Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel.

Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz with the Midas touch, recently opined that Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities and successes represent a meaningful threat to Google’s product-search-related advertising business.

I will take Jeff’s thesis — with which I fundamentally agree — one step (maybe even more) further by saying that I believe Amazon is one of the few companies that has the ambition, permission, structure, and, maybe most important, data, to actually beat Google at its own game.

What Makes Amazon Different

As an Internet equity research analyst from 1996-2009 — go ahead... throw your drink on your screen and curse me loudly enough that the barista hears you — I had a front seat to The Show. I covered Amazon from its days as “just” a bookseller and Google when it was still a private company, in addition to eBay, Yahoo!, Excite, About.com, Netflix, Omniture, aQuantive, CNET, E*TRADE, and many other industry-defining companies.

(See also: The Epic Battle Between Apple And Google Is Over)

From the earliest days, it was clear to me (and a few others, obviously) that Amazon was no ordinary company, at any level. However, three attributes set it (far) apart in my mind:

1. Vision and ambition that were orders of magnitude beyond those of others team that I encountered (until, that is, I met Google);
2. A cult-like dedication to customer experience/satisfaction that permeated every decision made by every person at the company; and,
3. A business model that not only valued long-term cash flow and absolute profit potential, but also deemed near-term profits and profit margin largely irrelevant.

Individually, these characteristics have been powerful; in combination, they have been revolutionary. Jeff Bezos’ worldview gave his entire team permission — in fact, it gave them the mandate — to think Big, with a capital “B.” Customers’ pure delight with every Amazon interaction gave the company permission to sell (almost) anything to (almost) anyone.

And, finally, management’s clarity of financial intent (i.e., to perpetually focus on long-term potential) has, from day one, conditioned shareholders and Wall Street to expect a business that will forever be amorphous and unpredictable, with razor-thin margins.

The Yin To Google's Yang, Sort Of

Liberated from more typical corporate constraints, Amazon has evolved like few other companies in history — from its humble origins as an online bookstore into: Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Flexible Payments Service, state-of-the-art warehouses (~70) everywhere, Amazon Cloud Player, AmazonFresh, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Prime, A9, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Diapers.com, Silk, Amazon Cloud Drive, Zappos, Amazon CloudFront, Kindle, and so on.

Sound familiar? It should, because this transformation mirrors that of Google, itself, which began as “just” a search engine company focused on “organizing the world’s information,” and has now become: Gmail, Maps, Apps, Drive, Chrome, Android, Motorola, YouTube, Wallet, Voice, Google Cloud Storage, Shopping, Chromebook, Google App Engine, Google+, and so on.

(See also: How Google Is Kicking Sand In Apple's Face)

While not perfectly matching each other solution-for-solution, Amazon and Google now find themselves overlapping across, and competing within, most major categories of Internet-fueled technology and business. SaaS. Hardware. e-Commerce. IaaS. Enterprise. Media. Consumer. Applications. Browsers. Storage. Payments. Consumer. Tablets. And so on.

Amazon's Trump Card: Data

Despite all these evolutions and comparisons and similarities and overlaps, I actually think there’s one final aspect to Amazon’s business with which Google cannot (yet) directly compete, and which may prove to be the difference-maker in this faux-ish battle: Data.

With 17+ years of history and hundreds of millions of transactions across almost every category of goods, Amazon now has massive quantities of data about the actual buying habits of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of consumers around the globe. Not just what people are searching for (Google, though Amazon.com actually has it too). Not just what people “like” (“like” that, Facebook).

(See also: Will Facebook Go Out With A Bang?)

Not just what people want (Pinterest, though Amazon.com actually has it too). Not just what people tweet about (Twitter). But the items that people actually pay for with their own hard-earned dollars!

Armed with this unique transaction- and SKU-specific data, at scale, Amazon.com has the potential to become one of, if not the most signficant advertising platforms in the world, in my view — matching, if not besting, Google.

Look at it this way: if advertisers pay Google $44 billion per year for connecting them with consumers that it oftentimes thinks have interest in their product(s), what might those same advertisers be willing to pay Amazon for connecting them with people they know are interested in their products (or those of their competitors, or those in which they will soon have interest)?

What That Data Might Be Worth

For instance, do you think Volvo, Toyota, Lexus, Ford, et al., might be willing to pay a small fortune to be introduced to an individual in Huntington Beach, CA, who suddenly begins buying newborn diapers by the pallet? What about Gymboree? Gerbers? Whole Foods? Safeway? Fab? Gap? Pottery Barn? Ross? Home Depot?

Similarly, how much interest might be generated among home decor vendors, local service providers (e.g., physicians, athletic clubs, veterinarians), home maintenance vendors, etc., by a change in shipping and billing information for one of Amazon.com’s long-time customers? Say, someone whose pattern of purchases are highly suggestive — remember, Amazon.com has developed one of the best predictive commerce models in the world for its own e-commerce franchise — of a home with at least one child and one dog, an avid athlete/runner/yogini, with a taste for gourmet cooking and a passion for gardening, among other attributes?

And these hypotheticals say absolutely nothing of the extraodinary value Amazon could (theoretically) deliver to its customers/partners by sharing with them relevant online transaction activity that might follow said advertisements, effectively offering a closed loop marketing environment unlike any other.

By some accounts, Amazon has (finally) started focusing on the business potential of advertising. For years, it has run ads on its own sites. Then, in late 2010, the company also began serving advertisements on others’ sites, introducing what is, in effect, a full-fledged online advertising network. But these are just warm-ups in my mind — Amazon methodically experimenting (as is its custom) and purposefully tiptoeing around the edges of its potential.

I’m convinced the day will come — sooner rather than later — when Amazon unleashes its data and announces itself as an advertising powerhouse. And, when it does, I think the gloves officially come off and the real battle with Google commences.

Lead image via Flickr user Jorge Lascar, CC 2.0

As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out - by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.

In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me.

Cloud Services Can Lag

I am pretty agnostic when it comes to cloud providers - as long as they are free or close to it. However, as I was moving files around while preparing my most recent book A Week at the Beach The 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide I was a little surprised at the lags I sometimes experienced using the big-name cloud-based file-transfer services.

More than once when I wanted to use a file from one computer to another, I was disappointed by my cloud services. There were a few times that I got so tired of waiting for a file to show up on my other computer’s cloud drive that I resorted to sneakernet using a USB thumb drive.

After my book was published, I decided to go back and run some simple tests to see just how long the four best-known file-transfer/backup services actually take to put the files where you want them.

To compare Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, and Microsoft’s SkyDrive I started by exporting a 500K JPEG test image from Lightroom on my Windows 8 computer directly to each of the four services.

Fighting The Randomization Factor

After running the tests a few times, I noticed what can only be described as random operating system differences. Sometimes the file would pop up first on my Mac and other times it showed up first on my Windows 7 laptop.

In order to eliminate the operating system differences, I restarted the tests and this time stopped the timer when the file showed up on either my Mac running Mountain Lion or my Windows 7 laptop. I also reran my tests with a variety of sizes and types of files. In all I ran twenty-five sets of tests.

The differences were significant, if not overwhelmingly huge. The fastest synchs took less than 3 seconds, while a few others took several minutes. The biggest chunk of tests clocked in between 10 seconds and one minute. A few synchs never completed. But which service recorded the best times with the fewest problems?

Dropbox FTW!

Dropbox ended up being fastest 56% of the time. Even more importantly, it was slowest only 4% of the time.

Skydrive brought up the rear. It was fastest on 12% of the tests, but but slowest on a whopping 80% of the tests. It also had two files that never showed up on the Mac and one that never showed on the Windows 7 laptop.

The Amazon Cloud slightly outpaced Google Drive - which had one file that never showed up on the Mac and another that took a very long time to complete.

If my tests convinced me of anything, it is that Skydrive is a work in progress and has a long way to go. I even had trouble setting up the tests on Skydrive.

My tests also revealed a number of odd results. When testing files saved from Word, strange extra files sometimes showed up on all the cloud drives except Dropbox. The file names always began with the characters “~$”. Sometimes the mystery files disappeared and sometimes they hung around.

