The Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang will publish a SaaS Customer’s Bill of Rights next week. The Bill Of Rights is a collaborative effort that has input from a veritable who’s who of SaaS providers and thought leaders.
The SaaS Bill of Rights follows similar efforts/reports that have been created for Cloud Computing and ERP customers.
The timing of the SaaS Bill Of Right’s is fortuitous as new SaaS deployments are gaining more traction by the month in both large and SMB enterprises.
The document will be published under Creative Commons so that should give others a chance to lend their real world contractual and service experiences to the Bill of Rights.
San Antonio based Rackspace is a global web host and cloud provider known for their high end managed hosting and dedicated services. The company delivers managed services to over 16,000 customers from eight data centers worldwide.
Rackspace has recently made quite a splash within the Cloud Industry with the launch of a number of Cloud Services under its Rackspace Cloud division (formerly Mosso)
I recently had the opportunity to interview General Manager Emil Sayegh about the Rackspace Cloud.
OnDemand Beat – “Emil, What is your role as General Manager of the Rackspace Cloud?”
Emil Sayegh – “The Rackspace Cloud is a self contained Entrepreneurial Business Unit within Rackspace, with a great startup culture. My day to day role is to run all the facets of the Cloud business. I spend my days both strategizing, and continuously working with my team to evolve and improve our offerings to our customers. I ensure that our customers are getting the best value for our services, that our shareholders are getting the best return on their investment, and that our employees (we call them Rackers), have a great professional environment to work, and grow.”
OnDemand Beat – “What areas of the Rackspace Cloud are growing the fastest?”
Cloud Sites also is Number 1 in terms of market share and has a 60% larger market share than Google App Engine per the Wall Street Journal.
Cloud Servers has certainly grown the fastest, since we opened up the Cloud Server API allowing partners to create applications that interface with Cloud Servers. Now our growth is compounded not only by the appetite of our customers, but also by the appetite of our partners’ customers. We are lucky to have such great customers and partners that do not hesitate to recommend us. That is what powers and energizes me, and all other Rackers every day.”
OnDemand Beat – What type of customer has Rackspace noticed to date as being the most enthusiastic adopter of the Rackspace Suite?
Emil Sayegh – “The early adopters of the Rackspace Suite have been startups, SaaS companies, designers and developers. But we have recently seen a steady shift of the Rackspace Cloud customer base to Fortune 1000. These large enterprises are creating many new projects in the cloud.
Essentially the Cloud has become applicable for everyone in IT, but not for every IT workload. As an example, 4 major TV networks moved their online election coverage sites to the Rackspace Cloud on Election night 2008. They found that it was very economical not to scale up their own in house DC infrastructure for just one night of heavy traffic. Instead, their web pages applicable for the election coverage moved to the Cloud. They sustained extremely heavy traffic the night of the election. The TV networks of course only paid for their usage for one night of peak load. Otherwise, they would have to incur the high cost of buying and maintaining 100s of extra servers in their DC just to be used once every 4 years.
Many Fortune 1000 company CIOs are finding exactly what designers, developers, and SMBs had discovered – that the Cloud is great for starting and scaling new projects. Projects where predictability of success is variable are ideal for the cloud. The risk is very low due to the pay for use nature of cloud. Projects that have legacy or custom code, on the other hand, may not be suited for the Cloud.”
OnDemand Beat – “Cloud Servers support a number of popular operating systems – What operating systems and or Linux Distributions have turned out to be the most popular so far among Rackspace customers?”
Emil Sayegh – “Cloud Servers currently supports a variety of popular Linux Distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Centos, Fedora, Arch and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ubuntu has been in the lead. But as you may know, we also are working on a Windows offering on Cloud Servers, that is coming up very soon. We get a lot of demand for that as well.
Also, keep in mind our Cloud Sites platform is the only Platform Cloud in the market that supports both Windows (.Net), and Linux (LAMP) technologies. Demand Linux is still dominant on Cloud Sites, but Windows is not too far behind.”
OnDemand Beat – “A key differentiator I have noticed with Rackspace vs. other cloud service providers is the Rackspace SLA. Has the Rackspace SLA helped in convincing larger enterprises and government agencies to try the Rackspace Cloud Suite?”
