to go further with cross compatible libraries and abstract itself with LLVM (Low Level Virtual Machine) approach towards interfacing with specific compiler implementations.

From what we see, Google is planning on enabling additional compilers and plans to support LLVM in time.

The company is inviting developers to start building with the SDK now.

Beyond JavaScript

Dan Lewis, from the Native Client SDK team will be sharing thoughts on when and where it is best to use native code (rather than JavaScript) at the upcoming Google I/O event.

"Although JavaScript performance is rapidly increasing, there are still applications for which native code is a better choice. Learn about Native Client and how you can use it to build rich applications with all of the advantages and power of the web."

A Few Architecture Musings

Several things come to mind when thinking about the connection of browser, compilers, and the cloud in respect to Native Client SDK.

• Will the adoption of C++ in the core influence implementations in the back-end service design? If you know your client has a native compiler will web service orientated services package lower level objects to the client?
• Will the OS share implementations with the browser in the future for compiling code, or will the browser continue to bring in more OS layers over time?
• Will tools like Flash also implement similar strategies, and/or share libraries such as the one's being packaged in the Native Client SDK?
• Will this influence web frameworks like PHP and other tools that also have been implementing C and C++ compilers to speed up operations. Will there be tighter coupling of processing and will local clients have options on how much to process locally?
• Is this an prelude to a disrupting the games market, but offering a powerful enough browser to process games today? Can existing game code be ported easily and wrapped in a web view?

Google is making progress in emphasizing the browser the default experience for application frameworks and bringing C and C++ libraries into the mix makes sense for higher-order fun in building compelling tools.

Web developers, are there places in your code that you would want to always default to lower level libraries such as C++?

libCloud: Unifying Cloud Interfaces

The company's decision last year to move its work on libCloud into the Apache Foundation incubator project seems to be taking off. The project it has been growing in contributors to the effort as well as the number of cloud implementations that are supported.

The libCloud incubator project is designed to allow developers to interface with common functions across cloud providers with one library and to grow the support with the growth of cloud vendors.

Here is the current status of support offered in this library.

HTML 5 and Real Time Cloud Visualization

Additionally, the company is demonstrating it's HTML 5, Canvas, and JavaScript implementation of its visualization tool of real-time cloud resources. This tool shows some of the promise of HTML 5 and also demonstrates the power of CloudKick's monitoring services and the power of visualization in real-time.

Here is how it looks when getting started. The axes are orientated around response time (ping), CPU utilization, and memory utilization. (View demo live)

Here we see clicking on one of the dots (which represent a server host), a control panel pops up with real-time stats.

Monitoring Open Source Implementations

CloudKick has also opened up monitors customized for other open source implementations, such as Cassandra and Apache to its list of pre-configured monitors.

The company also announced support of Memcached and DNS at the same time.

CloudKick has been a first-mover in abstracting and connecting cloud services together for the practical purpose of supporting applications. In a way, the company seems to be supporting projects that it loves (e.g. Cassandra) and is keeping up with innovative developers who are using the latest software techniques to scale in the cloud.

Are there other services you would like to see unify within cloud vendors?

To learn more about the current state of affairs IT managers implementing Google Apps, we spoke with company founder, Michael Cohn. He shared with us a few of the insights that led the company to its products and what it means to "be native" within Google.

More Tools, More Google, More Cloud

Cloud Sherpas was one of the first fifty applications in Google Apps marketplace. It has leveraged this position to learn what tools are most needed by administrators of the platform. In the areas of its focus, it has extended the administration functionality of Google Apps to meet processes demanded by corporate clients. The company first product launch was a free tool, now the company is announcing a set of premium services as a companion to the free offering.

Cohn shares his thoughts on the opportunity:

"We're 100% focused on making life easier for Google Apps admins. We think SherpaTools is a great fit for the largest companies and busiest IT pros."

