What is this event?

Now in its third year, CloudSlam® covers the latest trends in the world of cloud computing. The conference has evolved from a purely virtual format to a hybrid Cloud Computing conference spread over 5 days. Day 1 of the conference will take place at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View California on Monday 18 April followed by 4 days of virtual cloud content.

Conference tracks for 2011 will include technology & innovation, implementation experiences, social & mobile cloud, security in the cloud and cloud for business.

How can you win Free Pass?

Simply click the button below or like the new OnDemand Beat Facebook Fan Page, for a chance to win the pass. The fifth person to like the page will win a pass to CloudSlam’11.

If you don’t win the pass you can still receive 10% off either the VIP or virtual conference fee by using discount code OnDemandBeat when registering.

What you need to know

1. The Winner will receive 1 virtual conference pass (Day 1 VIP pass not included)
2. The CloudSlam® Conference Pass Winner will be contacted via email.
3. Contest deadline is Wednesday April 13th and the winner will be announced on the OnDemand Beat Fan Page on Thursday April 14th.
4. No purchase is necessary to win.

Good Luck!

Is the timing ripe for Cloud Computing Capacity Marketplaces?
The beta launch this week of SpotCloud; from Reuven Cohen’s firm Enomaly, is a first in terms of a company focusing on the trading of compute capacity. Although SpotCloud is first to market, I would expect many players in this space in the near future as smaller cloud providers will have to soon start maximizing utilzation and profitability to stay viable.

Social Business Vs Enterprise 2.0
Peter Modigliani’s recent article really keys into the latest trending of the dualing terms Social Business vs Enterprise 2.0.

Cloud Computing Stocks Outperform General Market
While I don’t agree with the inclusion of Qwest Communications as a pure Cloud computing company, the charts do bear out that Cloud computing companies are doing quite well on Nasdaq since 2009.

Applications Made for the Cloud
James Urquhart reviews the 3 application types that are currently thriving or posed to do well in the coming years in the Cloud.

One of the issues that has held cloud computing back from even faster market adoption is a lack of understanding by rank and file business and consumer users of the benefits of moving to the cloud.

Spearheaded by Box.net, CEO’s of a number of prominent cloud vendors have banded together to talk about the benefits of the cloud with the; I Choose the Cloud, initiative. Other vendors who have joined include Xobni, SocialText, Zuora, Get Satisfaction and Freshbooks.

Will be interesting over time to see if other cloud vendors join this or similar initiatives as the cloud continues to becomes even more mainstream.

China Is World’s Fastest Growing Software Market
Gartner Report that outlines how China will remain the worlds fastest growing Enterprise Software Market through 2013. Areas of high growth will include On Demand ERP and data integration soltions

Is SAP a leader in Web 2.0?
SAP’s Timo Elliott details how SAP is leading other vendors in terms of adoption, rollout and usage of Web 2.0 tools and technology

US Air Force will further validate Cloud Computing
How the IBM/Air Force Cyber Security Cloud will help remove lingering thoughts about Cloud security.

Virtualization and Cloud Jobs on the Rise
Great article from Steve Jin that reviews what Virtualization and Cloud Jobs are hot at at the moment and the projected demand for Cloud related jobs in the future.

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?”

Emil Sayegh – “Cloud Servers have taken off tremendously; the momentum we are seeing to date is amazing. As Guy Rosen said “The big surprise here is Rackspace, which seems to be just a stepbehind Amazon”.

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.

• Twitter Conference LA 9/22/2009
• Blog World 10/15/2009
• No SQL 10/28/2009
• Cloud Computing Expo 11/2/2009″

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.

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.

There are a slew of Cloud Computing Conferences and Camps scheduled between March and July 2009. Some of the more notable ones are:

• March – June – There are 11 Cloud Camps scheduled worldwide in the next 4 months.
• March 30 – April 1 – The 2nd annual Cloud Computing Conference and Expo will be held in New York.
• April 20 – 24 – Cloud Slam is a virtual Cloud Computing conference held over 4 days in April.
• April 24th – The 13th Under The Radar Conference will be held in Mountain View, CA.
• May 18-21 – TechWeb’s Enterprise Cloud Summit will take place in mid May in Las Vegas.
• June 22-24 – O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference focuses on web performance and operations and many conference goers attend both the Velocity and Structure Conferences.
• June 25 – Structure 09 is GigaOm Networks 2nd annual Cloud Computing conference held in San Francisco.

The conference had extremely high attendance (The attendance I am sure was boosted even further due to the Velocity conference and the inaugural CloudCamp San Francisco taking place in the Bay area the same week) and I ran into Dan Farber and Steve Gillmor in the press area so it also had a bit of star power.

This conference had good marketing free content for the most part and the only session that seemed out of context to me was the panel on Harnessing Explosive Growth. Structure 08 was focused on Cloud Computing for the Enterprise so it was a bit much to have to sit and listen to yet more consumer orientated stories from the likes of Facebook and Meebo. It was also a bit jarring to hear that companies like Ebay and Facebook have no plans to put SLA’s in place to guarantee uptime for their users. When I worked for an ASP 10 years ago, SLA’s were standard and were required of us from all of our Enterprise customers…thus again proving that Enterprises and consumer facing companies like Facebook are in a different world.

The best keynotes in my opinion were from Greg Papadopoulos; Sun’s CTO and Zach Nelson; Netsuites CEO. Greg’s mention that Sun supports Open Services amongst On Demand vendors lead to a few groans in the audience but I think he is right on in saying that the On Demand market wont grow substantially until customers are sure their data wont be held hostage by vendors. And Zach Nelson laid out a great overview of the elusive Middle Market…a huge potential customer base for On Demand vendors that SAP learned recently with Business ByDesign; is hard to design solution for and sell into.

Gigaom Omni Media has become a true new media company along the likes of Tech Crunch and Read Write Web and Om has a full time staff of writers and editors. Thus instead of me giving an overview of the remaining sessions please read Liz Gannes live coverage of the conference here and check out photos here.