• Azure Targets Facebook Developers

    March 23, 2010

    Design
     
    All is Azure

    Image by sbisson via Flickr

    When Microsoft announced the commercial availability of Windows Azure during last year’s PDC, some of the companies they showcased were more of Web 2.0-ish than any enterprise scale. Even though companies from Web 2.0 and beyond were not using Microsoft technologies, it is a huge market for Microsoft to ignore. The huge success of Facebook applications made this market segment very important from Microsoft’s perspective.

    In fact, Windows Azure can be very handy for such developers who want a seamless way to scale up and down based on demand, without getting their hands dirty on the nuts and bolts of infrastructure.Even though I don’t like the lock-in aspect of Azure cloud, I like the way it is set up to be developer friendly. Developers who code for social networking platforms are either individuals or small shops with a handful of people. They are not prepared for the sudden, unimaginable success that could come in through these social networking sites. Cloud Computing, in general, and Platforms like Azure and Google App Engine, in particular, can come handy for these developers.

    Recently, Microsoft announced that they have partnered with Thuzi, the consultancy firm specializing on social media platforms, to offer a toolkit for running Facebook apps on Windows Azure. Named Facebook Azure Toolkit, this open source tool allows developers to get started easily and deploy Facebook applications on top of Windows Azure Cloud. This will help them focus on the development of the app without worrying about any viral impact of the Facebook platform.

    This starter kit consists of

    • Facebook Developers Toolkit
    • Ninject 2.0 for Dependency Injection
    • Asp.Net MVC 2
    • Windows Azure Software Development Kit (February 2010)
    • AutoMapper
    • Azure Toolkit – Simplified library for accessing Message Queues, Table Storage and Sql Server
    • Automated build scripts for one-click deployment from TFS 2010 to Azure

    With this toolkit, the developers can either deploy directly on Azure cloud or run locally on their computers. The project can be used with Visual Studio 2010 RC and makes Facebook app deployment only a click away. Even though there are not many developers in this space building their apps on top of Microsoft technologies, this opens up another opportunity for developers. Since free markets is all about having choice, I think this is good for developer community.

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  • Eucalyptus Systems Changes CEO – What’s Next?

    March 23, 2010

    Analysis
     
    Mårten Mickos

    Image via Wikipedia

    On Friday, Eucalyptus Systems, the open source software powering the private clouds in the enterprises, announced that the former CEO of MySQL AB, Mårten Mickos, has taken over as CEO of Eucalyptus Systems replacing Woody Rollins who will now be their CFO. This has taken the entire industry by surprise. I am also equally surprised because I just spoke with the Eucalyptus team including Mr. Rollins on wednesday and I got no clue about their impending move. In this post, I will briefly talk about Eucalyptus Systems and what this move means to them.

    Eucalyptus started off as an NSF-funded academic research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, developed by a team of researchers headed by Dr. Rich Wolski. They started Virtual Grid Application Development Software Project to develop a programming language and runtime system techniques for large-scale computational grid applications. At the same time, Amazon EC2 was gaining traction and they wanted to see how AWS can be tapped for their project. In order to do this, they developed Eucalyptus software to act as a local cloud platform. Essentially, they developed a platform that we call in today’s terminology as Private Clouds. They built their platform on top of unmodified open source components so that they can incorporate any future upgrades without any hassle and, also, run on top of any existing Linux distributions. From the beginning itself, they made a conscious decision to develop a modular platform so that it can be integrated into many different virtualization environments. Even though they supported only Xen (and, hence, the support for AWS) in the beginning, this decision to have a modular architecture is allowing them to support other virtualization platforms like KVM, VMWare, etc.. When I asked them about the support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V, they told me that they are looking into ways to integrate with Microsoft’s hypervisor.

    From its academic roots, Eucalyptus Project morphed into a commercial entity with the name Eucalyptus Systems, supported by a $5.5 million Series A funding from Benchmark Capital. Once it became a commercial entity, they quickly expanded to add support for third party management tools like Rightscale, CohesiveFT, rPath, Ylastic, etc.. They also partnered with Canonical to support Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. In Sept. 2009, they launched their first commercial offering, Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition, that offered support for VMware’s vSphere, ESX and ESXi. With this move, Eucalyptus announced their intention to take on the enterprise market. They expanded their offerings with partnerships with newScale and Terracota. The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud 9.10 accelerated the adoption of Eucalyptus with a tighter integration which made the installation of Eucalyptus cloud a breeze.

