The Facebook IPO has no direct relevance to how IT professionals do their jobs. I’m sure everyone will be watching it today, though, and wasting, er, spending a lot of time discussing it.

Thus comes my responsibility as a member of the IT industry’s Fourth Estate to write about it.

I’ve tried to work myself up into a lather about how overvalued Facebook is, how ridiculous (and damaging) these technology bubbles are to the industry and to the global economy, and how unfair life generally is. But I just can’t get too worked up over this. If someone wants to blow their money in Las Vegas or on too many visits to Disney World, let them do it, I say.

It doesn’t matter to me whether someone buys Facebook stock today, either.

Remembering When…
I do think, however, there may be some value in taking a quick peek back at some of the industry’s landmark IPOs. The grandaddy of the modern age would be Netscape, which went public on August 9, 1995. This IPO was a very big deal back then, kids. The stock more than quadrupled in price during its first day on the market, closing at $58.25 and creating a market capitalization of $2.3 billion for Netscape.

What few of us understood at the time was that this was a disastrous day for the company. The stock was offered at $14 a share, which is what the company reaped. Any profits made by investors selling at a higher price than that went to those investors, not to Netscape. The company, in essence, left more than $1.5 billion on the table. This was considered to be a large amount of money in those days.

Yahoo had a similarly splashy, if much smaller, IPO in April of the next year. The stock was offered at $24.50, peaked at $43 during the day, and settled in at $33. This valued the company at less than $1 billion, a seemingly modest amount, but not bad for a company which had less than $2 million in annual revenue at the time.

Yahoo has been losing altitude for a decade now, with the rise of Google’s search algorithm replacing Yahoo’s pioneering index-based approach to finding stuff on the Worldwide Web. Google’s superior approach was the foundation of its IPO success a few years later, in August of 2004.

Determined not to leave money on the table (as had Netscape and so many others in the 90s), Google took a unique variation of the “Dutch Auction” approach, in which investors bid on shares before the offering. This nipped any sort of Tulip Mania in the bud and kept the stock from skyrocketing and gyrating that first day.

Even so, Google was valued at $23 billion at the end of the first day, having sold only about 6.5 percent of its available shares in the public market.

One Hundred Billion Dollars
So now we come to Facebook and its $100 billion valuation. This number is not the biggest ever associated with an IPO, but it does cast a long shadow over Google’s day in the sun some seven-plus years ago. There’s really only one relevant question here: Is it worth it?

As a writer and analyst within the IT industry, I don’t buy technology stocks. My approach has the added benefit of saving me a lot of heartburn over the course of time. I also don’t make recommendations. This policy is a good one, I think, because I really have no idea of whether Facebook will soar or sink today, and soar or sink over time.

I do know that “FB” (Facebook’s official ticker symbol) will be valued north of $100 billion when it hits the public market today. I also know that Google, after 8 years of non-stop success and growth, is worth about $200 billion today.

Think of everything that Google has done right for almost a decade. Then think about Google being valued at only twice that of Facebook. Does this add up for you?

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SilkRoad Technology, the aptly named competitor of, say, the up-and-coming Workday that peddles cloud-based social talent management solutions, has topped up its funding with another reportedly oversubscribed $35 million round.
That makes an incredible $162 million since 2003.
The latest money comes from new investors Keating Capital and NTT Finance along with existing investors Intel Capital, Crosslink Capital, Foundation Capital, Azure Capital and Tenaya Capital, among others. It’s supposed to support worldwide expansion and product innovation ahead of a potential IPO this year or next.

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Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service offer us easy scaling of services. However, scaling is not as easy as it seems to be in the Cloud. If your software architecture isn’t done right, your services and applications might not scale as expected, even if you add new instances. As for most distributed systems, there are a couple of guidelines you should consider looking at. I have summed up the ones I use most often for designing distributed systems.
As Moore stated, everything that can fail, will fail. So it is very clear that a distributed system will fail at a certain time, even though cloud computing providers tell us that it is very unlikely. We had some outages [1][2] in the last year of some of the major platforms, and there might be even more of them. Therefore, your application should be able to deal with an outage of your cloud provider. This can be done with different techniques such as distributing an application in more than one availability zone (which should be done anyway). Netflix has a very interesting approach to steadily test their software for errors – they have employed an army of “Chaos Monkeys” [3]. Of course, they are not real monkeys. It is software that randomly takes down different Instances. Netflix produces errors on purpose to see how their system reacts and if it is still performing well. The question is not if there will be another outage; the question is when the next outage will be.

