New Florence. New Renaissance.

“Cloud Pioneers”

When the Open Cloud Manifesto was unveiled recently by IBM et al I wrote "The (Cloud) Bastards say, Welcome"

And I invited several cloud pioneers who have been at it - delivering cloud based products and services or helping evaluate and nurture them for several years - to discuss the manifesto and what they have learned in Cloud Computing over the last few years.

The guest series on the Deal Architect blog has had the following contributors so far:

Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce,com

“The most powerful manifestos are coming from customers and developers.  We're listening, learning, and delivering the services that customers and developers are asking for. But we are just getting started.  So are Google, Amazon and Facebook. “

Timothy Chou, who started Oracle On-line in 1999

“It seemed silly for a software company to own a data center but after six months on the job I realized this was really a fundamental shift in the economics of software.”

Chris Barbin, CEO of appirio

“Appirio has helped more than 150 enterprises (including some of salesforce.com and Google's largest customers) begin their transition to the cloud.  We even have built our own company on the cloud, running our entire business (over 120 employees globally) on infrastructure from Amazon, salesforce.com, Google and Intaact without needing a single server.”

Jeff Kaplan, CEO of THINKStrategies

“..our most recent SaaS survey in November 2008 found that SaaS adoption had nearly doubled over the previous year to 63% fueled by the economy and over 90% customer satisfaction and referral rates. These are success rates which few legacy application vendors can match.”

Dan Druker, SVP at Intacct

“Streamlining the Data Center” and “Scalability on Demand” are small, incremental ideas. Breakthrough innovation like transforming a $100 billion profession comes from thinking about and addressing unique real-world, high-value business problems that just can’t be solved in any other way than in the cloud.”

Eric Dirst, CIO at DeVry

“SaaS is here, and anyone who doesn’t take advantage of it is costing their company money, time, resources and limiting their business customer’s agility.”

Michael Lamoureux, Sourcing Innovation

“What you need is the ability to get a complete data extract in a neutral format (XML, CVS, etc.). That way you can always obtain a competitive solution, load your data, and keep on truckin'.”

Bob Warfield, EVP at Helpstream

“Every philosophy has some bedrock principles. The way I was raised, multi-tenancy is that principle in SaaS. Recently, I have seen industry discussions on single-tenancy - tenancy – just virtualize and get the same benefits. Heresy if you ask me. Or at least sub-optimal to SaaS economics. Why make it less compelling?”

Yahoo's M45

"The University of California at Berkley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Yahoo's cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research.

Yahoo says the research will focus on new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources.

Carnegie Mellon has been using the Yahoo cluster, also known as M45, since November 2007. The cluster has about 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks."

Webpronews

The Amazon Web Services start-up competition

Yieldex won from the 7 finalists leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build their infrastructure and business - for the grand prize of $100,000 in cash and AWS credits.

The cloud computing pioneers are detailed here.

The Economist on Cloud Computing

The Economist has a free survey on cloud computing, SaaS etc - the changing face of corporate IT.

Here's a summary

"This special report will chronicle the rise of the cloud and try to predict where it is heading. It will start by looking at the technology. Computing clouds are immensely complex, but can be roughly divided into three layers: infrastructure, applications and the periphery where they meet the real world. These will be discussed in turn. The report will go on to consider the impact the cloud will have on the IT industry and the economy as a whole. The conclusion will look at what might stop the cloud from growing ever thicker: regulation and worries about the safety of both personal and corporate data."

Computing on 2 Watts of Power!

"CherryPal's cloud-based computer is unique because it offers the technology without subscription costs, and only draws two watts of power. The machine has no moving parts, and uses hardware encrpytion to provide a secure link to the cloud (which is run by Amazon)."

Gizmodo

And Zoli has a suggestion:

"why not go all the way (to cloud computing): forget desktop software, just bring up the browser and make Zoho or Google Apps the homepage."

The "SuperNAP"

"In the next couple of months, Switch will open a new facility located just a few miles from the McCarran International Airport called the SuperNAP. Roy describes the 407,000 square foot facility as the most energy efficient, tightly packed data center on the planet. He expects it to be filled by the world's most prominent companies, including just about every technology heavyweight you can think of and the major media conglomerates. The SuperNAP monstrosity looks to stand as just a starting point for Switch with the company's investors urging it to build close to 10 similar centers around the globe. Such an undertaking could strap actual muscle to the cloud and utility computing buzzwords that have become commonplace in the technology industry."

The Register

11 Cloud Computing Vendors to Watch

CIO Magazine cites a Forrester analysis

1. Akamai
2. Amazon
3. Areti Internet
4. Enki
5. Fortress ITX
6. Joyent ( a sponsor of this blog)
7. Layered Technologies
8. Rackspace
9. Salesforce.com
10. Terremark
11. XCalibre