Robert Duffner Interviews Chris Kemp, NASA, and Kevin Jackson, NJVC, on GovCloud

Recently, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mr. Robert Duffner, director of Product Management for Windows Azure, as part of his "Thought Leaders in the Cloud" series. In this interview, we discussed:

• Actual government IT successes, especially using cloud computing
• Deconstructing the hype around cloud computing and talking about its real characteristics and value
• How clouds need a critical mass to function and provide elasticity, and how the size of the US places it in a strong position to develop these kinds of clouds
• Industry transition from system integration to service integration
• Use of clouds among defense departments and other organizations with other high security requirements
• Synergy between cloud computing and geospatial data

I was honored to follow Mr. Chris Kemp, NASA CTO, in this series.  During his interview with Robert, they discussed:

• Mandate to consider cloud computing for every major government IT project
• "Be a Martian" - NASA using Windows Azure to let students classify craters
• Opportunity for government to use more open source rather than write as much in-house
• Security concerns around government data
• Inter-country collaboration on cloud computing initiatives
• Gartner blog post titled, "Do Government Clouds Make Any Sense?"
• Collaboration with Microsoft Research on public/private cloud hybrid
• NASA is leading the charge towards cloud computing and modern IT for government

I urge you to take the time to read both of these thoughtful interviews.

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

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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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Microsoft Azure

With the announcement of Azure, Microsoft has finally made it's cloud computing plans public. Maybe Larry Ellison is now ready to revise his opinion, huh? While this announcement is definitely a good thing, it also seems to be a defensive move on the software giant's part. In a USA Today article "Ray Valdes, an analyst at researcher Gartner, said that Microsoft's Web services strategy still isn't cohesive. It's "taking every major asset of intellectual property, and cloud-enabling it to some degree."

Key components of the Azure Services Platform include:

• Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking;
• Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting;
• Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control;
• Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and Web sites;
• Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud.

When this is coupled with Amazon's October 1st announcement to host Microsoft solutions on its EC2 platform, one can only wonder how long it will take before agencies just stop buying licenses and paying for maintenance on these products.

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Steve Ballmer comments on Microsoft's cloud plans

On October 17th in the "Redmond Channel Partner Online", a Microsoft Partner community publication, Kurt Mackie reported on Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer's comments on the company's vision for syncing up applications in the Internet cloud. Although Ballmer held back on much of the details he did say that Microsoft is planning to release big news on this topic at its Professional Developers Conference, which is scheduled to take place on Oct. 27 in Los Angeles.

According to Ballmer, Microsoft's applications will not have to be rewritten to run in the cloud, "but we'll encourage developers to do something to make apps more manageable at a higher level,".

"It's a transformation for our business, but I don't think we'll be buying all of the world's data servers," he said. Instead, Microsoft will have to "service-enable our partners and customers."

Ballmer also denied that Google was Microsoft's most significant competition. He said that Microsoft's main challenges are the open source business model and getting good at advertising for the consumer market.

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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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Microsoft Midori

Last week word got out that Microsoft's new research project codenamed Midori. According to Information Week "the Midori system is being called Microsoft's first cloud-based OS, and it could one day replace the company's keystone Windows franchise".

According to Reuven Cohen of Enomaly, Microsoft is downplaying any significance of this. Reuven describes this project as an "attempt to address the next logical step in operating systems design where a desktop is no longer centric to a users computing experience".

Is Midori really the end of Windows?

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Microsoft: "Cloud Computing is the Plan"

From the Wireless Business & Technology Cloud Computing News Desk :

"Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft’s Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October."

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Microsoft announcing Cloud Computing offering

According to Information Week, Microsoft plans to make three important business software offerings -- Exchange, Office Communications, and SharePoint -- available in SaaS versions for business this year, but it's still very much a soft sell: Microsoft senior VP Chris Capossela told InformationWeek that cloud computing isn't going to be cheaper than on-premise software and infrastructure, because "You're going to pay forever. ... It's a subscription, for goodness' sake."

UPDATE
Microsoft says "Focus on SaaS"

Microsoft CEO Ballmer said he believed "the cloud," applications and other computing services offered by vendors, will grow at a faster pace than hosting opportunities for solution providers. And he said Microsoft can't afford to delay its cloud computing efforts while competitors push ahead. The CEO also said Microsoft has plans to re-engineer its server products as it introduces more cloud computing services, but he didn't offer details other than saying the company would "re-invent" its server technology for cloud computing in such areas as scalability, cost and geocaching capabilities.

