SUN-IBM Talks Breakdown

As reported in multiple sources today, including Reuters, Sun has apparently rejected a purchase offer by IBM.

"Shares of Sun Microsystems Inc tumbled 22.5 percent after it rejected a $7 billion buyout bid from IBM, leaving the smaller server and software maker vulnerable to lawsuits from shareholders nervous about its viability as a stand-alone company."

Part of the precipitous drop in share price was the realization that IBM-SUN threat to Microsoft dominance may no longer be a possibility.

(from Digital Journal)

"But the Sun cloud computing announcement also coincides with IBM's virtual desktop strategy that they brought to market late in 2008, bundling Lotus and other services to effectively strike at Microsoft. The IBM strategy, as reported in eWeek, would not only threaten Microsoft's desktop software, but delivers what many in the hardware manufacturing space have feared - cloud computing for the corporate enterprise IT market."

Since Sun probably needs an acquisition more than IBM, this was quite an interesting move.

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IBM and Amazon

According to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) site, you can now use DB2, Informix, WebSphere sMash, WebSphere Portal Server or Lotus Web Content Management on Amazon's EC2 cloud.

"This relationship will enable you to bring your own IBM licenses to Amazon EC2, utilize IBM’s 'Development' AMIs, or leverage the 'Production' Amazon EC2 running IBM service. All of these options will enable you to get started quickly using popular IBM platform technologies in the Amazon EC2 environment."

To me, this move was clearly focused at besting Microsoft's Azure platform into the cloud and represents a huge leap forward for this nascent industry. Now an enterprise can easily use these IBM products as a utility. As IBM adds more of their products into the mix, cloud transition offerings (enterprise-to-cloud or cloud-to enterprise) will follow.

This also represents a huge turning point for cloud interoperability. IBM's enterprise footprint paired with Amazon's established lead in infrastructure-as-a-service could create a de facto standard within the cloud computing community.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but it is definitely a huge event.

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NCOIC Cloud Working Group

The NCOIC will be holding a cloud computing working group on December 10th during plenary session in Costa Mesa, CA. The session focus will be "Requirements for Enterprise Cloud Computing". The current agenda is:

• 8:00 - 9:00 HP, David Ryan (Chief Architect, HP Federal Technology Solution Group)
  "Secure Cloud Computing"
• 9:00 - 10:00 Salesforce.com, Peter Coffee (Director of Platform Research)
  "Building Mission-Critical SaaS Applications"
• 10:00 - 11:00 IBM, David Lindquist (Cloud Computing chief architect and IBM Fellow)
  "IBM's Perspective on Cloud Computing"
• 11:00 - 12:00 Cisco, Glenn Dasmalchi (Chief of Staff, Cisco CTO Office)
  "Cloud Computing: Trends and Opportunity"

A follow-up session is also planned for December 11th.

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IBM Rating Clouds

According to Cloud Computing Journal, and Red Herring, IBM will now rate other cloud providers. Using the "Resilient Cloud Validation" program, IBM will validate their facilities, applications, data, staff, processes and business strategy in order to weed out untrustworthy providers.

"IBM announced that Allscripts, a leader in delivering innovation technologies that improve the health of patients and the bottom line of physicians and other healthcare organizations, is the first company to begin the certification process. The designation is expected to enable Allscripts to enhance the current online data backup service it provides to better serve the needs of the 150,000 physicians who use the company's electronic health records, e-prescribing and practice management solutions. Next Spring, Allscripts will release a new online backup service, powered by IBM, which will provide a simple, easy to deploy remote data protection service, helping to ensure that sensitive patient information and medical documentation will be encrypted, securely stored away from the customer location, and easily recovered at a moment's notice."

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World Summit of Cloud Computing: "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group

To leverage attendees of the World Summit of Cloud Computing, a kick-off meeting of the "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group will be held near Tel Aviv, Israel on December 3, 2008. The stated goal of this meeting will be to exchange information about best practices, use cases, standardizations, success stories, emerging technologies, and issues in Enterprise Cloud Computing.

This clearly is a grass roots attempt towards creating a framework to facilitate the future global movement towards Cloud Computing. As put by Avner Algom of the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies:

"The rapid growth of this technology will require a trusted source of objective information to enable enterprises to understand the opportunities and risks in this area. An Enterprise Cloud Computing Group can play this role and provide value to both vendors and customers."

Bob Marcus of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium is supporting this effort by providing questions on key issues from many enterprise and government representatives. According to Mr. Marcus, current areas of interest to NCOIC members include:

• Security of applications and data in public Clouds
• Availability, risk management, and SLAs for public Clouds
• Interoperability between public Clouds and enterprise systems
• Management and governance of services across public Clouds and the enterprise
• Best practices for migrating appropriate applications to Cloud environments
• Use cases and patterns for Cloud deployments

According to Mr. Algom, he has already receive intent interest from many groups. So far, he is expecting participation from the following organizations:

• 451 Group
• Forrester
• BMC Software
• Sun
• Amazon
• IBM
• Cohesiveft

By the way, the summit has collected quite an impressive list of speakers, including:

• Cristophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer, Google
• Paul Strong, Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay
• Simone Brunozzi, Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
• Dr. Owen O'Malley, Hadoop Architect and Apache VP for Hadoop, Yahoo
• Charles Brett, Principal Analyst, Forrester
• Nati Shalom, Founder & CTO, GigaSpaces
• Peter Nickolov, President, COO and CTO, 3Tera
• Russ Daniels, Vice-President & CTOHP Cloud Services Strategy, HP
• Jon Mountjoy, Developer Relations Manager , Salesforce.com
• Richard Zippel, Vice President of Technology in the Chief Technologist's Office, Sun Microsystems

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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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Amazon, Elastra and the New Enterprise Data Center

Last week Amazon made an investment into Elastra. Some see this as Amazon's enterprise play. Others see it as move towards the viability of private clouds. I see it as a natural step towards cloud computing as a mainstream datacenter option.