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We are a part of a dynamically connected world where consumers are rapidly adopting new technology and dismantling business models in their wake. Disruption, unpredictability and variability happen without warning. The challenge for any organization is to evolve, to adopt new architectures and processes that increase business agility, scalability and governance/compliance and decrease risk. While cloud is complex, the consideration and adoption process can be simplified.
In his general session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Hanes, Executive Director, Dell Service & Solutions, will talk about a pragmatic approach to realizing the potential of cloud today while building a strong foundation for the future.

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“Big Data eliminates the data silos that formerly existed, improving the depth and quality of analysis that can take place,” observed Scott Kinka, Chief Technology Officer at Evolve IP, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Without these barriers, Kinka continued, “we gain access to information that was never before available. We can see where there are underserved markets, opportunities, problems that need to be addressed.”
Agree or disagree? – «While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.»
Scott Kinka: Agree and disagree. You can’t really separate the two. Here’s why: agility is the ability to not buy more than you need. It is the ability to add resources when you need them rather than having to overspend and overbuy upfront on the idea that one day you might need more.

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As the Diamond Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, SHI International is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Founded in 1989, SHI International Corp. is a 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 service professionals, SHI delivers custom IT solutions to Corporate, Enterprise, Public Sector, and Academic customers. With over 1,800 + employees worldwide, SHI is the largest Minority/Woman Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) in the U.S. and is ranked 19th among Everything Channel’s VAR 500 list of North American IT solution providers.

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Nvidia Tuesday unveiled a VGX platform – reportedly the result of five years of effort – that it called the world’s first virtualized GPU meant to accelerate graphics from cloud computing centers.
IT departments are supposed to use it to deliver virtualized desktops with the graphics and GPU performance of office PCs or workstations to employees using any connected and BYOD devices regardless of operating system including thin clients, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
The dingus, an enterprise implementation of the company’s new Kepler GPU, is also supposed to work with 3D design and simulation tools previously deemed too intensive for virtualized desktops.
Nvidia claims the platform “delivers an experience nearly indistinguishable from a full desktop while substantially lowering the cost of a virtualized PC.”

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It’s really easy to quantify some of the costs associated with a security breach. Number of customers impacted times the cost of a first class stamp plus the cost of a sheet of paper plus the cost of ink divided by … you get the picture. Some of the costs are easier than others to calculate. Some of them are not, and others appear downright impossible.
One of the “costs” often cited but rarely quantified is the cost to an organization’s reputation. How does one calculate that?
Well, if folks sat down with the business people more often (the ones that live on the other side of the Meyer-Briggs Mountain) we’d find it’s not really as difficult to calculate as one might think. While IT folks analyze flows and packet traces, business folks analyze market trends and impacts – such as those arising from poor customer service.

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The Cloud isn’t coming, the Cloud is here. You’ve heard the buzz, but how do you get started? What do you need to know? Soar into the cloud with examples of taking existing applications and migrating them to the cloud using Windows Azure.
There are many ways to learn a new technology. Some of us prefer to read books, others like videos or screencasts, still others will choose to go to a training style event. In any case you need to have a reason to want to learn, whether it’s a new project, something to put on the resume or just the challenge because it sounds cool. For me I learn best when I’ve got a real project that will stretch my knowledge to apply it in a new way. It also helps to have a deadline.

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Hybrid is an end state for most customers as it balances choice and the needs of the business against cost, flexibility and risk.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Clifton, Director Cloud Solutions at Dell Commercial Business Unit, will discuss Hybrid cloud adoption as well as the issues around data portability, integration and security that need to be proactively addressed.

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