Vinnie Mirchandani’s new book; The New Polymath, is full of profiles and case studies that illustrate how the New Polymath’s within many industries are creating disruptive innovation to leapfrog their competition and introduce innovation to their respective industries and customers.

The  book’s chapters on Technology and Cloud Computing profile  innovations of technology vendors. In particular, Mirchandani uses many examples from the Cloud Computing industry. Calling Cloud Computing the convergence of Marc Benioff’s “Democratization of Technology” with Marc Manos’ “Industrialization of Technology” Mirchandani cites diverse case studies from Japan Post Network to Salesforce.com in the New Polymath to prove his point.

One profile focuses on how Netsuite uses its shared cloud infrastructure to quickly adjust its business based on market conditions and to benchmark against its competitors. Netsuite hopes to use its collected customer metrics to create Business Process Outsourcing Partnerships that will allow its customers to monitor business process metrics that up to now have been extremely difficult to gather.

In yet another example of the innovation inherent within the cloud, Mirchandani cites Cloud Computing poster child Appirio. Appirio has not owned any servers since its inception and runs all of its operations from lead generation to payroll in the cloud. Unlike its competitors Appirrio only used 2% of its revenue on internal IT versus the industry average of 7%. This type of advantage allowed Appirio to utilize more of its venture funding and initial revenue’s for R&D and customers activities thus allowing the company to grow from 5 to 200 employees without an IT department.

Like the Cloud Computing vendors; who are Polymath’s for bringing disparate technologies together for customers, Mirchandani deftly brings together disparate examples in an engaging book that provides readers a guidepost in how to also become a Polymath.

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

The Cloud Slam’10 conference runs from March 23 – March 25 2010.

In its second year, Cloud Slam is a virtual conference that focuses on Cloud Computing. A few of the conference tracks for this year include the Legal  Aspects of Cloud Computing, Cloud Implementation Experiences, Security in the Cloud and Cloud Business Models.

New in 2010, the conference also includes a virtual exhibition hall and a networking lounge for attendees.

IBM Cloud Computing CTO; Dr Kristof Kloeckner, will keynote the conference and will be joined by speakers from Oracle, SAP, Intel, Redhat , Adobe and Novell among others.

OnDemand Beat readers can receive 20% off either the VIP or regular conference registration fee by using discount code ONDEMANDBEAT.

SAP Launches 12Sprints Beta
SAP launches its Cloud Based Collaboration tool, months (and in some cases years) behind similar tools by IBM , 37 Signals and  a host of other cloud providers

Cloud Computing Revenue Predictions
Interesting article from Linda Leung that estimates revenue from Cloud Computing operations for a few major cloud providers

The IPad and Desktop Virtualization
How the IPad could become the must have thin client for Desktop Virtualization in 2010.

Private Cloud Adoption Models
EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis describes the 3 primary adoption models he has seen companies adopt with private clouds.

E-Books in the Cloud
Will the use of the cloud for storage of E-Books  lead to even greater adoption of cloud storage in the coming years?

Enterprise 2.0 year in Review
Dion Hincliffe posts an insightful review of Enterprise 2.0 in 2009.

Practical SOA Applications
Joe McKendrick has compiled 17 examples of SOA being put to real world use with fairly good results.

Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 Assessment Tool
Oracle has created a useful (if not somewhat irritating at times) Enterprise 2.0 assessment tool.

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.

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 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

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.