Cloud Drive Recommendations

So here are some quick recommendations:

• First, do not treat your cloud drive as one huge dumping ground. Create folders and try to force a little organization on yourself.
• If you save a file to the cloud in order to work on it from another computer, quit the application or close the file on the first computer after you have saved the file to the cloud drive.
• Make sure you have a local copy of important files in your documents folder - not just the replicated cloud folder on your computer. Interesting things sometimes happen when cloud files get updated or deleted from another computer. When you come back to the computer where you first created a file, you could be in for a nasty surprise.
• If you cannot get a cloud folder on your computer to update, trying quitting the cloud application or rebooting your system.

Dropbox and Amazon appear to be the most reliable solutions with only occasional delays. Google isn't far behind, and I can't imagine that Microsoft won't work hard to improve Skydrive - the company's subscription model depends on it.

Even so, I have no plans to throw away my USB thumb drives.

If you've ever used the Internet — and you know who you are — you've undoubtedly had apps or various services stop working unexpectedly. For ordinary users, this usually just means no access to Twitter or Gmail for a while. But for developers, whose apps and services rely increasingly heavily on hooks into popular Web services, the problem can be far more complicated.

That's because modern Web services (and the apps that facilitate them) can fail for a variety of reasons. One of the most common problems arises when some other service has gone down — more specifically, when the application programming interface (API) that lets your app tap into that other service stops working. Trouble is, until recently there hasn't been an easy way to confirm or rule out API failures.

You Don't Need A Weatherman...

And that's where API status dashboards, the weather reports of the Web-service world, come in. Dashboards enable developers and administrators to quickly check to see what's going on with the API itself. If the API is slowed or offline, then at least you, the developer, know the problem isn't in your own code. So you can start working with (translate: yelling at) the API vendor to fix the situation.

Zapier, a startup that helps developers integrate APIs into applications, was already using just such a dashboard for its internal purposes. It's now opened up that API weather report for the world at large. Zapier's tool is unique in that it covers a lot of APIs for smaller but still useful services out there, not just their mega-service cousins. It should be a stopping point for anyone who is using one of these smaller APIs.

...To Tell You Whether APIs Are Up Or Down

It might seem a little obsessive to be so concerned about an API's status that we build "weather reports," but it makes good business sense. Like the air around us, APIs are a type of environment, too. They have to work and be available at any given moment in order to enable connectivity to a given web application and service. When they fail, data exchange can slow down or completely halt.

Of course, API failures aren't the only things that can bring down a Web service. The service itself could have bad code, or one of the servers might be on the way to failure. Tracking down the exact failure, though, can take a lot of time, especially if hardware failure is ruled out. That leaves the code itself, precipitating a search that could take hours.

So it's definitely helpful to know right away whether you've got an API problem... or something else. "When a call to an API breaks," says Zapier CEO and co-founder Wade Foster, "you don't always know where the problem is."

But Weather Reports Help

Zapier isn't the only status board around. Watchmouse has an API Status board that monitors the larger API services, such as Google, Twitter, Dropbox and the like. Its technology was so attractive that CA bought the company in 2011 and incorporated the monitoring service into its Nimsoft Cloud Monitoring tools.

Unfortunately, it's not entirely clear that the public Nimsoft page is up to date. The page is currently reporting disruptions for Digg, Dropbox and some Google services. The latter seems inaccurate, since Google itself isn't reporting any issues today.

Of course, if you have an app that depends on Google services, you can always check out Google's API status page. Amazon Web Services has its own API and service reporting dashboard, too.

If you're building an API for your own service, you can provide your users with a quick status dashboard of your own, using the Stashboard code that was open sourced by Twilio a few years ago. Developers can use the code to create a dashboard that can be hosted on Google Apps Engine.

Lead image courtesy of NOAA

If you're visiting the Google I/O developers conference this week, you're a tiny part of a giant Google experiment to sniff out everything from your body heat to your breath. Google is even listening to your footfalls as part of its Data Sensing Lab I/O 2013.

Think that's a scary, Big-Brother invasion of privacy? The conference attendees I talked to didn't seem to mind. In fact, one wanted Google to collect even more data.

Google planted 525 powered sensors around the halls of San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, and began collecting data from them on Wednesday, according to Michael Manoochehri, a developer programs engineer at Google. The company began measuring temperature, humidity, light, pressure (including nearby footfalls), motion, air quality and both RF and ambient noise. All of the data is sent back at intervals of 20 seconds or so, collected by Google's App Engine, with analysis performed by its BigQuery Big Data analysis tool. You can see the results at the Lab's dedicated Web site. 

Among other things, Google's I/O developer conference has focused this year on improving developer tools and better integrating the services that it already owns via a more intelligent cloud. The unnamed sensor project, part of Google's Data Sensing Lab, encompasses a bit of all of that. By itself, knowing that the air quality diminished at 4a.m. might be intriguing, but not all that significant. But by correlating that information with a peak in another data stream - ambient noise, say - it becomes possible to guess what's going oin; in this case, perhaps, the arrival of the cleaning crew.

Manoochehri said that Google could build in queries against the sensor network into its Google I/O app, to identify the quietest spots on the floor for a phone call or a brief nap.

Crossing The Creepy Line?

Eric Schmidt, then the chief executive of Google, famously described Google's policy as "to get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it." When Google unified its privacy policy in March 2012, the company suggested that its unified services could anticipate an afternoon meeting and direct you to leave at a certain time. A year ago, that notion prompted righteous outrage from members of Congress, users and privacy advocates. A year later, that feature (now called Google Now) has been lauded as the herald of anticipatory search. (Six privacy advocates from the EU are still threatening action.)

Source: Google

It's probably fair to say that attendees of Google I/O give Google a bit more leeway than the general public. That certainly proved to be the case for those sitting near the sensors. Alan Holzman, a retired venture capitalist who last worked for Intel Capital, shrugged it off. "My life is tied to Google in much more significant ways," he noted.

Ditto for Sam Napolitano, who was covering Google I/O for the Huffington Post. Napolitano said he believed that the sensors were probably picking up on the NFC tag embedded within his name tag - something that Google employees said wasn't true. In any event, Napolitano said, he didn't care, as he had no expectations of privacy in a public space. "As long as it's not under my toilet seat, I don't care," Napolitano said of the sensors.

And "Rachid," an employee of Motorola Mobility who declined to give his last name, said he wanted to Google sample more data. More data and more correlation often derives more interesting results, he said, such as the various causes of depression. 

The Internet Of Things

Collecting data from sensors is increasingly seen as part of the rise of the so-called Internet of Things, and Google clearly wants to be a leader in this growing domain. Google already collects some location data via Android phones to better improve its knowledge of traffic, and provide better solutions via Google Maps. 

(See also How The Internet Of Things Will Revolutionize Search.)

We know that Google is very good at parsing user data - pulling keywords from emails, for example, and selling ads against them. (Selling ads against search terms is child's play.) Likewise, it can make recommendations for where to eat, where to go, the route to take and when to leave - building more comprehensive, personalized and valuable profiles along the way.

But the I/O conference project suggests that Google is prepared to take the same value proposition - collect data, analyze it, and provide and sell services against it - far beyond today's core businesses. Imagine sensors placed on Google Street View cars, and selling a comprehensive snapshot of air quality to the communities it maps. Or mounting similar sensors on the light poles from which it strings  it Google Fiber broadband connections.

It will be interesting to see how far Google takes this. Remember this is the company that attempted to track the spread of influenza via search terms. Google said that it wants attendees and other users to be able to interact with its new sensor data via the project's website. How soon will it be when we'll be able to do the same for, say, San Francisco?

While both Google and SAP shared a 1980's music sensibility at their respective conferences this week - Billy Idol performed at Google I/O and U2's Bono walked the floor at SAPPHIRE - the two companies see the future of computing very differently. Even when the two companies agree on the importance of cloud computing, their strategies couldn't be more different.

For one thing, SAP's new cloud isn't even a cloud. But then, SAP's Bono wasn't really Bono, either, but merely an impersonator.

Forrester analyst Stefan Ried takes SAP to task for getting cloud wrong in its new HANA Enterprise Cloud:

"The Hana Cloud is a very careful move to a new business model. It is not disruptive and will NOT accelerate Hana usage to the many more customers who have been struggling with Hana on-premises because of its licensing. 

"The announced Hana Enterprise Cloud follows the 'Bring Your Own License' paradigm. While this is great for customers that already have a Hana license and would like to relocate it into the cloud, it is useless for customers that might have largely fluctuating data volumes or user numbers and might specifically use a cloud because of its elastic business model."

In other words, it's not really a cloud. 

