Google is reducing Datastore prices by up to 25%, according to an announcement on their Cloud Platform Blog. This price change impacts both App Engines HRD and the new Cloud Datastore introduced last week at I/O. The price decrease is sure to capture the attention of Amazon Web Services, perhaps even to the point of a small cloud price war.

(Also read How Amazon's Rising Headwaters Could Threaten Google.)

Dell is a computer company desperately in search of a new market as the desktop and laptop PCs dwindles. But the Austin-based company is finding that that an elusive target.

Public Cloud? That's So 2011

Yesterday the company announced it was dropping Dell Cloud, its home-grown infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud service. It is also pulling the plug on its planned OpenStack-based public cloud service and online storage service before they even get off the ground.

Dell isn't out the cloud game altogether, mind you - it will be reselling public cloud services through its new Dell Cloud Partner Program. And it's still working on private cloud offerings.

Dell's decision to drop its program after only two years isn't terribly surprising - it was regarded as pricey compared to similar offerings from HP and IBM, and going head to head with similar services from Amazon Web Services and Google without good pricing and a very solid support system is tantamount to suicide these days.

Bring On The Dongles

But Dell is still on the hunt for new revenue. Reports out today indicate that the hardware maker will be releasing a new thumb-drive PC, codenamed Project Ophelia, this July for a reported $100.

PC World has revealed that the device will be based on Android and can be plugged into a TV or monitor via the HDMI port. File storage will be handled via Wyse's PocketCloud.

Dell wants to get this device in the hands of telecomm carriers, who could use Ophelia to deliver streaming TV to customers who don't currently have smart TVs or devices like Roku or Apple TV to pull in online content.

Developers will get their hands on the PC-on-a-stick first, in order to build Android apps and build up a collection of TV-friendly apps. Since there's a lot of Wyse thin-client tech packed into this thing, presumably there will be some capability to have portability between home and work.

This is an interesting concept, save for the fact that there are already similar and cheaper devices on the market now. The concept of a dongle PC is not new, and to date, they haven't really taken off.

The idea also ignores the very real trend away from vertical screen and keyboard/mouse devices to handheld tablets and smartphones. While Ophelia devices would give you portability, you still need a mouse, keyboard and screen to use these things… so the portability is constrained. And if I'm essentially recreating a PC-like portable work setup anyway, why not just use a laptop?

I suspect that's why Dell is emphasizing the telecom angle when it pitches these things. Carriers could offer Ophelia with video and data plans, maybe. But it's hard to imagine consumers buying these things off the shelf when there are other similarly priced set-top devices already on the market and proven to work.

Dell is clearly throwing a lot of things against the wall to see what sticks. Public cloud didn't work, and it's difficult to see Project Ophelia working out, either. Servers, however, aren't doing badly right now. Perhaps Dell should stick to what it knows best.

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.

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.

A new video technology quietly announced late last week could mark a landmark change in how apps are deployed on PCs, tablets and smartphones for years to come - and also have big ramifications on how companies like Apple do business.

You wouldn't think that the technology launched by the Mozilla Foundation and graphic-rendering vendor Otoy on Friday would be all that big a deal. After all, the software, which is known as a codec, was originally designed to allow for the playback of videos on HTML5 pages within a browser without plug-ins.

That alone is pretty cool, from a consumer's point of view. There's are still videos out there, such as those encoded with the H.264 format, that need a special plug-in to be viewed, thanks to the patents tied to the H.264 specification. Live TV and HD video can be viewed with any HTML5 browser that can support WebGL (hold that thought).

But the other thing the new codec, known as ORBX.js, features is much, much more significant: it also enables steaming of desktop applications. An application (say, Microsoft Office) could be hosted on a company's server and then used by any employee who logs in to the application. It would not matter what operating system they were using (Windows, OS X or Linux) or even what platform (phone, tablet or desktop), because the browser would be the only thing that matters.

"This is not just remote desktop tech, or X11 reborn via JavaScript]," [blogged Mozilla Foundation CTO Brendan Eich, "Many local/remote hybrid computation schemes are at hand today, e.g., a game can do near-field computing in the browser on a beefy client while offloading lower [level of detail] work to the [game processing unit] cloud."

When Cloud Becomes The Platform

Using streaming video to deploy remote desktops is not new, of course, this is pretty much the way Logmein does it with their remote desktop technology. But as good as Logmein and other RD vendors are, they still use a dedicated client and the speed of the remote setup can be hampered by the power of the source desktop as well as the limitations of bandwidth.

If the application were to be hosted in the cloud with more resources, as Eich suggests, then only bandwidth would become a limit to application performance. In fact, if ORBX.js performs as promised, you won't even need a "beefy" client, as Eich says we have now - nearly all of the processing work will be done in the cloud and streamed to the waiting browser client.

Streaming apps, if this technology works, would then represent a big change for end users and even a potential cost savings - if the bulk of the processing power is situated in the cloud, then hardware requirements for end-user devices can stay where they are or even be lowered.

Another big change - if all you need is a decent screen and an interface to connect to applications, you could host your entire work/home environment in the cloud and access it from any compatible device at any time. It could be a full version on the desktop or laptop, and perhaps a scaled-down version on your tablet or smartphone, but the apps and your data would always be there, on any of your machines.

Walled Garden? What Walled Garden?

If applications can be delivered effectively through this kind of enhanced video streaming, currently that also puts Apple and Microsoft at a strong disadvantage against competitors like Google and Blackberry, especially in the mobile space.

Recall the requirements for the JavaScript-based ORBX.js: any HTML5 browser that can support WebGL.

As it stands right now, the Safari browser on the iOS mobile platform does not support WebGL at all (except for iAd developers) - and on OS X, Safari only offers partial support for the standard (if the user has up-to-date video drivers). Internet Explorer does not support WebGL at all, either.

Android is a little tricker: neither the native Android browser or Chrome for Android support WebGL, but Firefox for Android does. As of BlackBerry 10, the BlackBerry browser will support WebGL, too.

This would mean that Android and BlackBerry users could run cloud-based apps on their devices right now, while Windows Phone, Windows 8, Windows RT and iOS users would be out of luck.

That's probably no accident, either, since any application that streams in through browser is one the operating system vendor can't monetize. In other words, Apple and Microsoft won't get their app store cut from apps that are streamed.

That this is a deliberate choice on the part of Apple and Microsoft seems likely. Even Google has yet to support WebGL on its mobile-device browsers, possibly for the same reasons.

But given that Google's Chrome browser is all in for WebGL, Google could still reap the benefits of cloud-based applications soon. If that proves a success, or if BlackBerry's WebGL bet pays off, then it won't be a long wait for the Android browsers to come around to WebGL.

At which point, it will be anyone's guess if Microsoft and Apple will jump on board, too. There are already rumors that Internet Explorer 11 will support WebGL, so Microsoft may be on its way to enabling cloud-based streaming apps.

