VMware is changing its flavor. Image: osde8info/Flickr

VMware has named Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO, moving the industry veteran from parent company EMC, where he served as president and chief operating officer, Wired Enterprise reported late on Tuesday. Earlier in the day, the news leaked out about the company  being “on the verge of a major shakeup that will see the company replace CEO Paul Maritz and spin-off Cloud Foundry, its highly-regarded open source cloud-building platform…”

Wired Enterprise‘s Caleb Garling continues in his report:

On Monday, trade publication CRN reported that VMware CEO Paul Maritz will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel bigwig who is now president and chief operating officer of storage giant EMC, VMare’s parent company.

The news came just hours after Gigaom reported that VMware is spinning off Cloud Foundry into a new company that wil also oversee Project Rubicon — a joint venture between VMware and EMC that seeks to build another type of cloud builder — and the EMC data analytics outfit Greenplum.

…It’s also unclear how the rumored CEO change is related to Gigaom‘s report that EMC and VMware are spinning off a new cloud company. Citing sources close to the deal, Gigaom reported that the spinoff — which is not yet finalized — would help VMware compete with cloud services offered by Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The bottom line, as Garling writes: VMware’s vSphere’s market share as high as 80 percent, but it is not used by the big cloud players. “Amazon, for instance, uses the open source Xen hypervisor, while Google’s new infrastructure cloud, Google Compute Engine, uses the open source KVM software. Clearly, VMware wanted to stake a claim to the burgeoning cloud market — and apparently, it’s willing to make some major changes to get there.”

VMware’s new CEO, Gelsinger, said Tuesday that VMware would fight more aggressively to provide businesses with tools for managing and automating the use of virtualized servers. Presumably, this includes a big push into virtual networks. Just as virtual servers are servers that exist only as software, virtual networks are networks built with software. The aim to make networks easier to setup and modify — to make them as programmable in the way that servers are programmable, Wired Enterprise reported.

But as Peter Ulander wrote for Cloudline recently  in “Top 5 Things The Cloud Is Not“:

2. Cloud is not server virtualization. Despite what many believe, and what many will tell you, the cloud is not the same as next-gen server virtualization. It doesn’t surprise me that many believe that by virtualizing their data center they will create a private cloud. Some vendors are intentionally trying to blur that line, aiming to convince customers that their vCenter clusters somehow deliver a private cloud. On the contrary, that is a gross exaggeration of the term cloud.

So what’s going on? Is this all hype or is VMware embracing the cloud in a big way going forrward?

So what’s up with all the Windows Azure moves?

Microsoft has a unique ability to do many things at once without making much noise about why. It’s a company that seems defined by the tactics of doing things rather than a comprehensive and clearly defined strategy.

Witness the recent traction it has secured since it hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on its Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in early June, rebooting it as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and an Amazon EC2 competitor:

• It signed the massive electronics and engineering conglomerate Samsung to the Windows Azure cloud for its Smart TV infrastructure. What that will mean for either company isn’t yet clear, at least not to the biz/tech press, but it’s a powerful partnership between two of the largest and most ubiquitous tech companies in the world.
• It expanded its Azure incubator program from Israel to China. It’s a sweet deal for startups that want $60,000 worth of free public cloud computing resources and a serious threat to EC2’s dominance on the international startup scene. TC has a good, comprehensive review of the accelerator program and the companies coming out of it.
• It built Windows Server 2012 with Azure management capabilities so cloud service providers can offer white-label Windows Azure clouds to their clients. This is a strategy that looks more like VMWare’s VCloud Director partnership program than an Amazon EC2 competitor and suggests that Microsoft is once again bundling its products to dominate a nascent market.
• It built Office 2013 to work directly with the cloud, perhaps to better control distribution and the unauthorized copying of its massive moneymaker.

So what does it all mean? Major international partnerships, support for startups, a white-label program and integration with its flagship Office suite. To my mind, it feels like a Kobayashi fuseki, a specific whole-board opening strategy in the game of Go to secure territory as comprehensively as possible. To over-generalize, it’s all about putting your pieces in diverse areas to secure an advantage across the board rather than in a single location.

Microsoft has been doing this in its other products and the subsequent mishmash makes the company look, at least to journalist Kurt Eichenwald, as though it’s had a “lost decade.” Xbox secures a position in gaming, Bing secures a position in search, Surface secures a position in tablets, MSN secures a position in digital content, Microsoft Dynamics GP secures a position in account software, Windows phones secure a position in mobile…the list goes on. None of these products, taken separately, is a leader in its vertical. Winning local territories isn’t Microsoft’s strategy. It’s after the whole board and all the pieces on it.

