There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend.

With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming.

We’ve assembled a list of ten private cloud companies that we think are particularly intriguing — focused on massive opportunities and leading the disruption in the sector they’re targeting.

Any venture capitalist would be psyched to have invested early into this portfolio of ten. Frankly, there are hundreds of exciting companies that could have made this list — we’ve seen and like a lot of them — but as editors, we’ve forced ourselves to winnow it down to ten. Seven companies on the list improve the way things work in the enterprise. Three give consumers better services via the cloud. VentureBeat has covered all of them fairly recently.

On top of this, with our first-annual CloudBeat 2011 conference coming up quite soon, this is be a great time to show off some of the innovators. Many of them, including Box.net, Workday and Zendesk, will be represented at the conference. You can sign up here.

Here are the ten cloud companies:

Box.net
Led by young, charismatic CEO Aaron Levie, Box.net is a leading provider of cloud storage services for the enterprise. To date, the company has more than 7 million users and 77 percent of the Fortune 500 have deployed its service in some form.

Box recently raised a recent $81 million extension round of funding, and also has launched the Box Innovation Network, a network for third-party developers who work on enterprise apps. The Innovation Network includes strategic partners including Heroku, Rackspace, Cloud Foundry (a division of VMWare), Appcelerator, SnapLogic, and Twilio. We eat our own dog food too. VentureBeat uses Box and couldn’t be happier. We can save our docs — any kind of docs — in a single place, and share everything easily.

Dropbox
Cloud storage startup Dropbox is on quite a roll. It now has over 45 million users in 175 countries that save upwards of a billion files every three days and the company just closed a $250 million round of funding in mid-October. A report earlier in the year suggested the company was valued a staggering $5 billion.

While the company had a widely reported security snafu back in June, Dropbox’s basic philosophy of helping consumers (and businesses) with file management and syncing folders across computers and mobile devices is catching on. The service said recently that it is on track to triple its user base by the end of this year. It’s often considered comparable to Box.net, and we also use Dropbox for some of our files. Its user interface is incredibly simple. But we went with Box company-wide because of its focus on the enterprise and security features. Dropbox, amusingly, declares it is not a cloud company, and is going after the consumer and small business (not enterprise). But we’re calling it a cloud company anyway.

Evernote
Multi-platform note-taking service Evernote helps its customers with keeping notes organized and synced across various operating systems. Super easy, and pretty fun to see it in action. It has a community of over 5,000 third-party application developers and offers apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, Mac, and more.

Back in June, Evernote reached 10 million registered users, with more than 400,000 of those customers paying $5 a month for a premium plan that enables bigger uploads and better collaborative tools. The company has raised $95.5 million in total funding to date, with a $50 million round in July.

Marketo
Marketo is a marketing automation firm that offers software and services focused on improving and managing sales lead generation. While that might sound a little dull, it’s a surprisingly fast growing and important type of service that can help enterprise sales teams succeed. The company also recently launched Spark by Marketo, a lead-generation engine for small businesses rather than its typical enterprise and mid-size clients. The company has raised $107 million to date, with its most recent round this month worth $50 million.

In the marketing automation category, we also want to give a shout out to Eloqua, the SaaS company that filed for an estimated $100 million IPO in August. The company helps its clients with clients with analytics to help predict revenue performance and its IPO, which could happen in the next few months, could help validate just how important and big marketing automation is right now.

OnLive
OnLive is easily the most consumer-focused cloud company on this list and that’s OK because it’s pretty freaking cool. The company uses to cloud to provide games in an on-demand fashion over the web, allowing users to play A-class titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution straight from the web with no locally stored content.

Its service has been available in the U.S. about a year and in mid-September OnLive launched in the U.K. with more than 150 games. The service is available on web-connected TVs, PCs, Macs and tablets. OnLive has raised $56.5 million, with $40 million coming from HTC.

Panzura
Panzura equips enterprises with cloud storage hardware that’s faster, more advanced and more secure than typical “tier 1″ storage solutions. The company’s aim is to simplify the way file-based storage is deployed, managed, and protected using its multi-site file system and PanzuraOS. Additionally, it emphasizes its ability to encrypt data so it can be sent over networks safely. It scored a $12 million round last December, with funding led by Khosla Ventures.

RightScale
RightScale takes a software-as-a-service approach to cloud file management with a browser-based interface to help businesses manage their cloud networks without having to physically interact with servers. Its service is built on top of Amazon’s cloud and incorporates third-party apps like Alfresco. Its customers include Zynga, A&E, Patheos, Loggly, Coupa and Break.com. The company has raised about of $43 million total so far, with a $25 million round in September 2010.

Tidemark
Tidemark came out of stealth mode in October with its take on cloud-based enterprise performance management apps. Its apps help decipher critical enterprise data and extract information that can help managers, strategists, operations planners and forecasters with judging business performance and overall health. CEO Christian Gheorghe told us previously that business intelligence hasn’t kept up with the advances of the cloud, but Tidemark helps solve that problem. The company has raised a total of $11 million in two rounds, with backing from the likes of Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.

Workday
Workday provides more than 230 companies with cloud services for human resources, payroll and financial management. Although it could be considered a “cloud 1.0″ style SaaS, Workday’s depth of customers and resources are impressive — those 230 companies account for more than 2 million users. It helps accommodate users through most web browsers and in mobile with native applications for iPad and iPhone. The company has raised an eye-popping $250 million total, with its most recent $85 million funding round happening in October. The company is reportedly valued at $2 billion and will most likely go public in the next year.

Zendesk
Zendesk provides on-demand help desk services that greatly assist with managing customer support, including tools like email-ticket integration, online forums and widgets. In August, the service opened a new office in Denmark and gave several startup incubators its customer support software to build word of mouth and goodwill.

In September, the company launched the Twilio-powered Zendesk Voice, which lets customers set up cloud-based call centers for much less money than old-school call centers. The company has raised $25.5 million in three rounds of funding, with a $19 million round in December 2010.

Cloud photo via Kevin Dooley/Flickr

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike any other cloud events, we’ll be focusing on 12 case studies where we’ll dissect the most disruptive instances of enterprise adoption of the cloud. Speakers include: Aaron Levie, Co-Founder & CEO of Box.net; Amit Singh VP of Enterprise at Google; Adrian Cockcroft, Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix; Byron Sebastian, Senior VP of Platforms at Salesforce; Lew Tucker, VP & CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco, and many more. Join 500 executives for two days packed with actionable lessons and networking opportunities as we define the key processes and architectures that companies must put in place in order to survive and prosper. Register here. Spaces are very limited!

