Author: Barb Darrow

President Obama was inaugurated a scant few weeks ago but it’s never too early to think about the next election cycle. Tech teams for the 2016 campaign will need to hone in on location-based applications and finely tuned personalization, said Michael Slaby, former CIO for Obama for America.

According to Slaby, the team’s the initial 2008 effort was all about putting social networking on par with other messaging and communication. “We didn’t just stick it in the corner with a blog, it was a meaningful way to think about solving organizational problems,” Slaby told attendees of a Salesforce.com event in New York City Tuesday.

“In 2008 we were just trying to stay alive – [there was] an election every two weeks for months and months” he said. That didn’t leave a ton of time for strategizing or even staffing up. “We didn’t really hire engineers,” Slaby said during a panel discussion led by former U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, who is now Salesforce.com’s executive vice president for emerging markets.

The next time out, in 2012, OFA had the luxury of an incumbent candidate — meaning no primaries – so it was able to focus more on building infrastructure to provide “a unified experience for our supporters.”

In the future, teams like this will need to consider more big data and analytics advances. “There’s an old adage that all politics is local — I would add that all politics is personal … We need to use big data advances and technology that makes us capable of listening to more people at the same time and to provide a more personal experience for everyone,” he said.

“No one has figured out how to use location-based technology really well … We need to figure that out so in the future we can look at location metrics — where you vote, who you vote with, how you vote. Increasing personalization and awareness of location are part of what we need.”

Asked by Kundra what lessons he had for business IT pros, Slaby warned against getting obsessed with technology for technology’s sake. ”People have to focus on making your business more effective rather than focusing on this new thing. That’s the best defense against the new shiny object syndrome.”

And, there has to be a reset on thinking as well. “We see inbound cases not as a bucket of things to process but of opportunities for voter-initiated contact,” he said. “We had 6 million people coming to us — it’s an opportunity, not something we have to weather.

After the election, OFA team members have turned up at a number of tech events including Amazon’s  AWS: Reinvent conference in November and OFA CTO Harper Reed talked to GigaOM’s Derrick Harris last year about his work on the effort.

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• A near-term outlook for big data
• How to Make Cloud Computing Greener
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space

It’s become a truism to say that data is the new gold –but that doesn’t mean there are easy answers about where to store this gold. For now, many corporate customers will hold back on full cloud computing adoption until they’re convinced that they can move their data off a given cloud as easily as they put it there in the first place. Face it: fear of vendor lock-in is not limited to the on-premises IT world and it’s time enlightened vendors get this problem in hand.

The advent of cloud computing should make it easy to mix and match services from multiple vendors within a cloud and to let data flow in and out of parts of the clouds as needed. But that’s not necessarily the reality now.

“When you move to cloud, you should be increasing your choices, not decreasing them. You don’t buy three on-premises apps but you can use three services from three vendors in the cloud,” said Robert Jenkins, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Sigma, the Zurich-based cloud provider.

Bill Gerhardt, director of Cisco Systems’ internet solutions group’s service provider practice, agreed. “We need to sort out data portability. Customers ask: ‘If I give you all this data, how do I retrieve that data if I want to go somewhere else? Many cloud companies don’t have a clear exit route.”

It’s a fact of life: Cloud vendors have a vested interest in making it drop-dead simple and cheap to put your data on their respective clouds. If you don’t believe that just witness the price war that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are waging on cloud storage. Those vendors obviously hope once your data is in their grasp, they can up-sell you on pricier higher-level services. And, they don’t necessarily see the value in making the return trip so easy and that’s what has people spooked.

“It’s not just privacy and security. It’s also — if I change my mind or it doesn’t work out, how do I move on? This is an issue that’s prevalent in public cloud but in the era of big data it’s becoming quite an acute big problem,” Jenkins said.

“If you put a ton of data up there, the time and expense to manually stream it out can be very painful,” Jenkins added.

It’s fairly straightforward to move things off a bare-bones infrastructure as a platform. But not so easy when higher-end services get layered atop the platform. Even Amazon fans worry that the edition of Amazon’s Simple Workflow Service and other add ons create barriers to exit.

There have been the requisite attempts to build standards to neutralize cloud lock-in but to date not much has happened on that front.

There aren’t easy answers to this problem but Jenkins, Gerhardt and I will discuss it, along with data privacy and other concerns at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure: Data conference in New York March 20-21.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Moyan_Brenn

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• A near-term outlook for big data
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data

Here’s something to ponder for those who don’t see Google Compute Engine as ready for primetime: RightScale will start reselling and providing first-line support of the Google public cloud infrastructure. This is big news. RightScale prides itself on providing cross-cloud monitoring, alerts and management — for Amazon Web Services, for Rackspace, for HP Cloud and now Google Compute Engine or GCE. RightScale also works across private and hybrid cloud environments — an important consideration for financial services and other companies still wary of deploying in shared public cloud environments.

“People can come to us for onboarding and for full 24 /7 support to add to [support options] that Google just offered,” RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said in an interview. In fact, Google last week announced its first formalized tiered support offerings for GCE. RightScale can also help companies design and architect their applications.

