This week, a relatively large group of technology companies, along with NASA, launched OpenStack, an open source project designed to give businesses and service providers a top-to-bottom, and already proven, cloud computing platform. I'm all for openness, but as I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, it's do not too difficult to play devil's advocate and make the case that OpenStack won't create true rivals for leading cloud providers or cloud software vendors.

Assuming the provisioning engine comes to fruition, OpenStack will undoubtedly see adoption from service providers wanting to offer cloud computing, enterprises wanting to build their own internal clouds, and IT vendors looking to beef up their cloud software offerings. If all comes together as planned, it should be a very nice solution. Just like everywhere else in life, competition in the cloud is a great thing.

However, competition for dollars and developers is plentiful, including large cloud providers, software vendors and even other open source options. The idea of a network of interoperable OpenStack-based public and internal clouds is appealing, but it would require stealing business and developers from a wide variety of other proven, innovative and commercially supported offerings.

Even within the OpenStack membership, conflicts of interest exist. How supportive can Rackspace really be of other service providers without cannibalizing its own cloud revenue? Plus, it's also considering offering Windows Azure as a service. Dell already sells Joyent's cloud software, and it's also an early Windows Azure Appliance partner. If Dell does offer OpenStack as an open source alternative, it will be just that an alternative. Other partners will support the OpenStack platform, but that's on top of existing support for AWS, VMware and other industry-leading offerings. Supporting OpenStack is one thing, but pushing it to the exclusion of other options is something else.

Is OpenStack important? Yes. Will OpenStack attract a broad community of users? Yes. Will OpenStack-based offerings and deployments gather enough market share to make current leaders lose sleep? That's not such an obvious answer.

Read the entire column here.

Photo courtesy of Picasa user elinenberg.

Since the announcement of OpenStack crossed the wire on Monday, much of the emphasis has been on Rackspace's decision to open source their code and what this might mean in terms of the other major (proprietary) cloud players. But there are 25 companies who've signed on to the OpenStack organization and the benefit of the open source project will be far-reaching beyond just the cloud service providers.

Sponsor

I had a chance today at OSCON to talk with Peder Ulander, CMO of Cloud.com, about what being part of the OpenStack initiative means to the startup.

Cloud.com offers a software platform for building and managing both public or private cloud environments. Cloud.com allows customers to deploy cloud services within their existing IT infrastructure, facilitating the move to the cloud. Cloud.com has been open source all along, with modular offerings designed to meet the needs of its customers.

While the benefits, and even the inevitability, of cloud technology are clear to some, there are still major inroads to be made before adoption is ubiquitous. The fears of vendor lock-in - which is a major piece of what the OpenStack project addresses - are a big part of what's causing some companies to hesitate about the cloud. After all, despite the frequently heard assertion that cloud computing is a "disruptive" technology, Ulander says that companies don't necessarily want to adopt something "disruptive."

Ulander likens the adoption of the cloud to the adoption of Linux. Once major players like IBM "sanctioned" its use, Linux was able to make greater inroads in the enterprise. Similarly with the backing of major players like Rackspace, Ulander contends that the OpenStack initiative will probably help cloud computing take a big leap towards legitimacy and acceptance.

It's too early to tell if the open source project will be collaborative or competitive, but Cloud.com already sees the benefits of participating. Cloud.com is planning to adopt the OpenStack Object Storage platform into its CloudStack product, for example, allowing the company to immediately add a new feature to its offerings.

A group of cloud computing stakeholders have announced a new project called OpenStack, which aims to produce a standard open source cloud computing software stack. It will allow adopters to host their own elastic computing clouds and scalable storage grids. Key participants include hosting company Rackspace and NASA.

The project consists of several interoperable components that will be released incrementally as the code is made ready for public consumption. The OpenStack Object Storage framework, which is based Rackspace's Cloud Files service, is the first OpenStack component to be made available.

Read the comments on this post

Hosting company RackSpace is open sourcing the software behind its cloud storage and computing platforms on Monday, the company is saying. The company is also preparing to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, and will donate the open source code to that project.

NASA is also incorporating technology from the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform into the OpenStack project, says RackSpace.

RackSpace says they want to drive interoperability in cloud services to avoid vendor lock-in, and help create industry standards. More than 25 companies have shown interest in the project, says RackSpace, or are actively working on the code. They include AMD, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, Peer 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks and Zuora.

The code is being released under the extremely flexible Apache 2 license, meaning third parties can redistribute the code, build proprietary software around the code, and distribute it with few restrictions.

I hate lock in. It's one reason why I have used Wordpress for so many years. With it I can move my blog between hosts and, even, can export my blog to a database and import it into another tool. Dave Winer (the developer behind many of the technologies that run underneath blogs) and Matt Mullenweg (the guy who brought us Wordpress) have written about, and spoken about, how lock-in is anti customer and anti innovation quite a bit over the last 10 years.

Over the years I've asked developers, CEOs, and CTOs why they went with open source solutions rather than buying something from Microsoft or Oracle and they invariably answer something about how they don't want to be locked in. WIth open source, they tell me, they can see the code, poke around in it, and, even, take it and build their own systems with that code.

