Up until the Obama administrations appointment of Vivek Kundra as the Federal CIO, the Fed had not presented a comprehensive vision of its Cloud Computing plans. This changes with the General Services Administration (GSA) recently released RFQ (Request for Quotation) for Cloud Computing Services.
The GSA RFQ focuses on Infrastructure as a Service with an emphasis on:
Cloud Storage Services
Virtual Machines
Cloud Web Hosting
The RFQ also includes a high level view of the Federal Cloud Computing Framework; found in the Draft National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Working Definition of Cloud Computing.
The RFQ and framework help Cloud Computing Service Providers understand the cloud computing vision that the Fed has adopted in addition to various interoperability, bandwidth and security standards that the Fed mandates. The Framework also outlines the Feds high level categorization of Software as a Service Applications and Platform as A Service.This helps the fledgling cloud computing industry in 3 ways.
First off, it helps put to rest some of the misgivings and fears that private industry and sceptics have held concerning the adoption of cloud computing. Once the Federal government adopts certain cloud computing standards in its own framework, it is safe to say that sceptics and holdouts in private industry will soon come around and adopt these standards as well.
Secondly, this RFQ will give the service providers who are chosen to provide cloud computing services to the GSA, real world use cases and examples that can be put to use in selling cloud services to private industry.
Finally, the detailed cloud computing requirements that the GSA outlines in the document give both established and startup cloud service providers a blueprint for services and standards that they should adopt in the future.
The scope of this initial RFQ may limit the chosen service providers to larger cloud providers who can provide the full breadth of services, but the trickle down effect of the Fed RFQ will surely help smaller Cloud Service providers at the state, local and private industry level.
Honda yesterday announced and demonstrated the prototype of its stealth Brain Machine Interface (BMI) with Asimo in Tokyo.
Long rumoured; the Brain Machine Interface has the potential to revolutionize the technology industry.
Google’s emergent Cadie has expressed interest in creating a clone army of Asimo’s powered by BMI to create bug free Software as a Service and Cloud Computing code to jumpstart Google’s late entry into the Enterprise software market.
Technology titans Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, HP and SAP have expressed interest in BMI powered Asimo’s as they see the tremendous benefit of having one programmers thought patterns (and valuable software code and Intellectual Property) replicated throughout their firms. BMI powered Asimo’s will eliminate the need for the technology titans to spend billions acquiring entire companies when they can just hire one person from a start up or acquisition target and leapfrog their competitors. As an added benefit Asimo’s do not require lunch breaks or caffeine and up to now have not attempted to unionize or ask for cost of living salary increases.
View Honda’s amazing demonstration of BMI starring Asimo.
President Barack Obama signed into law the sweeping US Economic Stimulus Bill on 17 February in Denver. One of the most anticipated sections of the Bill for the technology community was Broadband Stimulus. (With the other being Health IT stimulus provisions)
The lack of cheap, ubiquitous broadband connectivity throughout the US has been a large stumbling block that has prevented technology solutions such as Cloud Computing and SaaS from being adopted by a larger number of American businesses and consumers. The US has fallen far behind the rest of the industrialized world (and its key economic and technology competitors in the 21st century) in the past 8 years and now ranks number 15 in Broadband adoption worldwide.
The US Economic Stimulus Bill includes $7.2 billion dollars in broadband subsidies. The broadband subsidies are to be used to fund grants and loans that focus on areas of the country that are unserved and underserved by broadband providers, particularly remote and rural areas of the US in addition to underserved urban communities. A large portion of America’s economic engine and overall employment is driven not by Fortune 1000 companies but by SMB’s in rural and urban area of the US.
$4.7 billion dollars of the subsidy will be distributed via grant programs administered by the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Technology Opportunities Program. (TOP) This is great news for those who like transparency in government as the NTIA’s TOP program’s grantees are searchable via the TOP Legacy Project. The remaining $2.5 billion of the subsides will be distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service in the form of grants and loans to broadband providers targeting service in rural areas.
The final version of broadband stimulus is not without its drawbacks. Chief among them is the fact that minimum broadband speed requirements were removed from the final version of the funding. In the US broadband speeds average a mediocre 4.9 megabits per second, far lower than the average in South Korea which averages 49.5 megabits per second or Japan which averages 63.6 megabits per second. The US will be in a mad scramble with Japan and South Korea to regain market share in the auto, electronics and countless other industries once the current recession ends and it will not help that the US will continue to be one step behind its trading partners and competitors in its broadband infrastructure.
But despite the drawbacks broadband stimulus could not have come at a better time for the US technology industry. Many jobs will be created by both large and small broadband providers to build out their broadband infrastructure, SaaS and Cloud Computing Service providers will have access to a larger pool of customers and industry stalwarts like Cisco and Sun will benefit due to increased purchases of hardware to support the broadband build out.
Requirements management has always been one of the facets of software development dominated by traditional packaged software solutions. Over the years, the solutions of choice have moved from commercial packaged solutions to open source solutions.
GatherSpace; headquartered in Santa Monica, was one of the first companies to move Software Requirements Management into an OnDemand Model. It offers a feature rich solution that has all the functionality that development teams are used to in packaged applications.
GatherSpace features include a software requirements hierarchy, iteration planning, use case functionality, built in Agile Software Development, bug tracking and very mature reporting options.
Pricing of the GatherSpace solution ranges from $15 per user per month with an annual contract to $25 per user per month with a 3 month contract. Gatherspace also offers an on-site deployment option that starts at $650 per user with a 10 user minimum. It will be a tough sell for some companies to commit to a 3, 6 or 12 month contract with an emerging company like GatherSpace and it would probably benefit them to initially offer month to month contracts like some of their competitors.