“That means a company can come to us as a one stop shop and buy Google compute time as well as RightScale in one package,” Crandell said. The news comes a week after Amazon announced its own OpsWorks cloud configuration and management tool that competes with some of what RightScale offers, but Crandell said the GCE deal just continues RightScale’s strategy of supporting all the major cloud platforms.

It also means that a customer can get a single dashboard for all of its cloud deployments.

“OpsWorks is a validation that something more is needed atop these cloud infrastructure platforms.It does overlap with RightScale but it’s a single-cloud solution and our experience with customers is that they’re increasingly concerned about supporting multiple options,” he said.

It’s true that AWS is the 800-lb. gorilla in public cloud infrastructure. But it is also true that more and better competition is coming online all the time — from Rackspace, HP and other OpenStack players, as well as more cloud options from telcos and legacy hosting players.

That, plus issues with Amazon’s US-East data center farm, means more companies are evaluating multi-cloud options. While some may not see GCE, which officially launched in June, as wet behind the ears, conventional wisdom holds that Google is one of a handful of companies that can compete with AWS on sheer scale.

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• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

When Paul Biggar was an engineer working on Mozilla’s Javascript engine, he hated the slow-as-molasses code testing process. “Sometimes it took 15 hours and I spent a year thinking about how I would do it better.”

So Biggar co-founded CircleCI with Allen Rohner in 2011 to offer continuous integration (the CI in CircleCI) and code testing as a service. The founders like to call it the “Heroku for testing.”

As of now, the San Francisco startup has $1.5 million in seed money from investors including Heroku founder James Lindenbaum, SV Angel, 500 Startups,  Kissmetrics’  co-founder Hiten Shah, and Slicehost founder Jason Seats. The news was disclosed in the company blog on Monday.

CircleCI offers a commercial (e.g. paid) software-as-a-service platform that competes with Jenkins, a popular open source tool — which requires a separate Jenkins server — and newcomers like Wercker, another SaaS CI tool, which won GigaOM Structure Europe’s Launchpad competition last fall, and which picked up $1 million in seed funding last month.

Biggar says CircleCI focuses on boosting developer productivity. When developers face a particularly knotty problem they can directly tap into CircleCI’s resources to see what’s going on with their code. “They can command-line right into our VM and see what’s happening,” he said in a recent interview.

The company has 6 employees now and the new funding will enable it to staff up, add more features, and to scale out its platform for more and bigger workloads.

“We offer parallelism to run your tests across multiple machines. Now we can do 8 machines and we’ll add the ability to slide it across 64 machines,” Biggar said.

It’s a hot market and one that CircleCI will not have to itself. Besides Jenkins and Wercker, other contenders include Austrian startup Codeship (once known as Railsonfire), Travis CI.

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• How devops can reduce cycle times
• Continuous delivery and the world of devops
• A near-term outlook for big data

In what will no doubt be just one in a series of security-related news blasts coming out of the RSA Conference this week, Box is unveiling a new set of features for its business-class cloud storage and file-share offering on Monday.

One example of the new Box security features is a tool to allow account administrators to block individual users from sharing a document or documents or creating folders outside the company, said Whitney Bouck, GM of Enterprise for the Los Altos, Calif., company.

Also new from Box:

• Device pinning: Lets administrators authorize a specific device for Box, making it eligible to receive and view company documents.
• Integration with Samsung KNOX mobile device management: All of Samsung’s upcoming mobile devices will ship with KNOX MDM which enables them to run dual personas: One device will support both a work and a personal profile for a given user. The work persona integrates and runs with Box applications. If the owner leaves the company, just that data will be wiped clean.
• Support for CipherCloud and Code Green Networks data loss protection: Box already integrated with ProofPoint on DLP, now it adds CipherCloud and Code Green to its roster.
• Integration with GoodData: This tie-in gives customers a dashboard across multiple applications — now including Box.

Box is making a big effort to solve what some think is the unsolvable bring your own device (BYOD) problem. Companies want employees to use their devices of choice but also want to control what they do with those devices. IT’s nightmare scenario is an accountant emailing herself work documents to a Gmail or Hotmail account or uploading them to Dropbox where they disappear from IT view and control. That kind of stuff happens all the time and poses huge compliance and risk issues.

A crowded cloud file-share-and-sync field

Box competes with Accellion, Egnyte, OwnCloud and others that focus on cloud-based file sync, share and store,  but also with bigger, broader companies that are adding similar capabilities to their own roster — hello Salesforce.com, Microsoft et al.  Those are tough straits to navigate and Box relies on partnerships with big enterprise companies – IBM, Oracle etc.– to boost its credibility in large accounts. But many of those same companies have their own competitive offerings as well.

Box has raised a ton of venture capital but it remains unclear how many of its claimed 15 million users actually move beyond the freemium version. A recent article in Forbes raised some eyebrows when it reported that 3 percent of those 15 million are paying customers. A Box spokesman would not verify that number but did say the company sees 40 percent annual revenue growth.

At some point, Box will have to talk about profitability, not just revenue gains.