    The Eucalyptus strategy is simple. They will offer their core product for free and monetize with proprietary addons and support. Their addons with open source platforms will continue to be free but any addon/adapter with proprietary technologies is going to cost money to the users. It is a neat way to monetize an open source software and they are finding an enthusiastic response to this strategy. I did prod them to give out some numbers on the enterprise customers they have but they refused to disclose anything. However, they told me that they are very optimistic and they are in a strong position to close the sale with many enterprise customers.

    Having seen the evolution of Eucalyptus Systems, let us take a look at the impact of the announcement of their new CEO. In my opinion, it is a smart move considering the role played by Mickos with MySQL. First and foremost, Mickos showed the world how an open source company can successfully monetize even while giving away the software for free. He was part of the MySQL team that helped grow the revenues from 14 Million in 2004 to an estimated 65 Million in 2008. In the business world, where the CEO’s words are filtered through their PR, he was brave enough to accept that MySQL gets one paying customer for every 1000 downloads. He was pretty clear about where he wants MySQL to go and the constraints it faces as an open source company. This will come very handy as he tries to steer Eucalyptus in a cloud world dominated by proprietary vendors.

    MySQL started off as a darling to web developers and continuously tried to reposition itself as an enterprise player in a market dominated by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Mickos played a very important role in that repositioning and helped MySQL convince enterprise to take them seriously. In fact, strong database players like Oracle and IBM saw this smaller open source vendor as a long term threat to their business. Mickos helped MySQL navigate this competitive marketplace and this experience will come handy as he helps Eucalyptus Systems navigate a competitive marketplace dominated by some strong players.

    Sun Microsystems surprised many pundits with its 1 Billion acquisition of MySQL. Even though it was a big surprise to many at that time, we cannot overlook the role played by Mickos that resulted in the high value deal. As he tried to thrust MySQL into the enterprise, Oracle tried to grab MySQL into its fold but Mickos pooh pooh-ed the attempt by Oracle and pushed MySQL ahead. Eventually, his team convinced Sun Microsystems to play a fortune to acquire them. In fact, many pundits are already wondering why Eucalyptus Systems is not acquired by one of those bigger players. I see the appointment of Mickos as CEO to be the first step towards such an endgame. This man knows how to do it. His experience in taking a small open source company across a competitive marketplace resulting in a $1 Billion paycheck will go a long way in taking Eucalyptus Systems towards a big acquisition. Plus, Mickos is not new to the cloud marketplace and he must be having a fairly good idea of the marketplace since joining Rightscale’s board as one of the directors. I am sure Benchmark Capital took all these into consideration before putting him on the driver’s seat at Eucalyptus Systems.

    The next few years will be crucial for Mickos as well as Eucalyptus Systems. They need to show the world that they can monetize their product successfully by establishing a larger footprint. Then they need to use all the available skills, including that of Mickos, to find a buyer who can give them a fat paycheck. In my opinion, the process has already started and we have to wait for the endgame.

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  • Personal and Business Finance – Blurring the Lines

    March 22, 2010

    Product reviews, Small business
     

    I posted a year or so ago that:

    the distinction between personal and business finance is pretty blurred

    It was a call for micro and small business accounting vendors to offer a personal finance service in the acknowledgement that most micro businesses have an increasingly blurred line between personal and business expenses. As I said at the time:

    Almost all micro businesses I know use a personal credit card for business expenses – sure that can be solved via expense claims but that’s not really in keeping with the actuality. Similarly most micro businesses that require funding achieve it by using their personal equity to guarantee debt – again removing personal finances from this business finance model ignores this fact.

    I was pleased to see then the other day that Xero’s (see disclosure) new personal finance offering really addresses this issue in the most logical way – giving users the ability to post business expenses incurred on a personal bank account through to the business.

    It works like this:

    As a personal finance user, you categorize a transaction as a business expense and then you’re given the option to send a receipt to whichever particular organization it may relate to (yup – believe it or not people are involved in multiple businesses):

    personalexpenses_1 

    You’re then able to choose the organization the invoice relates to and include some information in the description field:

    personalexpenses_2 

    You hit Send Expense Claim and now a draft receipt will be in your business organization:

    personalexpenses_3

    Your transaction will also update inside Xero Personal to show that your claim has been sent:

    personalexpenses_4

    So simple but so enabling – it’s little things like this that can save lots of time and effort for SMBs. Of course it would be even better if one could split expenses – ie 30% of my power bill become a business expense. So many use cases, so little time….