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How the NRO can leverage Cloud Computing

Last Thursday, May 22nd, I had the pleasure of attending an Intelligence Community Executive Forum hosted by Carahsoft. The topic of this forum was ""Innovative Technology for the Intelligence Enterprise". The speakers and panelist focused on how the National Reconnaissance Office could leverage information technology in support of it's advanced mission needs. Although neither cloud computing or netcentric warfare were on the agenda, both topics seemed to be central to where the agency is heading. Comments that peak my interest are below. This was an unclassified event so there are no secrets here (I hope).

Michele Weslander Quaid
Chief Technology Officer
Deputy Chief Information Officer
National Reconnaissance Office

• The ODNI wants the community to transition from the "need to know" mentality to a "need to provide" way of thinking. In doing this the community must move from it's mission silos towards web technology and into the netcentric world
• The NRO is an information services enterprise with its deliverable being value added information.

Guljit Khurana
President/CEO
Centrifuge Systems

• An event drive posture for information is now very important
• Persistent and temporal information analysis are critical to success

Ron Flax
Solution Architect
Hewlett Packard Software

• Industry is moving towards virtualization and automation
• Process change is critically needed in the NRO in order to allow technology to work

Bob Lozano
Co-founder
Appistry

• In order to build applications that work naturally in a cloud computing environment, you need to virtualize the application through the use of fabric software
• A different approach to solving bandwidth challenges is to move the application to where the data resides instead of moving large amounts of data to the application

Tim Stewart
Chief, IT Strategy and Technology Assessment
National Reconnaissance Office

• In order to realize the full value of virtualization, one needs to develop a real architecture. Government is not good at this which leaves the job for industry to complete.

S. K. Vinod
Co-founder and Headquarters Advocate
Xsigo Systems

• Input/Output virtualization is an important but under use aspect of modern IT infrastructures

Lt. Col Kirk Jester
Chief of Information Assurance (IA) Architecture and Governance
National Reconnaissance Office

• The NRO has 20-year-old systems
• There are no real good IT architectures
• The NRO is going back to the basics
• The organization has lost track of it's network endpoints and has trouble defining the perimeter

Lewis Shepherd
Chief Technology Officer
Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments

• There are 30,000 security holes in XP. Vista addresses that problem
• Vista is a trustworthy operating system, developed with the NSA
• The user experience is impinged by the extra security in Vista, but that is by design
• Vista is a platform for an entire end-to-end trusted stack
• Internet Explorer introduces security problems in the world of "mash-ups" because the browser is a multi-user system with multiple untrusted domains
• Microsoft is a "big time" provider of cloud services. It is also working on intelligence agency clouds
• There are approximately 500 million installations of the Microsoft operating system worldwide. When there is an operating system anomaly, these systems provide about 600,000 kernal reports a day. This forms the basis of a global early warning system for hackers and malware attacks
• Netcentricity needs a similar low-level warning system
• Microsoft cloud computing services will be built around MashupOS technology

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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 Renews Yahoo Bid

Microsoft renews Yahoo bid and is now offering to buy a piece of Yahoo. I believe this is just the opening of the second round.

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Gartner on Cloud Computing / Yahoo vs. Icahn- May 15, 2008

Gartner thinks that cloud computing may be the next big thing:

By 2012, 80 percent of Fortune 1000 enterprises will pay for some cloud computing service and 30 percent of them will pay for cloud computing infrastructure.

Through 2010, more than 80 percent of enterprise use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT infrastructure.

According to Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and Thomas Bittman at the Gartner Emerging Technologies conference in Las Vegas Cloud computing is largely misunderstood, but it’s a big deal. It could,in fact, be as big as the e-business revolution.

See more at Cloud computing: A look at the myths.

Carl Icahn and the the Yahoo Board of Directors are apparently having a very pointed discussion now. Mr. Icahn implies that the Yahoo board is not fulfilling their responsibilities to the stockholders. The back and forth is explained at Yahoo to Icahn: You misunderstand

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Yahoo-Microsoft Merger Proxy Fight - May 14, 2008

As I alluded to last week, "It's not over 'till it's over"

Carl Ichan Looking to Start Yahoo Proxy Fight

Money – The Microsoft-Yahoo Merger may not be over. Billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn is considering the prospect of starting a proxy fight to gain several seats on Yahoo's board in hopes of restarting negotiations with Microsoft.
I can only imagine that Mr. Ichan is looking at cloud computing as fertile ground.

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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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