Friday, October 31, 2008

The Geotargeted Cloud: Singapore to Offer Cloud Computing Service

Over the last year I've been saying one of the biggest opportunities in cloud computing is in the creation of "regional" compute clouds. These geo-specific sources of capacity which I described in a previous post called "The Geopolitical Cloud" address several fundimental problems with the use of remote infrastructure including network latency, security and accountablity. I believe that governmental agencies and telecoms are in an ideal position to take advantage of this transition to a network based software environment.

For quick refresher, Over the last few months there has been a lot of discuss here in Canada on the topic of hosting data outside of the country (specifically in the US). The topic has recently reached a breaking point when the Canadian government declared that government IT workers not use network services that are operating within United States borders. The reasoning is that Canadian data stored on those servers could conceivably be negatively impacted by the repercussions of the Patriot Act.

Well, now businesses in Singapore and southern Asia will soon be able to draw on their very own commercial, pay-per-use cloud-computing service, as part of a government-driven initiative to promote hosted cloud and grid applications for purposes beyond research.

The three service-provider groups appointed by Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) will activate on-demand access to computing power and software applications, as well as storage and archiving, from 1 November, according to a ZDNet Asia article.

The article goes on to say: the new grid-computing platform, Alatum, will go to market with 20 partners, including Citrix, Haley, IBM WebSphere Commerce, Microsoft, Red Hat and Salesforce.com. (And Enomaly, waiting for a response from their management)

Apart from on-demand applications, such as CRM (customer-relationship management), e-commerce, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and business management, the partnership will also offer 2,400 cores and 16TB of storage as an on demand service.

More details > http://www.alatum.com.sg

Zazzle: Luv the Ruv t-shirt


Kind a strange email waiting for me this morning. It's seems someone over at zazzle.com created a "luv the ruv" t-shirt. No idea why or what. It's kind of funny though.

Although what I really want is the custom skateboard.
They offer an online design tool that allows you to create a professional quality skateboard that ships to you in 24 hours!

Maybe for some upcoming CloudCamp's we'll give away a couple cloud boards.

Press: Start-up tries to connect enterprise IT to the "cloud"

Network world has written a nice article about Enomaly and our focus on the future of cloud computing. Also, just to clarify, Intel is a "backer" as in partner or sponsor of Enomaly, not a investor. The article kind of makes it sound like they invested in us, which they didn't.

Read the article here >
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/103008-enomaly-cloud.html

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Reuven Cohen's Biography

As many of you know I've been working on a cloud computing guide for O'Reilly. As part of this guide all the contributors need to have a biography included. Below is an excerpt of my bio.

--

Born on a kibbutz in Haifa, Israel, Reuven is the somewhat older twin born to a Canadian Father and Swiss Mother. While his early childhood was spent playing in burnt out tanks and bomb shelters, Reuven started at an early age to desire much more. Spending his latter childhood in Montreal and Saint John, and now living in Toronto. Reuven quickly became the product of a craft genius mother and philosophical father. Creative by Nature – Passionate by Design, a (technologist, entrepreneur, artist) was born.

Reuven’s somewhat official career began at the age of 13 as a beta tester for many first generation online services such as AOL version 1 (1991) and ImagiNation (Sierra On-line) online gaming community. By his late teens Reuven had already established himself as preeminent internet programmer and graphic designer being written up in international trade magazines and working for various websites, interactive firms and advertising agencies in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. His walls were filled with only homemade artwork, an easel in place of a television, a cramped bed secondary to a monitor.

Twelve years and more than 600+ websites later, Reuven can be found working with his current start-up Enomaly, and maintains a presence in New York City, San Francisco and Toronto, with clients also in Los Angeles, New Orleans, London, Chicago, Shanghai, Zurich, and Tel Aviv.

--

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Another Outage for Flexiscale

It's a hard, hard, life for a cloud provider, well at least Flexiscale. Looks like Flexiscales bad luck continues with another outage to their platform. This latest outage follows on the heels of their last major storage outage back in August.

This is from the Flexiscale status page >

Update Wed 29th 1745GMT
We have experienced a core network failure and are currently working to restore the platform. The restoration process will necessitate the restarting of all virtual machines, but the integrity of the backend storage has not been compromised.

Further updates will be posted at regular intervals as the work continues.

We are currently experiencing connectivity issues with the Flexiscale platform and are working to resolve them. Further updates will be posted as we make progress.