Upcoming: Structure:Data, Mar. 20-21, 2013, New York, Register by March 1 and save $200! More upcoming conferences.

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• New challenges for the IT organization
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Hotmail and Outlook.com e-mail services are down again for many customers and have been for several hours, according to Twitter reports and Microsoft’s own Twitter Support account.

@ronan_kelly We are aware the Hotmail/Outlook services are down and doing our best to fix it. See spr.ly/6010nTnk for updates. ^KLM—
Microsoft Support (@MicrosoftHelps) February 25, 2013

This is just more bad news for the popular Hotmail email service that suffered a big snafu on January 8, and folks don’t have much of a sense of humor about it.  Indeed some GigaOM commenters say the problems have persisted for them since that time — all the while the Microsoft status page registering no issue.  The UK’s IT Pro reported on the latest issue here, laying the blame on the snafu on the ongoing migration of Hotmail users over to Outlook.com.

An outage is definitely not good but  what’s really troubling here, as ITPro points out, is that the Hotmail/Outlook.com status pages reflect no problem at all. If cloud service purveyors want customers to come aboard, they need to provide a real window into what’s going on — the good and the bad. And this lack of disclosure — except thank goodness for Twitter — is unacceptable.

Grrrrrr come on Outlook it's been 3 hours now sort it out. #outlook #hotmail—
Emma Akbareian (@emmaakb) February 25, 2013

I will update this story when Microsoft responds to request for comment.

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• Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud
• A near-term outlook for big data
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo

There’s probably no better way to open up big data to the masses than making it accessible and manipulatable — if that’s a word — via Microsoft Excel. And that ability gets closer to reality Monday with the beta release of Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows. The product of a year-old collaboration between Hortonworks and Microsoft is now downloadable.  General availability will come later in the second quarter, said Shawn Connolly, Hortonworks’ VP of corporate strategy,  in an interview.

The combination should  make it easier to integrate data from SQL Server and Hadoop and to funnel all that into Excel for charting and pivoting and all the tasks Excel is good at, Connolly added.

He stressed that this means the very same Apache Hadoop distribution will run on Linux and Windows. An analogous Hortonworks Data Platform for Windows Azure is still in the works.

Microsoft opted to work with Hortonworks rather than to continue its own “Dryad” project, as GigaOM’s Derrick Harris reported a year ago. Those with long memories will recall this isn’t the first time that Microsoft relied on outside expertise for database work. The guts of early SQL Server came to the company via Sybase.

The intersection of structured SQL and  unstructured Hadoop universes is indeed a hotspot, as Derrick Harris reported last week, with companies including Hadoop rivals Cloudera and EMC Greenplum all working that fertile terrain. That means Hortonworks/Microsoft face stiff competition. This topic, along with real-time data tracking, will be discussed at GigaOM’s Structure Data conference in New York on March 20-21.

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• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• A near-term outlook for big data

It was another busy week in cloud. Amazon continued its enterprise push with the delivery of its promised Redshift data warehouse service and announced OpsWorks, an application configuration and management tool based on the Chef framework which competes to some degree with third party tools like Rundesk, Scalr and Rightscale. 

Shocker:  cloud computing can increase headcount

One fear among IT people is that the move to cloud computing will mean job cuts. But that may not really be the case, according to a new Rackspace-backed survey. Among 1,300 U.K. and U.S. companies surveyed by the Manchester Business School, found that more than half (62  percent) said they actually increased headcount or boosted wages and bonuses using IT savings they realized from their move.

“We really think [cloud deployment] can create jobs under the right circumstances,” Rackspace CTO John Engates said in an interview. “It leads to innovation and that … opens up the floodgates and gives people access to tools for more innovation — it’s a virtuous cycle.”

Of course,”if you’re the guy who punches the button on the server every day, you might have to retool your skill set,” he added.

Cloudtech has more on the survey.

Best and worst of times for Microsoft Azure storage

Microsoft Azure storage had an up and down week: On Tuesday, it beat out Amazon S3, HP, Rackspace, HP and Google as the best cloud storage provider after performance testing by Nasuni. On Friday suffered an embarassing worldwide outage after letting an SSL certificate expire.

Rackspace moves to tiered pricing

On Friday, Rackspace cut prices on its content deliver network (CDN) services and said it would move to tiered price model for other services. Most reporters (including yours truly) saw this as a competitive move against Amazon Web Services.

Rackspace CMO Suaad Sait said the move does not signal a race to the bottom in cloud service pricing. “We’re not trying to start any crazy price war,” he said in an interview.

He characterized both the CDN price cut and the tiering move as a response to customer input. “If you look at our bandwidth pricing, it was out of whack compared to what surrounded it.

Net, net, he said, there has been no change from Rackspace’s “fanatical support” mantra nor its goal of being the proven premium provider. 

More cloud news from around the web

Storage kingpin Seagate joined the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Foundation. OpenStack is an open-source cloud effort pushed by some 150 vendors.  OpenCompute was initiated by Facebook last year to push the design of standard, energy-efficient hardware for webscale data centers.

