Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google cloud infrastructure service Compute Engine is now open to all developers who want to use it, the search giant announced today.

Compute Engine was first announced about a year ago and aims to compete with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, Joyent, and other infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Back in April, Google opened up Compute Engine to many more developers and lowered prices by 4 percent.

On top of opening it up for all potential users, Compute Engine has also been updated with the following new features:

• Subhour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.

• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.

• Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers and enable you to build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud.

• Large persistent disks support up to 10TBs per volume, which translates to 10 times the industry standard

More Google cloud updates

App Engine, Google’s platform-as-a-service for developers, has also been updated with PHP runtime. PHP is one of the most popular web programming languages, so it’s great to include that in App Engine for all the PHP developers out there.

Google also used today to announce a new product called Google Cloud Datastore. It is a standalone NoSQL-based service for storing non-relational data. Google says the app includes automatic scalability, high availability, ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has opened up cloud infrastructure service Compute Engine to more customers while also lowering prices and adding several new features, the company said today in a blog post.

Amazon currently holds the title for largest infrastructure-as-a-service provider with Amazon Web Services, with Rackspace firmly in second place. But Google has a lot of cash and a lot of servers, both of which could help it force its way into the infrastructure-as-a-service sector — much like Microsoft is doing with Azure.

Google announced Compute Engine back in June, but it has limited its widespread availability so far. Today’s announcement makes it so any developer who buys Google’s $400 per month gold support package will now have access to it.

The search giant also lowered all Compute Engine pricing by 4 percent. In the United States, pricing starts at $0.132 per hour for its smallest virtual machine and tops out at $1.221 per hour its most powerful high-memory virtual machine. (Prices in Europe are a bit higher.)

Google says that it has also added the following features to Compute Engine:

• The option to boot from persistent disks mounted as the root file system, persistent disk snapshots, the capability to checkpoint and restore the contents of network resident persistent disks on demand, and the capability to attach and detach persistent disks from running instances.

• An improved administration console, the Google Cloud Console (preview), which allows you to administer all your Google Cloud Platform services via a unified interface.

• Five new instance type families (diskless versions of our standard instance types, plus diskful and diskless versions of high-memory and high-CPU configurations), with 16 new instance types.

• Two new supported zones in Europe, which provide lower latency and higher performance for our European customers. We’ve also made it easy to migrate virtual machine instances from one zone to another via an enhancement to our gcutil command line tool.

• An enhanced metadata server, with the ability to support recursive queries, blocking gets and selectable response formats, along with support for updating virtual machine tags and metadata on running instances (which enables dynamic reconfiguration scenarios).

Clouds photo via Nicholas_T/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise behemoths EMC and IBM are taking a close look at buying major infrastructure-as-a-service provider SoftLayer in a deal that could be worth more than $2 billion, Reuters reports.

Dallas-based SoftLayer closely competes with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and others to help companies with their IaaS needs. In the cloud space, SoftLayer’s name doesn’t get thrown around like Amazon and Rackspace, but it is a popular choice for IaaS and has more than 25,000 small-to-huge customers, including AT&T, SendGrid, Citrix, and Path. It has 13 data centers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia and has raised $30 million in venture capital to date.

The fact that both EMC and IBM are showing interest in buying SoftLayer shows that the company has been successful in recruiting customers to use its public cloud over so many other choices.

IBM especially is interesting since it already offers its own cloud infrastructure products. Perhaps this means IBM wants SoftLayer’s data centers and tech to bolster its efforts.

Storage giant EMC, however, could be looking at SoftLayer to combine with the efforts of cloud services giant VMware, which it owns a majority stake of. EMC’s latest big move is a joint spin-off with VMware called The Pivotal Initiative, which focuses on “big data” and data processing services.

Clouds photo via Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VMware picked an unusually busy day (new pope, new Android head, new Kickstarter record) to dump a lot of high-level cloud announcements in the laps of tech reporters everywhere. The company has some big things in the works, including an upcoming public cloud that will challenge Amazon and a new focus on software-defined data centers.

Let’s dig into the news dump.

Public cloud to take on Amazon and Rackspace

First up, VMware vaguely announced that it will be offering a stand-alone public cloud from its newly formed “Hybrid Cloud Services” business unit. This public cloud will challenge all the big dogs offering infrastrcture-as-a-service — Amazon, Rackspace, IBM, HP, SoftLayer, Google, Microsoft, and more — and it will launch in the second quarter of 2013.

Forrester analyst James Staten, who was pre-briefed on the announcement, writes about the decision in a blog post:

Sometimes you can only coax a reluctant partner and I&O customer community for so long before you feel you have to take matters into your own hands. That is exactly what VMware has decided to do, to become relevant in the cloud platforms space. The hypervisor pioneer unveiled vCloud Hybrid Service to investors today in what is more a statement of intention than a true unveiling.

VMware’s public cloud service – yep, a full public IaaS cloud meant to compete with Amazon Web Service, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, HP Cloud, Rackspace and others – won’t be fully unveiled until Q2 2013, so much of the details about the service remain under wraps. VMware hired the former president for Savvis Cloud, Bill Fathers, to run this new offering and said it was a top three initiative for the company and thus would be getting, “the level of investment appropriate to that priority and to capitalize on a $14B market opportunity,” according to Matthew Lodge, VP of Cloud Services Product Marketing and Management for VMware who spoke to us Tuesday about the pending announcement.

VMware said its public cloud will be aimed at its existing customer base and sold through its existing VAR and SI channel. This explains CEO Gelsinger’s strong comments from last month’s Partner Exchange — it wasn’t public clouds he was worried about but non-VMware public clouds. But for this channel fulfillment strategy to come true, its partners will have to get with the cloud program too and like the I&O clients they serve, many don’t see more revenue at the end of the public cloud rainbow. And most channel partners don’t have the skills or the trust level to help their I&O clients transition from static virtualization to cloud – that’s a culture and career path change more than a product they can sell them. This requires consulting skills and real cloud experience and most VMware partners don’t have either.

Software-defined data centers

VMware also said today that it will merge its “VMware vCloud Networking and Security” product line with the “Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP)” into one product family called “VMware NSX.” VMware paid more than $1 billion to buy Nicira in July 2012 for its software-defined networking potential, so here we are seeing that move in action.

There is some skepticism that software-defined data centers are overhyped, but we’re willing to let VMware put itself out there and see what it is able to do on this front.

