• T Shirt Friday #41 – Pervasive

     

    ns-pervasive-t Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with  a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

    If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

    At the recent NetSuite SuiteCloud event I met up with Adaptive Planning, a pretty cool vendor doing a nice budgeting service that is well integrated with NetSuite – I’ll review their offering sometime soon but in the meantime I’ll get the important stuff out of the way and talk about their T shirts.ns-pervasive-t-back

    I went into this review pretty hopeful – until I turned the shirt over and looked at the back! The understated an elegant front with two simple logos makes way to a diagram worthy of it’s own Hairball Award

    Hot

    • It’s white – and I’m a sucker for white shirts…
    • I quite like both the NetSuite and the pervasive logos

    Not

    • The logo on the back… I mean really!

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  • Riptano, Cloudera For Cassandra

     

    Riptano , a new company launched recently can be considered Cloudera of Cassandra project. This company was started by two ex-Rackspace employees (disclaimer: Rackspace’s Email Division is a client of Diversity Analysis) to provide support services for Cassandra much like how Cloudera was started to offer support services for Apache Hadoop. When I wrote about Cloudera just before its launch, I compared it to Redhat

    Cloudera is planning to do for Cloud Computing what Redhat did for Linux more than a decade back. Redhat took the Open Source Linux operating system, repackaged it and offered it along with paid technical support. They were essentially making money out of a free software (as in beer) by using what was a new and innovative business model at that time. Enterprises were skeptical about Linux till then and Redhat’s model helped in a faster adoption of Linux by the enterprises. Enterprise adoption of Cloud Computing is in the same situation where Linux was more than a decade ago.

    In fact, Riptano takes a similar approach to Cloudera, catering to the needs of businesses who are willing to pay for support from people who know the nuts and bolts of the open source software. Similar to Cloudera, Riptano also plans to offer some proprietary components for Cassandra.

    Cassandra is under Apache now with the name Apache Cassandra project. Cassandra was originally developed by Facebook following the distributed design of Amazon’s Dynamo and a data model similar to Google’s Bigtable. In 2008, Facebook open sourced the software and it is currently under Apache Software Foundation. Off late, Rackspace has become an enthusiastic supporter of Cassandra project and had three of the most active committers of the project on its payroll. Some of the well known users of Cassandra include Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Rackspace, Cloudkick, Cisco, SimpleGeo, Ooyala, OpenX, and many others.

    The minds behind Riptano are the two former Rackers and active Cassandra committers, Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil. They founded the company with support from Rackspace. Cassandra is very durable and the interest among enterprises are due to its scalability, support for multiple datacenters and hadoop analytics.

    The starting of Riptano doesn’t mean forking of Cassandra and according to the founders, they see no need for forking because the mainline development team is very active and there is no need for a third party to fork it for additional development. However, they might offer a custom distribution of Cassandra like what Cloudera has done with Hadoop. They also have plans to offer some proprietary tools that could extend the functionalities of Cassandra.

    According to Charles Babcock of Information Week, Riptano will offer training and technical support at three levels for Cassandra.

    Riptano will offer training in Cassandra, consulting and technical support, said Pfeil, summing up the new company’s business plan. Support will come in Bronze at $1,000 a year per node, Silver at $2,000 a year per node or Gold at $4,000 a year per node. Cassandra typically runs on a server cluster and Cassandra clusters can be expanded to an unlimited number of nodes, according to current users.

    The difference between bronze and gold is a 48-hour response time versus a four-hour response.

    This is a good strategy from their point of view. Let us see how they are received in the market and I will keep a tab on the company and report back after sometime.

    Update: Apologies for spelling the name wrong. I have corrected it. 

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  • On Design at Apple

     

    Whether you love or hate the way they do business, there are not many people who would argue that Apple creates product of deep thought and beauty. In this video, Apple chief designer Jonathan Ive, he who is credited with ideating every Apple device since the first iMac, talks about purposeful design in particular in relation to the unibody components of the MacBook Pro.

    It’s interesting to compare that video to an archive one from a few years ago,

    An interesting part for me comes a couple of minutes from the end when Ive declines to comment on the iPod battery issues that surfaced a few years ago – something of an insight into the control that everyone, even Ive himself, are under at Apple HQ.

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  • Video: Can Cloud And On Premise Storage Co-Exist

     
    From time to time, we showcase videos showing different vendor’s perspectives on cloud computing. As a part of this tradition, today we offer the perspective of i365 , a Seagate Company. If the embedded video is not available for you, use this link.