Amazon, more than any other cloud vendor, has insisted that such "clouds" don't deserve the name, as they fail to live up to the very premise of cloud computing: truly elastic, on-demand software. But while Amazon normally reserves its ire for private cloud vendors, SAP's HANA Cloud is even less of a cloud because it requires you to bring your own HANA license to the party.

Meanwhile, over at Google I/O, Google introduced improves to Google Cloud Platform and made Google Compute Engine available to all. Like Amazon, Google is making a powerful array of infrastructure technologies available on-demand, and totally elastic.

Google, like Amazon, realizes that the future of computing is not going to be won by the vendor with the prettiest device or even the best user interface: it will be won by the company with the best cloud services. As Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady pointed out, summarizing Google's first day announcements:

"[Google is clearly telegraphing that] the war for mobile will not be won with devices or operating systems. It will be won instead with services."

SAP must see this, too, but appears hamstrung by its past, in true "Innovator's Dilemma" fashion. It has so much revenue tied up in legacy deployments of legacy software that even releasing a kind-of, sort-of, not-really cloud offering is the best it can do.

This is not to suggest that HANA is bad technology. By most accounts, it's quite good. But as Ried argues, "The SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud is version 2 of the initial Hana in-memory database, but the cloud offering based on 'Bring Your Own License' is more version 0.1 of a cloud business model."

Which is to say, it's no cloud at all. While this may not seem like a big deal, enterprises are barreling into true clouds for a wide variety of needs, and no longer merely for development and test workloads. If SAP wants to participate in the future of enterprise computing, it should learn from the companies that are inventing that future: Google and Amazon.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Google's alternative to Microsoft Office, Google Apps, has always suffered from the fact that it offers a sort of "good enough" compatibility — fine for most basic document and spreadsheet tasks, but not enough to match certain Office features.

Now Google is preparing to use technology from a recent acquisition, QuickOffice, to close that gap.

In recent weeks, Google sources have told me that Google has been internally testing, or "dogfooding," QuickOffice, which began life as a standalone productivity app that offers better compatibility with Office than Google's own Apps. Now, however, Google is testing QuickOffice as a cloud-based service in its own Chrome browser.

(Google already provides QuickOffice as part of its Google Apps subscription, specifically as an app for customers with Android tablets or iPads.)

Why QuickOffice?

QuickOffice uses the same .DOCX file format that Office does, allowing users to quickly edit and share the same files as Office users. QuickOffice compatibility probably means that more businesses and users will see Google Apps as a viable alternative to Office, wounding Microsoft's Office cash cow. 

Google sources also say they're confident that Microsoft won't be able to block QuickOffice with licensing issues or other legal threats. Eventually, these individuals say, QuickOffice will become the foundation of Google Apps, although that's still a ways off.

The target, Google sources said, isn't the full PC-based version of Office itself - although that might be a bit of spin. Instead, Google claims to think of QuickOffice as a competitor to Microsoft's own Web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel - which often deliberately fall short of full Office functionality. For now, that means running QuickOffice as a browser app, probably using Google's Native Client technology, until Google's engineers can integrate it directly with Apps.

It's another example of the growing tension between Microsoft and Google, evidenced by the Microsoft's "rule-breaking" YouTube Windows Phone app and its use of an open API to talk to Google+ users via its Outlook.com Web site.

Google chief executive Larry Page, for example, used his Google I/O keynote to call out Microsoft's behavior as "really sad," and said that Microsoft took advantage of the open API. "Being negative is not how we make progress," Page said. "And most important things are not zero-sum. There's a lot of opportunity out there."

Google Tipped QuickOffice Plans At Pixel Launch

Google acquired QuickOffice last year for an undisclosed sum, and the team went quiet. But we know that Google plans to add QuickOffice to the Pixel, because Google said so.

At the launch of the Pixel a few months ago, Google's Chrome chief, Sundar Pichai, said that it would take two to three months to add QuickOffice to the Pixel, but that it would be included with it. Since it wasn't available when Google handed out thousands of Pixels to developers Wednesday, it must be coming soon.

Looking back, Pichai actually spoke quite a bit about QuickOffice's role within Google at the Pixel launch- but the media (probably correctly) focused on the Pixel hardware itself. Pichai set the stage for the Pixel handout by emphasizing, again and again, that the Pixel represented the best Chromebook experience for developers and early adopters: "if you're living in the cloud, this is the best experience you can use," Pichai said then.

Microsoft Strikes... Too Soon

Microsoft clearly anticipated a QuickOffice launch at Google I/O. On May 10, it published a blog post that directly attacked the compatibility of Google Apps as well as QuickOffice. Jake Zborowski, a senior product manager at Microsoft, wrote:

Productivity software is built to help people communicate. It's more than just the words in a document or presentation; it's about the tone, style and format you use to convey an overall message. People often entrust important information in these documents -- from board presentations to financial analyses to book reports. You should be able to trust that what you intend to communicate is what is being seen.

Zborowski's post included several sample documents that users could download themselves for comparison's sake, as well as a funny YouTube video that included Rob Schenider and Pete Rose, poking fun at the "gamble" that is Google Apps. In a supporting comment, Zborowski pointed out that Google doesn't support the Open Document Format, suggesting that Microsoft is more open than Google.

Google representatives shrugged off the post, noting that the example documents relied on Office functions typical users rarely touch, such as watermarks and odd text spacing. 

However, Microsoft's post also noted that Office Web Apps can now be used within Android, leaving the Microsoft-Google competition within the Android tablet space as an app - Google's QuickOffice - versus a cloud solution, Microsoft's Office Web apps.

The whole point of the Pixel, according to Pichai, is to show off the power of the cloud. Microsoft, for its part, is still largely wedded to the desktop application, and the $23 billion or so that its Business Division pulls in on an annual basis. (Office 365 doesn't live in the cloud, although it has cloud hooks in SkyDrive and its subscription delivery system.) That's a target that Google has attacked for several years now, with dueling customer announcements from both sides marking the ebb and flow of the battle.

Micosoft may be right that Google Apps and QuickOffice don't offer the full capabilities of Office. But they come close - and "close" has been the selling point behind Apps all along. QuickOffice looks like it could close the gap.

Image Source: Google

Your cloud provider is great. Your cloud provider is cheap. Your cloud provider is out of business.

Now what do you do?

If your favorite consumer cloud service goes out of business or simply feels it's time to end-of-life a particular application, it's frustrating but life goes on. More often than not, you weren't paying for the service, anyway. But for an enterprise, losing access to a preferred SaaS application can be devastating.

Just ask Xeround's customers.

Learning From Xeround's Failure

Recently the Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) provider terminated its cloud database service, giving free users a week to pack up and move on, and paid customers just two weeks:

"Xeround’s leadership forum has recently decided to re-focus the company’s effort. This means we will no longer be able to support our service over public clouds, across all of our currently active data centers... We ask you to please export your database instance and migrate your database to another service of your choosing before the termination date... We regret the inconvenience this causes you."

It's a nice thought, if not particularly helpful. Moving to an alternative solution is easier said than done. Migration between products, cloud or otherwise, is never particularly easy, often by design.

In the case of Xeround, which promises 100% MySQL compatibility, migrating to MySQL might not be difficult. But what if you wanted to move to an alternative database? Or what if instead of a database or other somewhat swappable infrastructure you were hoping to migrate off a SaaS application?

Good luck with that.

Open Source As A Safety Net

Could open source help with this? While not a panacea, giving users both a cloud service and an on-premises deployment, with the latter offered as open source, would ensure a robust back-up plan. It might also give them comfort to use the cloud service in the first place.

As Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos argues, infrastructure software is almost entirely open source now as developers "require access to the details [of their cloud infrastructure] — not just to have the ability to do the same, but for the ability to verify the quality and modify to fit their needs." Businesses are embracing the cloud because it yields cost and convenience benefits, as Forrester's Ted Schadler posits. Add to this developer peace-of-mind and it's a near-perfect combination.

This isn't really about source code. While some will want to tinker with code, doing so will generally void your contract with a vendor. Instead it's about security once the vendor fails or cancels a service: moving a cloud service to your data center, even if only temporarily, buys you time and makes the initiatl investment in the cloud much less precarious.

What's Your Back-Up Plan?

