Cloud Power IT Insights

Customers Reap Benefits from Comprehensive Cloud Approach

2011-08-29T12:22:53Z

Take a look at Brad Anderson’s, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, perspective on Microsoft’s
cloud computing strategy, our private cloud solutions and the economics of
those solutions versus VMware.

Click here to read more.

Changing the Conversation - Server Virtualization is the Overture, Not the Finale

2011-07-05T15:45:00Z

I wanted to provide a guest blog post from Brad Anderson, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, in which he share’s the news that Gartner has named Microsoft a leader in their 2011 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure*. In his post, Brad covers topics such as private cloud computing and the role that virtualization plays in it, as well as touching on public cloud solutions.

Please check out Brad’s entire post below and you can visit the following links for more information on Microsoft’s private cloud or Windows Azure public cloud offerings. Thanks and let me know if you have any questions or comments. Larry

Gartner just published the 2011 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure* and I’m very happy to report that Microsoft is listed among the leaders. Coming on the heels of InfoWorld’s Virtualization Shootout and a Microsoft-commissioned lab test by Enterprise Strategy Group, the Magic Quadrant rounds out a trifecta of independent recognition for Windows Server Hyper-V’s readiness in the enterprise. Added to this, a growing number of customers like Target and Lionbridge are running their businesses on Microsoft’s virtualization technologies.

What does this mean for you and your business? For one thing, it means the conversation about virtualization has changed for good. Now you can base your decision on value and which partner has the most compelling vision and strategy for the next logical step—private cloud computing. Private clouds provide elasticity, shared hardware, usage-based self-service—plus unique security, control and customization on IT resources dedicated to a single organization.

Throughout our industry, virtualization has become widely accepted as a means to a bigger end. In order to get the full advantage of cloud-computing you need to have world-class management capabilities that deeply understand the virtualized infrastructure—but more importantly have an in-depth understanding of the applications that are running virtualized. Microsoft’s management solutions provide that insight. System Center 2012 will System Center 2012 will offer the simplest solution to build private clouds at lowest price, using the infrastructure you are already familiar with and integrating seamlessly across the common virtualization platforms. “Concero,” a new capability in System Center 2012, empowers the consumers of cloud-based applications to deploy and manage those apps on private and public cloud infrastructures, helping IT managers deliver greater flexibility and agility to their business teams.

But customers don’t have to wait for System Center 2012 to get started with private cloud. Microsoft and its partners—including Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC—already offer a range of private cloud solutions (custom, pre-configured, or hosted) built on top of Windows Server Hyper-V and System Center 2010. These solutions pool hardware, storage, and compute resources so you can deploy applications themselves, quickly and easily. With Microsoft’s private cloud solutions, IT can empower their business groups to deploy applications and ensure those applications perform reliably.

And our private cloud solution is the only one in the industry that builds a bridge between your existing investments—in both infrastructure and skills—and the public cloud. For many large enterprises, the best solution will be to adopt both public and private clouds, often using them in tandem as a “hybrid cloud.” Microsoft customers will be able to do this seamlessly with a common set of familiar tools—including development, management and identity solutions—that span the entire spectrum, allowing IT to manage their public and private clouds from a single pane of glass and to adapt the mix easily to changing business needs.

If IT’s primary role is to deliver applications that move the business forward, then an application-centric approach will help you stay focused on what drives business value. It’s this unique combination—private and public clouds built and managed with one set of tools—that enables Microsoft’s customers to focus on the applications rather than the underlying technology. As business needs evolve over time, you maintain control and flexibility over how you create, consume, deploy and manage applications in the cloud. With Microsoft’s comprehensive approach your applications drive the resources, not the other way around.

Thanks for your time. Brad

*The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Microsoft Launches Office 365 Around the World

2011-06-28T16:47:22Z

Today Microsoft launched our newest cloud service, Office 365, which delivers Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online together in a predictable monthly subscription. You can find full details on the announcement here and also more information on customers and partners on the Office 365 web site here.

The set of offerings provides businesses with powerful cloud-based communication and collaboration tools, which are already helping boost productivity while reducing IT costs.

As part of the announcement a variety of partners supporting the release, as well as information on customers who have tried and are using Office 365 were included. For example, over 20 service providers around the globe also shared plans to bring Office 365 to their customers this year as part of their service offerings for small and midsize businesses. Customer stories are linked to from the announcement as well.

For full details on the announcement and information on Office 365 please visit the links above. If you’d like more information on Microsoft’s cloud offerings for businesses you can also check out the Cloud Power site here.

Thanks and if you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to get back to you.

Have a great day - Larry

Microsoft Server and Tools Division President, Satya Nadella on Cloud Computing at GigaOM

2011-06-21T17:22:58Z

Just wanted to give the quick heads up that Satya Nadella, the president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, will be speaking on Wednesday around 11:10 a.m. PST at the GigaOm Structure 2011 event this week in San Francisco. He’ll be participating in a Q&A fireside chat moderated by Eric Savitz, the local Bureau Chief at Forbes. The event will be streamed live at this link.

Topics covered will include cloud adoption trends, Microsoft’s work in delivering the technology to help customers take advantage of those trends, and a discussion touching on our vision for the future of commercial cloud computing.

If you’d like to hear directly from Satya on what Microsoft is working on in the commercial cloud computing space check the event out live Wednesday around 11:10 a.m. PST here. If you’re interested in finding more information on what Microsoft currently has to offer, check out the Cloud Power site as well.

Thanks for your time - Larry

Thought Leaders in the Cloud: Talking with Jason Bloomberg of ZapThink

2011-06-15T20:58:39Z

Jason Bloomberg is managing partner and senior analyst at the enterprise architecture advisory firm ZapThink LLC. He is a thought leader in the areas of enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture, and he helps organizations around the world better leverage their IT resources to meet changing business needs.

He is a frequent speaker, prolific writer, and pundit. His book, Service Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2006, coauthored with Ron Schmelzer), is widely recognized as the leading business book on service orientation.

In this interview, we discuss:

- Fault tolerance and cloud brokering
- Architecting for failureMaking the cloud part of your enterprise architecture
- The shift from forecasting demand to forecasting usage costs
- Public versus private cloud
- Different models for multi-tenancy

Robert Duffner: Could you please take a minute to introduce yourself?

Jason Bloomberg: I am managing partner with ZapThink. We are an industry advisory firm focused on service-oriented architecture, enterprise architecture, and broadly speaking, helping organizations be more agile. We take an architectural approach to dealing with the issues large organizations face in leveraging heterogeneous IT environments.

Robert: You recently wrote, “Without cloud brokering, managing a hybrid cloud may be more trouble than it’s worth.” Can you expand on that a little?

Jason: Interestingly enough, I wrote that article just a few days before the most recent Amazon cloud issue, where several different parts of the Amazon cloud infrastructure went down. A lot of companies were caught unaware by that and had cloud-based applications that went down as a result, since they were under the common perception that the cloud is inherently fault tolerant, so by extension, Amazon’s infrastructure is inherently fault tolerant.

There are multiple availability zones. We are doing all this great stuff in the cloud and it’s still going down. In fact, companies that were betting on the Amazon cloud had actually violated one of the core principles of compute systems, which is no less true of the cloud than anywhere else: you need to avoid single points of failure.

By putting all of their eggs into a single cloud basket, those companies actually made the Amazon cloud itself a single point of failure. That’s where cloud brokering comes in. If you are using the public cloud, you need to have multiple public cloud providers and broker across them. That requirement obviously raises the bar in terms of how organizations can leverage the public cloud.

Robert: When all this happened, the last thing we were going to do at Microsoft was engage in any schadenfreude, and for us, it was an opportunity to bring the issue to our customers and partners around their deployment strategy, and have conversations about architecting for resiliency.

Jason: It’s inevitable that outages are going to occur to everyone, and you are inevitably going to get egg on your face when the problem hits you. There is nothing perfect in the world of IT, and you can depend on the fact that problems are going to develop where they are least expected, whoever you are.

Robert: That’s exactly right. We have some customers who deploy to just one data center, and we have other customers who deploy to multiple data centers. It seems that the Amazon customers that only deployed to a single data center probably experienced the most serious outage.

Jason: That’s the single point of failure problem again.

Robert: Indeed. You made another great post called “Failure Is the Only Option,” where you talk about the importance of architecting for failure. Can you expand a little bit on that?

Jason: That also touches on this same topic of avoiding a single point of failure. You should expect failure anywhere and everywhere in your overall IT environment, asking what would happen if each piece failed: the database, the network, the processor, the presentation tier, and so on.

For every single question, you should have a good answer, and if anything fails, it shouldn’t cause everything to go down. The cloud actually makes that precept even more important, because the cloud’s inherent resilience leads cloud providers to use cheap hardware and cheap networks.

They use commodity equipment and rely upon dynamic cloud provisioning and failover to deal with issues of failure. The customer has to understand that the cloud is designed and expected to fail, and they need to build applications accordingly.

You can’t put everything into a single cloud instance, because the cloud provider doesn’t have any sort of magic, no-failure pixie dust. These considerations often mean raising the bar, in terms of how you architect your applications.

Robert: You deal with a lot of enterprises. Where do you often find the low-hanging fruit, in the sense of the things where cloud computing can make the most difference immediately?

Jason: Cloud computing is still relatively new, and most enterprise organizations are still at the phase of dipping their toe in the water. There are a few early adopters that are willing to place bigger bets on some of the more advanced capabilities, but that’s the exception more than the rule.

Most enterprises are still at the level where they will do some storage in the cloud or maybe some virtual machine instances, but they haven’t yet gotten to the point of thinking about application modernization or application consolidation leveraging the cloud.

That step requires much more of an enterprise-architected perspective on how to leverage the cloud. Some organizations are working through that now, and we are placing a great deal of focus there, helping organizations understand how the cloud adds to their options.

It has to fit into their architecture, and the cloud is not some sort of magic alternative to their data centers. The right approach is for them to think of it as one of the different options they have.

Robert: I get to do a lot of executive briefing presentations for customers from all over the world, and it seems that most of the enterprise interest has been around infrastructure-as-a-service versus platform-as-a-service. I think they are looking for the low-hanging fruit, in terms of just taking existing apps and having someone host them in the cloud.

Jason: That’s the most straightforward aspect of cloud adoption, and it’s something of a “horseless carriage” approach. Those organizations understand how to build an app and host it internally, and this approach allows them to extend that understanding to an external hosting model.

It does over-simplify the problem, and it carries some missed opportunity. On one hand, you need to re-architect your apps to take full advantage of the cloud. On the other hand, the cloud opens up new capabilities that you didn’t have before. That’s where the big win is, as opposed to something like just taking your existing ERP solution and sticking it in the cloud.

That’s not the right way to think about the problem. The way to think about the problem is that the cloud is going to reinvent what it means to have enterprise applications, but that’s going to take time. We are not ready for that yet.

Robert: What do you see as things that may never move to the cloud?

Jason: I’m reluctant to use the word never, because when you start thinking about the long-term prospects of a trend like this, what it means to do cloud computing becomes broad and ubiquitous. The cloud is just going to come to mean dynamic provisioning and virtualization deployed in an automated fashion.

We can do that internally or externally, leveraging resources wherever they happen to be. In 5, 10, 15, or 20 years, we probably won’t think of it as cloud anymore. It’s just going to be the way IT is done.

