Computerworld recently reported on two Goldman Sachs CIO surveys. The contents of their finding and the somewhat tepid response on Slashdot wasn't too surprising.
The gist was most Enterprise CIOs are not planning on investing in Cloud Computing; rather laying off staff instead. That said - they are interested in virtualization (to some degree as a mechanism for laying people off).
This pretty much is the shaping of the market we have planned for at CohesiveFT. Technology adoption for the most part is a cultural phenomena - old dogs as a rule don't learn new tricks. You have to wait for the young dogs to become slightly older dogs. I have seen studies that put "cultural generations" (generational beliefs and attitudes accelerated by shared mass media) turnover at about 8 years. This makes sense to me as we look at the post-baby boomer world.
So...VMware is an "overnight success" after 10 long hard years - and virtualization is still maybe only deployed in 20% of the Enterprises of these same CIOs. Our bet for the virtualization "harvest" is that in comes in 2010; we will be coming out of trough of disillusionment of virtualization and clouds, SaaS inroads will be even deeper, we expect virtualization and clouds to bring a couple of the Linux vendors even more to the fore in the enterprise, hardware refresh cycles will have kicked in thus dealing with today's virtualization latency issues, and Windows Server Core 2008 will be moving out in earnest.
So no surprise that "clouds" aren't on the radar of the average CIO. Good thing about averages is that there are people and organizations who are "above average" which is why vendors like CohesiveFT are out there successfully pitching to the early adopters. These organizations are able to look at virtualization and cloud computing and see the gains to be had now - and the realization that as the market matures and their facility with these technologies expands; there are even greater gains to be had.
As I said at Structure 08 when I was on a panel on PaaS (platform as a servcie) - we are looking at the early adopter part of the curve not as "Enterprise" vs. "SMB", rather as customers of SaaS (want to buy an outcome) and customers of PaaS (want to effect an outcome), and are planning our products, partners and marketing accordingly.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Carry on camping
Thanks so much to everyone who attended the first CloudCamp London event on Wednesday night, and to the many sponsors who made it possible. Everyone I spoke to said that they had a great time and would love to come again, which is why there will be more events. For those who could not make it this time, the talks were recorded - podcasts and videos will be posted soon.
It was a night of contrasts. Seeing 250+ people turn up on time to a central London venue at 6:30pm was a delightful shock. The inevitable network outage and subsequent discovery that the router had been locked in an office and could not be rebooted was, shall we say, the perfect counterpoint. At this point I'd like to thank Skills Matter whose team were both infinitely attentive and superlatively patient.
For me the absolute highlight of the night was the chance to meet a very large number of interesting and cool people from all parts of the industry. In true British fashion this really got going once we'd wrapped up the presentations and uncorked the wine. Immediately, dozens of groups formed. It was great to see the various cloud providers comparing notes. It was even better to see them in deep conversation with folks like Alan Williamson, who gave one of the best talks of the night, a chequered, perhaps even tartan, account of his wins and FAILs with cloud services.
As James pointed out, this particular sort of socialised interaction is something Brits feel most comfortable with... once we get going. We can be a little slow to break out of our shells. I'm reminded of the old joke in which three national stereotypes are marooned on an island and within a day the French has formed a government, the American has organised a revolution, and the Brit is still waiting to be introduced.
Which brings me on to the 'Open Spaces' aspect of the event and the lightning talks. Putting it about as politely as possible this is the area 'most in need of improvement' for next time. We'd set a limit of ten minutes per talk which of course everyone effortlessly broke. This was entirely my fault for not bringing a stop watch and baseball bat. Next time, all lightning talks will be ruthlessly limited - possibly using an Ignite format. Admittedly some speakers were so engaging that the time flew by and the questions could have gone on all night. But - that's why we brought beer and pizza.
Secondly this was the first Open Spaces event for many people who came. I must confess to having been nervous about this beforehand, and on the web site had asked people to propose talks or topics. About twelve people were enthusiastic or sympathetic enough to offer talks. I figured this would be enough to motivate others to step up from the audience but, aside from one or two fluent folks such as Mark Masterson, it just did not happen. Argh.
At the SF event there were many talks and many people who like to talk. Was London CloudCamp making people laconic, or worse yet, shy? Based on the fantastic atmosphere throughout, and the great conversations people had till late in the evening, I don't think so. I think we can make the format much better. One idea is to have more smaller rooms and start with an hour or two of Open Spaces unconference, then mingle over beers, and have a few really rapid fire talks after that. Please do comment on this blog if you have suggestions!
