Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music: Clintone and the song “Full Circle” via the podsafe music network Music Alley.

Discussed during the show:

Minnov8 Gang 87: More Buzz About Mobile is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions.

At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

CloudCamp MSP Liveblog is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

One of the key players there is Jonathan Zittrain, a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a guy who served as its first executive director from 1997-2000. He’s also the author of “The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It“.

I came across a 1.5 hour talk called “Minds for Sale” on the commercial side of cloud computing that was posted a few days ago and I’ve been listening to it in starts-n-stops whenever I had some time. It’s worth your time to listen to it closely if you are at all involved in commercial cloud computing, a startup in the web hosted space, or are a strategist or business leader in any thought leading capacity for your organization. In it you’ll hear “…why cloud computing is not just for computing anymore and how a new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.”

Listen by hovering over the speaker icon or download the mp3: Minds for Sale

Jonathan Zittrain on Minds for Sale is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

ReliaCloud, the new service from Visi that offers small-to-medium-sized enterprises cloud computing servers and storage space, has announced a new partnership with enStratus, a national cloud management platform that delivers governance for enterprise applications in the cloud. As they state in their press release about the “2+2=12″ aspects of this alliance, “Together ReliaCloud and enStratus offer companies a seamless, manageable cloud computing service. The two organizations are also joining forces to sponsor 2010 CloudCamp events and an April 7, 2010, webinar to educate information technology professionals about the business advantages of using cloud computing.”

Right here in our backyard we have both a strong cloud computing server infrastructure player (and ReliaCloud will also soon be offering storage as well) and a world-class cloud server management offering (enStratus) that offers such powerful tools that they’re used on the Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure platforms.

ReliaCloud & enStratus Form Partnership is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

We also discuss the Flash and iPad/iPhone controversy, Comcast bandwidth metering, upcoming events and more.

This Week’s Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Graeme Thickins (Phil Wilson is off this week)
Music by The Birdinumnums and the tune is “Thirteen Steps”. From the podsafe music network Music Alley.

Discussed during the show:

• Cloud Computing links:
  • Google backup articles from Lifehacker, Webmonkey, Labnol
  • Virtual container company: Jumpbox
  • Funny take from “Shouts from the Abyss” called, “The Great WordPress Outage of 2010“
  • Comcast Bandwidth Metering in the Twin Cities
  • Upcoming Event: CloudcampMSP
• Flash and the iPad/iPhone controversy:
  • New York Times article about no Flash on the iPad
  • Steve’s post about a personal Flash video test
  • Article about Adobe blocking HTML5 specification from supporting Flash
  • AppleInsider’s post entitled, “Inside Apple’s iPad: Adobe Flash“. It’s a three page article so be sure to read all the pages
  • An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash
• Other links:
  • Doc Searls (@docsearls)
  • Maverick Beach south of San Francisco and this awesome video of a surfer
  • Events:
    • MIMA’s March soiree at the Fine Line
    • Mobile March
    • Overnight Website Challenge
    • MinneWebCon

Minnov8 Gang 68: Falling Through the Cloud? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

And that was just the schmoozing part! 

There were lots of live demos going on in the theater adjoining, if you could squeeze yourself in there:

1. ArtsApp – like Monster.com for artists to submit multimedia (Dejen Tesfagiorgis)
2. ReliaCloud – a cloud computing platform that allows people to build scalable computing infrastructure on demand (Jason Baker, VISI)
3. Pedal Brain – advanced cycle computer based on the iPhone platform combined with web-based data analysis (Matt Bauer)
4. MinuteBids – an online bidding platform that makes it easy for property managers/owners to request and get bids for their property maintenance needs from top rated service providers (Jon Coudron)
5. Pedair – a many-to-many market place for people who love bikes (Andrew Korf)
6. MobileRealtyApps.com – Custom branded MLS home search apps for realtors on iPhone and Android (Aaron Kardell)
7. MileMarker - helps organizations capture ideas and prioritize them, making it easier to understand what to work on first (Bill Galfano)
8. Live Information Manager for Business – connects employees of an organization to their data and each other from anywhere in the world, all from within a single workspace (Roger Peters)
9. Mobile Roots – customized iPhone applications for campaigns (Lynn Smith)
10. WebSlide – provides you and your clients with a private, secure, easy-to-use system for uploading, sharing, and collaborating on designs without ever leaving your browser (Paul Armstrong)

Kudos to Luke Francl, Ben Edwards, and their team of volunteers for pulling off another great Minnedemo!  And a shout-out and huge thanks to the sponsors this time:

• TECHdotMN
• ipHouse
• W3i
• Livefront
• Split Rock Partners
• New Counsel

MN Tech Rocks – Last Night Was Proof is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Hosts: This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music by Midnight Music Quartet and the tune is, “Sweet Lorraine”.

About George Reese (@GeorgeReese):  George Reese is the founder of two Minneapolis-based companies, enStratus Networks LLC (maker of high-end cloud infrastructure management tools) and Valtira LLC (maker of the Valtira Online Marketing Platform). Over the past 15 years, George has authored a number of technology books, including MySQL Pocket Reference, Database Programming with JDBC and Java, Java Database Best Practices, and Cloud Application Architectures.

Throughout the Internet era, George has spent his career building enterprise tools for developers and delivering solutions to the marketing domain. He was an influential force in the evolution of online gaming through the creation of a number of Open Source MUD libraries and he created the first JDBC driver in 1996—the Open Source mSQL-JDBC. Most recently, George has been involved in the development of systems to support the deployment of transactional web applications in the cloud.

George holds a BA in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. He currently lives in Minnesota with his wife Monique and his daughters Kyra and Lindsey.

Discussed during the show notes:

• CloudCamp Minneapolis 2 on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at Microsoft office in Bloomington, MN.
• Visi’s Reliacloud
• Jumpbox
• Dasein Cloud and OCCI
• Apple data center in North Carolina
• ProgrammableWeb
• Apps.gov
• Alvenda.

Minnov8 Gang 63: A Conversation on Cloud Computing is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The first offering, dubbed “Cloud Servers,” allows business users to establish an account online. They can then quickly and easily set up one or more computer servers that run in one of  VISI’s data centers and are accessible to them and their users “in the cloud” — meaning via any Internet browser anywhere in the world.  Customers of the service thereby avoid the expense and work of having to purchase and maintain their own computers servers at their own site.  ”It’s a pay-as-you-go model,” said Gary Elfert, director of marketing at VISI, which is headquartered in Eden Prairie and has its original data center in downtown St. Paul. The pricing model for these Cloud Servers is by the hour, starting at 5 cents.