Cloud applications will never supplant native apps - connectivity issues and security concerns will make sure of that - but it's a future that looks pretty cool for users who want to use their applications and data any where, any time.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Intel, the chip giant, is buying Mashery, a seven-year-old company in San Francisco that specializes in linking together Web-based software and services, a company spokesperson confirmed to ReadWrite.

Mashery's 125 employees are learning of the acquisition through a companywide email sent this morning. Intel expects to offer the "majority" of employees jobs when the deal closes, which is expected to happen in the second quarter. The group will remain in its current location and join Intel's two-year-old Services Division. Terms were not disclosed, but the deal is not material to Intel's financial results.

Big Implications For Intel's Core Business

The implications of the deal are huge: it signals Intel's recognition that the central processing unit is no longer a silicon chip. It is the network.

Mashery, a company ReadWrite has long covered closely, specializes in managing application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are the lingua franca of the Internet, the systems through which machines communicate with other machines according to preset rules. For example, Facebook's platform, which websites and apps rely on to add social features, is a set of APIs. Foursquare uses APIs to let other apps access its location database and other features, allowing Instagram and Evernote users to add a place to a photo or a note.

The same techniques that connect consumer apps, it turns out, also work well within large businesses. Comcast, for example, uses Mashery's API management service to allow programmers to access internal systems. That's a far more sensible way to create internal software than the alternative, which involves doing a lot of one-off integrations at considerable time and expense.

Smaller companies often find it difficult to set up systems that grant developers access to these software interfaces. Likewise, enterprises don't generally want to build their own API-management systems. Recently, that has become a bigger and bigger business for Mashery.

Moving Beyond Chips

Intel is in the midst of a shift away from just selling chips to selling software and services. This change, while little-noticed, has been long in the making. Intel bought McAfee for $7.7 billion in 2010, putting it into the security-software business. In 2005, Intel bought a smaller company, Sarvega, which specialized in XML gateways. (XML, or extensible markup language, is a broad descriptor of a file format commonly used in APIs; an XML gateway transports files to make APIs possible.)

Intel first partnered with Mashery in November of 2012, pairing Mashery's API-management tools with its own security offerings. By bringing Mashery in-house, Intel has a more complete and credible offering in cloud-computing infrastructure. (Most cloud-software services communicate with other services via APIs.)

Ideally, Intel might sell the chips inside the servers running the software programs that communicate via these APIs, too. (It has a substantial business selling such chips.) But what's more important is the notion that Intel has a product offering that speaks to innovative startups, not just struggling PC manufacturers.

Mashery has raised a total of $35 million from investors, most recently $10 million last year in a deal that valued the company at $60 million. An experienced startup founder familiar with the terms of the deal says that investors are "happy" with the outcome.

The deal's not expected to be material to Intel's results, but industry norms suggest that Intel likely paid two to three times Mashery's most recent valuation—a range of $120 million to $180 million. (A Mashery spokesperson declined to comment on the company's fundraising or the deal's terms.)

Guest author Tyler Jewell is CEO of Codenvy, a cloud development environment.

Over the past decade, cloud computing has disrupted nearly every facet of IT. Sales, marketing, finance and support - all of these applications are being reengineered to take advantage of cloud's instant access, no download and pay-as-you-go attributes. According to Gartner, the cloud is changing the way applications are designed, tested and deployed, resulting in a significant shift in application development priorities. Cost is a major driver, but so are agility, flexibility and speed to deploy new applications. The firm estimates that 90% of large enterprises and government agencies will use some aspect of cloud computing by 2015.

The cloud has also begun to impact the tools and support solutions that drive IT. This includes performance management (New Relic), backup and recovery (Mozy), configuration management (Service Now), helpdesk (Zendesk), datacenter automation (Puppet Labs) and release management. The agility afforded by on-demand services is further penetrating the developer space.

We've seen cloud versions of middleware in the form of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), agile solutions (Rally Software), Code Versioning Systems (CVS) (GitHub), continuous integration (CloudBees) and system testing (Soasta). The more than 100 companies in these segments have cumulatively raised more than $500 million in capital.

Yet despite this transformation, there has been little disruption to the integrated development environment (IDE) world. The world's nearly 15 million developers, teams and organizations continue to use desktop IDEs as their workbench of choice. Why hasn’t the development environment moved to the cloud along with just about every other application?

What's Wrong With Desktop Development?

Desktop development environments are becoming outdated, failing more often and causing productivity issues for developers. Here's why:

Complicated configuration management: The substantial configuration management process for a developer's workspace turns developers into part-time system administrators, responsible for their own mini-data center running entirely on the desktop. This is time consuming, error prone and challenging to automate.

Many developers have multiple computers and are forced to repeat these tasks on each machine. There is no way to synchronize the configurations of components across different machines, and each machine requires similar hardware and operating systems to operate the components identically.

Decreased productivity: Many IDEs are memory and disk hogs, with significant boot times. They are so resource-hungry they can starve other applications, such as the Web browser. The net effect is a less productive developer due to a slower machine.

Limited accessibility: Desktop developer workspaces are not accessible via mobile devices. Developers who need remote access have to resort to complex and slow solutions such as GotoMyPC - if their firewall allows it.

Poor collaboration: These days, most developers work as part of a team, so communication and collaboration are critical. But desktop IDEs must outsource collaboration to communication systems outside the developer's workflow, forcing developers to continuously switch between developing within the IDE and communicating with their team via other means.

The Solution: Cloud Development

To solve these problems requires moving the entire development workspace into the cloud. The developer's environment is a combination of the IDE, the local build system, the local runtime (to test and debug the locally edited code), the connections between these components and the their dependencies with tools such as Continuous Integration or central services such as Web Services, specialized data stores, legacy applications or partner-provided services.

The cloud-based workspace is centralized, making it easy to share. Developers can invite others into their workspace to co-edit, co-build, or co-debug. Developers can communicate with one another in the workspace itself - changing the entire nature of pair programming, code reviews and classroom teaching. The cloud can offer improvements in system efficiency & density, giving each individual workspace a configurable slice of the available memory and compute resources.

Of course there is more work to do, and we are far from tapping into the endless possibilities the cloud computing offers developers. But the benefits are already clear.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Scott Geng is the CTO at cloud management software company Egenera.

It's no secret that the public cloud market has been growing like gangbusters. In fact, a recent Gartner study found spending on public cloud services is growing at more than 28% per year and private cloud spending is three times that of public cloud. That projects total cloud spending in 2016 to hit $240 billion.

Cloud computing (both public and private) will pave the way forward for how companies will deploy new IT services. Lower price points will help those organizations innovate faster, launch new services more quickly, be more responsive to market conditions and evolve their own business models.

Management And Specialization

The focus in the industry over the past few years has been on the core cloud management services of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. But to truly understand how cloud computing is evolving you have to dive deep below the surface. Two major developments are driving the evolution of cloud: Management and Specialization.

In the management space, innovations like self-service portals have given IT shops and end-users a much-preferred way to request and consume services.