Filed under: cloud, enterprise

Although it appears significant venture capital investment in Platform-as-a-Service startups is drawing to a close, Boulder, Colo.-based Standing Cloud was able to raise another $3 million, it announced on Thursday. The money comes from existing investors Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures, bringing Standing Cloud’s total investment to $8 million. The company likely can thank its unique spin on PaaS for keeping it in investors’ good graces.

Unlike more-popular PaaS options such as Heroku or Microsoft Windows Azure, Standing Cloud isn’t so much about automation and scalability as it is about choice. Developers choose the infrastructure cloud on which they want to deploy (you name it; Standing Cloud supports it); build their application stack (i.e., web servers, database, programming language, etc.); port their code; then launch their server. Standing Cloud also hosts a variety of open-source applications that customers can choose to launch, as well, which takes the platform into SaaS territory. It’s not as sexy as what some other PaaS providers are doing, but it’s very functional and probably very approachable for a large number of small businesses.

At this point, though, PaaS is becoming passé, at least with regard to general-purpose platforms for hosting web applications. It’s not that PaaS adoption has peaked — far from it, actually — but that the market seems to be getting saturated with regard to how many platforms it can support. Heroku, Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Amazon Elastic BeanStalk and Red Hat’s OpenShift are all backed by the deep pockets of public companies. In the startup realm, DotCloud, AppFog and CloudBees are all operating with double-digit-millions in funding and are regularly expanding their capabilities. Then there’s Standing Cloud, the similarly application-focused BitNami and veteran Engine Yard.

Assuming the world doesn’t need dozens of PaaS offerings — there are only a handful of legacy application platforms that PaaS providers are trying to displace, after all — it’s hard to imagine what investors would have to see to find a new PaaS investment worthwhile. Maybe it’s a focus on a new breed of social and mobile developers, or a business model that blends SaaS and PaaS in such a manner as to make those labels irrelevant. Thankfully for anyone trying to build those next-generation platforms, projects such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry help eliminate the need to invest in foundational PaaS capabilities so companies can just focus on differentiation.

But when it comes to broad platforms targeting applications generally, it seems investors have picked their horses and are backing them to the finish line. Hopefully, that means a wave of innovation to push the cloud platform discussion to the next level.

Image courtesy of Standing Cloud.

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Video editing startup WeVideo is launching a new product that will enable organizations to use its collaborative editing products in the cloud. The WeVideo Commercial product is aimed at bloggers, journalists, marketers and other video creators who wish to easily edit, manage and publish videos from a single online platform.

By putting editing in the cloud, WeVideo is taking advantage of cloud-based processing power to eliminate the need for expensive editing hardware and software. It’s also betting on collaborative editing, which allows multiple editors to make changes and to approve videos before they go live.

The platform offers a suite of tools that match most prosumer video editing software packages, and it comes with a set of royalty-free audio clips, transitions and graphics. Since all editing is done in a web browser, the platform is agnostic to the device it’s being edited on, whether it’s Mac or PC — and it can even be used to edit on smartphones and tablets when connected to the Internet. WeVideo is also agnostic as to the source file or publishing destination.

Once completed, videos can be published on a corporate website, as well as popular destination sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. WeVideo also incorporates social sharing tools to let users publish or embed videos on social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

WeVideo operates on a freemium model, and it already offers a free, consumer-based product, which it launched at the Demo conference in September. It’s also available to YouTube users as a way to edit videos directly on that site. With the launch of WeVideo Commercial, it’s giving enterprise users a much greater amount of storage (50 GB), as well as up to 1080p video resolution and 24-hour support for $79 a month.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social mediaPlayers and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream AdvertisingManaging infinite choice: the new era of TV user interfaces

The Open Compute battery cabinet.

The Facebook-led Open Compute Project launched a foundation Thursday to help it push the standardization of data center server hardware for webscale deployments. But as the project evolves it’s still hard to see where Facebook ends and Open Compute begins.

Leave the chassis to Open Compute and build something new.
The goal of the new Open Compute Foundation is to bring more vendors and voices into the mix, make sure their contributed intellectual property is well cared for, and to foster the idea that open-source development — so important in software — can benefit the stodgy world of data center servers. At the  Open Compute Project (OCP) launch in April, Facebook laid out building blocks for standard server designs. The idea is that other companies could build and innovate atop those designs and not waste time sweating the nuts and bolts.

“The main thing we want to achieve is accelerating the pace of innovation for scale computing environments and by open sourcing some of the base elements we will enable the industry in general to stop spending redundant brain cycles on things like re-inventing the chassis over and over and over and focus more on innovation,” Frankovsky said in an interview in advance of the foundation announcement. The effort will turn the data center, systems level and server hardware into commodity components designed for scaled out architectures.

The group has big backers with foundation directors including Silicon Valley superstar Andy Bechtolsheim who co-founded  Sun Microsystems and is now chief development officer of Arista Networks. Also on the board are Don Duet, head of global technology infrastructure for  Goldman Sachs;  Mark Roienigk, the COO of Rackspace; and Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s data center group. Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s director of hardware and supply chain, is executive director.

What’s inside Open Compute today and planned for tomorrow.
Along with the creation of the foundation, Facebook announced the Open Rack 1.0 specification, which lays out the basic design for power distribution and cooling for the server rack. That spec will evolve over time, integrating such perks as rack-level power capping, and I/O on the backplane at some point, Frankovsky said.

Also on Thursday ASUS said it will open-source its motherboard designs and Mellanox plans to release specifications for 10 Gigabit Ethernet cards. So far the OCP effort has received intellectual property contributions from Red Hat– which will certify OCP servers. Other contributions came from AMD, Dell, and Cloudera. Arista Networks is also now an official member of OCP, although has no specific contributions to announce at this time.

The OCP  has also moved to make OCP hardware more broadly available, working with Synnex, a computer distributor and its manufacturing arm, Hyve, which will act as a hardware OEM. Silicon Mechanics, a maker of rack-mount servers, is also aboard. When the effort launched in April Dell and Hewlett-Packard  both showed off servers that incorporated some of the elements of Open Compute.

 Open Compute Foundation, born of Facebook, still pretty close
The Open Compute chassis.

The fact that a Facebook executive doubles as the foundation’s executive director is bound to raise some eyebrows if OCP wants to shake the perception that it is an effort directed by the social networking giant.  Other open-source projects, notably the Eclipse effort around Java development environments, really hit their stride only after the lead vendor relinquished control. (In Eclipse’s case, that was IBM.) More recently, Rackspace eased some concerns among the OpenStack software crowd by forming an OpenStack Foundation, and vowing to step back.

“We modeled this as closely as possible on the Apache Foundation. Each project starts at an incubation committee which names a lead and [is eventually] voted in or out as a project,” Frankovsky said. “I have one-fifth vote. If the others don’t think it’s cool, it’s not in.”

Frankovsky said the effort is well-funded for now through voluntary seed contributions but the funding model remains a work in process.