As organizations move to the cloud, increasingly with a 'cloud first' policy, having a back-up in mind is important. Open source is one option that seems to be working for SugarCRM, Eucalyptus and others. But what's your cloud back-up plan? Frequent data dumps? If you had the chance to migrate your end-of-life SaaS application to an on-premises, open-source deployment, would you do it?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

A few years ago, Google's cloud services focused on simply storing and managing objects: email, documents, music, and movies. The 2013 version of Google is now using the cloud to connect and build relationships between them, responding to and anticipating the desires of its users.

Google used its I/O keynote to describe how its vast array of servers is now applying intelligence from everything from music to maps. Google drew cheers when it launched a suite of photo-enhancement apps, including tools to automatically pull put the best pictures from a camera roll, enhance them, and feature them in a selected list of photos.

Google Maps will now automatically generate recommendations to preferred restaurants and destinations, and dynamically reroute users aroudn traffic. Google will even read your Google+ posts — if you allow it — and analyze their content, providing a hashtag for your readers to go deeper and explore the topic of your post even further.

Wow. All this makes Apple's Genius music recommendation engine look positively ancient.

The Next Step: Putting Your Data To Work For You

Google's currency has always been user data, and the transaction has always been a simple one: users contribute data, Google sells ads against it, and both sides prosper. Recent Google I/O conferences have placed a strong emphasis on devices as entry points for that data, especially photos and location.

This year, Google executives appeared to be ready to take the next step.

"We have almost every sensor we've every come up with" right in your smartphone, CEO Larry Page told attendees. Devices are used interchangeably, Page said, implying that data and how it's interpreted should do the same. 

"Technology should do the hard work, so people can get on with doing things that make them happiest in life," Page said.

Photos

Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president responsible for engineering at Google, introduced the new Photos experience. Google said earlier this week that it will now spread 15 GB of data among a user's Photos, Drive, and Gmail storage.  But the new Photos experience will make "Google's servers your new darkroom," Gundotra said.

Specifically, Photos will now intelligently scan your photos and pull out the best ones, supposedly eliminating blurry and duplicate images. Enhancements like skin softening aim to smooth out wrinkles, and red eye reduction and noise filters will help sharpen photos automatically. Google will hunt for and display images that include smiles, not frowns. And an "auto awesome" feature wil automatically pull out a few photos and stitch them together, essentially making them an animated GIF.

For years, Google's servers have only been used for storage. Now, the computing elements within them are being applied to the digital objects within them. Artists may dispute the results - shouldn't I be able to take pictures of scowling children? - but enhancing user photos boosts Google+ and gives users another reason to upload their photos to Google.

Search 

Google, Microsoft, and Wolfram Alpha have engaged in an ongoing war in search for years, with Google jumping out to an early, enormous lead. Wolfram shifted the struggle away from results to answers. Microsoft's point of attack is social. On Wednesday, Google called anticipatory search as the next frontier.

What is anticipatory search? It's the sort of back-end data processing that would allow Google to answer the question "What time does my flight leave?" because it knows what flight you're on based on your email, when the flight leaves thanks to the airline's flight-status API, and how long you'll need to get to the airport based on your location, traffic, real-time transit schedules and the like.

Google first introduced that capability with Google Now, the "cards" feature that shipped with Android 4.0. But the new Cards feature significantly broadens the scope of Google's vision, adding elements like music, games, and public transportation, but also drawing further connections between the two. Being able to command Google to "show mew all my photos from New York" also takes Facebook Graph Search and adds a personal, Google-esque twist. 

Pulling out a feature from Google Glass - voice-triggered actions - Google also announced that a future version of search will "listen" for you to say "OK, Google" and then automatically trigger a search. 

Music

Google's least important announcement of the day involved its new All Access subscriptions, where users will be able to stream milions of tracks from the Google Play library for $9.99 per month. Quite frankly, most of what Google announced has been done already by companies like Pandora, which auto-generates a stream of music based on a seed of a song or artist.

But Google Play's new Listen Now capability will auto-suggest music based on tracks the user already owns, and what it knows about the genre, artist, tempo, and other components. Yes, it seems like an afterthought - and that's sort of the point. 

Maps

Google also unveiled a rethinking of its Maps application, where Google now doesn't provide directions, it directs: to places that the user frequently visits, to restaurants and other destinations that other users or reviewers recommend, and to locations that Google attempts to personalize in other ways.

You might argue that offering directions itself applies intelligence, sorting through numerous routes to the best destination. But the new Maps experience takes it to another level. 

Basically, here's what it all means: data isn't necessarily being devalued in the new computing landscape, but drawing relationships between the disparate elements have become increasingly important. From a consumer perspective, users should expect Google to ask for more and more data, fusing it together and increasingly adding context to it all.

That, increasingly, is becoming the business model of today's Web. Google is just doing it as well or better than anyone else.

Guest author Robert Jenkins is CEO of CloudSigma.

When The Hunger Games hit theaters in March, 2012, it took the box office by storm, grossing $155 million in revenue - in its opening weekend alone! Needless to say, Lionsgate, the film studio that backed the movie, is eager to get the next installment in the trilogy out the door while the excitement of the first film is still fresh in fans' minds.

Unfortunately, the release of the second movie will take an interminable 20 months after the release of the first film. With such a long lag time, movie executives run the risk of fans losing interest or a new movie franchise clouding the market. In a highly competitive industry, a faster time-to-market could help film studios land rights to the hottest projects.

This begs the question: why hasn't technology helped speed up movie production, appeasing fan excitement and helping Hollywood powerhouses maximize revenue streams?

The answer may lie in the cloud.

Production Delays and Data Overflow

The technology processes critical to film production can be a contributing factor to their sluggish schedules. Typically, a film's production environments and the participating service partners are distributed around the globe. For these groups to collaborate, data, film reels, etc., are physically flown around the world as needed. As you can imagine, this is cumbersome, inefficient and costly, and may be one reason movie fans have to wait so long for the next installment of their favorite flicks.

Dispersed environments aren't the only impediment to film production; data complexity and unique production workflows also play a role. Continuous industry innovation, like higher frame rates, 3D, streaming video and computer-generated imaging (CGI) have unleashed an unprecedented influx of data that is difficult for legacy technologies to handle. Just as important, since every movie has unique data and workflow requirements, predicting data capacity needs is a challenge. To avoid over- or under- provisioning while not blowing the budget, media companies need a technology solution that allows for fluctuating demands.

Cloud Computing To The Rescue!

As digital media files grow in size and complexity, media service providers must spend more time and resources developing, transferring, storing and optimizing them. Public cloud-computing services offer a solution to this, providing collaborative ecosystems in which providers can essentially work together under one roof to improve the efficiency of their services, including file conversion, encoding/transcoding, and moving and storing large media files.

Cloud computing offers greater elasticity, instantaneous access and increased collaboration to the media industry. For example, media companies can spin up servers to meet immediate demand and then shut them down when they are no longer needed. This level of elasticity is ideal for the media industry's unique workflows and exploding data volumes, allowing companies to control cost by using only the resources they require for the period they require them.

What's more, with the cloud, it doesn't matter if you're collaborating with partners in even the most remote corners of the world - as long as they have a good Internet connection.

Lastly, as more media companies leverage the cloud, the opportunities for collaboration will only increase, adding value and mutual benefits for all participating organizations. Moviegoers, meanwhile, can look forward to seeing better-made films faster than ever before! After all, who wants to wait until November 2013 to see part two of The Hunger Games trilogy?

Hunger Games image from YouTube trailer.

The Internet of Things isn't really an Internet of anything, at least not yet. Sure, devices are connected to the Internet, but they don't communicate with other devices — just with their own home servers. But that may be about to change.

A new common cloud platform dubbed Xively Cloud Services aims to provide a common ground through which any device connected to the Internet could actually communicate with any other device. Xively is an old fixture within the Internet of Things ecosystem, as it's actually a new commercial version of the older non-commercial Cosm platform, which in turn used to be known as Pachube until Xively's current owner LogMeIn purchased Pachube in 2011.

Like Cosm before it, Xively will offer a way for disparate devices to connect with each other, though now with commercial terms of service for commercial users and freely available services for projects in development. Whatever you call it, the availability of a platform like Xively is a key component in building a true Internet of Things instead of what we actually have now.

The Intranets of Things

To understand the difference, think back a decade or so to when the term "intranets" was all the rage. While the Internet was the grand, connected network of networks, intranets were the smaller, private networks used by corporations who were on the cutting edge of cool in the early days of the 21st century.