The company explained the decision in this excerpt from a lengthy blog post:

VMware NSX will be the world’s leading network and security virtualization platform providing a full-service, programmatic, and mobile virtual network for virtual machines, deployed on top of any general purpose IP network hardware. The VMware NSX platform brings together the best of Nicira NVP and VMware vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) into one unified platform. VMware NSX exposes a complete suite of simplified logical networking elements and services including logical switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPN, QoS, monitoring, and security; arranged in any topology with isolation and multi-tenancy through programmable APIs – deployed on top of any physical IP network fabric, resident with any compute hypervisor, connecting to any external network, and consumed by any cloud management platform (e.g. vCloud, OpenStack, CloudStack).

The Pivotal Initiative is a go

Finally, the VMware and EMC spin-off The Pivotal Initiative has become official.

The Pivotal Initiative is led by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz. It is 69 percent owned by EMC and 31 percent owned by VMware and focuses on “big data” and data processing initiatives. The new company has employees and technology from EMC’s Pivotal Labs and Greenplum units and from VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Spring, and Cetas.

EMC CEO and Chairman Joe Tucci believes The Pivotal Initiative will go public in the future, and Martiz has stated it will likely be a $1 billion business in five years.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by writer Andy Meek 

ProfitBricks, a global cloud infrastructure provider, has big ambitions despite not yet having widespread name recognition. The Boston-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company this week announced the launch of a foundation program for the startup community.

Amazon, with its cloud computing power, is the giant in the space. But ProfitBricks — the company that launched in a major way in the U.S. in September – wants to change that and believes it has the tech to back up that goal.

The reason why might not seem obvious at first. But it is intended to directly help the company’s larger mission.

The ProfitBricks Foundation Program is rolling out initially in New England and then nationwide in 2013. Through it, the company is offering startups the possibility of getting virtual data centers at a sharply reduced cost for one year.

Startups are a key market for Profitbricks. And by offering incentives for ProfitBricks’ next generation cloud computing services, it lowers the risk for a startup to try an alternative to Amazon. Companies with below $1 million in revenue will be eligible to use a cloud server from ProfitBricks for one year without cost. They’ll also get 20 percent off their IaaS services from ProfitBricks for one year.

“Our goal is to offer ProfitBricks’ virtual data center technology to startups who value access to cost-effective, next-generation cloud computing services,” said ProfitBricks USA CEO Bob Rizika.

Or, in other words, the goal is to add incentives where possible to further motivate startups to look outside the Kingdom of Bezos. And in a broader sense, the ProfitBricks story is one of a team of German computer engineers who regarded Amazon as forcing customers into buying packages they might not fully need.

The company was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneurs Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger. And with funding from the founders and United Internet, ProfitBricks built and is offering virtual data center technology with a host of benefits – flexible user defined instances, live vertical scaling capability, double redundant cloud storage — with basic minute-based billing. The team spent time and money to create ProfitBricks’ IaaS environment and presence, which now includes more than 100 team members from 17 countries.

They’re not the only ones attempting something similar. Along those same lines of pay-per-use economics, HP this week announced its HP FlexNetwork Utility Advantage Program at an event in London. According to HP, the new program allows communications service providers in collaboration with HP to help enterprise customers modernize their network with prepackaged network solutions with no upfront cost involved. Customers then work with the CSP for the network offerings they need on a pay-per-use basis, according to the company.

Andy Meek is a journalist in Memphis who frequently contributes to outlets including Fast Company, Forbes, Politico, and several tech blogs.

Image credit: HappyDancing/ShutterStock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon is the largest cloud infrastructure provider in the world, and it’s having to keep innovating on many fronts. It’s latest new feature: detailed billing reports that show usage by the hour to help customers control cloud costs.

Cloud services can cost your company a lot of cash if you don’t use them properly. Startups such as Newvem and Cloudability have already done a great job of starting to address this issue. Newvem has several tools, including a slick iPhone app, while Cloudability offers a variety of analytics tools for tracking costs.

Now Amazon is taking inspiration from these other player and will help its many users better understand their cloud usage. Jeff Barr, Amazon Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Solutions, writes on the company’s AWS blog:

We’ve had a number of requests for better access to more detailed billing data. We took the first step earlier this year when we announced Programmatic Access to AWS Billing Data on this blog. That data, along with the AWS Billing Alerts, provided you with additional information about your AWS usage, along with a notification if your spending for the month exceeded a particular amount.

Today we are going a step further, providing you with new AWS Detailed Billing Reports. You now have access to new reports which include hourly line items. If you use a combination of On Demand and Reserved Instances, you will now be able to ensure that you have enough Reserved Instances to meet your capacity requirements for any given hour.

As part of this release, we are also making it easier for you to track and manage the costs associated with Reserved Instances when used in conjunction with AWS Consolidated Billing. This report provides an additional allocation model for linked accounts, with two key features — RI Affinity and Unblended Rates:

• With RI Affinity, the allocated benefit of the less expensive hourly rate for a Reserved Instance is now prioritized to the linked account that purchased the RI first.
• Currently the consolidated bill uses a blended rate (the average of On Demand, Free Usage Tier, and Reserved Instance) when allocating costs to linked accounts. The detailed billing report will continue to include blended rate and cost information, but will now be supplemented with unblended rate and cost as additional columns.

You can turn on detailed billing in Amazon on the AWS Billing Preferences page.

Newvem VP of Marketing Cameron Peron told VentureBeat via email that Newvem appreciates the new feature and thinks it will help attract steer more people to use Newvem for even deeper analytics.

“We applaud AWS’s new feature,” Peron said. “Anything that can help AWS users improve their usage is a win for AWS users, AWS, and Newvem. Cost is a function of usage … so any tool that will give users better visibility into cost structure is a great benefit and means to improve over all usage.”

Businessman looking at cloud via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After the Autonomy debacle, software giant Hewlett-Packard is putting its eggs in a new basket: converged cloud services.

HP has announced the general availability of its Open Stack-powered public cloud service in the hopes that this will boost customer confidence as it recovers from the $10 billion botched acquisition of enterprise search vendor Autonomy.

The race to commoditize the open-source cloud operating system is firmly underway, but as an original investor, HP has a head-start. For HP, this is part of an ongoing push to bring enterprise customers a combination of private, public and managed cloud resources — a true hybrid cloud.