--

I'll keep you posted as I learn more.

Ruv's 8 Rules for Bootstrapping your Startup

Chatting with my board of advisors this morning I had a realization. Everyday I seem to get a call from some venture capitalist giving some ridiculous piece of advice on how to run my business. I hate to tell you but being 'small and scrappy' has never gone out of fashion. This little piece of news has never been more true then right now.

When I first started Enomaly back in late 2003 I put $20 into brand new invention called "Google Adwords". At the time the service was relatively unknown, and $20 could actually buy you a fair bit of traffic. If I remember correctly, roughly 400 click throughs @ .05 a click. With that $20 investment, I landed our first customer, which was some none profit looking for a scalable content management system for their new website. The project wasn't very big, I think it was $10,000 but I took 30% of the revenue and put it right back into Google Adwords, hired a developer and landing yet another customer and continued this over and over and over.

Five years later, we're still in business, now with millions dollars in revenue, major fortune 500 customers such as Best Buy, Intel, France Telecom, and John Hancock to name a few. To this day I have yet to take a dime in investment. My partners and I own the business with no one other then ourselves and customers to report to.

So What are my tips for bootstrapping in a tough economy?

1. Untraditional Marketing - Back in 2003 adwords was the new thing, today it's twitter, google groups, linkedin, or creating face to face events such as bar camps. In our case we created cloud camp, I'm also writting a Cloud Guide for O'Reilly, I started a Cloud Interoperability Forum, created several linkedin, facebook and google groups and created this blog. There are lots of unique ways to get the attention of your potential customers.

2. The SnowBall Effect - Put your money into things that make you money. I made money using google so I put more money into google. The more money I made, the more I spent in these things that made me money and so on. I also used this same concept in hiring people. Focus on the people who add directly to your bottom line.

3. HR - Don't be afraid to get rid of people who don't share your passion. Make sure to do this in no less then first two weeks of employment. If you can't tell in two weeks, you're not looking hard enough at your new hires. Also, hire people who are smarter then you, but don't let them know they are.

4. Advisors - Make sure to associate yourself and your company with the best advisors you can find. Don't give them too big a stake, but give them something to keep them involved. I typically find people who have had a big exit or have a similar bootstrapping background. Basically people who get me, but are going to give me an honest opinion.

5. Deals & Partners - Make deals with as many partners as you can. Use the spagetti appraoch, the more partners you have the more potential you have for some of those deals to actually work out. (Most partners will never result in any kind of customer acquisition)

6. Risks - Take risks, specially in times of economic uncertainty. We've spent almost 1 million dolalrs of our own building our ECP platform. This money could have easily gone into my pocket. Those new porsche's are sweet.

7. Talk - Talk to any and everyone, including to VC's but, don't talk too much.

8. Enjoy Life - Bill Flag said it best, Enjoy the freedom from not having investors, not constantly raising money, and not feeling crappy about missing projections. (and best of all not having to talk to another VC).

CloudCamp Federal (Washington) - Nov 12, 2008

The next CloudCamp event will be held just outside of our nation's capital. Dubbed "CloudCamp Federal" this "unconference" is scheduled for November 12, 2008 from 3-9 pm in Chantilly, VA at the Apptis Conference Center:

4800 Westfields Blvd
Chantilly, VA 20151

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

Registration is available now at http://www.cloudcamp.com/dc

I'm in The Economist Special Report on Cloud Computing

I'm Famous, or acknowledged in the Economist magazine anyway. A few people have point out that I'm listed in the Sources and acknowledgments section of the The Economist Special Report on Cloud Computing. I read through the articles and couldn't find any specific quotes, but I suppose being listed as a source is pretty good.

On a side note. I'm not sure if I agree with this paragraph

the cloud craze may have peaked already, if the number of Google searches is any guide (see chart 1). Cloud computing is bound to go through a “trough of disillusionment”, as Gartner, a research firm, calls the phase in the hype cycle when technologies fail to meet expectations and quickly cease to be fashionable. Much still needs to be invented for the computing sky to become truly cloudy.


If you look at other technology trends, like Virtualization, SOA or Utility computing, you'll see that much like the stock market trends goes up and down. For cloud computing, the trend is still very much in an upswing. Given the amount of news from various vendors this week, I think we'll continue to see this movement increase in poplularity. Why buy server infrastructures, this is specially important in though economic climates where every dollars counts. Cloud computing is the ideal way to save on your CAPEX.