What else? I had a wonderful time meeting and talking with people. People like Simon Wardley who broke the ice with a tour de force involving 101 slides in 10:01 minutes. People like Phil Wainewright, here seen with some analyst type demonstrating their green credentials, if not their handling skills, on a Segway. People from Sun like Wayne Horkan, and Sara Dornsife who impress by really getting the power of 'community' and who've really worked hard on making CloudCamp successful. The exceliant Adam Vile and his grid team. Thanks are due to Reuven Cohen who kicked off CloudCamp. Ruv, thanks for coming over to help us out with London too.
I was very grateful to Ben Hood from our team at CohesiveFT who was able to show a live demo of our new instant grid in the cloud capability jointly announced with Gigaspaces - using his 3G USB dongle after the network failed. And thanks are due to Dekel Tankel for letting us do that at the end of his talk on scalability issues in the cloud.
I will not forget the sight of William Fellows celebrating his birthday, and first talk at CloudCamp, by stage diving.
In just a few months CloudCamp has gone from an idea and a few emails, to an exciting and quite real phenomenon. Not only will there be more events in SF and London, but people have been getting organised in New York, Portland, Chicago, Paris, and Berlin to name just a few. How can this happen? It's about 'you'. The 'Camp' concept is all about community. There is NO barrier to entry. Please come to the next event in your town, or get involved in organising it. All are welcome.
UPDATE (21/7/2008) - The videos and podcasts are up. For example here is Adil Mohammed's talk, an engaging introduction to issues faced by start ups using the cloud. More like this please.
It was a night of contrasts. Seeing 250+ people turn up on time to a central London venue at 6:30pm was a delightful shock. The inevitable network outage and subsequent discovery that the router had been locked in an office and could not be rebooted was, shall we say, the perfect counterpoint. At this point I'd like to thank Skills Matter whose team were both infinitely attentive and superlatively patient.
For me the absolute highlight of the night was the chance to meet a very large number of interesting and cool people from all parts of the industry. In true British fashion this really got going once we'd wrapped up the presentations and uncorked the wine. Immediately, dozens of groups formed. It was great to see the various cloud providers comparing notes. It was even better to see them in deep conversation with folks like Alan Williamson, who gave one of the best talks of the night, a chequered, perhaps even tartan, account of his wins and FAILs with cloud services.
As James pointed out, this particular sort of socialised interaction is something Brits feel most comfortable with... once we get going. We can be a little slow to break out of our shells. I'm reminded of the old joke in which three national stereotypes are marooned on an island and within a day the French has formed a government, the American has organised a revolution, and the Brit is still waiting to be introduced.
Which brings me on to the 'Open Spaces' aspect of the event and the lightning talks. Putting it about as politely as possible this is the area 'most in need of improvement' for next time. We'd set a limit of ten minutes per talk which of course everyone effortlessly broke. This was entirely my fault for not bringing a stop watch and baseball bat. Next time, all lightning talks will be ruthlessly limited - possibly using an Ignite format. Admittedly some speakers were so engaging that the time flew by and the questions could have gone on all night. But - that's why we brought beer and pizza.
Secondly this was the first Open Spaces event for many people who came. I must confess to having been nervous about this beforehand, and on the web site had asked people to propose talks or topics. About twelve people were enthusiastic or sympathetic enough to offer talks. I figured this would be enough to motivate others to step up from the audience but, aside from one or two fluent folks such as Mark Masterson, it just did not happen. Argh.
At the SF event there were many talks and many people who like to talk. Was London CloudCamp making people laconic, or worse yet, shy? Based on the fantastic atmosphere throughout, and the great conversations people had till late in the evening, I don't think so. I think we can make the format much better. One idea is to have more smaller rooms and start with an hour or two of Open Spaces unconference, then mingle over beers, and have a few really rapid fire talks after that. Please do comment on this blog if you have suggestions!
What else? I had a wonderful time meeting and talking with people. People like Simon Wardley who broke the ice with a tour de force involving 101 slides in 10:01 minutes. People like Phil Wainewright, here seen with some analyst type demonstrating their green credentials, if not their handling skills, on a Segway. People from Sun like Wayne Horkan, and Sara Dornsife who impress by really getting the power of 'community' and who've really worked hard on making CloudCamp successful. The exceliant Adam Vile and his grid team. Thanks are due to Reuven Cohen who kicked off CloudCamp. Ruv, thanks for coming over to help us out with London too.
I was very grateful to Ben Hood from our team at CohesiveFT who was able to show a live demo of our new instant grid in the cloud capability jointly announced with Gigaspaces - using his 3G USB dongle after the network failed. And thanks are due to Dekel Tankel for letting us do that at the end of his talk on scalability issues in the cloud.
I will not forget the sight of William Fellows celebrating his birthday, and first talk at CloudCamp, by stage diving.
In just a few months CloudCamp has gone from an idea and a few emails, to an exciting and quite real phenomenon. Not only will there be more events in SF and London, but people have been getting organised in New York, Portland, Chicago, Paris, and Berlin to name just a few. How can this happen? It's about 'you'. The 'Camp' concept is all about community. There is NO barrier to entry. Please come to the next event in your town, or get involved in organising it. All are welcome.