U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel says the federal government has barely scratched the surface of cloud-big data convergence opportunities. 

Telecompaper, citing a new KPMG Cloud Monitor survey, reports that more than a third of German companies surveyed use cloud computing.

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That’s life, as Frank Sinatra once sang. Microsoft Azure Storage was named the world’s best public cloud storage service on Tuesday, then crashes and burns on Friday.

Here are a few of the posts to the Windows Azure status dashboard: 

22-Feb-13  ·  9:45 PM UTC

Access Control v2, Service Bus, WindowsAzure.com and WebSites services are impacted by Storage service degradation worldwide. We are actively validating the recovery steps to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

22-Feb-13  ·  8:44 PM UTC

We are experiencing an issue with Storage Worldwide and this is impacting all dependent services. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

Folks on Twitter and elsewhere attributed the snafu to the lack of a new SSL certificate. If such a certificate does expire, users cannot authenticate against their various services: No authentication, no access.

I’ve asked Microsoft for comment and will update this when they do. Whatever the cause of the snafu, it’s been an up-and-down week for Windows Azure. On Tuesday, Nasuni, a company that manages cloud storage for business customers, said Windows Azure storage outperformed all four other cloud services — including Amazon S3 —  in rigorous performance testing. Despite Azure’s performance, Nasuni said it would stick to S3 as its primary supplier, citing its maturity. Looks like that may habe been the right call.

Windows #Azure Blob Storage service is down due certificate issue. Check update at Windows Azure Service Dashboard:
windowsazure.com/en-us/support/…—
Avkash Chauhan (@avkashchauhan) February 22, 2013

Well, as Sinatra sang: “Riding high in April, shot down in May.” Web time just accelerates the process.

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As if to prove Amazon isn’t the only price chopper in cloud, Rackspace on Friday cut prices on a key cloud service and is starting to roll out tiered pricing for other services.

First off, it sliced the cost of its Content Delivery Network (CDN) services by a third from $0.18 to  $0.12 per GB. The new, lower price matches Amazon CloudFront CDN on-demand per-GB pricing for the first 10 TB per month of out-bound data transfer. CloudFront prices drop after that.  Amazon does not publish its reserved pricing for CloudFront. CDNs route traffic around the web to put it closer to prospective users thus reducing latency and page load times.

Secondly, the new tiered price structure will first apply to Cloud Files Object storage with volume discounts ranging from $0.10 per GB per month for up to 1 TB, then falling to $0.075 per month or lower when storage surpasses a petabyte (see chart.)

For comparison, AWS S3 storage prices are lower, but, as Rackspace likes to note, Amazon also charges for PUT, POST, LIST, HEAD, GET and DELETE requests and Rackspace does not.

This move shows that Rackspace, with its new OpenStack-based cloud services, is bound and determined to compete with the biggest of the big cloud players. In the past the company has seemed reluctant to compete on price alone, instead invoking its “maniacal support” mantra to justify a premium.”

“Rackspace has always responded to AWS price cuts with statements like ‘but we have great service.’    Looks like the market is demanding the cuts,” said David Linthicum, CTO and founder of consultancy Blue Mountain Labs and a GigaOM PRO analyst.

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• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

If you didn’t know any better, you might not believe that Hewlett-Packard came this close to unloading its PC business a year and a half ago.  On the company’s first quarter earnings call, CEO Meg Whitman gave a pretty strong impression that she is downright devoted to the Personal Systems Group (PSG), despite the fact that revenue fell 8 percent from the year-ago period.

Revenue for commercial or business PCs fell 4 percent, and for consumer machines it was off 13 percent, but Whitman saw the bright side.

“Against the backdrop of overall PC market contraction in the fourth calendar quarter, we gained 1.4 points of market share in PCs over the prior year, including a 4.6 point gain in the U.S.,” Whitman said Thursday night. She also cited the company’s new EliteBook Revolve convertible, ElitePad 900 as well as its new Google Chrome-based notebook as reason for optimism going forward.

After Whitman’s opening remarks, Raymond James analyst Brian Alexander, pressed her on PSG, noting that its profits were off  50 percent year over year.

“We are committed to this business,” Whitman said in response. “We are going to compete on differentiation, whether that is form factors, increased focus on mobility, a multi-OS strategy, multi-chip strategy, frankly relevant to various industries, we’ve got great response to our ElitePad 900 that can be customized by industry and then services.”

She also acknowledged that pricing will be “problematic and quite competitive… but we think we can manage that.”

HP has wavered on whether it would keep or jettison various businesses over the past year. Its proxy statement in December noted that the company would consider selling off or divesting some businesses as needed. So, given that the company had broached –then retracted a possible PC business spin-off once before– that got tongues wagging again.

This news comes just weeks after PC and server rival Dell announced plans to go private – news which prompted HP to put out its own comments inviting Dell’s customers to avoid the uncertainty of a leveraged buyout and jump ship to Hewlett-Packard.

Given Whitman’s statement of support for this margin-stressed business unit, HP is either in it for the foreseeable future, or talking it up to enhance its value to a potential suitor. Hey, you’ve got to wonder, right?