If you're interested in reading the Economist's Cloud report, please visit one of the articles listed below.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The Cohesive Cloud

The team of at CohesiveFT have launched a great new product called VPN-Cubed, which they describe as the first commercial solution that enables customer-controlled security in a cloud, across multiple clouds, and between the physical data center and cloud(s). I haven't had a chance to dig too deep yet.

I have call with Pat Kerpan and his team on Friday. I'll be able to give you more details afterward. But in the mean time, check out there product page at : http://www.cohesiveft.com/vpncubed

Monday, October 27, 2008

Why is Sun hiding behind a cloud

This is a message for Sun Microsystems. Where is your cloud strategy? You've had a several year head start, yet still we see nothing? Microsoft, Amazon and Google are eating your lunch, dinner and midnight snack. You have Java, MySQL, Solaris, network.com and some of the best engineers on the planet. What's the deal?

You can't make clouds with out the Sun™.

-
As a completely random cloud fact, Saturn's moon Titan has clouds which are believed to be composed largely of droplets of liquid methane. The Cassini-Huygens Saturn mission has uncovered evidence of a fluid cycle on Titan, including lakes near the poles and fluvial channels on the surface of the moon. Cool huh.

AWS Sales breakdown for Q3 2008

Amazon has never been very forth coming about their AWS sales and growth numbers, So the best we have to go on is there SEC filings. You'll notice that they have a line item called "Other (1), which includes non-retail activities, such as Amazon Enterprise Solutions (AWS), co-branded credit card agreements, and miscellaneous marketing and promotional activities. Amazon's "other" net sales for Q3 is outlined as 130million with consolidatd a growth rate of 43% year over year campared to last years 92m or 39% growth rate. They've outlined 367m for the first 9 months of 2008.

Interesting stuff.

Supplemental information about our net sales is as follows:




















Three Months Ended
September 30,


Nine Months Ended
September 30,



2008

2007

2008

2007


(in millions)

(in millions)

Net Sales:

















North America

















Media


$ 1,245

$ 1,081

$ 3,599

$ 2,995

Electronics and other general merchandise



950


631


2,697


1,801

Other (1)



107


76


301


216

















Total North America


$ 2,302

$ 1,788

$ 6,597

$ 5,012

















International

















Media


$ 1,249

$ 1,010

$ 3,845

$ 2,919

Electronics and other general merchandise



690


448


1,955


1,195

Other (1)



23


16


66


37

















Total International


$ 1,962

$ 1,474

$ 5,866

$ 4,151

















Consolidated

















Media


$ 2,494

$ 2,091

$ 7,444

$ 5,914

Electronics and other general merchandise



1,640


1,079


4,652


2,996

Other (1)



130


92


367


253

















Total consolidated


$ 4,264

$ 3,262

$ 12,463

$ 9,163

















Year-over-year Percentage Growth:

















North America

















Media (2)



15 %

38 %

20 %

28 %

Electronics and other general merchandise



51


54


50


57

Other



41


22


40


18

Total North America



29


42


32


37

International

















Media (2)



24 %

33 %

32 %

30 %

Electronics and other general merchandise



54


54


64


47

Other



49


410


78


216

Total International



33


40


41


35

Consolidated

















Media (2)



19 %

36 %

26 %

29 %

Electronics and other general merchandise



52


54


55


53

Other



42


41


45


30

Total consolidated



31


41


36


36

Year-over-year Percentage Growth:

















Excluding the effect of exchange rates

















International

















Media (2)



18 %

27 %

22 %

25 %

Electronics and other general merchandise



48


45


52


38

Other



52


379


71


194

Total International



28


33


31


29

Consolidated

















Media (2)



17 %

32 %

21 %

27 %

Electronics and other general merchandise



49


51


51


49

Other



43


39


44


29

Total consolidated



28


38


31


33

Consolidated Net Sales Mix:

















Media



59 %

64 %

60 %

64 %

Electronics and other general merchandise



38


33


37


33

Other



3


3


3


3

















Total consolidated



100 %

100 %

100 %

100 %

















(1) Includes non-retail activities, such as Amazon Enterprise Solutions, our co-branded credit card agreements, and miscellaneous marketing and promotional activities.
(2) Year-over-year percentage growth rates include the effects of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. We sold 2.5 million copies during Q3 2007.

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