UPDATE (21/7/2008) - The videos and podcasts are up. For example here is Adil Mohammed's talk, an engaging introduction to issues faced by start ups using the cloud. More like this please.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Oh what a mesh we are in...
It has been a few months since the Microsoft "Mesh" announcement. I am still awaiting my developer preview account - but here are some thoughts from the aftermath.
On one hand the Mesh announcement was initially disappointing. My first response was "Foldershare + some new UI stuff + maybe it actually works". Then I heard some others say "Lotus Notes Documents".
But...upon reflection I think it is one of the first steps of a fairly subtle plan - either out of intent or accident. I am thinking intent. Sun said the network was the computer, other people have coined different variants of the phrase since then. Here Microsoft Mesh is saying "the big giant distributed hard drive in the sky is the computer". This is a very savvy move given how "hard drive"-centric the Microsoft platform is. Now add on a tarted up version of the roaming profile stuff that has been in Windows since NT, and how fast broadband is now, and a Vista machine - one can start having more lightweight infra with easier synchronization of assets. If the Mesh starts moving my files close to where I am in the background - even better.
Also - look at how MSFT is describing the user experience of the Softricity stuff they bought - now called Softgrid. Although in many ways unchanged from way back when Softricity wrote it, Microsoft uses interesting words. When you "stream" an application from the server - to run on your Windows Desktop (ultimately all of the application components arrive on your machine, all executing locally) MSFT emphasizes that the application is NOT INSTALLED on the local machine. It is just "copied to the cache and executes from there". Wow! That is what I have always wanted. If a bundle of files can be copied to the hard drive and then run without spewing bits all over the hard drive, and without having anything to do with the registry, and then runs, that is what we all want. Sounds remarkably like installing software on Linux, Unix, Solaris, or Mac. The worldwide hard drive, roaming profiles, application installation via file-copying, and licensing checked at runtime, not install (copy) time - really opens up some interesting opportunities in the Microsoft world.
THEN - there appears to be WinFS bits in here somewhere - which was supposed to be a pluggable filesystem. If that is the case and I can upload a bit of CLR somehow, somewhere, that executes based on actions in the file system, then I have a big, slow, global, message bus. Which again tees up some interesting possibilities.
As we just recently saw at CloudCamp San Fran and as I said on the PaaS Panel at Structure 08; we are in the "Cambrian explosion" period of cloud computing and we will see lots of interesting life forms before the winners become obvious. Microsoft Mesh certainly adds some interesting DNA to the ecosystem.
On one hand the Mesh announcement was initially disappointing. My first response was "Foldershare + some new UI stuff + maybe it actually works". Then I heard some others say "Lotus Notes Documents".
But...upon reflection I think it is one of the first steps of a fairly subtle plan - either out of intent or accident. I am thinking intent. Sun said the network was the computer, other people have coined different variants of the phrase since then. Here Microsoft Mesh is saying "the big giant distributed hard drive in the sky is the computer". This is a very savvy move given how "hard drive"-centric the Microsoft platform is. Now add on a tarted up version of the roaming profile stuff that has been in Windows since NT, and how fast broadband is now, and a Vista machine - one can start having more lightweight infra with easier synchronization of assets. If the Mesh starts moving my files close to where I am in the background - even better.
Also - look at how MSFT is describing the user experience of the Softricity stuff they bought - now called Softgrid. Although in many ways unchanged from way back when Softricity wrote it, Microsoft uses interesting words. When you "stream" an application from the server - to run on your Windows Desktop (ultimately all of the application components arrive on your machine, all executing locally) MSFT emphasizes that the application is NOT INSTALLED on the local machine. It is just "copied to the cache and executes from there". Wow! That is what I have always wanted. If a bundle of files can be copied to the hard drive and then run without spewing bits all over the hard drive, and without having anything to do with the registry, and then runs, that is what we all want. Sounds remarkably like installing software on Linux, Unix, Solaris, or Mac. The worldwide hard drive, roaming profiles, application installation via file-copying, and licensing checked at runtime, not install (copy) time - really opens up some interesting opportunities in the Microsoft world.
THEN - there appears to be WinFS bits in here somewhere - which was supposed to be a pluggable filesystem. If that is the case and I can upload a bit of CLR somehow, somewhere, that executes based on actions in the file system, then I have a big, slow, global, message bus. Which again tees up some interesting possibilities.
As we just recently saw at CloudCamp San Fran and as I said on the PaaS Panel at Structure 08; we are in the "Cambrian explosion" period of cloud computing and we will see lots of interesting life forms before the winners become obvious. Microsoft Mesh certainly adds some interesting DNA to the ecosystem.
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