Therefore, it’s not really a question of whether something is cloud or not. It’s really just a question of where you want your virtualization. Where do you need dynamic provisioning? Where do you need your levels of abstraction? How are those abstractions going to provide flexibility to the users?

With that perspective in place, it becomes a continuum of best practices, more than seeing cloud as a particular thing where some things belong and some don’t.

Robert: Mark Wilkinson is giving a talk at the Cloud Expo on “Overcoming the Final Barriers to Widespread Enterprise Cloud Adoption,” where he says many organizations view moving to the cloud as a leap of faith. Do you think organizations typically worry about the right things?

Jason: The companies that are placing big bets on the cloud are early adopters, and they have a particular kind of psychology. They are willing to place the bet on something that has risks, because they perceive that they can get a strategic advantage by being first.

Those companies are willing to assume the risks of the cloud in exchange for beating their competition to the cloud, and then taking that to the customers before the other guy. Only certain companies have that psychology; most companies are too risk-averse to do that.

A few are willing to place larger bets, and most understand that there are risks from the fact that it’s still a new approach, with missing pieces, a lack of standard support, and all the other issues you have with an emerging technology.

Robert: Joe Weinman put up a recent post on the Cloudonomics blog, where he offers some details around his “10 Laws of Cloudonomics.” One is the notion that on demand trumps forecasting. Do you have any thoughts around that?

Jason: I guess it depends on what you mean by “forecasting.” In the context of a traditional way of thinking where you have existing on-premises infrastructure, you know how many servers you’re going to need in the future, because you’re going to track your usage patterns and things like that.

The cloud frees you from matters such as having to forecast how many servers you need to buy, but on the other hand, it opens up new kinds of forecasting. We now need to forecast how we’re going to leverage the cloud and take advantage of cloud-based capabilities as they mature.

That different type of forecasting is very hard to do this early in the market, because there are too many unknowns. It’s easier to say, “Based upon the usage trends, I’m going to need to buy 10 servers next month.” That sort of forecasting is pretty straightforward.

Robert: More and more, I’m starting to see a blurring between infrastructure and platform-as-a-service, and even, to some level, software-as-a-service. A lot of what I call SaaS 2.0 vendors are fundamentally building platforms. Do you see infrastructure and platform-as-a-service coming together?

Jason: I would say, actually, that the distinctions among the three different deployment models were a bit artificial to begin with. That model was based on some early thinking about how these things would play out. Now we’re talking about how infrastructure as a service grew out of virtual servers and things like that, and we have this notion of platform as a service as well, sort of in between, as an outgrowth of middleware markets.

As time goes on, it’s really more of a continuum. How many capabilities do you put into your infrastructure before you have platform-type capabilities? Likewise, some of the elements that characterize platform as a service include application frameworks that you can build applications with. How robust does an application framework have to be before it’s software as a service?

Those answers don’t really matter, of course, because these terms are just meant to help clarify. They’re arbitrary distinctions to help conversations along, more than they are hard and fast distinctions in the technology.

Robert: That’s a good point. For example, with Beanstalk, Amazon is offering abstraction layers on top of the simple ability to run a VM hosted on one of their servers.

Jason: Amazon’s an interesting case, because they’ll run anything up the flagpole they think is cool, and Google does the same thing. If it takes off, great. If not, they’ll do something different. That means that, just because they’re doing something doesn’t mean it’ll become an established market, or even that it’s necessarily a good idea. It just means it was something they could do and they thought it was cool, so they figured they’d do it.

We’ll have to see how all this plays out. Over time, the individual market categories will consolidate and become clearer, but for the moment, it’s sort of all over the place. Of course, from the customer perspective, that just makes things even more confusing.

Robert: Gartner just published a research note saying that three quarters of respondents were pursuing a private cloud strategy and would invest more in private cloud than public. I’ve also seen some good research from James Staten of Forrester. One piece I specifically remember was called “You’re Not Ready for a Private Cloud.”

I think that discussion centers around what it fundamentally takes organizationally to deploy a private cloud. It’s one thing to virtualize workloads and reduce the number of physical servers through consolidation, but it’s a whole other thing to fundamentally deploy a private cloud and services layer.

What advice do you have for organizations looking at a private cloud strategy? And do you think this is really only for the IT shops that have huge budgets, such as large multi-national banks?

Jason: I would offer different advice for different customers, depending on what problems they want to solve. Keep in mind, though, that there’s been a disproportionate emphasis put on private cloud, and I see that as being a result of vendor spin.

From the vendor perspective, private cloud is a great way to sell more gear, so the big middleware and hardware vendors are pushing private cloud on the one hand because it sells more gear. On the other hand, particularly in IBM’s case, they see themselves as providing the gear to the service provider market.

They’re looking to the telcos who have been IBM customers to provide cloud capabilities to their customers. And of course, who are the telcos going to buy the underlying gear from other than IBM?

So there’s this emphasis on that because the vendors want you to do that. In reality, in many cases, there’s a better value proposition available from public cloud for enterprises, as they get a handle on what that means.

After all, public cloud gives you a lot of the cost advantages, the shift to operational expense, and some of the dynamic provisioning capabilities. One of the challenges of the private cloud is the need to support the ability to handle spikes in traffic, just as with your own data centers since day one.

With the public cloud, there are multiple customers, and hopefully everybody has spikes in traffic at different times. That’s the bet, anyway, and if it comes true, everyone benefits from much better utilization of the servers. The private cloud doesn’t provide that advantage, so in many ways, cloud value propositions are watered down in the private cloud.

Vendors are giving a lot of play to security and governance issues with the public cloud. Some of that is true, but you also have those issues in the private cloud as well. So some of it is vendor “fud”—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and some of it is just a reflection of the immaturity of the market.

It is important for cloud consumers to consider the role of vendor spin, as they are trying to push big enterprises to buy more gear. Many times, the story they tell is, “You have a data center, but now you need to build another one, which we’re going to call a private cloud. You need to buy all new racks, blades, and software.”

Some telcos want to build a private cloud to offer cloud capabilities to customers, and essentially, they’re building a managed service provider infrastructure. Conversely, some large enterprises think of a private cloud as their own internal service provider that will provide cloud capabilities to multiple divisions across a large enterprise.

There are still value propositions for companies in the public cloud, and over time, they’ll figure it all out. They’ll say public clouds are good for this and private clouds are good for that, with best practices that help define the pros and cons of each. For the moment, though, there’s an excessive emphasis on private cloud, in large part because the vendors see more dollar signs there.

Robert: That’s the end of my prepared questions. Is there anything else you’d like to address or expand on?

Jason: I recently published an article called “Cloud Multi-Tenancy: More Than Meets the Eye.” Multi-tenancy, as you know, is a key characteristic of public clouds, but I have found that there are actually different kinds of multi-tenancy at different levels.

First, there’s full multi-tenancy, or shared-schema multi tenancy, which is the kind that Salesforce has, for example, where everybody is essentially in the same application and the same tables. That model brings certain advantages, such as being easy to manage and scale, but it’s a one-size-fits-all kind of option.

There are other approaches as well. For example, there’s the clustered, shared-schema approach, where there are clusters of customers on different SaaS applications. Each of those can be configured to meet the needs of particular customers, which provides a bit more flexibility, but it’s also harder to manage.

Another model is what you might call isolated tenancy, where a big vendor might move a legacy app into the cloud, with a different instance for each customer. It’s not really multi-tenancy at all, at that level, but from the customer perspective, it can look like multi-tenancy.

That could actually encompass a bit more vendor spin, where every customer still gets their own application stack, but it’s now theoretically in the cloud, although, in reality, it’s more of a hosted provider option.

Robert: That’s great. Thanks for taking the time to share your perspectives.

Jason: Thank you; it’s been a pleasure.

CDW Talks Cloud Computing - Guest blog post

2011-06-08T20:00:00Z

I wanted to share a guest blog post from Derrek Kim, a Technology Specialist with CDW, on cloud strategies and the role of virtualization in cloud computing. In the post Derrek shares some perspectives on cloud computing, including both public and private cloud deployments and the results of CDW's recent Cloud Computing Tracking Poll. Give the post below a read and let me know if you have questions or thoughts in the comments section. If you're looking for more information on Microsoft's business cloud offerings check out the Cloud Power site also. Thanks - Larry

CDW talks Cloud Computing

It is an interesting time for the IT industry right now; a pivotal point in IT history that has a profound effect on our lifestyle. The “Cloud” has reached mainstream status, infiltrating everyday life with offerings from email to minute by minute status updates on aspects of our personal lives. Cloud services are changing how we deploy and use technology more and more. There are many customers I speak with who are either saying it is just another XaaS (substitute X to make your favorite offering as a Service) or believe it simply means running servers in a 3rd-party datacenter. Though a vast number of IT professionals are still digesting the cloud’s potential, those on the leading edge or those that have a mature IT services model as a pervasive part of an operational framework understand that the Cloud promises to be the most compelling IT story yet.

Currently, the cloud can primarily be divided up into two general types; Public and Private (although there are others such as community and hybrid). The public cloud is a bit more mature and understood as a collection of capabilities that come together to offer just what we ask of it; an application, a specific service, a server or even an entire infrastructure. Additionally, the public cloud’s pay-for-what-you-use model is exceptionally cost effective, eliminating upfront capital investments. Most importantly, you can focus more time on adding business and operational value to your organization’s strategic initiatives rather than chasing down the reason a network port just went offline, for example.

Cloud’s potential impact on driving efficiencies and cost savings is not yet well defined. CDW’s recent Cloud Computing Tracking Poll surveyed 1,200 IT professionals from eight business segments to gauge organizations’ progress toward cloud adoption as well as their future plans for moving to cloud solutions. The results are surprising and illustrate how quickly the cloud is being adopted. For instance, large businesses and higher education institutions lead cloud adoption at 37% and 34%, respectively.

It is interesting to note that 50% of the respondents indicate they have not put together a cloud strategy, providing them with an opportunity to take advantage of the many flavors of cloud offerings including SaaS, IaaS or PaaS.

Business and IT leaders will dictate their rate of progression to the cloud based on organizational goals. In fact, many organizations have already moved one of their most critical applications to the cloud, email. This is a good indication of an organization’s wiliness to enable seamless remote access to a critical application running in the cloud.

There are many services beyond email that can benefit from moving to the cloud. Expect to see many other offerings from major software vendors in the near future. While the public cloud has dominated the offerings from major providers, we shouldn’t overlook the private and hybrid cloud approaches.

Private cloud promises much of the same value as the public cloud; we can start to liberate ourselves from the nitty gritty details of IT and start to think (and act) at a higher level. We want to deploy line of business applications, not hard drives, network cards, servers, operating systems, etc.. Private cloud enables us to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud while knowing that our data and security are still completely within our control or domain. This does not mean, however, that a private cloud has to be on premise; it can be housed in a 3^rd-party datacenter with proper physical security controls. Private cloud, no matter the location, is an assembly of technologies, processes, automations and flexibility rolled into one package.

For many there is an erroneous understanding that virtualization = private cloud. While virtualization is an important enabler to private cloud, it is important to note that it is just one part of the overall story. Private cloud provides for ease of deployment and advanced systems management. Virtualization lets us build a Virtual Machine by selecting the processor, network and storage. Following these decisions, it would be necessary to install the operating system and any necessary applications. With a private cloud solution however, a user can provision a pre-staged, fully operational service in just minutes with only a few mouse clicks. This may include multiple virtual servers, network load balancers, storage provisioning and application configuration. Not just a single virtual guest server. Through the combination of process and automation, a private cloud streamlines virtualization, allowing VMs to be fully managed, not simply run as separate servers operating on a consolidated host.