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If you use Google Compute Engine or Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, or BigQuery —  there are new support options at your disposal.

Google is offering a new tiered structure that includes a basic free level offering online documentation, forums and billing support; a Silver tier that adds best practices, email access to the support team for $150 per month; and a Gold level which layers 24X7 phone support and app development or architecture consultation atop all the rest starting at $400 per month. And then there’s the super-duper Platinum support that Google won’t even tell you about on its blog — you have to call in for details.

Before now, “premier” users of the Google App Engine platform as a service had access to advanced support, but users of the other products had to tap Google Groups and Stack Overflow for support. That sort of informal structure is not copacetic with most IT buyers.

The new options, announced on the Google Enterprise Blog Thursday, show that Amazon isn’t the only big cloud provider that’s trying to lure business customers into the fold. While Amazon Web Services (AWS)  is by far the leader in public cloud services, Google is one of a handful of vendors that even skeptics think can provide comparable compute and storage scale. The fact that third-party cloud providers like Cloudscaling — are adding support for Google Compute Engine APIs in addition to Amazon’s also shows that folks are looking for an alternative — or at least a backup — to AWS.

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We know that 3-D printers can spit out products from jewelry to digital devices. Then we started hearing about technology that could print out human organs. The concept is proven but the technology remains too expensive for most mortals. Now, a group of hackers at Biocurious  has built a device that can print out cells. Its cost? About $150, according to this MIT Review report.

That means you too, if you so desire, can churn out a sheet of E.coli bacteria using a machine built of some custom-built parts and recycled  inkjet cartridges and CD-drive components. And, before you panic, remember only a few strains of E.coli are harmful.

The initial model works just in two dimensions, printing out sheets of fluorescent E. coli cells that read “I  heart BioCurious.” But, according to the story, project organizer Patrik D’haeseleer’s longer-term plan is:

“… to print plant cells and build photosynthetic structures, although this is a long-term project that will be much harder than squirting E. Coli on a sheet. He imagines applications could include creating energy-producing surfaces on everyday objects. But really, D’haeseleer, mostly wants to print a leaf to see if he can do it.”

It’s projects like this that could bring the cost of big-time bio-printing down and perhaps give birth to a vibrant industry.  Fostering a sustainable food supply is one huge problem that bio-printing could help address, as GigaOM’s Katie Fehrenbacher reported Thursday. For example, startup Modern Meadow  hopes to use similar technology to print out “synthetic lab-grown meats.”   And there’s still more about the possibility of printing food in space.

Of course, any time you put make technology widely and cheaply available, the opportunity for abuse rises. One thing to think about: How many people really should be able to mass produce harmful strains of E.Coli (or other potential pathogens?)

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If you still don’t think Amazon is serious about winning enterprise accounts for Amazon Web Services, you need to get over it. The public cloud leader wants to be the preferred cloud for even the largest and most security-obsessed companies. In fact, attracting enterprise users — and reassuring C-level execs about the safety and reliability of Amazon’s cloud — was a primary rationale for last November’s inaugural AWS: Reinvent.

But until recently, the hiring spree underlying this effort — Amazon has been seeking (and in some cases poaching) high-level sales engineers from enterprise IT companies like Sungard, HP, Oracle and EMC for a year or so — was a bit under the radar, as GigaOM reported in November.

Can you sell to a CIO? AWS wants you

What’s new, as Business Insider reported this week, is that it’s now out in the open; Amazon has posted lots of listings for enterprise-focused sales reps and sales managers. BI claimed 75 — I didn’t count them all, but the list is pretty rich. As of Thursday morning, AWS was seeking enterprise sales managers for New York, Dallas, Herndon, Virg., San Francisco, Irvine, Calif., and Seattle, among other areas.  As one listing puts it:

“As an Enterprise Sales leader you will have the exciting opportunity to help drive the growth and shape the future of an emerging technology. Your responsibilities will include driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in enterprise accounts within the local geography. Your responsibilities will include building and managing a highly talented sales team focused on driving revenue, adoption, and market penetration in the Enterprise market. The ideal candidate will possess a technology sales management background that enables them to lead a team of senior enterprise sale representatives with engagements at the CXO level.”

Brian McCallian, founder and CEO of New York-based Bronze Drum Consulting, sees a tangible change in his AWS interactions of late. “What I see as a difference from 2012 is also the kinds of people AWS is hiring … the new Enterprise Account Manager and AWS Solution Architect I met with this week and last are more focused on eliminating organizational barriers that limit consumption of Cloud Services. And the focus area seems to be enabling Direct Connect for enterprise to simplify how enterprise connects to AWS.”

Startups and enterprises: two different animals

The fact that an established enterprise is, by definition, not a startup,  illustrates Amazon’s conundrum. Selling services to developers in startups is one thing and AWS was built on that business. But selling into an established enterprise with existing IT and with an internal bureaucracy is a whole other matter.

For all of AWS’s momentum — it claims enterprise accounts including Nasdaq and systems integration partners like  Accenture, Deloitte and Capgemini — some still doubt that big companies will trust mission critical loads to what they see as shared, and therefore insecure, infrastructure.

