Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Canonical and VMware announced today a partnership that will enable customers to run efficient OpenStack clouds using the two sets of technologies.

VMware is the latest company to throw its heft behind OpenStack, the cloud operating system that kicked off two-and-a-half years ago to enable any organization to offer open source software and services. Contributors to the OpenStack project include IBM, Rackspace, and Amazon.

Canonical’s Ubuntu, one of the most popular OpenStack distributions, will now include the plug-ins necessary to operate with VMware technologies, including vSphere or Vicira NVP. Canonical is a 600-person company that competes with Microsoft on desktop, Citrix, and VMware. “In every part of our history, we are encroaching on other people’s territory — but at the same time, we collaborate on OpenStack,” said Mark Baker, a product manager at Canonical, in a recent interview.

This is a major announcement for the industry — and somewhat of a surprise — as VMware hasn’t always embraced the project. Mirantis CEO Boris Renski wrote in a blog post that VMware is a competitor to OpenStack and should take part in the initiative.

Kyle MacDonald, Canonical’s cloud vice president, said in a recent interview that this is an “astute move” for VMware. “They are taking their enterprise business and partnering it with an open source project to try to get the best of both worlds,” he continued.

McDonald, who has defended VMware in the past, said that customers can now “reuse VMware estate with an open-source stack.” It’s a far cry from a world where “you’re either VMware or you’re not.”

As we reported in January, VMware has recently been getting back to basics with a renewed focus on infrastructure. The company announced it would spin off a separate business unit dedicated to “big data” and cloud.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

LAS VEGAS – IBM just announced that it’s basing its cloud products and services on open cloud architecture.

IBM is placing its considerable heft behind OpenStack, a cloud operating system that kicked off two-and-a-half years ago to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. The nonprofit Open Stack Foundation manages the product, and IBM announced it would be a big-time sponsor last April.

“It’s a vote of confidence for the maturity of the [OpenStack] technology,” said Robert Leblanc, the senior vice president of IBM Software (pictured, left), on a conference call with the press. IBM made the announcement at its Las Vegas cloud conference “PULSE,” which began Sunday and ends Friday.

The hope is that IBM’s existing customers will adopt open source-based technologies, which can be ported across hybrid cloud environments.

“I’m excited to see IBM throw their considerable weight behind Open Stack,” said Deepak Advani, a general manager at IBM customer Tivoli, on the call. 

IBM is a long-time contributor to the OpenStack project, along with companies like Rackspace, Dell, Cisco, and Yahoo.

“I think the first couple years of OpenStack is really about helping people run and configure it,” said Scott Sanchez, Rackspace’s strategy lead for Open Cloud in a recent interview with VentureBeat. “But we are seeing a tremendous amount of traction,” he said.

Going forward, IBM will dedicate 500 of its developers to work on open cloud projects. IBM also announced that its Smart Cloud offering (the cloud portfolio used by 5,000 customers) will incorporate open cloud pieces. ”It brings along so many capabilities ” said Leblanc, who pointed out Smart Cloud launched before there even was an Open Stack movement.

IBM’s rebranded offering, “SmartCloud orchestrator,” is currently in beta testing. Benefits for customers include a reduction in operational costs, better integration with third party tools, and a simplification of cloud services.

Jim Smith, a managing partner for Mohr Davidow Ventures, said this is a step forward in “breaking the chains for high cost technologies.” On the conference call, he said that for large businesses and entrepreneurs, “the canvas for innovation is moving to the cloud.”

Photo illustration by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Open-source cloud technology is proving to be an attractive proposition for venture capitalists.

Today, OpenStack private cloud player, Piston Cloud closed an $8 million funding round. Investors see massive potential in the space, despite that it has become increasingly flooded with competitors, such as Hewlett-Packard and Rackspace.

The San Francisco-based startup’s claim to fame is that it was the first to launch a commercial OpenStack distribution. The goal is to increase adoption by offering all the necessary components in one package, including compute, storage, networking, management and platform as a service (PaaS).

