Author: Barb Darrow

Mark Shuttleworth is nothing if not ambitious. How may other tech execs have actually been to space?  Not counting Microsoft alum Charles Simonyi, that would be one: the aforementioned Shuttleworth.

Now Shuttleworth, who used tens of millions of his own dollars to fund Canonical and made it his ambition to entrench Ubuntu Linux on desktops and servers is now launching a full-on assault to put it on your smartphone, your tablet and the computers that run your favorite cloud services via OpenStack.

Taking on the giants

It’s a gutsy bet. He’s basically taking on Google’s Chrome Browser, ChromeOS and Android OS. And then there’s iOS. Not a job for the faint of heart. In a recent interview with GigaOM,  Shuttleworth said a key Ubuntu advantage is that its basic code really does run everywhere from itty-bitty mobile devices to big iron. No Android-Chrome OS divide here.

“The core of Ubuntu that runs on the server is the same as on the phone and that’s a wonderful resonance,” Shuttleworth said. “We’ve done  pioneering work to put server Linux on ARM chips and the core of those ARM chips is the same for servers as it is for smartphones,”  Shuttleworth said.

Admittedly, it’s still early days for running ARM servers in a production environment — my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported that Baidu is doing it — for storage — but few others are. But the need for energy-sipping servers is not going away. And ARM servers address that demand.

As more cloud services get delivered via smartphones and tablets, all that “resonance” could come in handy. But timing may be a problem. Android and Apple iOS, which dominate that smartphone and tablet market now, will be hard to dislodge. If you believe Google Chairman Eric Schmidt — a biased observer — Android Android’s growth rate is, is on track to hit 1 billion downloads within the next 6 to 9 months. And, to further complicate matters, Microsoft seems willing to spend big to build its presence in smartphones and tablets as well. As much money as Shuttleworth has, Microsoft has more.

Seemingly undaunted, Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is getting serious looks from silicon providers, from carriers and from handset makers who are interested in offering it on their devices. He declined to provide names. It is true that Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile assets still worries third-party handset makers who don’t relish the thought of competing with their OS provider, but that doesn’t seem to have slowed Android adoption.

Ubuntu shows strength in cloud

Ubuntu is already a big presence in the cloud by virtue of Amazon Web Services where it is the most popular operating environment on EC2 — at least as measured by the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that people create. “The number of AMIs running Ubuntu is 5 or 6 times as many as Windows or any other operating system,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with Redmonk. One caveat is that people create lots of AMIs that they may not actually use, cautioned The 451 Group analyst Carl Brooks.

And Ubuntu came earlier than many other vendors to the OpenStack party. It’s got a leg up in the enterprise two years ago when  HP named it the lead host and guest OS in HP’s OpenStack cloud. That relationship continues to this day.

Shuttleworth also said Ubuntu’s OpenStack gets tons of interest from telcos and carriers that are rushing to create their own cloud services to better compete with AWS. One theme coming out of the OpenStack Summit last month was that these sleeping giants, many of which offer VMware vCloud Director options that price them out of the market, are finally waking up to the threat that AWS poses to them. And that is something Shuttleworth feels Ubuntu, with Canonical behind it,  can capitalize on.

“We are in a very good position when carriers want to look beyond standing up OpenStack to what the end-user experience is,” he said.

In his view, Ubuntu more than other Linux OpenStack flavors, offers simplicity and power — a claim that other OpenStack players would likely dispute. Linux rivals Red Hat, SUSE and are also all in the mix here. And Nebula’s selling point is its OpenStack controller that makes it easy to plug OpenStack into existing legacy environments. There will be a ton of competition among the OpenStack providers even as they all contend with CloudStack and Eucalyptus options.

Shuttleworth maintains Ubuntu’s advantage, however.

“We really are at the point where you can take a USB with Ubuntu, stick it on 1 to 300 servers and in a short period have a high-availability cloud — compute, storage, and network — up and running that provides a lot of value,” he said. “This is real and it’s helping people get over the conceptual hurdle of moving to cloud. It’s at the point where you can have ten people debating it for a week or you can just go and do it — the cost is low enough and the lessons are valuable enough to make it happen.”

But what about revenue?

