Author: Barb Darrow

Opscode is having a pretty good run. the devops-focused toolset. In February, Amazon launched application life cycle management console based on Opscode Chef. On Wednesday, Joyent said it’s add full support and integration of Chef into the Joyent Cloud.

Expect more pledges of support and woo to come out of Opscode’s annual conference kicking off tomorrow in San Francisco. Tools like Chef, and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. One 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. At least in theory.

In Opscode parlance, Chef configurations are deployed and managed via a “cookbook.” Joyent’s support of Chef means it will be easier, going forward, for customer to move cloud deployments to and from any cloud, said Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman in a recent interview.

“Chef, rather than the bare APIs, thus becomes the abstraction layer,” Hoffman told me. “By supporting Chef we make workloads more mobile. If Amazon calls an instance M1 why don’t we have one?” If that nomenclature is standard across clouds, the various scripts will work more easily anywhere.

That means, in Hoffman’s view, that folks who’ve deployed workloads in AWS but want better and more explicit service level agreements or other contractual terms that AWS may not grant, they can move the whole kit-and-kaboodle over to Joyent or, truth be told, vice versa.

As to why Chef appears to be gaining so much traction over CF Engine and Puppet? Hoffman thinks it’s because Opscode is more aligned with developers whereas Puppet targets admins, or the “ops” constituency of devops. In January, Puppet received an additional $30 million investment from VMware, funding which leads some to see Puppet falling into the VMware camp — a contention that Puppet CEO Luke Kanies denied at the time of the deal, pledging to continue support for heterogeneous hypervisors and environments.

Joyent, along with the various OpenStack-allied vendors are all hoping to take business from Amazon which, to be fair, isn’t taking that potential threat lying down. AWS has been adding more enterprise-friendly features and services while its competitors add more services. Later on Wednesday, we’ll hear about how the EMC and VMware-backed Pivotal Initiative plans to take on AWS and other cloud competitors. And, to further muddy the waters, VMware said on its earnings call Tuesday night that it will launch its public-cloud take — which it calles VMware Hybrid Cloud Service on May 21. We’re going to need a score card.

No doubt we’ll hear more about Hoffman’s vision of mobile cloud workloads and the increasingly competitive cloudscapewhen he takes the stage at Structure 2103 in San Francisco on June 19

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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We always hear how smart and creative the Valley is. It’s home to hundreds of startups, thousands of apps and billions of dollars in venture money. You might think from all the hype that it has a lock on innovation.

Not true. Companies in old-line industries — little brand names like Goodyear, which reaped $21 billion in net sales last year;  Brown Brothers Harriman, the country’s oldest and largest private bank; Whirlpool, the appliance conglomerate behind thWhirlpool, Amana, Kitchen-Aid, Jenn-Air and Maytag brands; and the Mayo Clinic, the 150-year-old hospital to the stars – know a little something about innovation too. Or they probably wouldn’t still be around.

Executives at those companies tasked with keeping them stocked with new ideas for products and services were on hand in Boston Tuesday at an Imaginatik-sponsored event to talk about how they do what they do. Here were six things I learned.e

1: Make innovation a priority and put someone in charge of it.

No, you don’t have to dub this person a Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), but you’ve got to give him or her access to the top and the authority to be heard across all business units. A couple speakers invoked the name of Louis Gerstner, the former IBM CEO credited with turning that company around.

When Gerstner came into IBM at the height of the dot.com boom, he wondered why IBM hadn’t come up with web servers or search engines. “When they looked inside IBM labs, it turns out it had but [those ideas] hadn’t been surfaced,” said James Euchner, VP of Global Innovation for Goodyear, Akron, Ohio.

And given the ratio of failures to successes in any business, innovators should be allowed to try things and fail, said Whirlpool’s Global Director of Innovation Moises Norena. Lessons learned from failures, after all, can be invaluable.

2: Think outside the box

Who could have predicted that a freezer manufacturer should also be in the garage organizer business? But that’s what Whirlpool figured out.

“If you want to sell appliances that go in the garage, you probably need to help [people] clean that garage out first,” said Moises Norena, global director of innovation for Whirlpool, Benton Harbor, Mich. And thus,  Whirlpool’s Gladiator Garageworks line of storage organizers was born.

New York-based Brown Brothers Harriman has done well in banking, where lending money has worked pretty much the same way for the last thousand years. “We don’t need to reinvent that wheel but we always want new services for our clients,” said Philip Swisher, SVP of innovation for the 200-year-old private bank, which manages $3 trillion in assets.

Sure, $3 trillion is a lotbig, but BBH’s most direct competitor, State Street Bank is ten times bigger; so Swisher’s always on the lookout for new services.

He encourages all of the company’s 5,000 employees to pitch ideas and use Intuit’s Brainstorm cloud platform for global collaboration. “All employees have access — it has no permissions by design,” he said.

3: Research, research, research

When most people go to the doctor, they want to see the doctor — or that’s the conventional wisdom anyway. But in most cases, they don’t really need to see a doctor, said Lorna Ross, design manager and creative lead for the Mayo Clinic’s Center of Innovation in Rochester, Minn.

The center gathered a whole primary care team — nurses, pharmacists, a resident — to review patients every day and determine the best course of action for each. It turns out, that only 6 percent of those patients really needed a doctor. That’s admittedly a “controversial” finding for an organization that sees itself a patient care provider.  GigaOM’s Ki Mae Heussner recently detailed another medical practice with a similar holistic approach.

But, if you think about it, most people go to the doctor about a problem and if that problem can be addressed by a nurse, physician’s assistant, pharmacist, most patients are happy. Better evaluation of the patient up front can ease the primary care bottleneck and cut costs, Ross said.

4: Know how to deal with people, not just technology

It may sound creepy but successful innovators need to be social engineers. “You have to know your corporate culture to affect change,” said  BBH’s Swisher. “You can’t ‘train’ an executive, but you can ‘brief’ one. I wear a suit every day because if I showed up in jeans and spiky hair no one would take me seriously and I don’t want to provoke the immune response.”