Building a private cloud requires deep knowledge of server, storage and networking coupled with an understanding of the business workflow and process automation. For large organizations this means coordinating activities across many teams or groups. In small organizations, it can increase the necessary knowledge to levels that may not be found currently inside the company. It is essential to have specialists with deep technical knowledge that understand the needs of the organization when implementing a private cloud solution.

Identify the business goals – Work with stakeholders to identify how a private cloud fits into the overall organizational strategy.
Support and Maintenance – Anytime a new technology is brought into operation you must consider support resources and costs. Incidents rarely happen when we are ready and available to take on a new task. Formalizing a support process will ensure incidents are addressed in a timely manner.
Avoid Shelf-ware. It is easy to fall into the lure of the “Deluxe” “Pro” “Plus” technology packaging schemes. Understand your organization’s needs and requirements to avoid over purchasing.
Business process analysis – Private cloud helps streamline the manner in which services are deployed and maintained in the datacenter. Determine what functionality can be moved away from high cost sys-admin personnel to other personnel in the organization. Your investments should not be to simply make it easier on IT, but to enable the business to be more nimble and agile.
Leverage a partner – Technology providers can bring perspective and knowledge that is often difficult to know unless you specialize in that particular technology/solution. It’s not really a cloud if you have to start from square one. Your time is valuable too. When creating solutions from scratch, many times the best of breed philosophy comes into play. Though there are some advantages to a best-of-breed approach, it is important to consider how this may impact the level of support you receive from each of the chosen vendors. A technology partner should be able to help identify reference architectures which have been deployed and have the deep vendor relationships necessary to escalate issues to knowledgeable resources on your behalf.

Ultimately, the goal of cloud computing is the ability to be more efficient in IT operations. It brings technology together so it is cheaper, faster and easier to deploy. Not too long ago the industry disputed the details of each component to determine which one would work best in any given architecture. Today, there is less concern, as functionality has become so evenly matched between suppliers. When the technology just works, we don’t need to question and examine each little detail. The commoditization of computers and components has simplified the industry a great deal. Virtualization is fast becoming a commodity offering as well. From a performance and reliability standpoint, there is little difference between any of the major Hypervisors.

As technology evolves, it is the natural course that technologies which become commonplace get adopted by every vendor. We are moving past differentiation in many hardware and software technologies to differentiation solely in how these almost identical technologies are implemented and managed. The real value of the private cloud is that it promises to provide the glue to bind together many of the various common hardware and software technologies. It allows a large part of the functionality to be managed as a whole rather than as numerous individual technologies.

In CY 2011 Q1 Microsoft announced the release schedule for an overall update to its System Center family of products. Within this release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 will be some very promising capabilities for private cloud management. The most compelling part of the story is the commitment of support for many of the major technology vendors. Regardless of which brand of storage, virtualization and servers are being used, everything to support a cloud environment will be manageable thru a single console. This unification is game changing. Coupled with Service Desk functionality and data center process automation enabled by new orchestration tools, this vision is a fresh approach to what has been coming from Redmond for the past couple of years. We are excited to see where this takes us.

Thanks for your time - Derrek

Thought Leaders in the Cloud: Talking with Rob Gillen, Oak Ridge National Lab Cloud Computing Researcher

2011-06-08T18:27:30Z

Rob Gillen is researching cloud computing technology for the government at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He also works for Planet Technologies, which recently launched a new cloud practice to assist government and public sector organizations with cloud computing. He has a great blog on cloud computing that goes back seven years, and he also has a lot of presentations and talks up on the web. Rob is also a Windows Azure MVP (Most Valued Professional).

In this interview we cover:

-The pros and cons of infrastructure-as-a-service

-Maximizing data throughput in the cloud

-Cloud adoption in computational science

-The benefits of containerized computing

-Architecting for the cloud versus architecting for on-premises

Robert Duffner: Could you take a moment to introduce yourself?

Rob Gillen: I am a solutions architect for Planet Technologies and I work in the Computer Science and Mathematics division here at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and I'm doing work focused on scientific and technical workloads.

Robert: To jump right in, what do you see as advantages and disadvantages for infrastructure and platform-as-a-service, and do you see those distinctions going away?

Rob: Each of those aspects of the technology has different advantages. For many people, the infrastructure-as-a-service platform approach is simpler to start using, because your existing codes run more or less unmodified. Most of those services or offerings don't have requirements with regard to a particular OS.

As we receive more technically-focused offerings of unique network interconnections and so forth, people are able to deploy cloud-based assets that are increasingly similar to their on-premises assets.

We have seen some interesting pickup in platform-as-a-service offerings, particularly from the lower end of scientific computing, among people who have not traditionally been HPC users but maybe have been doing a lot of computing on their local machines and have become machine bound. We've seen tools written and developed that can extend their problems and algorithms directly into the cloud using the APIs that are inherent in platform-as-a-service offerings.

As far as the distinctions going away, I think the days of a particular vendor only offering one or the other will be over soon. If you look at some of the vendors, there's a lot of cross-play across their offerings. Still, I think the distinctions will continue to live on to some degree. Additionally, don't think that platform-as-a-service offerings will be going away any time soon.

For example, Amazon’s elastic compute cloud service is very much an infrastructure-as-a-service play. However, if you look at their elastic MapReduce product or their Beanstalk product, both of those are very much platform-as-a-service.

When we compare offerings from our perspective as computational researchers, as you start with the infrastructure offerings, you have a great deal of control from a programmatic standpoint and an infrastructure details standpoint, but you give up a lot of the “magic” traditionally associated with clouds. As you move along the cloud spectrum toward platform as a service, you give up some control, but you gain a lot of magic, in the sense that there are a lot of things you don't have to worry about. So depending on the type of computation you're doing, they have different value to you.

To summarize, I think that individual technologies will continue to grow, but the distinctions at the vendor level will fade over time.

Robert: It seems that, in the current state of the market, infrastructure-as-a-service is better suited to migrate existing applications, and platform-as-a-service is really architecting a whole new type of cloud-based applications. Would you agree with that?

Rob: Mostly, yes. Infrastructure-as-a-service is definitely easier for migrating, although I am would want to clarify the second half of your statement. I think it depends on the type of problem you're trying to solve. The platform-as-a-service offerings from any vendor are generally very interesting, but they have constraints, and depending on the type of problem you're trying to solve, those constraints may or may not be acceptable to you.

So, I agree with you, with the caveat that it's not a blanket statement that green-field implementations should always look at platform as a service first – you have to evaluate the suitability of the platform to the problem you are trying to solve.

Robert: You've interacted with government agencies that are looking at the cloud, and you've blogged about your company's launch of GovCloud. What are some of the key differences between government and other uses of the cloud?

Rob: One of the biggest things comes down simply to data privacy and data security. The first thing every customer we talk to about cloud brings up, both inside and outside the government space, is data privacy. While there’s some good reasoning behind that, the reality is that cloud computing vendors often do better there than what the customers can provide themselves, particularly in the private sector. For many of those customers, moving to the cloud gives them increased data security and data privacy.

In some areas of the government, that would also be true (especially in some of the smaller state and local government offices) – cloud vendors might actually have a more secure platform than what they're currently using. But most often there are policy and legal issues that will prevent them from moving into the cloud, even if they want to.

I think some of the major vendors have recently been certified for a base level or what we would call low-security data, allowing public sector customers to put generally available data in the cloud. But anything with any significant sensitivity can't be moved there yet by policy, regardless of the actual appropriateness of the implementation.

That's a major consideration today – which is unfortunate – because as it stands, the federal government has many tasks that could benefit from a cloud computing infrastructure. I get excited when I see progress being made toward breaking down some of those barriers. Certainly, some of those barriers should not and will not go away but there are some that should, and hopefully they will.

Robert: You did a series of blog posts on maximizing data throughput in the cloud. What led you down that path? And was there a scenario where you needed to maximize a file transfer throughput?

Rob: One of the aspects where we think cloud computing can be valuable for scientific problems is in post-processing or post-analysis of work or datasets that were generated on supercomputers.

We took a large selection of climate data generated on Jaguar, which is one of the supercomputers here at Oak Ridge, and we modeled the process of taking that data and moving it into the cloud for post-processing. We looked at different ways to get the data there faster while making sure that data integrity remained high.

We also worked through problems around data publishing, so that once it’s in the cloud, we can make it available in formats that are consumable by others, both within and outside the particular research domain. We're working through the challenge that many scientific domains use domain-specific file formats. For example, climatology folks often use file formats like NetCDF and HDF5. They have particular reasons for using those, but they are not necessarily widely used in other disciplines. Taking that same data and making it available to a wide set of people is difficult if it remains in those native formats.

Therefore, we're looking at how to leverage the infrastructure in the platforms provided by the cloud, whatever data structures they use, to actually serve that data up and make it available to a new and broader audience than has previously been possible.

That was the main problem set that we were working on, and we found some interesting results. With a number of the major providers, we came up with ways to improve data transfer, and it's only getting better as Microsoft, Amazon, and other vendors continue to improve their offerings and make them more attractive for use in the scientific domain.

Robert: Data centers are pretty opaque, in the sense that you don't have a lot of visibility into how the technology is implemented. Have you seen instances where cloud performance changes significantly from day to day? And if so, what's your guidance to app developers?

Rob: That issue probably represents the biggest hesitation on the part of the scientists I'm working with, in terms of using the cloud. I'm working in a space where we have some of the biggest and brightest minds when it comes to computational science, and the notion of asking them to use this black box is somewhat laughable to them.

That is why I don't expect, in the near term at least, that we’ll see cloud computing replace some of the specifically tuned hardware like Jaguar, Kracken, or other supercomputers. At the same time, there is a lot of scientific work being done that is not necessarily as execution-time-critical as others. Often, these codes do not benefit from the specialized hardware available in these machines.

There are certain types of simulations that are time-sensitive and communication heavy, meaning for each step of compute that is performed, a comparatively significant amount of communication between nodes is required. In cases like this, some of the general cloud platforms aren’t as good a fit.

I think it's interesting to see some of the cloud vendors realizing that fact and developing platforms that cater to that style of code, as illustrated by some of the cluster computing instances by Amazon and others. That’s important in these cases, since general-purpose cloud infrastructures can introduce unacceptable inconsistencies.

We've also seen a lot of papers published by people doing assessments of infrastructure-as-a-service providers, where they'll look and see that their computational ability changes drastically from day to day or from node to node. Most often, that's attributed to the noisy neighbor problem. When this research is done in smaller scale projects, by university students or others on constrained budgets, they tend to use the small or medium instances offered by whatever cloud vendor is available. In such cases, people are actually competing for resources with others on the same box. In fact, depending on the intensity of their algorithms and the configuration they have selected, they could be fighting with themselves on the same physical nodes, since the cloud provider’s resource allocation algorithm may have placed them on the same physical node.

As people in the scientific space become more comfortable with using the largest available node, they're more likely to have guaranteed full access to the physical box and the underlying substrate. This will improve the consistency of their results. There are still shared assets that, depending on usage patterns, will introduce variability (persistent storage, network, etc.) but using the larger nodes will definitely reduce the inconsistencies – which is, frankly, more consistent with traditional HPC clusters. When you are running on a collection of nodes within a cluster, you have full access to the allocated nodes.