There’s one not-so-small hitch here. As many good reviews as Ubuntu Linux has gotten, the revenue or profit picture is about as clear as mud. Canonical’s business model is that customers pay for support and maintenance on free software. But the privately held company won’t say how many people actually pay for any of that. And it doesn’t talk about how much money Shuttleworth has ponied up since founding the company in 2004. The question is whether Canonical (and Ubuntu) could stand on its own without his deep pockets. Face it, it’s hard to take a customer from free to non-free.

When it comes to questions about revenue or profitability, Canonical will only say that customers including PC, phone and tablet manufacturers and big companies that deploy Ubuntu at scale  use Canonical’s paid tools and services to support their server, cloud and client environments.

That may not be enough detail for enterprise buyers who want to know if the vendor they use today will be around next year or the year after. For a company that has such grand plans for a free operating system, Canonical needs to address these questions at some point.

Shuttleworth will be talking about his grand cloud vision at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in London in September, so here’s your chance to ask.

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Xeround is shutting down its free MySQL database service next week. An email went out May 1 alerting customers that they should move their database instance to another service before midnight eastern time May 8 to avoid downtime.

The two paid versions of the MySQL service — which runs on Amazon Web Services; Rackspace, AppFog, Heroku and HP Cloud — were not mentioned in the email.

Cloud vendors who came with an array of free or near-free services on a variety of clouds now appear to be narrowing their focus. AppFog said it was doing just that last week when it said it was dropping Rackspace from its stable of supported clouds.

Xeround could not be reached for comment but rivals are circling — ClearDB and Cloudant posting tweets to woo Xeround users.

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VMware wasn’t kidding early this year when it said it would divest itself of non-core businesses. In March Clearslide bought Sliderocket from VMware. Now Pramati, a technology incubator, is acquiring the assets of WaveMaker, another acquisition that VMware apparently reconsidered. Terms were not disclosed.

Two years ago, VMware purchased WaveMaker and its technology for simplifying the construction of enterprise Java applications and made it part of its SpringSource business unit. As GigaOM’s Derrick Harris wrote at the time, Rod Johnson, who was then head of that business, said Wavemaker made sense because:

” … applications developed with it actually are Spring applications. That means VMware can tightly align WaveMaker and Spring developments to make WaveMaker an even more fulfilling experience, and after simple applications are built using WaveMaker, an organization’s Spring developers can go in and code away to make it work even better. When it comes to developing Java applications, VMware now has something for almost everybody, and it all works together at some level.”

The mystery here is that SpringSource and associated technologies were spun off to the VMware-EMC-founded Pivotal startup. Why WaveMaker was not included is unclear to me. I’ve pinged Pivotal for comment and will update with a response.

Pramati co-founder and president Vijay Pullur said former Wavemaker exec Michael Harper is with his company, which is expanding into cloud infrastructure. WaveMaker technologies could play a roll in an upcoming cloud venture, he said. We’ll be talking about projects like this and what’s new in cloud computing at Structure 2013 in San Francisco in June.

According to the press release announcing the news:

 ”WaveMaker applications are cloud-ready, highly scalable, multi-device, and backed by a strong developer community that has doubled to 35,000 active monthly users over the last two years. With its long heritage of mission-critical Java application development, Pramati expects to accelerate this growth going forward.”

In other words: stay tuned.

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Over the past year, we’ve seen more and more evidence that Amazon sees Amazon Web Services as a real business — not a sideline or distraction. And, as AWS tries to build credibility among enterprise accounts, it’s started to mimic its IT elders by launching a formal partner program and a bona fide conference called AWS: Reinvent. Now it’s drawn up AWS certifications that would, in theory, show that a person has the skills needed to spec out, build, run and manage AWS implementations.

Here’s how AWS lists the three broad job descriptions covered by the certs:

• Solutions Architect: a technical individual who is skilled at designing distributed applications and systems on the AWS platform. A Solution Architect generally has knowledge across a broad array of disciplines, including distributed application architecture, networking, infrastructure, and security.
• SysOps Administrator: a technical individual who is responsible for the operational health of an application on the AWS cloud. A SysOps Administrator has in-depth knowledge of the application or service they operate, including how the application is constructed, deployed, and automated, as well as the controls and monitoring points available.
• Developer: a technical individual who has designed and built an AWS-based application. A Developer has involvement with or responsibility for operating the application on the AWS platform.