BBH has remained private and has been remarkably stable since Brown Brothers merged with Harriman Brothers in 1931 — “we have an 80-year track record of no M&A,” Swisher said proudly. Initiating change in a way that doesn’t capsize that stable boat is his goal.

5: But technology is important too

Trends like the internet of things (IoT) and the maker movement are of keen interest to both Whirlpool and Goodyear, for example. While Norena said he doesn’t see huge demand from customers wanting program their washing machines from their iPads, he does see other opportunities — Whirlpool already has a smartgrid effort, for example. But he is intrigued by the notion of forging a connection between the food you’re cooking and the device you use to cook it.

“What if you have a branded product you put in the microwave which reads the instructions — maybe it scans a code on the popcorn bag so itknows the size and type of corn and pops it optimally?” he asked.

Euchner said Goodyear is trying to understand two things about the IoT. First, it has to make sure tire sensors will work reliably. Second, it has to figure out where all that intelligence ends up. Sensors are great for monitoring tire pressure and issuing alerts when the tires wear out. But, for vendors like Goodyear, the question is, who gets those alerts? The driver?  The car dealer? The manufacturer? If that data goes to a dealer, the car may end up with non-Goodyear tires, he said. Maybe not an earth shaker for the driver, but certainly not good for Goodyear.

6: Be creative but careful

It’s good to improve existing products, but be careful of messing with success.  Norena and I discussed the popular Kitchen-Aid countertop mixer (pictured above left.) I don’t use mine as much as I should be cause it’s big and heavy and dragging it out of the cupboard is a pain even though it does the job better and more uniformly than my dinky hand-held mixer. Norena agreed but said it would be foolhardy to mess with something with so iconic.

Mayo Clinic photo courtesy of  Flickr user -Tripp-

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As we’ve been hearing, application programming interfaces (APIs) and their management is a hot battleground. And it got hotter Tuesday morning with MuleSoft buying ProgrammableWeb.

With this acquisition MuleSoft gets a popular online site used by web, mobile and other developers who want to connect their applications to third-party applications and data sources. San Francisco-based MuleSoft paints itself as a de facto hub for new-fangled web and mobile APIs as well as the more mature APIs behind enterprise applications.  It’s a wide world. MuleSoft estimates there are more than 13,000 active APIs  currently.

What ProgrammableWeb brings to the table is a sort of white pages directory of APIs, said Richard Seroter, a product manager for Tier 3, who uses the service. ProgrammableWeb has “lots of API content on the blog and is a good source of stats on API proliferation,” he said via Twitter.

The Next Web reported Tuesday morning that Alcatel-Lucent bought ProgrammableWeb three years ago; but i just double checked and there is no reference in MuleSoft’s statement about Alca-Lu ownership. I’ve asked MuleSoft for follow up and will update this when i hear.

This news comes a day after CA Technologies bought Layer 7, an API management company and five days after Intel purchased Mashery, another API management company.

This story was updated at 9:22 a.m. PST with the Next Web link.

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The management and quality control of application programming interfaces or APIs is hot now. That’s why CA Technologies is acquiring Layer 7 in a deal announced Monday, just days after Intel announced plans to by Mashery, another API management player. Mulesoft, another API management player, just snagged $37 million in Series E venture funding, bringing its total to $81 million.

Successful implementations of APIs enable applications to talk to each other and share data with other authorized applications. And, according to CA:

“the combination of CA and Layer 7 solutions will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and deliver more confidently and quickly the cloud, mobile and composite applications that run today’s business services.”

As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham explained last year: APIs are “the connective tissue of the cloud.” A company can offer API access to its own web services or data either “for a fee or as a way of building out its own platform,” she wrote. Amazon, for example, publishes APIs to its own web services to enable customers to make use of those web services.

As an example, if you have an app for Acme Airlines that alerts you of flight delays or changes, that app was enabled by Acme’s APIs. The availability of well-written and documented APIs can build a network effect around the services themselves, making them more ubiquitous and potentially more valuable to users. Companies like Mashery, Layer 7, Apigee and Mulesoft make sure their customers’ APIs are well crafted to enable the smooth flow of authorized information to flow from one application to another.

The news of the buyout, terms of which were not disclosed, comes out of CA World, the company’s annual customer conference in Las Vegas. It’s a big week for legacy IT players to buy stuff: Earlier on Monday CA rival IBM said it’s purchasing UrbanCode to bolster its devops expertise.

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Upstart, the company that hopes to encourage promising college students to get their degrees before pursuing the startups of their dreams, just celebrated its first birthday with a $5.9 million Series A round. The funding, from new investors Khosla Ventures, Founder’s Fund, Collaborative Fund, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and serial entrepreneur Scott Banister, comes atop a $1.75 million seed round that helped kick off the venture in April 2012.

The company also gets two new board members, Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska and former president of the New School, and Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva, which helps organizations obtain microfinancing.

David Girouard, the former president of Google Enterprise, founded Upstart last year because he thought that the difference between a smart grad starting his or her own company or not often boils down to relatively small amount of money. “At Google, we hired hundreds of great young people who couldn’t put together $30,000 to buy a car if their life depended on it without going into credit card debt,” he told me last year.

Goal: Helping  students stick with school, then launch

Upstart’s goal is to match those students with backers/mentors — mostly tech industry veterans like Andy Palmer, co-founder of Vertica. The Upstart entrepreneurs agree to give up  a set percentage of future earnings — capped at 7 percent — in return for the backer or backers’ investment.

“An upstart can have as few as 3 or up to 30 backers,” Girouard said in an interview. “How much they can raise can vary to over $100,000 but the sweet spot is $30,000 to $40,000.”

In the past year, more than 80 grads have been funded and 135 backers signed on. And Upstart, which started out focusing on select universities, has now opened up the program to all comers. This is not a charity: Upstart gets 3 percent of the patron’s initial contribution. If the effort pans out and the entrepreneur repays the patron, it also collects a 0.5 percent service fee, down from 1.5 percent last year.