That's exactly what Rackspace is doing today in announcing OpenStack. But that's not the only big announcement we're making. Already 25 companies, including NASA, have already started using the OpenStack code to build some impressive things, but more on that later.

This is the biggest strategic announcement we've made since going public.

Why?

1. It means the end of lock-in for cloud customers. Don't like Rackspace for some reason? Take your cloud-based apps somewhere else. We already have competitors who are using OpenStack to run their own cloud infrastructure. Compare this ability to ANY other cloud infrastructure available on the market today and you'll see we're the only one who has absolutely no lock-in. How will Rackspace compete? Plain old customer service and fanatical support.

2. It means that new capabilities are coming your way, including those developed at NASA, who have also open sourced cloud infrastructure as part of OpenStack developed to run NASA's Nebula Cloud Platform.

3. This is a true open source announcement, not one of those we're open announcements where you find out by looking at licenses that something key has been kept proprietary. Compare our licenses to ANYONE and you'll see we're the ones who went fully open source.

4. OpenStack will include several cloud infrastructure components, the first being OpenStack Object Storage, a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The second component, OpenStack Compute, will be a massively scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula compute project and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology, available later in 2010. Any organization will be able to turn physical hardware into massively scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

5. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held in Austin, Texas on July 13-16, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding partners had the opportunity to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.

So, what does this mean? Why would Rackspace turn over code it spent 10s of millions of dollars acquiring and developing?

1. It puts the focus on Rackspace's famous fanatic customer service like never before. Because we have no lock-in anymore there is only one way we'll keep customers: provide the best support.

2. It extends Rackspace's development efforts far beyond what we could achieve otherwise. And we have been building some awesome software development teams. You might have missed but we hired most of the MySQL Drizzle development team, among many other great developers. But this wasn't enough when faced with new cloud competition from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. One company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, just was never going to be able to take on companies with market capitalization in the 10s of billions of dollars. But as you've already seen from the new capabilities that NASA has brought to OpenStack this brings a massive new group of developers into this and the entire world will benefit from that.

3. It has already helped hiring and employee morale. I didn't grok just what it would do here. I guess that's part of my Microsoft background. You know, the one that says why would a company give away its crown jewels? But it has turned working at Rackspace for many of my coworkers from just a job to one that's a mission. After all, our code now is going to be used by NASA. Think about what that does. Also, it's a lot easier to recruit great developers when they get to work on an open source initiative. I almost didn't talk about this on the blog because this effect has been so pronounced. I believe it'll force other cloud companies to go open source as well because they'll lose key hires to Rackspace and they already have.

4. It further aligns Rackspace with the industry it serves. Go around the industry as I have with my video camera and you keep hearing we're betting on open source and companies that don't lock us in. Every startup, nearly, uses the LAMP stack and those who don't go that way tell each other at private industry events like the one I'm at right now in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that jumping off the open source stack brings negative results for companies. I've been talking with CTOs, VCs, and CEOs and they are excited to have more choice in cloud-hosting. More on that later as this announcement rolls out.

Here is the official press release. You can learn more at OpenStack.org and also on the official Twitter account for OpenStack.

Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA and Other Industry Leaders on OpenStack Project

More than 25 companies, including Citrix and Dell, support open source cloud platform to accelerate industry standards

San Antonio, TX July 19, 2010 HYPERLINK http://www.rackspace.com Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX) today announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the HYPERLINK http://nebula.nasa.gov/ NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand, said Chris Kemp, NASA's Chief Technology Officer for IT. To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on HYPERLINK http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and HYPERLINK http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. It is expected to be available later this year. Using these components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies, said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. We are proud to have NASA's support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability, said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, HYPERLINK http://www.citrix.com Citrix Systems. As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products.

We believe in offering customers choice in cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency, says Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager of Server Platforms, HYPERLINK http://www.dell.com/ Dell. OpenStack on Dell is a great option to create open source enterprise cloud solutions.

To download or contribute code and get involved, visit OpenStack.org. Follow OpenStack on Twitter @OpenStack.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. For more information, visit http://www.rackspace.com/ www.rackspace.com.

About the NASA Nebula Cloud Program
NASA Nebula is a Cloud Computing service based at NASA Ames Research Center that provides high performance compute, network, and data storage services to NASA scientists and researchers. Nebula allows NASA to share and process large scientific data sets and was one of three flagship projects highlighted in NASA's Open Government Plan. For more information, visit http://nebula.nasa.gov.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development of the OpenStack project; the acceptance of OpenStack technology as an industry standard; anticipated operational and financial benefits from any development of the OpenStack project; the participation of other companies or individuals in the OpenStack project; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from the OpenStack project may not materialize because the underlying technology is not reliable or generally compatible with industry standards; there are changes in technology that adversely affect the adoption of the standards, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2010, filed with the SEC on May 6, 2010. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

###

UPDATE: Here's some blog posts about this:

Techcrunch. OpenStack.org: Rackspace Open Sources Their Cloud Services Platform, and Gets NASA On Board.
The Next Web. Rackspace issues a challenge to the cloud industry; goes open-source with OpenStack.
RWW: OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem.
GigaOm: OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud Project Emerges.

Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and all similar sites are a part of something called online social media. Social media is what we use to promote trending topics, websites, products, and interesting links on the web. The sites I just mentioned dominate the social media arena. But there is an up-and-coming competitor to these sites. I am referring to Plenton.

Plenton is a cloud sharing' website with wonderful social media potential. I remember when I first visited Digg, it took me a while to get used to all the links and controls. In contrast, Plenton was a breeze to get used to. All I had to do was create a free account and start sharing.

After you create an account on Plenton (and optionally upload a display picture) not only can you share links to interesting online content, but you can also upload media (images and video). Whatever you share on the Plenton network, the Plenton community will vote and contribute related media material to your link thereby making it bigger. This process turns your share into a cloud and this is the cloud sharing' concept.

People who simply want to browse the site to see what happening on the web and everywhere else, Plenton offers a great site layout. The categories bar lets you view articles categorically.

The homepage of the site has clouds selection which always contains very interesting material.

The Spotlight section features latest shares.

Most popular clouds can also be viewed on the site's homepage.

A section called Upcoming Clouds helps social media enthusiasts know about the upcoming trends and topics on the Plenton network.

The network's features add up to a great social media site, one that has immense potential.

Try out Plenton yourself and leave a comment letting me know what you think about it.

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Server virtualization created cloud computing. Without the ability to run multiple logical server instances on a single physical server, the cloud computing economics we know today wouldn't be possible. Most assume that server virtualization as we know it today is a fundamental enabler of the cloud, but it is only a crutch we need until cloud-based application platforms mature to the point where applications are built and deployed without any reference to current notions of servers and operating systems.

At that point, the value of server virtualization will go down substantially. This fact is not lost on virtualization leader VMware, whose CEO Paul Maritz, less than two years after joining, has positioned the company to cannibalize its own server virtualization business with a move toward platform-as-a-service computing.

At Structure 2010, Maritz said that clouds at the infrastructure layer are the new hardware. The unit of cloud scaling today is the virtual server. When you go to Amazon's EC2 you buy capacity by the virtual server instance hour. This will change in the next phase of the evolution of cloud computing. We are already starting to see the early signs of this transformation with Google App Engine, which has automatic scaling built in, and Heroku with its notion of dynos and workers as the units of scalability.

Developers working on top of Google App Engine and Heroku never have to think about servers, virtual or physical. In a few years, clouds at the application platform layer will be the new hardware. At that time, traditional operating systems and server virtual machines will become much less important to the cloud.

First and foremost, server virtualization generates overhead. VMware performance tests suggest that the overhead is in the 8 to 12 percent range. However, when several virtual machines run on the same server and start competing for hardware and network resources, the overhead is substantially higher. This is waste. It's expensive. It's bad for the environment.

Some would argue that this is a necessary, small overhead that provides security and enables great efficiencies in the data center. That's true in the sense that without virtualization there is no easy way to take many enterprise applications architected in the 80s and 90s, bolted onto a Windows or Linux operating system and relying on resources such as files and sockets, and make them securely run on one physical server. The argument fails, however, when applied to most modern applications, which rely on network-accessible resources such as databases and Web services as opposed to local resources such as files and processes.

Aiding this trend, startups are building custom application virtualization layers that free applications from servers, obviating the need for virtualizing Windows or full-featured Linux OSes. At Structure, Tom Mornini, CTO of Engine Yard, and I spent a fascinating part of an hour with pen and paper drawing diagrams of what the new software stack looks like. Although Engine Yard's scaling model is still focused on servers, this is an indication of their enterprise go-to-market strategy. Enterprises are still much more comfortable thinking and buying in terms of servers.

Right now, many PaaS companies deploy on virtualized servers because they are small startups that don't own their own hardware. In the very near future, when a large cloud provider such as Amazon offers a PaaS, that provider will have the option to deploy at least a meaningful portion of the PaaS workloads of their customers against machines running a lean, stripped OS and/or a tiny hypervisor providing the barest minimum isolation from the hardware and no server virtualization layer the way the term is understood today. Multi-tenancy isolation will be achieved at the platform-as-a-service layer, not at the virtual machine layer.

The biggest hindrance to deploying these types of PaaS offerings on public clouds is trust something Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, emphasized in a conversation. Right now AWS trusts the server virtualization tier to provide security and isolation. Technically, this is not harder to do at the PaaS layer. In fact, it is easier you just have to remove or trap dangerous APIs but I expect it will still take at least a year or two before the volume of PaaS usage makes it worthwhile for large public cloud providers to go through the effort of eliminating server virtualization overhead.

Enterprise private clouds will need server virtualization for a while, but I expect that market to peak in three years and then begin a steady decline brought about by the commoditization of basic server virtualization we are already seeing and the shift of new development to PaaS. The same will happen with traditional server operating systems. It's not a question of if, but when.

A year after Maritz took over the reins, VMware bought SpringSource, which offered an application framework, server and management tools with a significant following in the Java developer community. Partnerships with Google around App Engine and Salesforce.com around VMforce quickly followed putting VMware in the Java PaaS game. VMware has seen the future clearly and is preparing to move up the stack to PaaS offerings.