Specialization, meanwhile, is a natural development of any market. A few of the specialized services that will contribute significantly to the adoption of cloud based products and services in 2013 include Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) and DisasterRecovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

DaaS: Portable Desktop Services

Desktop management is a fundamental service for IT organizations. It’s critical for keeping the employees of a company productive. But there have been long standing challenges with managing the traditional desktop. The investment in desktop hardware can be a significant capital expense, especially for large organizations and day-to-day management of these devices can be a huge time sink.

DaaS solutions are secure, cost-effective, easy-to-use and portable – you can get the same desktop on any device.

According to the 451 Research Group, “Interest in third-party DaaS is at a fever pitch.” IT consumerization, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) initiatives, increase in mobile workers, Windows 7 migrations and security/IP concerns are driving organizations to reevaluate their desktop strategy.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) was supposed to address many of these challenges, but it came with its own set of issues. While it has been promoted as a technology that can save businesses money, large upfront capital expenses and complexity have created barriers to virtual desktop adoption.

With DaaS, savings come from operational expense reductions from centralizing and reducing administration and hardware savings over time. DaaS delivers faster desktop deployment, enhanced security, less downtime and lower support costs - and can enable a truly mobile workforce.

MaaS: Bare Metal In The Cloud

MaaS - the dynamic provisioning and deployment of whole physical servers, as opposed to the provisioning of virtual machines - is a drastically underrated cloud service. MaaS services will finally open the floodgates to allow any application to be run in the cloud – any application with any service level. That means multi-tiered apps with a backend Oracle database, home grown, performance-intensive applications, low latency trading applications, etc.

It’s been hard for people to pay attention to MaaS, mostly because server virtualization has been “the shiny new toy” over the past few years and frankly MaaS is not an easy thing to provide. But that may change once IT administrators see the speed, scalability, agility and simplicity with which they can deploy and protect their underlying server infrastructure.

The statistics are clear – a large percentage of servers have been virtualized in the enterprise (40% - 50% now and heading to 60% - 70%). However, there are still a large number of applications that remain running on bare metal. That important (and underappreciated) fact means that MaaS could be a key ingredient to driving more widespread adoption of cloud technology.

DRaaS: Increased Demand For Disaster Recovery

Over the past few years, IT departments have had to live in a culture of cost reduction – it’s just been the way of life. That culture has resulted in aging equipment, overworked staff and lots of cut corners - a perfect recipe for higher failure rates. The fact is that hardware failure and human error are still the leading causes of unplanned outages - but devastating storms and other catastrophes are also forcing businesses to get serious about geographic disaster recovery planning. Some estimates put 2011 weather related disaster costs at almost $150 billion worldwide, up 25% from 2010. And that is just weather, and doesn't include the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Public Cloud Failures Drive Demand

Another strong driver for disaster recovery is public cloud outages. The public cloud companies are under intense scrutiny - every major outage is noticed and publicized. The statistics show that public cloud outages are on the rise year-over-year, and because so many businesses use these services, public-cloud service failures are felt very broadly – e.g. the Amazon outage that impacted Netflix.

One of the forces driving the next phase of cloud computing adoption is the delivery of specialized services like DaaS, MaaS and DRaaS. These services will help improve the service level of cloud resources, boost efficiency and automation and deepen the consumerization of IT resources. They will also give companies more confidence in placing business-critical applications into cloud infrastructures.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Jeetu Patel is general manager of EMC Syncplicity.

As enterprise software moves into the world of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and consumer technology innovations invade the workplace, how companies evaluate enterprise software vendor changes dramatically in many way. Yet, in some ways, it remains the same.

First, five things that SaaS changes forever:

1. Quality User Experience Drives Adoption

Gone are the days when IT could mandate software solutions with a less than stellar user experience. Today, users will go rogue and adopt consumer apps over enterprise-approved software if it makes them more productive and more mobile. Before you select an enterprise SaaS solution, put yourself in the users’ seat and compare the experience to leading consumer apps. Do they match up? If not, you better keep looking.

2. Simplicity Trumps Feature-Rich

For decades, enterprise software providers have jammed features into their products to meet every IT and user need. The mobile first, cloud-computing world is all about apps that do one thing really, really well. A portfolio of simple, elegant products that are easy to use and easy to implement makes more sense than a complex, comprehensive solution with a long roll-out time and a steep learning curve.

3. Continuous Improvement Is Expected

The 18-month product release cycle is a thing of the past. Today's users demand constant improvements to the way they work - without radical changes that require retraining or disrupt productivity. And you’ll find it’s a great advantage to have your vendor improve features without having to install any software updates. Ask your SaaS providers how they maintain their products with regular releases that streamline and bring the best to the top. What is their pace of innovation?

4. You’re In The Driver’s Seat

One big change in enterprise software is the shift from perpetual licensing that hits capital expense budgets to subscription-based pricing that hits the operational expense budget. Software in the cloud requires no capital investment, expensive roll out or prolonged training. With relatively low initial investements, if a service doesn't solve the problem or users don't adopt it, cancel your subscription and move on.

5. Your Success Is Critical To The SaaS Vendor's Success

Because there are no huge upfront costs, SaaS vendors have to keep customers happy on an ongoing basis. Enterprises have no problem paying good money for software that delivers value, they just have a problem paying upfront for technology that they are not likely to use.

And now, three fundamental ways your relationship with your vendor does not change.

1. You Still Want To know And Trust Your Provider

No matter how much digitization permeates our lives, people will continue to make large software or Software-as-a-Service purchases from people they know and trust. But this is a marathon, not a sprint. You need to partner with vendor in it for the long haul and are accountable beyond any one product or service.

2. Security, Compliance And Management Still Matter

IT technology restrictions may not seem logical to users, but the need to mitigate risk and comply with requirements remains and enterprise reality. A SaaS provider may be highly secure and have a terrific consumer following, but if it doesn’t meet the compliance bar, it doesn’t belong in the enterprise.

3. You Still Need To Know What’s Coming

SaaS companies that cater to the consumer market often introduce new features by rolling them out to users even before they tell them. Enterprises need predictability and a transparency about upcoming changes. Updates may have important implications for security, compliance, compatibility and workflow. Make sure your SaaS vendors communicate proactively.

Gone are the days when IT could mandate which tools were used where. People want to work as efficiently as possible, anywhere, on any device. That dramatically affects how enterprises choose and buy their software, but some things never change.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Lucas Carlson is the founder and CEO of AppFog.

2012 was a huge year for the cloud, providing developers with a bounty of both public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options.

Enterprise developers quickly understood the benefits of the cloud, and sunk their teeth into porting projects onto public infrastructure, experimenting with PaaS, developing cloud-based dev/test solutions and incorporating all kinds of SaaS offerings into their daily workflow.

While this is all very exciting for developers, rampant cloud adoption can be a headache for enterprise IT departments. They need to manage, govern and control cloud adoption or deal with chaos.

Uncontrolled Cloud Growth Creates Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is what happens when enterprise IT and the lines of business it supports all simultaneously but independently employ a variety of cloud services in an uncoordinated fashion.

The business groups could be running apps across a half-dozen different runtimes and using an equal number of different database technologies - some on-premise on a VMware vSphere cloud, others experimenting with OpenStack and some on Rackspace OpenCloud across various regions and zones. The rest could be using Amazon’s public cloud - in Virginia or perhaps Singapore.