The core issue in this area is to determine what the most applicable or appropriate hardware platform is for a given type of problem. If you're doing a data parallel app, in which you're more concerned about calendar time or development time than you are about your execution time, a cloud will fit the problem well in many cases. If you're concerned about latency and you have a very specific execution time scale concerns, the cloud (in its current incarnation, at least) is probably not the right fit.

Robert: Back in August of last year, you also posted about containerized computing. What interest do you see in this trend, and what scenarios are right for it?

Rob: That topic aligns very nicely with the one we touched on earlier, about data privacy in the federal space. A lot of federal organizations are building massive data centers. One key need for the sake of efficiency is to get any organization, government or otherwise, to stop doing undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Every organization should focus on where it adds value and, as much as possible, it should allow other people to fill in the holes, whether through subcontracting, outsourcing, or other means. I expect to see more cases down the road where data privacy regulations require operators not only to ensure the placement of data geographically within, say, a particular country’s boundary, but specifically within an area such as my premises, my corporate environment, or a particular government agency.

You can imagine a model wherein a cloud vendor actually drops containerized chunks of the data center inside your fence, so you have physical control over that device, even though it may be managed by the cloud vendor. Therefore, a government agency would not have to develop its own APIs or mechanisms for provisioning or maintenance of the data center – the vendor could provide that. The customer could still benefit from the intrinsic advantages of the cloud, while maintaining physical control over the disks, the locality, and so on.

Another key aspect of containerized approaches to computing is energy efficiency. We’re seeing vendors begin to look at the container as the field-replaceable unit, which allows them to introduce some rather innovative designs within the container. When you no longer expect to be able to swap out individual servers, you can eliminate traditional server chassis (which, beyond making the server “pretty” simply block airflow and reduce efficiency), you can consolidate power supplies, experiment with air cooling/swamp cooling, higher ambient temperatures… the list goes on and we are seeing some very impressive PUE numbers from various vendors and we are working to encourage these developments.

There are also some interesting models for being able to bundle very specialized resources and deploy them in non-traditional locations. You can package up a generator, a communications unit, specialized compute resources, and analysis workstations, all in a 40 foot box, and ship it to a remote research location, for example.

Robert: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just released a report on cloud computing, where they say, and I quote, "Without proper governance, the organizational computing infrastructure could be transformed into a sprawling, unmanageable mix of insecure services." What are your thoughts on that?

Rob: My first thought is that they're right.

[laughter]

They're actually making a very similar argument to one that’s often made about SharePoint environments. Any SharePoint consultant will tell you that one of the biggest problems they have, which is really both a weakness and strength of the platform, is that it's so easy to get that first order of magnitude set up. In a large corporation, you often hear someone say, “We've got all of these rogue SharePoint installs running across our environment, and they're difficult to manage and control from an IT perspective. We don't have the governance to make sure that they're backed up and all that sort of thing.”

And while I can certainly sympathize with that situation, the flip side is that those rogue installs are solving business problems, and they probably exist because of some sort of impediment to actually getting work done, whether it was policy-based or organizationally based. Most of those organizations just set it up themselves because it was simpler than going through the official procedures.

A similar situation is apt to occur with cloud computing. A lot of people won’t even consider going through months of procurement and validations for policy and security, when they can just go to Amazon and get what they need in 10 minutes with a credit card. IT organizations need to recognize that a certain balance needs to be worked out around that relationship.

I think as we move forward over time, we will work toward an environment where someone can provision an on-premises platform with the same ease that they can go to Amazon, Microsoft, or whoever today for cloud resources. That model will also provide a simple means to address the appropriate security considerations for their particular implementation.

There's tension there, which I think has value, between IT people who want more control and end users who want more flexibility. Finding that right balance is going to be vital for any organization to use cloud successfully.

Robert: How do you see IT creating governance around how an organization uses cloud without sacrificing the agility that the cloud provides?

Rob: Some cloud computing vendors have technologies that allow customers to virtually extend their physical premises into the cloud. If you combine that sort of technology with getting organizational IT to repackage or re-brand the provisioning mechanisms provided by their chosen cloud computing provider, I think you can end up with a very interesting solution.

For example, I could imagine an internal website managed by my IT organization where I could see a catalog of available computing assets, provide our internal charge code, and have that platform provisioned and made available to me with the same ease that I could with an external provider today. In fact, that scenario could actually make the process easier for me than going outside, since I wouldn’t have to use a credit card and potentially a reimbursement mechanism. In this model, the IT organization essentially “white labels” the external vendor’s platform, and layers in the organizational policies and procedures while still benefiting from the massive scale of the public cloud.

Robert: What do you think makes architecting for the cloud different than architecting for on-premises or hosted solutions?

Rob: The answer to that question depends on the domain in which you're working. Many of my cloud computing colleagues work in a general corporate environment, with customers or businesses whose work targets the sweet spot of the cloud, such as apps that need massive horizontal scaling. In those environments, it's relatively straightforward to talk about architecting for the cloud versus not architecting for the cloud, because the lines are fairly clear and solid patterns are emerging.

On the other hand, a lot of the folks I'm working with may have code and libraries that have existed for a decade, if not longer. We still have people who are actively writing in Fortran 77 who would argue that it's the best tool for the job they're trying to accomplish. And while most people who are talking about cloud would laugh at that statement, it's that type of scenario that makes this domain unique.

Most of the researchers we're working with don't think about architecting for the cloud or not, so much as they think in terms of architecting to solve their particular problem. That's where it comes to folks like me and others in our group to help build tools that allow the domain scientist to leverage the power of the cloud without having to necessarily think about or architect for it.

I've been talking to a lot of folks recently about the cloud and where it sits in the science phase. I've worked in the hosted providers’ space for over a decade now, and I’ve been heavily involved in doing massive scaling of hosted services such as hosted email (which are now being called “cloud-based services”) for many, many years. There are some very interesting aspects of that from a business perspective, but I don't think that hosted email really captures the essence of cloud computing.

On the next level, you can look at massive pools of available storage or massive pools of available virtual machines and build interesting platforms. This seems to be where many folks are focusing their cloud efforts right now, and while it adds significant value, there’s still more to be gleaned from the cloud.

What gets me excited about architecting for the cloud is that rather than having to build algorithms to fit into a fixed environment, I can build an algorithm that will adjust the environment based on the dynamics of the problem it's solving. That is an interesting shift and a very different way of solving a problem. I can build an algorithm or a solution to a scientific problem that knows what it needs computationally, and as those needs change, it can make a call out to get another couple of nodes, more storage, more RAM, and so on. It’s a game-changer.

Robert: What advice do you have for organizations looking at porting existing apps to the cloud?

Rob: First, they should know that it's not as hard as it sounds. Second, they should take it in incremental steps. There are a number of scenarios and tutorials out there that walk you through different models. Probably the best approach is to take a mature app and consider how to move it to the cloud with the least amount of change. Once they have successfully deployed it to the cloud (more or less unmodified), they can consider what additional changes they can make to the application to better leverage the cloud platform.

A lot of organizations make the mistake of assuming that they need to re-architect applications to move them to the cloud. That can lead them to re-architect some of the key apps they depend on for their business from the ground up. In my mind, a number of controlled incremental steps are better than making fewer large steps.

Robert: That seems like a good place to wrap up. Thanks for taking the time to talk today.

Rob: My pleasure.

Fujitsu Launches Global Cloud Platform Service Powered By Windows Azure

2011-06-07T15:11:00Z

Today, Fujitsu and Microsoft announced the upcoming August 2011 availability of the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform service, which marks the first official production release of a Windows Azure platform appliance delivered by Fujitsu. The new service offering has already been running in Fujitsu’s datacenter and available on a trial basis to companies since April 21, 2011.

Some of the benefits highlighted in the announcement include enabling customers to quickly build elastically-scalable applications using familiar Windows Azure platform technologies, and the ability to store their business data domestically in Japan if they prefer, which can help address compliance issues and also minimize the time accessing data due to network latency. Fujitsu datacenters utilize some of the most advanced technologies in the industry to offer cutting-edge disaster-readiness, security and environmental friendliness.

The service offering will be available globally, and will be geared towards a wide range of customers, from leading enterprises to value-oriented small and medium-sized companies. Building on a core platform of Windows Azure compute and storage, SQL Azure, and Windows Azure AppFabric technologies, the new service will also help customers with the development of new applications and the migration of existing applications.

Full details of the announcement are available in the official press release and on the Windows Azure blog. If you’re looking for more information on Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings for businesses, check out the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time and if you have any questions, please post them in the comments - Larry

Thought Leaders in the Cloud: Talking with Olivier Mangelschots, Managing Director at Orbit One Internet Solutions

2011-06-02T17:31:23Z

Olivier Mangelschots is Managing Director at Orbit One Internet Solutions, a systems integrator based in Belgium that is deeply involved in Microsoft technology.

In this interview we cover:

Identity management in hybrid environments
The role of partners in providing customized cloud solutions
SLAs and cloud outages
Migrating to the cloud vs. building for the cloud
Things in clouds work better together

Robert Duffner: Could you take a moment to introduce yourself and Orbit One?

Olivier Mangelschots: I'm Managing Director of Orbit One Internet Solutions. We have been in business since '95 here in a city called Gent, Belgium. Today, we have 18 people, and we mainly focus on developing web portals. We use technology such as SharePoint, Microsoft CRM, and Umbraco, which is an open source CMS based on ASP.NET.

We also try to help our customers realize the new world of work, making use of technology such as Microsoft Lync to be able to work from anywhere while staying in contact with their teams. We're really interested in the cloud and looking forward to this change.

Robert: You've been involved in building customer solutions since well before cloud computing. How have you seen the cloud impact the solution that you're providing to your customers?

Olivier: We've always tried to make solutions in such a way that the impact on the internal IT structure for the customer is as low as possible. Even as far back as 2000, the solutions that we've developed have mostly been hosted by us.

We try to minimize the need for customers to implement local servers, so they can focus on making the best use of the solutions instead of the technical infrastructure behind it.

Robert: Jericho Forum president Paul Simmonds says that new rules are needed for identity in the cloud and that passwords are broken. Can you talk about the challenges and solutions for identity management in the cloud? How is it different from traditional hosting?

Olivier: Identity is one of the key elements to make the cloud successful, and I think we've come a long way. Today, most cloud solutions are starting to incorporate identity management the way it should be done, using federated identity and single sign-on. In the past, an organization had to choose between doing everything on-premises or moving everything to the cloud.

It was difficult to have part in the cloud and part on-premises, because you had to manage users and synchronization separately. It was quite a pain. But now, large and small companies can move to the cloud and have centralized user management, so they are able to handle user services in a very transparent way.

It shouldn't matter for the users whether an application is hosted on-premises or hosted in a cloud at Microsoft or hosted at a partner, so long as everything is nicely integrated. Of course, the first thing the user notices is the fact that he has to enter a username and password, so that should be very transparent.

Robert: Customers can choose between cloud, on-premises, and partner hosting. How do you explain the differences between these options to the customers you work with?

Olivier: Cost is obviously one of the factors to take into consideration. Most customers are coming from an on-premises history, and by moving to cloud technologies such as Windows Azure, Office 365, and CRM Online they can save a lot on costs. Of course, one has to look at the complete picture: not only licensing, but also factors such as human resources, hardware, and electricity.

