NGA Sets GEOINT Strategic Direction with Earth Builder

Last month Google and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency started sharing details about their "GEOINT on Demand" collaboration. The project, named Earth Builder, was built specifically to enable NGA to directly use Google’s cloud-based geospatial processing power.  this capability will enhance the agency's ability to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence to the DoD, Intelligence Community and the entire National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG).

For those not familiar, the NSG is a unified community of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) experts, producers and users organized around the goal of integrating technology, policies, capabilities and doctrine to produce GEOINT in a multi-intelligence environment. NGA is the Functional Manager for the NSG, providing strategic thinking, guidance and direction to the community concerning all aspects of GEOINT, from its acquisition to its utilization.

This move is clearly in-line with the vision outlilined last November by NGA Director Letitia A. Long in her speech at the GEOINT 2010 Conference in New Orleans. In that presentation, she outlined her new vision that involves taking advantage of key location-based applications and trends that deliver intuitive and powerful apps for solving a multiple of GEOINT challenges, as well as the importance of empowering users to easily take advantage of this new frontier of GEOINT.

Video of Director Long's entire speech is available online.

Read more on Google's collaboration with the NGA on the Google Enterprise Blog.

 

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

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Salesforce.com and Google expand their alliance

In a Jan. 3rd announcement, Salesforce.com announced an expansion of its global strategic alliance with Google. In announcing the availability of Force.com for Google App Engine™, the team has connected two of the industry’s leading cloud computing platforms. This could definitely help in expanding the number of applications available through cloud-based services. It also bears watching.

In my earlier post on cloud interoperability , I discussed three paths to accomplishing this worthy goal:

• “Standards Body” Approach
• “Adopt Proven Technology” Approach
• “Customer Driven” Approach

This clearly fits in the second bin. While I welcome this expansion of cloud capability, the cloud titans should also keep the greater community in mind as they move forward. That may mean a more open Salesforce.com.

The quote from Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com is that,“We have an open vision for cloud computing.” Sounds good but as the late President Ronald Reagan would put it, "doveriai, no proveriai" (Trust, but verify).

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IBM, Microsoft and Google

On October 6th, IBM launched their cloud services initiative. This is a:

 "[C]ompany-wide initiative that extends its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). IBM's new cloud services can help businesses of all sizes more easily adopt cloud computing models to better manage data, lower operational costs and make collaboration easier."

Since IBM has partnered on cloud computing with Google, this commentary on Microsoft by Michael Vizard may be telling:

"Just about everything that Microsoft does and says about cloud computing comes across as fairly reactionary. Essentially, Microsoft has let Google set the tone for much of the last two years and every service that it rolls out is compared and contrasted to something Google already did...."

" ...Unfortunately, it looks like Microsoft is pretty much asleep at the wheel when it comes to cloud computing in the channel. Of course, one of these days Google is going to wake up to the same opportunity. And before Microsoft realizes, a large swath of the channel might find common cause with Google simply because it might actually be trying to make an effort."

But Google has issues as well. From the same commentary:

 

"Right now, it doesn’t look like Google even knows how to spell the word channel. But that’s not likely to stay the case forever. In the meantime, Microsoft is pretty much ignoring a coalition of the willing at its own peril."

Microsoft clearly has a chance to leverage it's dominance in the application space by helping it's partners port millions of applications to the cloud using the Microsoft Cloud OS. But will they move before Google wakes up and smells the channel?  

When is comes to channels, IBM also knows a few things so this will indeed be interesting.

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Cloud Computing: A pay-by-consumption scalable service

John Edwards (not the Senator) of Computerworld sees cloud computing as a "...pay-by-consumption scalable service that's usually free of long-term contracts and is typically application- and operating system-independent". His recent article discusses AT&T, 3Tera, Google, IBM, Sun, Terremark Worldwide, XCalibre and Amazon.

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Google Launches Chrome: Desktop-centric to Network-centric

According to Nicholas Carr, "Chrome is the first cloud browser". If you're not familiar with Chrome, this application is Google's entry into the browser wars. In his blog, Mr. Carr describes it as " the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages".

For the national security community this event really highlights the current shift from a desktop-centric world to the network-centric world.

Words from Google.

"All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build."

Read more on Chrome on the Official Google blog.

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SOA-R Interest Grows

Interest continue to grow in the use of cloud computing concepts for national security missions. Although some view the idea of a "private cloud" as an oxymoron, I personally see no better way of describing what organizations like the DoD and DHS are doing. Maybe "enterprise cloud" would be a better term. What do you think?