Why would anyone be crazy enough to enter a market that is already dominated by notable heavyweights like Amazon?  “Though there are some large players already in the public cloud computing marketplace, it’s still a nascent business, and a rapidly growing one,” said Antonio Piraino, Research Director at Tier 1 Research, in VISI’s press announcement.  “There’s certainly room for a competitive offering such as ReliaCloud.” His firm has projected that cloud computing services will be a $1-billion market in 2011.

A local observer sees another reason a public cloud offering from VISI has a place. “It’s no secret IT directors and CEOs like knowing where their company data actually is located, which can be almost impossible with the big players’ globally dispersed data center operations,” said Graeme Thickins, a Bloomington-based technology startup advisor, who has been a consultant to VISI and is a colleague here at Minnov8. “And beyond just peace of mind, firms in many industries have compliance requirements whereby they must prove in which state or country their data resides.” With both its data centers being in Minnesota, that is not an issue for VISI’s cloud customers. And many firms in the region will also prefer working with a firm they know, he said, with people they know, and a long history of stability here in Minnesota.

What’s more, Jason Baker, CTO of VISI, added another differentiator in the company’s press announcement: “We specifically designed the new cloud service to be more reliable than the commodity providers in the market.” He also noted that “we didn’t want customers to have to re-architect their solutions just to work reliably in the cloud.”  Other goals in designing the service, said Baker, were elasticity and affordability. “We wanted customers to be able to scale from 10 servers to 100 servers, and back down again.” Regarding affordability, he said, “We made our pricing transparent and competitive — with a slick web management portal, high availability, load balancing, 24x7x365 support, and a complete API.”

VISI said the service is targeted both to IT managers in established, small to midsized firms, and to startup firms that want to take advantage of the significant economic benefits provided by running their servers and applications in the cloud.  Business users apply to be beta testers for the ReliaCloud service by filling out a one-page form at  the ReliaCloud web site.  Over time, the ReliaCloud brand will encompass a suite of cloud computing services, with “Cloud Storage” expected to be introduced in 2010. In the meantime, ReliaCloud “Cloud Servers” are complete computing environments that users can provision 24 hours-a-day, with full administrator access.

Founded in 1994, VISI is the Upper Midwest’s largest locally owned data center services and managed hosting provider, offering cloud computing, colocation, and managed hosting services.  VISI serves 10,000 customers with products and services provided through its two world-class SAS 70 Type II data centers, in St. Paul and Eden Prairie, Minnesota.  The company provides a full range of robust Web and application hosting services, first-rate Internet services and support, and personal, expert advice.

In another press release last week, VISI announced a cloud storage offering unrelated to its new ReliaCloud brand.  This service, part of its main VISI.com hosting service offerings, is a pay-as-you-go cloud offering geared for business customers whose need for storage is increasing, but can’t justify the capital necessary to expand their storage pool. With VISI Cloud Storage, there’s no need to buy new storage hardware. The new cloud storage service is “an elastic, pay-as-you go service, meaning businesses pay only for the storage and data transfer actually used,” said the announcement.  Pricing starts out at $0.25 per gigabyte per month, with no minimums or monthly contracts, “making it ideal for temporary storage requirements as well as off-site storage, backup, disaster recovery, and Web 2.0 storage.”

VISI’s Elfert said, “This initial cloud storage product is not an entirely pure ‘cloud’ service, by the strictest definition. However, it does have many benefits for companies such as per-hour pricing, no term commitments, and the ability to scale on-demand.” He added that the company expects to launch a 100% pure cloud storage offering under the ReliaCloud name soon, perhaps before the end of first quarter 2010.

Twin Cities Firm Joins Ranks of Public Cloud Computing Providers is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Music by Straight 8′s and the tune is, “Ann Bowman”

Discussed during the show:

• StarTribune article on Minnesota venture capital
• Don Ball’s post An Embarrassment of Hidden Talent about impressions from the recent MIMA holiday party
• Zipnosis
• Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Market report, recapped nicely in this post by ReadWriteWeb (Bonus: this Forbes article on the “no brainer” investment potential in mobile
• Visi’s ReliaCloud and the comparison
• Others mentioned during the cloud computing discussion: Enstratus; Jumpbox; and Subversion used by Tim Elliott with his various installations
• Mobile discussion included MotherApp; 100,000 iPhone apps post by Steve; WebDesignerDepot post on 40 Awesome iPhone Application Websites; publisher O’Reilly & Associates Best iPhone Apps website.

Minnov8 Gang 61: Mobile & the Groovy Kids is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The seminar featured talks by Mike Sowada, CEO of Visi, shown here on stage. (Photo courtesy of Charles Robinson.) Visi is the state’s largest Internet services and hosting firm, with data centers in both St. Paul and Eden Prairie.  A talk followed entitled ”Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage” by Chris Howard, a VP at analyst/research firm Burton Group.  Jason Baker, CTO of Visi, wrapped up the event by presenting the first details of his firm’s new ReliaCloud offering, which included a live, online demo by product manager Johnny Hatch that came off flawlessly. I captured a few of the key slides for you…

The suite of ReliaCloud services starts with the obvious one called “Cloud Server,”and Visi tells me they have already signed up more than 100 qualified beta testers for the public beta of this service, now underway. There is no cost to be a beta tester, and you can sign up here. The demo made it very clear that no special knowledge is required to quickly “spin up up a server” in the cloud. Visi’s cloud service is clearly being positioned not just for IT professionals, but for business users as well. And the firm is targeting organizations of all sizes — large enterprises, midsized companies (Visi’s sweet spot), and certainly startups as well.  Cloud computing is, of course, especially a favored choice of the latter, with their minimal IT budgets.

So, Why Would a Company Choose a Regional Player Like Visi as Its Cloud Computing Provider?

The obvious advantage for Visi that I heard attendees discussing following the presentations — as compared to the large cloud players such as Amazon EC2 and Rackspace — is the peace of mind that many firms will have in knowing where their servers and data are actually located. That is, the “comfort factor” that it’s all nearby — not in some unknown location that could be on the other side of the world. Also, more responsive, local customer support — including live, 24/7 online chat that Visi will offer — will have appeal to many firms, as opposed to the big national or global players, which have support that’s largely self-service or provided only by email.