This was spelled out in May by VMware CTO Steve Herrod: We are committed to making Spring the best language for cloud applications, even if that cloud is not based on VMware vSphere. Recently, GigaOM reported that VMware may be talking to Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails PaaS provider. Whether a deal happens or not, I'm impressed by VMware's bold approach under Maritz.

Soon we will be able to throw away the server virtualization crutch and, like in that memorable moment from Forrest Gump, we will be able to run leaner and more scalable applications in the cloud on next-generation platforms-as-a-service. For the time being, my call to action is for application developers to stop writing code that directly touches any hardware or operating system objects and try the current generation of platforms-as-a-service.

Simeon Simeonov is founder and CEO of FastIgnite, an executive-in-residence at General Catalyst Partners and co-founder of Better Advertising and Thing Labs. He tweets as @simeons.

Filed under: Fashion, Tech, Art / Design

As if it weren't already obvious...

Clearly a Mac fan from way back in the rainbow days.

An 8-bit totem pole of nostalgia.

The Linux Penguin looks a little depressed to be on this woman's arm.

The lack of muscle under this blue screen of death is not surprising.

It's not clear whether it's the image or the tattoo that's flipped here. If it's the latter, extra props for being nerdy enough to consider that most of the tattoo's viewing time will be in the mirror on those lonely Ubuntu nights.

Those would definitely get mad respect in the harsh prison system.

It's huge! Fire upwards through your own shield!

This tattoo represents the three stages of web design.

Pump up the wrist-volume.

USB - Unnecessarily Scarred Body

Riddle us this: if he's not plugged in, how is he pulling down the neck of his shirt?

NEXT, please.

Yep, that's his space, all right, and probably no one else's.

Sonic would be proud. Mario wouldn't give a damn.

A tramp stamp that says think different is nothing short of ironic.

Pants on fire.

But Itsa me, neck tattoo!

Link to the shoulder.

To tattoo or not to tattoo, a binary choice.

This guy was the king of the retro gaming world until someone got a Magnavox Odyssey tattoo on his butt.

"You have the controller to my heart, baby."

Cataloging history, one tattoo at a time. Hope there's room for a Wii wand on his foot.

For a tattoo that references imaging,this one is particularly scraggly.

The needle should be pointing to W, for "Why, God, why?"

The symbol for an RSS feed.

We did. Search term = silly tattoo.

Megaman is being watched by a winged cyclops skull. Enough said.

You'd have to have your head in the Clouds to get this Final Fantasy tattoo done.

Is this guy a Mac supporter or a Mac hater?

This guy is more ambivalent.

She kind of looks a bit like Ms. Pac-man

A tattoo that commands respect.

Mac tattoo: ok. PC tattoo: Umm... DELL tattoo: social suicide.

Looks like there's a smudge on the blue window. Probably a taskbar alert.

A tattoo that is ironically being inked by a guy wearing an iphone t-shirt. Maybe that explains the quality...

Half-Life or no life? You decide.

This tattoo was completed about 33% more quickly than the USB tattoo.

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EDUCAUSE Quarterly has published a special issue on cloud computing.

Here are some representative articles:

• "Cloud Computing Explained"
• "Embracing the Cloud: Six Ways to Look at the Shift to Cloud Computing"
• "A Tale of Two Clouds"
• "Demystifying the Cloud: Implications for IT Funding in Higher Education"
• "If It's in the Cloud, Get It on Paper: Cloud Computing Contract Issues"
• "Using Cloud Infrastructure as Part of a Digital Preservation Strategy with DuraCloud"

This week we're joined by Aaron Conaway of Aaron's worthless Words' fame, while we did our usual chit chat about a few things, the main subject was a conversation about career progression.

Networking Career progression

So many people are stuck in jobs they get nothing out of anymore, or don't see a way out of, that we started looking at how you get promoted, when do you move, and how important are certifications in your career.

The only problem, is we ran out of time long before we'd finished, so we're going to take off where we started next week! We'd love to hear your experiences, hints and tips on career progression, and we'll get them into next weeks show.

Cisco IOS Educational Licensing

We also talked about Greg's Petition for Cisco IOS Educational Licensing , which came out of Wendell Odom's article on the possibility of educational licensing for IOS. This would be a huge benefit to all those out there studying and building labs, and could only be a plus for Cisco. Please go to http://etherealmind.com/petition and signup asap!

Audience Involvement

We have achieved one thousand downloads of the last episode and we think thats pretty great. But don't let that stop you from telling your workmates, study classmates that we exist. More is just more.

Fact of the Week

We want you to send us a Fact of the Week. Every engineer has one trick, or one little fact that needs to be shared. So email your tip, trick or fact to packetpushers at gmail dot com.

IEEE is using Software Patents

IEEE Supports Software Patents IEEE is not transparent, doesn't answer to the community only it's paid up members who are large vendors competing and fighting for market position. Now it wants software patents for technology that it shouldn't own.

Cloudshark

An interesting varient on the wireshark idea is a new service where you can upload your dumps via number of methods to Cloudshark, who will analyze and give you a wireshart-like output on the web. Handy for sharing, or when you can't easily send the dump back to yourself. But what about the confidentiality aspects?