In addition to saving on costs, they can make things happen more quickly. If they want to deploy something new, they can do so in a matter of hours in the cloud, where they would need days, weeks, or sometimes months for an on-premises deployment.

Partner hosting is still very important, mainly because not everything is possible in the public cloud. There are certain limitations with Azure and Office 365, for example. The price is very affordable, but you get what's in the box, and partners can offer customization.

In addition to offering more personalized solutions with regard to technical features, partners can also provide customization in terms of service-level agreements, security considerations, encryption, and those sorts of things, which are very important for some organizations.

Robert: At EMC's recent conference, CEO Joe Tucci said that hybrid clouds are becoming the de facto standard. Can you talk a little bit about hybrid solutions that may use a mix of options?

Olivier: As an example, one of the things that is very easy to migrate to a public cloud is an organization’s set of Exchange mailboxes with contacts, calendars, and so on. The level of customization that users need is quite small, and most people are happy with the product as it comes out of the box.

If you move the mailboxes to the cloud, users typically don’t even notice. They just keep using Outlook and Outlook Web Access, synchronizing their phones as they need to. Still, it saves a lot of costs, as well as allowing many companies to have much larger mailboxes than they would otherwise be able to.

This is one of the mixed situations we see, where companies are moving part of their services to the cloud, such as Exchange mailboxes, while keeping, for example, SharePoints sites internally because they need some custom modules in there that are not available in the cloud.

Mixing and matching in that way can be a smart approach, because it allows companies to save costs while also being more productive and agile.

Robert: Following the recent Amazon outage where full service wasn't restored for about four days, are you seeing customers question the reliability of the cloud? What do you think is the lesson learned from that?

Olivier: Almost all companies are a bit scared of moving their data away to some unknown location, because they have less control over those systems. The event at Amazon was, of course, very unfortunate. The cloud on a massive scale is still very new, and certain technologies should really be considered to be in a beta phase.

I think we have to be realistic about the fact that in an on-premises situation, uptime is not guaranteed at all. Many organizations have far more than four days of outages a year because of human error.

Many companies are not ready today to move certain critical applications to the cloud. I believe that, as the cloud grows bigger and more mature, service-level agreements will be available from cloud systems that are far more demanding than those that are possible from on-premises situations.

This is also where partner hosting can come into play. You can combine certain things in the public cloud for very affordable mass-usage scenarios while putting specific, mission-critical solutions at a partner that will do a custom replicated solution.

In the long term, I believe that the public cloud will come in several flavors, including an inexpensive mass market flavor and a more enterprise-focused flavor with high levels of redundancy and availability, which will cost more.

Robert: Lew Moorman, the chief strategy officer at Rackspace, likened the Amazon interruption to the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It's a major episode with widespread damage, but airline travel is still safer than traveling in a car. He was using this as an analogy to cloud computing being safer than running data centers by individual companies. Do you think that analogy holds up?

Olivier: I think it does in certain scenarios, although not all. But I think you're absolutely right that when an airplane crash occurs, it garners a lot of attention, even though statistically, it is far safer than driving a car.

If a big cloud goes down, that’s a major news story, and everybody's talking about it. But actually, this almost never happens, and a very large scale public cloud can be much safer than environments run by individual companies.

At the same time, there is always a balance between how much you pay and what you get for it. I don't think it's possible to get the service with the maximum possible guarantees for a very low fee. If you're willing to pay more, you will get more possibilities.

Azure is a nice example, because you can choose what geographical area your data and services will be running in. And you're completely free, as a developer or as an architect, to create systems that are redundant over several parts of the Azure cloud, which allows you to go further than what's in the box.

Robert: Customers aren't always starting from scratch, and sometimes they have something existing that they want to move to the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about migration to the cloud and things that customers might need to be aware of?

Olivier: This is a major issue today. For certain services, migration to the cloud is more difficult than it should be. The issue is going to be addressed step by step. First, of course, you need to have the cloud. Then you can start building migration tools. When I look, for example, at Microsoft Exchange, it's very easy and there are lots of good tools to move from an on-premises or a partner-hosted solution to the cloud.

SharePoint, for example, or Dynamic CRM, is much harder to migrate. You need third-party tools, although Microsoft is working on creating its own tools. There is still work to do there.

Azure, I think, is a completely different beast, and you can’t just take an application and put it on Azure. To make it really take advantage of the Azure opportunities and added value, you need to redesign the application and make it Azure-aware. That can take quite some time to do, and it's a long-term investment for product developers.

Robert: As more people move to the cloud, there's the chance to integrate one cloud resource with another. I know you've been thinking about the combination of Office 365 and Azure. Can you tell us your thoughts on that?

Olivier: The combination of Office 365/Dynamics CRM Online with Windows Azure is a very interesting thing. For example, we have customers using CRM Online, which is kind of out of the box, you get what's in there. We combine it for them with custom Azure solutions to do things that are not foreseen in CRM.

To give you an example, there is a company called ClickDimensions that has an email marketing plug-in for Microsoft CRM. You can send out mass e-mails to people from CRM, and there is tracking functionality about who opens the e-mail and who clicks on your website. You have a whole history about your prospects and your leads.

Actually, all this is running in the Azure cloud. It's all custom-developed, and it's always up, piping this information through to your CRM system. This is a nice combination of using out-of-the-box standards, shared hosting products such as Office 365, and CRM Online, combined with custom-developed solutions running in Azure. You get the best of both worlds.

Robert: At Microsoft, we see cloud as a critical back-end for mobile applications. You probably saw the recent announcement around our Toolkits for Devices that includes support for the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Do you have any thoughts around the combination of cloud and mobile?

Olivier: I don't really have special thoughts, although cloud and mobile, of course, work very well together. On the other hand, I think that any application is nice to have in the cloud, and the nice thing about the combination of cloud and mobile is making sure it's available from anywhere, since mobile users can be coming from anywhere in the world.

It's very difficult to know when you roll out a mobile application how much people are going to use it, and hosting these kind of things on the cloud makes very much sense, because you can cope with the peaks, you can cope with identity issues, and you have a nice kind of platform to start with.

Robert: Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about or any other subject you want to discuss?

Olivier: Today, I see Azure as a tool kit, or a large system to build new applications and solutions, so the group using it is mostly developers and other technical people. It would be nice to see a layer between Azure and other scenarios, where Azure is the engine and Microsoft or other partners create front ends for it.

To give you an example, if I want to host simple websites running a CMS solution, I can choose any of a number of partners that have management modules that allow me to easily configure the website, hit start, and it's running. It would be great to see an integration between for example Microsoft WebMatrix and Azure, allowing less technical people to get their website running in Azure in a few clicks.

These extra layers on top of Azure are a big thing for partner opportunities, but I also think that Microsoft should also participate to speed up things. I see Azure as the first big infrastructure step, we are just at the beginning!

One thing that developers might be afraid of is that if today you build an application specially for Azure, you're going to use the Azure tables, the Azure way of doing message queuing, and so on, making it very hard to move away from Azure.

Of course, today, Azure is only available through Microsoft, but I think it makes sense in the future to have the Azure platform also available in custom flavors through service providers that are competing with one another on innovation and pricing.

Of course, Microsoft probably doesn't want to give everything away, but there are a lot of partner models. It will be interesting to see how this will evolve in the future.

Robert: Very good. Thanks, Olivier.

Olivier: Thank you.

WIRED event: Innovation and Opportunity in the Cloud

2011-05-31T18:00:00Z

I wanted to share another post from my colleague, Mark Miller, this time summarizing a recent WIRED cloud computing event in New York City. The full text of Mark’s recap is below and it also includes a couple links to videos from the event. Let me know if you have any comments or questions. Thanks – Larry

A Recent Smart Salon presented by WIRED: Innovation and Opportunity in the Cloud

The cloud – for some it’s an evolution, for some it is a revolution and for others that perspective remains to be seen. For most, cloud is a critical part of how IT will shift from being a technology provider to becoming an innovation engine that delivers business value. That was what I heard in early May when we invited more than 100 senior technology and business leaders to join us at a Microsoft sponsored Smart Salon event, presented by WIRED, to talk about the ways businesses are dealing with the disruption of cloud today and into the future.

Facilitated by WIRED Contributing Editor Spencer Reiss, the event featured two broad-ranging panel discussions, as well as a no holds barred Q&A session with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Bob Kelly. It was a great opportunity to hear senior leaders talk about their cloud reality in candid, real world, terms and so I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few of my takeways from the day.

The first was how divergent, yet aligned, people’s point of view is about the business considerations and opportunities of cloud computing. For some, the cloud is driving a revolution in how they approach computing – from the technology they use to how they run their business. For others, it is a technology evolution – helping them do things better than they have before. To nobody’s surprise though – whether evolution or evolution – the cloud’s ability to dramatically speed up time to market (or time to innovation) was clear to everyone - as one CIO said, “in the cloud model, it’s days, not six months to a year.”

My second takeaway was around how cloud is really making people think about the future of IT – specifically how it will look in our somewhat cloudy future. While no one had a perfectly clear vision of our cloudy future most of the attendees – especially our CIO panelists – were bullish on the potential of the cloud to help them deliver more business value. Their path to delivering more business value varied: For some, it was about improving overall business processes, and for others it was about becoming a critical source of innovation for their organization. But the need to deliver business value was clear.

My third takeaway was that, to no one’s surprise, throughout the day it was clear that there were a LOT of different definitions of cloud computing. That was one of the first things Bob Kelly addressed in his Q&A – during which he outlined Microsoft’s perspective on the core attributes of cloud computing and how the breadth of Microsoft’s cloud offerings gives businesses the option to transition to the cloud on their terms.

Whatever cloud computing is for you - an evolution, a revolution or an uncertainty – Microsoft is here for you. We understand the journey to cloud may be disruptive and we know the cloud is not one-size-fits-all. That is why we are committed to helping you do cloud on your terms. To learn more about this approach to cloud computing, check out the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time – Mark Miller, Director, Server and Tools, Microsoft

City and County of San Francisco Adopts Microsoft Cloud Solution

2011-05-19T21:03:00Z

Just catching up on some news from yesterday that the City and County of San Francisco are upgrading and consolidating their multiple citywide email systems used by more than 23,000 employees onto Microsoft Exchange Online, which is a cloud-based enterprise messaging solution.

The move is part of their efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of their services and reduce IT management costs.

Jon Walton, the San Francisco Chief Information Officer, also points out some of the other benefits such as ensuring that they have a system in place that is resilient. In the news release he says:

“By moving to the Microsoft platform, we not only get immediate improvements to our system, but we gain a disaster-resilient system that provides the most modern information tools, with solid support provisions that can scale with the needs of our constituents.”

You can see the full details in the story at this link and there’s also a blog post from Microsoft’s Tom Rizzo which talks about it and some of the other government agencies that have recently adopted Microsoft’s cloud offerings.

For more information on what Microsoft has to offer businesses interested in cloud solutions, check out the Cloud Power site. If you have questions or comments, post them here and I’ll get back to as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time - Larry

SAP and Microsoft Join Efforts on Cloud Computing

2011-05-18T12:30:00Z

I wanted to share news of an announcement this morning at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s business and technology conference being held in Orlando, Florida this week. The announcement states that SAP and Microsoft will work together on making application development and cloud management easier for developers and IT staff, helping customers harness the power of cloud computing. Additionally Microsoft was named the SAP Global Technology Partner of the Year.