What’s next for OCP?
As for what’s next? Frankovsky said the first round of motherboards were based on Intel’s Westmere chip technology while version two will be based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge technology. “Intel and Hyve will do a fast-ramp program,” he said.  OCP has worked to get early access to Sandy Bridge technologies that would otherwise not be available until the second quarter.

Facebook itself is working on some storage specifications it would like to  talk about for its next round of contributions. “Storing data at this scale has some unique challenges. We’ll work on those contributions and with the rest of the community on this,” he said.

The OCP remains focused on the compute platform itself, although Frankovsky didn’t rule out possible future forays into other parts of the data center universe.

Asked if networking was on the agenda, he said:  ”Andy Bechtolsheim has a lot of interest in networking but for now we’ve excluded networking from Open Compute. There’s already ONF [the Open Networking Foundation] and we don’t want to compete, but if the community thinks we should look at the physical layer of Open Compute, that’s a possibility.”

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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightBig Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars

Apple’s highly anticipated iCloud consumer cloud service went live last week in a debut marred by snafus that show that cloud providers still have some kinks to work out.

In short: Consumers are ready for the cloud–Apple claims 20 million iCloud adopters in just five days–but the clouds may not all be completely ready for consumers when it comes to easing the transition of on-device data to the cloud.

Expectations are high–especially when massive ad campaigns like Microsoft’s “to the cloud” commercials and Amazon’s new Kindle Fire device/Silk browser tandem make all this cloud stuff seem so easy.

But with iCloud roll-out glitches and worries that consumer clouds in general pose huge potential privacy issues, the cloud providers need to get their acts together.

Issue one: Moving stuff from device to cloud
The promise of iCloud is it will let consumers easily store their data—iTunes music, photos, etc.—on Apple’s cloud infrastructure. That data would then be available to them on all of their devices.

The problem is, last week (and even today for some customers)  iCloud often didn’t recognize existing Apple users with more than one Apple ID or who had shared IDs. Most impacted were customers that had used Apple’s older MobileMe service, which saw its own share of woes when it debuted three years ago.

Rule of thumb: Moving data from local devices to the cloud has to be drop-dead easy or you’ll see things like the  ”Is iCloud completely worthless?” discussion cropping up on Apple’s support forums and #iCloud #Fail threads on Twitter. Not the sort of glowing reviews Apple tends to get.

Complaints about iCloud’s inability to recognize or handle existing Apple IDs surfaced soon into the October 12 launch and persist today.

Clearly, in the iCloud case, sheer volume is an issue. Twenty million people is a lot to handle in five days, but execution counts big-time in the consumer space. So any vendor launching consumer-oriented services needs to assess initial demand carefully and make sure the infrastructure can carry the load.

Issue Two: Keeping your stuff intact
Another complaint from early iCloud adopters is that the installation process took their apps right off their local devices. That can be unsettling to say the least. As my GigaOM colleague Darrell Etherington explained in his Q&A with The Washington Post:

The fact that the installation removes the apps from your device is one of the most common complaints I’ve seen about the update. As to why Apple did things this way, I’m not sure, but it may be that the underlying code is changed in such a way that app folders and organization couldn’t be preserved. My only advice would be to re-organize apps in the way you want using iTunes, since it’s faster than trying to recreate your folders and home screens on your device.

Consumers who have been inundated with hype about how the cloud will make it easier/cheaper/better for them to store and view their stuff have high expectations. And that goes far beyond Apple iCloud issues.

Users need to be informed that their stuff — their digital photos, for example — will look the same now that it’s sourced from the cloud. Or if it will look different — if photos get resized — why that is. Transparency is key for users who do not have IT staffs to guide them.

PC users need to know up front if iCloud will support their devices and, on the flip side, if Microsoft’s Windows Live services support Apple devices. It’s all about meeting expectations and not ticking off customers who can be very vocal on Twitter, Facebook and other social sites about their discontent.

Issue Three: Data privacy/protection in the cloud
Questions about how user data will be stored and protected in these vast consumer clouds have percolated for months and surged on news that Amazon’s new Silk browser will use customer data to predict where a given user will go next on-line. The stated goal is to speed the browsing/shopping experience, but just what data is being aggregated, how it will be used and if and how it will be shared raised all sorts of red flags.

That omniscient nature of Amazon Silk (which ships with Amazon’s new Kindle Fire reader), raised a lot of eyebrows, including some in Washington D.C. Congressman Edward Markey  (D-Mass) fired off a letter late last week to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Markey wants Amazon to specify what customer information it collects; how that data will be used; how customer privacy will be protected; and if and how customers can opt out of the whole process.

So, while consumer clouds are supposed to be as easy as falling off a log for the actual users, making them that easy is very, very hard for the cloud providers. They’ll probably get there, but there have clearly been some misteps at the start.

Image courtesy of Flickr user akakumo.

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Cloud-based DNA-sequencing specialist DNAnexus has closed a $15 million second round led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech. Elsewhere, we learned Wednesday that agribusiness giant Monsanto has deployed Cloudant’s NoSQL database as the underpinning of the company’s genomics system. Big data technologies, it seems, can now include biotech — and genomics, specifically — among their many killer apps.

Innovation blowing past Moore’s Law
In a recent interview, DNAnexus Co-Founder and CEO Andreas Sundquist explained the opportunity he sees for his company’s services, which include cloud-based storage and processing of DNA-sequencing data. The problem and the opportunity genomics researchers face is that innovations in the field are “outpacing Moore’s Law,” he said, which has resulted in the cost of a DNA profile being pretty much on par with that of any other standard medical test. Soon, everyone will have DNA profiles as part of their medical records.

This “will change the way medicine is done” and could grow into a hundred-billion-dollar market, he explained, but it also will result in lots of data generation: hundreds of gigabytes per person. Whereas the high-end research facilities might have access to high-performance computing and storage necessary to perform DNA sequencing, the hospitals that will now be doing those analyses on a regular basis certainly will not.

And that’s where Sundquist thinks a service such as DNAnexus becomes indispensable. Leveraging the storage capacity and processing power of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Storage, his company provides sequencing facilities and researchers with the infrastructure and the software to run the analyses and display the results. Because of its investment relationship with Google and the sheer scale of its operations on AWS, Sundquist said DNAnexus actually works very closely with both companies.

However, unlike some areas where analytics are primarily focused on algorithms because access to storage is just a matter of buying more commodity gear, capacity is still a big issue in genomics. By using the cloud, Sundquist said DNAnexus lets customers share and collaborate on data without actually transferring hundreds to thousands of gigabytes.

It also helps with DNAnexus’ latest undertaking: hosting the Short/Sequence Read Archive. The comprehensive set of sequencing data was hosted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information but was slated for sunsetting because of budget cuts.