There are several examples of admin tools in the market. Here are a few cited in the Cloud Sherpas press release:

• Ability to retain data when an employee leaves. Administrators suggested that Google Apps needed a utility to "transition" all the documents from a user when deleted. Cloud Sherpas offers this feature now as a premium feature
• Enabling the help desk. Cloud Sherpas offers a tool to help manage user accounts without giving full access to the account. This was an area where the practical use of Google Apps in the enterprise demonstrated a need for a new access control feature.
• Company directory services enabling administrators to add more information about an employee in a central location.

Cloud Sherpas earns revenue by selling Google Apps licenses into new customers. Additionally, the company is offering new premium features for IT Administrators. So far, it looks like the product reviews and show that these services are welcome and the company has delivered on what administrators need.

At least one customer has suggested that Cloud Sherpas become part of the basic Google Apps tools.

Here is an overview of setting up Cloud Sherpas for Google Apps.

Cloud Sherpas is showing that where there are incentives to innovate, companies will. Listening to its corporate clients that are implementing Google Apps, Cloud Sherpas has started to bring Google Apps functionality closer to Microsoft Exchange - without waiting for Google to do it all by itself.

Smooth Edges in the Google Bubble

We wondered what it is like to "be native" in Google Apps.

Cloud Sherpas has chosen to let Google be the identity provider for their own customers who "add" Cloud Sherpas to their existing Google account as part of getting started. This is the default action in the marketplace and it seems to work best when your application is "only" in the Google marketplace.

This approach highlights one of the key decisions that app developers will need to consider when building applications for Google Apps, especially porting applications that may already have user accounts.

The more we learned, the more it becomes clear to the benefits for application developers to choose a platform and optimize for it.

It appears, that the elusive "win-win" can be found in both bringing new customers to Google and for Cloud Sherpas to get a lot of customers by extending Google as needed to win the enterprise.

Is Google Apps knocking on your IT doorstep?

The company has initiated a Credit Card Data Portability Standard, starting with a small group for merchants and payment processors that intend to "meet in the middle" and provide both security and portability of the sensitive credit card authorization used by merchants to bill for services. Today, for some parties in the ecosystem, this data is locked up with payment providers due good faith efforts to achieve compliance, but what has happened is vendor lock centered around personal data.

In a not-so-distant m-commerce post, Sarah Perez covered some of the "tower of babel" challenges that occur for developers when dealing with payment processes for mobile payments.

In the organic information economy that has been built in our world, we find sometimes things that should be simple are not.

Here, we explore the concept of Data Portability means and where a dialog is taking place in the payments industry.

30,000 feet: Payment Processing Landscape

Braintree is a payment gateway that is part of the payments landscape. Here, we see where the gateway (in this case Braintree) fits in the ecosystem.

For purposes of security and liability, the merchant calls services that transact, but don't store information on the transaction. In processing this information the gateway is shielding the merchant from change in the payment system and technology framework by offering front end services to websites that connect to back-end (and PCI compliant) back ends.

For reasons of liability and data compliance, many merchants and gateways have agreed to allow the payment processor "hold" the data for the consumer. This practice has created a sense of lock and causes merchants to restart transactions with consumers by speaking with them manually. It is in this process where customers can leak out by opting out, or not confirming the continued transaction.

Braintree points out that this is effectively holding consumers data hostage.

Scope of the Data

To help us understand the scope of the portability being requested, asked the team at BrainTree to share the data fields that fall under this model and which of those fields are considered required and optional. Here is the list he shared below:

• Payment information
• Credit Card Number Required
• Expiration Date Required
• Amount Required
• Name Optional
• Address Optional - Merchants get rewarded with lower processing rates if they include the billing address, so while it's not required, merchants have a big incentive to send it.
• Phone Number Optional
• Order Information Optional
• Customer Number Optional
• Product / Service Optional
• Etc. Optional

Out of this list there is an interesting mix, both transactional and conversational on what is going on with our credit cards.

