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In an important industry contribution, The Open Group has published a white paper on how to build and measure cloud computing return on investment (ROI). Produced by the Cloud Business Artifacts (CBA) project of The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group, the document: Introduces the main factors affecting ROI from Cloud Computing, and compares the business development of Cloud Computing with that of other innovative technologie; Describes the main approaches to building ROI by taking advantage of the benefits that Cloud Computing provide; and Describes approaches to measuring this ROI, absolutely and in comparison with traditional approaches to IT, by giving an overview of Cloud Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics In presenting their model, business metrics were used to translate indicators of cloud computing capacity-utilization curves into direct and indirect business benefits. The metrics used include: Speed of Cost Reduction; Optimizing Ownership Use; Rapid Provisioning

This is my second post on my impressions from the Under The Radar conference . Check out the first post on NoSQL . Virtualization is not cloud computing. However virtualization has significant potential when it is used to achieve cloud-like characteristics such as elasticity, economies of scale, accessibility, simplicity to deploy etc. I have always believed that the next wave of cloud computing is going to be all about solving “special” problems on the cloud – I call it a vertical cloud. These vertical problems could be in any domain, technology stack, or industry. Raw computing has come long way. It is about the right time we do something more interesting with the raw cloud computing. Delphix is attempting to solve a specific problem - database virtualization. I met the CEO Kaycee Lai and the VP of sales Jedidiah Yueh at Under The Radar reception the night before. They have great background in understanding the cost and flexibility issues around de-duplication from their days at EMC

It was great to be back at Under The Radar this year. I wrote about disruptive cloud computing start-ups that I saw at Under The Radar last year. Since then the cloud computing has gained significant momentum. This was evident from talking to the entrepreneurs who pitched their start-ups this year. At the conference there was no discussion on what is cloud computing and why anyone should use it. It was all about how and not why. We have crossed the chasm. The companies who presented want to solve the “cloud scale” problems as it relates to database, infrastructure, development, management etc. This year, I have decided to break down my impressions into more than one post. NoSQL has seen staggering innovation in the last year. Here are the two companies in the NoSQL category that I liked at Under The Radar: Northscale was in stealth mode for a while and officially launched four weeks back. Their product is essentially a commercial version of memcached that sits in front of an RDBMS

Sandra Erwin of National Defense magazine just published an excellent article on the Army's foray into developing soldier-friendly smartphone applications.  Giving credit to Army CIO Lt. Gen, Jeffrey Sorenson and Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Sandra describes the services first steps towards the use of smartphones and cloud computing.According to the article, the Army is already planning to outfit 200 soldiers in a Fort Bliss, Texas brigade this year with an iPhone like device. “They’ll have the apps for system maintenance, instruction manuals. … Soldiers will give us feedback and comments on performance of the equipment, Wikipedia-like.” I would also like to thank Sandra for giving me the opportunity to provide my views on this forward leaning move by the Army. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of teaching a Army Knowledge Leaders class on cloud computing.  Being a Naval Academy grad , you can imagine how difficult it is for me to give the Army credit for an

I have been following the Chirp conference today where Evan Williams, who goes by @ev , disclosed Twitter growth numbers in his keynote and shared their pains, gains, and priorities. We all know that Twitter is growing fast – very, very fast – but here is the summary of those numbers that tells us what that growth actually looks like: 105 million registered users and they add 300k uses every day 3 billion API request a day (equivalent to Yahoo traffic) 55 million new tweets every day 600 million search queries every day 175 employees 75% traffic comes from third party clients 60% tweets come from third party clients 100,000 registered apps 180 million unique visitors on Twitter.com (you don’t have to be a user) FlockDB, their social graph database that they just open sourced, stores 13 billion edges They started using “Murder” a new BitTorrent platform to transfer files during development. This reduced the transfer time from 40 minutes to 12 seconds Made deals with 65 (telco) carriers

" [C]loud customers must be able to easily store, access, and process data across multiple clouds; weave together a mesh of different services to meet their needs; and have a way to collaborate with business partners around the globe. Federated clouds – networks of interoperable clouds that work together – will give rise to service grids which can harmonize technologies, business processes and policies to provide support across multiple businesses, industries, and levels of government. Through such a "network of networks" the true potential of cloud computing will be realized.  This is why National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is charged with leading our efforts on standards for data portability, cloud interoperability, and security."   - Vivek Kundra, April 8, 2010 Through NIST, the Federal government will now address cloud interoperability, portability and security in a focused and collaborative manner. To kick this off,  a "Cloud S