So it’s no surprise it would continue and refine the strategy when it comes to the public cloud. Microsoft Server and Tools President Satya Nadella put his group’s Azure strategy plainly to partners at a keynote last month in Toronto and influential cloud journalist Charles Babcock caught the significance of his quote:

“We’re delivering the ultimate cloud operating system, the boundary-less data center. There’s no translation of virtual machine formats and we give you a single pane of glass for management,” whether the cloud servers on are on-premises or at a public infrastructure provider, he said.

Winning, for Microsoft, won’t be about beating Amazon or VMware in the specific territories of public cloud computing. No, winning for Microsoft is remaining present in many positions, exerting influence and working on a much, much bigger picture.

(Full disclosure, ScaleXtreme is an Azure partner, we also partner with other public cloud providers).

With Office 365, you’re signed into your Microsoft account, visible at the top right corner of applications. You can see recent documents from your SkyDrive, as seen above in the left column. Image: Courtesy of Microsoft

Wired’s Gadget Lab has gone hands on with Microsoft’s new office suites, and come up with: “Microsoft Office Finally Gets Serious About the Cloud.”

Beyond making Office now “borderline cool,” writes Alexandra Chang, the big deal is in the cloud:

Facing competition from Google Drive and Apple’s iWork/iCloud integration, Microsoft is stepping up its game, making real strides in an Office suite that everyone uses, but no one really enjoys. On Monday, Microsoft officially unveiled Office 2013 and Office 365. With the cloud at center stage and a refreshed design borrowed from the Windows 8 Metro interface, the new Microsoft Office is actually relevant — and enjoyable to use.

Microsoft is finally going beyond the software plus services-model with Office and is going big on the cloud:

In the latest Office suite, Microsoft is introducing a subscription-based cloud service (and thus an entirely new business model). You’ll still be able to purchase the new Office 2013 in the same way you would with previous versions — by paying a one-time fee for the right to use Office forever on a single PC. But now there’s also a revamped Office 365 that you can pay for monthly.

Unlike the current web-based version of Office 365, the new version will allow you to purchase a subscription to the Office 2013 desktop applications as well. And if you buy Office 365, you’ll be able to download the desktop software onto multiple devices. For example, the consumer-facing Office 365 Home Premium lets you download Office on up to five PCs.

“It’s now your Office, not your machine’s Office,” Chris Pratley, General Manager of Microsoft Office Labs, Planning and Design, told Wired. “In the new world, you sign up for Office and your files and data and settings live in the cloud, and get synchronized with any device you own or any device you use, even if you borrow somebody’s device.”

With Office 365, you can sign in with a Microsoft Account at the top-right corner of the application, and it will sync everything from your account. Save your files to SkyDrive, and they will also sync across devices.

Read Gadget Lab’s full hands-on and have your say: Can Microsoft slow the Google Apps invasion?

Just a few years ago, cloud computing was a nearly unheard-of development in IT. Today, many enterprises are interacting with the cloud on a daily basis. A recent North Bridge Venture Partners survey of 785 IT decision-makers reported that 50 percent of users say they are completely confident in the cloud. IDC predicted that by the end of 2012, 80 percent of new commercial enterprise applications will have been deployed on cloud platforms.

Cloud adoption has nowhere to go but up. However, companies still do have hesitations about adoption. The top ones uncovered by North Bridge were security (55 percent) and regulatory compliance (38 percent).

If the CIOs of private enterprises listed security and compliance as their main hesitations about the cloud, imagine how government agencies feel. In fact, until 2011, federal government agencies, which operate under sophisticated IT governance structures, regulations and security requirements, had no official impetus to migrate to the cloud at all. The cost-savings and scalability advantages of the cloud may have been clear, but adoption was hampered by concern that cloud providers couldn’t navigate the government’s unique requirements. Read the rest of this entry →

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is in an early stage of adoption today, particularly in the enterprise space.  As with any early stage technology offering, adopters are most interested in what kind of advantage it offers them.  For PaaS, that advantage usually takes the form of getting a product to market more quickly, a decision increasingly being made by developers and lines of business.  Traditional IT management often finds itself being bypassed in the process, at least until a line of business runs into one of the many sharp objects IT management holds in its hands and wields like a weapon against rogue development teams.  Given the competitive stakes, you can find savvy organizations adapting in various ways, ranging from top-down cloud initiatives to a bottom-up embrace of devops, agile practice, and cultural changes.