CTO Jason Baker said that the second service to be offered in the ReliaCloud suite will be “Cloud Storage,” and that pricing for that would be by Gigabyte, and highly competitive. Watch for that announcement soon — in November, I gathered.  I also learned, after the event, that the ReliaCloud service is not even officially public yet on the Visi.com web site.  But a new site — www.ReliaCloud.com — will be going live in November. In the meantime, you can start reading more at Visi’s blog, including a brief recap of the October 21st seminar, complete with PDF downloads of the slide presentations.  You can also check out other blog posts there that chronicle the ongoing construction process at Visi’s new data center in Eden Prairie — including some cool time-lapse photography — a facility that CEO Mike Sowada told me he expects to be fully up and running in December. Financing for the project took well over a year, Sowada said — “a process that would have taken three days in previous years.”

A final note: to get ongoing updates on Visi’s new ReliaCloud services, you can start following along at special new Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as a new ReliaCloud blog.

Visi Launches ‘ReliaCloud’ Services to Packed House is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Along with the demo and pitch Visi featured a presentation on Cloud Computing as a Business Advantage by Burton Group VP, Chris Howard. Chris took some time to talk about opportunities, concerns, and even the multiple definitions of “the cloud.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ktP0i143B4

The slide deck of the presentation is available now from Visi.

Our Head In The Cloud: Minnov8 Talks With Chris Howard is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Discussed during the show:

• Strib/WCCO comparison and Tim’s pointing out how the Pioneer Press also “gets it” and shows that at their TwinCities.com site which has an extensive set of capabilities to email and print as well as a “Bookmark & Share” link to sites and services like Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter, Friendfeed, Delicious and more
• Alvenda: winner of the Minnesota Cup’s Breakthrough Business Idea
• Facebook Lite
• Twitter’s new Terms of Service
• UofMN New Media Research event Friday, Sept 18th
• Microsoft Office online and the new 2010 beta
• Carbonite and CrashPlan
• ComicTwit

Upcoming Events with Minnov8 Media Coverage:

• RAINMAKER CONFERENCE
• VISI Cloud Vision 2009 event
• MIMA Summit (which will include the fall MinneDemo).

Minnov8 Gang Podcast #51: Cloud and the Crowd is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As a sidenote, I worked for a company called Clothier-Herold Co in the early 1980′s on the side of the firm that represented this little company called “Apple Computer.” The other side of the rep business sold Visicorp (Visicalc, etc.), Microsoft (which, upon going public, I thought would never make it) and a bunch of PC-oriented lines of product. In addition, our firm represented Open Systems, though none of us ever met Ann at the time.

A strategy consultant for prestigious clients such as IBM, Microsoft, Price Waterhouse, and numerous start-ups, Ann has co-authored the book Object-Oriented Software and has written articles for numerous publications. Ann received a BA in mathematics and in business administration from the College of St. Catherine, and an MA in education and international economics from the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), which also subsequently awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Laws. She currently serves as a director of Voltage Security, Krillion, Mulesource and Star Analytics, a member of the Board of Trustees of St. Thomas www.stthomas.edu, and co-chair of SD Forum www.sdforum.org.

In this Idea Projects video, Ann talks about cloud computing and how by moving technology from location-based servers to a virtual environment, with expanded if not universal access, the opportunities for innovation increase exponentially. As a software funder she sees a trend towards 100% presence on any device at any time.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip3kgMKvyIw

VC Ann Winblad on Cloud Computing is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

These findings illustrate a departure from the stagnation in home high-speed adoption rates that had prevailed from December, 2007 through December, 2008. During that period, Project surveys found that home broadband penetration remained in a narrow range between 54% and 57%.

The greatest growth in broadband adoption in the past year has taken place among population subgroups which have below average usage rates. Among them:

• Senior citizens: Broadband usage among adults ages 65 or older grew from 19% in May, 2008 to 30% in April, 2009.
• Low-income Americans: Two groups of low-income Americans saw strong broadband growth from 2008 to 2009.
  • Respondents living in households whose annual household income is $20,000 or less, saw broadband adoption grow from 25% in 2008 to 35% in 2009.
  • Respondents living in households whose annual incomes are between $20,000 and $30,000 annually experienced a growth in broadband penetration from 42% to 53%.

Overall, respondents reporting that they live in homes with annual household incomes below $30,000 experienced a 34% growth in home broadband adoption from 2008 to 2009.

• High-school graduates: Among adults whose highest level of educational attainment is a high school degree, broadband adoption grew from 40% in 2008 to 52% in 2009.
• Older baby boomers: Among adults ages 50-64, broadband usage increased from 50% in 2008 to 61% in 2009.
• Rural Americans: Adults living in rural America had home high-speed usage grow from 38% in 2008 to 46% in 2009.

The Pew Internet Project’s April 2009 survey interviewed 2,253 Americans, with 561 interviewed on their cell phones.

As I read the report, it was clear that this acceleration in broadband adoption is, in my view, being driven by a number of variables: economic downturn causing a seeking of alternatives, efficiency and cost savings; friends, family and colleagues online (many using social media) creating compelling reasons for others to connect; and a continuing growth of online services in news, information, entertainment and more.

All that said, the important thing to Minnesota innovators is that people are increasingly online at home and participating, and that’s important to all of us in the internet and web innovation space!

U.S. Home Broadband Adoption Hits 63% is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

What a gorgeous spring week it was in Minnesota last week: clear, sunny, even sneaking into the ’70s.   The only “clouds” in sight were the proponents and would-be adopters of the latest, new hotness in enterprise computing.  Two events, on Wednesday and Saturday, attracted a wide array of these IT professionals, some 350 all told, who were hungry to learn more about… well, “the orange that’s the new pink,” as Larry Ellison would say. It was beyond impressive that so many people would give up being outdoors last week after the winter we’ve had in these parts!  Goes to show how deep our IT roots run in this state. Geeks are everywhere here and, doggone it, we’re proud of it!  We still have many old-school enterprise IT folks who remember the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and way more than our per-capita share of Fortune 500 headquarters in this state, all with huge (well, getting leaner) IT departments. But, along with all that, Minnesota has a seemingly endless supply of boot-strapped Internet and software startup developers — folks that are finding they love what cloud computing is doing for them.

So, it was an eclectic bunch that gathered at these two Minnesota cloud events, and I was there to take it all in….

The first was a panel at the MN High-Tech Association’s annual spring conference on Wednesday at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The conference drew some 850 attendees overall. The cloud panel, one of several breakout sessions, was billed as “Moving Into the Cloud – Drivers, Benefits, Reality.”  I had the pleasure of moderating this one, which featured the following panelists:

- George Reese, CTO and founder of enStratus, a developer of enterprise-grade tools for security and reliability in cloud infrastructures, and author a new book from O’Reilly, “Cloud Application Architectures.”
- Matt Googins, a solution architect at Carlson Marketing Worldwide who has responsibility for a portfolio of IT services and programs for several of the firms large, Fortune 500 clients
- Robert Metcalf, founder and CEO of Flyspy.com, a third-generation travel search engine that’s been in development for seven years. The service displays all your travel options in the next 60 days in a visual format and will be available in beta in the next month or two.

