networking-info

For some reason, this week seems to have more in it than most. While the steady stream of briefing request seem to be increasing, the post briefing discussions also seem to be much more intense. The cloud computing education phase seems to also be morphing into a cloud computing implementation phase. The number of "What is cloud computing?" questions are much fewer while the business case questions are now commanding the most attention. As if to highlight this transition, a Pentagon meeting I had earlier this week really crystallized the following points for me: Although SOA is not a pre-requisite for obtaining value from cloud computing techniques, it does maximize the operational and economic value of using cloud computing technologies. Detailed knowledge of an organizations business processes enhances the operational effectiveness and value of SOA, and by extension, a cloud computing deployment. Cloud computing can open up new avenues for federal acquisition competition. O...

I had discussion with Jim Fowler, the CEO of JigSaw , a couple of weeks back where he walked me through their new offering, Data Fusion , that JigSaw announced today . Data Fusion is a data-as-a-service offering that allows Salesforce.com customers to buy a large list of prospects with detailed verified contact information provided by JigSaw. There are plenty of legal and ethical issues around how JigSaw acquires the business contact information. Michael Arrington does not like JigSaw and Rafe Needleman calls it one of the creepiest products that he has ever seen. I don't want to argue about these ethical and legal aspects. I would let the other people, users, and customers sort that out. I find the idea of acquiring such a list to pre-seed a CRM instance with the vetted data is an interesting one that utilizes data-as-a-service. A pre-seeded CRM instance speeds up the adoption of the tool inside an organization since suddenly sales people start seeing value in the tool and are...

Today I attended a very impressive talk by the Federal CIO, Mr. Vivek Kundra at a Northern Virginia Technology Council Public Policy event. His open and "matter of fact" approach to explaining the coming government IT transformation was focused and direct. After engaging the audience with a personal anecdote about the 9/11 interview in Arlington that catapulted his professional career, he outlined why Virginia was his model for transforming the Federal information technology platform and bureaucracy. In tackling this huge task, his baseline assumptions appear to be as follows: The Federal Government has not done a good job of establishing IT requirements; Private companies have not been held accountable for their failures in delivering IT to the Federal enterprise; and "Faceless accountability" for the failure of Federal IT efforts must become a thing of the past. Another key point was that while recovery of the national economy is a clear priority, it is also impo...

A recent paper by Mike Stonebraker and others compared relational and columnar database in a parallel configuration with MapReduce . The paper concludes that MapReduce is an easy to configure and easy to use option where as the other data stores, relational and columnar databases, pay the upfront price of organizing the data but outperform MapReduce in the runtime performance. This study does highlight the fact that a chosen option does not necessarily dictate or limit the scale as long as the other attributes such as an effective parallelism algorithm, B-tree indices, main-memory computation, compression etc. can help achieve the desired scale. The real issue, which is not being addressed, is that even if the chosen approach does not limit the scale it still significantly impacts the design-time decisions that developers and architects have to make. These upfront decisions limit the functionality of the applications built on these data store and reduces the overall design-agility of t...

A community skirmish reminiscent of the recent " manifestogate " has apparently erupted around the McKinsey & Co. report " Clearing the air on cloud computing ". Booz Allen Hamilton Principals Mike Cameron and Rod Fontecilla have taken the report on with their own analysis. "The McKinsey report, as presented, seeks to be the 'other voice' and offer a contrarian view of cloud computing. The first thing we noted was the statement, on slide 7, that 'Cloud computing can divert IT departments’ attention from technologies that can actually deliver sizable benefits; e.g., aggressive virtualization.' This view seems to be an underlying motif in subsequent discussions, yet it is a premise that is not substantiated." Read all their comments in the Government Cloud Computing e-zine article .

Swooping in from nowhere, Oracle buys Sun for $7.4B !! "This morning, the companies announced that they'd struck a deal worth $7.4 billion or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. Under the terms, Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The arrangement would provide Oracle ownership of Java and Solaris and gives Oracle control of MySQL, in addition to its own flagship database technology ." What a coup for Oracle and a boon for cloud computing!! As a software company focused on transitioning to the SaaS model, Oracle is making a very loud statement with this acquisition. With our SOA-R partners , Northrop Grumman and Appistry , Dataline has already successfully demonstrated an ability to use the Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Beehive on the Amazon EC2 platform (see Cloud Computing: Infrastructure-as-a-Service Demonstration ). As one of the largest Oracle application users, the Federal government will now definitely see Oracle as a viable ...

Although Aneesh Chopra is a new name for most, he is well know in Virginia as Governor Tim Kaine's Secretary of Technology. For the Commonwealth, he was charged with leading the state's strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform. If his strategy for the state can be used as an indicator for his plans in President Obama's administration, you should take a look at Virginia's Strategic Plan for Information Technology . One of the state's most successful recent innovations was the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) , the Commonwealth's consolidated information technology organization. Not your typical government agency, VITA is actually a public-private partnership between Virginia and Northrop Grumman. "The 10-year, $2 billion public-private partnership between VITA and Northrop Grumman is transforming state government's IT infrastructure technology and providing the expertise and resources to support improved delivery of g...

In a recent conference, analyst William Forrest says that large companies could end up paying more than twice as much by using cloud based services. According to a Forbes.com report, Deflating The Cloud , a study focused on a McKinsey & Co. financial services client showed that the financial firm would be paying 150% more for cloud-based services versus owning the infrastructure. "Much of cloud computing's misplaced hype, contends Forrest, comes from the assumption that businesses that make the switch will be able to do away with their entire IT department, an expensive collection of personnel. But in his analysis of McKinsey's financial services client, Forrest found that only around 15% of the company's 1,700 or so IT employees had hands-on access to hardware and software--most worked in support or other administrative areas. That means moving to Amazon's service would only cut about 200 full-time workers, hardly the savings chief information officers might i...

