“Open source is very important for the cloud ecosystem,” noted Manjula Talreja, VP of Global Cloud Business Development at Cisco, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “One of the biggest concerns our customers have about cloud is the fear of lock-in: cloud, especially public cloud, has the potential of becoming ‘a hotel’ where customers can check in but can never check out.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time – agree or disagree?
Manjula Talreja: Putting aside the old adage that “time is money,” Cisco agrees that cloud is more about creating efficiencies in business processes. This is true for the cloud consumers (to take advantage of new technologies more quickly and with maximum flexibility and to tap into pay-as-you grow business models where they pay only for what they consume) and for cloud providers (to create new services rapidly and with fewer barriers to sell and create demand for those services).

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Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle. They got IaaS to work, disrupting the pre-existing data center outsourcing market. They achieved market dominance, enabling them to be the low-cost leader. And they figured out how to scale, facilitating unlimited growth. But such growth and market dominance cannot go on forever, can it? What—if anything—has any hope of stopping, or even slowing down, the Amazon Cloud juggernaut?
The first place to look for an AWS-killer, of course, is the competition. And perhaps the one adversary that has a real shot at dethroning Amazon is Google. They are the only competitor that understands infrastructure at scale as well as Amazon does. They also have a trusted, well-established brand, and they’ve shown they’re willing to take risks and provide market leadership. Expect better than an AWS clone from Google.

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Salesforce.com, the poster child of the cloud computing era, has agreed

to pay a giant $2.5 billion – at an equally giant 53% premium – for

ExactTarget, the Indianapolis-based company that got started very late in

2000 intent on stuffing marketing e-mails from mid-sized companies into

people’s inboxes, something now called social marketing.

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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to give Amazon.com credit. Not only is Amazon Web Services (AWS) the undisputed leader in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, they are moving faster than their competition. Try as their competitors might, they all appear to be losing ground to this Cloud juggernaut.

Amazon’s low-cost Wal-Mart strategy of continually lowering prices as they achieve ever-greater economies of scale is squeezing the profitability of direct competitors, forcing most of them to look for niches Amazon hasn’t targeted…yet.

In fact, Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle. They got IaaS to work, disrupting the pre-existing data center outsourcing market. They achieved market dominance, enabling them to be the low-cost leader. And they figured out how to scale, facilitating unlimited growth.

This lethal combination of market forces positions them to grow ever larger as they squash competitors like bugs under their sandals …

IBM Tuesday said it’s going to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, the Dallas-based outfit that’s supposed to be the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider in the world.
Terms were not disclosed but the good ole rumor mill, touched off by a Reuters report in March about how both IBM and EMC were interested in buying SoftLayer, pegged the deal at around $2 billion. Others venture that it could be worth as much as $2.5 billion.
Either amount makes it the largest acquisition of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s new reign.

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Calling it a full-fledged tree-hugger may be a slight overstatement, but cloud computing is being viewed as an eco-friendly service that reduces the number of machines and the carbon footprint of enterprises.
Thanks to virtualization and server utilization rates of around 60-70 percent, large, shared data centers are usually able to employ fewer physical machines to achieve the same capacity as an equivalent number of in-house data centers, according to an article on GreenerIdeal.com.
Large data centers can also dynamically allocate resources where they’re needed, where individual enterprises must often buy more machines than they need to handle peak data loads. This reduction in physical servers means less energy expended in running, cooling, manufacturing, transporting, and replacing these machines, and that can mean big savings over time.

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Hadoop is delivering on its promise to provide Big Data analytics for enterprises at a fraction of the cost of proprietary MPP systems. The combination of industry-standard hardware and open source software is the key combination behind this success.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Wing Au, Director of Server Application at Supermicro, will discuss how to utilize innovative multi-node server architectures for Hadoop DataNode designs. He will illustrate the flexibility that allows using similar building-blocks to build starter Hadoop configuration up to hyper-scale and power-user implementations. He will also share Data Center environmental optimizations and management software suites that help to scale out your Hadoop deployment.

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The hybrid cloud provides compelling benefits to the enterprise – the security of the private cloud combined with a public cloud’s scale and scope. However, hybrid clouds also experience similar challenges. Increasing traffic demands combined with their dynamic nature can result in costly overprovisioning or inefficient under-provisioning of resources. OpenFlow-enabled SDN as a foundation for hybrid cloud provides a uniquely scalable and cost-effective solution to these problems.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Marc LeClerc, a representative of the Open Networking Foundation, will discuss this solution to the provisioning issues of the hybrid cloud and the resulting benefits.

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