That database is currently at about 400TB, but Sundquist says that’s just the tip of the iceberg. He said DNAnexus has actually “blown past” analyzing data at the Hadoop/MapReduce scale and is now focusing on parallelizing computation across 100,000 nodes and scaling its storage infrastructure into the exabyte range.

Genomics aren’t just for humans
Say what you will about Monsanto’s business in genetically engineering food, but it does involve high science on par with DNA sequencing in humans and presents many of the same data problems. That’s why Monsanto deployed Cloudant’s BigCouch database as the focal point of its massively distributed genomics system.

According to Mike Miller, co-founder and chief scientist of Boston-based Cloudant, NoSQL offerings such as his company’s CouchDB-based product are actually ideal for the genomics space because they allow for cheap, horizontal scalability and high throughput. Cloudant is particularly well-suited, he explained, because of the incremental MapReduce engine built into BigCouch.

Miller compares it to Google Percolator, the data-processing framework Google recently deployed to replace its legacy MapReduce system. Whereas traditional MapReduce implementations such as that found in Hadoop are designed for batch processing, Percolator and Cloudant’s MapReduce implementation enable near-real-time analysis because they let users process data as it enters the system and update the dataset accordingly.

This is important for Monsanto because BigCouch isn’t just an analytics system, but an operational database serving a wide variety of users. Some users who aren’t data scientists, but consumers of the data, need up-to-date information and must rely on the system to provide it.

Ultimately, Miller paints a picture of DNA sequencing very similar to what DNAnexus’ Sundquist does. Innovation is rampant, but data growth is outpacing the ability to analyze it, making faster, cheaper and more scalable data systems integral to leveling the playing field. If they can help bridge the gap between the data and the algorithms to analyze it, Miller says, “We’re going to see things in the space beyond our wildest dreams.”

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user micahb37.

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Cloud storage provider Box.net today announced it has closed an $81 million extension to its fourth round of funding, which includes new investors New Enterprise Associates and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The new round gives Box.net, which has evolved into a provider of back-end storage on remote servers for enterprise applications, a lot of cash to make a mad grab in what has become a land rush in the enterprise software space. Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie said the funding will go toward research and development, staffing and other kinds of “marketable” expansion plans. That’s the kind of expansion that’s highly visible and makes it obvious that the company is growing quickly.

Box.net’s latest round gives the company a valuation well north of $600 million, compared to recent filings that suggest the company is worth around $550 million. Earlier this year, Levie turned down a buyout offer for the company that was worth $500 million, as we reported in October, before the company’s first Boxworks conference based in San Francisco, Calif.

In addition to expanding the company’s research and development, Box.net is also starting the “innovation network,” a third-party development community of sorts that uses Box.net as a storage back-end for enterprise applications. Levie said he hopes that any enterprise application developer — large or small — can walk in with his or her specific application and wrap it around Box.net’s cloud storage. Levie wouldn’t disclose any new details about the financial agreements the company would make with developers, but those should emerge sometime later this year.

Box.net will also build a third data center for the company, though Levie said Box.net hasn’t experienced any kind of strain on its networks. The deals with Salesforce.com and SAP were both strategic, meaning the companies will be working together on software in some way.

The enterprise cloud storage provider has more than 7 million users, and 77 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed its service in some form. Around half of the $162 million the company has raised to date is still in the bank, investors in the company told me. Even with that much cash around, Levie said there’s still a chance that the company could seek additional funding in the future — though his investors want him to take the company public.

“Obviously, if I’ve learned anything it’s not to say that this will be the last round,” Levie said. “We’re always on the lookout for a good deal.”

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

For a more in-depth look at how Aaron Levie runs Box.net and how the company got its start, check out this VentureBeat profile from earlier this month.

Filed under: cloud

Members of the OpenStack community are, for the most part, pleased by news that RackSpace will relinquish control of the OpenStack effort but want to see how the foundation is set up and staffed before endorsing it wholeheartedly.

Any foundation must replicate and build upon successful past open-source group efforts such as the Apache Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation, said attendees of the OpenStack Conference in Boston. They said lingering concern over Rackspace’s power of the OpenStack effort to date drove the move.

“The model is there for this. The Eclipse Foundation did an awesome job–but IBM had to get out of the way first,” said a software developer for one of the Linux distributions who was at the conference.

Whatever the foundation’s makeup, the goal is to keep the resulting platform open and evolving, said Chris Kemp, CEO of Nebula and former CTO of NASA. Rackspace said the transfer of the OpenStack intellectual property and trademarks should be done by 2012.

The challenge is huge as OpenStack partisans position their effort as the open-platform equivalent to Amazon Web Services and VMware efforts.

“If this platform does not emerge as the Linux of the open data center, then we’ve done the wrong thing,” Kemp told attendees Thursday morning.

“I will bluntly state when I see a company like Sun acquired by Oracle, whose  value is a completely integrated platform, that’s scary. It locks everybody else out of that ecosystem, and Exadata becomes ‘Exadollar’ to lock out innovation, interoperatiblity and portability,” Kemp said. Exadata was the first of a handful of hardware-software data center appliances launched by Oracle in the past two years.

The anti-Oracle meme surfaced several times both in keynotes and in attendee discussions. Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace’s cloud effort, flashed a photo of Oracle’s glossy headquarters building and referred to it as “the high temple of lock-in.”

“There’s a lot of work to be done and there’s already been a lot of politicking behind the scenes,” said an executive with a hardware company that backs OpenStack who would not speak for attribution. “It depends on who the leadership is and the devils are in the details,” he added.

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Nimbula, a company ties together public and private cloud resources in a way that companies can manage them easily, this week released the latest version of its software.

Nimbula calls itself a cloud operating system — because it helps its corporate customers manage their various cloud assets — private, public, and hybrid — from one place, with a single login. It’s new product is called the Nimbula Director 1.5.

Chief executive Chris Pinkham stopped by VentureBeat‘s office recently for an interview (see video above).

He said there’s been a lot of talk about the “hybrid cloud,” but it’s been just that. Until now, no one has really been able to do it well. While gaming company Zynga was a front-runner, and built a hybrid cloud internally — because of the huge cloud computing needs of its popular social games, Nimbula is one of the first to offer it to third parties, he said.

EMC, VMware and Citrix all offer products that require customers to rely system administrators to manage large installations, he said. But Nimbula removes that middleman, Pinkham explained, and allows companies to manage both public and private cloud computing and storage assets more simply (self-serve), and to scale them as needed. If customers want to keep existing infrastructure products, they can build upon that, say by adding public cloud infrastructure.

Competitors include Openstack and Eucalyptus.

This “infrastructure as a service” market is a $4 billion market, Pinkham said, citing Gartner research.