The details of the announcement are covered in the news release on the SAP site, as well as in a blog post from Microsoft’s Ted Kummert, SVP, Business Platform Division, which I’ve also included the text of below. Thanks for your time - Larry

SAP and Microsoft Make App Development and Cloud Management Easier

Microsoft’s broad partner ecosystem is what powers increased value and solutions for customers and their evolving business needs.

One example of this is today’s announcement of SAP and Microsoft’s plans to focus on two key areas: first, to help .NET Framework developers more easily build applications connecting to SAP, and second, to help customers harness the power of the cloud.

As a result of this announcement, developers can expect much more support and integration between the development worlds of SAP and Microsoft. Business processes from SAP software can now be easily consumed and extended by .NET developers, simplifying the overall application development process. This level of access will immediately reduce the number of steps developers must take in order to ensure application integration, and also lead to shorter development cycles and lower costs.

Microsoft and SAP also plan to provide integration between SAP’s landscape management software, Microsoft System Center and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V technology, bringing greater agility to cloud management and deployments.

This integration will instill enhanced flexibility, scalability and management in the cloud, all while reducing cost and risk. Through these connected offerings, SAP and Microsoft customers will be able to easily scale their deployments in their own data centers or through private clouds, for example, if they have a workload that needs on-demand scale periodically, such as a paycheck or employee performance review application.

Together, Microsoft and SAP are committed to driving greater levels of innovation and flexibility for application development and cloud deployment – from your datacenter to the public cloud, eventually enabling hybrid computing scenarios via Windows Azure for companies to embrace cloud computing on their terms.

This announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 15-18, 2011 where Microsoft was also named SAP Global Technology Partner of the Year.

Posted by Ted Kummert

Senior Vice President, Business Platform Division, Microsoft

New Research from Harvard Business Review Sparks Discussion at Cloud Computing Customer Event

2011-05-17T16:26:00Z

A colleague of mine, Mark Miller, was at a recent cloud computing dinner event in Silicon Valley. He wrote up a brief summary of the event, which I thought would interest you and wanted to share. Give it a read below and let me know if you have any comments or questions. Thanks - Larry

New Research from Harvard Business Review Sparks Discussion at Cloud Computing Customer Event

Whether you’re an IT or business decision maker, it probably seems like all you hear these days is “cloud computing.” In fact, if you’re in any type of business, anywhere in the world, you are hearing a lot about cloud computing: the benefits it provides, the latest technologies available, and the various approaches to cloud adoption. For example at this year’s TechEd North America, the theme was Cloud Computing: Delivered and cloud computing was also the focus of a more intimate dinner last week in Silicon Valley.

This dinner brought together over 40 business and IT leaders from a variety of industries to hear Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT and leading voice on innovation, and Harvard Business Review’s research editor, Angela Herrin, discuss a Microsoft-sponsored whitepaper from Harvard Business Review, entitled, “How the Cloud Looks from the Top: Achieving Competitive Advantage In the Age of Cloud Computing.”

I encourage you to look at the whitepaper as it puts a distinctly business-oriented point of view on the transformative technology of cloud computing. The findings reaffirmed some of our perceptions about where the market is today – and I wanted to share a few key takeaways:

- Early adopters of cloud computing believe it has already provided significant new business value and over half of the respondents think cloud will be a source of competitive advantage.

- The majority of businesses believe cloud will be a significant part of their business over the next three years.

- Despite the promise of competitive advantage and the acceptance that cloud computing will be a reality, barriers to adoption still remain. These barriers include concerns around data security, compliance, and business continuity.

During the course of dinner, we discussed the survey results and also had the opportunity to go a level deeper - learning more about the cloud from the thought leaders at the event and each other. Here are a couple of highlights from the evening’s discussion:

- Many customers discussed the importance of interoperability for cloud computing, a point which was strongly reinforced by the event’s featured speaker, Michael Schrage. In particular, a customer from the healthcare industry expressed frustration about interoperability with current cloud offerings for that market, calling for better solutions.

- Michael also described how the cloud creates unique opportunities for businesses today by effectively bringing the cost of ‘process innovation’ down to zero. He believes people should think about business process as they move to the cloud and this focus on process is what will drive innovation - a shift to doing things in new ways.

It was a great evening – full of learning, insights and dialogue – and we look forward to continuing that experience at the next two events in June. I believe that when we listen to our customers we can design and develop better products and strategies. Forums like these help to inform our cloud vision, and help us offer the right array of solutions and technologies so you can move to the cloud on your terms.

I am excited to hear what business and IT leaders have to say at these future events and I’ll be sure to share these future insights with you on this blog. Until then, you can learn more about Microsoft’s approach to business-focused cloud computing at the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time – Mark Miller, Director, Server and Tools, Microsoft

Travelocity Critical System Runs on Windows Azure Cloud

2011-05-16T18:01:00Z

This week the Microsoft TechEd North America conference is taking place in Atlanta Georgia. TechEd is an annual conference which provides IT professionals and developers with deep technical education across Microsoft’s current and upcoming products, solutions and services.

Taking into account the high level of interest in private and public cloud computing this year, the conference includes extensive information on how attendees can begin to take advantage of the cloud, partners supporting it, and customers who are already actively adopting the technology. Customers are turning to cloud computing for a variety of reasons such as the appealing economies of scale and the opportunities to improve the speed of innovation and application deployment.

One of the customers highlighted by Robert Wahbe, Corporate Vice President with Microsoft, during his keynote at TechEd and in his blog is Travelocity, a global online travel agency. Travelocity chose Microsoft’s public cloud solution, Windows Azure, to deploy their Java-based critical analytics system to the cloud in just two months. In the related news release, Dave Matthews, CTO at Travelocity, had the following to say:

“At Travelocity we work hard to understand our customers and make travel a quick and easy experience for them. We wanted the same for our transition to cloud computing, and the ability to quickly get new products to market, regardless of the platform, is an important advantage of Windows Azure, allowing us to easily move and deploy a core application to our business.”

You can hear more about why Travelocity chose Windows Azure and their experience building and deploying their application to the public cloud in the following video:

There's also an extended length version of this video with more details available here.

In his blog post, Robert also covers a topic I’ve previously blogged about, which is the economics of cloud computing. He talks about the TCO benefits when deploying to a public cloud, such as Windows Azure, which are driven by the combined effect of scale, demand diversification and multi-tenancy. I urge you to check out the whitepaper if you haven’t previously to explore the potential benefits of cloud computing has for you and your business and the methodology behind the study.

To read more on the other announcements related to TechEd, such as partners supporting Microsoft’s cloud offerings, check out the news release and Robert’s blog post. If you have other questions or would like to find more information on what Microsoft has to offer businesses interested in cloud computing check out the Cloud Power site.

Thanks for your time and if you have questions or comments, please post them here and I’ll work to get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks – Larry

CA Technologies ARCserve coming to Windows Azure platform as SaaS offering

2011-05-11T17:55:00Z

Couple of interesting updates on the Windows Azure front that I came across yesterday on Redmondmag.com and Mary Jo Foley’s All About Microsoft sites.

Redmondmag.com covers the announcement from CA Technologies that they’re bringing their ARCserve backup and recovery solutions exclusively to the Windows Azure cloud computing platform as a SaaS solution in the second half of this year. Sounds like there will be some nice integration as well with the story saying that setting up an ARCserve account will automatically establish a Windows Azure subscription. The solution will provide customers with the ability to specify critical files that they would like to store in Windows Azure in case of a complete disaster recovery scenario, such as some of the recent natural disasters in the news.

In the article, Steve Fairbanks, CA’s VP of product management for data management is quoted giving a nice nod to the Windows Azure operations team saying:

"We think that their SLAs, their security, everything about the Azure service really services our market well, so we're excited to partner with those guys. What's unique here is you're getting the combined local backup capabilities and the cloud storage capabilities all sold as a convenient service."

The solution will provide a compelling set of offerings for customers looking for off-site storage of their mission critical information and data.

The other story of interest is on Mary Jo Foley’s site covering the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS and the upcoming version for Android. There’s also a post on the Windows Azure blog that goes into more details on the announcement. The toolkit adds to the already available version for Windows Phone 7 and provides resources and services designed to make it easier for iOS developers to use Windows Azure.

Both stories demonstrate the increasing usage and options available to customers interested in taking advantage of the Windows Azure cloud computing platform either directly or via services offered by third parties.

For more information on the cloud business offerings available from Microsoft, check out the Cloud Power site. If you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to address them as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time - Larry

Cloud Elasticity - A Real-World Example

2011-05-04T22:03:00Z

In April, I wrote about the Social eXperience Platform (SXP) powered by the Windows Azure platform and how it delivers cloud-powered capabilities to Microsoft Showcase and the Cloud Conversations sites. There were some notable numbers in that post related the improved availability and reduction in costs corresponding with the team's move to the cloud.

I saw another post from Bart Robertson today that further expands on that previous post and one of the key, cloud computing benefits frequently talked - elasticity.

In Bart’s post, he has a graph showing a spike of over 700% in traffic that the occurred for a period of 72 hours related to the launch of online advertising. He equates this to ‘Black Friday’ traffic that retailers experience during the holiday buying rush. This is why cloud computing is the ideal hosting environment for applications that require ‘bursty’ resources to accommodate spikes in traffic, such as e-tailers during holiday seasons, companies that have month-end reporting or data collection requirements, or online communities that may see large traffic spikes during online activities for example.

This is why cloud computing is likened to utilities that we use at our homes, such as electricity or water. We pay for what we use and ‘turn the faucet off’ when we’re not using resources. The alternative is traditional IT infrastructure environments where there is a large spend on cap-ex resources that may sit idle for large periods of time, waiting for the occasional times when they’re needed to scale up to meet demand.

Take a look at Bart’s post for a real-world example of cloud computing elasticity delivered on the Windows Azure platform and how it makes sense for this and a variety of other IT scenarios.

If you have questions on cloud computing or what Microsoft has to offers businesses interested in investigating cloud computing, check out the Cloud Power site to get started.

Thanks for your time and have a great day - Larry

Orion Energy Systems Moves InteLite software to Windows Azure platform

2011-05-02T22:27:00Z

I came across an interesting announcement today over on the Windows Azure blog regarding Orion Energy Systems and their use of the Windows Azure platform to host their InteLite offering, a sensor-and-control solution designed to help their customers save energy and control lighting costs.

The announcement says that the move to the Windows Azure platform will provide Orion with approximately $57,000 in savings each year in hardware, labor and maintenance costs. This savings is occurring while providing them with a new, scalable method of aggregating customer energy consumption data, along with improved data security.

In the news release on the subject, Jason Young, chief technology officer at Orion Energy Systems said, “With Windows Azure, we’re giving our customers access to all their data at a competitive price point. We’re taking the money we would have invested in server space and putting those funds directly into product research and innovation for our customers.”

Their case study has more details on what the problem was they wanted to address and why they chose the Windows Azure cloud platform over other available solutions they considered. It also covers topics such as performance optimization, how they can provide better customer service now and improve data security. It’s a quick read and might help you better understand how you could benefit from moving some of your applications to cloud computing and the Windows Azure platform.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. If you’re interested in other information on Microsoft business cloud offerings, be sure to check out the Cloud Power site as well.