Sooner or later the developer-driven urgency to move to PaaS as a time-to-market advantage will give way to those boring but important issues IT management has traditionally been concerned about.  How does it impact my budget?  Can I avoid vendor lock-in?  How do my technology and product choices impact my long-term strategy and obligations?  How can I re-use my existing investments and skills?  And let’s not forget about security!  PaaS vendors – if they’re smart – will think about how to arm their developer and line-of-business advocates with the tools they need to have this conversation with IT management and enterprise architects.

With that in mind, let’s talk about Total Cost of Ownership.  As you might imagine, the gems of real information in the wilds of the Internets are sparsely strewn across a stinking field of vendor-supplied garbage.  There is lots of hotly disputed information on IaaS (e.g., use of Amazon Web Services) versus in-house infrastructure ownership and management, but PaaS TCO information is lacking. Read the rest of this entry →

In its third year, OpenStack needs to move beyond a collection of different efforts into a well-understood and directionally driven platform, writes Haislip. Where do you think it stands? Image: Courtesy of OpenStack

It’s hard to believe that OpenStack is just two years old. I was at lunch last week with a Rackspace executive discussing just that. It seemed incomprehensible that what started as a NASA science project could become such a ubiquitous part of public cloud infrastructure in such a short time.

It is, in large measure, a tribute to the power of open source. OpenStack, in the minds of many, seems the only viable alternative to the proprietary systems of Amazon and VMware VCloud (though the CloudStack folks might offer a different opinion). Beyond RAX, HP and IBM have also thrown their clout behind the OpenStack project and there are thousands of others contributing code, though NASA has dropped off. (Full disclosure: ScaleXtreme’s dev team is a beta user of the RAX OpenStack-powered cloud and reports it performs well and remains stable.) Read the rest of this entry →

Is Collective Intelligence up to the job? Is cloud-based antivirus ready for prime time, and is this time the right time for the “lightweight” security tech? Image: Courtesy of Panda

Panda, which says it was the first to deliver antivirus from the cloud (in 2009), on Monday released Panda Cloud Antivirus 2.0, which its says adds a news disinfection engine, a “community-based firewall”, and 50% faster scans.

Panda’s free cloud-based antivirus has offered what it calls Collective Intelligence technology (see video on how it works), but with 2.0 the service adds behavior-based scanning technologies, which the company says was previously only available in the Pro Edition. Read the rest of this entry →

Who, me? Image: likeaduck/Flickr

We have recently covered one of the weakest links with regards to cloud services uptime: unreliable power. Now it seems there is another more wiley problem: squirrels in the data center!

In fact, Level 3 Communications says squirrels may just be enemy No. 1 in the data center, accounting for “an astounding 17 percent of all of their cable damage last year,” reports Wired Enterprise‘s Bob McMillan.

So, next time you see that a services is down, it could be a squirrel behind you not being able to access your cloud-based customer-relationship management (CRM) tool. “Caddyshack,” anyone?

Are you paying for cloud services that don’t play nice with other services? You’re not getting your money’s worth. Image: Aidan Jones/Flickr

When I tell people my work involves the cloud they often quite reasonably ask: “What is the cloud, anyway?” I explain that — like the web — it is a layer of services built on top of the internet. This often leads to another question: “There’s a difference between the internet and the web?” Yesterday, for example, an acquaintance said that he’d heard the web had something to do with Darpa, but he’d also heard it had something to do with CERN, which was it? Both, I said. The internet, which is the web’s substrate, emerged from Darpa-funded work in the 1970s; the web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990s. The same question came up after a class I taught at Virginia Tech back in April. A student wrote on her blog: “Who knew that the web and the Internet were different things? I thought they were simply interchangeable words.”

Those of us who’ve worked with these technologies for decades know how the layer cake was made. Most people don’t, though, and that’s generally OK. Like other infrastructures on which civilization depends, our data networks shield us from vast complexity while delivering services that we take for granted — except when they sometimes fail. Still, I’ve been asking myself lately what people really ought to know about the internet, the web, and the cloud. It boils down to just two things: standards and services. Knowing about such things matters less in other realms where we are mainly consumers of standards-based services. But when it comes to modern data networks we are also producers of services that are, or anyway should be, based on standards.

Read the rest of this entry →

Filepicker.io now offers a full mobile library for app developers. Image: Courtesy of CloudTop

The winner of this year’s MIT 2012 $100K Entrepreneurship Competition today formally rolled out its Filepicker.io Mobile Library, saying it “enables mobile developers to integrate with multiple cloud storage services through a single software library.”

Cloudtop said its new mobile development library, available at filepicker.io, and designed for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems, would “saves hundreds of hours of engineering effort for developers” by connecting apps to cloud storage without the need to integrate them with each service. Read the rest of this entry →