Kicking the can down the road?

Upstart, based in Palo Alto, Calif., stands in contrast to the Thiel Fellowship, which pays smart college kids to drop out and pursue their business objectives rather than staying in school. Girouard has said repeatedly that degrees have value and hopes his program will encourage students to stick with their studies until completion..

Still, Upstart came under some fire — including from some GigaOM commenters — who said it just encourages students to incur more debt, “kicking the can down the road,” when they should just dig in and self-fund or take their first jobs to make money before setting out on their own.

Girouard maintains it’s a creative and low-risk way for these would-be entrepreneurs to get funding that could mean the difference between founding a startup or not.

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Here’s a news flash: despite all the gazillions of objects stored in Amazon’s S3 cloud (the latest official count is two trillion!) we’re very early in the cloud migration. Not really sure how meaningful that number really is, but still, two trillion!

 

It’s earlier than you think

IThere was tons of energy and more than 2,000 attendees at last week’s OpenStack Summit but most of those were vendors that have signed on to the effort and hope to make money off it. The proof of the pudding will come when actual end-user organizations that are not necessarily tech companies start adopting.

451 Group analyst Carl Brooks estimates there are now a few hundred OpenStack projects in production now, 60 to 80 of which are in production. Of those 40 to 50 are run by service providers of which maybe 3 or 4 make money.

SAP seeks cloud cred

We all know that tons of startups and a growing number of bigger companies tap Amazon Web Services for storage and perhaps some compute loads, the vast bulk of corporate computing remains on-premises. We’re entering an interesting era in which the legacy powers — Oracle, IBM, SAP, are rushing to embrace cloud and reap fiscal benefits. SAP CEO Bill McDermott last week told the AP that the ERP giant “accelerated into the cloud in a big way about a year ago and already we’re making money on it.”

Not to get all Clintonian here, but much here depends course a lot depends on how you define “cloud.” SAP is most certainly lumping in any and all revenue coming in via Software-as-a-Service implementations where the company gets paid via subscription vs. big lump fund payments for software licenses. SAP said cloud computing contributed nearly $37 million to its first quarter earnings.

SAP’s favored child product, the HANA in-memory database, saw its year over year revenue triple to €86 million (or about $112 million) for its first quarter.

Muddying the waters

When the industry started down this path, AWS was the big, scalable public cloud — with an ever-growing number of services that startups used to write, test and then deploy shiny new applications. VMware plugged vCloud Director as the way for existing VMware customers (most big companies) to move their legacy applications to a VMware compatible cloud.

Cutting to the chase, and vastly oversimplifying the case, it was one cloud for new apps vs. another for

old applications.But things have gotten a lot more, um, nuanced, since then.  AWS has added more services to accommodate those older but still-mission-critical applications while VMware announced plans for its own public cloud (which it calls hybrid.) And VMware/EMC spinoff the Pivotal Initiative on Wednesday will talk more about its take on cloud computing.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user ahockley

 

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I’m a fan of Twitter but not blind to its abuses. And Friday’s Boston Marathon bomber manhunt, which  had my hometown locked down for more than 12 hours on Friday, brought out the best and worst of the social media network — or more accurately — its users. I would argue here though, as bad as those abuses were, the thought of no access to the network would have made this whole ordeal, as bad as it is, much worse.

As is usually the case when a terrorist act occurs, racist assumptions surfaced on Twitter and so did near-immediate blowback.

In between the updates and helpful links are the inevitable ignorant racist statements. #idiots #Watertown—
Anouk Vonne (@VelvetWallpaper) April 19, 2013

There were fake Twitter accounts of the suspects and perhaps even a real account. But not to be lost in all that was that actual useful information was brought to the fore.

4:00 PM #MBTA UPDATE: Service on ALL MODES remains SUSPENDED. Please continue to check this account and MBTA.com.—
MBTA (@mbtaGM) April 19, 2013

The local TV and radio outlets put out as much or possibly more misinformation than the Twitterati, although I’m not sure how such a thing could be measured. The beauty of Twitter is the near immediate feedback loop it provides.  If you tweet something egregiously wrong, you’ll be called on it.  Very publicly. When the N.Y. Post reported incorrect information after the Boston Marathon bombings, it let its story stand.

Twitter as escape valve

When you’re told not to leave your house, sooner or later you’re going to want to leave your house. The fact that there is an interactive online communications channel helped keep isolated folks engaged in what was happening and prevented the onset of complete cabin fever. If you rely on social media networks, you have to consider the source. But having said that, Twitter at least allows crowd-sourced rebuttals of falsehoods and correction of mistakes.

We apologize for the confusion. Wrong model of Honda. Suspects were in Civic, not CRV. Sorry, it has been a fast-moving day.—
MASS STATE POLICE (@MassStatePolice) April 19, 2013

And, not to state the obvious, it provides a lifeline connecting the shut-ins  with the rest of humanity — for better or worse.

This manhunt is to social media as the OJ chase was to cable news. This will be viewed as a revolution #manhunt. #watertown #bostonbombing—
Chris Bradley (@ChrisBradley81) April 19, 2013

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user  The Paperclip

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The first call came at 2:38 a.m., which I missed. Caller ID said “Watertown Emergency.” The second came a few minutes later; it was a robocall from the chief of police warning us of an “active incident” in East Watertown, telling folks to stay at home and not open the door for anyone not in a uniform.

Try to sleep after that. A quick check of Twitter showed there had been a shootout and possible explosions in East Watertown and that the suspects were also involved in the shooting of an MIT campus police officer late Thursday night. The officer died.

I live in Watertown, a town just west of Boston where overnight police have converged in their hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers. The town — and to some degree the metropolitan area including Boston, Cambridge, Newton, and Waltham — is now in full lockdown. My house is barely a mile from what appears to be a paramilitary operation but I can hear and see nothing of it. Nor did I hear the gunfire and explosions that rocked East Watertown in the early morning hours, and which neighbors captured on cell phone video.