Older tech companies — Microsoft, IBM, VMware, Cisco Systems — have long relied on certifications as a way for people — either those inside IT shops or at third-party VARs and integrators (and those seeking jobs in either camp) — to show that they have what it takes to succeed working with specific technologies. As with those programs, AWS candidates must pass an exam to get their credentials. Testing will be administered by Kryterion.

Some of the more valuable certs in recent years include the VMware Certified Professional (VCP), Cisco Certified International Expert (CCIE) and Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP). And Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), a more vendor-agnostic certification, is also a top draw for potential hiring companies.

In another nod to the IT concerns of enterprise accounts, AWS also launched a security blog this week. The news comes just after Microsoft opened up Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities in Azure that are more directly competitive with AWS and Google gears up for the public release of Google Compute Engine, which I expect will happen at Google I/O in May. While AWS dominates public cloud infrastructure by virtue of its head start, many enterprise customers in particular will likely test out these rivals as well — nobody wants cloud lock-in.

Still, given the traction AWS has among startups and increasingly at bigger businesses, I’d expect to see these certifications cropping up in lots of job postings going forward.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Mega Pixel

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Those wacky IBM scientists are at it again.

Researchers at the IT giant’s Almaden Lab in San Jose, Calif.  worked for ten days moving 10,000  individual atoms around on a microscopic surface to build the images of a boy and his interactions. It takes some massive gear to move 10,000 tiny atoms around and IBM’s lab had just the thing, a 2-ton scanning tunnelling microscope (STM).

One goal, according IBM, is to inspire kids to study and pursue careers in science and technology.  And, the work could lead to breakthroughs in storage and other technology fields.

According to an IBM blog post on the project:

“The ability to move single atoms, one of the smallest particles of any element in the universe, is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic-scale memory. In 2012, IBM scientists announced the creation of the world’s smallest magnetic memory bit, made of just 12 atoms. This breakthrough could transform computing by providing the world with devices that have access to unprecedented levels of data storage. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, the scientists moved atoms by using their scanning tunneling microscope to make … a movie, which has been verified by Guinness World Records™ as The World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film.”

Enough chit chat though, check out the film for yourself:

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In case you hadn’t noticed, mobile app development is where the action is. It’s why Facebook just bought Parse, and why Amazon, Rackspace and Salesforce.com are frantically bolstering their mobile app building capabilities. And it’s why Heroku, which is owned by Salesforce.com, is now adding PostGIS 2.0 support to its development platform.

PostGIS is an extension to the PostgreSQL database that many developers use on Heroku’s platform as a service. According to a blog post announcing PostGIS 2.0 support in beta form, Heroku’s Craig Kerstiens wrote:

“PostGIS 2.0 will enable a new class of Heroku applications that leverage location data. Whether you are looking to compute walkability scores to nearby schools, target ads based on GPS locations, or search for apartments by specific neighborhoods PostGIS can help make you build richer functionality into your application more easily.”

Heroku’s sales pitch is that using PostGIS with Postgres gives developers more resources while cutting the number of services they might require.

For example, a developer who might have in the past turned to a proprietary tool like ESRI’s ArcGIS, and then manage that along with the rest of the stack can now stay with an open-source option tightly linked to the database of choice. That means reduced complexity and the ability to build richer location-based functions faster. At its most basic level, PostGIS support means you can perform spatial queries and analysis on your data.

And that could mean more useful apps. Instead of an app that shows you on a map where the nearest Peet’s Coffee is, you could get the best walking route to that location factoring in terrain and real world traffic or other data, according to Kerstiens.

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Stackdriver, the Boston startup that wants to bring grown-up monitoring to IT running across public clouds, opened up a public beta of that service on Tuesday. The goal of the Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring service is to let companies know if there’s a hot spot or a bottleneck that could spell trouble, said Stackdriver co-founder Dan Belcher. “We work in real-time to identify issues quickly before they become a real problem,” Belcher said.

The company said the service, which supports Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, already manages nearly 100,000 cloud resources and processes more than 125 million datapoints daily. Beta customers include Edmodo, Yellowhammer, Exablox, Atomwise and Webkite, according to a press release announcing the beta.