The company received $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia and Accel Partners last year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive cloud trends at our inaugural CloudBeat event on Nov 30-Dec 1 at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood Shores. We’ll be unveiling some of the most revolutionary cases of cloud adoption by the enterprise. It’s invite only. To apply to come, click on this link.

Filed under: cloud, dev, VentureBeat

The cloud computing revolution has made the titanic valuations of major Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and Twitter completely justified, storied venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen (pictured right) said today.

Some major companies in the Web 2.0 era have become incredibly popular and have ballooning valuations. Facebook, for example, is valued at more than $80 billion. Social gaming company Zynga recently filed for an initial public offering in order to raise up to $1 billion and is reportedly valued somewhere around $10 billion. Those colossal valuations have made some investors and entrepreneurs concerned that the companies are overvalued and are contributing to a tech bubble similar to the one that led to a recession in the early 2000s.

But a decade ago, during the last emergence of the last technology investing bubble, Facebook probably would never have made it off the ground because of the massive infrastructure costs and requirements. Thanks to cheaper online storage and the cloud computing revolution, it’s become trivial to start a company that at one point would have to pay millions of dollars to Oracle and others for servers and hardware. That massive shift in development and computing has led to the emergence of Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, Twitter and others that have revolutionized the way people use the Internet, Andreessen explained onstage at the Box.net Boxworks conference in San Francisco, Calif..

“It costs so much less to run a company like Salesforce.com today than it would 10 or 15 years ago, so you can get these amazing services actually delivered to people,” Andreessen said. “The cost structure today is so much lower, 10 years ago Facebook would have been impossible to have as a company, the infrastructure costs would have crushed it.”

Andreessen is considered one of the most prominent investors in the valley after he started Netscape during the last dot-com boom. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested in companies like cloud storage provider Box.net, Groupon, Foursquare, Twitter and Zynga. Most of the companies that his firm has invested in use those new cloud-based computing applications like Amazon’s AWS service and Google Docs, he said.

Companies like Amazon and Google, which run powerful servers that can handle computing-heavy applications remotely, weren’t around a decade ago. Back then, each new startup had to “sign four checks to Oracle, Sun and two others” before they got off the ground to handle their infrastructure costs, Andreessen said. That meant much larger early capital costs, which required larger — and more risky — early-stage investments, Andreessen said.

“People who lived through the 1990s, investors and entrepreneurs are so psychologically starved of the bitter disappointment that it’s hard to look at this landscape and see the things that are working and not get upset,” Andreessen said. “Stuff is actually just working, it seems like it’s real.”

[Photo credit: Matthew Lynley]

Filed under: cloud

Salesforce.com GM of Platforms (and former Heroku CEO) Byron Sebastian

Last week, Facebook and Heroku announced a partnership through which Facebook developers could easily launch applications on Heroku’s cloud Platform-as a Service via the Facebook development portal. That appears to have been a smart partnership for Heroku, which reports it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference.

On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 [applications] a minute. Facebook has again innovated and captured the excitement of the developer community.”

However, in the comments to both Heroku’s post and on Hacker News, there’s some debate over whether these are “fake apps” launched to get access to the new Timeline feature. It’s difficult to tell, especially because developers don’t need to launch on Heroku to access those features, some commenters claim.

Assuming at least a good portion are actual applications, though, such a large number is also a ringing endorsement for PaaS, in general, which increasingly appears to ideal for developers wanting to build and launch lightweight applications. For individual developers, PaaS is a way to host an application without getting caught up in systems management or other low-level concerns. Enterprise developers get the same benefits, even if they only utilize right now for non-mission-critical Facebook or mobile applications.

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Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes FlightInfrastructure Overview, Q2 2010Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Ben Black (left) and Tim Anglade (right)

Database have never really been sexy. They’re important. They’re necessary, but they’ve never really been sexy, except for possibly a brief, shining moment in 2010 and perhaps a bit of 2011, when every reader of Hacker News was sharing his or her experience and every coder on GitHub was playing with a way to access data. The NoSQL movement had hit its stride.

But for those of us on the outside, the conversations about Cassandra, HBase, Hive and MongoDB are hard to parse, maybe even unintelligible. But if you really want to know, there’s a website that can help. The NoSQL Tapes is a collection of videos shot by Tim Anglade in a journey around the world made last summer to discuss what was happening in data storage and access.

The tapes, which have attracted 17,000 unique visitors to the site, are well done and can offer a good overview of technologies from specific (Mike Miller on MapReduce) to general (Ben Black on NoSQL and cloud computing). They are helpful primers on their various topics, but they also capture a moment in tech history when a disparate group of engineers got together to build tools using open source software. The videos showcase the use cases for technology as well as attempt to engage people on the technical merits of each project, as opposed to a bunch of marketing speak.

As Anglade told me in a conversation, these videos represent a time before NoSQL “moved toward the enterprise” and became overrun with marketing. Now an evangelist at Cloudant, which offers a platform for CouchDB, Anglade recalls his summer of running around interviewing technologists fondly. The site launched in January, and so far Anglade has put up about 20 videos and has about 20 more to process and put on the site (although not all of those may make the grade). At about an hour-long, the videos on the site represent a huge time commitment, and the NoSQL community has been the primary audience.

However, there are videos that have proven popular such as Black’s or Jason Hunter and Eric Bloch of MarkLogic on when NoSQL makes senses for large corporations, that just about any business or technologist trying to understand why NoSQL is a big deal could learn from. Check it out, as a resource, and as a snapshot of the moment data became sexy.

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Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for EnterprisesInfrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

Cloud storage provider Box.net is unveiling a new set of code libraries that will let app developers quickly embed company’s storage and collaboration tools in their apps, the company announced today.

“We have 40 developers building that back-end stack, and people want to be able to deploy that instantly into their applications,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box.net. “Developers don’t want to have to manage the user management, the access controls and the storage — they want to be able to write on top of a layer.”

The company hired Chris Yeh (pictured right), who was the product head for Yahoo Groups, Delicious, Contacts and several other social programs at Yahoo! Before taking over the social programs, he was the head of developer relations for Yahoo. The company is doubling down on developer relations because it wants to be a provider of back-end storage software that any developer can add to an app, Levie said.

Box.net is also launching a developer contest that challenges mobile app developers to write an enterprise application that uses Box.net’s storage and collaboration tools. The winners will be announced at the company’s first conference, which will be held in September. Again, the company was trying to promote the idea of using Box.net as a back-end provider of storage tools that developers can use for their enterprise apps.

That seems like it’s the direction the company is headed. One of the company’s larger real estate clients built a customer relationship management (CRM) application from scratch using Box.net as the back-end storage and collaboration component, Levie said. Most companies opt to license CRM software from companies like Salesforce.com.