In the hours after the robo-call, there was the usual flurry of information and misinformation on Twitter as well as the TV stations — one of the suspects was erroneously identified on Reddit and other sites as missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi. One of the local TV outlets, after spending a half hour rehashing what had been reported and misreported by others, then dropped the feed of the State Police’s statement during the night. Mind boggling.

Friends and family of missing Brown student Sunil Tripathi are frustrated that he was falsely accused of the bombing: ow.ly/kdZL2—
Ted Nesi (@tednesi) April 19, 2013

Folks quickly turned to police scanner apps to get the lowdown. (Ustream then picked up another app here.) That sparked a debate on just how responsible that is.

Police scanner just went down. It's obvious they are trying to keep their operations more private. #watertown—
Josh Varela (@JVarela13) April 19, 2013

Finding out what happened required triangulation — as one Twitter correspondent put it, cops on the scanners are having conversations, they don’t know what’s going on either.

Reports were all over the map. Both suspects of the Marathon bombing were involved; both were killed; one was captured, one was killed; the reality emerging this morning is that one suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was dead; the other, his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was at large wearing a suicide vest. Or not. The latter appears to be suspect number 2 (white hat guy) in the Boston Marathon bombings.

What this shows is that proximity to an event means nothing in terms of accuracy unless you are an actual eyewitness. The information I had a mile away was available to everyone.

The lockdown continues.

Photos courtesy Getty Images.

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The biggest news out of Microsoft’s third quarter earnings call was that its flagship Windows business held up better than expected after reports of the demise of the PC market. But it still wasn’t perky. Once a big  upgrade was factored in, Windows revenue was flat year over year — more sobering news for a company that built its fortunes providing operating system for PCs.

All things considered, however,  Microsoft had a pretty good quarter — with  profit of $6.06 billion, up a healthy 18.5 percent from a year ago. Not bad for a company that’s been slammed for missing the smartphone and tablet revolution.  It shipped Windows 8 in November as part of its bid for credibility in these new form factors, but the OS met with mixed reviews. On the call, Microsoft  CFO Pete Klein (who will leave the company at the end of the fiscal year)  noted the challenge:

“There is no doubt that the device market is evolving. Consumers and businesses are increasingly shifting their focus to touch and mobility, and as a result, they want touch-enabled computing devices that are ultrathin, lightweight, and have long battery life. While Windows revenue has been impacted by the transition from the traditional PC to a new era of computing devices, the overall addressable markets are growing, and we are excited by the opportunities ahead of us.”

He reiterated that it is moving to an “accelerated pace for updates and innovations” starting with Windows 8 to meet the challenge.” Klein also said Microsoft’s big investment in cloud are starting to pay off with broader adoption of Office 365, which delivers office productivity tools including Word and excel in a Software as a Service manner. “One in four of our enterprise customers now has Office 365, and the business is on a $1 billion annual revenue run rate,” Klein said. Some on Twitter noted that in a dismal economy Microsoft managed to post pretty impressive profit growth. Maybe that means folks will stop calling for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s head. But then again, maybe not.

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HP’s cloud computing efforts have been the subject of much curiosity —  not always in a good way — over the past year, but Hewlett-Packard’s top cloud guy Saar Gillai  said the company is putting confusion and concern about its long-term future behind it.

“Last year was an interesting one, but in the last six months since Meg took the reins, it’s all been positive news,” Gillai said in an interview on Wednesday at the OpenStack Summit. Meg Whitman is HP’s CEO.

During that timeframe HP brought its public cloud online  and  the compute, block store and object store subsystems are all broadly available. This week, it announced new “cloud bursting” capabilities for HP CloudSystem and that it had integrated its 3Par fibre-channel storage with OpenStack.

As for actual customer adoption of that HP public cloud? The company will only put the number at “thousands.”  And, Gillai reaffirmed that the company will make OpenStack available on all its major platforms, which in theory would include its glitzy new Project Moonshot servers. OpenStack is HP’s operating system for cloud, is the message.

But HP’s version of OpenStack, will be  hardened for the enterprise” vision  and backed by enterprise-class SLAs, a stance that echoes what Zorawar Biri Singh, HP’s last cloud chief, told GigaOM a few months ago.

Here’s the thing, despite HP’s dramatic ups and downs of the past two years, it has lots of long-standing enterprise accounts, really would prefer not to defect to another vendor at this stage. “Our customers want us to succeed,” Gillai maintained. And, many of these companies have barely tested cloud deployments.

The Amazon Web Services question

Many of those same customers are no doubt using Amazon Web Services for some storage or running non-mission critical workloads, but Gillai said AWS has a long way to go to become a true enterprise technology provider.

“Enterprise customers require business continuity assurances, they want someone to call and interact with,” he said. “Sure, AWS  is going after the enterprise, but it’s not that simple. You need feet on the street and you need account management. There’s a reason it takes companies time to build all that. You need a brand and you need trust.” he said.

And, he said, echoing a now familiar theme, once big companies get a true picture of how much it costs to run some loads in AWS, they may find it cheaper to bring them into their own data centers or use a private cloud deployment instead. That’s where AWS may find some tough going, despite its moves to build bridges between AWS and private cloud.

Given AWS momentum, and the full court press it’s made on enterprise sales, this may be wishful thinking but as many GigaOM commenters have pointed out the percentage of total IT spend going to cloud now is pretty damn small. This is early days.

OpenStack consolidation to come

Unlike other OpenStackers at the show, Gillai expects there to be a shakeout of OpenStack vendors over time. “If all you’re doing is [an OpenStack] distribution, that’s not a business. I can build a distro right now for a one-server system, it’s a lot harder when you’re dealing with networked systems,” he said.