Today, the concept is still the same, even if the mystique of the term has worn off somewhat. Devices that are connected to the Internet at large behave in much the same way as servers on an intranet: they communicate only with their corporate systems, reporting data only to the commercial manufacturer.

Instead of the Internet of Things, then, what we have now is a whole bunch of intranets of things.

This may work for individual products, such as the car sensors that report back to the factory with critical maintenance data that, ideally, leads to faster diagnosis and repair of problems. But it doesn't leave much room for connecting devices and objects that really were never designed to communicate with each other.

What The Internet Of Things Might Look Like

Imagine, says Xively VP Chad Jones, a collection of tiny accelerometers and heat sensors woven into the fabric of an infant's onesie, designed to communicate with monitoring software in the cloud with the intent to watch the baby's breathing and body heat for the onset of sudden infant death syndrome or any other form of respiratory distress. The special clothing probably has its own alarm, but what if parents wanted the option to set off every fire alarm in the house?

(Hey, when it's your kid, you might want it to call the fire department and the National Guard, too.)

Right now, both the clothing and the alarms might be connected to the Internet, but not to each other. To make such an option work in our current circumstances, the manufacturers of the devices would have to meet, figure out common signal specifications and work out a commercial agreement. And that's for every fire alarm manufacturer.

Xively enables device makers to set the privacy settings for device data in the Xively network to share all, share some or share none, Jones explained. If device makers were on the Xively platform, they would have a common ground to connect and effectively communicate, using data sharing combined with directory services that provide the ability to selectively share device data and control.

Connecting the medical onesie and the alarms in this scenario would be a far easier and more frictionless experience.

This sort of common platform is exactly what the Internet of Things really needs. Xively and similar platforms like Open.Sen.se will make it much easier and faster for unrelated devices to connect with each other and start delivering on the promise of smart homes, intelligent devices services and similar long-promised notions.

Besides ushering in a boon of new connected devices, common cloud platforms for devices will ultimately help the consumer by ushering in competition and more choices. Right now, to build a smart or connected home requires you to choose from a relatively small array of compatible devices — which, unsurprisingly, aren't cheap.

Introduce more compatible devices through a common network, then suddenly the market will naturally drive prices down. More device vendors should jump into the game, too, knowing they will have a fair shot in this new market.

Image courtesy of Xively

Google announced Monday that it has combined its free storage options across multiple apps, making it easier to manage how much space you're using in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+. Previously users had to separately track the 10GB of free space allotted for Gmail and the 5GB of free space allotted for Drive. Now, they have 15GB of unified space to use among all the Google apps, and any additional storage they purchase can be used wherever it is most needed. 

To put these changes in perspective, Google offered a clear example: 

Maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.

Check out a screenshot of the new storage management tool and soon-to-come storage option changes below: 

As cloud computing dominates more and more aspects of the tech world, similar-sounding but confusingly different something-as-a-service acronyms keep piling up. You've probably heard of SaaS (Software as a Service), since it applies mostly to cloud services delivered to end users. 

But what about IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? Even many tech professionals can't explain the differences without babbling incoherently. 

Fortunately, this new infographic from IaaS provider ProfitBricks does a good job of explaining the differences and who uses which one for what. Enjoy.

VMware has a firm if fading grip on the server virtualization market, but according to IDC analyst Al Gillen, virtualizaton serves as a convenient on-ramp to private cloud, which in turn leads to the public cloud. Is VMware paving IT's path to Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and other public cloud providers?

Not exactly.

Virtualization: Still Relevant, Mostly VMware

According to Gillen, who spoke at the Open Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco earlier this week, VMware continues to dominate the virtualization market, with just under 60% market share. VMware's installed base, coupled with CIO resistance to change, mean that VMware's hold on virtualization should persist for years. 

That's the good news.

The bad news is that VMware faces fierce competition from Microsoft's Hyper-V, currently claiming over 25% of the market, as well as a strong and growing threat from KVM, now bolstered by a rising OpenStack. KVM deployments grew 50% last year, according to IDC. Xen, the other open-source virtualization alternative, remains robust but isn't growing as fast, though its move to the Linux Foundation may help to revive its growth.

By themselves, however, none of these virtualization competitors poses much near-term risk to VMware. Of far greater importance is a distinct trend toward multi-hypervisor environments, as well as an enterprise shift from virtualization to cloud.

Each of these trends threatens VMware.

Multi-Hypervisor Trend No Friend To VMware's Cloud

According to Gillen, some 15% of enterprises deploy multiple hypervisors today, but Gillen expects that number to double in the next one to two years, with cost being a primary driver for experimentation with new virtualization technologies. The more enterprises experiment with non-VMware virtualization technology, the more likely they will also diverge from VMware's cloud offerings.

Why? Because virtualization is a clear precursor to cloud adoption.

According to IDC's Platform Migration MCS, January 2012, roughly 80% of servers that enterprises are migrating to the cloud are already virtualized, rather than being virtualized as part of the migration. Often, enterprises will rely on their virtualization vendor to walk them into the cloud, with private clouds the first stopping point on the way to public clouds.

As such, VMware has actively been building out both private and public cloud options, creating a clear "upgrade" path for its enterprise buyers. As Matthew Lodge, VMware'e vice president of Cloud Services, emphasizes, VMware enables enterprises to stitch together “what they have in their data centers and their public cloud instance.” All running on VMware technology.

It's a compelling strategy, one also being adopted by Microsoft (Windows Server + Hyper-V + Azure) and Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux + Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization + OpenShift or OpenStack), among others. 

Virtualization Not The Only Path To The Cloud

But not all workloads follow this single vendor path. Indeed, Gillen cited IDC's 2012 Cloud System Software Survey, which found that transitions to the cloud allow vendors to "sell cloud system software on its own merits and embed a hypervisor as part of the package." Some 53% of those surveyed indicated that they were using a new hypervisor in their cloud deployment, compared to the 47% using their existing technology. 

In Gillen's words, this "opens the door for non-installed alternatives such as KVM into VMware-dominated shops." 

This is particularly true for new applications that are born in the cloud, especially public clouds, rather than old workloads being migrated there. We're already seeing a class of applications skip the private cloud altogether, starting up on public clouds like Amazon. And while many enterprises still haven't dipped into the cloud, it's interesting to see what little variance there is between private and public cloud adoption:

Add to this Rightscale's finding that 77% of enterprises are using multiple clouds, and it seems doubtful that any vendor will be able to gently lead enterprises from its virtualization technology to its cloud. Fragmentation is the norm.

The Cloud? It's Complicated

VMware isn't going away anytime soon, in part because the enterprise moves slowly, and in part because VMware has a compelling cloud story for enterprises when they do decide to graduate from simple virtualization to private and public clouds.

But that "graduation" path is messy, with plenty of room for enterprises to find their way to different hypervisors and competing clouds. For these reasons, the virtualization and cloud markets may well be among the most competitive technology markets we've seen in a long time.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

If you're looking for a U.S.-based cloud provider to host your business applications and data, you might want to take note of one new report that ranks the performance levels for providers in 2012. The results might surprise you, because it turns out that size and location may make a big difference in overall performance.

The data was provided to ReadWrite via Compuware's CloudSleuth service, which monitors the on-going availability and response time of providers around the world. The CloudSleuth application is hosted by cloud providers just like any other customer's app and is constantly polled for metrics from 17 locations around the U.S.

Global Cloud Availability, Past 30 Days

The data for the rank list was aggregated over the 2012 calendar year, measuring average response time, availability, and consistency. Consistency is the standard deviation of the response time, indicating the range of values for the reported response times over the course of the year, according to Compuware APM Technology Strategist Stephen Pierzchala.

To come up with the overall ranking, Pierzchala explained, the company combined the individual ranks for all of the three categories.

In 2012, based on overall rank, the top five providers were:

1. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
2. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
3. Qube (US East - New York)
4. Layered Tech (US South - Texas)
5. Layered Tech (US Central - Missouri)

Not exactly widely known providers, are they? The players with more notoriety - like Rackspace, Google, Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services - are conspicuously missing from the top five listing. Looking at the rest of the list, Rackspace's Texas facility rolled in at number 6 overall, with Windows Azure's Illinois data center tying for ninth. Google App Engine was ranked number 15, and the highest Amazon Web Service rank was the EC2 facility in California, which came in at number 26 in a list of 38.

Fly-Over States Rock

There's another interesting pattern, one that leaped out as soon as Pierzchala pointed it out.