Yes, indeed, (especially if you're in Vegas) transactions can tell a story.

The Required Fields: Transaction Authorization

In the most basic form, merchants (through gateways) would receive portability in this proposed standard. That is the goal of the team at Braintree and others that support this open approach to industry competition.

At this stage, it consists of programs for merchants and payment processors to announce their intention to support portability of credit card authorization information.

For merchants it suggests they ask these questions when negotiating a contract with a payment processor and gateway.

• Does your organization adhere to the Credit Card Data Portability Standard?


• What is required of us to receive the sensitive data we process and/or store with you?


• What is the process of receiving the data and how long does it take?


• Are there fees associated with releasing the data to us?


• What data will be released and is there a time limit?


• Where can I get a copy of the terms?

The Optional Fields: Transaction Authentication and Details

These optional fields above (name, address, phone number, what was purchased) are not required to enable transaction authorization in its base form.

However, considering consumer rights and privacy they are in a way the most sensitive. For example, if each field was populated with detailed text, values from a list, or microsyntax, we could easily see valuable consumer level data involved in the transaction between parties.

One are in the specification that might be nice is a focus on customers and rights of customers to have a say in how this information is stored, forwarded, and retained.

We took a few moments to consult some of the folks at the DataPortability Project (similar name, broader scope) to weigh in.

Connecting Dots: Start of Data Portability.Org Working Group

We had a chance to ask Elias Bizannes, member of the DataPortability Project his take on whether these credit cards fit into the vision of data portability.

We found the DataPortability Project supportive about all types of data portability efforts. The group is is welcoming the Credit Card Data Portability effort to join as a workgroup in the project.

As this happens, it is likely that an increasingly broader voice and view into the issues surrounding the importance of data portability to businesses and consumers alike will form.

One of the active DataPortability Project efforts is focusing on Terms of Service. A team, led by Steve Greenberg is focused on the portability of personal information offered and agreed to when agreeing to use different web sites.

We can see a direct tie-in to these efforts. Where business is conducted on the web, whether transactional (Visa), learning (Google), or social (Facebook), consumer rights to a basic set of patterns around portability could center around the consumer and the agreements accepted at point of entry into a new site.

Summary

The case of credit card portability shows that industry privacy and liability can create significant boundaries between parties sharing data. This can create information lock and become a fertile ground for vendor lock in an ecosystem.

In a service-orientated world we look to simplifying processes for everything. In payments, the flash point is recurring payments and finding a balance for the many businesses that doesn't increase exposure for customers. The current state of affairs in the credit card ecosystem is a big challenge to building seamless apps between merchants and consumers.

In many ways, it seems much more challenging than the problems of "end to end control" that Apple tends to demonstrate in its business. Perhaps because Apple thinks of model driven architecture and wants to have no surprises in the user experience, it has set constraints on how applications perform.

So far, the credit card data portability effort seems like it is off to a good start. It is working on expanding its team, focusing on quick wins, and keeping it simple.

Does your gateway or payment processor support data portability?

What would it take for you to insist?

Photo credit: andresrueda

In this post, we'll take a brief stroll through the work of Caliber Point in mixing up both outsourcing and cloud computing.

We look at where it touches on major shifts in enterprise software architectures and franchises like Oracle which this software-as-a-service product is built on.

In a way, the very definition of "corporation" suggests the creation of sensitive information. By having the purpose of bringing people together to generate profit, actions such as retaining employees, building strategies, and defining products create information boundaries within a company, and within the competitive landscape.

It is in the context of outsourcing sensitive information and processes that we analyze a product called Republic, by Caliber Point that has technology to merge Oracle R12 core technology with a software-as-a-service offering for outsourcing Human Resources. This product enables companies to have a product and set of services to run the basic business processes such as HR payroll and administration.