In any case the first SOA-R event drew participation from across the industry and Government market space. Presenters included representatives from Google, IBM, Appistry, and Parabon. Attendees included representatives from The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, BAE Systems, Juniper Networks, SAIC, and many more. The event created the venue for an open forum, cross-industry discussion regarding cloud computing, SOA, and adoption and implementation by federal government and Department of Defense users. The focus of the event centered on defining cloud computing and what it means to government customers. The second event will be held on August 13th and will focus on Global Information Access. Speakers from Cisco, Appirio, and Akamai have been confirmed.

Cisco appears to be jumping into cloud computing "big time"!! I understand from some of my discussions that they have focused in on solving all the network security and provisioning issues around the use of virtual machines. This would address many of the concerns agencies now have with cloud computing. They also demonstrate the ability to assure access to the cloud in their video on radio aware routing. You will recognize Appirio's name from one of my earlier posts. Their expertise is in connecting various clouds together. Akamai is also a strong cloud computing proponent. They are arguably one of the largest information providers in the world.

Membership in the SOA-R wiki also continues to grows. Recently added documents include ACT-IAC's "Toward a Service Driven IT Infrastructure" and Gartner's "Cloud Computing Meets Data Center Realities"

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CC Tidbits

Interesting tidbits from Maureen O'Gara in Apple, Google, Yahoo & Cloud Computing:

• Industry gadfly John Dvorak is advancing a theory culled from the blogosphere that Microsoft wants Yahoo for some all-important patent or another that would give it an edge in cloud computing, SaaS and portable search advertising.
• Appirio, the two-year-old start-up with products and professional services using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) from Google and salesforce.com that are supposed to jumpstart enterprises on the on-demand path, has gotten a $5.6 million B round from Sequoia Capital, the VC behind Google, Yahoo, LinkIn and PayPal. Appirio’s widgetry is also supposed to connect the Amazon, Google and salesforce clouds. It got a $1.1 million A round from salesforce.com and angels.
• Apple’s first flirtation with the Cloud has turned stormy. The Wall Street Journal’s great and powerful technology critic Walt Mossberg, a known Apple devotee, has panned its $99-a-year corporate-style synchronization service as unreliable. MobileMe, which includes 20GB of online storage, web-based apps and an online photo gallery, is supposed to synch people’s e-mail, contacts, calendars and bookmarks across Windows computers as well as Mac, iPhones and iPods. Mossberg says it’s problem-ridden and “ragged.”

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SOA-R First Session Presentations Announced

The presentations for the first session of the SOA-R Educational Series sesion have just been announced:

Steven L Armentrout, PhD
President & CEO
Parabon

Grids, Clouds and Computation: Getting to Ground Truth under Mostly Cloudy Conditions

For the past decade - under the banners of distributed computing, cluster computing, grid computing and, now, cloud computing - network-centric computing architectures have evolved steadily toward the inevitable: computation delivered as an on-demand service. The economic, temporal and analytical benefits of this utility-style model are, indeed, compelling and now that secure implementations are available, Federal adoption has accelerated, albeit not as swiftly as the hype around it. This presentation will dispel many popular misconceptions about grids, clouds and computation. You will walk away with a greater understanding of the industry, as well as a checklist of considerations designed to help you effectively leverage "computation on demand."

Bob Lozano
Co-Founder & Chief Strategist
Appistry

Private Clouds: Cloud Computing for Intelligence, Defense and the Enterprise

Seemingly from nowhere, cloud computing has become one of the hottest IT topics in 2008. For many IT practitioners, cloud computing represents IT services and infrastructure delivered by providers outside the enterprise via the Internet. While this will most certainly happen, many applications within Intelligence, Defense and Commercial Enterprises must remain within the firewall. For these organizations, the true opportunity represented by Cloud Computing is not simply the outsourcing of infrastructure, but the transformative effect the Cloud model will have within the organization. Every IT shop will become a cloud computing provider in its own right, operating a Private Cloud for its own applications. Today’s stove-piped application delivery models will give way to the cloud-based models of tomorrow. The rapid adoption of virtualization in the data center is only the first step.


Todd Wiseman
Manager, Federal Enterprise
Google

Implications of cloud computing

Cloud computing or utility computing is not a new concept but is finally accelerating rapidly in today's marketplace due to a number of developments and forces. Google will demonstrate several examples of capabilities available today in the 'cloud' and where software-as-a-service is headed in the future.

Greg Boss
Cloud Infrastructure Architect
IBM

What is Cloud Computing?