“The core focus of Box is really to be an open platform,” he said.

(Normally I’m against companies using the term “platform” when describing the company because it’s overused and misunderstood. But in this case it’s the right context.)

Box.net currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. It raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding. Box.net is also expanding to a new office in the next several weeks.

As of January, the Box.net application was downloaded more than 250,000 times on the iPad. The company launched the Android application in the fourth quarter of 2010 and already has 70,000 downloads. Box.net is working with Samsung specifically to further develop its application on Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Filed under: mobile

Over a year ago on this blog, I posed the question, Can Networking Be Made Cool Again? A lot has changed since then. The pendulum has swung back, and now networking is hot. In the past year Cisco hit a major speed bump, the OpenFlow networking protocol has burst into the popular consciousness and the first new wave of startups has emerged to meet the changing requirements of the large-scale, highly virtualized data center network.

Many have been waiting for it, but this year, the cracks in Cisco’s dam finally burst open for all to see. The networking giant has lost $60 billion in market cap in the past year, hammered by Wall Street for its flirtations with consumer, collaboration and other noncore businesses. Simultaneously, Cisco flubbed the emergence of the web-scale data center customer. Its UCS servers and Nexus switches are out of touch with these customers’ performance requirements — laden with features they will never use yet must pay handsomely for.

The emergence of OpenFlow
In the same time period, OpenFlow has emerged from the Stanford labs and exploded on the scene. OpenFlow is a protocol that defines how external controllers communicate with switches to program their forwarding tables. The reaction of the networking industry reminds me a lot of what happens when I put a shiny new toy in front of my six-month-old daughter. First she stares at the toy intently, then bats at it a few times, ultimately succeeding in grabbing hold. Then she jams it straight into her mouth. We are currently still in the frantically swatting stage. You’ll know the industry has jammed OpenFlow into its mouth when you see Cisco supporting third-party controllers programming their switches.

Despite the purported revolutionary nature of OpenFlow, the concept of separating the control plane from forwarding is nothing new. One example of this architectural practice is the use of a parallel signaling network for call setup and teardown in the plain old telephone system. An OpenFlow control serves a conceptually similar function for packet switches. It’s ironic to see this decades-old voice concept now wreaking havoc in the data world.

But just because the concept isn’t new doesn’t mean this isn’t an important development. However, OpenFlow itself is just an interface protocol. As Nicira CTO Martin Casado put it, “OpenFlow is about as exciting as USB.” What matters is the value you can deliver in the controllers leveraging it and the potential change in industry structure enabled by the standardization of this interface. Standardization and abstractions allow the emergence of third-party controller vendors who don’t make switches. This is the truly exciting development and the one that scares the incumbent switch vendors, no matter how much lip service they pay to embracing OpenFlow.

Don’t look for the VMware of networking
In most of the discussion around OpenFlow the market seems infatuated with trying to identify the VMware of networking. This makes for splashy headlines but is a flawed analogy. What is really needed before that concept can take hold is the Linux of networking. I am sure that that won’t be the network operating systems from the major vendors, including Cisco’s NX-OS, Juniper’s JUNOS, or Arista’s EOS.

All of this virtualized software is great, but let’s show some respect to the physical layer. Web-scale data centers still need switches — big, dense switches to connect servers. Interop was the coming-out party for OpenFlow, and the number of vendors that showed up for the OpenFlow Lab at Interop this year was impressive. Cisco and Arista were conspicuously absent. Not surprising, since the whole concept behind OpenFlow — taking the control plane and routing computation physically out of the router — is a scary thought for them.

I suspect the next shoe to drop is that the networking industry gets Open Computed. It is inevitable that an open-source hardware architecture for the large chassis switch gets released, likely driven by a consortium of large customers. When combined with the external software control enabled by OpenFlow, this will really shake things up. Once this happens, it will be akin to the shift that took place in the server and database layers in the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. Early large-scale websites were built with Sun servers and Oracle databases, while today commodity servers and open-source databases are the norm in many environments.

Hurry up and wait
While the disruptions coming to the networking industry are real, it is important not to overhype the speed at which they will take place. These transitions take time, lots of time; Cisco and Juniper are amazing companies, full of world-class technologists and with massive installed bases of customers. They are not going out of business tomorrow because of OpenFlow, nor are they going to sit idly on the sidelines. This isn’t the first time a new technology emerged that purported to be a major threat to Cisco’s dominance. MPLS is a good example of a technology that was supposed to do serious damage to Cisco but that it ultimately embraced and came to lead.

It has been exciting to see networking back in the spotlight again, and I suspect the next year will be even more exciting and dynamic. Two promising startups, Big Switch and Vcider, launched this week at Structure 2011, and a number of others are still percolating in stealth mode.

Perhaps the most exciting promise of the software-defined networking movement is simply that it will increase the velocity of innovation in the industry. As the promise of these new technologies is delivered in the next 12–24 months, they will find use cases that are not restricted to the largest web properties but reach into other applications, including network security and potentially all the way down into the enterprise wiring closet. It has the potential to disrupt and reshape the industry. This means networking is cool again.

Alex Benik is a principal at Battery Ventures.

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Tired of trying to keep track of AWS' convoluted pricing for your cloud deployment? Then take a look at what Uptime Software has with its new UptimeCloud service, beginning tomorrow. The idea is to connect to your cloud environment at Amazon and keep track of what you are spending - and more importantly, will be spending - so that when the bill arrives at the end of the month there are no surprises.

Sponsor

The UptimeCloud service will show you the current costs of all your running instances, as well as make recommendations for how to save money by changing your cloud configuration. Here you see a dashboard summary, and there is a lot more detailed information available too.

Uptime collects historical information so you can see what has been going on in your cloud provider's environment, and also tracks instances that may not be currently running but consuming storage fees.

Right now the service is only available for Amazon's Web Services, but the company will be slowly adding in other providers such as GoGrid and Rackspace in the future. They are also looking at adding other infrastructure providers to have hybrid cloud pricing too. They want to provide the total cost visibility for every kind of cloud application and be able to conduct cost comparisons at a very accurate level.

Uptime claims they are the first to offer this kind of service, at least to the level of graphical visualization and simplicity involved. The company has a deep monitoring and management background with all kinds of infrastructure deployments. The beta service is available tomorrow, but no pricing has been announced, and it will initially be free for the first customers.

NOTE: I briefly did some consulting work for the company last year.

Discuss

Typesafe, a maker of software development tools for the Scala programming language, has raised $3 million in a first round of funding.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company is also introducing today its open source Typesafe Stack, which integrates the most recent releases of the Scala programming language, Akka middleware and development tools. That makes it easier to develop software with Scala, which takes advantage of multicore hardware and cloud computing. Scala is used by some of the world’s highest-trafficked web properties such as Foursquare, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Multicore processors and cloud computing offer a lot of benefits for speeding up performance and allowing lots of users to use software at the same time. But it requires programming tricks to take advantage of them. That’s where the open-source Scala comes in. Scala is the foundation for building apps that are used by millions upon millions of users.