In addition to releasing its OpenStack-powered public cloud product, HP also announced enhancements to its Cloud Service Automation software, and that its suite of cloud offerings now includes a platform as a service (PaaS) based on VMware’s Cloud Foundry. Read more here about the growing demand from enterprises for PaaS, which makes it easier for developers to deploy applications in the cloud.

HP will make the announcement of the release today at its Discover event in Frankfurt, Germany. The company faces some stiff competition from incumbent cloud computing giants — Rackspace and Amazon make similar claims about the benefits of the hybrid cloud. Dell and Internap are also rolling out their Open-Stack based public clouds. But given HP’s early experimentation in the area, it is already in the game in some ways: France’s second largest carrier, SFR, for example, is using HP’s OpenStack modification in its own offering in France (see how that deal emerged from our own CloudBeat conference in 2011).

HP’s open-cloud offering, Cloud Compute, promises to deliver reliable resources to handle heavy production workloads — its a “pay as you go” model that lets customers pay for the services they actually use. Cloud Compute is an “open cloud” service, meaning that customers are free to choose their platform and language without fear of vendor lock-in.

Free trials are currently on-offer and promotional pricing is available until January – early customers will receive the service at a 50 percent discount.

According to Network World, the company is also announcing a beta version of a cloud-based block storage service, which will likely be generally available in the coming months.

Top photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VMWare parent company EMC is planning to carve off VMWare’s non-core businesses, including its popular Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, into a separate unit owned by EMC, according to multiple sources, including GigaOm and TechCrunch.

Paul Maritz, the former chief executive of VMWare, will head the new unit, the reports say.

The new unit will include Cloud Foundry, plus SpringSource, Gemstone, and EMC’s “big data” product, Greenplum, reports say. This would give EMC a more dedicated unit to compete with other cloud service providers, most notably the industry leaders, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. It would also allow VMWare to concentrate on its core business of server virtualization.

The rumors are an update to rumors reported in July, 2012, by GigaOm, which suggested that VMWare was about to spin off Cloud Foundry together with Greenplum and Project Rubicon, an infrastructure-as-a-service product. The new spinoff plans appear to be somewhat different, suggesting that EMC’s plans have evolved.

Maritz, a former top Microsoft executive, was the CEO of VMWare from 2008 until September 1, 2012, when former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger replaced him. Interestingly, Maritz announced his departure as CEO around the same time as the first set of rumors about a VMWare spinoff.

EMC is the majority owner of VMWare, holding 80 percent of the publicly-traded company. Separately, VMWare recently announced plans to repurchase up to $250 million of its stock.

VMWare chief technical officer Stephen Herrod spoke last week at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference (video), but refused to address the rumors at that time.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Claranet, a London-based cloud hosting provider, has scooped up Star, a company that delivers managed technology services like unified communications, and advanced security services.

According to an official statement released on Star’s website, this acquisition has turned Claranet into the largest mid-tier provider of integrating hosting and networking services in Europe.

The local media views this as evidence of “cloud hosting consolidation;” Europe-based cloud companies like Claranet need to grow quickly, and bolster their range of services to compete with global cloud hosting giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace.

Related news: AWS recently announced that it would expand to its ninth region; it already has a strong footing in Europe with a data center in Ireland.

“This announcement confirms our ambition to become the clear European leader in the delivery of managed services,” said Claranet Group CEO, Charles Nasser. In a statement, Nasser termed this an “British entrepreneurial success story”, as both companies were founded in the UK.

The new business will incorporate an extended range of managed hosting and network services, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, and virtual data centers.

Claranet claims that this new and expanded company will have revenues of over $150 million, about 700 staff, and over 4,500 customers, and operations will be expanded to the UK France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

In addition, new customers gained through the acquisition include Airbus, Amnesty International, Care UK, Channel 5, Veolia, Signet, CSH, IRIS, De Vere Hotels and Richmond Events.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s EC2 cloud service appears to be fully restored after yesterday’s big outage, which took down sites and services including Reddit, Airbnb, Pinterest, Flipboard, GetGlue, Coursera, Foursquare, and more.

As of today at 6:33 a.m. PT, Amazon’s Status Dashboard says EC2 at its North Virginia data center is “operating normally.” The company writes:

23rd Oct 6:33 AM PDT The remainder of the affected ELB load balancers have been recovered and the service is operating normally.

We have restored IO for the majority of EBS volumes. A small number of volumes will require customer action to restore IO. We are in the process of contacting these customers directly with instructions on how to return their volumes to service.

Volumes affected during this event are continuing to re-mirror (which we expect will continue through the remainder of the day). While this process continues, customers may notice increased volume IO latency.

While EC2 appears to be back to normal, Amazon said the Relational Database Service for its North Virginia data center was still not completely restored. It writes:

23rd Oct 6:37 AM PDT We continue to make progress towards restoring access to the remaining DB Instances in the affected Availability Zone. The service continues to operate normally for the rest of DB Instances in the Region.

A member of hacker collective Anonymous claimed responsibility for yesterday’s outage, but Amazon flatly denied that an attack occurred. We believe Amazon, as the evidence suggests this person is routinely lying about attacking websites and services including GoDaddy and Facebook.

Yesterday’s crippling outage isn’t the only one Amazon has had this year. The company suffered a major outage in June that took down services including Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, and Heroku. Amazon also suffered large EC2 outages in April and August of 2011.

If you plan to change cloud infrastructure providers because of this outage and the ones before, shoot me a note at sean AT venturebeat.com.

We’ve asked Amazon for more details about what exactly happened with yesterday’s EC2 outage and will update this post if it gets back.

Clouds photo via Tokinu_Unikot/Flickr

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Platform-as-a-Service is part of the booming cloud computing sector, one area of the cloud that some analysts, companies, and developers have overlooked. But recent research shows that PaaS is no longer the ugly duckling of the cloud industry — and that it’s ready to grow quite a bit during the next few years.

PaaS will make up barely 1 percent of the overall $109 billion cloud industry this year. But it will likely grow more than 30 percent annually over the next four years, according to research firm Gartner.

This could make PaaS a $2.9 billion market by 2016, or more than 2 percent of the $209 billion total cloud market. While small, it’s the second fastest growing “layer” of the cloud and one that cloud-watchers should be paying closer attention to.

What is PaaS?

Like many things dubbed cloud, PaaS is a term that sometimes get lost in technobabble or marketing jargon. So let’s break down what PaaS actually is.