Disruption is In: The Back Office

In all the virtualization and cloud computing change occurring, sometimes it is easy to forget about arguably the hardest to distribute resource, the database tier. And, where the database tier is tightly interwoven with software (like enterprise packages) it can become a sedimentary set of infrastructure.

Although not normally associated with the movement of cloud computing, Oracle in itself has been disrupting the layers of software and infrastructure in the back office with its heavy acquisitions and merger of Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA, and now Sun.

In a way, the company has faced some of the hardest integration challenges by thinking about enterprise services bus, which is an enterprise version of software-as-a-service that is used extensively in cloud computing.

Both small companies and large companies support this movement, Caliber Points notes here:

"....Larger clients such as Cadbury (50,000), BNP Paribas (65,000), Astra Zeneca (70,000), IKEA (67,000), Philips (110,000) etc. have implemented their HR systems on a multi-tenanted model."

Multi Tenant: Just Makes Sense

We took a moment to sit down with Caliber Point CEO RU Srinivas to discuss how the company has been working within the Oracle innovation model to help figure out where cost-savings, SaaS, and enterprise licensing meet - and innovating to offer a multi-tenant solution in the midst of the evolution underway for the entire market.

In the one pager, the company offers these human resource services:

• Administrative HR: Employee Database, Workforce Administration, Employee Self-Service, Reporting Manager, Self Service.
• Compensation - Records and Updates
• Payroll and Employee Benefits
• Time Entry and Management
• HR Regulatory Reporting and Analytics

The companies Republic product release offers customers a solution that both extends as well as fits into Oracle's business product offering. In their brochure, Caliber Point stresses the overall value of mulit-tenant solutions and how the combination of configuration patterns lead to more effective software deployment - an easy place to gain cost savings.

We believe this gives Oracle opportunities to look into the future of where PeopleSoft and Oracle database technology future lies. If we live in a "multi-tenant or whither" world, it is key for Oracle (and others) to position themselves for a dominant solution like has been enjoyed in the past in the enterprise.

Unhost: (Verb)

We're not sure if to "unhost" is an official term, but if it was, we'd suggest this definition: "Reduce technical footprint and save money by leveraging outsourced commodity services that you used to manage yourself".

It could be argued that public cloud computing (Amazon) is a part of the outsourcing movement. Instead of taking people processes however, cloud computing starts with resources and works its way down by wrapping compute, storage, and networking into service definitions that are accessible by credit cards.

Caliber Point's CEO, RU Srinivas "RU" shared with us the base case for cost savings with the models of outsourcing. Here, in the company's Republic white paper the case is being made on the pressure of change to pricing for SAP and Oracle and the benefits of the next wave of outsourced infrastructure.

We asked RU if it was possible to break it down the cost savings in a simple way for large enterprises who pay for licenses for platforms today would be tempted to "un-host" their infrastructure.

RU explained that it wasn't quite that simple, considering the depth of solutions with tools like PeopleSoft and other factors, but as a basis, cost savings of 30% were a reasonable starting point.

However, as noted in the companies outsourcing products, it is also possible to gain similar cost reductions in human resource outsourcing offerings Caliber Point offers.

This brings us to the conclusion that multi-tenant may mix well with multi-continent support like that offered by big outsourcing organizations.

The opportunity for both hosting and supporting becomes a big win for companies looking reduce expenses in core business functions such as human resources. We wonder if offerings like Republic will emerge out of cloud computing and compete with Amazon (and others) as the new center of the cost-savings universe.

What comes to mind when you think of outsourcing and cloud computing today?

And, where people are productive, security is to be questioned. In this short review, we look at the new feature Google offers admins and look a bit closer at security in a browser-based world.

To further enable Google Apps administrators, the company has released a new cookie based reset tool for managing security between the client and the enterprise cloud. This functionality of Google Apps allows an administrator to flag a user for re-authentication on their next HTTP request to Google's cloud apps.

This new feature is targeted at environments where a user of the the Google Apps cloud loses an IT asset and the company wants to remove access to any current for future page requests.