The Gestalt IT Tech Field Day

Ethan is off to the Gestalt IT Tech Field day in Seattle this week. We're a big supporter of the Tech Field Days, as it's a great way of getting the information that people want from big vendors out there, a lot more clearly than you ever do from your rep or reseller. In fact we're such big fans of the concept, that we had a special announcement about the first PacketPushers Network tech field day to be held later this year. We're all really excited about this (especially Greg)! More details to follow!

If you enjoy the show, please take a moment to write a review on iTunes. Help spread the word, and thanks!

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Microsoft, feeling the heat from some of its rivals such as VMware, is starting to focus its cloud computing efforts on hybrid and private clouds. In an effort to capture the nascent market, the company says it is going to start offering a Windows Azure Platformbased cloud appliance that will replace one hundred to one thousand servers. The news of this new appliance was first revealed by Microsoft's President of Server and Tools Business, Bob Muglia, at a Microsoft partner event in Washington D.C.

For now, the appliance will be in limited production release Microsoft-speak for available to chosen partners. Microsoft says eBay is an early appliance customer. Dell, Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard are going to implement the appliance inside their own data centers, and eventually will manufacture and sell the Microsoft appliances to their customers. Think of the appliance as a way to create a platform as a service inside a corporate data center.

Microsoft's decision to launch an appliance is a tad confounding and perhaps reflective of the fact that its Azure platform hasn't quite been adopted by enterprises as widely as the company would have hoped for. I couldn't quite get any clarity on the decision during a conference call with Microsoft executives.

Research Report: Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware

Public cloud isn't going to be an only choice for government and corporate infrastructure, said Amy Barzdukas, GM, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. She pointed out that most companies are still looking to control their infrastructure because of legal, security and other corporate reasons.

Her views dovetail with my one big takeaway from our Structure 2010 conference earlier this summer: Most large companies were focusing their attention on private clouds, which are being viewed as a way to optimize the internal IT infrastructure and slowly transition to a hybrid model where they use internal cloud environments in tandem with a public cloud service.

VMware CEO Paul Maritz, in a fireside chat with me, said that his company was betting big on helping large companies make the transition to private cloud with its new offerings. Microsoft's strategy seems closer to IBM's, which has both hardware (CloudBurst) for companies that want to build their own clouds, and a variety of workload-specific platforms on offer to clients, as opposed to VMware, which is building platforms as a service with no hardware in sight. This strategy also puts Microsoft in competition with Cisco Systems, which is working on its own strategies to compete in the emerging cloud marketplace using specialized and easily configurable hardware. Microsoft, it seems, is merely following what is en vogue these days.

I'm struggling right now with the proper way to open this blog post. On the one hand, the inspiration for the post you're now reading was written by a former podcast co-host of mine, MG Siegler with his usual flair. On the other hand, MG's diatribe displays a spectacular lack of attention to detail or the tech industry.

You see my quandary. I don't wanna be a complete jerk, but admitted Apple fanboy Siegler essentially wrote a 1,500 word post where the upshot is Yeah, Microsoft whipped Apple's butt for the last 25 years, but I have done no research to try to divine what their next move or idea will be, so they're most likely doomed to a slow death.

Not to Detract from His Compelling Post, But Here's a Summary

After opening up the post with a brief plug for the upcoming Chris Nolan film Inception, here's the story as MG lays it down:

- Microsoft has exhibited a long line spectacular fails as of late, in particular, the Death of the Kin, and internal struggles. OK, maybe that's just two things, but to be fair, the way he wrote that paragraph, he made it appear to be four things.

- 25 years ago, Microsoft stole the idea of the graphical user interface from Apple. Or maybe they didn't. But they probably did. Either way, MG was three years old, and he's pretty sure he remembers the facts (because he certainly didn't quote any sources).

- He recalls that Apple probably stole the GUI from Xerox's PARC, but Microsoft was way more evil for stealing it from Apple.

- All Microsoft ideas are bad ones. Want proof? Microsoft watches are stupid. Also, the Kin. Apparently the failure of these two projects are so monumental that it breaks the laws of mathematics, making the sum of 1 + 1 > 24.

- The idea of a GUI is disappearing, and Microsoft will be left in the dust (yet some how make a lot of money off Windows).

About 750 or so words in, MG gets to the point and some actual verifiable facts.

- XBox Live and the Zune Marketplace are accounting for nearly 2% of revenue at Microsoft (but, he notes, $1 Billion isn't anywhere as big of a number as $58 Billion). Obviously, he further remarks, this whole selling movies and music is a dead-end idea.

- Google and Apple are competing with Microsoft on the mobile side with the Android and iOS platform.

- Should Microsoft launch a touchscreen pad, they'd be facing the same competitors.

- Steve Ballmer is overseeing the entertainment division, when he should be playing to his strength at the enterprise side of the business. Technically this is a fact mixed with an observation, but we'll let it slide since we need a couple bullet points to fill out the fact section of this post.

At about wordcount 1400 or so, MG admits he has no clue what's next for Microsoft.