Greylock, the investment firm whose roster includes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, made the investment. Cambridge, Mas.-based Typesafe makes money via commercial support and maintenance options through a subscription service. Martin Odersky, chief executive of Typesafe, created the Scala (which stands for scalable language) programming language in 2001 at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and launched it seven years ago. It runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine and is interoperable with Java.

“The previous generation application architecture came from sequential computing and it is running out of steam,” said Odersky. “With Typesafe, we’re introducing a modern software architecture that is designed for parallel and distributed computing, bringing huge advantages in scalability and reliability.”

Greylock partner Bill Kaiser, who made his bet on open source as an early investor in Red Hat, said that computing is entering the era of “big cores,” meaning lots of cores, or computing brains, on a single chip. And there are lots of chips inside servers, which are the computing machines inside data centers that keep huge internet web sites running. Kaiser said Scala is the only proven alternative that can handle the challenges of multicore and cloud computing. Typesafe, Kaiser says, can take Scala to the mainstream and thereby help protect the billions of dollars that corporations have invested in java.

Chris Conrad, engineering manager at LinkedIn, says Scala is a powerful programming tool that offers scalability and efficiency. He is glad to see the creators of Scala launch Typesafe so that they can invest in the next generation of the programming language.

Alex Payne, former platform lead at Twitter and chief technology officer of online banking firm BankSimple, said that Scala played a critical role in improving the scalability and reliability of Twitter’s backend services (which have had to handle huge computing loads as more and more users sign up for the service).

The company named Java creator James Gosling and Java concurrency expert Doug Lea to its board of advisors. Willy Zwaenepoel, a parallel computing expert, has also joined the advisory board. Odersky co-founded Typesafe this year with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka. The company has 12 employees.

Tags: cloud computing, Open source, Scala

Companies: Typesafe

People: Alex Payne, Doug Lea, James Gosling, Jonas Boner, Martin Odersky, Reid Hoffman, Willy Zwaenepoel

I am a sucker for data visualization. I am less enamored with infographics these days as I have noticed some hijacking of the medium for public relations stunts. Taking a few anecdotes and drawing some arrows does not cut it in my book.

Anyway...moving on.

I did find this excellent post this morning by Jacob Gube on Six Revisions that gives an overview of 20 JavaScript libraries.

Gube says the JavaScript libraries "turn boring numerical data into beautiful, interactive and informative visualizations." I can agree with that.

Sponsor

Here are five libraries that I picked out from Gube's post:

Highcharts

Highcharts offers seven charting types such as line, pie, and bar. You can zoom in and out of charts. It offers tips with more information about data points. Documentation is excellent.

JavaScript InfoVis

Gube writes that JavaScriptInfoVis is similar to MooTools, a modular, object-oriented JavaScript framework designed for intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers. Due to its modular format, you can use JavaScriptInfoVis to keep your pages light. It also includes an animation effects capability, multiple charting types and a class for working with JSON data. There are several demos that show how to use JavaScript InfoVis. JavaScriptInfoVis is the work of Nicolás García Belmonte, a senior software engineer for Sencha, which provides developers with frameworks, tools and services to build Web application experiences using HTML5 and JavaScript. You can see the passion in his work from examples such as the demo for this stacked area chart.

moochart

moochart is a MooTools plugin. moochart plots bubble diagrams. It will eventually expand to feature pie, line, and bar graphs. moochart is open source and released under the MIT license.

StyleChart

StyleChart is an API for creating charts. According to Gube, it includes tooltips, legends, and 19 types of charts including 3D pie, 3D bar graphs and Pareto charts.

TufteGraph

According to Gube, the TufteGraph is a JQuery plugin that emphasizes minimalism and ease of use. It offers only a few options for styling. This has its upside as it instead relies on CSS for customizing the look and feel of your graphs. It also helps speed up Web pages as the there is less load placed on the JavaScript.

Introduction to TufteGraph from Xavier Shay on Vimeo.

I encourage you to explore all 20 of the examples that Gube has collected for his post. They well demonstrate how JavaScript and data visualization are so innately tied.

Discuss

Many companies have launched API programs, and many more will in 2011. Some have used their API to become unstoppable market forces by empowering a new indirect channel. Others have seen minimal API adoption, and are unclear on why they haven’t succeeded. Even more are in the “mushy middle” between success and failure.

At Apigee, we observe common patterns in API programs that succeed – in planning, management, and organization. Those that fail hit common pitfalls in these categories as well. So we have developed a nine-box model for API program management that helps track how both strategy and execution must come together to build a successful API effort.

Strategy: Know your market segment and channel partners (developers)

Market segment. An API should be something that extends or accelerates the existing core business into a new part of the market. This may have been a segment that was previously unaddressable, or it may be a segment that is under attack. Without a clear picture of the market result that the company wants to produce, the API program will not only be unfocused, but immeasurable in the company’s standard key performance indicators.
Takeaway: Specify the segment(s) to target and the standard key performance indicators the API program should change.
Channel model. An API program should incent third parties to adopt the API. The strongest reason to adopt an API is to make money. Given the segment targeted in the first step, what drives the developers that are your channel partners? If developers are building an app, their model may be app sales (including in-app purchases). If the developers will drive revenue for your company, then their model should be affiliate royalties. If the developers’ model is advertising then take some of the money you would have spent on web advertising and pay developers directly for promoting your brand in their app. If the developers already have a strong model but need more market awareness, then use your properties (advertising, branding, and PR) to extend your developers’ reach. Takeaway: Understand the business model of the targeted channel and ensure that the API program can contribute to it.
Industry goal. An API should have a clear industry-level goal of either being a true platform or of serving existing partners. Building a dominant platform such as Amazon Web Services, Twitter, or eBay requires tradeoffs in favor of openness, interoperability, and onboarding. When your goal is tens or hundreds of thousands of developers, you must cover a broad set of functions, use security models that are easy to understand, and deliver world-class self-service (from sign-up to documentation to support). Building a partner channel requires completeness in specific use cases, partner support, and business process. Partner channels typically have only hundreds to thousands of developers so security can be more customized and support can be hands-on. However, these developers won’t work to fill in gaps in your API and you must therefore expose entire processes (i.e. order-to-cash, trouble-to-resolution).
Takeaway: Decide whether you are targeting the platform or the partner model, and be consistent with that choice.