Co-founded by VMware veterans Belcher and Izzy Azeri, Stackdriver got $5 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital and others last August to pursue its plan put eyes on cloud workloads.

Early competitors include Datadog and Boundary but old line network management vendors like IBM Tivoli; BMC and CA Technologies are also in the mix. As more business workloads flow to cloud infrastructure, the need for reliable, real-time tools to monitor performance and flag trouble spots will play a critical role.

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SoftLayer, the cloud and hosting provider that you may or may not know, has been busy again. It’s added a hosted Riak database service to its portfolio.

It worked with  Basho, the Cambridge, Mass. company behind both the Riak NoSQL distributed database and RiakCS  storage to do the integration work.  Both Riak and Riak Enterprise now run on SoftLayer’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

As GigaOM’s Jordan Novet recently reported, Riak is used by companies including Github because it stores, replicates and retrieves data, even when multiple nodes fail.

According to a statement by the two companies, the Riak solution makes it easier and faster for companies to “deploy scalable production-grade systems”at the click of a button.”

In March, Basho made its Riak CS distributed storage  available under the Apache 2 license. Late last year, Softlayer worked with 10Gen to put the popular MongoDB database on its infrastructure as an option. It’s clearly filling in its NoSQL check boxes here.

Dallas-based SoftLayer’s been the subject of acquisition rumors lately. IBM is (or was) reportedly interested in buying the company.

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Microsoft’s claim that it’s sold $1 billion worth of Azure cloud infrastructure services over the past 12 months has got to be raising eyebrows, and not just across Lake Washington at Amazon Web Services headquarters.

The sales figure was made by Curt Anderson, who heads up finances for Microsoft Server & Tools business unit, in a Bloomberg report.

The gist, with my emphasis added:

“Microsoft’s $1 billion sales figure includes Azure, as well as software provided to partners to create related Windows cloud services, Anderson said in an interview. Azure customers use the services to run corporate programs, websites and applications from Microsoft’s data centers, rather than spending on their own servers, storage machines and workers to maintain them.”

Since neither Microsoft nor Amazon has responded to a request for comment, let’s examine the possibilities. That phrase “software provided to partners” probably means Microsoft is lumping in sales of on-premises software. It could also include Office 365 sales. Office 365 provides functionality that used to be relegated to shrink-wrap software via a software-as-a-service model.

An executive with a company that works with both Amazon and Microsoft said the latter is moving personnel from Office to its SaaS platform. “It’s a great thing but it’s hardly net new revenue or anything like what Amazon is doing with IaaS,” he said.

Microsoft launched its Infrastructure-as-a-Service competitor to AWS two weeks ago. Up until now Azure was pretty much a platform-as-a-service game and thus not directly competitive with AWS. That’s all changing now, which is probably why Microsoft is beating the drum about Azure momentum.

It’s not surprising that vendors play games with their sales numbers. What would be a shocker is if Microsoft — or any big cloud services provider — explicitly broke out what those sales numbers really include. That includes Amazon, which buries its cloud services sales number in a broader category that includes promotional and marketing activities. For its most recent quarter, that group logged $750 million in sales.

AWS is the uncontested leader in public cloud infrastructure — by its own and everyone else’s account. It recently claimed that its S3 storage service is home to 3 trillion objects. Last July, Azure said it stores 4 trillion objects. And, given Microsoft’s investment in Azure, you’d be foolish to rule it out.

Of course, another competitor, Google Compute Engine (GCE) looms. I’d expect Google to announce public availability of the service — introduced last June — at Google I/O next month.

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AppFog, the Platform as a Service that pledged to run your applications on (almost) any cloud, is now one cloud down. As of May 2, the company is “turning off” the Rackspace infrastructure option. An email message announcing the change of plans sent April 27 told customers they could no longer create new applications on Rackspace as of that date.

While helping users host applications on five public clouds was one of Appfog’s main selling points, “it’s also become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console, which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.

Carlson could not be reached for comment Monday morning, but, Generally speaking, PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaS because it makes development and testing very easy, but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house (i.e., not on a public cloud). And, more specifically, there have been rumors  that AppFog was seeking investment or even a potential buyout.