He brings it around town. Direct quote:

It's just not clear where Microsoft's second inception is going to come from. Where that big idea that will steer the company for the next 25 years is going to pop up. The only thing that is certain is that Microsoft needs that second inception.

As Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) says at one point in the Inception trailer, The dream is collapsing.

After I read the end of it, my jaw sort of dropped, and my mind flicked back to a comment I had read on a different Techcrunch article earlier that day: This article is about as prescient as the time my dad said the internet was just a fad after his WebVan stock crashed.

MG Actually Skirted Part of the Future of Microsoft

but it appeared to whoosh right past him as he raced to the next thing he could think of where he could write a sentence intimating a Microsoft failure or idea theft.

He acknowledged Ballmer's attention to the enterprise and entertainment sector and Microsoft's recent successes with the XBox Live marketplace. This is a future success and brilliant idea I've been hinting around here at SiliconANGLE for quite some time, but very explicitly described the other day. In that post, I pointed to a recent Microsoft missive in which they framed the XBox platform as a media consumption platform rather than simply a gaming console.

The first number set is interesting because it shows the context in which Microsoft thinks about the XBox. Typically, Microsoft is blasted for taking a loss on the device in the early years. The foresight here is only just now becoming apparent, particularly when you take today's BusinessWeek estimations in context of the numbers Shaw put out last week. XBox Live and XBox Media income accounts for nearly 2% of Microsoft's total revenue!

In essence, Microsoft is building an ecosystem both on the macro level (in the same way that iTunes is building a media consumption ecosystem), as well as driving the need for people to keep a home private/public cloud structure. If you're into collecting movies, TV shows, music and other media with your XBox as any part of that, the need will arise at some point for you to maintain a home media server (something that, quite famously, effortlessly integrates with other Microsoft-based devices).

With current and future versions of the XBox, the console doesn't really mind where the data sits on your network (be it laptop, network device, media server or what have you), so long as it's shared out. XBox plays it all as if it exists within the same volume. By corporate IT standards, this isn't what's traditionally thought of as private cloud, but it is the consumer equivalent to what's currently emerging in that world.

We're not used to thinking in these terms, but Microsoft is turning into a major driver for consumer level adoption of hybrid public/private cloud, in concept, if not reality.

Beyond the consumer side, which I talked about yesterday, Microsoft has had a clear vision when it comes to enterprise adoption of the hybrid private / public cloud with the Azure project a vision that falls in line with the current corporate slogans of companies like EMC, Citrix, Sun and VMWare. Their roadmap for the enterprise includes a range of options, from the current roll your own options, to the private and public IT cloud infrastructure options all the way to the cloud app options like Google and a million Web2 startups offer today.

The point is that Microsoft has been on top of their long term product vision for quite some time now years, in fact and has shown amazing prescience on where the enterprise market is headed.

Remember the Kinect Announcement? That Was Only a Couple Weeks Ago.

Their problem, now and in the future, continues to be one of marketing and branding. The problem extends further than the issue Microsoft has with myopic bloggers and tech journalists like MG (who refuse to see the potential of any product designed by a multi-billion dollar company that isn't Apple or Google). It extends into the average consumer's field of vision. In part, this is shaped by the Apple/Google dominated tech press, but is mostly shaped by the recent levels of success Microsoft's consumer products achieve.

The most recent unmitigated successes for the OS giant have been Windows 7 and the XBox platform (in both perception and sales), which at first blush have very little connection to the world of the enterprise, or even the future of user experience and user interface.

While the Kin may have had a confusing launch and disappointing reception the one product launch that looks like it's going to do wonders for Microsoft is the Kinect interface for the XBox, which Microsoft says will also be able to be utilized on the desktop as well, which truly threatens to change the user experience radically for the first time since the keyboard we all use to this day was laid out in the late 1800's:

We're stuck with slow internet, but we're stuck with even slower input devices. The iPad and any smartphone out there doesn't improve the speed at which we're able to digitize what's in our heads it slows it down. The keyboards we all use and view as the optimal way to input information were invented around the late 1800's. The mouse was created in 1963. We've made minor improvements on both, but by and large, we haven't improved the way we put input into machines for 130 years for text.

That's why I get excited about technologies like Project Natal / Kinect and to a lesser extent older but interesting innovations like the Twiddler and the Dasher.

Until there is a technology that allows us to, while on the go, achieve input speeds that exceed what's possible from traditional input devices, the need for a let's sit down and get work done station will always exist.

Like I mentioned above, there's the connection to cloud computing where the Xbox acts as a consumer metaphor for the network architecture giants like EMC, SAP, Sun, IBM and dozens of other giants are pushing to their customers now.

If you're not immersed in that world, though, it's a difficult set of concepts to grasp. Microsoft has always had an advantage over the other enterprise players, though, in that since the days of Wintel, there's been a large cross-section of the public that understand the basics of what they have to offer. When it comes to buying an Exchange server or a Microsoft database or Web server, the average buyer in even a small business doesn't have far to go to understand exactly what that means, because they have some version of exactly what they need on their consumer machine at home.