The cloud features four main layers, according to Gartner: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, and Business Process-as-a-Service (IaaS, Paas, SaaS, and BPaaS,).

IaaS companies such as Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Joyent offer the core infrastructure and virtual servers that host applications and data. This is where the heavy iron sits, such as storage, servers, and so on. The SaaS category, meanwhile, lies on the opposite end: It includes applications that companies deliver exclusively via the web (rather than desktop apps). These include apps such as Google Docs, Salesforce CRM, Workday, Box, Taleo, and NetSuite that enterprise workers rely on. BPaaS includes business process services like advertising or payments.

PaaS sits in-between IaaS and SaaS, providing an environment for developers and companies to host and deploy applications more easily. Simply put, PaaS companies shield developers from the hassle of setting up, configuring, and managing things like servers and databases, so that they don’t have to see the infrastructure side.

What makes PaaS so attractive is that it can improve the speed of developing an app, save you money, and maybe most important, let you focus on innovating your application and business. Major PaaS providers include Salesforce (Heroku), Google (App Engine), and Microsoft (Azure).

In the diagram below, you can see how PaaS fits into the main layers of the cloud:

Boom time

In terms of size, SaaS, IaaS, and BPaaS far outstrip PaaS. In 2012, PaaS revenues ($1.2 billion) will be a tenth of the size of SaaS ($14.4 billion), a fifth of IaaS ($6.2 billion), and just a tiny fraction of BPaaS ($84.1 billion).

However, when it comes to year-over-year growth of the PaaS segment itself, it looks quite nice.

Research firm IDC breaks down the market slightly differently than Gartner and is more bullish on PaaS. It estimates that the worldwide public PaaS market will grow from $2.6 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion in 2016. That represents 30.9 percent annualized growth.

By 2016, IDC believes public PaaS will account for 8.5 percent of overall app dev and deployment revenue, with “strong growth” occurring in every region of the world. Stephen Hendrick, IDC group vice president for application development and deployment research, calls PaaS’ future “exciting.”

Just this week, Salesforce COO George Hu said at DEMO Fall 2012 that its platform services have surpassed Salesforce’s CRM in terms of API calls per day. “The pace keeps me up at night,” he said. “Things are moving incredibly fast at Salesforce right now.”

Additionally, a recent survey by smaller PaaS provider Engine Yard, which had $28 million in revenue last year, indicates that PaaS adoption is on the rise with medium and large companies. Two out of three survey respondents said they already use or plan to use PaaS in the next two years. “Enterprise is beginning to bite,” Mark Gaydos, the Engine Yard SVP of marketing, told us at the time.

For more on how the market is growing, take a look at some of the biggest players:

Heroku

One of the largest players in the PaaS marketplace is Salesforce with Heroku, which has more than 2.3 million apps currently deployed on it. A year ago it had just 200,000. Heroku customers include Walmart, Macy’s, Activision Blizzard, and GroupMe.

“We see PaaS as a fundamental game changer,” Heroku chief operating officer Oren Teich told VentureBeat. “We’re looking at the base of innovation. We’ve only climbed 100 feet of a 3-mile-high mountain.”

Teich said he expects Heroku to host more than five million apps a year from now. He admits that he’s being cautious with that number and said it could potentially be more akin to six million or seven million apps if momentum really picks up. Salesforce would not reveal the revenue it generates from Heroku.

Google App Engine

Google and its App Engine is one of the earliest players in PaaS, opening its doors in “preview status” in April 2008 and officially leaving preview in November 2011.

Here, too, Google does not break down revenue it gets from App Engine. However, Google’s statistics show that usage of App Engine is growing quickly. At the Google I/O conference this past June, Google announced that it had more than 1 million active apps deployed on GAE and 250,000 active developers building on the platform. In May 2011, Google said it had 200,000 active apps and 100,000 active developers.

Half of the Internet’s IP addresses touch Google App Engine servers each week, a Google spokesperson recently told me. Some two trillion datastore operations are performed on it each month.

Microsoft Windows Azure

Thirdly, we have Microsoft and Windows Azure. Azure turned some heads in June by also starting to offer developers IaaS on top of its already strong PaaS product.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us that Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that Azure has doubled the number of its customers over the past 12 months. He said Microsoft has doubled compute capacity for Azure so it can meet demand and that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the world used in 1998.

“We’ve worked hard to keep up with demand the past two years,” Martin told us. “In the long term, PaaS will be most widely used for application development.”

Other players

The PaaS market also encompasses a number of smaller players, such as VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, AppFog, dotCloud, CloudBees, Engine Yard, Red Hat’s OpenShift, and Salesforce’s enterprise-oriented platform, Force.com.

AppFog has more than 60,000 apps hosted, up from 50,000 apps a month ago and 10,000 apps a year ago, according to AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson. AppFog also recently acquired Nodester, a PaaS that supports the popular Node.js programming environment.

Developers take control

The prospects for PaaS weren’t always so exciting. Redmonk analyst Steve O’Grady says that the earliest PaaS implementations — Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure — did not sell as well as the market expected.

“From an adoption standpoint, early PaaS largely failed,” O’Grady said. “Did Force.com and Google get users? Yes, but they did not live up to expectations.”

That said, a few barriers were stopping the mass market from buying in. First, many large enterprise companies don’t permit PaaS use. AppFog’s Carlson says that CIOs are often concerned about vendor lock-in and don’t like PaaS providers taking over functions the company could potentially set up on its own.

But developers go around their IT overlords and use PaaS services anyway. Because much of the technology is low-cost or open-source, developers say “screw it” because PaaS greatly improves their productivity and lowers project costs.

O’Grady says what the CIOs want doesn’t matter now that their developers have taken control. “They don’t have a choice,” he said.

The second barrier to Paas adoption? Not enough people know what PaaS can help their company accomplish. Heroku’s Teich said when he talks to developers and enterprises about PaaS, they don’t do much evaluation of their options or even know what the options are. Basically, they are woefully uneducated.

“Developers have a lot of preconceived notions about which PaaS they should use,” Teich said. “It’s another sign that PaaS is something that has a lot of growth potential.”

If you feel like you need a PaaS education, come join us for the CloudBeat 2012 conference on Nov. 28 and 29 in Redwood City, Calif. We look forward to seeing you there.

Clouds photo via Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr

Cloud breakdown slide via “Windows Azure Platform: Cloud Development Jump Start” via Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform has been given a major update that will offer deep support to Linux-based developers, the company announced today in a blog post.