AppFog tried to end-run that argument by allowing deployment on private clouds as well, but it’s unclear how well that effort has gone. There has also been angst among companies, including AppFog, that built their PaaS offerings atop the Cloud Foundry framework. That was true when Cloud Foundry resided under VMware, and remains true since it was spun off to Pivotal, which is now selling its own Cloud Foundry PaaS that competes with third-party options.

I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.

Update: Carlson would not comment on rationale for dropping Rackspace but did say that AppFog has hundreds of paying customers and that his goal is to “build a big company in a big space.” AppFog still supports Amazon Web Services in three regions — North America, Europe and Asia as well as HP’s cloud.

This story was updated at 7:25 a.m. PST with Carlson’s comment.

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Last week it was RightScale, now it’s Cloudyn eager to share its new data about how real customers use Amazon Web Services.

According to a survey by Cloudyn and The Big Data Group of 450 Cloudyn customers — who all use AWS — here are the main takeaways:

• Amazon’s EC2 constitutes nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of total AWS spending.
• More than half of those EC2 users now deploy Reserved Instances as part of their deployment.
• On-demand pricing remains the number one choice for most users — it sucks up 71 percent of all their EC2 spending.
• The S3 Simple Storage Service is still the most popular storage option, although Glacier, the cheaper archival storage choice, is gaining momentum.
• The largest constituency among the Cloudyn/AWS users are those who spend less than $50,000 a year on AWS, but they account for just 4 percent of total AWS spending.
• Just 4 percent of the customers spend more than $1 million a year on AWS, accounting for 52 percent of total spending.
• Customers who spend less than $50K per year make up the largest group of AWS users, yet account for only 4 percent of total spend.

Cloudyn is one of a half dozen or so startups that have made tracking, monitoring and managing AWS infrastructure their business. Competitors include Cloudability, Newvem and RightScale. And all of them are eager to prove that they can save their customers the most money by guiding their AWS deployment choices. Of course AWS itself is not standing still, building more granular monitoring and management options — including Trusted Advisor –  over time.

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Eucalyptus has made no secret that it wants to be the private cloud that best complements Amazon’s public cloud. Now, it’s banking that its support of popular Netflix open-source tools will show that it’s the most Amazon Web Services-compatible private cloud of them all.

By supporting these tools that help deploy, run and monitor workloads on AWS, Eucalyptus is going a step beyond supporting the bare-bones AWS APIs, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos said in a recent interview.

The new Eucalyptus 3.3 release, due in May, will support Chaos Monkey for testing the limits of a cloud deployment under stress; Asgard for automating deployment of large-scale applications; and Edda, a dynamic querying tool, for polling AWS resources.

“For Eucalyptus customers, this is real proof of AWS compatibility. Other folks who say they are AWS-compatible really aren’t — the real proof of the pudding is in supporting these Netflix tools,” he said. ”We’re not saying that everyone in the world will start using Asgard, although many will.”

That Eucalyptus would throw its lot in with Netflix is not shocking. Mickos and members of the Eucalyptus team attended the Netflix OSS open house in February. Netflix used that event to promote the use of its open-sourced cloud management, testing and monitoring tools by third parties, at least partly so that cloud alternatives to AWS will emerge.

Netflix is one of the biggest and most skillful AWS customers. Netflix tools fill gaps in AWS and help it run better. But Netflix is also acutely aware that Amazon has a streaming video service that is a direct competitor to its own core business and would very much like there to be another cloud out there that is as scalable and price efficient as AWS.

In the open-source cloud world, Eucalyptus contends with a slew of OpenStack players as well as OpenNebula and CloudStack.  But there is concern that the market, as young and potentially big as it may be, will not support all these options. Talk at the recent OpenStack summit and beyond is that there will be consolidation of the contending vendors.

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Enterprise cloud adoption ticks up

 A RightScale survey released last week said  bigger companies — those with more than 1,000 employees — are “slightly more likely” to claim  cloud adoption than their smaller brethren: 77 percent of large companies surveyed said they’re adopting cloud in some form compared to 73 percent for smaller companies. The survey reinforced what RightScale CEO Michael Crandell says all the time: most companies want to use multiple clouds to avoid over-reliance on one provider.

Of course companies like RightScale and competitors like Enstratius and Server Density, which promise  a single dashboard for multiple clouds, have a vested interest in multi-cloud being the adoption mode of choice. So do most of the cloud providers who fear a world were Amazon Web Services will become the cloud standard.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services keeps chugging along. For Amazon’s first fiscal quarter, the business category including AWS, logged $750 million in net sales, down from $769 million from the historically strong fourth quarter, but still a pretty impressive number.