So, just who was in the crowded, standing-room-only audience of more than 200 in this breakout session? I was shocked when I asked for a show of hands and saw upwards of a third say they were with firms of 1000 or more employees. A similar number identified themselves as senior or C-level execs. About 15% were developers or other technologists.

Big Topic to Cover in 45 Minutes
I led the panel discussion around the normal topics: is cloud computing over-hyped (we opened with the Larry Ellison rant — quite timely, as it turned out), then jumped into what are the definitions, the panelists’ experience with app development and deployment, and the platform-as-a-service approach versus infrastructure-as-a-service. The panelists provided an overview of the industry-leading Amazon Web Services offerings. But we moved quickly into a discussion of the advantages and business benefits of cloud computing, which was what most were there to hear — focusing of course on the economic benefit of greatly reduced cap ex and the pay-as-you-go model.  A statement by Reese that the cloud computing juggernaut is coming more from the CFO’s office than the CIO’s may not have been what many in the audience wanted to hear.  Metcalf added later that we don’t have a Chief Water Office or Chief Electricity Officer, and that many of the duties of the CIO are bound to change in coming years. Googins, after several successful evaluations of cloud infrastructure for his large enterprise clients’ apps, said he was within days of presenting to his CIO his recommendations for significant transformation to cloud infrastructure, and was confident that would be approved. He cited one successful application, for Monsanto, that he’s had in the Amazon cloud for nine months at 100% uptime.

But it was Rob Metcalf who may have wowed the audience the most with his success story, calling himself “the poster boy for cloud computing,” and admitting it may be responsible for nothing less than saving his fledgling startup.  Flyspy is a highly complex app that processes more data in 12 hours than Orbitz does in all it queries in a month, so Metcalf knew it would require massive infrastructure. But cloud computing allowed him to lop-off no less than $150,00 from his cap ex budget, which went a long way toward helping him get funding.  He now has just minimal monthly costs to run his service. After about seven months of experience in the Amazon cloud, Metcalf was now touting what the new infrastructure model has meant for his startup. He spoke in glowing terms about his experience with Amazon’s EC2 service, and also the advantages of its Simple Queue Service (SQS) for his particular huge compute needs. He also is a big fan of management and monitoring tools for the cloud,  such as those from Reese’s firm, enStratus. Googins also will be using those tools in a production environment he said he’d be rolling out in about a week.

Audience questions focused on pricing transparency, speed of deployment, the big issue of dealing with culture of the corporate IT department in moving to the cloud, and the status of legal language in contracts used in the new model. On that latter question, Flyspy’s Metcalf said his firm spent months modifying the contracts his data providers normally use for firms that have physical data centers. He said whole sections had to be cut out, many pages, and lawyers don’t do that easily (whereas “they’ll add stuff all day long”).  He said it was a huge hassle for his firm, and darn-near sunk it. But all is now well.

Serious Geeks Ignore Sunny MN Saturday, Talk Cloud Inside
You could tell those who gathered at CloudCampMSP on April 18 at the U of MN’s computer science building were serious. It was the Twin Cities’ first real spring Saturday, and there were tons of things we all could’ve been doing outside.  Being a free event, the less-dedicated of course didn’t show.  But that was a good thing, because the more than 100 who did pretty much filled the schmoozing space and the main room, anyway, and there was a ton of energy in that building.  We first heard lightning talks from local firm Visi.com, then Aserver, enStratus (also local), Microsoft (a local .Net architect) , Slicehost/Rackspace, and Rightscale — so, three of  those came to town just for this event.  Following was a lightning panel featuring three of the above, along with myself and a developer of some new cloud apps for Best Buy (Curtis Thompson), a proponent of PaaS (Google App Engine).  Audience participation was lively, prompting discussions of PaaS vs. IaaS, how businesses have to do more with less today, private vs. public clouds, bandwidth (esp in rural areas), nonprofits’ use of the cloud, and more.  Breakout sessions addressed a number of hot topics (see photo). I attended one on cloud mobility (led by Uri Budnik of Rightscale, all the way from LA), and another on security/reliability/regulation/compliance, led by Jim Hanlon, chief architect at Digital River (DRIV). I was impressed by the amount of intelligence in the room, in both sessions. Highly experienced, senior architects, some from huge firms — along with some pretty damn smart young guys, too, including startup founders (like Lukas Dickie of Gimigo).  Cool mix of cultures! 

In the mobility session, we talked about how we’re starting to hear of the promise of easily moving apps from one cloud to another (or data center to cloud), though Rightscale’s approach, I learned, is about moving servers from one to another; what they do is keep the server config consistent.  Later, in the security/compliance session, we talked about how compliance issues don’t change with the cloud; we still have the hard questions to ask. One big difference now: where is the server physically located?  And what about legal issues of, say, someone subpoenaing all the server records of a cloud provider when it has nothing to do with your company? (Witness the recent FBI example.)  We certainly don’t have all the answers. As Digital River’s Hanlon said, “This regulatory/compliance stuff is really hard, and that’s why companies want to outsource it” — citing it as a major reason they’re in business.

[For a further rundown on CloudCampMSP, go to search.twitter.com and enter "cloudcampmsp" or "ccmsp" -- both hashtags were used variously during the day, along with "cloudcomputingmsp" till I realized my mistake..   The event was one of the top trending topics on Twitter this sunny day in April, and a big success by all accounts. A ton more conversation transpired at a NE Minneapolis watering hole during the reception following...but, naturally, there weren't many tweets from there. And I know you'll thank me for not doing any of my podcast audio interviews while we were all drinking.]

It Was Cloud Week in Minneapolis, and All the Cool Kids (and Old Guys!) Were There is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Our post, “Internet Providers Want Control Over Your TV” sparked concern within the ranks of regional Comcast leadership, especially when this cross-posting of that article on MinnPost appeared. It caused them to take action to correct what they viewed as factual errors within the article.

While those (arguably) factual errors are corrected in the comments below the original post here and discussed within this article, Comcast’s “internet control” problem remains and I gained an unintended clarity about it from a conversation with a Comcast executive.