Amazon has worked to ease these concerns with new enterprise support options; with Virtual Private Cloud, which cordons off a section of Amazon’s cloud for a given company’s use; and management tools like Trusted Advisor.

And then there are such enterprise-y services as RedShift data warehousing, the Data Pipeline data consolidation service, and any number of new big data and other services promised by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels at Structure: Europe last year. The Register picked up on yet another job listing indicating more big data goodies to come from AWS. Perhaps some sort of big data managed service similar to DynamoDB would be in order.

Christopher Smith, cloud analyst at Cloud Technology Partners, a Boston-based systems integrator, says corporate customers are warming up to AWS and are getting more sophisticated about the notion of putting IT loads outside the firewall. “”Obviously [AWS is] the elephant in public cloud space. Clients are hesitant because of associated compliance and governance risk, but we’re seeing more openness due to key enabling technologies, while at the same time a cultural shift and greater understanding that just because you can see and touch the box, doesn’t mean its secure.”

But that new-found understanding comes as more cloud providers enter the scene. Going forward, Amazon will face more enterprise-focused competition for those business accounts.  EMC chief strategist Paul Maritz will doubtless speak about Pivotal Labs’ take on cloud infrastructure at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure:Data conference in New York, March 20-21.  And, as Rackspace, HP and Red Hat gear up their OpenStack-based clouds — IBM will likely say more about its OpenStack plans at the upcoming OpenStack Summit — one thing is for sure: Amazon may be the biggest cloud seeking enterprise customers, but it won’t be alone. And all of those rivals sport enterprise relationships that Amazon still craves.

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Server-side flash memory is a big thing. It puts fast storage right next to the compute nodes, which speeds things up, but that model is not particularly virtualization friendly. Startup PernixData, once known as ProximData, wants to change that — it aspires to be what it calls “the VMware of server flash.”

The company co-founders know from VMware. CEO Poojan Kumar once headed up data product initiatives at the virtualization giant, where he worked on vFabric Data Director and other projects. Co-founder and company CTO Satyam Vaghani was principal engineer at VMware, where he worked on the vSphere kernel and created the company’s VMFS clustered file system.

PernixData’s software, now in beta, will aggregate all of a customer’s server-side flash into one shareable pool. “We make a flash virtualization platform that sits between your apps and the primary storage system and acts as a read/write acceleration tier for all the data in motion,” Vaghani said in an interview.

No rip and replace

The software itself runs on the servers — actually within the hypervisors. It only works with VMware initially but Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM support is promised. That means customers don’t have to replace existing servers or their existing primary storage, and that’s an attractive proposition for many businesses that don’t want to rip out and replace perfectly good hardware.

PernixData claims its software-only approach to this problem is unique. That may be but many other vendors are also attacking the issues associated with server-side flash performance, says Howard Marks, founder and chief scientist of Deep Storage LLC. “There are 22 products in my database that in one way or another use solid state flash to accelerate access to shared storage and make things go faster,” he said.

Making server-side flash virtualization friendly

Legacy giants like HP, NetApp, and EMC, all have their takes on the problem but none of those products fit very well into a virtualized world, analysts said.

“If you put flash in a server, then flash is owned by that server,” Marks said. And that causes problems for companies that want to use Vmotion to move their workloads around. PernixData writes the data to SSDs in at least two servers, which means that if one goes down, the surviving server can flush that data to where it needs to be, said Marks.

Marks does give PernixData credit, which received an unspecified amount of A Series funding from Lightspeed Ventures, for its software-only focus, noting that last year Dell spoke of a similar strategy called Fluid Cache, based on technology acquired from RNA Networks, but it’s not on the market yet.

But as Marks pointed out, there are many other ways to skin the server flash storage cat. “Flash is a complicated space and there are so many startups and technologies it’s hard to see where they all fit. Pernix seems to be the only software-only way to unlock server-side flash to be more scalable but there are many other companies working to enhance flash,” said Stuart Miniman, Wikibon analyst.

 QLogic, for example, bakes software into its adapters that take PCIE server side flash storage or other SSDs and turns them into a SAN device, Miniman said. And, GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham outlined Jeda Networks’ take on the problem earlier this week.

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In the current cloud computing landscape, nothing is certain but change. And Appsecute, a company that was banking on providing a single dashboard across multiple platforms as a service (PaaSes), is changing as well. The focus of its new product is to provide devops folks with a single view into the real-time status of all their services as well as a Facebook-like timeline for their projects.

Anyone who does development work is probably using a half dozen or more services and spends a good part of her day toggling back and forth among various screens. Appsecute itself was using 14 different services, according to CEO and co-founder Mark Cox. That’s a lot of toggling.

That decentralized information glut is also inefficient in other ways. “Just because a support request comes in doesn’t mean you should interrupt all your developers,” Cox said. Getting the right alerts to the right person and then logging that this person is on the case in a timeline means the rest of the developers keep their heads down on what they were doing.