This presentation will describe how the IBM HiPODS team leverages our world wide cloud centers to work closely with enterprise customers to developed best practices, workload patterns, and reusable assets for cloud computing. We will describe a high-level infrastructure framework and its underlying enablers, such as virtualization, automation, self-service portal, and monitoring. We will describe how IBM has pioneered these technologies and is using them internally in our own cloud implementation. We will also share examples of production cloud data centers that we have built for customers. Finally we will give a demonstration of a actual customer production cloud data center.

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Dataline, IBM, Google, Northrop Grumman on Cloud Computing

My company, Dataline LLC, in cooperation with IBM, Google and Northrop Grumman Mission Systems, is sponsoring an educational series entitled "Cloud Computing in a Netcentric Environment". The series will be held at The Tower Club in McLean, VA and is designed for those interested in understanding how cloud computing and the associated technologies can be used to support national security applications. The series schedule is as follows:

What is Cloud Computing? --------------Wed, July16, 2008
Global Information Access --------------Wed, August 13, 2008
"Increased Efficiency, Reduced Cost"----Thu, September 11, 2008
Event Driven Information --------------Wed, October 8, 2008
Information Availability ----------------Wed, October 29, 2008
Mission Relevance --------------------- Wed, November 12, 2008

Registration is available at http://www.dataline.com/soar2.htm

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Salesforce.com & Google

A short promotional video on Salesforce and the Google cloud.

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Cloud Computing on CNBC - $100B market

Google’s Head In The Clouds

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May 1 IBM, Google Partnership Announcement

In this video, IBM and Google announce their joint cloud computing initiative. As I said in my earlier post, Google and IBM have teamed up to provide a "Google-like" infrastructure. Built on top of IBM technology, this is an open platform designed to support global collaboration in the design and development of enterprise applications that can leverage cloud computing concepts.

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Microsoft vs Google in Cloud Computing

Many took note of the Randall Stross essay in the New York Times last weekend. In it he succintly described why Microsoft is failing in it's attempt to bridge the next major shift in the computing industry. The cloud computing relevant points seem to be:

1) Microsoft's online services aren't doing well at all. The last time it made money online was fiscal 2005. Microsoft's online business actually lost $74 million last year.

2) Google--which makes about 90 percent of its revenues from online advertising--made $1.5 billion in 2005, $3 billion in 2006, and $4.2 billion in 2007. "Google’s share of searches in the United States has increased to almost 67.9 percent in March 2008 from 58.3 percent in March 2006. During the same period, Microsoft’s share has dropped to 6.3 percent from 13.1 percent."

With another view on Microsoft, Chris Capossela, Microsoft SVP, made the following comments:

• [Microsoft]will see more and more companies abandon their own in-house computer systems and shift to "cloud computing," a less expensive alternative.
• [Microsoft] plans to be "agnostic" by offering customers the choice between a traditional licensing model or a subscription-based service model embraced by rivals like Salesforce.com and Google.
• "In five years, 50 percent of our Exchange mailboxes will be Exchange Online,"
  

No wonder they need Yahoo.

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Microsoft gives up on Yahoo? - May 04, 2008

"Cloud computing is far more than a concept. With Broadband Internet connections now all-but-ubiquitous and microcomputers and locally-run software now so trouble-prone, Cloud Computing's time has come."

This is a quote from Steve Stroh's newly started blog on cloud computing. Steve has been writing about about Broadband Wireless Internet Access systems and technology since beginning a column about wireless for Internet Service Providers called Wireless Data Developments in Boardwatch Magazine in April, 1997. He started this last February blog because he hadn't "seen any good coverage of what the Cloud Computing trend makes possible from an ordinary user's perspective".Well Steve, I think things are going to change now.

Last week, I attended the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. While this conference is obviously meant to build the IBM brand and business, "cloud computing" was highlighted as the new computing model. This vision changes the idea of convergence from "everything in one device" to having all information "in the cloud" accessible by any device via industry standard protocols and interfaces. To that end, IBM and Google have teamed up to build a "Google-like" technical infrastructure upon which business enterprises can leverage cloud computing to have ubiquitous access to information globally no matter where it resides. Microsoft's announcement yesterday that it had given up on its attempt to buy Yahoo, now leaves Google and IBM in the perfect position to now define the future of cloud computing, right?

NOT!

Mark my words. The other shoe hasn't dropped yet. Cloud computing could completely change the mobile computing world. Since mobile device would serve as portals into the cloud, they would need to comply with any standards that would be put in place. An IBM/Google cloud platform could spell the end to the Microsoft dominated world. Just on Friday I was exchanging thoughts with Adam Zawel, INmobile.org Chief Collaboration Officer, on how the emerging battle between IBM/Google and Microsoft/Yahoo could drive future mobile device design just like the operating system shakeout (Windows Mobile vs. Symbian vs. Palm vs. RIM) did earlier. Cloud platform standards will basically determine what mobile function reside where.
IMHO there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Here's some reading for you Steve!

