Enterprise 2.0 Software Patents

In a sign that Social Computing in the Enterprise is now going mainstream, Alexander Wolfe reviews 13 recent Enterprise 2.0 patent applications.

CA Acquires Cloud Consulting Firm

CA continues its acquisition strategy with the purchase of Silicon Valley based 4Base; one of the more established Cloud Consulting firms in the industry

Is the Cloud Ready For Open Source?

Ashlee Vance comments on how RackSpace OpenStack might finally open the gates for Open Source Cloud Computing solutions.

Will China Become The Leader In The Semantic Web

Do current events point to a future where China will be the de facto Semantic Web Leader?

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″

Amazon Web Services today announced the public beta of its newest addition to its web services portfolio; Amazon Elastic MapReduce.

Elastic MapReduce is a web service that allows researchers, analysts and businesses to process and analyze data using a hosted Apache Hadoop “data processing engine” that runs on Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2.

Much like the Mathematica and Mathworks EC2 computational solutions, Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a metered service that is designed to be used for applications like data mining, machine learning, financial analysis or scientific research. Amazon’s entry into the market will provide a bit of competition (to say the least) to Cloudera for users interested in running Hadoop in the Enterprise.

Elastic MapReduce will initially only be available in the USA and users can choose standard Amazon EC2 Instances or High CPU EC2 Instances to run their applications. Pricing for Elastic MapReduce ranges from 10 cents per hour for a small standard EC2 instance to 80 cents per hour for an extra large High CPU instance. Elastic MapReduce supports Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and Perl.

Elastic MapReduce will be appealing to users that need to scale up quickly as the High CPU plans allow users to run up to hundreds of instances running Hadoop and instances can be run concurrently. Amazon EC2 and S3 have to date been very stable and the fact that EC2 and S3 are integrated with Elastic MapReduce and that instances can be managed via the AWS Console or command line are key selling points.

Jimmy Wales sat down this week with a group of Bloggers and analysts prior to his keynote address opening the 2008 SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas and discussed a number of topics relating to Wikimedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization set up to encourage the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia Foundation also operates Wikimedia Commons, the repository of free images and other media and MediaWiki, the popular open source wiki software behind a huge number of corporate wikis.

I asked Mr. Wales what the Wikimedia Foundation’s plans were to increase revenue, especially now that the foundation has increased its staff.

Mr Wales said that the Wikimedia Foundation has to date relied on individual donations and volunteer efforts to achieve its mission and one of the longstanding goals of the foundation has been to increase revenue so that it can expand its mission and keep Wikipedia and the various Wikimedia projects running.

Mr. Wales mentioned that the foundation has recently hired dedicated fundraising staff and is looking at several strategies to increase revenue including:

• Working with additional philanthropic Institutions like the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to increase grants and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
• Spending time contacting wealthy donors who the Wikimedia Foundation in the past could not engage due to the small size of the foundations staff
• Utilizing the Wikipedia brand in co-licensing deals with Mobile Carriers for example, who want to offer a quick and easy way for thier customers to access Wikipedia
• Creating Wikipedia Branded Books
• Launching Wikipedia Branded Games

Mr. Wales said that all of the ideas for raising addition revenue have to adhere to the Wikimedia Foundations values and that the Wikimedia Foundation will never considered offering advertising on its varied projects. But with a dedicated fundraising staff in place he and the Wikimedia team look forward to working through the various ideas and strategies.

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.

Gatherspace’s packaged software requirements competitors include IBM Rational Requisite Pro and FeaturePlan. OnDemand competitors Include Accompa, Rally Software and Artifact Software.

Mindtouch announced today a new version of its Opensource collaboration and collective intelligence platform. The new version of Mindtouch Deki, “Kilen Woods” introduces new data connection and enterprise integration tools to what is already a very robust Wiki platform.

Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO, said that:

“MindTouch Deki has evolved into a powerful platform that is the connective tissue for integrating disparate enterprise systems, web services, and Web 2.0 applications, and enables real-time collaboration and collective intelligence – dynamic data collection and application integration.”

New Enterprise Adapters introduced in MindTouch Deki include adapters for:

• SugarCRM
• Salesforce
• LinkedIn
• MySQL
• Microsoft SQL Server, Access and Microsoft ADO.NET
• VisiFire
• PrinceXML
• ThinkFree Office
• WordPress

This new functionality helps MindTouch Deki jump to the front in terms of competing Wiki Platforms as now within a single platform users can create mashups, dashboards, reports etc from within the Wiki interface. This type of enterprise integration will make Wiki’s (if more Wiki platforms are able to catch up with MindTouch and add this type of integration in the future) an easier sell for companies as integration with existing applications is always at the top of the list of wanted features.

MindTouch Deki also differentiates itself from other Wiki platforms in that its existing feature set allows drag and drop in a GUI interface for most of its functionality. This makes adoption within a company a lot easier than other wiki tools in that users do not have to learn html markup etc to create content.

Will be interesting to see if MindTouch can build upon the list of current adapters with integration for high end ERP (SAP, Oracle etc) and CRM (Seible) applications.  MindTouch Deki “Kilen Woods” should be available for download by the end of July

Sun is hosting a free event called Startup Camp in San Francisco May 4-5, 2008. Startup Camp allows startups to participate in an un-conference networking event and hear from web/enterprise 2.0 experts, meet other startups and apply to Sun’s Startup Essentials program.

The event also includes SpeedGeeking, where startup founders can compete in the Best Startup Contest by presenting a 5-minute pitch of their business to VC led groups of peers. Confirmed guests include: Pete Cashmore, Jonathan Schwartz, David Berlind, Om Malik, Matt Marshall etc.

This event should be a great way for startups to network and discuss ideas.

826 National, TED & Hot Studio stepped up and helped make the first part of David’s wish come true by creating the Once Upon A School website.

In the 2 weeks that the website has been live there have been a number of potential project ideas created where technology companies could pledge to help. Once Upon A School is seeking 1000 pledges nationwide from individuals and or companies ready to help their local public school.

A few of the recently listed project ideas that would make excellent pledge projects for Enterprise 2.0/Web2.0 companies include:

• Scaling up the OnceUponASchool.org website site so that it includes social networking functionality.
• Building out a robust tracking system for projects/ideas/stories.
• Institute an internship program that actively recruits from the nearest struggling public school.
• Help a school develop a useful website presence.

At Applation we are discussing making a pledge to start an internship program with a local Phoenix Area High School in the fall.

This is a very worthwhile cause and effort that hopefully will gain traction nationwide.  The OnceUponASchool.org website mentions that there have been 100 pledge committments so far but there is still a gap to get to the goal of 1000 pledges.