The timeline for devops goes to beta now with connectors included for Github code repository and versioning system, Zendesk  and Tender Support customer service software; CircleCI’s continuous integration tool; and AppFog, Cloudfoundry.com, and Heroku PaaSes. Appsecute also promises connectors will come for New Relic, Amazon Web Services, the full Cloud Foundry, Travis CI, Jenkins CI, Team City, Pingdom, PagerDuty, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, SNMP, Nodejitsu, EngineYard, OpenShift, Rackspace, Nagios, Sendgrid, Mailchimp and Cloudability.

What’s happening in cloud echoes what went on in the earlier distributed computing model. As  companies deployed multiple on-premises applications, they soon came to want a single way to view and (hopefully) manage all that IT. That led to the rise of systems and applications management consoles and other windows into their myriad services.

So expect more of these products in the cloud realm as well.

“A number of social stream services have aspects of what we do, particularly the timeline side, [while] other services focus on graphs and metrics. We want to specialize in putting events into the context of the software applications and components that devops care about,” Cox said.

Indeed, adding a specialized social networking layer to devops tools is not new. Wercker, a  Dutch startup that offers a SaaS-based continuous integration tool  (and which won GigaOM’s Structure Europe Launchpad competition) also touts its Facebook-like timeline as a major plus for devops.

Providing  the proverbial “single pane of glass” to all important services is an attractive proposition, but it would seem to me that inclusion of AWS into the mix had better come quickly.

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So here’s an interesting tidbit. Nasuni, which manages cloud storage for small and midsized businesses, ran a set of exhaustive tests to assess the performance, availability and scalability of five major cloud storage providers. And the winner? Microsoft Windows Azure. Yup. Not Amazon S3, but Azure Blob storage.

“We ran uptime tests and other tests and the long and short of it is that all the vendors got better, but Azure just leapfrogged. It was the fastest, had the best availability and uptime and was the only provider to never register an error,” Connor Fee, VP of marketing for Natick, Mass.-based Nasuni said in an interview.

This according to Nasuni’s new State of Cloud Storage 2013 Industry Report, which also evaluated Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Rackspace storage. Nasuni is a pretty good judge of cloud storage provider performance since it assesses the best of the services to use for its customers’ data.  It views the various cloud storage players much as EMC or NetApp views hard drives — a piece of its overall service.

Azure’s no.1, but Nasuni still dubs Amazon S3 as its primary backend

Now before we get all wrapped around our axles about this glowing Azure endorsement, it’s important to note that Nasuni still counts on Amazon as its primary storage supplier and will continue to use Azure as a secondary supplier in some cases.

So if Azure is so great, why stick with Amazon? “One major thing we evaluate is maturity and experience in the market and Amazon still clearly has the most experience and is the most mature player in this space,” Fee said.

So how to explain Microsoft’s vast improvement? Fee, refers to this Microsoft blog post, which outlines a major upgrade of Azure’s storage layer, as a possible reason. Basically, Microsoft upgraded its storage layer, from a 1 gig to a 10 gig network and from a hierarchial to a flat network. That means it’s faster handling myriad small files.

Microsoft honed performance on handling lots of itty-bitty files

Think of it this way: Every time you want to store something to the cloud, you have alert the cloud that you’re about to write to it; then you write to it; then it acknowledges receipt of what you’ve written. “There’s a lot of back-and-forth there,” said Fee. “With very big files, if you have a very fast network connection that’s usually enough. But with small files, all of that chatter matters, so whatever Azure did, they got really, really good at handling small I/O,”

It’s also important to note that this year’s report differs from Nasuni’s 2102 testing so year over year comparisons aren’t all that useful, although Nasuni was impressed with Azure even then.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Gutiérrez G.

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Joachim Kempin has some ideas about how Microsoft, his former employer, can achieve greatness again and they go beyond his already widely publicized call for the company to deep-six CEO Steve Ballmer.

Kempin, who left Microsoft in 2002, was the exec who ran the company’s cash cow OEM business. He was the guy who cut the deals with hardware makers who bundled Microsoft Windows and Office on their machines. Those negotiations were by most accounts brutal, leaving hardware partners like Dell and HP reeling. They also led some to call Kempin Microsoft’s Dark Angel. And now he’s peddling a book on Microsoft and is penning a series of blogs for ReadWrite.

Here are the some of his suggestions for Microsoft from his first post:

1: Microsoft needs a tech guru. 

Kempin writes:

“The company needs a bold and charismatic executive with bona fide technical credentials to head all of its product divisions. This dynamic leader must not only serve as the main spokesperson for all products, but he or she must also inspire and command the respect of developers. (Unfortunate Ray Ozzie did not survive in this role, and the one who came after him, Craig Mundie, was from the beginning the wrong person.)”

No kidding. This is true, and it was also true when Bill Gates started stepping back from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Even when he dubbed Ozzie his successor as chief software architect in 2006, many wondered why he didn’t go for a younger, new-age thinker; a response to the Google guys. No one doubted Ozzie’s tech vision, but by that time Microsoft had already “missed” the internet and had to make up for lost time. Ozzie was of the same generation as Gates and Ballmer. The feeling was Microsoft really needed an infusion of new blood. Ozzie was new to Microsoft but he was rooted in the same client-server world they came from. For what it’s worth, Microsoft is bleeding many of its long-time execs with Robbie Bach, J Allard and Steven Sinofsky all exiting over the past two years.