Thanks for your time - Larry

Microsoft CIO Tony Scott: 5 Lessons Learned from Our Cloud Deployment

2011-04-27T18:31:00Z

I wanted to share a blog post from Microsoft’s CIO, Tony Scott, where he provides some insight into 5 lessons he’s learned along the path to deploying cloud computing solutions at Microsoft. Tony shared this information with an audience of fellow CIOs at a Forbes and Microsoft CIO network this week in New York.

Hopefully the information will prove beneficial to you as you’re considering the right approach to take on your own cloud deployments. Thanks for your time and let me know if you have questions or comments. As always if you have questions on Microsoft’s business cloud offerings, please check out the Cloud Power site. Below is the post from Tony. Thanks - Larry

Microsoft CIO Tony Scott: How to avoid “cloud paralysis”

I spend about one-third of my time speaking to chief information officers from a variety of industries and regions of the world on a myriad of issues, but the topic they most often want to discuss is cloud computing. On Monday, I had the privilege to attend a Forbes and Microsoft CIO network event in New York and, along with Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard, offered some advice to CIOs on how to avoid what I’ll call ‘cloud paralysis’ and start realizing the benefits of this technology opportunity.

CIOs have heard about cloud computing and know the benefits, yet they remain uncertain on how and where to begin to bring their business into the cloud. As Microsoft CIO, my top priority is to transform our IT organization to meet the company’s ever-evolving business and technical needs. This vision brings agility to our IT services while lowering the cost structure of delivering IT services to the more than 150,000 people our organization serves each day around the world. Cloud computing is one of the most important tools on this journey.

As an early test environment for both Office 365 and Windows Azure, we’ve had good experience deploying cloud computing at the company and have learned lessons along the way.

1. Moving to the cloud is both a business and technical decision. When making the decision to migrate to the cloud, both the business and technical vectors need to be balanced. At the core of every cloud computing decision should be the business problem that your organization is trying to solve. Ask your CEO, "What's the most important system in the company and what do you care about?" For us, this was our volume licensing platform.

2. One size doesn’t fit all. It is up to each individual organization to choose where to start and how to grow cloud services. Your approach will vary based on your business needs. For instance, a few years back we right-sized and optimized our companywide lab environment because capacity was growing rapidly, server utilization was decreasing and support costs were rising. We deployed a private cloud environment, and Microsoft IT was able to reduce support costs by 35 percent, enhance the SLAs with the product teams and improve customer satisfaction.

Microsoft uses a decision framework, taking into account questions that every organization should ask:

a. What are the capabilities in our offerings? What’s our roadmap?

b.Which of our applications can be moved most easily? Which are already state-separated? Which can be virtualized? Which are not worth moving to the cloud?

c. What’s the business impact of moving each application to the cloud?

3. Take advantage of the opportunity to re-architect: When it comes to line of business applications, many IT professionals have historically lived by the doctrine “if it’s not broken don't fix it.” With the introduction of cloud, IT now has the opportunity to dramatically change the cost profile of older applications and move them onto a platform that's more scalable. One of our first projects in the cloud was moving our internal Giving Campaign auction tool to Windows Azure because it’s only used once a year for a month, and the final 48 hours always see a large spike in use. By rebuilding the tool, we reduced the cost of running it while gaining a more reliability.

4. Look upstream for cost savings. Behind every production environment, there are several upstream environments, such as test environments, that often times go unused and underutilized. Cloud provides capacity for these environments at the push of a button, decreasing underutilized IT resources. That’s instant cost savings in a place that most CIOs don’t even look.

5. The role of the CIO will change as the cloud takes hold and organizations change. CIOs need to prepare themselves for the evolution of the CIO role. As more and more business becomes digital and we move away from analog, the CIO should organize around business processes as opposed to organizational boundaries.

The bottom line when it comes to cloud computing is that CIOs should get started. That's the hardest part. However, once they get in there and experience a cloud platform, it will boost their enthusiasm and willingness to move forward. Once you dip your toe in the water, the learning process begins.

Posted by Tony Scott

Chief Information Officer, Microsoft

Thought Leaders in the Cloud: Talking with Scott Morehouse, Director of Software Development at Esri

2011-04-27T16:44:00Z

Scott Morehouse was involved in the early development of GIS (geographic information system) in the Harvard Graphics Lab and is now director of software development for Esri. He was responsible for the initial design and architecture of Esri's ARC product.

In this interview, we discuss:

-How the cloud is enabling more collaboration around GIS data

-The cost and complexity in setting up on-site GIS solutions, vs. using cloud based or on-demand solutions

-The opportunity for "mashups" where users combine their on-site data with cloud-based data

-Opportunities created by Azure virtual machines and database instances

Robert Duffner: To get us started, could you please take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Esri?

Scott Morehouse: I direct the software and product development activities of Esri. I've been involved in building information systems for working with maps and geographic data for 25 or 30 years. We built systems for workstation and client/server environments, then we built web-based systems, and now we're building systems that leverage cloud services and infrastructure.

My background is in geography and software engineering. We're heavily involved in applying the appropriate computing technology and leveraging general-purpose computing infrastructure to serve our users, who work with maps and geographic information.

Robert: You've been involved in GIS for quite some time, going back to the Harvard Graphics Lab. How have you seen the field change over the decades, and where do you see it going?

Scott: It's interesting to see the technological changes, but the fundamentals actually are quite the same, in terms of bringing geographic information to life in support of real users, real decision-making processes, and real work flows.

One thing that has especially become easier with modern technology is building collaborative systems and making information available to everyone in an organization, rather than having it locked up in departmental systems or information silos. Using web technologies and mobile device styles of system building has made it a lot easier to allow people in a given community to participate in implementation of the information.

Robert: You've talked about the underpinnings moving from client/server to a web-based modality, and now leveraging cloud computing. How do you see cloud providing benefits for GIS?

Scott: There are a number of different dimensions that make cloud interesting to us and our users. First is the simple fact that information systems have been moving from a client/server pattern to a web-centered pattern. By that I mean that even intranet or internal systems within an organization are being built around a web programming pattern and around a web style of user interactions.

Building a web-style information system implies an easy-to-use, browser-based modality that is stateless and uses a certain programming pattern. It implies making the information available to devices like iPhones and tablets as well as to work stations. It implies a certain style of documentation and leveraging a community of people for a more collaborative environment.

People are very interested in building applications that work that way, because that's the highest style of technology that they're used to. Nobody works with command prompts anymore except for system administrators and developers.

Another trend is the complexity of building and managing a computing infrastructure for an organization or even for yourself. It's really a difficult process to create the right infrastructure for hard drives, CPU cores, network connectivity, security, software patches, and so forth. So the notion of being able to grant or tie into a hosted infrastructure rather than having to build and maintain your own is very attractive to our users. They just want to turn a switch and get a new server that they can deploy a workload to.

A third thing is the ability to combine and mash up functionality and information that comes from other places. Users like to be able to take our case maps and data that others have created, and use them together in their own applications.

Robert: With SaaS applications, you want multi-tenancy and for each customer's data set to be completely isolated. That's sometimes true with GIS, but at other times you want to share and use community data. How does the cloud facilitate that?

Scott: The cloud facilitates the sharing of information in a couple of ways. One is that web-style system architecture makes information accessible through services. The notion that information is accessible through RESTful services or web-style interfaces really reduces the problems of getting at information. You're not having to ETL data from one database to another or these types of things.

In that context, you have to be clear as to what information is private, what information is semi-private, and what information is public. I think there's an implication that if information is easily accessible through a web-style interface, it also has to be public information. That's not necessarily the case, and we can put security around information in that context.

I think the question of whether a system is based on a multi-tenant architecture or whether it's based on having actual instances per user is kind of a fine point of implementation.

SQL Azure is multi-tenant, but there are individual database instances within that. Some people can own and control their own database container, but the system is optimized in such a way that it scales and has other attributes that multi-tenant applications give you. We see a combination of services that are implemented in a multi-tenant style and applications that are instance-per-organization style.

In the context of SharePoint, for example, there's a role for both a multi-tenant approach, for sharing documents and collaborating on them, as well as for allowing people to rent their own SharePoint instance in a hosted or cloud environment.

Robert: You've also talked about the cloud lowering the barriers for people to utilize GIS because they don't have to stand up servers to have GIS capabilities. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Scott: The main barrier for people to get into this web style of system building with geographic information is setting up and managing servers. The cloud makes that easier in a couple of ways. First, people can stand up and manage their traditional enterprise-type servers and services using the cloud as a hosting environment, or a virtual data center for their servers, if you will.

It also allows us to create new services that are lighter weight, leveraging the scalability of frameworks like Azure. So people can basically get going with information managed and delivered through services accessible from web clients a lot easier than if they had to buy their own hardware and connect it to the Internet.

Robert: Esri itself has a bit of a hybrid model, where you host your own servers but you also use Amazon and Windows Azure. Can you talk a little bit about your architecture and how you decide what to keep in house and what to host in the cloud?

Scott: Our fundamental architecture is web-centric, meaning that we've been working to expose maps and geographic information through open, web-accessible interfaces, primarily REST and JSON, but also SOAP and some other types. We've engineered our front end as clients to these services, so this web-centric system architecture can be deployed within an enterprise entirely, but it's also well suited to running on the Internet. It's also well suited to having elements of it, namely some of these services, actually hosted in a cloud infrastructure.

Since everything is a service, it really doesn't matter whether the service is running on physical hardware that's connected to your LAN or on virtual hardware that's physically located in an Amazon or Azure data center. We just make practical decisions about which aspects of the system make sense to run in our customer's data center, which services should run in the Azure cloud environment, and which ones should run in Amazon's cloud. We look at requirements such as what functionality is most efficiently implemented in which infrastructure and which environments meet the security and access requirements.

Robert: How do you see other enterprises using hybrid models where they may keep a large number of servers and applications on site for the foreseeable future, but consume cloud services like those that Esri provides?

Scott: It's not necessarily the case that to take advantage of cloud computing, you need to rewrite or move all of your applications from an enterprise-centric architecture to a cloud-centric architecture. It's certainly possible to build on-premises enterprise applications that combine information coming from your enterprise systems with data feeds, information, and functionality that are coming through a subscription to a cloud service.

We're seeing lots of mash up patterns where people combine geographic information from our hosted services with their enterprise information and even build their enterprise systems using on-premises web sites or thick-client applications.

Robert: I think a lot of companies with products they've traditionally sold as on-premises offerings see the cloud as something of a threat, but Esri has really embraced the cloud and pivoted to this technology. What advice do you have for other companies or organizations that have on-premises solutions about adopting the cloud?

Scott: Every organization is different, and we've really just focused on recognizing that this new pattern of building systems that leverage browsers and mobile devices is a pattern of systems that people expect. They want to get at their corporate reports or their geographic information from their iPhone as easily as they can get to their music from their iPhone.

There's an opportunity there to grow and support that style of solution as well as more traditional desktop computing. Amazon and Microsoft have both worked hard to make it relatively simple to migrate applications from a traditional server computing environment to a hosted computing environment.

In particular, the latest release of Azure has virtual machines and other capabilities that work both on premises in private clouds as well as off-premises in hosted ones. I don't see cloud-based applications completely replacing on-premises based ones, but I see the two complementing one another, and I see a lot of cases where you can design a system that will work well in both environments.