This feature shows how mobile and personal computer are again creeping together in security needs for cloud data service use.

This feature reminds us of the "remote wipe" in MobileMe that is offered for the iPhone. The iPhone version targets removing data from the physical device but for practical purposes is nearly akin to "cookie invalidated" by Google Apps, which forces log-out any active sessions of a cloud based application.

Both features target keeping sensitive information safe and can be activated at any time, killing an active user of the device. Google shares the goal of the tool here:

"Combined with the existing ability for administrators to reset user passwords, this new feature to reset users' sign-in cookies improves security in the cloud in case of device theft or loss."

Google goes into a bit more detail in the help file for the cookie reset feature, which describes how to find the feature to reset the cookie (in Users and groups: Passwords) and as an admin remove authorization from any current or future authenticated user or browser client:

"To prevent unauthorized access to an account, you can reset the sign-in cookies for that user, which has the effect of logging out that user from all current HTTP sessions, and requiring new authentication the next time that user tries to initiate an HTTP session to log in to Google Apps."

The help file also describes how to find the feature, which shows up in the Users and but in our version of Google Apps (non premium) it didn't show up in the password section as described.

So far, it looks like this security feature is getting a good response from the administrators that have responded to Google's blog. We see it as a welcome effort on Google's part towards preparing their cloud for the enterprise, but also it raises questions of the use of cookies and tying down access to machines (IP) vs. browser cookie.

Securing the browser for the cloud causes us to think of this question:

Are mobile phones (iPhone for example) inherently more secure than computer based browsers?

As corporate blog applications grow as operational business tools, the ability to respond to users who launch comments becomes a critical component of doing business. This requires being able to integrate this information flow into company processes as a natural extension of the blog.

SalesForce.com has been focused on aggregation of customer prospects across all channels a company performs in. So, this is a very natural extension to SaleForce's destiny to consider the corporate blog an important touch point for consumers.

And, with the momentum of SalesForce's Chatter platform - which enables enterprise collaboration and hooks to services like Twitter and Facebook, this integration both helps get comprehensive and in our opinion, increases the value of the blog as a tool for the enterprise.

SalesForce provided us screenshots of the application, we'll walk through them here.

In the SalesForce dashboard, set up a Wordpress receiver.

When configuring the Wordpress integration, set up the system to auto-respond with a custom message.

Build a form in SalesForce.com to capture user contact information using the form builder.

Embedding the connection between the widget or page in Wordpress by tying it to the SalesForce identifier.

Viewing the widget in Wordpress.

Adding the contact widget to the Sidebar widget (for example) enables the blog to use it pre-defined presentation mechanics to bring the SalesForce powered contact widget to users. This can be done across the entire site (like shown in sidebar), or added to an individual page or widget that is controlled by the Wordpress publishing process.

In this model of the universe, the blog owner is able to connect the blog viewer to company processes. We think this may be help blogs grow to being more operational tools, bringing the ease of publishing to the ease of customer relationship management.

Do you run Wordpress and Saleforce.com today? What do you think about this merge of capabilities?

If you have a block of Red Hat Linux licenses, you can now enroll with the company to enable these to be authorized on an EC2 instance with your Amazon account. We took a few moments to sit down with the team from Red Hat to learn more about the details of the partnership.

Going Elastic

One of the big reasons motivations is the ability to support enterprise use cases, such as web hosting, that are increasingly including a part of their service in the cloud. Red Hat is committing to make the latest versions of Red Hat Linux available on Amazon EC2 at the same time as their normal release. This includes both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Red Hat Linux.

Red Hat is already supported on virtualization platforms such as VMware and (of course) KVM, so this move is a natural extension in giving IT the ability to run a Red Hat image wherever and however they host their compute resources.

A Few Considerations

One nice thing about Red Hat in the Amazon cloud is that the company is proving updates to the OS to the Amazon customers as well.