On Friday April 10th, I talked for an hour with David Diers, VP of Advanced Services for Comcast Twin Cities (he’s been involved in rollouts, for example, of Comcast’s Digital Voice, the 50/5 DOCSIS 3 service which I have at my office, and is now involved in accelerating the deployment of Comcast’s business services). Should mention that the setting up of this call was done by Tim Elliott (Disclosure: Tim is one of the Minnov8 team and involved with social media marketing for a firm engaged with Comcast and a friend of mine) so I went into this call with an open mind.

After letting the call sink in I realized that Mr. Diers regurgitation of the company positions and line were so well scrubbed (e.g., the comment here is mostly a cut-n-paste from Comcast press releases and FAQ’s) that the essence of the post in question was deflected and the overall issue remains: Comcast is attempting to control their internet pipe into your home or business and protect their cableTV franchise to your detriment, and arguably in a way that is already stifling innovation.

The internet is the most important development in human communication and connection since the telephone. It is already more profound in its impact than the development of the interstate highway system and is evolving. It is a fundmental infrastructure that will continue to accelerate (and increase efficiencies within) medicine, education, B2B/B2C commerce, while increasingly augmenting our human connections by allowing us to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of either geographical separation or time.

For anyone who reads Minnov8 knows, our position is that the ‘net is vital to 21st century competitiveness in the State of Minnesota. Optimal access is key to innovation, an imperative for collaboration, and increasingly a component in mission-critical business activities that cannot be ignored nor, quite frankly, controlled by any entity with a primary focus on their profits and stakeholders that ends up outweighing what’s in the public’s interests.

All that said, I do go back-n-forth over the need for broadband to be a public utility vs. providing a playing field (with rules that we call “regulations”) which allow for-profit internet providing companies to flourish and continue to do what Comcast has done: maximize their network and provide their customers with faster and better internet access.

THE CALL: OBJECTIVE MET & AN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE
Diers’ goal for our call was clearly to set the record straight. Mine was to hear him out and get more insight into their motivations and positions.

While Mr. Diers achieved his goal, I ended up preparing for the call in advance by doing more analysis of the issue of control and Comcast’s stated positions and, ironically, emerged from this call stronger in my resolve that rules and regulations are a must if our State is not to be dependent upon any internet services provider working toward their own incentives vs. those that strategically ensure the public good is maintained and that innovation continues in an open, competitive and affordable internet.

The conversation David Diers and I had was amiable and pleasant, and started off by establishing one another’s credentials and why the call was happening. There were two key issues he wanted to clarify:

1) One key problem Comcast officials had with the post was my characterization of their executive escalation person’s response to my query over my ability to buy more bandwidth and have no caps. While her response to me was that “bandwidth caps are bandwidth caps” — and I’d have no recourse if I consumed more than Comcast’s 250GB cap — was incorrect since I can buy business services and have unlimited bandwidth. Their position is that the 250GB is remarkably generous since “just over 1% of our customers come even close to hitting those caps.”

In retrospect, I realize now that — even though I’m fairly certain I asked specifically about business services in a residential setting — I’ll give the executive escalation rep the benefit of the doubt and chalk this up to a miscommunication. Comcast does, in fact, offer unlimited bandwidth if one is to buy a business class service for their home and I’m guessing she thought I was asking about what was available for residential services only. I stand corrected.

2) The second problem they saw in my post was my characterization of Comcast simply cutting off services for those customers who overtly, or inadvertently, exceed the 250GB cap. Section IV of their Terms of Services (TOS) states, “Comcast prefers to inform customers of inappropriate activities and give them a reasonable period of time in which to take corrective action.” While that sounds reasonable, reading the entire TOS document shows that Comcast, “… reserves the right immediately to suspend or terminate your Service account and terminate the Subscriber Agreement if you violate the terms of this Policy or the Subscriber Agreement.”

Yes, it’s in their best interest to inform us but they’re not obligated to do so but I should’ve gone back to their site and re-read their TOS. Mea culpa and I stand corrected.

One reason I emerged more resolved after this call than before it was that these two corrections are ‘nits’ and the substantive issues brought up during the call were deflected with vanilla responses.

250GB Today…But What About Tomorrow?
The essence of my post was not just bandwidth consumption today, but rather what consumption will be in 2010 or 2011 and that my opinion is that their bandwidth cap is an anti-competitive move.

I tried to focus on the “control over tv” theme in the post and make the point that the rapid adoption of sites like YouTube and Hulu — and the increased use of media centers by everyday consumers of TV — is the threat they’re trying to stave off.  I argue that these media center users will soon begin to demand even BETTER quality video to be delivered (e.g., rivaling what they get out of Comcast’s cableTV box) and that both the use of these media centers, and the bandwidth used to view this TV content NOT delivered via a Comcast cable box, are competitive and disruptive threats to Comcast’s cableTV franchise and the primary motivator behind the bandwidth cap.

Diers continually fell back on Comcast’s position and argued that only a tiny fraction of customers even came close to the 250GB bandwidth caps (and that they at Comcast are being incredibly generous with such a huge cap) and he never once took the media center piece head-on. So I gave him an example of my back-of-the-envelope calculation of consumption at my own household as my reasoning behind why Comcast’s positioning of the 250GB cap as “generous” is disingenuous at best:

+ A typical Standard Definition (SD) video stream is roughly 500kbps. One hour of video consumes about 221MB’s of bandwidth
+ But a typical High Definition (HD) video stream is roughly 1.2mbps. One hour of it would consume roughly 525MB (and that’s for highly compressed HD video)

If we watched streaming SD video for 4 hours each day for 30 days, that would equal about 63GB’s of bandwidth used. But assume that we will demand a qualitative increase in our video to HD quality (which we already are after only two weeks of use), then that compressed one hour of HD video could easily meet or exceed 1GB an hour. If so, that 4 hours each day for 30 days of video consumption would equal roughly 120GB’s or approximately half of Comcast’s 250GB bandwidth cap for TV alone!). (Yes, I understand that one measurement is bits per second and the result is measured in bytes, but again this is back-of-the-envelope and it’s very close).

That’s just TV bandwidth consumption…if you now factor in the explosion in we “always-on, always-connected” people dealing with digital content by creating and uploading it, consuming it, storing and forwarding it and more, you have a 250GB Comcast bandwidth cap that will look as quaint as the world’s first gigabyte-capacity disk drive, the IBM 3380, which was the size of a refrigerator, weighed 550 pounds, and had a price tag of $40,000 when introduced in 1980…when we can buy a 500GB, 2lb, USB bus-powered drive at Costco for $79.