For this reason, it is positioned to take advantage of the increasingly popularity of OpenStack, which boasts a global community of over 1,500 contributors.

“We evaluated a number of opportunities in the OpenStack market, and expect to see continued growth and widespread adoption in the coming years,” said new investor, Data Collective’s Matt Ocko. Ocko said in a statement that his cloud computing and “big data”-focussed firm identified Piston Cloud as a contender to “capture the lion’s share of the market.”

The startup also brought on new CEO Jim Morrisroe in December. Former CEO (now CTO) Joshua McKenty is a big name in OpenStack circles, and was a technical architect in NASA’s Nebula cloud computing platform.

Morrisroe, a former general manager at VMware-owned Zimbra, said in a statement, “OpenStack and private cloud software is emerging as a massive market and is disrupting billions of dollars that is today spent on legacy technologies.”

Morrisroe today explained that the funding will help the two-year-old company “enhance our products, grow our customer base and establish new partnerships.” PistonCloud already pulled in $4.5 million in its first funding round in April, 2011.

Cisco, Data Collective, and Swisscom Ventures invested in the second round, joining existing investors Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad and True Ventures.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist at Newvem

I believe that this is the year when the enterprise will find its way to the cloud.

The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.

The traditional CIO understands that in order to achieve that goal, IT will need to start and do cloud, make sure that IT resources are utilized right, and that his teams move fast.

1. Enterprise will move to the public cloud

The enterprise has already moved and started its proof-of-concept.

Those who have realized the option to reduce cost, increase agility, and enjoy the real benefits of the cloud will continue migrating the resources of their non-critical services. Internalizing the public cloud (specifically AWS cloud) will inspire the enterprise to learn how to maintain a robust, highly available and secured service on the public cloud. That will put the hybrid environment in the front, supporting bursting and load migrations.

The traditional enterprise follows the new era one, making sure to transition and acquire only online and mobile services. The SaaS market will continue to grow and be the premier source for the enterprise new online services.

2. Slow adoption of Openstack

OpenStack is one of the candidates to compete with AWS.

This open source platform is being led by heavy traditional industry, such as HP. These traditional vendors don’t have the Internet company culture of moving fast, supported by fast cycles of refinement. In 2012 Amazon released a huge number of new features to support the enterprise cloud, following great agile product management. By contrast HP, which leads the OpenStack community, is still dragging its feet while trying to copy the AWS base offering.

However, it is important to mention that a new trend is emerging in which enterprises are moving to deploy OpenStack instead of renewing VMware licenses.

3. Private cloud is still an option (at least for another year)

Although I am a public cloud “believer,” adoption takes time and the enterprise IT will not shut down its on-premises resources on the spot.

The hype supports the penetration of the cloud to every IT team, including the enterprise … but traditional enterprises want risk free migrations. The basic recommendation is to move on with a quick proof-of-concept to taste and test the actual benefits.

The next move comes when a need for additional resources arises, such as an upgrade, new application, or load growth. Once a real need for additional resources arises, IT managers will then decide whether to purchase new on-premises technologies or cloud resources. And the innovative IT leaders will choose the latter.

Another option is that the enterprise experiments on the public cloud, and only then purchases dedicated resources due to high lease costs. But once a real price war takes place, I believe that the preferred option will be the public cloud, although I’m not sure that this will happen in 2013.

For these reasons, the hybrid cloud model is still valid (unfortunately).

4. Cloud brokers and managed service providers will flourish

Thanks to the knowledge gap, the simple reality is that IT can’t meet the demand for cloud skills. In fact, according to an IDC study, the demand for cloud computing will grow at six times the rate of IT skills overall.

The re:Invent APN summit for partners and the IDC study strengthen the position of cloud managed services. It is obvious that Amazon loves its MSPs because these vendors are growing like crazy. I follow at least five different MSPs whose business as integrators of AWS has grown to 80-90 percent of their whole business, and these are growing amazingly fast.

Amazon also invests in these vendors as it knows that the way enterprise deals with time-to-market issues is by outsourcing, and it will continue to do the same in the future.