On the one hand, with the large amounts of data being processed by large organizations, working without the aid of private / public cloud solutions are quickly becoming pipe-dreams. On the other hand, every solutions provider faces a two or three hour intro segment to their sales pitch while they try to educate potential clients on just what the hell it is they're trying to sell them. No one on the planet runs an Oracle database or a half-million-dollar EMC data volume in their broom closet so they can better organize their DVD collection.

But it's becoming increasingly common for folks living in the Microsoft XBox ecosystem to understand the difference between public cloud (Netflix streaming, Hulu streaming, Last.FM streaming) and private cloud (Downloaded Zune videos and music, downloaded games and add-ons, created media on their local media server or laptop). All a Microsoft solutions provider need do would be to say Hey, you know how your XBox works with your network? Yeah, like that.

Let's Be Realistic Here

I know it's hard to imagine for some of us who live in an Apple ecosystem or a Google ecosystem, but Microsoft does have their own ecosystem. By and large, it dwarfs the other two consumer facing tech-ecosystems in many ways, and is out-classed by its competitors in other ways. Because Google hasn't yet trounced, well, anyone in the adoption rate of enterprise tools doesn't mean Google's doomed. Because Apple hasn't figured out a way to crack 10% consumer marketshare on their computers doesn't mean they're doomed either.

Because Microsoft has a really slick marketing tool in their chest doesn't guarantee they'll succeed either if there's anyone that can screw up a marketing push, it's Microsoft.

It's unfair to focus on two bits of bad press in the last month and say it's indicative of a culture of IP theft and ultimate doom.

[Mark cross-posted this at SiliconANGLE.]

Related posts:

1. Enterprise mobile don't expect an Enterprise level Windows Phone 7 til 2011
2. XBox Live Drives $1 Billion in Revenue (and Consumer Adoption of Private Clouds)
3. Without A Voice Microsoft Is Doomed To Mediocrity

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world's leading provider of information infrastructure solutions, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Greenplum, Inc. Greenplum is a privately-held, fast-growing provider of disruptive data warehousing technology, a key enabler of "big data" clouds and self-service analytics. Upon completion of the acquisition, Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC's Information Infrastructure business.

EMC announced today that they are acquiring Greenplum a company that makes disruptive data warehousing technology that enables "big data" clouds with self service analytics. I was sensing something was brewing from EMC but didn't expect this to happen this fast.

Competitive Moves - Smart EMC

We all remember Data Domain and the bidding war after Net App wanted to fill that hole in their product line. For those who don't remember EMC won the day with money to prevent NetApp from that product advantage. To this day EMC has a product advantage over NetApp because of the Data Domain acquisition.

Just last week I wrote a post talking about the role of big data in the enterprise when Cloudera announced that they were releasing the new enterprise "big data" platform and business model.

With Greenplum we see some similary good moves by EMC. Instead it's not a takeaway from the competition (NetApp), but a counter against the big bad Oracle who has Exadata. Exadata has been getting good reviews of late and so has Greenplum. Greenplum has success all around the ecosystem from open source to the big commercial vendors.

This is the EMC statement loaded with quotes (usually a PR gesture that means that it's a big deal) -- enjoy

Today, new forms of data -- massive amounts of it -- are emerging more quickly than ever before thanks to always-on networks, the Web, a flood of consumer content, surveillance systems, sensors and the like. In a recent report, IDC predicted that over the next 10 years the amount of digital data created annually will grow 44 fold. Companies are increasingly turning to new architectures and new tools to help make sense of this "big data" phenomenon.

Regarded by industry experts as a visionary leader, Greenplum utilizes a "shared-nothing" massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that has been designed from the ground up for analytical processing using virtualized x86 infrastructure. Greenplum is capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional database software at a dramatically lower cost. Data-driven businesses around the world, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media have adopted Greenplum for sophisticated, high-performance data analytics.

Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, said, "The data warehousing world is about to change. Greenplum's massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separate itself from the incumbent players and emerge as the leader in this industry shift toward 'big data' analytics. Greenplum's market-leading technology combined with EMC's virtualized Private Cloud infrastructure provides customers, today, with a best-of-breed solution for tomorrow's 'big-data' challenges."

Bill Cook, Greenplum CEO, said, "EMC and Greenplum bring extraordinary potential to customers at the intersection of 'big data' and sophisticated analytics. As technology and business partners, EMC and Greenplum witness daily the enthusiasm with which customers embrace how together we impact their businesses in very tangible, positive and meaningful ways. The technology speaks for itself. What energizes us most now is EMC's ability to open new doors of opportunity and accelerate delivery of our joint vision for the future."

Scott McNealy, executive advisor to Greenplum, said, "EMC's strength in the enterprise, and Greenplum's push to fully transform data warehousing and business analytics, makes for a perfect fit. Together they are brilliantly bringing together the power of cloud computing, virtualization, and social collaboration to help customers as they venture into the next phase of computing and business analytics."

Jeff Wiggin, Vice President of Enterprise Systems at T-Mobile USA, said, "Greenplum and EMC have the potential to be a powerful and transformational combination. It could present many opportunities for T-Mobile USA to deliver new innovative technology solutions that have an impact on our ability to be more efficient, effective and provide better service to our customers."