2: Go easy on the enterprise schtick

Kempin said Microsoft’s focus on enterprise customers was lucrative but hurt the company with consumers.

“… its reputation as an innovative tech leader deteriorated in the public eye. Once cool, today Microsoft is a well-oiled money machine, but the contagious excitement around the time when Windows 95 launched is long gone …. That torch has passed to the Apples, Googles, Twitters, and Facebooks of this world.”

My take: I’m not sure anyone ever thought of Microsoft as “cool.” The big flash-bang Windows 95 event was fun; but cool? Hardly. Jay Leno hosted and even in 1995 Leno was your father’s talk show host. Even many language and compiler geeks found Borland a much more amenable culture than Microsoft.

It’s true that Microsoft has gotten too enterprise-oriented. In fact, it appears hell-bent to replicate Oracle and IBM at a time when many question the relevance of those companies in a consumer IT focused world.  Even Microsoft Surface is painted with an “Office” paintbrush. Exceptions to this rule: Xbox and Kinect — which probably doesn’t carry the Microsoft brand on purpose. The reason companies update Windows and Office is to stay legal, not because of any compelling new features. Sad but true.

3: Microsoft needs to go back to school.

Kempin writes:

“The US school system is antiquated and needs to be brought into the 21st century. This presents an opportunity for Microsoft to engage and help teachers, parents, and children to excel.”

Assuming here that excel is not a pun, he has a point. Most students use Google Docs (and most of the students I know personally are using it on MacBooks.) And when is the last time you heard a student (or anyone) request a Dell (or HP or Acer) laptop running Windows?

Kempin thinks Microsoft (with help from its big cool philanthropic friend The Gates Foundation) should just underwrite a complete re-do of technology in the nation’s schools. It would be a bold move. But Microsoft still needs to make products that people want to buy, not products that they accept because they have to.

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For those who continue to view Amazon Web Services as bare-bones infrastructure, the company’s new OpsWorks may come as a shock.

The service, based on technology Amazon acquired when it bought Peritor last year,  lets AWS users configure and manage their applications more easily without resorting to custom tools. According to Amazon, OpsWorks handles rollback, patch management, auto scaling and auto healing.

The service — free to users of EC2 and other AWS services — takes on some of the tasks traditionally done using Scalr, Rundeck or Opscode Chef or Puppet (see disclosure.) Although most of those other tools do higher level work than what OpsWorks promises. And, as one GigaOM reader commented, OpsWorks also takes aim at some of the tasks that Rightscale takes care of for AWS customers.

But Dan Belcher, co-founder of Stackdriver,a Boston-based startup that works with AWS, said it is actually a boon to both customers and many partners in the Amazon ecosystem. “Customers have struggled since the birth of AWS to come up with a reasonable way of organizing their resources. Everyone does it differently,” he said.

“Because the taxonomy of OpsWorks is available by API  customers can create dashboards and policies to manage their resources. Because of that API, we literally woke up this morning and supported OpsWorks,” he added. There’s more here on the Stackdriver blog.

According to Amazon’s press statement OpsWorks Amazon can:

• Create a Stack. A stack contains the set of Amazon EC2 instances and instance blueprints, called layers, used to launch and manage these instances (e.g., all the PHP servers and the MySQL database used for your production web application). Apps, user permissions, and resources are scoped and controlled in the context of the stack.
• Define the layers of your stack. A layer defines how to set up and configure a set of instances and related resources such as volumes and Elastic IP addresses. AWS OpsWorks includes layers for common technologies such as Ruby, PHP, HAProxy, Memcached, and MySQL, and makes it easy to extend existing layers or create custom layers. Lifecycle events can be used to trigger Chef recipes on each instance to perform specific configuration tasks. For example, the deploy event could trigger a script to create a database table for a new app.
• Assign instances to your layers.Create instances in configurations you choose, including instance size, Availability Zone, volume creation and RAID configuration, EIP, security group, and operating system. Start your instances, or apply them to auto scaling groups.
• Define and deploy your apps. To define an app, tell AWS OpsWorks where to find your code and specify additional deployment tasks, such as database configuration. AWS OpsWorks supports a variety of repositories such as Git, SVN, HTTP, and Amazon S3. When you deploy the app, AWS OpsWorks will pull code from your repository, place it on the instances, and run the specified deployment tasks so that your application is properly configured. Afterwards, you can view your app’s deployment logs to review the deployment steps, verify its functionality, and debug any issues.

For a brief intro to OpsWorks, here’s the Amazon video.

The addition of OpsWorks to the AWS repertoire shows how Amazon is serious about adding higher-level and more intricate services to its stack as it hopes to lure more enterprise accounts. Those additions can be a double edged sword — they add functionality that many customers want but are getting from open-source and third-party toolsets. What’s good for AWS and some of its customers is definitely not a plus for some AWS partners.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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