"If you look at the first 10-15 providers, they're almost all located in the center of the U.S.," he noted.

Location, it seems, makes a big difference in where you choose to host your cloud applications. If you are one of the coasts, there's a certain logic to hosting your cloud applications and data in a facility that is in the middle of the country, where all users, wherever they are, can roughly traverse as the same amount of network to get to the actual cloud machine. Balancing your data and app use geographically can provide real benefits.

North America Cloud Response Times, Past 24 Hours

That the top-ranked providers are all smaller providers may not be an accident, either. Larger providers may have slower response times ands availability by virtue of the fact they are working with so many customers and web applications. If that's the case, there may be something to using a smaller provider that's not located on one of the Coasts.

The full overall rank list is below, followed by the top 10 providers in terms of average response time and availability for 2012, respectively.

2012 Top U.S. Cloud Providers

1. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
2. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
3. Qube (US East - New York)
4. Layered Tech (US South - Texas)
5. Layered Tech (US Central - Missouri)
6. Rackspace (US South - Texas)
7. GMO Cloud (US West - California)
8. PeakColo (US West - Colorado)
9. SoftLayer (US East - Virginia)
9. TekLinks (US South - Alabama)
9. Windows Azure (US Central - Illinois)
12. SoftLayer (US South - Texas)
13. SoftLayer (US West - Washington)
13. US Signal (US Central - Michigan)
15. Google App Engine
16. ElasticHosts (US West - California)
17. BlueLock (US Central - Indiana)
18. CloudSigma (US West - Nevada)
19. Dimension Data (US East - Virginia)
20. ElasticHosts (US South - Texas)
20. TekLinks2 (US South - Alabama)
22. SoftLayer (US West - California)
23. GoGrid (US West - California)
24. Cartika (US South - Texas)
25. Dimension Data (US West - California)
26. Amazon EC2 (US West - California)
27. Terremark (US East - Florida)
28. eApps (US East - Georgia)
29. Amazon EC2 (US East - Virginia)
29. Green House Data (US West - Oregon)
31. eApps (US East - Virginia)
32. GoGrid (US East - Virginia)
33. Voxel (US East - New York)
34. Claris Networks (US South - Tennessee)
35. Green House Data (US West - Wyoming)
36. Voxel (US West - California)
37. Bit Refinery (US Central - Colorado)
38. PhoenixNAP (US West - Arizona)

2012 Top 10 U.S. Cloud Providers (By Average Response Time)

1. Windows Azure (US Central - Illinois)
2. Layered Tech (US South - Texas)
3. Rackspace (US South - Texas)
4. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
5. SoftLayer (US South - Texas)
6. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
7. Qube (US East - New York)
8. Layered Tech (US Central - Missouri)
9. PeakColo (US West - Colorado)
10. BlueLock (US Central - Indiana)

2012 Top 10 U.S. Cloud Providers (By Availability)

1. Layered Tech (US Central - Illinois)
2. Connectria (US Central - Missouri)
3. SoftLayer (US East - Virginia)
4. Terremark (US East - Florida)
5. US Signal (US Central - Michigan)
6. SoftLayer (US West - Washington)
7. GMO Cloud (US West - California)
8. Green House Data (US West - Oregon)
9. Amazon EC2 (US East - Virginia)
10. Qube (US East - New York)

Story images and data courtesy of Compuware.

A new survey of IT decision makers by SAP and Harris Interactive reithat the rise of machine to machine (M2M) communications - more commonly referred to as the "Internet of Things" - is on the cusp of transforming our homes, our cities and how business is conducted.

How, you ask?

• By leveraging Big Data and real-time analytics to improve parking and traffic flow, which could reduce pollution and traffic accidents as well.
• By managing all the gadgets in our homes, from lights, computers and smartphones down to our coffeemaker and garage door. Wake up, the coffee is brewing, the house is heated, the car already knows the best route to work and the news we need is showing on the screen of our choice - prioritized, obviously.
• Connected cars, roads and smartphones will guide us to the nearest open parking spot - and bill us automatically.

This Internet of Things will also let businesses increase "efficiency, productivity and collaboration," as it delivers real-time data and insight when and where it's most needed, including to a widely dispersed, highly mobile workforce.

Buried within the survey results are such nuggets as:

• Mobile devices will outnumber humans this year. 
• 90% of consumer-connected devices will have access to some personal cloud in 2013.
• 24 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020.
• 66% of IT professionals surveyed believe business and consumer technology will converge within 3-5 years - great news for consumer tech leaders like Apple, Samsung and Google.
• At least 4 billion terabytes of data will be generated this year alone.
• The trend toward BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has clear and present business repercussions: 75% of the surveyed IT professionals believe that employees' personal use of mobile devices impacts how the business itself uses the cloud. 
• 65% think the Internet of Things' biggest challent in managing and analyzing the resulting real-time data.

(Note: SAP and Harris have also prepared an infographic of the survey results, visible here.)

Global Phenomenon

The business-funded survey of 751 IT "decision makers" was generally upbeat about the Internet of Things. A statement released with the survey suggested connecting data from CRM systems, social media and billions of devices, all in real time, will result in "the ultimate social media collaboration of man and machine." 

That said, it is somewhat surprising that IT decision makers in developing countries - China, India and Brazil - appear more eager eager for the M2M revolution. Consider the response percentages to specific statements regarding the Internet of Things:

• Gives companies greater insight into their business: China (96%), India (88%), Brazil (86%), Germany (79%), U.S. (74%) and UK (61%)
• Enables businesses to respond to real world events: China (92%), India (86%), Brazil (82 %), Germany (82%), U.S. (78%) and UK (73%)
• Increases business efficiency:  Brazil (54%), UK (53%) and U..S (49%)
• Increases productivity for employees:  China (69 percent) - significantly higher than any other countries surveyed

Nearly all decision makers (89%) across all surveyed countries agreed, however, that widespread availability of LTE/4G infrastructure was vital for the success of the Internet of Things. This will likely not come cheap, however. A recent statement by Cambridge Wireless noted that today's mobile networks are "lacking ubiquitous coverage" and suggested that "service tariffs are too high to support" the full potential of the Internet of Things.

(See also Futurist's Cheat Sheet: Internet of Things)

The hope of the Internet of Things is that greater connectivity, vastly more data, improved data analysis - and response - will make our lives better in ways we can scarcely predict, at home, on the road, at work; everywhere.

Note: Per SAP, "the survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of SAP among 751 IT decision makers in Brazil (n=126), China (n=125), Germany (n=125), India (n=125), the United Kingdom (n=125) and the United States (n=125) between January 15 and February 1, 2013."

Enterprise IT keeps trying to shove the public cloud genie back into a private cloud bottle, but the majority of developers are having none of that, according to Forrester principal analyst James Staten (@staten7), speaking at the Open Business Conference (OSBC) on Tuesday in San Francisco. Interestingly, these cloud-savvy developers aren't newbie troublemakers just getting started in enterprise IT, but instead skew older and more experienced. Perhaps with Twisted Sister cranking on their Walkmans, this rising breed of middle-aged cloud developer isn't "gonna take it anymore."

Which, of course, is exactly how open source made its way in the enterprise.

Open Source: Not So Young But Very Restless

Back in 2002, Boston Consulting Group surveyed (PDF) the open-source developer community to get a feel for the demographics of the movement. While early open-source development was thought to be marshalled by anarchists and free code-loving hippies, BCG's study revealed that the open-source community was actually comprised of experience IT professionals with an average of 11 years of programming experience.

And while the open source ranks weren't filled with Baby Boomers, they also weren't being pushed by Generation Y. The average age was 30 years old. While not exactly middle aged, it skewed much older than expected.

This shouldn't have been surprising. Often, those who have the most value to contribute are more experienced programmers. In addition, such programmers have also been working in enterprise IT long enough to recognize a better, more efficient way of developing software, and to have the job security needed to take a risk on coloring outside the lines of enterprise IT policies.

Cloud As An Antidote To Corporate Bureaucracy

It's therefore not surprising to see cloud computing also driven by experienced developers, rather than newly minted graduates. According to Forrester's Forrsights Developer Survey, Q1 2013, 71% of cloud developers have at least six years of programming experience, and some 11% have been writing code for over 20 years. These aren't novices trying the cloud because it's "cool."