Mobile cloud access is hot hot hot

Not that it’s a surprise, but mobile is big. More people tap their cloud services with their tablets and smartphones instead of (or in addition to ) their PCs. that’s why Facebook bought Parse, the mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) provider.  And why AWS is bulking up its mobile development efforts. And also why Rackspace and Salesforce.com are building up their own mobile development portfolios.

All of that activity comes after Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish. It’ s clear that expertise in mobile development platforms is a huge draw right now.

The takeaway from this activity? Expect more “acqui-hires” by big companies of mobile back end services players.

What’s up with Dell cloud?

In January, Dell said it would hold off on its public OpenStack cloud until the fourth quarter and two week sago it announced a partnership with SUSE to build out its private OpenStack implementations. Under that pact,  Dell will package up SUSE’s OpenStack implementation on Dell hardware in a sort of easy-to-plug-in cloud appliance. In the background, the battle raging around Dell’s future ownership model has had to be a distraction. That may start easing up since Blackstone, which had been mulling its own bid, reportedly dropped those plans last week.

And, in a surprise appearance at the annual Silverlake Management conference in New York, company founder and CEO Michael Dell said IT security and cloud computing are key customer pushes for the company going forward — and  defended the much-maligned PC business in a world obsessed with smartphones, according to Bloomberg News. 

Mr. Dell is partnering with Silverlake to take his company private in a deal valued at about $24.4 billion when it was announced in January.  Some shareholders, including Southeastern Asset Management, which owns about 8.4 percent of Dell shares, and Carl Icahn characterized that as a sweetheart deal that undervalues the company.

 

There’ll be lots of cloud infrastructure talk, including on mobility, at Structure 2013 in San Francisco June 19-20. Please join us.

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Some folks still say that Amazon Web Services is a distraction for the Amazon retail juggernaut, but it’s hard to argue that it’s small potatoes given the growing size of that cloud infrastructure business.

For its first fiscal quarter ending March 31, Amazon netted a healthy $750 million in the “other” category of North America sales, up 64 percent from $458 million for the year-ago period. Amazon always cautions that this category also includes “marketing and promotional activities and co=branded credit card agreements.” But I would wager the bulk of that $750 million comes from the aforementioned AWS.

No doubt, $750 million is a big number but it’s down from the $769 million compared to Q4; but then again, the category typically sees a dip between Q4 to Q1.

Given that Amazon never breaks out AWS any more granularly than this, it’s key to follow this stat quarter to quarter.

Here’s how Amazon’s net sales looks from AWS inception in 2006 till now.

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Remember Baxter the Robot? The $22,000 machine  initially built for manufacturing applications can now be repurposed for research tasks, according to Rethink Robotics.

Baxter’s advantages lie in its ability to “learn” tasks from a person who walks it through a series of motions. The trainer need not be a computer programmer. And, because Baxter is sedentary — it doesn’t roll or walk around — there is no need for protective cages to separate it from human co-workers.  For tasks that can be performed at a countertop or an assembly line, Baxter could be an ideal worker.

Rethink has said all along that Baxter will move on to other types of jobs, including, potentially, home healthcare. Last fall, Rethink CEO Rodney Brooks promised a Software Development Kit (SDK) that would enable Baxter to be refashioned for new jobs over time. “Our story is manufacturing, but there will be new software every two to three months with new capabilities,” Brooks, pictured above, told EMtech 2012 attendees in October. “Researchers will find places to use it that we wouldn’t have guessed.”

Here’s the scoop from Rethink’s web site:

“Baxter Research Robot is a $22,000 humanoid robot platform with two 7-axis arms, integrated cameras, sonar, torque sensors, and direct programming access via a standard ROS interface. It is entirely safe to operate around humans without safety cages, making it the perfect companion for late nights in the lab… with no extra pizza required.”

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We’re entering the home stretch for GigaOM’s annual Structure event which kicks off in San Francisco June 19. To whet your appetite, we’d like to introduce you to the six really cool startups chosen as this year’s Structure Launchpad finalists, culled from more than 50 candidates.