Amazon's design tweaks to its review system has resulted into $2.7 billion of new revenue argues Jared Spool. Other people have also picked up this story with their analysis . I am wary of absolute revenue numbers tied to a feature to derive lost opportunity cost since a variety of other things could have driven the sale. It is wrong to assume that people would not have bought the products had the feature not existed. However I do believe it is a great step in the direction of making the review system more useful and drive more clickthroughs and conversions. Simply the presence of the reviews, magic number 20 in this case , motivates consumers to drill down into the details of a product and its reviews. Amazon has made significant progress in collaborative filtering through their review system and it is an exemplary of a long tail business model. It has helped consumers to gain transparency and has also helped expose issues with the products. This is not enough. As an e-commerce m...

A couple of weeks ago, Krishna Sankar provided a glimpse into Cisco's cloud computing strategy in a presentation titled "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Inter-Cloud" . The presentation outlined the four tenets of Cisco's cloud computing strategy: Build Right Products (Unified Fabric, Unified Compute, Virtualization Aware) Technology (Enhanced IP core with tight coupling to software) Multiphased (Standalone Clouds to Enterprise-Class to Inter-Cloud) Open Standards (Accelerate Cloud deployment and federation through Cloud standards) Services/References SW (Services-led Cloud blueprints with reference software stacks) The presentation also describes and end goal as a time "when enterprise applications can seamlessly move between their internal and external clouds leveraging the elasticity and multi-tenancy that a cloud infrastructure offers". An "Inter-cloud" standards and protocol roadmap is also offered.

As the NCOIC gets it's arms around this new paradigm, the Cloud Computing Working Group has focused on establishing a roadmap for providing value to the industry. Using the established NCOIC Interoperability Framework, Network Centric Analysis Tool and Building Blocks, the working group's way forward will be to: Embrace collaboration with Federal Projects and stakeholders in order to aid their effort to leverage cloud computing across the Federal Government Embrace collaboration with Vendors & standard bodies Work with these organizations on pragmatic cloud projects, as and when appropriate Use Capability and Operational patterns to validate operational impact of cloud interoperability Identify key net-centric operations interoperability requirements and preferences within identified technical patterns Iterate with NCOIC stakeholder companies and government organizations Leverage analysis to drive cloud interoperability recommendations and best practices In developing net...

As reported in multiple sources today, including Reuters , Sun has apparently rejected a purchase offer by IBM. "Shares of Sun Microsystems Inc tumbled 22.5 percent after it rejected a $7 billion buyout bid from IBM, leaving the smaller server and software maker vulnerable to lawsuits from shareholders nervous about its viability as a stand-alone company." Part of the precipitous drop in share price was the realization that IBM-SUN threat to Microsoft dominance may no longer be a possibility. (from Digital Journal ) "But the Sun cloud computing announcement also coincides with IBM's virtual desktop strategy that they brought to market late in 2008, bundling Lotus and other services to effectively strike at Microsoft. The IBM strategy, as reported in eWeek, would not only threaten Microsoft's desktop software, but delivers what many in the hardware manufacturing space have feared - cloud computing for the corporate enterprise IT market." Since Sun probably n...

I was at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco last week. It was not very different from the previous year except that I could see the impact of slow economy - shrinking attendance, less crowded booths, and "Hire Me" ribbons . Tim O'Reilly's keynote was interesting. He said that Web 2.0 was never about the version number (read, he does not like people calling Web 3.0 a successor of Web 2.0). He had the equation Web 2.0 + World = Web Squared. I changed it to Web 2.0 + Cloud = Web 2 . The cloud seems more appropriate and the superscript is much cooler. If this catches on, remember, you read it here first! The biggest shift that I have observed in Web 2.0 is the exponential growth of social media. This was evident at the Web 2.0 expo by looking at the number of participating social computing companies. Web 2.0 is certainly taking the direction of social computing. Tim mentioned in his keynote that the immense data gathered by the sensors and other means have hidden meanin...

Last month, former Transportation Department CIO Dan Mintz offered his views on cloud computing to Eric Chabrow, Managing Editor of Government Information Security . According to Mr. Mintz, there is currently a debate raging within government circles on the safety of the wide use of cloud computing. "We're having a hard time to secure information without the cloud," Mintz says. He goes on to say that processes need to be first developed to determine which information is safe to be accessed over the Internet. As I mentioned in an earlier blog , NIST is actively working that issue right now by drafting a Cloud Computing Security Publication. (Once again I recommend reading Perspectives on Cloud Computing and Standards by Peter Mell and Tim Grance) In the Government Information Security article, Former NSC counter terrorism director Paul Kurtz adds his views on the issue by saying that determining which information is safe to be accessed over the Internet shouldn't be ...

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of presenting at the Sys-con International Cloud Computing Expo in New York City. My presentation, The View from Government Cloud Computing Customers, reviewed findings from the second Government Cloud Computing Survey. Sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton , 1105 Medi a and Dataline, LLC , the purpose of this survey was to validate finding of the October 2008 survey and to see if the significant trends noted then had changed. Here are some of the highlights from the survey. As expected, the respondents were mostly from the Federal government with 51% admitting that they new nothing about cloud computing. Industry respondent were clearly focused on the cloud with 66% claiming that they were very familiar with the topic.  As in the earlier survey, datacenter and capital budget limitations seemed to be the driving force behind the government's interest in cloud computing. As shown in the earlier survey, security remains the number one concern among t...