Indeed, delving deeper into Forrester's data, the primary reason developers turn to the cloud is speed of development:

In other words, as with open source, these developers can't be bothered with corporate bureaucracy. In an earlier Forrester survey, developers said the primary benefit of the cloud is that it's the "Fastest way for me to get my project done and deployed." This calls to mind Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's assertion that "Convenience trumps just about everything" when it comes to cloud adoption.

A Race To Capture Middle-Aged Hearts And Minds

Amazon was the first to spot this market, and is now the preferred  Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering for 71% of developers, according to Forrester, with Microsoft Azure (25%) and Google (23%) playing catch-up. Cloud developers overwhelmingly want IaaS because they want "deep platform access" to things like app servers, web servers, and databases, as Staten noted in his OSBC presentation.

Again, cloud developers are not neophytes. They're serious developers who understand core IT infrastructure but want the freedom to get work done without waiting on corporate procurement or legal policies to catch up.

As such, the IaaS platform that best serves this need will win.

Image courtesy of Jørund F Pedersen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

As mobile devices dictate the terms of search and how results are being conveyed to end users, there's another phenomenon that will greatly influence the future of search - very soon, we're going to be swimming in more data than we will know what to do with.

The rise of the Internet of Things means billions of physical objects will soon generate massive amounts of data 24 hours a day. Not only will this make traditional search methods nearly impossible to use, it will also create an environment where instead of looking for things in the world, those things will be seeking us out to give us all sorts of information that will help us fix, use or buy them.

(See also Forget Searching For Content - Content Is About To Start Searching For You.)

Search Collides With Internet Of Things

When talking about the Internet of Things, it is important to get past the hype and explain exactly what it is: vast numbers of automated physical devices and objects connected to the Internet. These devices are usually routers, switches, phones… but increasingly devices like security cameras and remote climate sensors are being added - and over time we can expect everything from cars to refrigerators to join the party.

(See also Futurist's Cheat Sheet: Internet Of Things.)

At this moment in history, the relationship between search and devices on the Internet resembles the model of searching for Web content: you search for data from devices, and you get it.

The Shodan search engine follows this model very well. Using Shodan is pretty much like using Google or any other search engine: enter your search string and up pops quite a few results matching devices that Shodan has found on the Web. Routers, cameras, municipal control systems… they're all there to see.

CNN, true to its alarmist nature, recently described Shodan as the "The scariest search engine on the Internet" - and indeed, there are some disturbing aspects to using Shodan. Entering the search term "cisco-ios last-modified" - a term suggested by Shodan itself as popular - reveals a number of Cisco-based devices on the Internet that had not been updated in a very long time. Such devices could be very vulnerable to attack through well-known exploits.

Shodan exposes what security experts have known for a long time: a lot of devices connected to the Internet have been largely forgotten even as they continue chugging along performing tasks that range from mundane to mission-critical.

But Shodan, while interesting, will probably not represent the future of searching Internet of Things. Instead, as the world around us "wakes up" and becomes increasingly connected to the Internet, the world will talk to us without our having to look for it.

When The World Touches You

Here is one vision of how this potential future might work:

Imagine, says  J Schwan, CEO of Solstice Mobile, walking into an office building in which you are a maintenance technician about to start your day. Over the course of the previous day and evening, various tickets were filed by the building's tenants (or maybe even by the devices themselves): a squeaky door here, a hiccuping elevator there. An app on your phone lists the problems to be fixed - ordered by priority and optimized for maximum efficiency. This is a system that Solstice is working on now for clients.

Other examples abound. A department store could be populated with products connected to the Internet via RFID tags. Customers could walk in, request a certain item, and see a map to that item's exact location displayed on their phones. Or even see it as an augmented-reality display on their Google Glass or other wearable computer.

The same store's managers could use augmented-reality displays to view sales figures of the items the see on the shelves, perhaps in the form of a heat map that instantly indicates which items sell better in what position in the store. Just by speaking a couple words, they can have the stock room shift the position, or even update electronic price tags on the shelves to attract more buyers. Those price updates, by the way, then show up as alerts on shoppers' devices.

Not Far Away

This world is not far off. Smartphones and other mobile devices can already tap into public search engines to discover more about the world around them. You can use augmented reality to see results displayed graphically on device screens.

As more and more objects join the Internet, they'll create information that will be added to the potential data you can receive, raising the level of information available by orders of magnitude. This will be both a boon (more data to help make decisions) and a curse (so much data you could drown).

Searches, as active tasks, will become less needed - and less practical - as not just the Web, but the whole world around us will automatically send us information based on our preferences. And the questions we will have to ask will be far simpler and less arduous to construct.

Instead of entering "2013 best televisions" in your browser to get back lots of data in the form of articles and content, you'll be able to stand in the store and ask "which one of these TVs is the best for me for me right now?" and see the answers (based on your budget, space and other preferences) right in front of you.

Knowing the tenacity of advertisers, you probably won't even have to ask.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The world of search is about to be flipped completely on its head. As part of that sea change, today's reactive Web-based searches are about to give way to proactive, geo-fenced answers that will pop up before you even frame the question.

In many cases, you won't be searching for content - content will be searching for you.

Putting The New Search In Context

Search, to date, has mostly worked something like this: You type a word or phrase into a search bar in a browser or mobile app and a search engine with a funny name returns a list of Web pages it deems related to your query.

In recent years, search has gotten a lot better in a number of ways. One key improvement takes location into account. If I type "Notre Dame" while I'm in my hometown, then it's very likely I will get results about the University. If I were located near Cleveland, though, I might get results about Notre Dame College. And if I were in France, surely my results would focus on this beautiful edifice. 

Location is part of what experts call "contextual search," which becomes even more important with the rise of mobile computing. Where we are and who we are makes a big difference in the search results we want, and contextually aware search engines are working to use that information to decide what results to return to us.

According to J Schwan, CEO of Solstice Mobile, there are four aspects of contextual searching that all have to work together:

• Where
• Relevance
• Push
• Security and privacy

First, there's the where - what Schwan refers to as geo-fencing. Where you are, as noted above, makes a difference in what search results are most appropriate.

Then there's relevance, which dictates results through explicit preferences that you have set, the results delivered to other users in a similar context and what is going on around you at that particular time (traffic, weather, business hours, etc.).

The third aspect Schwan highlighted is relatively new, but fast-becoming more important to contextual search: push. Rather than waiting for users to search and then reacting to that query, data providers and search engines are working on how to push data to users based on their context. Google Now does this now on Android and its Chrome browser extension: cards based on your search results, location and even email messages will appear that give you the traffic report to get home or inform you of the latest sports score.

The final aspect is the wrapper of security and privacy that has to work with all of this to ensure a user's data doesn't go where it's not supposed to.

Squinting For SEO

Contextual searching is perfect for mobile, because, well, mobile users are by definition moving around. But the mobile form factor also makes contextual search more important.

Many people may have honking big 27-inch monitors on their home PCs, but relatively tiny smartphone screens inherently limit the amount of information we can access. In that context, it's even more important for mobile users to get the right results near the top of the results screen.

This is even more true when adding natural interfaces to search, such as voice-activated searching using systems like Apple's Siri. Forget search strings, Siri has to process natural-language queries and either speak or display usable results on a small screen. 

For search-engine optimization (SEO), this is a huge challenge: With contextual search, it's no longer enough to get your business or product listed on the first Web page of results. On a mobile device, as well as in push situations, SEO is really effective only if you can push your results into the top position, or at least into the first few lines.

Wearable devices like Google Glass and the rumored iWatch could put even more pressure on search results. We don't yet know what their interfaces will look like, but it seems safe to assume that there may be even less real estate available to display search results. 

This is one reason why the search engines are working so hard to deliver knowledge rather than just Web page links in their results. Google and Bing both now feature "knowledge boxes" that try to encapsulate the pertinent information about a topic in one glance. This "knowledgization" of search results is conducive to mobile search because it parses data into easily displayed and digestible chunks - essential for the smaller screen.

We may already be seeing the early effects of this trend. Last Fall, Google reported its first-ever drop in search volume. Some of this decline is no doubt attributable to competition - such as Bing, Yahoo or even local searches through services like Yelp. But how much of it is due to pushed content and knowledge replacing what might have otherwise been searched for? If the information being received is of better quality, then perhaps we won't have to search as much in the future.

By incorporating context and working towards knowledge - useful information instead of just plain data - the next evolution of search will take advantage of new opportunities and cope with new demands and challenges.