And the finalists are:

28msec: With offices in Palo Alto and Zurich, this startup aims to streamline the task of writing complex queries against your MongoDB database of choice.

Appscale Systems: This open-source implementation of Google App Engine (GAE) can run on a developer’s laptop, on Amazon Web Services or the Google Compute Engine.

Factor.io; This service lets developers knit together their tools of choice — for source control system, for PaaS, for testing — into a coherent, flexible workflow using an “if-this-then-that” interface.

Metrica: Metrica’s service lets folks use SQL queries against their MongoDB data, cutting the time it takes to create histograms, time series, and scatterplots and other data visualizations.

Saltstack:  This startup tool aims to speed up devops tasks including cloud orchestration or in-house server automation and infrastructure management.

Synapsify:  The company’s text search and analytics capability can help companies find the most important and relevant content for their needs.

Structure is GigaOM’s flagship conference that focuses on the future of cloud computing and internet infrastructure. For the past seven years, it’s convened the most influential speakers, buyers and vendors for two days of discussion, reporting, and debate.

Startups less than 12 months old with innovative technologies in cloud computing, internet infrastructure, or big data applications were eligible to apply for LaunchPad. The finalists will present their business plans on stage at the Structure conference in San Francisco, June 19-20. Follow @GigaOM on Twitter (#structureconf) to keep apprised of new speakers and sessions.

 

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Opscode’s been on a bit of a roll. The devops fan favorite is the foundation of Amazon Web Services new Opsworks application lifecycle management capability and now it’s being embraced and integrated into IBM’s SmartCloud and will work with Microsoft Azure, via a collaboration with Microsoft Open Technologies. The news comes out of Opscode’s ChefConf, kicking off Thursday in San Francisco.

Opscode, the name behind the Chef tools that many developers use to automate the configuration and deployment of IT, has got more than a toehold in the cloud landscape. Earlier this week Joyent, another cloud provider, said it was integrating Chef into the Joyent cloud.

As I wrote at that time, tools like Chef, CFEngine and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. A key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud.

Opscode VP of marketing Jay Wampold says IBM and Microsoft’s moves show that enterprise customers are ready for cloud-type deployments. “If you look back over a decade, you see that Google, Facebook and Amazon figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure to deliver to consumers built from the ground up on code. Now you’re seeing major [older] enterprises moving IT from a back-office support function for internal operations into a front-office effort that is a touch point for consumers.”

As part of this deal, Opscode has agreed to support IBM’s AIX Unix operating system.

That means they need to develop, configure, test, deploy and monitor applications in web time and at web scale, which is where the devops movement and tools like Chef and Puppet come in. The devops school pushes developers and IT people to work together on fast, incremental tech deployments rather than at cross-purposes. Where Chef and Puppet differ is that Chef focuses more on developers while Puppet concentrates on admins — the “ops” side of devops.

The news of the past few months seems to indicate that Chef has momentum  – although one IT person who watches this space would not give Chef the edge, necessarily. “Chef and Puppet both seem to be doing great. The push by AWS and Joyent is probably more a function of the fact that Chef is easier to stand up as a hosted service than Puppet,” he said.

Another factor could be that VMware recently invested $30 million more in Puppet, something that makes some businesses wary> The fear is that Puppet won’t be totally dedicated to heterogeneous environments, a worry that Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies denies. The VMware relationship does help Puppet in the private cloud market  but “we’re not changing our roadmap for VMware, and they don’t have anything resembling a controlling stake,” Kanies said via email.

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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Yesware’s goal in life is to help sales people close deals by tracking and gauging the efficiency of their email communications with customers. Is the message opened? When and how many times? Yesware sheds light on what too often becomes a black hole.

Now, it’s adding two new features to aid in that battle. Yesware Reminders lets the user set up a time in the future to check in with the recipient and that reminder will bubble up pertinent information about that prospect — how many emails were sent, when and where they’ve been opened, if they’ve been opened. That feature competes with options from Baydin and Followup.cc.

And Calendar Sync, as the name implies, lets users sync up appointments that are often scrambled between Google Calendar and Salesforce.com — a key concern given how many sales people use those applications. That feature competes with Appirio’s Cloud Sync. 