The update will bring Windows Azure to a new level of versatility in what it can offer developers of all stripes, and it will no longer be treated purely as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Azure will now have outlined elements that make it an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as well. (See my cloud 101 primer to get a better handle on cloudy acronyms.) Ideally with the new IaaS focus in place, Microsoft can to peel off developers using Amazon’s ubiquitous cloud for their IaaS needs.

The full scope of what Microsoft will be offering with Azure now, as outlined by Microsoft server and cloud head Bill Laing, can be read through below:

• Windows Azure Virtual Machines — Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. Migrate existing workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SharePoint to the cloud, bring your own customized Windows Server or Linux images, or select from a gallery. As a common virtualization file format, VHD has been adopted by hundreds of vendors and is a freely available specification covered under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

• Windows Azure Virtual Network — Virtual Network lets you provision and manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Windows Azure as well as securely extend on-premises networks into the cloud. It provides control over network topology, including configuration of IP addresses, routing tables and security policies and uses the industry-standard IPSEC protocol to provide a secure connection between your corporate VPN gateway and Windows Azure.

• Windows Azure Web Sites — Build web sites and applications with this highly elastic solution supporting .NET, Node.js, and PHP while using common deployment techniques like Git and FTP. Windows Azure Web Sites will also allow easy deployment of open source applications like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and Drupal to the cloud with a few clicks.

• New tools, language support, and SDK — Windows Azure SDK June 2012 includes new developer capabilities for writing code against the latest service improvements with updated support for Java, PHP, and .NET, and the addition of Python as a supported language on Windows Azure. Additionally, the SDK now provides 100% command line support for both Windows and Mac.

• Availability in New Countries — Availability of Windows Azure is being expanded to customers in 48 new countries, including Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa, and Ukraine. Roll-out will be complete later this month, making Windows Azure one of the most widely available cloud platforms in the industry with offerings in 89 countries and in 19 local currencies.

Microsoft will be holding a full-fledged announcement tomorrow with a live webcast at 1 p.m. Pacific if you want to get a better look at the new Azure. The company will then release preview editions of the platform.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Infrastructure-as-a-service startup SingleHop has raised $27.5 million in its first round of funding, cash that will help it quickly accelerate growth, the company announced today.

SingleHop has been slowly making a name for itself in the cloud computing and cloud infrastructure arena. The company’s proprietary management platform, called LEAP, makes it possible for clients to deploy and manage their web infrastructure from a unified platform. Its traction has been so good that it was named No. 25 on the Inc. 500 list for fastest growing companies in the U.S., leaping up from the No. 58 spot a year prior.

The firm’s relatively large first round came from Boston-based Battery Ventures. Battery General Partners Dave Tabors and Morad Elhafed will join SingleHop’s board of directors.

“SingleHop is well positioned given the rise in cloud computing and demand for outsourced IT services. With its automated technology platform, the company has carved out a unique position in the market,” said Tabors, in a statement. “Customers are happy and sticking around, and that’s a direct result of the company’s business model, coupled with superior technology and a smart leadership team. We’re really looking forward to helping this company scale.”

Chicago-based SingleHop was founded in 2006, has 80 employees, and has clients in 114 countries. The company has two data centers in the Chicago-area and more than 10,000 servers online. Next on its to-do list is to open a data center facility in Phoenix.

You can watch SingleHop’s video describing the LEAP3 cloud infrastructure solution below:

Photo credit: Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock

Apple products, not cloud computing, will be the real force behind computer equipment sales in 2012, according to a report by analyst firm Forrester.

“Analysts have been predicting that cloud computing — specifically, infrastructure-as a service (IaaS) — will reshape the server and storage market,” the report read, “Actual adoption of IaaS remains limited.”

Meanwhile, there’s another trend that’s picking up: People are increasingly bringing their own devices to work, and those devices are frequently Apple products, since Apple is known globally for making products that are easy to use, easy to set up and that quickly proliferate to the masses. The “bring your own device” culture that began infiltrating the workplace in 2011 will mean companies will have to make technology plans around Apple, as opposed to the “less pressing” IaaS.

Cloud computing is a big switch that IT managers are dealing with. It’s new, it’s shiny, but it also means huge change, which causes doubts. In the second fiscal quarter of 2011, Forrester surveyed a number of companies and discovered that 14 percent had plans to introduce IaaS into the company structure. Only 3 percent said they were implementing these plans in 2011. Forrester believes the global economy will put a bigger strain on chief information officers’ budgets in 2012, however. Thus, early worries about spending money on new equipment supporting IaaS, will cause CIOs to cut these purchases out of the budget.

Forrester estimates that in 2011, Apple sold $6 billion in Macs as well as the same number of iPads to businesses, despite the fact that Apple does not target the corporate market. The iPad in particular is an easy-to -use technology that is less of an investment than a suite of Mac computers. This may be appealing to CIOs, and it show in Forrester’s 2012 and 2013 predictions.

In 2012, the firm predicts Apple will increase sales to the business sector, as growth in the overall tech market is expected to remain stable at a projected 6 percent per year through 2012 and 2013. Apple should sell $9 billion in Macs and $10 billion in iPads to government and businesses in 2012. 2013 looks even better, with a predicted $12 billion in Macs and $16 billion in iPads sold to the same segment.

In a recession, CIOs will turn toward easy, simple solutions, and thus Apple is the likely winner. IaaS may still play a big roll in shaping what the future of equipment may look like, but for now the iPad is still the executive’s favorite work toy.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As I write, the VentureBeat offices sit enveloped by a cloud. In all directions, the fog wraps our office building in a soft, gray fuzz, obscuring the views of downtown San Francisco, the bay, and the ocean.

It’s not unlike the cloud of marketing and hype surrounding “cloud” technologies. A fog of jargony words and needlessly ugly acronyms obscure understanding and make everything look like the same, soft grayish fog.

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, cloudware, private clouds, cloudsourcing, utility computing … even the word “platform” gets overused and abused, rendering it nearly meaningless. What do all these terms mean? It’s easy to get lost in them if you’re not already deeply wrapped up in the cloud.

So I’ll be honest: Even though VentureBeat has a cloud channel and we’re planning a cloud conference that’s happening later this week (you should go!), I started out as a serious skeptic of all things “cloud.”