5. Transparency is a Key value

One of the most important things I have learned from HP Discover was that the enterprise wants and will be happy to pay to maintain control.

The cloud puts control and transparency at risk due to the fact that traditional enterprise leaders and users are used to having great control of IT resources, and the concept of not having the “irons” intimidates them. The cloud vendors and developers will have to make sure they report back to leaders on the adoption progress, making sure that these new IT resources generate the expected business benefits without harming services, compliance, SLAs, and so on.

Organizations that run to deploy without planning and control will put their cloud adoption and innovation at great risk. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic move, and picking the right way to manage your new cloud resource is part of this strategy.

And one wish for 2013 …

I wish that public cloud competition would become a reality very soon, that it would generate great price reductions, and that it would enable adoption. I hope that Amazon’s cloud will continue to strike and overwhelm everyone with its enterprise penetration, bringing that future even closer. And I hope that the traditional enterprise will be able to adopt “continuous integration” and “cycles of refinement” while removing constraints and presenting the great innovation that the cloud enables.

Ofir Nachmani is Chief Evangelist at Newvem, a web-based cloud usage analytics service that enables CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, Developers and Operators to capture and improve the effectiveness of their public cloud operations and ensure their cloud infrastructure is in sync with business performance. Follow him at @iamondemand.

Image credit: Google

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chris Kemp has a pretty impressive resume: a co-founder of OpenStack, former NASA CTO, and CEO of next-gen private cloud startup Nebula. So when he speaks, people listen up.

On stage at CloudBeat 2012 today, Kemp predicted that “next year is the year of OpenStack.” OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that was established in 2010 by NASA and Rackspace, has attracted a lot of fans since its inception and has more than 150 participating companies using it including Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo.

So it makes sense that OpenStack adoption will continue to increase, especially over the next few years as more companies increase their reliance on cloud solutions. This ties perfectly to what Kemp is selling with his company Nebula. Nebula has raised more than $30 million from Comcast Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and others on the promise of equipping businesses with more flexible and secure private clouds.

Kemp argues that private clouds need to deliver all the benefits of the public cloud (Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Joyent, etc.) but behind a firewall. Ideally, you get fast and reliable computing power but with more security. He also makes a fair point that companies need better hardware, especially if they are running a cloud.

“If you’re a developer using the cloud, the hardware doesn’t matter,” Kemp said. “If you’re running a cloud, it very much matters.”

Check out the full talk with Kemp below for more interesting tidbits from this impressive fellow:

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post written by cloud analyst Paul Miller, who is content advisor for VentureBeat’s upcoming CloudBeat 2012 conference, November 28-29 in Redwood Shores, Calif.

Established by US space agency NASA and hosting company Rackspace in 2010, the OpenStack open-source cloud project has done a remarkable job of attracting attention to itself over two short years. The project now lists over 150 participating companies including major players like Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, and Yahoo, and consistently eclipses earlier open source projects such as Eucalyptus in media coverage of the cloud.

For a quick check of its growth in mind-share, check out the graph above, taken from Google Trends. It shows OpenStack’s dominance (the blue line) of search terms for open source cloud infrastructure projects.

OpenStack’s proposition is simple, with the same freely downloadable code powering big commercial cloud data centers run by Rackspace, Hewlett Packard, and others. Customers, the argument goes, are therefore able to easily move their applications from one provider to another without having to alter their own programs. They can even download a copy of OpenStack to run inside their own data center as well, which (in principle) makes it feasible to move computing jobs from a private data center to commercial clouds and back again, at will.

For some customers, this portability might be critical to the way they run their IT. For many (most?), it’s simply an insurance policy; a comforting demonstration that they can move, should they ever need to.

