We are very proud to present the EuroCloud Portugal work plan for 2010, please read it here: EuroCloud Portugal work Plan.
We will add to it more details very soon, we are working very hard on the EuroCloud Portugal Call For Business and CloudViews – Cloud Computing Conference 2010 and we hope to be able to introduce them at the 20th of February.
As all of you already know it, the cloudviews project is actively working on the organization of the EuroCloud Portugal association. And as result of our work we proudly announce that Eurocloud Portugal will have its public presentation in two sessions that will take place in Lisbon and Porto. The Lisbon session will be on January 21st at the LNEG auditorium and the Porto session will be on January 22nd at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto auditorium. On both sessions, we will have presentations on the Cloud Computing paradigm made by IDC and presentations made by companies that already have their businesses focused on Cloud Computing. For additional information please use: http://tiny.cc/EuroCloudPortugalPublicPresentation
EuroCloud Portugal would like also to welcome Microsoft as its sponsor. EuroCloud Portugal is sponsored by IBM, EMC and Microsoft.
New applications developed under the all-in-one cloud umbrella (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) have several responsibilities that are often referred by IT specialists: They need to be more agile, create new markets and reach far more customers, help lowering Total cost of ownership (TCO), create new business models, etc, etc, etc. than their Off-the-shelf older cousins.
In this large umbrella I’m specially interested in business applications that are used by normal users (non techies). These type of applications have another responsibility: They need to change the way non-IT users perceive and use business software.
I state this because when I talk to friends, coworkers and even family about their use of business software I always have the feeling that they hate working with them (ERPs for example). These users too often become angry users that avoid working with software for as long as they can. Many times they tell me that these business aplications are difficult to use, have too many options (that clutter the user interface) and fail too many times. Some of them even have found ways to taken advantage from software bugs so they can get around some limitations in this systems.
Besides being an IT guy, I’m also an user and to be honest too many times I have the same feelings.
In the cloud ecosystem we already see some players that serve as a good example of transforming these angry users in happy ones. One of them is 37 signals. Their release of basecamp some years ago helped users to move from big systems (like Microsoft Project) to a clean and simpler approach of “less is more” in the project management area.
Interesting articles I’ve read this week:
Cloud computing and the return of the platform wars:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=303&tag=nl.e539
How enterprise software giants separate you from more of your company’s money:
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/23/big-software-has-duped-us-for-decades-part-i/
SaaS Competitive Advantage – SaaS Economics 101 e-Book:
http://chaotic-flow.com/2009/05/04/saas-competitive-advantage-saas-economics-101-e-book/
The emerging case for open business methods:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=218
Tags: Cloud Computing, SaaS
For the past two months, although it has been very difficult to continue the writing, the CloudViews.Org has not stopped its work. As we promised in our ending notes on the CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference 2009 the main subject for 2010 will be Interoperability, but before we start thinking on the layout of the new event we have to clarify some organizational issues. We want to use the base layout of 2009’s event but we have to articulate it with other projects that we are planning. All the projects will have as main goal to promote and help moving forward the Cloud Computing paradigm in an open and free way, but as I think all of you are able to imagine that is something not very easy to achieve.
On the writing side of CloudVIews.Org we already have some posts which are almost finished and ready to publish, but the subjects are so many and with the ideas flowing on the same path it’s becoming very hard to select the ones to finish first. If you want to continue your readings I leave here some of the sites and subjects that I’ve been occupied with and that have captured my attention:
So please stay tuned and as an appetizer here are some titles of next posts (not necessarily in this order):
IT news from Australia is presenting a work made by the UNSW School of Computer Science. In this study they try to verify if the Cloud is as the Vendors are claiming that it is: elastic, reliable, dynamic, fault tolerant, high available..
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/153451,stress-tests-rain-on-amazons-cloud.aspx
These are very interesting points and independent tests are fundamental to create trust among Cloud users and providers.
Although I think this kind of test should be more focused on specific applications. As studies show, some of the potential problems found on the Cloud could be solved by the developers.
Using these ideas as starting point I’m working on a project that should be presented as a parallel event on the CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference – 2010. This project, and the whole CloudViews.Org Cloud Computing Conference 2010 will be presented very soon, but If any one is interested in these topics, feel free to contact me directly.
Amazon has introduced today the new AWS Virtual Private Cloud service, more details on it could be found here: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc
On the follow up of this new service, some doubts have arisen about the real type of the cloud built with this new service, and also if this kind of cloud could even be difined as Private Clouds.
Using the NIST definition:
” Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise. ”
It’s very clear, a Private Cloud could be on premise or off premise. The next question is what should be considered the premises of the cloud. Should it be the wall of the datacenter, the box of the server or the VM where the OS is running? For one company their premises could be a single room, whereas to another it could be the entire building, in the cloud computing paradigm the private cloud is, in my perspective, a sandbox, which has boundaries well definite and on which we trust. These boundaries are the set of features that are available (CPU, network, storage, development API, etc) and the trust comes by means of contracts, cloud provider reputation, etc…
It’s easy to understand that this kind of definition are not closed to discussion, but in my prespective, the service introduced by Amazon should be consider a very interesting tool to build effective Private Clouds.
Tags: amazon, IT Departments
Maria Spinola
Recent Comments