In a whitepaper titled "From Cloud Computing to the New Enterprise Data Center" IBM has positioned cloud computing as precursor to the new enterprise datacenter model.

"The new enterprise data center will be a virtualized, efficiently-managed center, which will
employ some of the tools and techniques adopted by Web-centric clouds, generalized for
adoption by a broader range of customers, and enhanced to support secure transactional
workloads. With this highly efficient and shared infrastructure, the ability for companies to
respond instantaneously to new business needs, to interpret large amounts of information in real
time, and to make sound business decisions based on moment-in-time data becomes possible.
The new enterprise data center is an evolutionary new model to provide a new scale of efficient
and dynamic approach in helping to align IT with business goals."

From another point of view, Gartner analyst Lydia Leong while commentting on Rackspace's recent IPO said that "we expect to see the majority of [corporate] IT infrastructure move into the cloud" over the next two decades.

If all this is true, cloud computing is how enterprises will managed their IT infrastructures. No wonder then that Amazon has made this early bet.

If you're interested in learning more about Amazon's plans, join us at the cloud computing education event on September 11th when Amazon is currently scheduled to present.

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IBM Invests Nearly $400M on Cloud Computing Centers

In a press release last week, IBM says that it will spend $360 million to build its most sophisticated, state-of-the-art data center at its facility in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. IBM will also build a new cloud computing center in Tokyo, Japan that will provide large enterprise customers, universities and government agencies immediate access to experts who can help them deploy cloud computing environments.

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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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What is Cloud Computing? -- Another view

Irving Wladasky-Berger, chairman emeritus of IBM's Academy of Technology, recently wrote and article on cloud computing titled "What is Cloud Computing, Anyway?". The following is my interpretation of a few of the excellent points he made:

• Well designed cloud computing applications completely hide the underlying software and hardware
• Cloud computing is part of the evolution of the Internet
• Cloud applications scale up to support billions of users, a scale far bigger than what has been done to date
• Cloud computing represents the "industrialization" of IT infrastructures and datacenters
• Enterprises need to embrace cloud-like methodologies now !!

The entire article is well worth your time to read first hand

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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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IBM Opens Africa's First "Cloud Computing" Center

...... Second Cloud Center in China

"IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the opening of new "cloud computing" centers in South Africa and China. Cloud computing enables the delivery of personal and business services from remote, centralized servers (the "cloud") that share computing resources and bandwidth -- to any device, anywhere.
The shift to cloud computing is fueled by the dramatic growth in business collaboration, connected devices, real-time data streams, and Web 2.0 applications such as streaming media and entertainment, social networking and mobile commerce. Cloud computing represents a major step up in computing -- as it enables governments, businesses and individuals to access super-computing power, analysis of massive amounts of data, and applications five to 10-times more cost effectively.*
The new centers are designed to help clients in Africa and China tackle issues they would otherwise not be able to address. For example, using IBM's new centers, a university could access the computational power of a supercomputer to analyze data and determine how diseases might spread in a region or how climate changes will affect natural resources. "

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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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IBM Cloud Computing Center

On June 5th, IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.

The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company.

On the same day, IBM released an updated version of IBM's Tivoli Provisioning Manager focused on allowing data centers to benefit from cloud computing, allowing them to scale more cost-effectively. IBM is now positioning TPM at the forefront of its "Blue Cloud" cloud computing initiative.

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Is IBM serious about cloud computing?

Last week in Eye on the Enterprise, Joe McKendrick, highlighted IBM VP Steve Mills' apparently less than enthusiastic statement regarding cloud computing. In an April 30th interview with CNET’s Dan Farber, Steve Mills said:

"The cloud as some amorphous concept that meets all needs and requirements is science fiction."

Mr. McKendrick sees this as evidence of IBM's long history of competing with itself. Personally, I believe that IBM is just being coy about it's intentions. To support my point, I refer you to Mr. Mills' statements on March 19th regarding the IBM European Cloud Computing Hub:

"Our investments in cloud computing are a prime example of how IBM is seeking out emerging global market opportunities and new computing models that benefit IBM clients," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software Group. "Through this new facility and the cloud computing model, the wealth of talent at IBM's software lab in Ireland will be accessible to not only the rest of Europe, but Africa and the Middle East as well."

Cloud computing is good for IBM hardware and IBM software. Trust me. IBM will continue to be a leader to the cloud computing revolution.

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IBM Blue Cloud

A short news interview on the IBM Blue Cloud .

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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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HP & EDS

In an interesting take on his Enterprise Architecture blog, Chris Pearson sees the HP acquisition of EDS as a ploy by HP to remain relevant in a cloud computing world.

"The next step is cloud computing. With outsourcing offering, the market was more or less limited to big companies able to manage global contracts when streamlining their IT operations. With cloud computing concept, computing power is seen like energy. It may be provided everywhere like a commodity. Small and medium enterprise would afford then to be connected. To be able to compete on this market is the real motivation of the acquisition which may result in a consolidated revenue of $38 billion in services behind IBM with its $54 billion."

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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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