Eucalyptus was originally known as one of the key open-source contenders in the battle for private cloud computing customers. Later, it became known as the company that broke with the pack to become compatible with AWS public cloud services, thus becoming a player in the world of hybrid cloud.

Now Eucalyptus moved to a 3.2 version with a new GUI that enables self-service, as well as simplified cloud administration and usage reporting.

The new GUI “allows users to perform self-service operations including the provisioning of instances, keypair and password creation, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume and snapshot operations, image catalog listing and registration, user group operations, and elastic IP operations,” according to the company.

Eucalyptus 3.2 is more robust than previous versions as well, with the company stating its “load-test harness may handle up to 6000 concurrent connections to 20 test applications across multiple groups and phases of development.”

I asked Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos how he views the company’s positioning now and how much of 3.2’s improvements and enhancements came from customer feedback.

“Most of the new features came from customer requests,” he said. “One of our big
corporate customers asked for the VNX adapter, for example. The reporting and logging
was asked for by customers (in addition to other features).”

Mickos also said he thought that he and the company’s major competitors “each have our own sweetspot. We are the only AWS-compatible enterprise-focused cloud platform. OpenStack is popular among those who build their own cloud platform. CloudStack is popular among service providers. VMware’s vCloud Director is not very popular, but to the degree it is used, it is used by customers who have gone all-VMware.”

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Cloud computing isn’t just re-inventing technology, it will also drive evolution of the business practices that the technology is used for.
For example CRM: Customer Relationship Management.
This is a science that started as simple contact management apps, like ACT!, through Goldmine then of course Salesforce.com.

After their ASP (Application Service Provider) phase of the Cloud evolution we’ve since had the social media explosion and so the principle category to add is “social media CRM”. After that came Cloud and so we’re now at a phase best described as Cloud 2.0.

This is most powerfully demonstrated by the public sector, where CRM is about ‘citizen engagement’ and where the core expression of the model can be referenced through ‘CORE’ design, standing for Community Oriented Re-Engineering.
In short this reflects the simple point that online is about communities, and how you re-engineer your business processes to harness this principle is the fundamental nature of this CORE design and therefore how it can be used to implement a Cloud 2.0 strategy.

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At the Amazon Web Services Re:Invent conference Tuesday Red Hat rolled out OpenShift Enterprise, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) designed to be installed on-premise in customer data centers or on private, public or hybrid clouds that it announced in May.
Since it launched the thing at Re:Invent one might logically deduce that Red Hat will host the widgetry on Amazon’s EC2.
The product is bound to compete with VMware’s open source Cloud Foundry and its Spring framework if for no other reason than Red Hat loathes VMware and regards it as its biggest enemy, someone to crush.
Anyway, it’s Red Hat’s latest step in delivering its PaaS strategy and is supposed to be the industry’s first comprehensive open on-premise PaaS for the enterprise.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Aspera, Inc., creator of patented fasp™ transport technology that moves the world’s digital assets at maximum speed, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Aspera’s unwavering mission is to create the next-generation software technologies that move the world’s large data at maximum speed, regardless of file size, transfer distance and network conditions. With the unstoppable explosion of Big Data in a world where IT and networking infrastructures are more diverse and flexible than ever, Aspera focuses on supplying innovative data transfer solutions that help organizations operate and collaborate more effectively on a global scale.

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Let’s take the notion of a user identity – or to be more precise, the user’s avatar – and consider it to be a Cloud resource. The user, that is, we can provision such avatars as we see fit. And because they’re in the Cloud, they’re location independent. Facebook could use our avatar. Assign it privileges or other properties. Or our bank. Or our employer. But we control it.
The reason PII has such power, of course, is because we give it power. Knowing a username and password gives you the power to access a system. Knowing your Social Security Number and birth date may give you the power to get bank account information from a call center rep. Add a bit more knowledge and you have the power to apply for a loan or a job or a security clearance. The old adage states that knowledge is power, but information only has power if we choose to empower it.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that SHI International Corp., one of North America’s top 20 largest IT solutions providers, has been named “Diamond Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Founded in 1989, SHI International Corp. is a $4 billion+ global provider of technology products and services. Driven by the industry’s most experienced and stable sales force and backed by software volume licensing experts, hardware procurement specialists, and certified IT services professionals, SHI delivers custom IT solutions to Corporate, Enterprise, Public Sector, and Academic customers. With over 1,900 employees worldwide, SHI is the largest Minority and Woman Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) in the U.S. and is ranked 18th among Everything Channel’s VAR 500 list of North American IT solution providers.

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Realtime, creator of the leading global technology framework and applications to power the Realtime web, announced a competition for developers to submit their xRTML 3.0 apps before a distinguished panel of judges, including developer Peter Lubbers of Google and Sam Wierema of TheNextWeb. The latest release of xRTML 3.0, the eXtensible Realtime Multiplatform Language, is transforming the World Wide Web into the Realtime Web.
The new xRTML 3.0 flattens the learning curve for building next-generation apps with bidirectional Realtime communications. Its instantaneous updates employ a fraction of the bandwidth required of traditional request/response and near-real time technologies.

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Apprenda has just launched rev 4.0 of its flagship private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), claiming the new eponymous, uniquely single-language widgetry will be the model for how to modernize existing mission-critical enterprise applications and build new cloud-architected apps and services.
Well, so long as they’re Windows apps and Windows-based cloud environments. Ah, but then let’s remember that 40% of the apps running the enterprise, many of them custom-made, have Windows written all over them.

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While a public cloud provider, like Amazon, secures the datacenter and network, application owners are still responsible for securing their applications and virtual machines (instances).
When you host applications in the public cloud, you assume partial responsibility for securing the application. The cloud provider, for example Amazon Web Services (AWS), secures the physical data center (with locked badge entry doors, fences, guards etc) in addition to securing the physical network with perimeter firewalls. This is no significant change from how you secure your corporate datacenter.

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Do chief information officers really prepare and provision their datacenter backbones especially for Christmas? Do CIOs honestly talk to systems architects, software development team leaders and individual programmers about the festive season and plan for an additional data burden?
The fact is that the IT industry has a vibrant and healthy media and publicity scene. Come the “holiday season” (let’s use the politically correct term), the stories turn to the so-called seasonal spike ahead.
Of course, Christmas is really only one seasonal spike among many for the truly discerning CIO. During normal trading hours companies witness demand spikes for any number of reasons including new product launches, web-based viral (usually positive) publicity surges and even the weather.

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