GigaOm’s Structure 2010 conference kicks off this week in San Francisco. Structure 2010 is spread over 2 full days and includes an impressive list of speakers and sessions in addition to a launchpad.

OnDemandBeat Readers can receive a $300 discount off the conference fee with discount code

http://structure2010.eventbrite.com/?discount=PRESS300

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.

One of the more eagerly adopted cloud services thus far in 2010 has been CloudShare Pro. CloudShare Pro is a “light” version of CloudShare’s Enterprise level product and is aimed at individuals and small teams who want to quickly set up training, sales or testing environments in the cloud and share copies with other colleagues.

Free during its beta period; CloudShare Pro allows user to create up to six Linux or Windows VM’s, each with its own internal IP and outbound access to the internet. CloudShare Pro also allows users to create snapshots of their environments (the beta version only saves the latest snapshot) and supports drag and drop file sharing from a desktop environment.

At the time of this article CloudShare Pro offers Windows 7, Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2008 and 2003 and CentOS 5 templates. These templates include the appropriate software licensing  for installed applications such as Microsoft Office, SQL Server 2008  and Oracle 11g database.

One of the more innovative features of CloudShare Pro is the ability to share user created environments with other teams members or associates. Users have up to 10 invites that can be sent out at any one time to allow others to share created environments.

Once an invited user collaborates on an existing environment, the new user can then either use the environment as is or can click a link to become an environment author and create his/her own CloudShare Pro account and custom environments. This viral effect is unique amongst cloud providers and is partly responsible for the reported 1000 users who signed on and created new environments in the first 2 weeks of CloudShare Pro’s launch.

In its current beta state, CloudShare Pro has a few limitations that hopefully will be addressed prior to GA. One of the most glaring is the small amount of RAM and hard disk space allocated for the images. Windows XP server 2008 for example only has a 12 MB hard disk partition and 2gb of ram. This would preclude the use of Cloudshare Pro to lighter usage such as for demo systems or for sales teams vs the enterprise level environments that can be setup via CloudShare’s Enterprise product. In addition, although internal IP’s and networking are allowed, Cloudshare environments are not accessible externally (Which prevents users from using CloudShare Pro for setting up websites or mail servers etc)

But for the users who need a lightweight cloud solution, CloudShare Pro very nicely fills a void that has developed in the Cloud Industry. Most Cloud vendors to date have marketed their offerings towards IT departments for medium to heavy use applications and as a result their solutions have a learning curve that has limited adoption to the more tech savvy user. With CloudShare Pro, almost anyone who can utilize a web browser should be able to quickly setup Cloud based environments

The rollout and fast adoption of CloudShare Pro is being watched closely in the industry and it would be safe to assume that the incumbents (Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid etc) will offer similar services in this space soon.

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.

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

The initial lack of capabilities in the provider interfaces created the market for cloud consoles. The initial crop of cloud consoles, however, has grown beyond simply providing a better interface into the cloud. This market has evolved into cloud brokers that act as the trust layer between the customer and their cloud infrastructures. The evolution from cloud console to cloud broker occurred in less than a year. In 2008, the only way to access Amazon Web Services was a command-line tool or writing your own code. As a result, a number of people built their own custom web interfaces for accessing AWS and a number of third-party tools like enStratus appeared in the market to simplify the job.

As the market changed, the role of a pure console became obsolete. Amazon added a graphical console for AWS. Today, all cloud providers have some form of basic web interface into their services. Though most third-parties still provide better front-ends with more features than the provider consoles, the third-parties have become something much more significant: cloud management tools and cloud brokers.

A cloud management tool adds functionality beyond the simple management of raw cloud assets. RightScale, for example, provides robust auto-scaling beyond what AWS auto-scaling allows. enStratus, on the other hand, provides key management that enables complete encryption of data at rest and in transit in the public cloud without the cloud provider being able to gain access to your keys.

Cloud brokers offer yet another layer of functionality on top of cloud management tools. A cloud broker provides a single interface through which you can manage multiple clouds and share resources across clouds. A cloud broker provides the following capabilities:

• It provides a single interface for interacting with multiple clouds
• It operates outside of the clouds it controls and monitors those clouds
• It detects cloud failures and reacts in some appropriate way to those failures
• It can move infrastructure elements from one cloud (public or private) to another

A cloud broker is a critical piece of your public cloud infrastructure. Minimally, a cloud broker provides a solid business continuity strategy. Without a cloud broker, your infrastructure is at risk against failures in your cloud provider.

The ultimate failure is, of course, the cloud provider going out of business. Outside the cloud, you are somewhat isolated from vendors going out of business. For example, if your non-cloud infrastructure is built entirely on Windows, your Windows desktops and servers will still start up if Microsoft were to declare bankruptcy. If, on the other hand, your infrastructure is running entirely in Azure and you have no cloud broker, you go out of business along with Microsoft. If you are a public company, the argument that “Microsoft will never go out of business” is not sufficient for SOX compliance. Even if it were (or if you are a private company), you should keep in mind that no one ever thought Enron would go out of business or that GM would declare bankruptcy.

A cloud broker can spread your operations across multiple cloud infrastructures and enable real-time disaster recovery into a secondary cloud. If Amazon were to suddenly disappear for some arbitrary reason, enStratus can enable you to bring that infrastructure back up in Rackspace; for example, with little (or even no) data loss.

In the future, cloud brokers should evolve into brokers in the truest sense of the word “broker”. The Holy Grail in the cloud broker world is the ability to automatically decide the least expensive cloud components for efficiently operating your systems and move those components around different public clouds based on pricing and quality of service. Though we’re still a long way from that vision, cloud brokers are creating the building blocks that will make the vision possible.

George Reese is the CTO of enStratus™, the provider of the leading cloud management platform for enterprise applications. George is also the author of the #1 selling cloud computing book “Cloud Applications Architecture“. To learn more about enStratus visit www.enstratus.com

Designed to help Sun ISV’s and other third parties with developing SaaS applications, a number of Sun partners including AT&T and Endeavors have launched SaaS solution on Solaris since the programs inception.

With the recent development and interest in Ubuntu, Hp Unix and AIX cloud computing platforms, Suns Solaris offering rounds out the major Unix and Linux distributions.

There are a number of new events scheduled at this years conference including new cloud computing workshops and an open enterprise study.

The popular Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad returns in 2009 and a strong group of Enterprise 2.0 developers and entrepreneurs have made it to the round of 8. The comunity will choose 4 finalists to present at the conference based on each firms 2 minute product video.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference organizers at TechWeb have offered 1 free conference pass valued at $2200 that I will give away to one of the OnDemand Beat’s readers.

The pass will go to the first reader who can answer either via twitter to @ondemandbeat or via a comment to this post the answer to the following question:

“Who were the 5 finalists in the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference LaunchPad?”

If you do not win the Free Conference Pass you can still save 30% on conference registration or get a free Pavillion Pass by using code CNAPEB22 on the conference registration page.