This is one big reason OpenStack will not follow the Linux model, he said. ” The question is how do you make money?  Linux is all about your compute system with some drivers –it’s an operating system. OpenStack is a plug-in architecture with myriad plug-ins and that can take you from one node to a million. To certify and install it can be miles more complicated than with Linux so you need another business model”

Companies that run public clouds — like, say HP, will be the experts with lots of insight, he said. “I would be wary of getting OpenStack distribution from someone who doesn’t run it on a  huge cloud.”

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Sitting in on OpenStack Summit keynotes and sessions this week, I had an epiphany: OpenStack is to technology as kale is to food. Let me explain.

If you’ve taken part in CSA (community-assisted agriculture) program you know you get a bin of in-season fruits and veggies every other week or so — hopefully from a local farm. In that bin will be a few tomatoes, radishes, whatever and a ton of kale, which grows easily and big and is forgiving of bad weather. It’s prolific and it’s cheap. Then you find dishes and recipes to use that kale.

And this is where the fun begins: Kale, it turns out, can be used in everything. In chicken soup, in salads. It can be coated with sesame oil and roasted to make kale chips (my favorite). It can be sliced and diced in myriad ways. It can be boiled, fried (or sauteed, if you’re a fancypants) and baked. And it’s good for you.

Proponents would like to say the same about OpenStack.

OpenStack — in cable, in marketing, on a stick

Look at the various packages and delivery modes coming online: Red Hat this week announced the rollout of its RDO OpenStack distribution, “a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives.” Piston Cloud (see disclosure) offers what InformationWeek called OpenStack on a stick, the software packed on a memory stick for easy deployment. Nebula just brought out its OpenStack-in-a-box controller for linking legacy applications into the OpenStack arena. HP cloud guru Saar Gillai talked up his company’s “hardened” OpenStack for enterprise use. Cloudscaling offers an OpenStack cloud that will burst into Amazon or Google public clouds as needed.

More to the point is that end-user organizations — not just the usual tech vendor suspects —  showed off some of their OpenStack-based offerings. These included a new Comcast online interactive cable TV guide that helps users quickly navigate their hundreds of channels to find the sporting event they want to see and bring it up on screen for a quick score check. There’s also Hubspot’s use of OpenStack to build a hybrid cloud that powers and helps target its inbound marketing campaigns. Whether or not you want to get targeted in-bound marketing, these are real use cases for the technologies that will impact actual users.

Key to OpenStack success? Making it disappear

As Florian Otel head of HP Cloud Services in EMEA, told a session on enterprise use of OpenStack, that many of the techncial gaps in the software have been filled and folks now have to focus on real customer value. “Remember how many years we heard this would be the year of Linux on the desktop? That never happened. Android is what it took to make Linux attractive to desktop users,” he said. By bundling the underlying technology with hardware and a problem to solve and an application to solve it, Linux in another guise is hugely popular, he said. For htose who would quibble with his Linux analogy, he added: “Linux has as much to do with Android as iOS has to do with BSD.

The same will be true for OpenStack he noted. As it becomes a platform or an enabler for higher-level servcies, it will take off.

Now, to get back to the kale thing: The metaphor unravels a bit because most folks use kale as an adjunct to other foods (although not always) while the goal is for OpenStack to be the basis for a whole realm of services — for enterprise users, for mobile users, for fill-in-the-blank constituencies.  The big question this time next year will be how much of OpenStack is being consumed by the masses — whether they know it or not.

 Feature photo courtesy of  Flick user B*2

Disclosure: Piston 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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Cloudability says its new analytics tool will give Amazon Web Services customers customizable and more granulized views of their cloud costs by tapping into AWS hourly detailed billing reports.

Its AWS Cost Analytics will help users make sense of a deluge of usage data that most now have to put into unwieldy spreadsheets to manage, the company said.. “With this tool, you will no longer have to pump giant files — tens of megabytes in size — and pares them down so you don’t have to pump them into Excel,” said Cloudability CEO Mat Ellis.

Ellis says this tool differs from what Cloudability competitors now offer because it provides not just “pre-canned” reports but will let the user build “17 million different combinations of reports as needed” all based on this burgeoning flow of cost information provided by Amazon.

To be sure Cloudability faces a half dozen competitors including Newvem, Cloudyn, Cloud Vertical, in this AWS cost assessment and management space – all offering their own take on what goes on in your Amazon cloud. What Cloudability says its doing differently is providing more user-defined customization and the ability to handle this new influx of hourly data.

Ron Fuller, web manager for Mentor Graphics, a large electronic design automation vendor, is sold. Other tools, provide simpler reports and alerts but by the time the alert occurs, you are probably already over budget, he said.

“If I have a $15,000 a month to spend and hit that limit half-way through the month, I can’t just shut down. Cloudability gives us daily reports with our incremental usage spend and detailed cost analysis across multiple accounts and projects,” Fuller told me. That can flag problems before they get out of hand.

Like many AWS users, Fuller loves what he’s able to do with all those AWS services, but the complexity of tracking their usage can be overwhelming. Cloudability’s tool helps him figure out where to use discounted reserved instances vs. other, pricier instance types for example. “If I’m overspending in areas of I/O peformance, I can see that right away and maybe rethink my test model.”

Cloudability and its rivals have to contend with each other but increasingly with the Amazon mothership itself which keeps adding more management and assessemnt tools of its own. But, as Forrester Research analyst Dave Bartoletti said few months ago: “Amazon’s tools will get better and better but Amazon has no desire to get you to use less of its services. It’s like in storage — You’d think EMC would be the best vendor of storage management but historically they haven’t been.”

Keep in mind: All these  third-party vendors rely on Amazon-supplied data to work their magic, and given the rather bracing competition so far, I would expect the others to add similar reporting capabilities pretty quick.

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There was a lot going on at the OpenStack Summit, where a couple thousand of the open-source cloud faithful gathered this week. Here are my main takeaways.

1: Customer-to-vendor ratio is getting better.

But just a bit. Tuesday’s keynotes featured real, live OpenStack users Bloomberg, Comcast, HubSpot and Best Buy. Not bad.

