Below is a video of Ian Murdock, Sun's VP of Emerging Technologiesof that was sent to the CommunityOne Oslo event when Ian couldn't make it.  In it he addresses the CommunityOne attendees on Cloud Computing and Open Source and the relationship between the two areas.

You can get details of CommunityOne Oslo here.

Russ

In a story I saw on the New York Times website was this piece about how enterprises are looking at Cloud Computing.  Entitled, "The Enterprise Impact of Cloud Computing," it makes a very good point about the optics Cloud Computing provides to enterprises, even if a company doesn't adopt Cloud Computing.  

 In essence the story observes that enterprises are using Cloud Computing as a pricing benchmark.  While this might not be a fair benchmark, its a fairly transformative idea.  If an enterprise discovers its paying 10x for storage that a Cloud provider is charging, it might lead to all kinds of interesting pricing pressures.  I'm keenly following this notion.

From Cloud Computing Expo last week, the folks at Sys-con had a few photos that caught my eye.  

First up is Dave Douglas, the head of Sun's Cloud Computing group.  Next is my fellow booth staffers Cassandra Clark and Angelo Rajadurai.

Finally, if you want a very in-depth review of Cloud Computing Expo, I suggest you read Said Syed's blog entry.

 Russ

If you want to learn more about where the Sun Cloud will reside this video is a corporate overview by Switch.  It provides a good overview of the firm, the facility and the approach.

Russ

I was able to attend the IDC Directions Conference today and was particularly looking for the "Clouds and Beyond: Positioning for the Next 20 Years in Enterprise IT" session run by Sr. VP and Chief Analyst, Frank Gens.   It had a fairly large crown for San Jose in the teeth of a recession.

The talk was positioned as providing info on what one can expect from the cloud and how to take advantage of it.  To me the session seemed aimed a the IT person in an enterprise that was still trying to make sense of Cloud computing.

Gens did a good job of providing some high-level industry perspective and spent a fair amount of time reviewing the IDC data.  Seeing 2009 as a year where enterprise Cloud activity moves from the sandbox to the mainstream seems a fairly safe prediction.

When I'm at these industry forums I look for the data/information I didn't expect.  Gens had three nuggets I came away with that stood out to me.  First, there was a slide that outlined the barriers to clouds that their survey respondents listed.  After security, which was #1, the next four items (performance, availability, difficulty in integrating with my current operations and not enough customization) seemed to all be pages from the same book.  That is, the barrier that respondents were listing were are particulars about using clouds.  Not a barrier on *whether* they'd use a cloud.

Second, there was a very interesting slide on what workloads worked better for clouds and which didn't.  The information looked very promising and Gens didn't spend much time on it.  It looked like early thinking.  I wish I'd taken a picture.  Finally, IDC seemed to be predicting that about 25% of the increase in market spending from 2009 to 2012 will be on IT that's a Cloud service.  That might not sound like a big number, but when you think of the size of the market ($300B+) and even given modes market growth, they're talking a huge number.  I was pining for more info on this as well.

All in all a worthwhile time with some good perspective.  Thanks IDC and Frank Gens.

Last Friday, TechCrunch hosted a very well well attended roundtable on Cloud Computing with a number of cloud luminaries.  Hosted by Steve Gilmor and Erick Shonfeld the panel had a blue chip panel of Cloud Computing experts:

• John Engates, CTO, Rackspace
  
• Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed.
• Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, Google
• Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
• Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
• Werner Vogel, Amazon Web Services CTO
• Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
• Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
• Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Product, Yahoo!
• Lew Tucker, CTO Cloud Computing, Sun

The size of the panel was a bit large for great interaction, but you can't beat the line-up.  It was a little tiresome listening to Benioff always talk about his firm's earnings, but listen for yourself and see if you agree.

The event was held at Microsoft's offices in Mountain View.

Yesterday at the SugarCon 2009 event, Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, and Cloud Computing CTO, Lew Tucker disclosed that Sun is indeed going to enter the Cloud computing arena with its own Cloud offering. 

You can see some of the coverage from Infoworld and InternetNews.com.

We're being mostly mum on details, but promise more details at CommunityOne East in NYC on March 18.  The agenda is being built right now, but one should expect Lew Tucker and the head of Sun's Cloud Computing BU to be at the event.

 More to come.

Here is the link to download a .pdf copy of the presentation Dave Douglas, the head of Sun's Cloud Computing Business Unit will be talking from for his chalk talk today at 1:00p Pacific.

Russ

Does anyone else find this type of story in Computerworld tiresome?  I mean does this story really help anyone with anything?

I know that writers at Computerworld seldom write their headlines, but give us a break.  I guess we were warned when the first person quoted had their comments lifted from a blog.  The real payoff was the quote, "There will be things for the enterprise that will completely make sense and things that won't."

 I'm blinded by the light on that one.

Can we please get some more meaningful stories on this topic?  Not a list of things that have gone wrong with an area that's essentially new.

Like a lot of people I've been eagerly following the conversation between Hugh Macleod, Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr on the nature of Cloud Computing and the possibility the market can be dominated by some large vendors.  The posts and the comments are fascinating and certainly thought provoking. Even some well known analysts like James Govenor and Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk have weighed in.

I realize there might be as much of a first mover advantage for commentators as there is for market entrants, but this does seem like a lot of traffic on a market that's really quite young.

That said, I'd like to pose two questions that came from following this topic.

First, does everyone assume that one cloud is pretty much like any other?  I realize there's segmentation around IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, but even then,  are these clouds really going to be mostly the same?  I suspect how you answer this question will color your thoughts on the topic as a whole.

Second, on the economies of scale notion, at what point do diminishing returns kick in?  Does anyone really know or are some of the really, really big data centers being built right now an experiment in finding out?  I recall a while back that some very large semiconductor fabrication facilities were built and only after they were completed did they find out that the planned savings didn't pan out as intended.

As always, I'd love any thoughts that might be had.

Hello there.  I've been bitten by the cloud computing bug here at Sun, so I'm going to focus on that for a while.

As this chart from Google Trends show, the volume of traffic on Cloud Computing is growing fast.

As I've gotten involved, I've been struck by the number of traffic that is “defining” cloud computing.
At the recent SD Forum event there was a lot of defining the technology in the presentations.  Type in 'cloud computing definition' into your favorite search engine and you'll see what I mean.

As this video suggests, there's really no set definition. 

With all this, does the definition really matter?  When the buzz cycle hits like it is for cloud computing, there's a natural tendency to want to help by defining.  But like Web 2.0, or web services, or grid computing the definition the we end up with, if one ever resolves, will likely be to high level and vague to be much specific use.

Sure, the term will get you in the general area of what you might want to discuss, but when a segment of the market thinks that cloud computing means they have to give up the rights to their pictures stored on a 3rd party website and another segment wants to have a discussion about APIs, then spending time on a definition is fruitless.

So having said this, its clear that something big is going on with cloud computing.  There are too many people who want to take advantage of a different kind of economics around computing for this to be a fad.  Whatever the definition.

That's enough for now, I'd love your comments.