Why a Regulated Internet Provider Market Matters
The recent US financial markets meltdown has made many question “the free market” as well as the idealistic and naive belief in zero regulation, but like anything there are layers of complexity that need sorting out in order to protect economic incentives for profit, while ensuring that smart and strong business people don’t devolve into Snidley Whiplash-like characters once they’ve built their momentum, become a sole source provider, or are in a position to exhibit or capitalize upon monopolistic opportunities.

It’s my belief that Comcast is at a “Snidley Whiplash tipping point” since they hold a dominant market position in many areas they serve (including much of the Twin Cities), but during our call I focused on the Twin Cities and Minnesota and wanted to get a sense from Diers about Comcast’s position with respect to their dominance and its effects.

As a counter to my argument that they’re becoming a monopoly, Diers brought up their competition with Qwest and AT&T as examples of alternatives to Comcast’s broadband. While this is about as true as comparing a Ferrari to a Toyota Corrolla, I detailed my choices at home as evidence that competitive choices were no available to me: Comcast broadband at 16mbps download and 2mbps upload speeds or Qwest at what they describe as my “possible but we won’t know until we test” ability to get a connection that is 768kbps download and 384kbps upload speeds. While Qwest is about half the price of Comcast for internet service, anyone but the most casual internet user would even consider dropping down from Comcast’s speeds to such a low DSL speed from Qwest.

If a consumer only has one viable choice, isn’t that choice, by definition, a monopoly?

What I wanted to get to, however, were how bandwidth caps and controls had a negative effect on innovation and why I already believe that Comcast is stifling innovation by trying to control our TV’s and that their bandwidth cap is the first attempt at putting guardrails alongside their internet offering so they can better control what happens over their pipe and keep out the disruptors threatening their cableTV revenues.

I brought forth two examples of limiting choice and stifling innovation that I’d hoped Mr. Diers could relate to: the woefully inadequate nature of Comcast’s cableTV offerings as compared to the exciting innovations occurring with open source and commercial media center offerings, and their Digital Voice service more akin to an old line telephony provider than to a 21st century VoIP one:

1) COMCAST’S CABLE BOX: My TiVo interface from five years ago was delightful and packed with features. When DirecTV (my provider for 9 years) stopped supporting TiVo and delivered their own DVR, I was stunned with how antiquated its interface was compared with TiVo. But it wasn’t until I received my Comcast cableTV box a couple of months ago did I realize how laughingly bad an interface truly could be: it’s so much worse than DirecTV’s that I actually considered going back to DirecTV.

But NONE of them can compare to the incredible innovation with media center interfaces and the features packed into them. From easy and simple access to internet video from YouTube, Vimeo, CBS, Hulu, Revision3 and many others, it’s also trivial to access your iTunes music/tv/movie library, your iPhoto library if on a Mac, or point to media files residing on your file system. In short, the innovation in this category is nothing short of astounding and I’m constantly stunned at the enormity of accessible content at our fingertips through our Mac mini media center (and we’re discovering new stuff by the day!).

But it gets REALLY interesting when you realize that there is a robust and vibrant ecosystem of developers who are creating plugins for these media centers in order to connect them to an increasing number of video outlets. Why does this matter? If one wants a Fora.tv plugin…someone is working on it. Geeks wanted a Revision3 plugin to access their hidef shows…so someone built one and no one had to ask permission to make plugins.

There are no plugins for a Comcast cableTV box since it’s a closed and proprietary delivery mechanism solely controlled by Comcast and the only way to watch any internet-centric content on your television is through a media center or computer connected to it.

This is understandable since Comcast makes more than 50% of its gross revenue on its cable television business, these alternatives to what they offer are undoubtedly seen as a huge threat (and major consumer of bandwidth, thus one reason the cap is in place now before these media centers really take off). Like the record companies before them, one hopes they don’t make the same mistakes trying to control and manage the innovation surrounding them, but rather find ways to embrace, extend and support this innovation.

Diers immediately brought up that, “Did you know we’re playing in this same area, just like Hulu, with an offering called “FanCast”? Our objective is to figure out how to deliver video everywhere: the web, mobile device, etc.“

I responded with, “I do David….but this proves my point about why Comcast has to be net neutral and support all of the media center offerings. Don’t you find it curious that none of the developers of any of the upstart media centers out there have written a plugin for FanCast?“

2) COMCAST DIGITAL VOICE: It gets worse though. Comcast’s Digital Voice service, for example, is also as woefully inadequate as is their cable box software interface.

While Vonage offered a complete web-based dashboard to control all of its features — a service I first signed up for in early 2001 — my landline provider Qwest still doesn’t allow web-based management and Comcast’s Digital Voice is also lacking in features and has embarassingly inadequate capabilities in their web management offering. In this regard, Comcast is more like a plain old telephone company than they are a modern voice over internet protocol (VoIP) provider playing in a web world. Perhaps that is why they were traffic shaping early on rendering Vonage, a competing phone service, unusable.

I agree with many internet thought leaders that the internet ‘pipe’ needs to be dumb and the intelligence at the ends of it. The old joke is that if Ma Bell still had a monopoly on telephone service — making us all lease our Western Electric phones — we’d still be using rotary dial ones. Same thing here: Because Comcast doesn’t support media center offerings that could hang on the end of their internet connection, and instead controls the distribution via their own cable box, we end up with the crappy experience they provide since they have no competition for it.

We covered several other areas that could’ve been hour long calls alone:

• Their lack of monitoring tools so we can meter our bandwidth. It’s like Xcel Energy sending us a bill without a detailing of our energy consumption. Diers answer was what is in their FAQ’s on their website: they offer them now in their (PC only) antiviral suite, but for any consumer with multiple PC’s gaming systems and iPhones using the Wifi, a per-device monitoring solution is a joke

• Privacy is an issue. Since they are able to tell a customer what their consumption is at any given moment, how do we know trust that they’re not also able to view all our traffic? Know what URL’s we view? They say they’re only “aggregating traffic” by bandwidth, but how do we know? Diers had no answer.

I ended up winding down the conversation since it was clear that any meaningful discussion with Mr. Diers into competitive issues — beyond the press release or FAQ boilerplate stuff he espoused — was above his pay grade.

What do I think should occur next? As I stated at the outset of this post, this is a complex matter and finding the sweet-spot of open markets and regulation is a job best left to the professionals. But those people need to be very aware of why this is needed, examples of how it is (or could) stifle innovation and limit choice, and that the pipe needs to be as dumb as possible so we can add the intelligence to the ends where all the innovation occurs anyway.