Of course, this is available today in the normal subscription service, but in talking to the company we were able to envision a cloud future where your Red Hat instances on EC2 "report in" through a messaging service that they are ready to be updated. We can see a time where provisioning updates, including pulling servers out of the pool gracefully, reconnecting them, could be triggered by a Red Hat update and automated through the pool of services.

Red Hat emphasizes that when hosting your licenses on Amazon EC2 that you will be billed for what you use. Just like you can configure instances spin-up and down based on need, your license pool can extend as well. Like the core computing billing the license tally will follow this pattern. Something to consider when you are allocating licenses. We wonder if there will be an "elastic pool" someday, or if the company will offer deeper incentives for scaling.

Getting Started

The Red Hat Cloud Access subscription feature is available for Amazon EC2 now. To learn more about Cloud Access, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/access/

Here's a few more resources we found that are a good starting point:

• Getting started


• Red Hat in the Amazon cloud


• Subscriber guidelines


• How to enroll

Red Hat Linux in Amazon's cloud makes sense for enterprise customers. We like the fact that the company launched in a way that supports existing license holders and enables license portability.

Red Hat is also helping companies build clouds with its virtualization technology and large asset in Linux. The company is positioning itself to be a force in cloud computing by continuing its legacy of open software.

We wonder: Will all software platforms move to Amazon? Will there a be a time that the "cloud distribution" is the first priority at Red Hat and other operating system releases?

We took time to talk to leaders at SalesForce and VMware to absorb the news and start to dig in. In this post, we'll share what we know and insert speculation in the force in the market this product may exert.

The VMforce Zen: Moving Java from Run Anywhere to Distribute Now

One of the best parts of our dialog with the company representatives Ariel Kelman, VP Platform Product Marketing of Salesforce.com and Jerry Chen, Senior Director, Cloud & Application Services at VMware was getting them explain how they came to the conclusion that the time was right to choose each other as key partners.

From the one side, we have VMware's vSphere, vCloud and Spring as the entry point to building applications. On the other side we see this force of infrastructure mixed with the smoothness of SalesForce security, enterprise cloud readiness, and database in the cloud as an always-on set of services.

In essence, when looking at the respective synergies in these two key cloud providers we heard several times, from Kelman and Chen that it "just makes sense".

Being curious about how both organizations grow, it was hard to disagree that a compelling opportunity exists - and that was before the slides that follow.

The VMforce Pitch

Here, we'll take you through the pitch the company shared with us and analyze a few of the key parts of what is being prepared for the platform.

Many Enterprises Love Java

One of the nice things about VMware bringing Spring into the discussion is the focus on lightweight stack for Java development. Although several patterns are supported, a default paradigm is to combine top patterns in the Java language ecosystem including the combination of Spring, Tomcat, and Eclipse.

Secure Cloud Computing and Legacy System Harmony

One of the best parts of using virtual infrastructure is the ability to avoid the hardware sizing discussion. With VMforce, the dialog extends even further to include database layer that has been proven with mission critical applications. In a way, Java is fully prepared to be bundled with database in the cloud, so this makes a lot of sense for SalesForce to bring enterprises into its cloud.

How VMforce Works

From the Java development point of view, it works like the past. But, from the smart infrastructure at your fingertips point of view, a new array of services now plug into the development tool set. This includes provisioning of the physical environment - including tuning and scaling. And it combines services offered by SalesForce in its cloud applications.

Developers Build Java Apps the Same Way

The incredible thing about this generation of tools, is the power that is added to the developer. The core application has always been "air traffic control" for many teams. Now, with the option to deploy to the cloud, we expect that application development will become more automated than ever before.

Database is Always On and Hosted in the Cloud

Have the Database in the cloud is an important strategic piece of this fabric. In essence, the crown jewels of architecture are being automated by applications. SalesForce with its scaling database technology, and VMware with it's ability to monitor and provision architecture are working to take a whole layer of IT system design out of the mix by offering database and infrastructure as a service to each application deployed in VMforce.