Here’s why: The cloud was originally a symbol used in network architecture diagrams, where it stood for “the Internet” — basically, a bunch of servers and networks that the network architect didn’t really want to think about in detail. Thanks to the standardization of communications protocols like TCP/IP, it wasn’t necessary to think about all those other servers and networks — you could treat them as a single, addressable resource that did some magic, transmitted some data from one place to another, and then brought it back to earth in another part of your network.

The cloud was the network architect’s equivalent of “then a miracle occurs.” But thanks to the Internet, it was a miracle that happened every single day, until it became so commonplace that we didn’t even notice it any more.

Eventually, it seems, product marketers latched onto that cute little “cloud” icon scrawled in these diagrams and decided that it would make a friendlier face for their Web applications.

“Cloud” is a more approachable term than “Web application” or “Internet-based service,” after all, so the marketing shift makes perfect sense. But it doesn’t have much content. You could substitute “Internet” anywhere you see the word “cloud” and it would mean just about the same thing.

However, there is some hard reality underlying the, um, fog of hype.

“In my mind, cloud is a somewhat vague term, but it has a very specific implication, which is it’s all about making IT more responsive to the needs of business,” Dan Scholnick, a general partner at venture capital firm Trinity Ventures, said in a recent VentureBeat interview.

Business IT services delivered over the Internet — what we can call, in general, cloud services — are in fact driving a major shift in the way companies think about and use information technology. Cloud services are cheaper and faster to deploy, at least initially, because there’s no on-premise hardware or software installation needed. Cloud services can scale more quickly than software or services that you run yourself. If you need to add 100 more users to your contact-management system, you can turn them on in minutes using a cloud-based service provider like Salesforce.com. If you need to subtract 100 users, it’s just as easy.

By contrast, if you are running your own salesforce management software on your own servers in a datacenter somewhere, every time you want to add a significant number of users you’ll have to buy additional hardware, install it, get additional site licenses, make sure all the software was up to date, and so on. If you then go through layoffs, you’re left with a bunch of capital that you can’t get rid of easily.

Indeed, in some cases cloud services are making it possible for companies to have tools and resources that previously were only available to the largest of corporations.

To take one relatively minor example, Stitch Labs’ inventory management system gives small-time Etsy sellers the ability to get sales-channel reports and customer insights that you used to only get if you were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an enterprise resource management system.

“We couldn’t have existed before the cloud,” Eloqua CEO Joe Payne told me recently. His company uses at least a dozen cloud-based services, including Salesforce.com and his own company’s marketing automation tools, but also including cloud-based Web-conferencing, accounting, contract management, payroll processing, software version control, collaboration, recruiting and training. It may sound like overkill, but all those services give Eloqua flexibility and speed that it never would have had before, and have helped drive the company to grow its revenues at a cumulative 54 percent per year over the past 5 years.

It’s hard to say exactly how big the market for cloud services is, partly because the term is so broad that it comprises a whole bunch of disparate categories. To take just one slice of the pie, cloud infrastructure services, awkwardly called “infrastructure as a service” or IaaS, are a $4 billion market by themselves.

Software-as-a-service, which most people call SaaS but which I think could be more simply called “software services” or “cloud software,” has been a $21 billion market in 2011.

On the consumer side, services delivered over the cloud are already huge. Online games were a $19.3 billion market in 2010. Services that let people store data online (storage-as-a-service, which could also abbreviated SaaS by cloud terminology chumps) will hit $3 billion by 2012, IDC predicts.

And, heck, if you consider webmail a cloud service, there are approximately a gazillion people using email-as-a-service, or EaaS. (I just made that last term up.) Of course, most of us don’t pay anything for webmail, and we don’t consider it a “cloud” service, which leads me to my final point:

By the time an Internet-based service gets truly ubiquitous and everyone is using it, we no longer think about the Internet part of it. We don’t send each other “Internet emails,” we just email each other. We don’t look things up on the Web any more, we just look them up.

Eventually, companies won’t be buying “cloud services,” they’ll just be buying services — and those services will be delivered, like everything else, over some combination of public and private networks, all of which are based on underlying Internet protocols and technologies.

In short: And then a miracle occurs.

Note: I’ll be talking with Payne about Eloqua’s use of cloud services at our upcoming CloudBeat 2011 conference later this week. I’ll also spend some time onstage with Jeff Lawson, the CEO of Twilio, and Adrian McDermott, the vice president of engineering for Zendesk, talking about how their respective cloud-based services work with each other. There’s more on both of those CloudBeat sessions here. If you haven’t registered for CloudBeat 2011 yet, there’s still time. And if you’re coming, look me up: I’d like to hear what you think about the cloud.

NOTE: Subscribe to my newsletter and you can read these columns a whole day before they appear on our website.

Golden Gate bridge photo credit: jazure/Flickr.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Everyone is talking about the “cloud,” but is there anything new here? How is the “cloud” different from “internet” or “web?”

There is something new — and it’s a big deal — but it’s not what everyone usually talks about.

A few years ago, when someone would store his photos on Picasa, he would say, “I am using this website to store my photos” or “I put my photos on the Internet.” Now he would say, “I store my photos in the cloud.” What’s the difference ? In most cases, none. In consumer language, the word “cloud” has replaced “Internet” or “web” — it is just more trendy!

And yet, something real is happening.

In the business-to-business world, the word “cloud” is just as pervasive as it is in the consumer world. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has even attempted to define it, although the definition is incredibly complex:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

This is actually accurate. But what is revolutionary and new here? Based on this description, the cloud is an evolution, not a revolution. It is the continuation of a series of changes initiated in the nineties with the advent of the commercial Internet, but its roots go back even further.

The first network-accessible “cloud” computing resources were already coming online some 50 years ago when American Airline launched SABRE in the early sixties.

In the eighties, bulletin board systems (BBSes) and Minitel were full of applications that were used through a network. The leading applications were yellow pages (search), travel reservations, order input systems and online dating.

In the late nineties, online services all converted to the Internet to benefit from lower costs and larger audience. Shortly after, a new concept appeared: “SaaS” or Software-as-a-Service. Some innovative software vendors realized that the Internet had become reliable enough for corporations to depend on it. We all know the success of Salesforce.com, essentially continuing and enhancing the order input systems from the BBS era.

A decade later, bandwidth has become so ubiquitous that it is in the air, and it is now common to access the Internet using smartphones. Most users have multiple devices from which they want to access their service, to the point that location has become nearly irrelevant.