So What Should You and I Do Now?
While the Obama Administration is working toward a National Broadband Policy, if you care about high speed broadband and how much control one (or a handful) of companies have over it, I’d urge you to make your voice heard by connecting NOW with the Minnesota Ultra High Speed Task Force members and let them know why and how this issue matters to you.

The Task Force needs to hear from you. They’ll be making their recommendations to the State Legislature this Fall and key portions of those recommendations are being formulated as you read this post. If they don’t hear from you and soon, they’ll never know an open, unfettered internet matters as much as we online participants do.

Minnesota Ultra High Speed Task Force Member Emails (full contact info here). UPDATE: Task Force chair, Rick King, asked that all email correspondence be directed to Diane Wells (email) as she’s compiling them and releasing a daily digest to the members.

Control Over Your TV: A Comcast Executive Conversation is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Well, one local entrepreneur, George Reese, is right smack in the middle of all this buzz, and is in a position to help clear up a lot of the confusion about it — especially for enterprises looking to take advantage of the economic benefits of this form of computing.   His new book on the subject is scheduled to be released by O’Reilly on April 10.  It’s entitled “Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud.” (And here’s the Amazon link.)  George is a Minneapolis-based technologist and startup founder.  I’ve known him since late 2006 and thought it would be interesting to get his thoughts on this very hot topic, and hear the story behind his book.  This is an interview I conducted with George earlier this week, which first appeared on the cloud computing site Cloud Ave.

Graeme: How long have you been involved with cloud computing, and what made you decide to write this book?

George: I suppose that depends on what you mean when you say “cloud computing.” I’ve been developing SaaS [software as a service] systems for the past five years, but got into Amazon Web Services and Infrastructure as a Service in late 2007 when my company Valtira needed an alternate approach to a high-availability infrastructure. During this time, I’ve developed a body of experience in putting transactional database applications into the Amazon Cloud.  My editor at O’Reilly, with whom I’ve written several books in the past, heard I was doing cloud work and asked me to put together a book on the subject.

Graeme: Why is cloud computing gaining adoption like it is?  What is its attraction?  We know Internet and IT startups love it, but do you think it will catch on in any significant way with larger enterprises?

George: The primary attractions to cloud computing are cost and flexibility. Cloud computing enables you to build out a world-class IT infrastructure with no up-front capital investment and pay for the growth of your infrastructure as the business it is supporting grows.

I believe enterprise IT has a strong need for the benefits of cloud computing, but they have higher expectations with respect to reliability and scalability than startups. My company enStratus is all about dealing with these two concerns for enterprise IT, and I talk a lot about that in the book.

Graeme: For what types of readers did you primarily write the book? What will they get from it that they can’t get elsewhere?

George: The book is for people tasked with making the move into the cloud and guiding them through that move. I start by establishing what the cloud means from my perspective and what its value is to an organization. The book covers how you evaluate what makes sense to move into the cloud and, once the decision is made, the security, availability, and disaster recovery planning necessary to operate at an enterprise level in the cloud.

Graeme: Do you deal in the book with the issue of choosing a cloud computing provider?  In not, why not?  Do you attempt to compare providers?

George: No. Anything I might say in the way of a comparison would be out of date by the time the book hit the shelves. Jeff Barr from Amazon reviewed the book for technical accuracy, and E.J. Johnson from Rackspace and Randy Bias from GoGrid both provided appendices describing their offerings.

Graeme: What are some of the other key issues you deal with in the book, such as security and reliability of the cloud?  And what does the book deliver that’s not available elsewhere?

George: Given my role at enStratus, cloud security and reliability are obviously key concerns of mine. I spend an entire chapter on security issues and cover how to architect your applications for maximum availability throughout the book. I have not seen much of this kind of talk available on the Internet; mostly warnings about how security and availability are things you should worry about.

Graeme: Readers of the book will also learn about the management tools you have developed for use in your own company, Valtira, which offers a SaaS marketing platform. Please tell us how those tools led to the formation of a separate, spinoff company.

George: Valtira was looking to build out a new service offering that required a high-availability infrastructure. We priced out a managed services infrastructure to support our needs, but that proved too costly for a new product offering. We then turned to the Amazon cloud to see if it would meet our needs. We ran into a number of obstacles along the way. Some of these obstacles have since been addressed by Amazon through new service offerings like Elastic Block Storage. For other obstacles, we built out tools to take care of things. It turns out that people who were not Valtira customers really wanted our tools, so we spun them out into enStratus.

Graeme: You began working on the book many months ago. The release of the book seems now to be right at a time of intense focus on cloud computing, undoubtedly driven in part by current economic conditions.  What’s your take on all the hype?

George: Cloud computing is the most disruptive technology to hit business since the Web. It’s not hype. Like any disruptive technology, however, there’s a lot of misinformation flying around. To make matters worse, every person has a different internal definition of “the cloud” that frames their discussions on the subject. So, the hype is warranted, but everyone needs to pay particular attention to context and definitions in their discussions.

Graeme: With the book’s release, your speaking schedule is naturally heating up.  Please tell us where people can find you in coming weeks and months.

George: Well, first, I’ll be presenting at CloudCamp in New York City on April 1. Following that, O’Reilly has a webcast scheduled for April 8 on “Getting Started with Amazon Web Services.” In Minneapolis, I’ll be speaking at the Minnesota High Tech Association’s spring conference on April 15, and then at CloudCamp Minneapolis/St. Paul on April 18 at the U of MN.  Recently, my company enStratus was chosen as a presenting startup at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, CA, on April 24.  The following month, I’ll be speaking on the topic of information privacy and security in the cloud at the Glue Conference in Denver on May 12. Then it’s off to London, where I’ll be speak on May 15 at WebTech Exchange 2009 on the topic of hardening an EC2 infrastructure.

Graeme: That definitely qualifies as a whirlwind, George! Thanks for taking some time to tell us about your book, and I look forward to seeing you at some of these upcoming events.

(Disclosure: the author has a consulting relationship with George Reese’s company enStratus.)

What’s All This About ‘Moving to the Cloud’? One Minnesota Entrepreneur Can Tell You How is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

In addition, if you’re an investor with any money left in your 200.5k (i.e., half of a 401k) and could stomach some internet investing, then viewing opinions and recommendations on where to invest is key.

In both cases, an analysis of the potential of various sectors of an internet economy — by one of the world’s leading financial institutions, JPMorgan — is reason enough to spend the time necessary go through their “Nothing But Net” report.