Developers Get Access to Force.com Business and Collaboration Services

One of the most compelling parts of this combination is the bringing of collaboration to the enterprise. With the momentum of SalesForce Chatter, it becomes easier and easier to see how enterprise teams may embrace SalesForce.com's services into their applications.

Instead of learning Force.com APEX model, now the services can be brought into the application, and when hosted they can be tuned to peacefully exist within the cloud infrastructure and database layer.

VMForce is More than Infrastructure

SalesForce has been seen as a platform as a service, whereas VMware and Amazon have been focusing on bringing infrastructure as a service. With this partnership, we (jokingly) like to think about it being platform as a service, with infrastructure inside (paaswii).

Here, the organization lays out its terminology and how infrastructure as a service like Amazon may be contrasted with VMforce.

Together, SalesForce and VMware bring together infrastructure as a service and software as a service into a platform. SalesForce calls it Cloud 2. We simply consider it a next evolution of the thing we call the Cloud.

Demo: Competition Starts with Being There

Here's the solution demonstration VMforce offers for developers that want to sign up for the preview beta.

Here are a few screen shots that the companies shared with us. This shows a first version of how VMforce services are consumed in SalesForce and managed in Force.com.

Here, we see sample applications in the VMforce console.

A Spring application in the VMforce console offers it services to the platform.

Spring for Java: Run, Java, Run

Java has had the pleasure of too much success, or at least success in some of the wrong places. With big supporters like IBM with WebSphere, BEA (now Oracle) and other models, the language has been tugged in several directions.

Still, it is a dominant language and development paradigm. Luckily, the wise sages within Java community have been working on deployment bundling and distribution of Java enterprises packages for a long time. At the same time, the pattern of Spring has been embraced by many developers have chosen a model to optimize towards for development.

VMforce, as it rolls out into 2010 may have the opportunity to become the heir-apparent to the thrones of historic greatness enterprise software by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP. We think this is revenue opportunity for this effort.

At the same time, this move further evolves the competitive cycle of cloud computing and becomes more to those building services on the Amazon cloud, Google's App Engine, and even vendors in the operating system layers including Microsoft, and RedHat.

A Few Questions to Consider

Here are a few questions to think about. As this rolls out, we hope to explore further as we watch the evolution of VMforce and Java as a cloud ready ecosystem.

• How does this help Java is what about iPhone, iPad? We wonder, could there be a model for this piece of the puzzle to be optimized so that enterprise developers who want to keep Java systems in place have a nice way to connect to the other models of computing such as Apple's Objective C.
• What does it mean to be a first mover in Java cloud? Can, will this entry into Java bring it together, tear it apart, or other? Oracle and Sun are one, and IBM is still working to bring its cloud offerings to market. In a way, this move seems to force more scrutiny into the efforts at Oracle and its investment in Java. How will more competition shake up an already changing landscape?
• Will other platform as a service organizations respond? Google App Engine is targeting Java Developers, Heroku is suggesting Ruby as a model for enterprise web applications. Where will it shake out?
• Will partners emerge in the framework like they do today? We see a lot of goodness in the Spring, Tomcat and Eclipse development tools. Will other providers of Java services and software find a home in the VMforce curated cloud?
• Can SalesForce grow in both directions at once? In a way, SalesForce is moving both into lightweight (Twitter-like) applications and also heavy enterprise class services simultaneously. Perhaps it is needed for the end-game, but can it be done gracefully?
• What and where is the OS and choice? With this stack, it is increasingly obvious that in cloud based architecture, the OS (and database) fall into commodity. Are we ready for this? How do Microsoft, Redhat (and even Oracle) respond to show value for their respective layers of the IT infrastructure?

Is your Java ready to collaborate with the cloud?

Photo credit: h-k-d
Presentation graphics credit: VMforce