OnDemand Beat

OnDemand Speed Links 23 February 2010

Ameed Taylor — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:36:47 +0000

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.

Red Hat OpenSource Cloud Computing Forum

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:29:59 +0000

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

Oracle + Sun Cloud and Virtualization Strategies

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:54:10 +0000

The tech industry has been abuzz the past week now that the Oracle acquisition of Sun has cleared the last hurdle from the European Union and is officially complete.

Oracle and Sun executives have begun addressing a number of questions about how Oracle will integrate Suns various hardware, system and software stacks into the Oracle ecosystem.

Two areas of integration that hold quite a bit of interest to this blog’s readers are Oracle + Sun’s Cloud and Virtualization Strategies. In the following prerecorded videos Richard Sarwal SVP of Product Development and Edward Screven; Chief Corporate Architect, give insight into Oracle’s future strategy.

IBM rolls out Beta Cloud to Developers

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:42:29 +0000

IBM last month rolled out its Beta Cloud to the general public. The Beta Cloud is IBM’s dynamically provisioned runtime environment that includes tools to develop and test application code on IBM software.

With this new offering on the market it will be interesting to see who dominates amongst Amazon, IBM, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and Force.com as the environment of choice for Cloud development.

The following video shows developers how to create environments on the Beta Cloud.

OnDemand Speed Links 21 December 2009

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:38:39 +0000

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.

Is BI Ready For The Cloud?

Ameed Taylor — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:38:35 +0000

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.

Salesforce Unveils Chatter At Dreamforce

Ameed Taylor — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:42:42 +0000

Marc Benioff unveiled Salesforce.com’s Chatter application on the opening day of the firm’s annual DreamForce conference in Moscone Center In San Francisco.

Salesforce Chatter is a secure, private social network intended for enterprise use. Chatter has social computing features along the lines of Facebook and Twitter and is composed of a Chatter App and a Chatter Social Development Platform.

The Chatter App includes standard social computing features like Profiles, Status Updates, Feeds and Content Sharing. Users of Twitter and Facebook will see familiar functionality and social media tools built into Chatter App.

The Chatter Social Platform; billed as the Collaboration Cloud, will include standard social media and collaboration components as well as Twitter, Google and Facebook developer toolkits. The Chatter Social Platform will also include API’s that will enable developers to integrate data from both cloud and on premise apps into Chatter.

Salesforce Chatter is scheduled to go live in 2010. Chatter will be included in all paid editions of SalesforceCRM and Force.com and a Chatter edition that includes Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content ad Force.com will be available for $50 per user per month.

V2 of Cloud Computing Use Cases Published

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:51:43 +0000

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.

OnDemand Speed Links 28 October 2009

Ameed Taylor — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:26:58 +0000

Amazon Launches Relational Database Service
Amazon this week launched its Relational Database Service.(RDS) Amazon RDS is a MYSQL 5.1 database offering that will compete directly with Joyent’s recently announced MySQL Accelerator and indirectly (but not at an enterprise level) with Microsoft SQL Azure.

Cloud Wars Begin
Amazon also announced a 15% drop in pricing for all EC2 instance families and sizes. This is significant due to the fact that one can expect EC2 competitors like GoGrid and Softlayer to follow suit and lower pricing as well.

Stephen Baker Researches Enterprise 2.0 Consulting
Over on BusinessWeek; Stephen Baker is creating a few articles on Enterprise 2.0 Consulting. Will be interesting to see whether his research indicates that Enterprise 2.0 consulting is a viable industry or more of the sometimes dubious Social Media consulting with an Enterprise twist.

W3C announces OWL2
The Semantic Web group within W3C released the OWL2 recommendation. OWL2 is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web Toolkit and is a standard for representing knowledge on the Web.

Microsoft Makes Windows Azure Push

Ameed Taylor — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:23:46 +0000

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.