Red Hat OpenSource Cloud Computing Forum

Below are three of the more interesting/promising presentations from the recent Red Hat sponsored OpenSource Cloud Computing Forum.

Is BI Ready For The Cloud?

On Demand Business Intelligence has picked up traction in the past year as both SMB’s and their larger brethren turn to hosted BI solutions to deploy BI projects faster with less risk  and at lower cost. Initially reserved for analyzing excel files and for small departmental projects, BI in the cloud is now being utilized for extremely large data sets and data warehousing projects.

GoodData is one of the first firms to offer BI in the cloud and just recently won the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge.  GoodData offers standard BI functionality and tools for Analytics, and Dashboard and Report creation but due to its Cloud architecture offers scalability and collaboration ability not available with on premise BI tools.

A few of GoodData’s competitors include SAP Business Objects, Swirrl, and SQLStream. Expect to see more competitors jump into the space as both computing cycle costs come down and as more companies make the transition to the cloud for BI projects.

V2 of Cloud Computing Use Cases Published

Version 2 of the  Computing Use Cases White Paper has just been published.  V2 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases focuses on developer roles and what is necessary for Open API’s to work with Cloud Computing.

V2 of the Use Cases series follows the release of the the initial Cloud Computing Use Cases document in August 2009 that focused on requirements that need to be standardized in a cloud environment to ensure integration, portability and interoperability.

The Cloud Computing Use Cases Group is now soliciting input on V3 of the Cloud Computing Use Cases series and has identified the topics of Moving to the Cloud, Security in Cloud Computing and SLA’s for Cloud Computing as potential focuses of V3.

Microsoft Makes Windows Azure Push

Microsoft has recently made a strong push into consolidating mind share amongst Cloud Developers with a relaunched Windows Azure Platform developer portal and targeted adverts on LinkedIn and other social networking sites.

Microsoft technical strategist  Steve Marx outlines the  Windows Azure Platform for developers in the following video.