Emil Sayegh – “Rackspace has always stood for our top quality of service. Our Fanatical Support® is a key differentiator that customers have gotten used to with Rackspace and do notice when compared to the other Cloud Service providers.”
OnDemand Beat – “Rackspace just recently launched its Cloud Tools Site. Can you give an overview of what the Cloud Tools Site is and the benefits of the site for Rackspace customers?”
Emil Sayegh – “Cloud Tools is a destination for Rackspace customers that are looking to expand the functionality and the power of the Cloud by leveraging third-party tools and applications. These tools are built by our partners using the open source API, launched in July 2009, to create custom, value-add applications for the Rackspace Cloud.
To date Rackspace partners have created over 40 applications that are available on the Cloud Tools Site with many more coming online soon.”
OnDemand Beat – “To date, Rackspace Cloud Tools are available for Monitoring & Reporting, Development, System Management and Client Software. What are some of the additional Cloud Tools you see forthcoming in the near future?”
Emil Sayegh – “Honestly, it is hard to predict all the different categories that will emerge. Harnessing the power of the cloud will be up to the imagination, and innovation of our partners. Just to give you a taste (no pun intended), we have a new partner named Vanilla that is using our API to power their forum hosting service. Also, we are seeing partners like Sonian using us for email Archiving, or like SOASTA for load testing. So there is a myriad of use cases that are emerging, and we encourage our partners to submit their applications.”
OnDemand Beat – “Emil; you have mentioned in the past that Rackspace has a startup culture with all the benefits of an established company—how does Rackspace maintain that balance?”
Emil Sayegh – “Lew Moorman (Rackspace Cloud President) and I have worked hard at maintaining an environment where employees always have the ability to impact change. We accomplish this by keeping the number of management levels low. We also hire people who we fully trust to make important decisions.
The Rackspace Cloud, through recent acquisitions and growth, is composed of a number of groups; however, the principal is always the same…treat the customer like a king and wow them with our service, and with our technology. Give them the best user experience from end to end, better than anywhere else they go.”
OnDemand Beat – “What upcoming conferences and events can OnDemand Beat readers meet the Rackspace Cloud team?”
Emil Sayegh – “Here is the list of events we will be at. I really hope to meet some your readers there. Please look me up, I love to talk to folks about the Cloud. My email is emil.sayegh {at} rackspace(.)com, and my twitter account is @esayegh.
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.
VMware this week officially launched vSphere v4 at its headquarters in Palo Alto. vSphere is the long awaited 64 bit successor to VMware’s ESX line of virtualization solutions.
Written to take advantage of the Intel Xeon 5500 “Nehalem” chipset; vSphere has about 150 new features compared to ESX. vSphere has an incredible (in my opinion) amount of partner support on its rollout and VMware CEO Paul Maritz was joined on stage by John Chambers, Michael Dell and HP’s John Mouton at the product launch.
Touted as the industry’s first cloud operating system, vSphere’s feature set is very robust. Created to appeal to both SMB and Fortune 100 clients, vSphere supports both application and infrastructure services. On the application side vSphere handles availability, security and scalability. Availability and security have always been sticking points in the typical virtualized environment and vSphere handles these challenges with firewall, intrusion prevention and detection services while larger sites and institutions should be able to utilize Dynamic Resource Sizing for scalability.
Via a number of partner solutions, vSphere has support for storage, network and compute infrastructure services. Cisco Systems is using vNetwork as a foundation for the Cisco Nexus 1000V soft switch, which works via an API with vSphere. And to date 25 VMware partners have built storage solutions to support vStorage new thin provisioning functionality.
The launch event was also used to detail out the vCloud initiative; VMware’s ecosystem of cloud service providers and application providers. To date over 1000 application providers have certified Web2.0, SaaS, Linux and Windows applications to run as vApp applications in the VMware Cloud.
A key advantage that VMware has with vSphere compared to competing virtualization solutions is that the VMware team is wholly focused on virtualization (and at this point cloud computing) This gives VMware quite a leg up in terms of product support staff, adoption of industry virtualization standards like Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and with R&D effort for point and major new releases of the product.
Priced starting at $999 for a 3 server “package” for its SMB focused VSphere Essentials up to $3,495 per CPU for its Enterprise Plus product, vSphere is a big step forward in the cloud computing industry and in future articles I will delve into a bit more detail about vNetwork and vStorage solutions partners are building for vSphere.