In some cases, the enterprise pays for the cloud services. But in many cases, individuals are simply using their personal credit cards and expensing the costs. It’s the Wild Wild West!

Not surprisingly, IT leaders are conflicted. On one hand, they’re inspired by the drive and creativity of their development teams. And they love the velocity of development and releases, and the innovation that results. But they are positively horrified by the thought of making it all work together: “If my department has an app in development on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we need it on our private cloud. Who’s going to make that happen? How much time are we talking here?”

From Cloud Sprawl To Cloud Sanity?

Cloud sanity means having one deployment and management solution responsible for the wide range of app lifecycle processes, including app deployment, deletion, starting/stopping, database service provisioning and tunneling, cloning and re-deploying apps across infrastructures, memory management and more.

It also means having one solution for deploying to AWS, and for migrating from Azure to OpenStack, and for creating new PostgresQL databases, and for syncing up distributed systems through RabbitMQ… well, you get the idea. Right now, sadly, most companies have a single tool (or more commonly each employee has their own version of a script) for each individual task.

The old way of taming cloud sprawl was through vendor lock-in. If your company’s data and apps ended up scattered across a variety of clouds, then you were compelled to pull them all under a single umbrella, be it a private cloud or a single public cloud provider. IT gained predictability from doing this, but lost the ability to experiment outside of the chosen vendor’s bubble. Lock-in means degraded velocity and an elimination of flexibility. Lock-in means an end to innovation.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Horizontal Hybrid PaaS = Cloud Sanity

A horizontal hybrid PaaS provides a single solution to handle app deployment and management without having to give up on an agile, experimental way of doing things. With a horizontal hybrid PaaS, the enterprise gains freedom from both vendor lock-in and cloud sprawl.

CTOs, CIOs, IT directors and other technology decision makers regain governance of cloud services across the enterprise, as well as single-point-of-truth insight into where apps and services are housed. If they don’t like what they see in terms of performance or agility or any other metric, the workload portability gained from using a horizontal hybrid PaaS makes it easy to switch between clouds, turn services on and off, and switch apps from development to production and back.

Meanwhile, developers gain agility and speed above and beyond anything they’ve experienced in the enterprise. They gain the ability to use and experiment with a variety of cloud services – public, private, Rackspace, AWS, OpenStack, Azure and any language they want – in a way that doesn’t give their bosses headaches about cloud sprawl.

Business leaders are happy because IT is humming along, quickly implementing new ideas and doing more with less. All with reduced cost complexity.

Heterogeneous Clouds In The Enterprise

In 2013, heterogeneity is the name of the game in the cloud. But cloud heterogeneity is still scarier than it needs to be. But heterogeneity can be freeing and enabling, if it's properly managed.

IT should want to have it all: flexibility and control, experimentation and insight, the cost and efficiency advantages of the cloud and a no-surprises approach to cost apportionment.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Kyle Falkenhagen is director of product management at ServiceMesh.

Business and IT leaders are bombarded with cloud computing hype and promotion. Yet very little is said about how the cloud affects the evolution of the IT organization itself. Enterprise cloud adoption is a transformative shift where the greatest implementation challenges are often more about people and process than technology integration.

Agents of change, especially in large enterprises, must overcome various forms of resistance. This includes organizational fiefdoms and the IT silos that evolved with them. These four organizational change strategies can help IT departments fight fear and inertia as they move to cloud computing:

IT Change Strategy #1: Use Tiger Teams To Break Down IT Fiefdoms

While no one is shocked that IT silos can hinder cloud adoption, you may be surprised how quickly you’ll encounter resistance. For example, setting up IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offerings for your first private cloud will likely involve separate groups responsible for storage, computing, networking, platforms and security. Coordination among these groups is already difficult and you'll quickly find that many cloud vendors have product interoperability issues that cause documentation gaps, integration problems and incompatibilities. Teams will have to escalate issues through multiple vendors, causing long delays and strains between IT fiefdoms not accustomed to relying on each other.

The key is for siloed groups to share activities across traditional boundaries. To encourage this, leading companies have created Tiger Teams: small cross-functional groups of skilled, respected and entrepreneurial-minded workers. They should be experienced enough to navigate their home departments to accomplish needed tasks, politically astute enough to marshal resources and enterprising enough to push projects to completion. And they need a strong sponsor who can provide political cover and help break through entrenched resistance.

IT Change Strategy #2: SWAT Away “Analysis Paralysis”

One large financial institution implemented a cloud strategy with an incumbent vendor that claimed to offer the right strategy and products. The firm waited too long for proof points and had vastly disappointing results. When it tried to bring in other cloud vendors, they merely added confusion to the existing failed effort - leading to analysis paralysis and the inability to decide on the proper next steps.

Unfortunately, this scenario is being played out in many large enterprises. If you can’t afford a year of paralysis, create a SWAT team.

Smaller and more discreet than a Tiger Team, a SWAT team is quietly let loose to “get something done.” It emerges only when it has a concrete working model to integrate with the IT ecosystem for evaluation. Because it runs “small, fast and dark,” a SWAT team can be easier to initiate than a Tiger Team. A SWAT team’s goal is to break the paralysis and create a tangible model that everyone can improve. Building a SWAT team is relatively cost effective, especially compared to the opportunity cost of spending a year just trying to decide what to do.

IT Change Strategy #3: Challenge Legacy Obstinacy

Many organizations cling stubbornly to legacy applications and platforms, often including proprietary applications running on no longer supported platforms. While some groups may propose porting those applications to a modern, standardized, platform and as-a-Service offering, legacy zealots may claim that's too risky.

But there are many different techniques for cloud migration, including some require little to no re-architecture efforts. One size does not fit all when it comes to migrating applications to the cloud.

That's critical, because the benefits of eliminating non-standard platforms and infrastructure in favor of lower cost, cloud-based service offerings are too important to ignore. Because cloud computing promises automated processes that lower costs and speed cycle times for application provisioning, maintenance, patching and updating, cloud-based IT service costs will almost certainly decrease over time. Legacy system costs, meanwhile, typically continue to creep up. Many times, simply running numbers can help overcome emotional objections to changing the legacy status quo.

IT Change Strategy #4: Challenge Habitual Inefficiency

Most organizations existing IT processes and governance approaches are the result of years of layering of systems, technologies and process exceptions. Today’s cloud initiatives present a significant new opportunity to improve process automation and implement new governance best practices. That will likely breed resistance based on the idea of, “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.” Don't buy it. The process has likely been broken for years.

Part of the resistance is political, as people within the IT organization understandably worry about positions being eliminated or particular fiefdoms losing prestige and power. The misperception may also exist that automation is fraught with risk.

But the real risk lies in not doing anything.

While some positions may in fact be eliminated and other roles may change with a move to the cloud, this is far better than the alternative. Sub-optimal IT efficiency can lead to lower enterprise productivity, a loss of competitiveness, lower profits and ultimately the risk of wholesale outsourcing of IT operations.