    Friendly contacts have ensured that I’m part of the beta program – I’ll be taking it through its paces and, once it’s ready for roll out, I’ll post a detail review.

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  • T Shirt Friday #35 – Tweet4YourTee #2

    March 19, 2010

    Just for fun
     

    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.

    ufm ufollowme 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).

    I wrote about Tweet4Yourtee recently and reviewed another of their shirts. Here we have version two, emblazoned with the same Twitter handle (of course). You too can have a fully customized self-aggrandizing t-shirt – just visit their site, pull out your credit card and it’ll be in the mail. So.. what’s to like (and not)?

    Hot

    • White T shirts are good
    • Saves people being embarrassed asking who I am
    • 100% Cotton (why would you do anything else?)
    • My hometown heros – Wellington to the World!
    • Nice use of the Twitter API on their website

    Not

    • Made in Bangladesh – need I say more?
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  • MYOB Goes SaaS…. Again

    March 18, 2010

    Product reviews, Small business
     

    I wrote almost a couple of years ago now about MYOB’s (see disclosure statement) first foray into the world of SaaS. I wasn’t overly impressed, saying at the time that:

    MYOB has the experience, the money and the clout to bring a product to market with the features that users need. Under this measure MYOB has failed, if it’s true that this has been a five year project, BBO is a failure.

    Since then lots has happened – MYOB has been sold to a private equity firm. The product head for BBO, Stuart Bale was poached by (and subsequently let go from) Xero and meanwhile BBO has pretty much stood derelict and orphaned.

    Come April MYOB are going to it again and will be releasing their MYOB Live Accounts product. The Sydney Morning Herald have trumpeted about the move but, as is often the way with traditional media, haven’t understood some of the subtleties that give a story context. They also quote MYOB’s CTO saying that the product is built on Microsoft Azure however I have it from a source within MYOB that this is not in fact the case.

    So what can we expect form this product? An MYOB reseller newsletter that came across my desk this week gave some minor details – pricing around NZD35, a pared down offering focused on sole traders and the like and leveraging heavily the automatic bank feeds that are Xero’s main differentiator.

    I’d expect to see, similar to the previous MYOB SaaS product, an offering that serves the invoicing and expenses parts of the business with little on the “richer” parts of the desktop offering (inventory, financial reporting etc). I’d also expect MYOB to leverage the excellent relationships it has with banks in Australia and New Zealand in order to cut a blow into Xero’s self-proclaimed position as “thought-leader” in this particular space.

    I can’t imagine it having any real impact on that other Australasian SaaS vendor Saasu – of the three, the Saasu product is the most fully featured and I’d imagine MYOB’s product would come in well below this in terms of functionality.

    Watch this space for a more detailed review once I’ve seen the product.

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  • HubCast – Ponoko for Printing ;-)

    March 17, 2010

    Design
     

    Coming from a manufacturing background, and having an understanding of the pressures and imperatives facing manufacturing, I’ve long been excited by Ponoko’s attempts (more on ‘em here) to reinvent manufacturing. The other day I received a note from HubCast who’s seeking to do something similar for printing. According to their PR. HubCast:

    changes the way premium-quality print is bought, sold and delivered. HubCast completely automates printing with a simple cloud application that delivers premium print production, competitive pricing, global reach, and the speed of next-day delivery around the world.

    Essentially HubCast is both cloud content storage and distributed outputting of that content. The idea is that:

    users can upload and maintain an unlimited number of files to a library on the cloud…. File verification in HubCast Professional ensures that each file uploaded to the library is press-ready, guaranteeing easy and confident reordering…[and enables] printing with a simple cloud application that delivers print production, competitive pricing, global reach, and the speed of next-day delivery around the world

    Sounds good huh? In essence it’s cloud storage meeting the ability to output material anywhere in the world and HubCast have coined the term “cloud printing” to describe what their service is. From his introductory blog post, founder Toby LaVigne says:

    Cloud Printing. What?! Is Guttenberg printing from above?… Not exactly.

    Imagine this; you go online to your cloud printing account(think Amazon or Expedia). And you upload a high resolution pdf file, select a quantity, choose your stock and pick a delivery destination and hit “submit”.

    You just printed in the cloud, and you did it in seconds, on your time, from anywhere, to anywhere with the click of a mouse.

    Cloud computing is bringing to print what it has already brought to services like travel, banking and enterprise applications.