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  • ClearBooks Ups the Ante

     

    Interesting to read that ClearBooks , the UK based privately held online accounting application, has just secured a new financing deal for an undisclosed sum. Their press release announcing the deal is a marketing message – calling out Sage and Intuit, and specifically pitching itself as a “more UK focused service than online international competitors Xero Limited.”

    No mention of the other UK players like Free Agent Central or KashFlow.

    Further spin comes in the following:

    Clear Books is a rapidly growing company with customer numbers increasing more than 20% per month. It is quickly establishing itself as a leader in the growing SaaS online accounting software market in the UK. Managing Director, Tim Fouracre, said, “Our cash flows continue to reflect impressive growth month on month, but this additional financing will help us accelerate our expansion plans. One of our key objectives is to add depth to our development team to ensure we continue to develop the very best application. Our aim is to make both maintaining company accounts and doing the bookkeeping as easy as possible for small businesses. We are already making great progress on this front with our online VAT filing direct to HMRC and our new payroll module”.

    As I said, with no mention of the amount raised this is little more than a marketing release – that said it’s interesting to see ClearBooks so obviously throw some punches Xero’s way. Interesting also given the recent prediction of QuickBooks’ return to the UK

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  • Red Hat Takes Another Step Towards Cloud Computing

     
    Picture Source: ArstechnicaRedhat, the poster child of open source and maker of most popular Linux distribution in the enterprise market, took another step into the cloudy future. Redhat recently released version 5.5 of their popular Enterprise Linux distribution. They followed it up with an announcement focused mainly on the hybrid nature of the enterprise cloud adoption in the immediate future.
    According to the announcement, Redhat announced what they call as Red Hat Cloud Access which allows their enterprise customers to use their existing subscriptions on Amazon Web Services, EC2 to be more specific. With this, Amazon Web Services becomes first Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider. With Red Hat Cloud Access, eligible Redhat customers can move their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions between traditional on-premise servers and Amazon Web Services. With this feature, customers can select appropriate computing resources for their needs, without the need for new business or support models. It is important to note that not all customers can move their licenses to AWS but those enterprise customers with at least 25 subscriptions are the only ones allowed to move back and forth. Check their website for further eligibility requirements.
    Red Hat is also introducing new features designed to continue allowing enterprises to leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services:
    • The latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be available on Amazon EC2 at the same time as the release for traditional on-premise deployments, in an effort to provide consistency between on and off-premise usage. This includes the features in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5.
    • Standardized, secure 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, which include cloud-specific content like creating images from a specific manifest and certificates, are secured using SELinux and firewall protections.
    • Continuous delivery of updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux within Amazon Web Services, offering delivery of security errata and feature enhancements.
    Well, this is long expected from Redhat with Canonical making it damn simple for enterprises to use cloud computing. Unlike Redhat, Canonical doesn’t charge a subscription for their distribution and, rather, they charge for the support. Such a business model allows Canonical customers (well, there aren’t many like Redhat on the enterprise side) to easily tap into Amazon Web Services without worrying about the subscription terms. Plus, Canonical has taken a major leap into cloud computing by tightly integrating Eucalyptus into their Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud edition. The rave reviews about UEC has put enormous pressure on Redhat to do something as more and more enterprises are warming up to cloud computing, both public and private. This easing of subscription terms is an important step in ensuring that enterprises have the necessary flexibility to move from on-premise to cloud. There is a long way to go before Redhat becomes an important player in the cloud market. We will have to wait and see how it shapes up.
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  • Adaptive Planning for Budgeting

     

    At the recent SuiteCloud conference (see disclosure) I met with AdaptivePlanning and had a look at their application. AdaptivePlanning was founded in 2003 by a CFO who had previously been involved with many large businesses. Having built a number…

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  • PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: VMForce – A Marriage Of Convenience

     

    This is a second post in my series titled “PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services“. I was planning to write about Heroku but since the VMForce news was a good fit for the topic, I am pushing the…

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  • Differentiating in a Commoditized World: On Syncplicity and Expanz

     

    At the Cloud Connect event in San Jose, Allister Croll gave an excellent presentation, actually as an aside, Croll ran close to half of the Cloud Connect sessions and really did a sterling job of managing the conference. Anyway…

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  • Appirio Guest Post

     

    Over on the Appirio blog they’re running a series getting cloud perspectives from a bunch of different industry players. Appirio approached me with a bunch of questions to answer, I thought I’d repost those questions (and my answers) here.…

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