Successful Organizational Change Management

Addressing organizational change is vital to ensure the success of enterprise cloud-computing initiatives. By incorporating the right approach and building strong arguments to overcome resistance, you can help your organization make the changes necessary for successful implementation of enterprise cloud strategies.

IBM's decision to throw its considerable weight behind OpenStack has some folks declaring victory for the open source cloud consortium. The hitch? Amazon already claims a considerable lead, with more than 70% of the market, according to Forrester's James Staten, and as one prominent Amazon backer declares, the lead grows daily.

Can Amazon Withstand Sustained Cloud Computing Competition?

The question is whether Amazon can withstand a sustained, concerted attack by nearly everyone else in the cloud computing industry.

So far, according to Adrian Cockroft, director of architecture for Netflix, Amazon Web Services' biggest customer, the answer is an emphatic "Yes." In a Twitter exchange last week, Infoworld's Eric Knorr asked "Is the choice really between OpenStack and AWS? What about other cloud solutions?" Cockroft's response was clear:

@ericknorr that's not the choice. A barrier for people currently using AWS is the feature gap to anything else. OpenStack not closing gap.

— adrian cockcroft (@adrianco) March 14, 2013

When asked which features, in particular, AWS had that OpenStack couldn't match, Cockroft insisted that there is "too much to list," but "Availability Zones and Autoscale Groups" are two features that stand out. Furthermore, Cockroft indicated that OpenStack's six-month release cycle cripples its ability to catch up with Amazon, which rolls out new features (and price drops) on a continuous basis.

In other words, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Has Amazon Already Won? Yes and No.

But has Amazon already won? If you look at the absolute number of jobs being created, relative to OpenStack or Cloudstack, the answer is yes. Ditto if you go off general interest, as measured by Web searches:

But if you look at relative job growth, suddenly OpenStack has a fighting chance.

Perhaps even more tellingly, a foray into the code contributions for OpenStack suggest a truly dynamic, growing entity, one that is no longer Rackspace's pet project, but rather a true community effort. The most recent data I could find is a year old, but already shows growing influence by Red Hat and others.

Does this matter? Absolutely.

Big Players Will Make A Big Difference

However, I suspect that OpenStack will gain prominence in tandem with a few of its primary supporters gaining outsized influence due to these code contributions. Linux took off as IBM invested $1 billion (and then much more) and Red Hat, in particular, invested armies of engineers to make it into an enterprise-grade operating system standard.

The same will hold true of OpenStack. Right now it's making waves by being the open, community standard. That's nice, but insufficient and somewhat misleading, as Gartner's Kyle Hilgendorf has established. Ultimately, enterprises don't care about community and openness unless the product itself is rock solid.

Which is one reason that Microsoft and Google also can't be counted out. Microsoft holds sway with CIOs, and has been actively welcoming open-source technologies to its Azure cloud service. Google, for its part, was building clouds long before it was cool, and has so many hooks into developers with its various software and services, from Android to Maps to YouTube to Apps, that it cannot help but be a major player. Google Compute Engine's performance compares well against Amazon, too, but it's the ease developers will have tying into Google's services that truly favor it.

Has Amazon won Round 1 of the Public Cloud wars? No question. But some serious competitors are looming, each with attributes (Microsoft, enterprise fealty; OpenStack, community; Google, popular developer services) that give them a real chance to cut into Amazon's significant lead.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

At one time government IT was the last place to look to find innovation. With little incentive to save money or do much beyond keep the lights on, governments across the world have happily dumped money into a cabal of legacy IT vendors without much thought for consequences. All too often, those consequences were dire.

But something seems to have changed. Today, from the City of Chicago to the UK government's Government Digital Services group, government IT has become a hotbed of open innovation. For the first time, private industry has much to learn from government IT.

Yes, you read that right.

Uncle Sam's CIO

The Obama administration gets some credit for helping to kick things off. In March 2009, the U.S. named Vivek Kundra its first-ever chief information officer. Kundra then set to work with a cloud-first policy that saw him shutter dozens of resource-heavy datacenters, moving more workloads to the cloud, in an attempt to save taxpayers $18.8 billion by 2015. Kundra has since left, his legacy lives on.

It has also crossed the Pond. Years ago, the UK was roundly criticized for its too-cozy relationship with Microsoft. Today, the UK's Government Digital Services Group, which is tasked by the UK government with transforming its digital services, espouses a set of design principles that would be right at home within the most progressive of Silicon Valley startups, and which cut against the "buy-whatever-Ballmer-tells-us-to" mentality that sometimes pervaded UK procurement policies:

1. Start with needs
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again.
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

These aren't merely mottos inscribed on the wall and forgotten. The government has actively been espousing them, in part by hosting its code on GitHub. But then, which governments aren't hosting code on GitHub? As O'Reilly's Alex Howard points out, GitHub is increasingly popular with the government IT crowd, with the total number of government repositories booming on the popular code-sharing site:

Source: GitHub. Chart by Alex Howard.

All of which is interesting, but becomes even more so when you dig into what is being hosted there. Take Chicago, which has not only open sourced code, but also datasets for things like building footprints, bike paths, etc. That's a great step toward open data, but Chicago is even more ambitious. The City's WindyGrid project, for example, a "real-time infrastructure for the publication of data that delivers information in the moment of need." Sounds promising, but what does that mean?

As The Wall Street Journal notes:

[As an] example, city officials might look at a high crime area, while also mapping out the number of liquor permits for a neighborhood, along with the amount of nearby abandoned buildings. Using transcripts from resident complaints or 911 calls, officials could also see trending concerns for the area, like broken lights or stolen garbage cans, and the times the incidents are occurring. If the high crime area also has a high number of liquor permits, for example, officials could then see if other neighborhoods also faced both issues, allowing them to create a more effective response for those areas.

Big Data being put to use in real time, at considerable cost savings and improved productivity for the City. Oh, and WindyGrid will be open sourced, too, so that other government organizations can use it.

This kind of project would be interesting no matter who was doing it, but the fact that it's a government organization is impressive. Same with GDS in the UK. Or with the US' own shift to cloud computing.

It's hard to pinpoint a particular reason for this. Perhaps the embrace of cloud and open source is simply a way to squeeze more productivity out of ever-tightening resources, given the global recession over the past few years. Or perhaps government IT got tired of seeing its private enterprise peers playing with all the shiny new toys. Either way, it's a welcome change to government as usual.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

With IBM tossing its might behind OpenStack, the open source software used to run cloud-computing installations is in a strong position to become the dominant platform in the industry.

OpenStack Rising

IBM announced Monday that it will make OpenStack the foundation of its cloud services and software. In backing the open source project, Big Blue joined other tech heavyweights behind the technology, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat and Rackspace.

"IBM is the big fish in the sea and for them to make the level of commitment that they did today is a big deal," said James Staten, analyst for Forrester Research. "That's the kind of heft OpenStack needs."

The announcement is likely to send OpenStack's two main competitors VMware and CloudStack, another open source cloud computing platform, into a battle for second place.