    • Lower overall costs
    • Smaller environmental impact (with less paper waste)
    • Substantial time savings

    The HubCast service sounds good, and the site looks nice – it is however a little unfortunate that it lacks a fair amount of what can only be seen as the basic information. The FAQ page for pricing for example is substantial but nowhere does it actually indicate the pricing to output a document.

    I spoke with CEO Toby LaVigne with a real world example of needing to output some material. My example (somewhat far fetched I’ll agree) saw me needing to print a document from here in New Zealand and get copies to clients in Mozambique, Iraq, Cayman Islands, Haiti and Antarctica, his answer was reasonable:

    …we focus on delivering our service in the top 100 GDP markets worldwide.  Not a stroke of brilliance on our part, it’s simply where most of the need and business is.  Our perspective is driven by HubCast service delivery.  We want to be able to support business in as much of the world as possible in as short an amount of time as possible.  Strictly speaking, the number of countries we print in is less relevant than the number of countries we can deliver to reliably – next day, 5-day, etc. Your specific examples are unique.  Antarctica and Iraq we are taking a pass on for now.  Mozambique, Haiti, and the Caymans are next-day service.  And, of course you can order from NZ

    Which is pretty good – to be honest I’ll accept that Antarctica and Iraq are pretty much “edge cases” but the ability to output from my location and have copies in three locations as different as Mozambique, the Caymans and Haiti the next day is pretty powerful.

     

     

       

     

     

     

     

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  • Cloud Connect – Cloud Is In The Air

    March 17, 2010

    Analysis
     
    Image Credit: Salesforce.comCloud Connect is in full scale today. Yesterday, there was the Cloud Business Summit where top industry executives spoke about the impact of Cloud Computing on today’s business. I had a chance to talk to many leaders in the industry and I could feel the cloud in the air. People are pretty excited about how cloud computing is going to change the entire business landscape in the coming decade. The sessions ranged from discussions about which business models are winning to exploring different challenges and opportunities in the enterprise market to the investment scene and go to market strategies.
    I had a chance to speak to Mr. Jason Green of Emergence Capital Partners yesterday. Emergence Capital were an early investor in Salesforce.com and their portfolio includes such big names like Successfactors, Echosign, Yammer, etc..  He sounded very positive about the state of the clouds. He told me that they exclusively support cloud vendors, especially on the applications side. He was telling me that he sees a big increase in enterprise adoption and expects it to stay that way in the coming years. 
    Another interesting topic in our discussions was about SaaS players using other cloud based services (platform and infrastructure) for their needs. I had a twitter discussion long back on the same topic. We see SaaS and Web 2.0 startups using IaaS and PaaS for their infrastructure needs early on and move to their own datacenters as they grow big. I am really keen to hear from SaaS companies on why we see such a trend while IaaS and PaaS players are trying to get enterprises move into the cloud. It is also interesting because on one hand, they want customers to trust them and put their data on their services but, on the other hand, they don’t think they can rely on IaaS or PaaS players to deliver their apps. Ideally, I would like to see SaaS providers use the -aaS’ all the way down to the infrastructure part of the stack.
    In short, I get a feeling that Cloud Computing has finally taken off. In spite of some hyping on the vendor side and scare tactics on the side of the traditional software vendors, it has finally reached mainstream. I spoke with a couple of ISVs and both of them told me that they were at the conference because they want to move their apps to clouds. Nope, they didn’t talk about cloud washing, they want to re-architect their applications so that they can offer them “as a service”. If anything this conference has highlighted, it is the fact that the cloud has arrived.
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  • StrataScale Unveils New Cloud and Hybrid Solutions

    March 17, 2010

    Design
     

    Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Automated Managed Hosting, and Hybrid Hosting Services to be Available 24/7 through Easy-to-use Storefront

    The launches are coming thick and fast at Cloud Connect here in Santa Clara. StrataScale is right now announcing the addition of three new cloud offerings. In addition to its physical Automated Managed Hosting service, StrataScale has developed  their own public and private virtualized clouds. The company also unveiled a Hybrid Hosting solution that allows customers to integrate physical managed servers and virtualized cloud servers on-the-fly in the same secure network and optionally cross connected with existing co-location infrastructure. StrataScale’s cloud offerings live on servers housed in parent company RagingWire 220,000 square foot data center offering 99.999% availability and N+2 redundancy.

    StrataScale Vice President of Marketing, Dave Geada, gave me a demo of their offering and more importantly their new self-service storefront. I am of the belief that cloud services are becoming more and more commoditized – there are two ways to differentiate – one is by price while the other is by value add. The likes of Microsoft and Amazon will always be able to beat the smaller players on price, so companies like StrataScale need to compete on service.