Not Just a Pretty Dream: Why Cloud Computing May Be the Most Durable 2.0 Tech

What is cloud computing?
Understanding the Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS markets: a Map of the Players in the Industry
Intel: "Web 2.0"-style cloud computing just a passing vapor

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IBM, Google and the Blue Business Platform - May 01, 2008

Today was good !!

This morning. there was a main session built around "CIO 2.0". The basic premise was that CIOs have now earned a seat at the business management table. With that privilege, they now need to have something worthwhile to say. In accordance with the session's title then, CIOs are now at a crossroads ( or as Bob DeRodes, EVP and CIO of Home Depot put it, in the cross-hairs). CIOs now need to decide if they are going to block the influx of Web 2.0 technologies or if they are going to adopt, embrace and leverage these new capabilities within the enterprise.
This discussion clearly set up the big news for the day. Sam Palmisano, IBM President & CEO, and Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman and CEO, announcement of the Blue Business Platform. A much better John Simonds provides a much better description of the session in his blog, Delusions of Adequacy, but basically, Google and IBM have teamed up to provide a "Google-like" technical infrastructure. Built on top of IBM technology, this is an open platform designed to support global collaboration in the design and development of enterprise applications that can leverage cloud computing concepts. This really changes the meaning of convergence. Instead of waiting for everything to converge into one device, information and services will all converge into the computing cloud. Interaction with the cloud, however, would be standardized across the industry. In that way, any device you have would be able to interact seamlessly with all information data-types within the cloud.

This vision really is Web 2.0 creating real business value.

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Google, Cloud Computing, and the US Intelligence Community - April 29, 2008

Just arrived in Los Angeles for the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference. IBM is billing this as a "new" conference, but I have my doubts. I am, however, very interested in hearing many of the speakers, particularly Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google. His presentation on "The Future of the Web, Cloud Computing and Innovation" should be quite interesting.

Since my focus is on technology in the public sector, the impact of Web 2.0 technologies is really turning my head. According to Maryann Lawlor of Signal Magazine, even government agencies are recognizing the effect of Web 2.0. According to her, "The Web 2.0 revolution is impelling cultural change faster and to a greater degree than ever experienced in recorded history, and democracies that answer to their populaces already are feeling the effects of that change—and ignore those effects at their own risk."

William Vajda, chief information officer (CIO), U.S. Department of Education, and co-chairman of the best practices committee, CIO Council is also watching these technologies closely. He describes Google as an internet intermediaries— an entities that is willing to step in and give the people what they want because they have access to the questions that people actually ask. This position makes then better positioned to know what is on the public’s mind than some government officials.

The U.S. intelligence community is also getting into the act. For example the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has made these technologies part of its information-sharing acceleration campaign. They have even developed a Wikipedia knock-off called Intellipedia for intelligence community.

For more on Web 2.0 in the US Government see Signal Magazine's online article, Governing in a Web 2.0 World .

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IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference - April 23, 2008

I just completed registration for the IBM Business Partner Leadership Conference. This is a new invitation-only conference being held this year in Los Angeles from Wednesday, April 30th through Friday, May 2nd. I'm looking forward to renewing my IBM contacts "in person" versus the "virtual" meetings that have become such a fixture of today's business world. If you're going to be there, please send me an email and let's catch up. If not, check out my blog next week for my personal insights.

(From the IBM website)
The conference will bring together executives from IBM Business Partner firms around the world, IBM senior-level executives, and recognized leaders from across business and industry, renowned academics, and many others. Ravi Marwaha, general manager, IBM Global Business Partners, will kick off the conference at an afternoon General Session on Wednesday, April 30th in the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.Recently announced speakers include:

• IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano
• IBM Executive Vice President Nick Donofrio
• Google Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Eric Schmidt
• Dr. Warren Bennis, one of the world’s foremost authorities on leadership
• Dr. Dan Esty, an acclaimed author and environmentalist
• Frank Gens, senior vice president, Research, IDC
• Harvey Koeppel, executive director of the Center for CIO Leadership

In addition to General Sessions in the Nokia Theatre, geography and business unit breakouts will be held in the Los Angeles Convention Center adjacent to the theatre.Chief decision makers from firms around the world are invited to attend the conference and contribute to a dialogue covering topical issues, trends, strategic directions and opportunities.

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