“OpenStack has won the race to become the standard, and it has done it rapidly,” Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist and a managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, told AllThingsD.

IBM And Open Source

IBM has conducted a long love affair with open source software. In 2000, it backed Linux and a year later committed $1 billion to the development of the operating system. IBM's support helped drive Linux into large organizations and made it a viable competitor against Microsoft as a server platform.

"IBM could have the same impact on OpenStack as it did on the Linux world," Staten said.

IBM recognized years ago that open source code fit its business strategy a lot better than proprietary technology. The company draws most of its $100 billion in annual revenue from providing IT services. By basing a lot of its own technology on the code from various open source projects, as well as industry standards, IBM is able to work its hardware and software into what enterprise types call "heterogeneous computing environments" — the combinations of patched-together technology from a variety of vendors typically found in large companies, the segment of the tech market IBM is strongest.

"IBM has really great credibility in the open source community," Gary Chen, analyst for International Data Corp., said. "They really do understand open source."

IBM's First OpenStack Product

IBM followed its announcement with the introduction of its first OpenStack-based product, SmartCloud Orchestrator. SmartCloud is the brand name for IBM's platform for running cloud installations in customers' or IBM's data centers or in a combination of both. Orchestrator is a service customers use to configure the computing, storage and networking resources for cloud applications.

One unanswered question is how IBM will integrate its current SmartCloud code base with OpenStack. In an interview with NetworkWorld, Robert LeBlanc, a senior vice president of software for IBM, waxed mystical in describing how Big Blue will handle the transition.

"We're on a continual journey," LeBlanc said. "But we think this is a major step in that journey."

Cloud Standards

IBM clearly wants to influence OpenStack's technological direction and efforts to develop industry standards for cloud computing, which is still a relatively immature architecture. IBM has formed a 400-member Cloud Standards Customer Council to help push other tech vendors in a direction favorable to IBM. The company says it has more than 5,000 customers running private clouds on its platform.

IBM is also a major player in standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

While standards are key to making different technologies work together, they won't help companies make the cultural changes necessary to adopt cloud computing and make it work. Delivering applications as a Web service dramatically changes the role of IT departments and affects how employees interact with software, too.

Because of its success in professional services, IBM is in a strong position to help companies make those cultural changes, but it won't be easy. "A lot of enterprises are not ready to hear it," Staten said.

Nevertheless, the momentum in the tech industry is behind cloud computing. The public cloud service market alone is expected to grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion worldwide.

With that much money on the table, IBM plans to become a major player in the market and is betting that OpenStack can help it achieve that goal.

Image courtesy of ShutterStock

Guest author Daniel Lopez is co-founder and CTO of BitNami.

It is difficult to avoid a weird feeling of Deja-vu when looking at the current cloud-computing landscape. Microsoft is once again battling for the future of the technology industry.

For years, Microsoft dominated the IT landscape with its Windows operating system, providing an industry-standard platform that others built on top of. Regardless of any pricing issues or technical shortcomings, the vast ecosystem of Windows applications and service providers ensured the continued success of the platform for many years and was an insurmountable barrier for competitors. It was not until the Web came along that this dominance was seriously challenged. The book High-Stakes, No Prisoners chronicles the story of the Frontpage acquisition and does a good job of providing a peek into the ruthless ‘battle for the Web’ against Netscape.

Microsoft Is A Cloud Computing Underdog

Microsoft is now waging another platform war: the battle for the cloud. The difference is that this time, Microsoft is the underdog.

Amazon has built not only an automated way to spin up new servers and databases, but an entire platform for building and running a whole new generation of applications. Where in the past you had to write apps using Win32 APIs and third-party OCX controls, you can now write applications using Amazon’s cloud APIs for file storage, database access, message queues and dozens of other services. The launch of the AWS marketplace further solidified Amazon’s move up the stack. If Amazon acquires a critical mass of users and vendors to build on top of its platform, the network effect will make it very difficult to displace that ecosystem.

Microsoft has not been sitting idle. The original version of Windows Azure was architected around a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and was very Windows-specific. It had many shortcomings and attracted little developer and partner support.

Making Windows Azure More Competitive

However, in 2013 Microsoft has refreshed its Azure offering, providing a Virtual-Machine-centric offering modeled after Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The company went out of its way to make sure Linux and open source were first-class citizens. Microsoft has even demoed Azure using Apple MacBook Pro laptops and launching Ubuntu images. Microsoft finally “got it” - the launch of Azure Virtual Images was the first step towards fighting AWS head on.

About a month, Microsoft unveiled the Windows Azure Community portal, which provides dozens of popular open source applications and language runtimes contributed by partners. Even more recently, Microsoft took this a step further and made the images from the portal available directly in the Azure console, so they can be easily deployed onto Azure infrastructure. By making it easier to deploy third-party apps on its cloud, Microsoft is helping to grow its own ecosystem while increasing the utilization of its infrastructure. It also provides a counterpart to the AWS marketplace that, while limited, it is in many aspects simpler and easier to use.

Not Better, But Maybe Good Enough?

Microsoft still offers only a fraction of the functionality of Amazon, but it has a much bigger established user base among small and medium businesses and the enterprise. Coupled with its willingness to aggressively compete on price, Microsoft does not necessarily need to be better than Amazon to win. It just needs to be “good enough” to prevent its own users from switching.

It is incredibly refreshing to finally see viable competition to Amazon in the public cloud arena. Together with Google Compute Engine, Microsoft should be able to give Amazon a good run for its money.

Who will be the big winners of this war? For one, end users, who will benefit from lower prices from increased competition, as the cloud giants fight for market share.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

You would think that after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy and last month's brutal East Coast snow storm, more and more people would start to take disaster preparation seriously. While that may be true for "preppers" taking shelter in the event of an impending apocalypse, it's not so much the case for small businesses.

A survey of 600 small business owners conducted by Alibaba, Vendio and Auctiva in December of 2012 illustrated their preparedness in the event of a natural disaster, and the results were not too promising. 

Among some of the more alarming statistics collected is the fact that 74 percent of American small businesses do not have any disaster plan, while 84 percent do not have disaster insurance. In the event of a power outage, 71 percent of the respondents admitted to lacking a back-up generator.

Not all of the information revealed through the survey projected a negative outlook for future disaster scenarios. Two stats that were positive - as well as indicating how tech-savvy small business owners are today - were that 62 percent of respondents said that they could operate their business via mobile phone, while 30 percent said they store their information in the cloud.

For all those out there worried that the next big super storm might descend on your business, heed these warnings.   

On Tuesday, Dell faced Wall Street analysts for what could be the last time, as Michael Dell and a collection of investors prepare to take the company private. And though Dell Inc. reportedly exceeded Wall Street's expectations, the results were disappointing overall. And in some ways, that's a good thing.

Dell revenues fell 11% to $14.3 billion. Profits were down, too: 31% to $534 million. Dell's consumer business fell by a whopping 24% to $2.8 billion; The slogan "Dude, you're getting a Dell" is now a distant memory.