Will that help us make better decisions? We can hope.

Lead image and Notre Dame images courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook is planning to build a massive data center in Altoona, Iowa, the company said on Tuesday. That's right, Altoona, Iowa, a suburb of Des Moines.

With more than a billion users around the world to support and just three wholly owned data centers (Forest City, North Carolina; Prineville, Oregon; Luleå, Sweden, with the latter two still being built out) Facebook may have needed another location. (The company has also stashed servers in at least two co-location facilities owned by other companies, on both the East and West Coasts.) But why Altoona, Iowa?   

Why Iowa?

According to The Des Moines Register, which deserves credit for breaking the story on Monday, Altoona officials sold Facebook on four key selling points:

1. The site sits on the nexus of an interstate fiber optic system, providing connectivity to the rest of the nation.
2. A power substation sits within half a mile of the campus.
3. Transportation access.
4. Environmental stability.

The last is an increasingly important consideration. Data-center providers that went down during Superstorm Sandy in New York last year learned that lesson well; hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and other natural disasters can bring a cloud services down just as effectively as a power outage. 

A Facebook blog post, meanwhile, cited "an abundance of wind-generated power" as well as proximity to "a great talent pool that will help build and operate the facility" as reasons for building in Altoona. Apparently, Des Moines and Ames are the new Silicon Valley and Boston when it comes to technical skills. The new facility will break ground this summer and begin serving traffic in 2014, Facebook said. According to the Register, Facebook's facility "will join what’s becoming a data center corridor of sorts in Altoona. LightEdge was built in 2006, and Enseva will break ground this spring."

Facebook hasn't confirmed the size of its new data center, but the Register earlier this month claimed that planning documents put it at 1.4 million square feet and said Monday the total investment could hit $1.5 billion. That's about four times the size of the company's Prineville facility - and 50% larger than Apple's $1 billion investment in its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina. 

Apple's data center in Maiden, N.C. (Source: Apple)

"In the coming years, as our service continues to grow and people share and connect in more ways, we need to make sure that our technical infrastructure also continues to scale," Facebook's Jay Parikh said in the blog post. "Our goal is not just to deliver you a fast, reliable experience on Facebook every day – we also want to help make connectivity a universal opportunity. Our data centers are essential for making that happen."

How Facebook "Hacks" Its Data Centers

Facebook has put almost as much technology effort into its data centers as its core services. Earlier this year, Facebook disclosed that its Luleå facility would be entirely built on hardware constructed by no-name server manufacturers using designs developed by the Open Compute Project, which shuns "vanity" hardware sold by traditional server vendors like Dell and Hewlett-Packard in an effort to minimize cost. Rather than pay top dollar for the most sophisticated and powerful equipment, this kind of "open source hardware" approach adds capacity by just adding ever more cheap, generic servers.

(See also Can Servers Save PC Manufacturers? Sadly, No.)

Facebook's Lulea, Sweden data center. (Source: Facebook)

Facebook also has been a pioneer in using natural or ambient cooling its data centers. Traditionally, data centers place servers on raised floors cooled by mechanical "chillers," or air conditioners, that push away heat from the servers to keep them running properly. 

Facebook's Prineville facility uses a combination of evaporated water and ambient air to cool the servers without the need for energy-hogging chillers; its Swedish site uses the frigid near-Arctic air to do the same thing. (Google, meanwhile, is building a data center in Hamina, Finland, which pumps water - and exchanges heat - from a nearby canal.) Although Facebook hasn't disclosed how its Altoona servers will be cooled, it's likely to employ some form of evaporative cooling.

Last week, Facebook was the first to offer a near-real-time look at the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) — the all-important batting average of a data center's energy efficiency  — of both its Prineville and Forest City facilities. A few years ago, a PUE of 1.8 was considered average; the Prineville facility's PUE now regularly pushes below 1.10, close to the 1.0 ideal.

Lead image via Facebook.

Cloud computing is all about "abstracting servers," turning actual hardware into virtual machines and moving them out of your organization so you don’t have to worry about them. Big data’s non-relational databases and Hadoop clusters perform a similar level of abstraction on database administration. Software-defined networks (SDNs) may do the same thing with networking.

SDN promises to make high-capacity networks cheaper to build and especially to re-configure on the fly - as well as potentially faster and more efficient. As more and more computing moves to the cloud, those network improvements will be critical to keeping everything affordable and available.

It won't be just cloud environments that will get SDN benefits, either. SDN could enable corporate networks to be reconfigured on-the-fly. Imagine being able to plug in a multimedia-intensive device in a conference room and the network adapting to effortlessly handle the sudden new load without grinding the rest of the building's network traffic to a staggering halt. Or re-arranging cellular networks during a disaster to deliver connectivity when and where it matters most. That's no doubt why analysts like IDG are predicting the business of SDN hitting $2 billion by the year 2016. 

But Software Defined Networks are incredibly complicated, so even as many networking professionals look forward to SDNs as the best thing since sliced bread, others are scratching their heads and wondering if the IT hype machine has gone completely off the rails.

Who's right? To answer that question we need to look at exactly what is a software-defined network, and how do you create them?

Here's The SDN Theory

Think about a traditional network and everything that entails. You have your routers, your switches, and lots and lots of CAT5 and CAT6 cable strung around: all physical hardware that, when connected in a certain way, defines the flow of data in the organization. Like laying down a network of highways, planning a network takes time; it has to be done right the first time because shuffling things around afterward is expensive.

A network has to do two big things: deliver data and manage the flow of that data. If I am downloading a video from California, the network knows to get it to me here in Indiana. Shunting the data through India and Europe would not be the most efficient way to do it – unless, of course, some big physical failure occured between here and the West Coast that required the signal to be sent the long way around the planet.

Inside a company, the same thing happens on a smaller scale. Data is passed back and forth, and that traffic is usually managed by software inside the physical devices - software that knows how to manage the day-to-day operations of the workplace.

With cloud computing, the physical servers that hold the virtual machines are still networked together with the same routers and switches that are used in a workplace network. But the demands on that physical network can be much, much greater - at times - than anything your employees can dish out. (Which, really, is the whole point of using the cloud in the first place.)

What SDN does is this: Assume you have the network cable laid out between every physical server in the cloud environment and all of the optimized routers and switches. The SDN layer essentially acts a virtual software switch or router in place of (or in conjunction with) the physical network devices.

So instead of software embedded in the routers and switches managing the traffic, software from outside the devices takes over the job. The network layout, or topography, is no longer rooted in the physical. Instead, it's flexible and adjustable to the systems’ needs on the fly.

Properly implemented, this means an application running inside the cloud itself can take over the job of directing networking traffic. Or a third-party cloud-management application could do the job. That could make it easier to perform tasks such as load balancing devices across servers and automatically adjusting the network architecture to deliver the fastest and most efficient data paths at the right time.

Rules Of The SDN Road

There are risks involved in this kind of networking - namely those stemming from how complicated these kinds of operations can be.

Traditionally, networking "decisions" have been left in the hands of the the devices on which the network actually runs. That's what they are meant to do. Taking the control away from these specialized devices and the embedded software that runs them could be the prelude to a networking disaster, unless everything is done exactly right.

Done improperly, this would be akin to letting every driver in Cleveland have independent control of all the traffic lights in town. Chaos. This is why there's a gap between theorizing about SDN and actually implementing it.

Right now, the Open Networking Foundation's OpenFlow protocol and the Linux Foundation's new OpenDaylight project are two open source projects working to establish a set of SDN traffic rules that applications can use to prevent such chaos.

These protocols would also vastly simplify the work of application developers, who would not have to learn the nuances of networking control, but rather just call on one of these tools to handle the heavy lifting for planning the right path through a network, based on an application's need.

Think of it like getting a police escort through a strange city. You don't have to know anything about the city or worry about stops - you just get in your car and follow the vehicles with the flashing lights, trusting that they know what they're doing and where they're going.

SDN Benefits Could Be Widespread

Because of its complexity, SDN won't take off right away. But once SDN is implemented, the benefits will be immediately apparent. Cloud computing environments controlled by SDN will see significant increases in speed and efficiency, since their networks will be optimized for the applications running in that cloud environment. Corporate and mobile networks are also likely to gain benefits from SDN implementations.

IT will have to lay down the rules of the road first, but no one can deny there is big potential in software-defined networks to bring more adaptable networking resources to businesses and consumers alike.