Synching up email and appointments and tracking efficiency of outbound mail is a  both big businesses these days. GigaOM’s Jorden Novet recently wrote about Appmesh, a startup founded by Salesforce.com vets that’s also dedicated to helping sales people keep ahead of the email crush.

Boston-based Yesware, which is backed by Google Ventures and Foundry Group, claims customers including Gooddata, Hubspot, Groupon  and Adroll

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Pivotal boss Paul Maritz knows how to paint a pretty picture that enterprise customers want to hear — Pivotal will launch an infrastructure-independent “operating system” for the cloud. It will enable new applications to help companies make sense of the data explosion expected to come with the internet of things.

He pledged Wednesday that PivotalOne technology will run on Amazon Web Services, and on OpenStack and other infrastructures. And that this effort will be independent of its owners EMC and VMware (and now General Electric as well).

That is a very, very tall order, which I’ll get back to. But first, the actual news from the official Pivotal launch event:

• Maritz now has a title: he is Pivotal’s CEO. Up until now he was just sort of the “head” of Pivotal.
• The first deliverables of PivotalOne will be generally available in “less than 6 months,” according to Pivotal SVP Scott Yara. It was, however, unclear which parts he was referring to.
• We can now definitively drop the “Initiative” from the Pivotal Initiative name.

To be fair, Pivotal was just spun off four months ago, after six months of leaks. And in February it made its first move, launching Pivotal HD, a re-architected Hadoop implementation that is key to this whole effort.

How independent is independent?

Now, back to positioning.  Maritz, who spent 14 years at Microsoft, where he helped lead the Windows 95 and then Windows NT server charge, has huge credibility with developers and customers alike. If anyone knows from OSes — and what customers want from them — it’s him.

But the notion that Pivotal will be given free reign to cozy up to Amazon, or Microsoft, or other infrastructure providers as needed when it is still part-and-parcel of EMC and VMware — both of which have their own cloud agenda — strains belief. VMware is launching its own public cloud May 21.

Much of Pivotal’s promise — it will provide an abstraction layer atop third-party infrastructure so that applications will run anywhere — is what VMware promised with Cloud Foundry, the open-source PaaS that is now part of Pivotal. But there’s also the new Pivotal Data Fabric which builds on EMC’s GreenPlum technology and VMware’s Gemfire fast transaction processing capabilities. And then there will be Pivotal Expert Services, including Pivotal Labs’ rapid application deployment capabilities, which can be offered in conjunction with or atop the whole stack.

I don’t doubt the quality of the technologies here or even Pivotal’s ability to integrate them. But customers will wonder just how independent an entity that is 90 percent owned by two technology giants can really be to work with competitors in a scenario that will reassure corporate customers who don’t want lock-in.

The fact that GE is investing $105 million in this effort remains the headline. That news has got to have both Amazon and Microsoft sweating. Amazon is the world’s biggest public cloud provider and is adding more enterprise-class services by the day atop that cloud. Microsoft is pitching Azure now as an AWS infrastructure rival but has also tried to be the PaaS of choice for the millions of Windows businesses out there.

Both of those companies would have given a lot for an endorsement that GE gave Pivotal early today.

Check out Om Malik’s interview with Maritz earlier this year at our Structure:Data conference below:

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The Pivotal Initiative, the big cloud and big data startup backed by parents EMC and VMware, now has another big, scary backer: General Electric is ponying up $105 million for a 10 percent stake in the company.

Bill Ruh, GE’s VP, will talk about the investment and the Pivotal One Enterprise PaaS later today on Pivotal’s coming out party at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, joining Paul Maritz, the former VMware CEO who’s heading up Pivotal.

GE, the huge conglomerate that makes everything from household appliances to medical devices to jet engines, has been talking up the industrial internet of late.

According to the release announcing the planned investment:

“The companies also announced their intent to enter into a broad research and development and commercial agreement aimed at accelerating GE’s ability to create new analytic services and solutions for its customers. The investment and business agreement are each expected to be finalized in the second quarter of 2013 and are subject to standard regulatory approval and other closing conditions.”

When EMC and VMware formally announced the effort last month, VMware owned 69 percent to EMC’s 31 percent. The nascent effort — which took on assets from both companies — had 1,250 employees and represented about $300 million in revenue, according to EMC Chairman Joe Tucci.

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