With decades of improvement in available bandwidth and reliability, it is increasingly possible to rely on systems that are not on the same premises as the end user of the system. An innovative vendor, Amazon.com, saw that not only software but the computing infrastructure itself could be offered as a service. And thus the cloud was born. But fundamentally, there is not much difference between provisioning an instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and using a distant computer on a BBS 30 years ago.

And yet, a revolution is happening, but it is elsewhere. It is the consumerization of IT.

How consumerization has driven infrastructure

For decades, innovation in information technology has been driven by enterprises, government, and military needs. With the cloud wave, the place for innovation has changed, and it is now the consumer which is the driving force in IT.

Serving consumers at the scale of the Internet is mind-boggling. The service has to be on, all the time, for everyone, despite the variety of situations, devices, time zones, character sets…. When you address such a large population, there are no ‘safe’ maintenance windows. You can be almost certain that someone is using your service at any weird hour of the day or night, even on Christmas eve! Not only do you need to deliver 24×7, ubiquitous, highly reliable computing, but you need to do it cheaply, so cheaply that you can sell it for pennies or make money from advertising.

Large web sites such as Amazon, Google and Facebook have faced these challenges since the mid-2000s. They have independently found the same solution: distributing IT over many generic servers in a completely distributed architecture, where components can fail and be upgraded or changed individually without material impact on the whole system, thus reducing manual operations to a fraction of those required with traditional IT systems. This approach is now the foundation for the cloud wave.

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos documented through many interviews the process by which Amazon became the leader of public cloud services. Here is an excerpt of an interview with Bezos in Wired:

Approximately nine years ago we were wasting a lot of time internally because, to do their jobs, our applications engineers had to have daily detailed conversations with our networking infrastructure engineers. Instead of having this fine-grained coordination about every detail, we wanted the data-center guys to give the apps guys a set of dependable tools, a reliable infrastructure that they could build products on top of. The problem was obvious. We didn’t have that infrastructure. So we started building it for our own internal use. Then we realized, “Whoa, everybody who wants to build web-scale applications is going to need this.”

Google and Facebook had to build similar technology; they just took different business routes to get there. Google kept everything in-house powering its multiple applications, simply publishing a few white papers on what it had created (notably MapReduce, which is the foundation to Hadoop). For its part, Facebook contributed much of its infrastructure work to the open-source community (including projects like Cassandra and OpenCompute.org).

This kind of infrastructure has revolutionized software development. Now instead of having to deal with infrastructure as a hindrance (because it is too slow or too expensive) developers can program the infrastructure to deliver exactly the amount of computing power, network resources or storage capacity that is required.

A new kind of developer

I am too old to talk about this revolution with any level of detail. However, I can notice that the kids developing applications today use completely different languages and paradigms than what I was using twenty years ago. Their approach to development is completely focused on what they want the application to do. They do not have to manage the hardware in any way.

Typically these applications leverage a “web service” type of software architecture, making it extremely easy to link applications together. Look at how easy it is to have your Twitter feed show on Facebook and LinkedIn at the same time, or how you can easily log in to a site using your Facebook credentials. This is the result of a web service architecture.

Furthermore, since the infrastructure is programmable, these developers can treat the infrastructure itself as just another service. Now, an application can request 1,000 servers but only for the time it needs to get your result, and then free up these 1,000 servers for some other task, all without any manual intervention. That’s the cloud!

In fact, the NIST definition with “with minimal management effort or service provider interaction” is really a understatement. If an application becomes popular and requires more resources, it will simply request those resources from the Infrastructure-as-a-Service. This is what has made Amazon Web Services so popular with start-ups. Now developers can program the infrastructure and operations as part of their software development. That’s led to a new term, “devops,” that makes explicit the merger of what used to be completely different skill sets, software development and IT operations.

This new style of application development results in applications which are more fun, easier to use, more practical, and more reliably scalable, both in terms of functionality and capacity. All of this can be achieved with a higher productivity in the development process.

The old man’s initial reaction is to dismiss the young kids’ approach. But when you see the success and stability of applications that have been built this way, such as Facebook, SmugMug or Dropbox, to name a few, I am willing to bet the opposite. Within ten years, this style of development will have become standard in the enterprise.

On the hardware side also, innovation is also driven by consumer technology. The cost of silicon-based components is mostly capital cost: the cost of R&D plus the cost of building a fab. Consequently, the cost of silicon based components is inversely proportional to the number of components sold. This is how solid state drives, which were originally used for digital cameras, smartphones and USB keys, got down to a cost point where they are now competitive with hard drives for certain business applications. Without the billions of SSDs sold to the mass market, there would be no way for startups to use SSDs as a viable storage alternative today.

Employees seizing control

Finally, there is yet another way in which consumer technology is driving innovation. Until recently, employees had to make do with what was supplied by their IT department. They would sometimes complain that an application was slow, or a process not practical, but at the end of the day, they would use the tools they were given.

With so many applications and business processes now available through the web, this has changed. How many times have I tried to send a large attachment to someone, and after it was rejected by the corporate mailbox, the person recommended I use their private Gmail account? Actually, the more senior the person and the more confidential the document, the more likely it is to happen!

The tables are turning. Employees are savvy users of IT at home. Devices such as the iPad, Kindle, and Android smartphones, websites such as Facebook or Netflix, applications such as Xfinity, Skype or Evernote have become part of daily life. People can easily listen to the same music at home, in their car, or on vacation. With Xfinity, they can select a movie on their iPad and launch it on their home HDTV. They can share pictures and videos of their last party with all their friends, or with only some of them at the touch of a button.

And then they arrive at work, only to discover that it is impossible to validate a purchase order from their corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from their smartphone. The gap between the amazing technologies they have at home and the lame ones they have at work is widening, and it is becoming intolerable for employees. Intolerable situations cause revolutions.

The consumerization of IT is the real revolution. It is the wind pushing the cloud. The real debate is not about public or private cloud. The real challenge for corporate IT is to embrace this revolution, and accept the fact that an IT made of many simple web processes and many generic servers actually delivers better applications, more functionality, more agility and more reliability, at a fraction of the cost of the big iron.

It is counterintuitive, but it is real. This is what the cloud is about.

Jérôme Lecat is the chief executive of Scality, a large-scale storage management startup. He is a serial entrepreneur and business angel with 15 years of internet start-up experience.