Bloomberg CTO Pravir Chandra said his team set some high goals for what they were trying to  build — they needed high availability, no cascading failures and smooth scale down and scale up. They were able to get there by deploying OpenStack along with considerable custom work of their own, both above and below that layer. They ended up setting up the high-availability databases and figuring out how to aggregate logs from the hypervisor level.

Comcast SVP Mark Muehl said the cable giant is using OpenStack to provide real-time programming guides and fast program search. One application quickly locates the NCAA tournament basketball game you want — no easy task — and brings it up for a fast score check. “We are integrating real-time sports feeds. That app would have been impossible to do on our own [older] platform,” Muehl said.

2: Ceph is hot, hot, hot

Based on an informal poll of speakers and attendees, Ceph storage is where it’s at. The Swift storage system?  Not so hot. Best Buy moved from Gluster to Ceph because of the latter’s self-healing capabilities. Ceph offers object and block storage all in one integrated product while Swift handles object storage only. Mirantis EVP Boris Renski said Swift, which comes out of Rackspace, has lots of production installs, but Ceph is viewed as having a more “elegant” architecture. “Unlike Swift, you can use Ceph as the backend for both object and block.” Also, because of a better algorithm for handling data replication, it can promise better scaling, he said, although Mirantis has not fully tested that out yet.

3: Grizzly brings more maturity and features

Grizzly, the seventh release of OpenStack in three years, brings more features and functions to the table. HubSpot will use Grizzly (with some of its own tweaks) to run images on “full bare metal,” said CIO Jim O’Neill. “That means the same image can run on your cloud of choice … . The application doesn’t need to know or care where it runs anymore.”

And that cloud agnosticism brings huge payback. “We took this single image, picked it up from public cloud into a Rackspace-powered private cloud and saw a 4X increased efficiency running that workload,” he said.

4: Choice is good

The same meme of large companies opting to deploy their workloads on multiple clouds vs. one cloud continued at the show. And yes — I can sense the eye rolls coming — there remains an uneasiness over cloud lock-in. The Best Buy guys put a local traffic manager in front of multiple (unnamed) clouds specifically because “we don’t want to lock into any one vendor,” said Steve Eastham, director of web architecture for the Minneapolis-based retailer.

And even the speakers at this OpenStack event said they will remain flexible in their technology choices going forward if OpenStack doesn’t meet their needs. Asked why Samsung opted to go with OpenStack over CloudStack two years ago, Kirk Kim, cloud CTO for Samsung SDS, said they thought OpenStack would scale better.  ”But,” he added, “given the situation today, we might look at that again.” Hmmm. He could not be reached for follow-up.

5: The subtext: AWS and VMware 

The OpenStack faithful are obviously proud of what they’ve accomplished over the past three to four years. It’s not nothing that all that hundreds have contributed to this project and that some customers — outside the OpenStack community itself — are starting to put this stuff into production.

What was left  unsaid, for the most part,  is that OpenStack continues to be measured against Amazon Web Services in the public cloud infrastructure sector and VMware in the (mostly) private cloud market, where legacy applications are in play. This despite the fact that VMware is now an OpenStack Foundation member.

OpenStack may be growing, but it does not have the field to itself.

Feature photo courtesy of hockleyphoto.com.

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It’s been so long in coming that many folks stopped waiting for it, but Microsoft’s Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service — its long-promised response to Amazon Web Services — goes live for all customers on Tuesday.

While he did not characterize Azure IaaS as an “Amazon killer,” Azure GM Bill Hilf did say Microsoft will match AWS on price for any of its base-level infrastructure — storage, compute instances, etc. — continuing a price war that flared last November when AWS, Google and Microsoft traded price cuts on their respective cloud storage offerings.

And, Azure IaaS pricing will be uniform across all geographies and data centers. Microsoft runs 8 data centers worldwide, 4 in the U.S., 2 in Europe and 2 in Asia. This is a pointed response to AWS, which relies heavily on its aging-but-humongous U.S. East data center farm in Ashburn, Virg. Many AWS services debut there and prices for U.S. East services are often lower than the same services originating in other AWS regions. “Many customers architect their applications in really weird ways to take advantage of that pricing,” Hilf said. U.S east is also the epicenter for most of the AWS outages over the past year or so.

And before you write off Azure as too late to matter, consider this: For the many companies that run Windows applications and may want to move them betwixt and between a public cloud and their own Windows-centric server rooms, Azure may be a really smart choice. In the run up to this news Microsoft announced Active Directory for Azure  last week.

PaaS priority hurt Azure

Microsoft’s problem is that it zigged when it probably should have zagged 3 years ago when it rolled out Azure as a full Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It was a great idea in theory, but by then developers — especially those in startups — were already flocking to AWS and its easy-to-spin-up-and-pay-for infrastructure.

That interest started to spread to bigger, more established businesses or departments within enterprises where developers loved the idea of being able to quickly build their own sandbox on AWS without IT interference. Fair or not, the perception soon became that Azure was a development and deployment platform for old-world Windows and .Net applications. It was deep and rich, but it was attacking a moribund market.

Ironically, those old-school Windows shops could now be Azure’s saving grace. The majority of legacy enterprise applications run on Windows and many of those enterprises are evaluating cloud deployments, although not many of them are wild about moving enterprise applications to a public cloud. Hilf’s argument is that since Azure’s underpinnings mirror those of Windows Server 2012 shops, applications can run on premises or in the cloud and partially in either.

Google Compute Engine, aka the wild card cloud

For many developers, the great unknown here is what impact Google Compute Engine will have when it becomes widely available. I would bet that might happen at Google I/O  next month, but who knows, Google may want to counter program this Azure news. Plus the OpenStack Summit is this week with lots of news coming out of companies including Rackspace, IBM, HP and others —  which hope to combat with AWS with OpenStack-based public clouds.

But many think that Google, by virtue of its sheer scale, will be the cloud to watch vis-a-vis Amazon Web Services.