Execution: Plan, Manage, Organize

Planning. Determine and document what will be accomplished for the segment, channel, or industry. Define requirements at the business, partner and technical levels.
Management. Establish measurable dimensions of execution, rhythm of reporting, and key actions. Establish a common dashboard across the project including the key performance indicators and component metrics, executive reviews, and executive sponsor.
Organization. A strategy area without a leader will fail. Grant yours the authority, support, and appropriate staffing to win.

This results in the following nine-box model for executing an API program. This assumes that the channel is developers but should be modified to match the way that your business needs to define the channel.

Planning
Management
Organization

Target Segment(s)
Define market segment in detail including size and user persona; specify API profile needed to satisfy top use cases for each target segment
Establish key performance indicator targets, traceability and dashboard
Business-ledSegment-oriented workstreams

Engage Channel
Specify business model and marketing driver for the channel that will reach each target segment
Establish developer adoption targets, developer marketing and channel actions (community site, events, and communication)
Channel-ledCommunity, developer, and business development workstreams

Industry Goal
Specify roadmap of API deliverables, mechanics, integration, and business process to meet target segment needs
Implement API roadmap, adjust and report on iteration cycle, and establish alpha developer team
Engineering-ledAPI, infrastructure, and developer support workstreams

The top-left box should pull all of the others. And API programs’ key performance indicators should align with existing corporate business key performance indicators. With this framework in mind, the most common pitfalls in API programs we observe are a lack of a business goal and a lack of a channel leader.

Without a business goal and attendant core performance indicators the program will fail – because it’s not seen as a business or an ongoing program, but as a side project, solely led by engineering. But APIs are in fact lines of business in their own right – and companies have to manage them as such. Without this alignment – the team will get pulled in different directions, or company focus, funding, and commitment will falter.

Similarly, the lack of a channel leader ensures that the program will fail – because the channel itself is not understood. An effective leader for the developer channel understands both developers and business and is a full peer to the engineering and business leader. In many cases the de facto leader for a developer channel is a community manager, developer advocate, or API evangelist. Sometimes this person doesn’t exist as a full-time role, and in other failure cases the position is not granted the right level of authority. We will see this role become more understood in the coming year – especially among companies that have successful API programs.

Good luck in your API program, and let me know in the comments if you have questions based on the model above, or want to suggest further articles on API strategy and execution.

Sam Ramji is Vice President of Strategy at Apigee, a company that manages APIs. Prior to Apigee, Ramji led open source strategy across Microsoft.

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If you want to lock customers into your service, get ready to hand them the keys to their data. That was the point hammered home in a talk today at GigaOM’s Structure conference that included SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin, Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos and Kim Polese, founder and CEO of SpikeSource.

The most successful vendors of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, according to Mickos, will be those who can offer a model similar to banks. “Today we put our money in the bank because we know it’s safer there than at home,” he explained, and because we’re confident that at any point we can withdraw our money. “That apparent lack of lock-in is what creates the real lock-in, which is loyalty from the customers.”

Augustin described a scenario where this would matter in the marketplace. “If all your data is at one place in the cloud, and all of a sudden that data goes away,” (due to a power outage, for example, as small businesses relying on Intuit’s services experienced first-hand this month), then you lose all access. But with a more open SaaS model, you could run a local copy or “go over to a cloud service provider for a day or two,” said Augustin. “Of course, you don’t just need the data; you need an application that can get to it.”

Eventually, Mickos predicted that customers will demand the same sort of freedom with their data that we currently demand from banks when it comes to our savings. “I would like to go to Google and say, ‘Give me all the searches I’ve ever made, and stop using them,’” he said. “But I can’t.”

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I remember attending the inaugural GridWorld conference in 2006 and hearing Argonne National Laboratory’s Ian Foster discuss the possible implications of the newly announced Amazon EC2 on the world of grid computing that he helped create. Well, 2010 is upon us, and some of the implications Foster pondered at GridWorld have become clear, among them: For many workloads, the cloud appears to be replacing the grid. This point is driven home in a new GigaOM Pro article (sub req’d) by Paul Miller, in which he looks at how space agencies are using the cloud to do work that likely would have had the word “grid” written all over it just a few short years ago.

Miller cites a particularly illustrative case with the European Space Agency, which is utilizing Amazon EC2 for the data-processing needs of its Gaia mission, set to launch in 2012. The 40GB per night that Gaia will generate would have cost $1.5 million using local resources (read “a grid” or “a cluster”), but research suggests it could cost in the $500,000 range using EC2. The demand for cost savings and flexibility isn’t limited to astronomy research, either.

Research organizations that need sheer computing power on demand are looking at EC2 as the means for attaining it. Several prominent examples come from the pharmaceutical industry, where companies like Amylin and Eli Lilly have publicly embraced the cloud, as has research-driven Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. A related case study comes from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, which is using EC2’s capabilities as a framework for upgrading its worldwide grid infrastructure. So high is demand cloud for resources, in fact, that even high-performance computing software vendors, such as Univa UD (which Foster co-founded), are building tools to let research-focused customers run jobs on EC2.

Unlike HPC-focused grid software, however, the cloud opens up doors beyond crunching numbers. Miller also highlights NASA’s Nebula cloud, a container-based internal cloud infrastructure used to host NASA’s many disparate web sites. Built using Eucalyptus software, NASA users can provision the resources they need for their sites as those needs arise. In theory, they could call up some of those resources for parallel processing, too. While grid computing projects often federate resources and democratize access to them, they do so at a scale that makes tasks like site-hosting impractical, and grids don’t provide the nearly bare-metal access that makes cloud resources so flexible.

Of course, none of this is news to Foster. In early 2008 he noted the myriad similarities between the two computing models, including the ability to process lots of data in a hurry. In late 2009, the cloud market having matured considerably, he observed that a properly provisioned collection of Amazon EC2 images fared relatively well against a supercomputer when running certain benchmarks. There are plenty of reasons why cloud services will not displace high-end supercomputers, but where simple batch processing and cost concerns meet, the cloud could make in-house grids and clusters things of the past.

Full article on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d)

Big data is certainly on the tip of everyone’s tongues these days as both the amount of data entered online expands and the ways to track objects and people grows with wireless connectivity and sensors. We have both more information being entered and more sources of that information, providing a river of data that somehow we’re going to capture and use to make money and better decisions.

For those wondering about the big picture and some of the nitty-gritty details (metadata, data visualization, open document formats) The Economist has a killer package on big data. Download it at the web site, or wander out and get your own copy of the magazine. I was intrigued by the idea that the “it” career in a data driven world was statistician.

Writing about the concept of big data is kind of like trying to write about water. Water is essential, touches so many aspects of life — from evolution to the current location of cities — that one article, one book or even one field of study can’t articulate its influences. Data will be the same way in the not-t00-distant future, thanks to cheap, scalable computing and ubiquitous broadband enabling a connected everything.



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