Robert: Key software providers like Esri providing services in the cloud definitely provides an opportunity that wasn't there before, in terms of enabling customers to co-locate, for lack of a better term, their software with your software in the same cloud. What are your thoughts on that?

Scott: People can build systems that take advantage of the cohesion of software components if they share a common cloud infrastructure and common application fabric. We are certainly exposing aspects of our system that allow people to take advantage of that, for example, building web roles that work with our worker roles and our data services, tying them into a common application fabric.

Another interesting thing about this sort of web-centric architecture is that, if it's truly service-based, it is to some extent agnostic as to where the services are coming from, and that's a good thing. We don't want to have to replicate or copy the same information and functionality across to six different ways of storing and managing blobs in a web-addressable way.

We can definitely have applications that mash things up between Windows enterprise architecture and Azure cloud architecture, as well as other hosted environments like Rackspace and other virtual environments like Amazon. You can build in a degree of system cohesion, and it's not necessary to rewrite everything so that it runs entirely inside of Azure, Amazon, or any of the others.

Robert: I came across a paper for the 1997 Esri User Conference titled "Democratizing GIS: Are We There Yet?" Where do you think we are on the path of democratizing GIS?

Scott: A lot of the technical challenges have been overcome. The challenges now are about how to create a lot of great content and communities that can collaborate around it.

Robert: How would you characterize the value of platform as a service, as opposed to infrastructure as a service?

Scott: I think the whole distinction between platform as a service and infrastructure as a service is a false one that creates a lot of confusion. I prefer to think in terms of "system as a service." To build a system, you use the appropriate technology, whether it's database technology or client technology. When people have big debates about whether the business logic should live in the database tier or the middle tier of a three-tier architecture, the real answer is that it should live where it's best suited, and where you can build and maintain a system most appropriately.

I really like what's been going on with this latest release of Azure, because from a practical standpoint, we're actually blurring that distinction. The religious people that refuse to let Azure be platform as a service have relented and allowed us to have virtual machines and allowed us to have database instances with SQL Azure.

That's really opened up a lot of opportunities for moving more conventionally architected systems to the cloud and then adding functionality that might leverage the fabric or platform-as-a-service capabilities. I look at Azure and Amazon not as differences of kind but as differences of quality. Both allow you to build cloud-based systems or system as a service, and you can use both to do tier services, build user experiences, or even have databases.

What's different, really, is the quality of the relational data store, the quality of the runtime environment for hosted app instances as Web roles, and how easy it is to build and manage a system as a service in one or the other.

Robert: Thanks, Scott. I really appreciate your insights.

Scott: Thank you.

What others are saying about the Office 365 beta

2011-04-26T21:50:00Z

It’s been a little over a week since the public beta of Office 365 became available, and there have already been some great comments on it from the press and customers.

For those not familiar with Office 365, it’s an always-up-to-date cloud service which brings together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online and is currently available in public beta across the globe in 38 markets and 17 languages.

For a couple bits and bytes on what the press are saying about Office 365, check out the following quotes from their stories and links to them:

Paul Thurrott, Windows IT Pro:

“We're both (Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera) impressed by the deep collaboration features in SharePoint in particular, and the ability to collect information, share it, and then write side-by-side, literally, in the same document. It's going to change the way we work going forward.”

Woody Leonhard, InfoWorld:

“Individuals and small companies that have shied away from the big server tools now have a chance to catch up with the large corporate installations, without breaking the bank or seconding an employee to full-time server servitude. That's a notable achievement.”

Edward F Moltzen, CRN:

"Office 365, frankly, is to Google Apps as XBOX 360 Live is to Pong. It’s in a different league entirely and represents a leap into the next generation of computing.”

Ed Bott, ZDNet

“I can tell you-enthusiastically and without reservation-that Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released cloud services are incredibly promising.”

Here are a couple things customers and partners have said about Office 365 from a variety of sources, including the original public beta announcement and real time sources such as the Office 365 Twitter feed:

David Kroenke, an original Office 365 beta tester and book author:

“I work out of two offices, and Office 365 saves me the hassle of tracking book files between so many different places” said Kroenke. “I don’t have to wonder where I put everything, because it’s always available to me, no matter where I am.”

Stephen Cracknell, managing partner for US Medial IT (a Microsoft Certified Partner):

“When the doctors travel, Office 365 can help them spend more time performing surgeries, rather than screening candidates or handling surgery follow-up,” Cracknell said. “The doctors also plan to use Office 365 to collaborate with each other, when a patient requires the expertise of several different specialists.”

William Bunce (Twitter handle @ds2600 on the Office365 Twitter feed):

“…just started using the beta of @Office365 and it already blows away Google Apps.”

There’s a link to join the beta on the Office 365 site, as some good blog entries on the Office 365 Community site like this one on the Top 10 Q&A’s.

For information on other Microsoft cloud offerings, check out the Cloud Power site. If you have questions or comments, please post them here, and I’ll work to respond as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time. - Allen

FISMA Certification and Accreditation for BPOS-Federal

2011-04-25T16:24:00Z

Good news last week from the Online Services team at Microsoft with the announcement that the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite-Federal (BPOS-F) offering has received FISMA certification and accreditation, a process by which federal agencies validate the security of information management systems.

The BPOS-Federal offering includes Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online. For more details check out the announcement.

The announcement last week follows the news from December last year that the Microsoft Global Foundation Services cloud infrastructure also received their FISMA certification.

Cloud computing services security is certainly a top of mind item for customers and you can find information on the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) at the attached link. Congratulations to the Microsoft Online Services team and achieving the milestone of receiving this certification and accreditation as it relates to the USDA.

For information on our cloud computing offerings for businesses, check out the Cloud Power site. If you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to respond to them as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time and have a great day - Larry

Social eXperience Platform (SXP) Powered by Windows Azure

2011-04-21T16:00:19Z

Whether you know it or not, when you visit the Cloud Power site you’re most likely experiencing a service or application hosted on or utilizing the Windows Azure platform. Whether it’s the social media experience for videos hosted on the Microsoft Showcase site or visiting our Cloud Conversations section on the Cloud Power web site, you’re interacting with services utilizing the Windows Azure platform.

The experts in these areas have written a couple great posts on the topics to provide the insider’s view, one on the Windows Azure team blog and another from Bart Robertson, a Microsoft Cloud Architect who worked on the Microsoft Social eXperience Platform (SXP). In Bart’s post, he covers some key attributes, benefits, and improvements that the team has experienced while using Windows Azure during the last year including: scalability, agility, elasticity, performance, availability, and reduced costs.

Bart provides an infographic in his post that summarizes the compelling numbers from before cloud computing and after moving to Windows Azure cloud computing platform, which I’ve replicated here:

This summary is truly impressive when you consider the improved availability coupled with the reduction in costs and time to execute releases. I urge you to read Bart’s full post for the drill down on the details.

As businesses look at evolving their IT infrastructure, cloud computing holds great promise for improving business efficiency and reducing costs. The key is that this can be an evolution of existing systems and investments, not an all or nothing ‘rip and replace’. In addition to existing IT infrastructure solutions, Microsoft offers a full spectrum of cloud computing solutions including private, public and hybrid cloud computing solutions.

For more information on how to get started, what other customers are doing, how to get started check out the Cloud Power site. As always if you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Thanks - Larry

Microsoft Office 365 Launches Public Beta

2011-04-18T21:06:00Z

There are a variety of stories coming out today regarding the availability of the Microsoft Office 365 cloud service public beta, including this one on PCMag.com and the official news release on Microsoft.com here. The beta is available to 38 markets and in 17 languages.

Office 365 brings the familiar experience of Microsoft Office together with SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online as a cloud service which will always be up-to-date for customers. You can read about some of the customers that have already been testing the early beta in the news release.

Another part of the announcement today was the Office 365 Marketplace, which is a simple way for customers to find apps and services when they want to customize and extend Office 365. The Marketplace is live already and has over 100 apps and 400 professional services available from a community of 16,000 Microsoft cloud partners.

There’s a variety of information and the link to join the beta on the Office 365 site, as well as blog entries like this one on Top 10 Q&A’s, available on the Office 365 Community site.

For information on the other offerings Microsoft has available for cloud computing, check out the Cloud Power site. If you have questions or comments, please post them here and I’ll work to respond as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time - larry

Windows Azure platform supports Media and Entertainment industry

2011-04-13T18:00:00Z

A Windows Azure platform update from “The Entertainment Capital of the World”, Las Vegas, and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show going on there.

At the show we announced that we’re working with a variety of industry partners and creating a partner ecosystem to help Media and Entertainment (M&E) companies take advantage of cloud computing. The end goal is to provide the industry with a simplified digital supply chain.

There are a variety potential benefits that M&E companies will be able to experience with the combined strength of the partner ecosystem and the Windows Azure platform, including:

- * Reduce capital expenditures for new IT infrastructure
- * Allow innovation and shorten time to market for new digital media services, lowering risk and giving media companies the opportunity to test new services and business models
- * Better provision resources to focus on their core strengths in media creation and delivery instead of IT
- * Leverage economies of scale of Microsoft’s datacenters and platform investments
- * Develop and deliver new applications and services on a global scale

As with all Microsoft’s cloud offerings, we understand that customers will most likely need and want to utilize a combination of on-premise and off-premise IT resources and tools, which is why we’ve ensured solutions we provide deliver that flexibility. To this point Jake Winett, director of Media & Entertainment Industry Solutions with Microsoft, says:

“We understand that media customers need a hybrid, flexible approach that allows them to access a custom set of offerings and tools specific to their needs. The M&E partners working with Microsoft are able to balance multiple applications within a cloud environment because Windows Azure is a technology-agnostic platform. This makes it easier for companies to create, manage, deliver and monetize media on a wide range of platforms and devices.”

Microsoft has already actively been working with the industry as well on Windows Azure solutions including the work on “Avatar” during its filming and companies such as Pixar.

You can check out the full information on the news here and check out the following links for more information on the Windows Azure platform or other business oriented cloud offerings from Microsoft at the Cloud Power site.

As always if you have questions or comments, please leave them here and I’ll work to get back to you as quickly as possible via this forum.

Thanks for your time - larry

All Things Digital with Seven Questions and Answers on Windows Azure

2011-04-11T22:14:21Z

This morning I came across a newly published article on All Things Digital by Arik Hesseldahl titled “Seven Questions for Doug Hauger, Head of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform”.

When I talk with others in the industry I sometimes get questions about what Windows Azure is. Arik’s Q&A session with Doug helps provide clarity on what Windows Azure is and also about some of the real-world customer adoption taking place such as the news last week related to Toyota and the telematics (telecommunications and informatics technologies) systems in their next generation of cars. The All Things Digital article also talks about companies such as Coca-Cola Enterprises and Pixar who are benefiting from their work on the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, as well as some of the other cloud providers and how Windows Azure differs from what they offer.

Doug discusses how many customers are already moving past the initial stage of realizing the benefits that cloud computing has to offer, such as the cost savings related to capital expenditures (CapEx) or the reduction of time required to manage resources, and are now beginning to take advantage of the rapid development and innovation opportunities provided by the platform.

For more on Windows Azure, customers using it today, and the benefits associated with it, such as cost savings and quicker innovation, check out the All Things Digital Q&A. As always if you have questions on Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings for businesses, check out the Cloud Power site or leave your question in the comments field of this post and I’ll work to get back to you as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your time - larry