The other issue is whether Amazon, which is by all accounts the world’s largest public cloud provider, can maintain the advantages of being first to market with its gigantic cloud and whether it can attract enterprise accounts with higher-end services like RedShift data warehousing.

AWS has rolled out hundreds of services and features since launching in 2006 — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos  put the count at 159 new features last year alone. That’s quite a head start and Amazon fans say it’s market position is unassailable.

But remember: People used to say the same about Microsoft.

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Anyone who’s been an IT administrator for a decade or more will tell you of the good old days when there was far too little information about the underlying IT configuration of a given enterprise. Now, the problem is too much information — which can be just as useless unless put into the right context. That’s the issue that ManageEngine said it’s addressing with a new Enterprise Search function for its IT360 IT management software.

“There are too many IT consoles, too many vendors — one for network management, one for help desk, one for application performance,” said Raj Sabhlok, president of ManageEngine’s parent company Zoho. Pity the poor admins who have to piece all that information together to figure out what’s going on, or worse, what went wrong.

The search function promises these woebegone admins a “Google-like interface” that lets them search on a device name, for example, and get back every instance in which that name crops up.

“If you search on the term ‘Windows’ it will surface all instances of Windows — in SolarWinds, in ManageEngine, in Numara (now part of BMC ), then you click on a hyperlink and it will take you right into that native context,” he said.

If you search on a given server type, it will bring back every instance of that server along with all the applications that touch it or have referenced it. “You can see the nodes, the inventoried assets, any notes in the help desk file or in your CMDB (configuration management database),” Sabhlok said.

The search is part of ManageEngine’s overall  IT360 on-premises management product but will work across all relational database backends he said. And the beauty is it will work on competitive management products like the aforementioned SolarWinds. “SolarWinds is siloed. So are we, but we know customers need one way to find and view this stuff,”

The company may end up breaking Enterprise Search out as a standalone package, over time, he added.

 

 

In dueling announcements Monday, Cloudscaling and Hewlett-Packard outlined advances to their respective OpenStack offerings.

San Francisco-based Cloudscaling is one of the new-look OpenStack cloud providers. Unlike HP, IBM, Red Hat and even Rackspace, it doesn’t have to retrofit OpenStack into its legacy hardware or software and instead can focus on new applications and workloads.

On Monday, Cloudscaling said it’s teaming up with Juniper Networks and will use that company’s Virtual Network Control to enable a new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) feature that maps to VPCs in Amazon’s public cloud. Cloudscaling said its VPC can isolate elastic cloud resources from the outside world “without sacrificing the core benefits of elastic clouds.” Juniper and Cloudscaling will also work together to deploy Cloudscaling’s Open Cloud System 2.5 in customer accounts.

The advantage of partnering with Juniper is that the company — by virtue of its acquisition of Contrail Networks — is moving into the software-defined networking market, Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in an interview. SDN support means companies can rely on standard, inexpensive hardware and reconfigure it as needed in software.

Cloudscaling is much smaller than many of its OpenStack colleagues/competitors and it made waves by announcing support for not only AWS APIs but with Google Compute Engine APIs as well — a bet that GCE, when it comes out of preview mode, will become the second largest public cloud available, Grant said. Fidelity with key AWS services is crucial — hence the new VPC capability — because the goal is to let customers move workloads and data up into the biggest of the big public cloud infrastructure with minimal muss and fuss. Oh, and bring it back down again, as needed.

Hewlett-Packard has likewise made a big bet on OpenStack and this week said it has enabled HP CloudSystem, its private cloud, to “burst” workloads into other clouds. The Register has a more in-depth look here. Also by virtue of its support for the latest Openstack’s “Grizzly” release, OpenStack customers can use HP’s 3Par virtual storage. One key benefit of Grizzly is that it lets companies  mix and match storage subsystems from different vendors and manage them from one console.

With so many OpenStack clouds, what about interop?

Now that there are so many OpenStack clouds coming on line, the OpenStack Foundation and its members will have to address nagging concerns about interoperability between the various open source clouds.

The OpenStack challenge is to offer a common denominator of interoperable technology that also acts as a foundation for higher-level services that vendors can provide.

As Cloudscaling CTO (and OpenStack Foundation board member) Randy Bias explained recently: “The foundation needs to put a stamp on OpenStack — something like SQL 92  in the database world. Every [major relational] database — SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, runs that set of commands but then they diverge.The foundation’s intention in the short term is to put a stake in the ground around that baseline interop.”

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Rackspace fancies itself as the OpenStack supplier to the stars. The company says it will provide telcos and other service providers with OpenStack technology that will enable them to compete better with Amazon Web Services — although you could argue it is arming other large companies to compete with its own OpenStack offerings. This announcement is no doubt just the start of a flurry of press releases timed for this week’s OpenStack Summit in Portland.

Big IT vendors, telcos and hosting companies have watched Amazon’s growing dominance in public cloud computing with concern and that’s why many of them — AT&T, IBM, HP, Red Hat  soon to be joined by Ericsson and JuniperNetworks et al. have glommed onto OpenStack, as an open-source cloud underpinning to jump-start their efforts. Now, Rackspace says it can give them an even better head start, sharing all its best practices and blueprints for OpenStack-based public clouds.

Rackpace CTO John Engates said telcos and service providers have “approached us for years about helping them to get into the cloud business — they want the same category of service that we offer specifically around OpenStack … They want to go faster without having to do all the heavy lifting. They see us as uniquely positioned in that we know how to operate OpenStack, we have a public cloud.”

A federated set of OpenStack clouds

As part of this program, Rackspace would specify hardware and software infrastructure “powered by OpenStack” and handle automated testing and delivery of updates. It will likewise take care of patching, tuning and monitoring the resulting cloud with “carrier-grade”  service level agreements or SLAs.

Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for the San Antonio, Texas, company described what could emerge as a network of interconnected OpenStack-based clouds operated by different telcos but all federated to support multi-national companies as needed. “We’ll treat their data centers as our data centers. they’ll all run technology that is interconnected, we can link them all. So customers of one provider will see all the zones fo all the providers in this network,” he said.

In some ways Rackspace’s pitch to embed its OpenStack into third-party  clouds mimics VMware’s initial go-to-market for vCloud Director. VMware’s vision initially focused on moving legacy applications to the cloud while Amazon attacked new applications, said Gary Chen, IDC’s research manager for cloud and virtualization software. But now, as VMware  and Amazon’s are encroaching on each other’s turf. And, different flavors of OpenStack, depending on the provider, are attacking old and new applications as well.

Target:  Amazon Web Services

Rackspace would not name any telcos or service providers who have signed on but Sanchez said telcos that are the incumbents or dominate in a given region are likely prospects.

With the latest, seventh release of OpenStack, code-named Grizzly, OpenStack has gained maturity and features but still lags far behind features and functions that Amazon has churned out since the AWS launch in 2007. But the desire for an AWS alternative remains strong.

“This is all about OpenStack as a global infrastructure-as-a-service platform available to customers in every geography,” Engates said.

Sanchez shrugged off the notion that Rackspace may be fostering more competition for its own cloud services. “In a way we did that three years ago when we took our code and open sourced it to people who may have been considered our competitors. The goal here is to help people be more successful as cloud providers.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user SOMKKU

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Bezos: more is more when it comes to AWS updates, price cuts

In his annual letter to shareholders (PDF) on Friday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reiterated his company’s rage to update features and functions (and then cut prices) on Amazon Web Services features.

According to Bezos, AWS which he characterized as a “clear example of internally driven motivation” put out 159 new features and services in 2012 and cut prices 27 times since launching 7 years ago. (Frankly, 27 sounds like an undercount to me, but he’s the boss.)

He also touted Amazon’s commitment to enterprise customers. Amazon has

“… added enterprise service support enhancements, and created innovative tools to help customers be more efficient. AWS Trusted Advisor monitors customer configurations, compares them to known best practices, and then notifies customers where opportunities exist to improve performance, enhance security, or save money. Yes, we are actively telling customers they’re paying us more than they need to. In the last 90 days, customers have saved millions of dollars through Trusted Advisor, and the service is only getting started. All of this progress comes in the context of AWS being the widely recognized leader in its area – a situation where you might worry that external motivation could fail. On the other hand, internal motivation – the drive to get the customer to say “Wow” – keeps the pace of innovation fast.”

The lastest tidbit for enterprise users was this week’s addition of support for Microsoft Hyper-V support in Amazon’s Storage Gateway. For more on Bezos’ letter, here’s  PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen’s take.

Bezos’ letter comes at a time when more observers –including some AWS fans question whether AWS really is the low-cost option when it comes to non-variable (in-elastic) production workloads — as opposed to development and test jobs– but that’s a quibble. Until one or more of the OpenStack crowd or, more likely, Google Compute Engine, hits its stride — or in GCE’s case comes out of preview stage, AWS remains the public cloud to beat.

OpenStack: the ABM (Anyone But Amazon) alliance?

The OpenStack crowd is getting larger. This week — barring last minute delays at Monday’s OpenStack board meeting — Juniper Networks and Ericsson — should be aboard the OpenStack Foundation as Gold members, as GigaOM reported Friday. Both companies were already sponsoring companies but board membership brings a bigger financial contribution and presumably more influence. With them in the fold and especially after VMware joined last summer, it’s become easier to list which vendors are not in the OpenStack ecosystem than those who are. And that list would be Amazon, Google, Joyent, Microsoft and Oracle.

OpenStack, when it was born more than 3 years ago was an attempt by Rackspace and NASA to build an open-source alternative to Amazon in the public cloud and to prevent VMware from leveraging its virtualization lock in enterprise data centers into the cloud. The effort, as measured by by third-party vendor support has exploded since then, especially after Rackspace turned over the reins to the OpenStack Foundation two years ago. Since then the floodgates opened with HP, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, joining younger companies — like Cloudscaling, Nebula, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) on the effort. Let’s see, that would be Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Joyent. Or as Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman quipped — giving his company top billing OpenStack would be the “Anybody but JAMOG” alliance.

Piston Cloud updates

Perhaps seeking to beat the rush that’s bound to come next week at the OpenStack Summit, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) brought out Release 2.0 of its OpenStack cloud, or as InformationWeek called it “OpenStack on a stick.”

As Informationweek put it:

“The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.”

Disclosure: Piston 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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The OpenStack Foundation may get more networking mojo next week when Juniper Networks and Ericsson are on the ballot to become Gold members of that organization.

Both companies are already corporate sponsors but have applied to join the foundation itself and their applications will be voted on on Monday, according to the agenda for Monday’s OpenStack board meeting. That meeting kicks off the annual OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. A Juniper spokeswoman confirmed that company’s application. Ericsson could not be reached for comment.

Juniper and Ericsson are already corporate sponsors of the open-source cloud effort, but joining the foundation will give them a seat on the board. It  also requires a funding committment of between $50,000 and $200,000. (The formula is pegged to company revenue per the OpenStack wiki.). Each of the eight top-tier Platinum partners –  AT&T; Rackspace IBM, HP, Nebula, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu — pony up $500,000 per year and must commit to a three-year tenure.

Other Gold members — the total number is limited to 24 companies — include Juniper rival Cisco Systems, Dell, Intel, Mirantis, Piston Labs(see disclosure), VMware and others.

Talk at the summit will no doubt focus on how  new features and functions of the Grizzly release of OpenStack can bring value to customers. Folks will especially be watching for new customer stories. Most of OpenStack’s case studies to date revolve around tech companies —  HP, Intel, Cisco/Webex — all of which are building OpenStack implementations for their own use or which they they want to sell. Now, with Grizzly being the seventh major release of code, it’s time to show OpenStack traction in the world beyond the tech bubble.

Disclosure: Piston 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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