Highlights of areas covered within it include:

• US Sector Outlook
• Ad Networks on the Rise
• eCommerce Outlook
• The Mobile Market
• Social Networks Primer
• Cloud Computing Outlook
• Internet for Social Good

…and much more.

The paper is embedded after the jump along with a download link.

Download PDF here.

JPMorgan Internet Investment Guide is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

George Reese, a local software developer and tech company founder, knows a lot about the topic — so much so that he was recently commissioned to write a book on cloud computing by O’Reilly Media, based in Northern California, one of the most prominent names in computer publishing.  Reese is the founder of two Minneapolis-based companies: a new one called enStratus Networks LLC, a maker of high-end cloud infrastructure management tools, and an established business called Valtira LLC, the maker of an online “marketing platform” of the same name. Over the past 15 years, George has authored several technology books — with such names as MySQL Pocket Reference, Database Programming with JDBC and Java, and Java Database Best Practices. But his upcoming title, Web Architecture and Programming in the Cloud: Transactional Systems for EC2 and Beyond, may become his most popular yet.

A longtime designer of enterprise tools for software developers, as well as software solutions for the marketing domain, Reese has more recently been heavily involved in the development of systems to support the deployment of transactional web applications in the cloud. Interestingly, his background includes a BA in Philosophy from Bates College and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Some Definitions
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Reese about his new book, and get an early look at the first chapter, which he says is aimed more at decision-makers than the rest of the book (which is primarily intended for developers). He also said this first chapter “has some claims some people might not like or agree with, especially if they’re competing with the cloud.”

According to Reese, cloud computing “is the evolution of a variety of technologies that have come together to alter an organization’s approach to building out an IT infrastructure.” He goes on to compare it to the development of the Web, more than a decade ago: “There is nothing fundamentally new in any of the technologies that make up cloud computing. Most of the technologies that made up the Web existed for decades before Netscape came along and simply made it all accessible; similarly, most of the technologies that make up cloud computing have been around for ages. It just took Amazon to make them all accessible to the masses.”

Yes, that same Amazon you know as an online retailer has also become a huge player in cloud computing with their “EC2″ infrastructure, which is changing the very way software businesses build their products and bring them to market — and saving them a ton of money at the same time.

Reese states in his first chapter: “The purpose of this book is to empower developers of transactional web applications to leverage cloud infrastructure in the deployment of their applications.”

An excerpt from the chapter that also helps define cloud computing:

The cloud is where you go to use technology when you need it, for as long as you need it, and not a minute more. You do not install anything on your desktop and you do not pay for the technology when you are not using it. The cloud can be both software and infrastructure. It can be an application you access through the web or a server that you provision exactly when you need it. Whether a service is software or hardware, here’s a simple test to check if that service is a cloud service:

If you can walk into any library or Internet cafe and sit down at any computer without preference for operating system or browser and access a service, that service is cloud based.

Reese speaks of “cloud services” (the type available via vendors such as Amazon), and points out that these include both software services and infrastructure services. “In terms of maturity, software in the cloud is much more evolved than hardware in the cloud” (meaning infrastructure), he says. “Software as a Service (SaaS) is a term that refers to software in the cloud. Though not all SaaS systems are cloud systems, most of them are.” He also provides a definition here that is helpful to those trying to understand this new paradigm: “SaaS is a web-based software deployment model that makes the software available entirely through a web browser. As a user of SaaS software, you don’t care where the software is hosted, or what kind of operating system it uses, whether it is PHP, Java, or .NET. And, above all else, you don’t have to install a single piece of software anywhere.”

Reese says SaaS systems have four defining characteristics: (1) availability via a web browser, (2) on-demand availability, (3) payment terms based on usage, and (4) minimal IT demands.

The Hardware Side of the Equation
“In general,” says Reese, “hardware in the cloud is conceptually harder for people to accept than software in the cloud. Hardware is something you can touch. You own it, you don’t license it. If you server catches on fire, that disaster matters to you. It’s hard for many people to imagine giving up the ability to touch and own their own hardware.”

Another excerpt from the book:

With hardware in the cloud, you request a new “server” when you need it. It is ready within 10 minutes. When you are done with it, you release it and it disappears back into the cloud. You have no idea what physical server your cloud-based server is running, and you probably don’t even know where it is physically located geographically.

Reese points out the advantages of a cloud infrastructure. “Think about all of the things you have to worry about when you own and operate your own servers: (1) What if I am running out of capacity? (2) What happens when there is a problem? (3) What happens when there is a disaster? (4) I don’t need that server anymore — what do I do with it?  (5) What about real estate and electricity, for infrastructure that goes unused?”  His summation: “None of these issues is a concern with a proper cloud infrastructure.”

The Value of Cloud Computing
In his book’s first chapter, Reese says the impact of the cloud is significant. “For some organizations — in particular, small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and SaaS vendors — it makes it possible for an organization never again to purchase a server or own any software licenses.” In other words, he adds, all these worries disappear:

• Am I current on all my software licenses?
• When do I schedule my next software upgrade?
• What do I do when a piece of hardware fails at 3am?
• What do I do with my old hardware?
• How do I manage the depreciation of my IT assets?
• When can I afford to add capacity to my infrastructure?

It All Comes Down to Economics
“Perhaps the biggest benefit of cloud computing over building out your own IT infrastructure has nothing to do with technology — it’s financial,” Reese says. “The ‘pay for what you use’ model of cloud computing is significantly more financially advantageous to a company than the ‘pay for everything up front’ model of internal IT.”

It’s here where Reese reduces everything to the bottom line: “The right managed services option and cloud computing are always financially more attractive than managing your own IT. Across all financial metrics — capital requirements, total cost of ownership, complexity of costs — internal IT is always the odd man out.”

The new book is scheduled for publication in April 2009.

Upcoming Book on Hottest I.T. Trend: ‘Cloud Computing’ is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Based upon feedback we’ve received from you and many other listeners, the Gang is increasing the pace of the show and getting to areas of interest in a tighter show format.

In today’s show, a few links mentioned include:

+ Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit

+ The concurrent UnSummit that occurred for those unable to get into the MIMA Summit 

+ TechCrunch article on the credit crunch

+ “With credit tight, young companies keep closer eye on cash” by Katharine Grayson, Twin Cities Business Journal

+ RangeBuzz, “...the Iron Range MN online guide to northern MN dining, nightlife, music and area events. RangeBuzz.com makes it easy for you to discover what’s happening on the Iron Range in Northern Minnesota!”

+ Next Social Media Breakfast on October 31st at Deluxe Corp. (watch their site for details to appear).

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 9 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.