The earnings call is a unique event in American business; although chief executives occasionally deign to hear questions from business reporters, rarely do they sit down with their upper management and submit to questions about their past and future financial and operational performance. Calls following quarters in which a business dramatically exceeds expectations, taking a drink each time an analyst congratulates execs ("Great quarter, guys!") will usually result in a long nap under one's desk.

After a lousy quarter, on the other hand, analysts feel unusually liberated to ask the pointed questions that should always be asked. And - hurray! - some of them did their jobs on Tuesday.

Here are the five questions that Dell will need to answer going forward:

1. Does Dell Belong In The PC Market?

In many ways, this is the same question that Hewlett-Packard faced in the wake of Leo Apotheker's decision to shop the PC business, Meg Whitman's decision to retain it, and then the ultimate reorganization into a combined printer/PC business. With very little room for adding value besides bundling a printer with a PC, adding the crapware software that users hate, and striking out into relatively untested waters such as ultraportables and tablets, the answer seems to be: "Yes, but barely."

Dell's strengths are its XPS tier and its Latitude line of business PCs. But as Dell chief financial officer Brian Gladden noted, the growth continues to be in tablets and in the low-value desktop and notebook space - both areas where Dell, seeking higher profits, has consciously avoided.

2. Is There An Opportunity To Refresh Older Corporate PCs?

Yes, definitely. And that's the primary reason Dell won't bail out of the PC market any time soon - it has established longstanding ties with corporate America. This was one of the most telling quotes of the call:

"I think that’s really tough to get at, but the data that we’ve seen would suggest there’s still somewhere in the range of 40% of the corporate installed base for PCs that is XP or Vista that needs to be upgraded," Gladden said. "So that’s, I think, pretty consistent with the data that we see for our installed base, and for what we hear from our corporate customers."

Corporate IT departments rarely, if ever, update a PC operating system without refreshing the hardware, too. Microsoft may have to worry about corporate customers turning to Windows 7 rather than 8, but Dell doesn't care either way. And with support ending for Windows XP in April 2014, Dell knows there's a windfall ahead.

"All the data that we’ve seen, all the conversations we’ve had with customers, would lead us to believe that there’s still a significant refresh activity that has to happen in the next 12-14 months," Gladden said.

3. Is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) The Answer?

Yes. Or it was in December, when Michael Dell said exactly that. 

"And in the customer conversations that we’ve been having, the interest in Windows 8 is quite high, even with commercial customers, who would normally wait a few releases to adopt the new versions," Dell said. "What we’re seeing here is really an immediate need, because CIOs are worried about the ramifications of a BYOD world. With Windows 8 products... we’re pleased with the incredible experience that they expect, while you get the security and versatility and reliability that your enterprise really requires."

Since then, Microsoft has reported terrific Windows 8 numbers, although there has been some suspicion that the company hid behind previouslysold Windows 8 licenses. Still, Dell and the rest of the PC industry will certainly help try and make Windows 8 a success. Ultimately, however, Michael Dell has bet his farm on Windows, while other hardware makers, like Samsung, have diversified into Android and phones. Time will tell who made the right choice.

4.) Will Server Customers Keep Buying From Dell, Or Roll Their Own?

If you're not following the datacenter market that runs the cloud services we use and love, you're may be unaware that Facebook has pioneered an industry-wide program called Open Compute, which publishes detailed specifications on building your own servers via components from no-name manufacturers. Facebook recently said that a major European datacenter would be constructed entirely from these "white box" servers, and companies like Rackspace have also signed on.

Revenue-wise, Dell’s Server and Networking Business unit grew 11% in the last quarter, to $9.3 billion. But ISI Group's Brian Marshall asked one of the key questions: given the Open Compute model, will the trend continue? Gladden waved off the question.

"It is relatively isolated to a few number of large-scale customers who can make the economics work, and given that, we’re still seeing strong growth in that business, and significant opportunities to continue to grow the hyperscale business," Gladden said. "So I don’t think it’s a new dynamic."

Gladden's right; most companies are not going to exert the time and effort to design their own servers, Open Compute or no. But over time, this may eat into the server businesses of Dell and others.

5.) What Effects Will Virtualization, Consolidation and the Cloud Have On Servers?

Virtualization, where a number of "virtual servers" can share computing resources, helps effectively consume underutilized servers, especially older hardware. Some of the older hardware can be retired, as data centers "consolidate" their hardware and run virtual machines on top of them to maximize their use. At the same time, as more cloud services are deployed, the number of servers they require goes up. Unfortunately, analysts have reported that the number of servers sold has flattened - the trends of consolidation and virtualization are holding down sales, and revenues are actually decreasing.

For a long time, notebooks became the escape route out of the quicksand of commoditization that has dragged the industry down. Then servers were the answer. Now, they're apparently sinking into the mud, too.

Dell may in fact continue to provide updates to Wall Street as it goes private; it hinted as much when it talked about a fiscal first-quarter earnings release. But as the company moves into the financial shadows, away from public scrutiny, it did not provide any guidance for the future. One can wonder whether its outlook is equally cloudy.

Guest author Anthony Smith is CEO of Insightly.

You may have read a lot of articles last year about why the so-called "freemium" model doesn’t work for most consumer-oriented companies. And it’s true that offering a base-level product for free to gain visibility and marketshare and then converting a subset of users to a paid, premium version is not a viable strategy for every business.

However, depending on the product you’re offering, the freemium model can work well for business-to-business (B2B) companies, and especially well for B2VSB (business-to-very-small-business) companies.

(See also Why Free Is Bad: Businesses Should Be Happy To Pay For Key Services)

Here are six questions to ask yourself if you are entertaining a freemium model for business customers:

1. How big is the target market? For a freemium model to work, you need to make sure your audience is extremely large, since typical conversion rates range from 3% to 10%. According to the Small Business Administration, in 2009 there were almost 28 million small businesses in the United States. (The SBA defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees). Let’s say your business captures 2% of all the small businesses as free accounts, and 3% of those convert to paying customers. That’s almost 17,000 paying customers. Based on your business model is that enough to sustain and grow a profitable business?

2. What is the value of a free customer? By offering your product for free, you run the risk of cementing that value in the minds of customers. The flip side of this is that when you’re trying to build a brand and a user base, the freemium model makes it easier to get exposure, a base of quality leads, the potential of high virality and a built-in sounding board for essential user feedback.

3. How does your product impact the daily lives of your users? Do your users recognize that your product makes their work life more productive, more efficient, more organized or more informed? If so, converting from a free version to a paid version will be a natural progression.

4. Does your product help grow your customer’s business? If your product offers some kind of analytics or metrics that can be used to measure an aspect of the health of the business (i.e., sales, efficiency, productivity savings or gains), then it’s easier to align your product with the growth of the company and easier for a small business to justify spending dollars on it.

5. What is the best conversion metric – transactions or users? Both models have pros and cons. In many cases, users like the transaction model because it’s often pay-as-you-go. However, sometimes a transaction model can be perceived as nickel-and-diming the user. A user license is another common conversion metric, and it may be easier for your customers to swallow as they try to justify the budget to convert from a free account to a paid one. If it makes sense, you can may be able to combine both models (i.e., offer X number of transactions per user license).