Top image credit: Alexander Kirch/Shutterstock

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!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anyone who who follows technology trends has undoubtedly heard the term “cloud service” thrown around a few gazillion times over the past few months. But if you don’t know the difference between terms such as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, don’t fret — you’re far from alone.

Let’s start at the beginning. “Cloud” is a metaphor for the Internet, and “cloud computing” is using the Internet to access applications, data or services that are stored or running on remote servers.

When you break it down, any company offering an Internet-based approach to computing, storage and development can technically be called a cloud company. However, not all cloud companies are the same. Typically, these companies focus on offering one of three categories of cloud computing services. These different segments are called the “layers” of the cloud.

Not everyone is a CTO or an IT manager, so sometimes following the lingo behind cloud technology can be tough. With our first-annual CloudBeat 2011 conference coming up at the end of this month, we thought this would be a good opportunity to go over the basics of what purpose each layer serves and some company examples to help give each term more meaning.

Layers of the cloud

A cloud computing company is any company that provides its services over the Internet. These services fall into three different categories, or layers. The layers of cloud computing, which sit on top of one another, are Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Infrastructure sits at the bottom, Platform in the middle and Software on top. Other “soft” layers can be added on top of these layers as well, with elements like cost and security extending the size and flexibility of the cloud.

Here is a chart showing simplified explanations for the three main layers of cloud computing:

IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service

The first major layer is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS. (Sometimes it’s called Hardware-as-a-Service.) Several years back, if you wanted to run business applications in your office and control your company website, you would buy servers and other pricy hardware in order to control local applications and make your business run smoothly.

But now, with IaaS, you can outsource your hardware needs to someone else. IaaS companies provide off-site server, storage, and networking hardware, which you rent and access over the Internet. Freed from maintenance costs and wasted office space, companies can run their applications on this hardware and access it anytime.

Some of the biggest names in IaaS include Amazon, Microsoft, VMWare, Rackspace and Red Hat. While these companies have different specialties –  some, like Amazon and Microsoft, want to offer you more than just IaaS — they are connected by a desire to sell you raw computing power and to host your website.

PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service

The second major layer of the cloud is known as Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS, which is sometimes called middleware. The underlying idea of this category is that all of your company’s development can happen at this layer, saving you time and resources.

PaaS companies offer up a wide variety of solutions for developing and deploying applications over the Internet, such as virtualized servers and operating systems. This saves you money on hardware and also makes collaboration easier for a scattered workforce. Web application management, application design, app hosting, storage, security, and app development collaboration tools all fall into this category.

Some of the biggest PaaS providers today are Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Saleforce’s Force.com, the Salesforce-owned Heroku, and Engine Yard. A few recent PaaS startups we’ve written about that look somewhat intriguing include AppFog, Mendix and Standing Cloud.

SaaS: Software-as-a-Service

The third and final layer of the cloud is Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS. This layer is the one you’re most likely to interact with in your everyday life, and it is almost always accessible through a web browser. Any application hosted on a remote server that can be accessed over the Internet is considered a SaaS.

Services that you consume completely from the web like Netflix, MOG, Google Apps, Box.net, Dropbox and Apple’s new iCloud fall into this category. Regardless if these web services are used for business, pleasure or both, they’re all technically part of the cloud.

Some common SaaS applications used for business include Citrix’s GoToMeeting, Cisco’s WebEx, Salesforce’s CRM, ADP, Workday and SuccessFactors.

We hope you’ll join us at CloudBeat 2011 at the end of the month to explore a number of exciting case studies in cloud services.

Cloud photo via Jeff Coleman/Flickr

Cloud breakdown slide via “Windows Azure Platform: Cloud Development Jump Start” via Microsoft

CloudBeat 2011 takes place Nov 30 – Dec 1 at the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, CA. Unlike  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!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday finally announced that his company would take the plunge into public cloud computing with Oracle Public Cloud. He made the announcement on stage at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference.

Oracle’s emphasis for several years has been on powerful hardware and software solutions for data centers and enterprise customers. Ellison in the past decried true cloud solutions as “water vapor” and “idiocy.” But the company will soon provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to customers that want to deploy Oracle Fusion apps in a public cloud or to develop Java-based applications. Pricing for the new service has not been announced.

Oracle customers will now be able to use the Web to access Oracle applications or use apps they have written via the cloud. Ellison said what differentiates Oracle’s public cloud from competing clouds is that Oracle will let customers move data more freely, a somewhat nebulous claim. Ellison fired a serious shot at competitor Salesforce.com by calling it “the roach motel of clouds,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has been critical of Oracle for some time, saying the company advocates a “false cloud.” Benioff left Oracle to create Salesforce.com, so the two CEOs clash now and again. Oracle even cancelled Benioff’s OpenWorld keynote on Wednesday at the last minute. Perhaps this was because Oracle planned to announce the Public Cloud solution or perhaps because Ellison was fed up of being routinely attacked by Benioff.

But if Wednesday’s Public Cloud announcement is any indication, Oracle is tired of not being in the cloud game and will do whatever it takes to make sure its customers have at least some cloud access.

Cloud storage and computing has become increasingly popular because it provides businesses with a low-impact, pay-as-you-go model that offers a lot of computing power and storage without high maintenance and installation costs. This third round of funding is just another example of how much interest there is in cloud processing, said RightScale chief executive Michael Crandell.

“The funding is a validation of very high expectations — both of the cloud and of RightScale,” Crandell said. “Part of RightScale’s specific appeal is our launch around the time of Amazon’s EC2 (elastic compute cloud), so everything we’ve done has been organized around the new cloud architectures that are popular today.”

RightScale takes a “software-as-a-service” approach to cloud management with a browser-based interface that incorporates third-party applications like Alfresco to help businesses manage their cloud networks without having to physically interact with servers. The software runs on top of cloud infrastructure providers like Rackspace and Amazon.com’s EC2 cloud servers.

The most recent round was led by Tenaya Capital, though existing investors Benchmark Capital, Presidio Ventures and Index Ventures and new investor DAG Ventures took part.

The funding will be directed to marketing as well as research and development for the RightScale cloud management platform. RightScale also plans to expand the number of applications built by external developers.

RightScale has a pretty wide array of customers, including Zynga and Playfish — two of the top social game companies on Facebook that run games like FarmVille, Cafe World, Mafia Wars, FishVille, Pet Society, PetVille and Restaurant City. Founded in 2006, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company has launched more than 1.5 million on the RightScale platform.

RightScale raised about $22 million in its previous two rounds of funding and other investments.