Cloud Computing Focus of Structure08 Conference

Om Malik’s Structure08 conference is being held on June 25th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Structure08 was created to inform businesses so they can plan their future computing infrastructure needs. Attendees will have opportunities to review new technologies and determine the right choices based on industry best practices, case studies, ideas and startups.

In addition, the conference organizers just announced this past week that Google will hold the first public workshop on Google AppEngine at the Structure08 conference.

Om has great pull in the tech industry and he has gathered one of the deepest speaker lists I have seen for a conference in quite a while. As a matter of fact I am curious as to how the packed agenda will be squeezed into a one day conference.

The OnDemand Beat Blog has a special discount code for Structure08 for its readers. OnDemand Beat readers can sign up for Structure08 and receive a 10% discount on registration at http://structure08.eventbrite.com/?discount=ONDEMAND

If signing up via the Structure08 registration page use Discount Code ONDEMAND.

Finally don’t forget that CloudCamp will be held the evening prior to Structure08 at Microsoft’s San Francisco Office.

Launch of OnDemand FriendFeed Rooms

FriendFeed recently launched a new feature called rooms.  Users can join and share links, news and comments around a topic, event or idea. The rooms can either be public or private, and should be a good way to share information.

I have set up a number of rooms within FriendFeed with topics of interest to OnDemand Beat readers. Sign up on FriendFeed and contribute to the topics you are interested in:

SAAS - Room to share information and news about Software as a Service Technology and Companies
IAAS - Room to share information and news about Integration as a Service Technology and Companies
PAAS - Room to share information and news about Platform as a Service Technology and Companies
Cloud Computing - Room to share information and news about Cloud Computing Technology and Companies
Conferences - This room is to share information and links about upcoming technology and non technology conferences.

Visual Map of OnDemand Marketplace

Peter Laird; with assistance from Kent Dickson and Steve Bobrowski, has created an excellent visual mapping of the current state of the OnDemand Marketplace as of early 2008.

Peter has the marketplace broken out into:

Cloud Computing

Platform as a Service ( Link to Dion Hinchliffe whitepaper - 2.4 mb pdf )

Software as a Service

Core Cloud Services

Within these 4 Markets, Peter has numerous submarkets with the majority of companies as of today providing solutions in the Cloud Computing and Software as a Service Markets.

I would expand a bit on Peter’s definition of the Software as a Service market to also include Billing and Contract Management which he has broken out into Core Cloud Services. On Demand Billing and Contract Management can be utilized not just for Software as a Service and Integration as a Service solutions but could also be used behind the firewall to meter in house computing usage.

I will create followup articles over the next few months that go into detail on the technology and players in the Integration as a Service, (Market where my firm Applation is developing solutions) Database, Storage, Security, and Cloud Computing Markets.

US Ranks 15th in Broadband Adoption

One of the factors that has so far hindered wider adoption of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service in the US is a lack of consistent and inexpensive broadband service throughout the entire US.

A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation ranks the US 15th (Yes that’s right 15th) globally for broadband adoption. The US ranked number 4 in 2001 so this drop off in adoption is very alarming considering that we are in the midst of a major fundamental change in enterprise computing with Cloud Computing and Software as a Service becoming more prevalent.

The ITIF broadband policy report measures 3  major factors; price, speed, and availability to come up with its rankings. 

The report has numerous recommendations to improve US broadband adoption and also has case studies from countries that rank both above and below the US in terms of adoption.

Three recommendations that I think may have an impact in the short term if adopted include:

• Enact more favorable tax policies to encourage investment in broadband networks, such as accelerated depreciation and exempting broadband services from federal, state, and local taxation.  (This will help immensely with making broadband less expensive for SMB customers and start-ups and give the incumbent Telco and Cable providers incentive to modernize their aging infrastructure)

• Continue to make more spectrum, including “white spaces,” available for next-generation wireless data networks. (This is critical as has been proven in Korea…more and more Enterprise 2.0 and Saas applications will be available via mobile devices)

• Expand the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service Broadband Program and target the program to places that currently do not have non-satellite broadband available. (For the US to be more competitive in the future, Broadband access has to be universal throughout the US. Satellite broadband is relatively expensive and Satellite service is a still a bit spotty)

Unfortunately many of the recommendations in the report are based on government policy and that policy is always up to change depending on who occupies state and federal government positions.

But alas, a government broadband policy is crucial as the higher broadband adoption rates in countries like Sweden (pdf) South Korea (pdf) and Japan (pdf) were achieved via strong and focused government broadband policies.

Google Launches App Engine Into The Cloud

Google on April 7 launched its highly anticipated development infrastructure called Google App Engine. App Engine is Google’s fully integrated hosted application environment that allows developers to run their web applications on Google’s infrastructure.

Announced at Campfire One, App Engine is currently in preview release and is limited to an initial pool of 10,000 developers. (The first 10,000 developer accounts were fully allocated on April 7th) Google App Engine initially only supports Python but will roll out other popular development languages over the next few months.

Google App Engine will provide 500MB of storage, 10GB bandwidth per day and 200M megacycles of CPU per day during the preview period.

The preview development environment includes the following features:

While not direct competition to Amazon Web Services or Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine will allow developers to create an entire web application stack on the Google App Engine infrastructure. This will work great for developers for example who are new to ondemand cloud computing and will help them scale as the use of their applications grow.

Google has a number of applications in its appspot.com application gallery that were created with the first iteration of Google App Engine. Although their are only a couple of enterprise applications (versus the normal glut of Web 2.0 applications) listed in the gallery so far, I would expect the number of enterprise applications to grow quickly.