6. What is the difference between the free and paid versions of the product? Don’t cripple your free version to the point that it offers minimal value. Remember, your customer’s first interaction and impression will likely be with your free product, so make sure that your free offering is useful on its own terms and not just an obvious stepping stone to a higher-level paid version.

Freemium models should be based on your specific business realities. If the math of the freemium model looks like it will work for your business, your product and your audience, give it a try.

 Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Bart Copeland is CEO of ActiveState.

Jetpacks, flying cars, hybrid cloud. Which one will be ubiquitous in two years? Here’s a hint: It’s the one that doesn’t involve personal air travel.

In two years, the cloud-computing-enabled enterprise will have the enviable luxury to take much for granted, including accelerated time to market, seamless deployment, true polyglot coding and agile-as-you-want development.

And the technology that will enable that bright future? Here’s another hint: It starts with “private PaaS” or private Platform- as-a-Service. Think of private PaaS as cloud middleware for the enterprise — Platform-as-a-Service technology for on-premise service delivery behind a firewall, or an operating system for an enterprise private cloud.

Here are six ways private PaaS will change the enterprise cloud space by 2015:

1. Mobile apps will drive enterprise cloud and private PaaS adoption.

Two years from now, the biggest driver for cloud adoption won’t be traditional applications, it’ll be mobile apps. Disparate workforces already make Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) a cost of doing business for the enterprise: More types of enterprise work will require more types of mobile applications. And that will burden IT leaders mandated with managing the cloud. To retain control (and sanity), those IT leaders will embrace private PaaS technologies to provide integrated application management of mobile (and Web and cloud) applications.

2. Private clouds will dominate the enterprise market for now… but hybrids will win in the end.

Marketers spin idealized tales of cross-cloud hybrid love, with capacity-enabling bursts to the public cloud, easy multi-datacenter application administration, better security management, and redundancy/failover operational models abstracted from the developers and employees doing the actual work. It’s a great, achievable vision. But for most enterprises, that hybrid cloud vision is still two years away. Which is why they’re investing in private PaaS architectures now. Today’s enterprise cloud adopters see private cloud — and in particular, private PaaS technology — as the path to tomorrow’s hybrid cloud glory.

3. Smaller "public PaaS" players will dwindle as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) subsumes PaaS.

To differentiate themselves against commoditization, IaaS service providers will continue to incorporate PaaS technology into their infrastructure service offerings. Service breadth will expand, prices will fall and small business will embrace the low-cost public cloud. But those competitive pricing scenarios will challenge small standalone public PaaS providers as VC funds dry up and competitors either partner with or get absorbed into larger cloud-services corporations.

4. 2013 PaaS purchase criterion: deployment acceleration. 2015 PaaS purchase criteria: administrative control, true polyglot development, easy extensibility to Big Data.

In the PaaS world, 2013 will be the year of rapid application deployment: Enterprise private PaaS adopters will see their cloud application deployment cycles reduced from weeks or months to just minutes. In two years, cloud adopters will take that speed-to-market for granted. As a result, enterprise cloud adopters will evaluate private PaaS technology not just for how it accelerates workflow, but for how it impacts the bottom line. In 2015, private PaaS technologies will offer even easier administrative control, support for development in any language, seamless integration to corporate applications (particularly big-data databases), and hybrid cloud capabilities.

5. Beyond polyglot, "anyglot"" development will move apps forward in ways we can’t yet imagine.

In today’s cloud technology market, enterprise developers must often choose between their preferred development language and the development language dictated by their IaaS/PaaS solution. When infrastructure services (whether public or private) mandate development environment, it’s the coders who suffer, and they’re the ones who must adapt to the new world order. In some cases, that can mean learning new languages and recoding (or even dumping) legacy applications. But two years from now, we’ll look back on inconveniences like that and laugh. Envision truly polyglot cloud middleware. Applications developed in multiple languages. True cloud application portability. Both developers and cloud managers (DevOps) collaborating. Dogs and cats living together in harmony. Really.

6. Agile development will be so agile we’ll need a new name for it (“SuperAgile?”).

Tomorrow’s agility will make today’s agility look laughably slow. In 2015, we’ll enjoy polyglot application development and dynamic deployment. With those capabilities will come newfound agility… not just accelerated nimbleness for cat-herders, but flexibility: Developers can work in the (fast) way that’s right for them. More apps, better apps, delivered to market faster.

The future looks… um, bright.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Mike Pav is engineering vice president of Spanning Cloud Apps, a provider of data protection solutions for the cloud.

When Amazon Web Services crashed on Christmas Eve (which brought down Netflix among other high-profile sites), Amazon offered this explanation: its elastic load balancers failed. Load balancers, as the name implies, distribute the network's workload. Among their most important functions is protecting the system's components from becoming overburdened and shutting down. 

After Amazon's outage, the Web became a virtual fount of suggestions for avoiding more such glitches. Some said Amazon's cloud customers should write their own load balancers. Others said service providers like Netflix should deploy multiple data centers as insurance against another PaaS failure.

(See also: Why Netflix's Christmas Eve Crash Was Its Own Fault)

Failure Is An Option

A month later, it seems clear to me: Cloud outages, while rare, will continue to be a fact of life.

Here's why: Perfection is simply too expensive. To achieve uptime of more than 99.99% requires an investment of  money, machine and human resources that - given the rarity of failures - just isn't worth it. The extra cost inevitably would be passed along to customers, all but negating the cloud's cost advantage. 

Instead, customers should expect PaaS providers to provide them with a well-reasoned plan for handling any disruptions.

PaaS providers should be the first to know when an outage has occurred:

• They should be able to estimate when service will be restored.
• They should know and be willing to report who was impacted, and whether data was irrevocably lost.
• After an outage has been reported and until service is restored, PaaS providers should supply customers with regular status updates.
• Once service has been restored, they should offer a detailed post-mortem as well as a plan for avoiding future interruptions.

Here's where it gets tricky: PaaS providers are understandably reluctant to offer gory details for fear that they will lose current or prospective customers. If the PaaS company in question is publicly traded, those fears will be compounded by the worry that its stock price will tumble.

The real reason to sign onto a PaaS has nothing to do with whether it claims to offer 100% uptime. You choose a PaaS provider because it offers scalability and elasticity, and the same efficiency and user experience regardless of the level of system usage. Applications can be built and delivered on a PaaS an order of magnitude faster when compared with non-cloud-based systems.

Using a PaaS not only reduces a customer's total cost of ownership - they operate on a pay-per-use model - it allows them to delegate tedious and time-consuming IT chores like system monitoring and maintenance. With that stuff out of the way, PaaS customers can focus their resources on truly adding value for their constituencies.

Even after the well-publicized outages, the reason so many high-profile companies - including Netflix - still use Amazon as their PaaS provider is because it does a great job of providing ready-to-use features. AWS isn't 100% reliable, but it can be used with very little up-front investment and scaled as needed. And that is an enormous improvement over the Information technology systems of the past.

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