The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year. Upon close, Bill Cook will lead the new data computing product division and report to Pat Gelsinger. EMC will continue to offer Greenplum's full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC Proven reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software offering designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.

Here is Pat Gelsinger at SAP Sapphire talking about competition landscape and more

Enterprise 2.0 - Done Deal - It's Happening Folks - It's not Social Media - It's Data

The biggest and fastest growing trend we are monitoring here on SiliconANGLE is the new Enterprise 2.0 around "converged infrastructure" meets "virtualization and cloud computing" - driving all that is users, applications, and data (both big data and little data).

It's not about SaaS any more. In fact, Marc Benioff said publicly that he is completely re-engineering this entire product to meet the new forces in the market. Salesforce is basically throwing away a decade of development because it's outdated. That speaks volumes because Salesforce is a leading cloud vendor, can you imagine how out of touch most corporate enterprises are?

How CIOs Think - Levis Strauss CIO Talks About Competition With Big Vendors

Tom Peck talked with me about his view as CIO and how acquisitions changes how he evaluates vendors. He talks about support SLA etc but clearly the stack wars are affecting them to build large enterprise so that they could grow and drive value for their company.

CIO Video - Tom Peck CIO of Levis Strauss

Big Problem - Too Much New Data Too Fast

The big problem facing growing enterprises is that they are flooded with more new types of data. Application and new user data from mobile devices and applications, are changing the mandates from CEOs and CIO of medium and large enterprises. This new world of "big data" is putting pressure on the enterprise to develop both business and technical model innovation strategies like nothing seen before. Hence the traction of the public and private cloud debate.

Data = Better User Experience; Better User Experience = Monetization

As we've been saying at SiliconAngle for over a year now, data is becoming the most important thing for developers and now for advertisers especially in mobile. Data drives a better user experience and a better user experience drive monetization. Data and data analysis is at the heart of this value proposition.

Look at the search industry in say Google. Having access to data enabled Google to build a quality search product and ad network. With Google constantly iterating their data quality they were able to consistently build better algorithms to present users with a compelling search product.

In mobile and smartphones search doesn't really work like on the wbe due to the screen size and real time nature of mobility. So display advertising hold the best seat at the table with respect to the search opportunity on mobile. The display ad and applications will be the vehicle where innovation (e.g. like search in late 90s) around consumer experience will occur.

The result for consumers will look like some automated cloud service that will do most of the work and then just show up in the display of the smartphone.

My Angle: It's All About Data - Data Innovation Cycle - Example: SmartPhones Enabled This Phenomenon

With the creation of the iPhone and the iPad the industry is seeing massive change. A paradigm that I haven't seen since the disruption of the browser. I expect to see some major game changing user experiences over the next 10 years. I call it the mobile innovation cycle - enabled by Apple's iPhone a few years ago.

My analogy: What the iPhone will do for mobile today is what the original Macintosh did for computing back in 1984- change the game in terms of user expectations around the required experience. Enterprise computing is changing to look more like the iPhone and iPad market.

Below is an illustration of what is happening. Rapid innovation around applications that is spawn new data. This new data is the powerful new disruptor or Data Is The New Developer Kit of which I've written in the past many times. How developers leverage data will determine how to make their applications more successful.

How they iterate the data feedback cycle is key. I call it the Mobile Application Innovation Cycle.

UPDATE: David Vellante Industry Analyst at Wikibon Project has his angle on this deal here.

Dave Vellante says:

The market has shifted as of late moving toward integrated appliances and this move gives EMC a very important arrow in its quiver to compete with the likes of Oracle/Exadata, HP/Microsoft, IBM and others.

My quick take:

*Business analytics is becoming a mission critical discipline within organizations
*Peformance is critical
*The workload (BI/Data Warehousing) is a memory, CPU and disk hog
*Practitioners indicate performance constraints are a huge gate to achieving desired business value
*The holy grail of the business is real time analytics

Bottom line: EMC recognizes the importance of the BI/analytics/data warehouse space and is making moves to guarantee that its storage doesn't get squeezed out of the picture.

Users will want to see:
*Optimized sytems
*Smokin' fast performance
*Reference architectures (or what EMC calls Proven Solutions)
*Scale
*Federation capabilities; not just big honking systems.

Good move by EMC even if it did pay a premium. The value of this asset will only go up in my view.

Big Data Clouds Are Here EMC Acquires Greenplum A Move To Counter Oracle is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

3 Comments

furrier says: July 6, 2010 3:08 pm Cloud acqusition deal EMC buys greenplum my angle here http://bit.ly/ae10kB big deal counters oracles exadata This comment was originally posted on Twitter Reply

alexishamilton says: July 6, 2010 3:10 pm RT @furrier: Cloud acqusition deal EMC buys greenplum my angle here http://bit.ly/ae10kB big deal counters oracles exadata This comment was originally posted on Twitter Reply

furrier says: July 6, 2010 3:10 pm RT @siliconangle SiliconANGLE Blog Big Data Clouds Are Here EMC Acquires Greenplum Move Coun.. http://bit.ly/bF3f2L This comment was originally posted on Twitter Reply

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