Unfortunately, Martin Dubois, Chief Counsel of HR SaaS giant Taleo, wasn’t able to make it for his presentation yesterday on Compliance, Regulation and On-Demand Applications. Both SaaS co-chair Jeff Kaplan and I are sad that Martin’s great content didn’t see the light of day, so we’re arranging to have him record the material as a webinar we’ll distribute to attendees.
By some sick twist of fate, Interop and VMworld are happening at the same time this week. That creates a real problem for those of us in the space where the application meets the network. Do we go to New York for Interop, which is conveniently next to the Web2Expo, or do we go to VMworld? Many companies, including Zeus Technology, split their executive teams, sending some to New York for stupidly expensive hotels and great food, and others to Las Vegas for slightly less expensive hotels and slightly inferior food, but better gambling. I ran into some of 3Tera’s execs at Accel’s reception at the Tao Opium Room, and they had the same problem.
Alistair made the call to go to Interop. I made the call to go to VMworld on my own nickel, since I have lots of friends in the virtualization business due to my time at Citrix, where I did strategic planning for their virtualization business pre-XenSource. Special thanks to Fortisphere for covering my show pass! I miss expense reports, or at least getting them paid.
But the real reason VMworld seemed a good idea is that, in addition to consulting, I’m working on a stealth mode cloud computing idea, and I guessed that VMworld would be the place for clouds. It sort of is, but not compared to Alistair’s cloud program at Interop. Sure, there is VMware’s Vclould announcement, and there are quite a few companies with the world “cloud” on their booth, and some real cloud companies like RightScale and SkyTap, but on Wednesday, there are more than 80 VMworld breakout sessions, and exactly one of them is about clouds specifically.
Why is this happening? It’s because VMware is focusing on virtualization in all its flavors, but the cloud computing guys see virtualization as only one of the enabling technologies that can make clouds work. So I guess it’s natural for the clouds to be attracted to Interop and Web2Expo more than VMworld.
It’s time to head to New York for the start of the fall conference season. This year, Interop and Web2Expo are side-by-side at the Javitz Center, and we’re holding the Interop Unconference event on Thursday night. Then there’s High Performance on Wall Street happening on Monday the 22nd.
At Interop this year, we’re helping to run the Software-as-a-Service track (in conjunction with Jeff Kaplan of Thinkstrategies) and the Cloud Computing track (helped by Peter Laird, who I first met when I saw his excellent Taxonomy of the Cloud, which he’s been hard at work revising for Interop.) I’m also doing a free session on cloud foundations at the show. The lineup of speakers and panelists is remarkable, and will hopefully lead to some great conversations. We also have folks from Google, Amazon, Joyent, 10Gen and Bungee on a Web2Expo panel.
Here’s a recap of the sessions and participants: [Read more]
At Structure08 last week, Bitcurrent and GigaOm introduced Briefings. These 20- to 30-page reports look at a particular industry or technology in detail, combining what we learn while reporting on the space with research and internal discussion.
The first briefing focuses on cloud computing, which was the topic of much of Structure08. It’s available from the Briefings website at an affordable $250 through Paypal. If you’re trying to come up to speed on cloud computing quickly — whether as an investor, an entrepreneur, or an IT professional — we hope this format of background, landscape, and industry direction will fit the bill.
We’ve got many of these planned — my next one will be on Application Delivery Networks, and we’re also doing one on mobility and telepresence.
I’ve been incredibly lucky this week: Awesome panelists and great discussions (several of which have run over) at Interop. The conclusion: Cloud computing is still cloudy, and if you want reliable on-demand computing, get it from a SaaS provider who can worry about the cloud on your behalf.
The Register and Infoworld, both of whom covered the events, seem to agree: There’s a lot of hype around on-demand computing, but it’s not fully grown up yet. Nice to know we’re trying to keep things honest.
While lots of folks are dabbling with cloud computing and on-demand infrastructure, it’s not really ready for business yet. Some of the cloud users we had — folks from Napera, Syntenic, and Kaazing – are using the cloud for “bursty” capacity or as a way to prototyping nascent applications. But what do the operators think?
John Overton’s deck from Interop. John has 8 years’ experience running on-demand operations for ATG, and this deck has an amazingly concentrated amount of information on what tools and processes worked for him during that time.
Here’s a copy of the presentation I’m giving today at Interop. It looks at the perils and best practices of moving an application from internally-run to software-as-a-service.
Web2Expo San Francisco is coming up. The conference has grown quickly; initially, as a reaction to the popularity of O’Reilly’s more blue-sky conference, Web2.0 (which is now called Web2Summit.) Following the success of Web2Summit — the organizers sold out their 2,000 registrations quickly and had to turn away thousands more — they launched the Expo.
Web2Expo isn’t just a spill-over conference; it’s now got an identity of its own. If the folks at Web2Summit speculate and scheme, then it’s left to the Web2Expo attendees to figure out how to build what their less grounded peers have already promised.
Since 1994, I’ve been attending and participating in the Interop show. It’s an incredible endeavour; the world’s largest production network gets set up and torn down in just a few days. The show’s been around for so long, it has its own class A address block. Seriously, check it out.
One of the reasons for the show’s longevity has been its focus on education. Rather than just being a sales convention, it’s a source of learning for the internetworking industry. A while back, this meant proving that one VPN could talk to another. Before that, it was simply getting two Ethernet hubs to communicate.
Today, however, those interoperability issues are long over. Instead, we worry about how IT will work in the future, and how different services or different companies can interoperate.
Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We're a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.
Unfortunately, Martin Dubois, Chief Counsel of HR SaaS giant Taleo, wasn’t able to make it for his presentation yesterday on Compliance, Regulation and On-Demand Applications. Both SaaS co-chair Jeff Kaplan and I are sad that Martin’s great content didn’t see the light of day, so we’re arranging to have him record the material as a webinar we’ll distribute to attendees.
I’ve been incredibly lucky this week: Awesome panelists and great discussions (several of which have run over) at 