    In their case, StrataScale are making life easy for customers to provision – they’ve got a nice self-service storefront but at the same provide good one-on-one customer support. On the storefront customers can automatically scale up or down and add new computers and IT components without speaking to a sales representative. All systems are automated on the storefront, including physical managed servers, public virtual servers and private virtual servers

    As for the technical details both public and private Cloud offerings deliver hypervisor based virtual machine instances running CentOS, Red Hat Linux, or Microsoft Windows. Hybrid Cloud customers can run Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Automated Managed Hosting servers all on the same network, managed through the StrataScale portal. The new offerings will be available after April 1 – pricing details below.

    StrataScale-Cloud-Pricing

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  • Why Google Apps Marketplace Could Become A True and Vibrant Marketplace?

    March 16, 2010

    Analysis
     

    When Google launched the Google Apps Marketplace, I was pretty excited about the prospects of this marketplace. While Ben wrote about how it will positively impact the SMB segment, I was getting ecstatic about its potential on the enterprise side. 

    I think few years from now, when we look back in this space, we may even conclude that this is a pivotal moment that catapulted Google into a strong player in the enterprise market. This has a potential to not only lift the prospects of Google on the enterprise side, this move will also strengthen the future of SaaS in a big way.

    In my opinion, Google not only enabled somewhat bigger players to sell in their marketplace, they also provided a way for developers and other smaller service providers to play in the marketplace. For example, individuals can offer services like setting up Google Apps for $30. All they have to do is to guide the customer to signup for Google Apps, setup the DNS records and activate different services in Google Apps. Any marketplace that opens up many opportunities for small and big players alike is a true marketplace and it has the potential to develop into a vibrant ecosystem.
    Somewhere in the hype about the marketplace, another interesting news got lost in the noise. Google has opened up the Google Apps script gallery to developers and users so that they can publish their scripts in the gallery for others to consume. 
    Today, we are excited to make Google Apps Script available to everyone. Some of you may already be familiar with Google Apps Script within Google Apps, but in case you are new to it, Google Apps Script provides a powerful and flexible scripting environment that lets you automate actions across your spreadsheets, sites, calendars, and many other services.
    This is pretty neat. This not only allows experienced developers to add value to Google services, it also opens up opportunity for relatively novice developers to showcase their talent by adding features on top of Google services with their own scripts. All these make Google very attractive for developers and has a potential to ensure a vibrant ecosystem around their services. What do you think?
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  • Appistry Introduces CloudIQ Storage for Data-Centric Applications

    March 16, 2010

    Design
     

    It’s Cloud Connect week – which means that every Cloud vendor under the sun is launching new products or services. Not wanting to be left out, Appistry today announced the availability for beta testing of Appistry CloudIQ Storage. CloudIQ Storage is a play for data intensive applications in the cloud – beta clients are running highly sensitive, big data applications for government security and intelligence, using a combination of private and hybrid cloud setups.

    CloudIQ Storage may be used as a stand-alone cloud storage system or in conjunction with Appistry CloudIQ Engine to enable what Appistry is calling Computational Storage. Computational storage unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and intelligently locating application processing on the machines containing the relevant data. As a result, computational storage allows for the delivery of data-intensive applications more cheaply than otherwise.

    Some relevant details:

    • Special CloudIQ Storage “editions” will address the unique storage requirements of particular communities.
    • The first of these, Hadoop Edition, offers plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), part of the popular Apache Hadoop open source framework.
    • The HDFS architecture is built around a single metadata repository, called the NameNode. Because the NameNode is not easily clustered, it represents a single point of failure and a bottleneck for the entire system. CloudIQ Storage has no single point of failure and no centralized bottleneck, making it more suitable for mission-critical deployment.
    • Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition ships with HDFS drivers, enabling it to be easily deployed in place of HDFS for applications where reliability and throughput are key considerations.

    It’s an interesting play that brings file-based storage down a few notches in the cost rankings while overcoming data access issues by co-locating processing and data storage. Finally it brings a smart approach to application workloads, moving them closer to the data on which they work. CEO of Appistry, Kevin Haar talks it up saying:

    Storage is an integral component of today’s data-centric applications. It’s no surprise then that traditional approaches to storage are often to blame for the high cost and inferior performance of many a mission-critical application… With Appistry CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance.

     

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