The proposition is simple, and it is compelling. The roster of participating names is a veritable who’s who of IT infrastructure. But the OpenStack story has not been without its hiccups:

• Throughout much of 2011, grumbling about the degree of control exerted by Rackspace persisted. In October, 2011, Rackspace announced plans to pass control to an independent Foundation; a process that only completed this summer;
• In April of this year, long-time OpenStack supporter Citrix took the CloudStack software it gained through acquisition of cloud.com in 2011, and submitted it to the Apache Software Foundation as a new (competing?) open source project. The first fruits of that project were released earlier this month. Citrix remains a ‘supporter’ of the OpenStack project;
• In June, a blog post by NASA CIO Linda Cureton sparked a flurry of speculation, as pundits claimed NASA was ‘ditching’ OpenStack in favor of Amazon and Microsoft’s Windows Azure. The reality, in which a large and complex organization sensibly continued using a range of different tools for a plethora of different purposes was clearly too mundane to report;
• And, despite already powering services for which customers are willing to pay, other pundits continue to complain that the code is developing too slowly, and neither robust nor complete enough for mainstream adoption.

Not the only game in town

OpenStack, however, is far from alone in providing cloud infrastructure. E-commerce behemoth Amazon remains the dominant provider of a public cloud solution, letting customers rent computing capacity in Amazon’s global network of data centers by the hour with a credit card.

Telecom giants such as AT&T and France’s SFR are also entering the market, as are established technology players from Dell and HP to Google and Microsoft.

Virtualization specialist VMware is increasingly keen to help its existing customers transform their corporate data centers into mini clouds, powered (of course) by VMware’s software.

Finally, smaller local entrants are increasingly offering services of their own, typically differentiated by geography, support, or nuances of configuration. These solutions are often proprietary or depend upon extensive modifications to open source foundations, and there are certainly plenty of open source pieces to choose from.

Those in need of some open source cloud infrastructure aren’t limited to OpenStack; they could also turn to Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, CloudStack, and others.

Each of these has its merits, and each is worth exploring further for its own particular story. OpenNebula, for example, emerged from a European research project and is now doing rather well in deployments both inside Europe and overseas.

Eucalyptus also emerged from academic research, this time at UC Santa Barbara. Designed to emulate Amazon capabilities using computers inside any data center, Eucalyptus has for years presented itself as a logical adjunct to Amazon usage. With OpenStack now promising the whole package (public and private clouds, running exactly the same code) there were many who presumed that Eucalyptus’ partial solution would struggle. I was amongst them but, despite continuing to attract less media attention, Eucalyptus continues to quietly attract paying customers. An agreement with Amazon earlier this year also made it easier for Eucalyptus to bill their product as the natural partner to Amazon’s offerings.

And if OpenStack ever gains sufficient marketshare to become a credible threat? The current market leader, Amazon, surely has a very simple response. The company will simply buy (or replicate) Eucalyptus, not in order to support innumerable private clouds for ever, but to smooth the path and drag reluctant corporate server-huggers ever closer to Amazon’s all-consuming data centers.

OpenStack certainly continues to attract the bulk of the media coverage for open-source cloud computing, and the project is also now beginning to deliver tangible deployments. But there is still plenty of room for other open source offerings to grow and differentiate.

Want to learn more? Open versus closed cloud computing is one of the six major themes of CloudBeat 2012, VentureBeat’s upcoming enterprise conference, November 28-29. With a stellar roster of speakers like Chris Kemp (co-founder of OpenStack whilst CTO at NASA), Chris Pinkham (responsible for the initial development of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud whilst working at Amazon), Lew Tucker (responsible for the development of Sun’s cloud computing offering, and now vice-chair of the OpenStack Foundation), we’ll have plenty of expertise and insight available to attendees. What, we shall ask them, are the merits of the various ‘open’ clouds, and how do they stack up against today’s 800-pound gorilla (Amazon, of course), or the bold ambitions and deep pockets of relative newcomers such as Google? Is there enough room for everyone? Come to CloudBeat and find out.

Benjamin Revcolevschi

Around this time last year, France’s second-largest telecom carrier SFR asked me and my team to reinvent its cloud business.

Specifically, SFR tasked us to devise a competitive offering of cloud and other services. A French competitor to Amazon, if you will.

To pull this off, it was clear we needed to exert some change from within.

SFR wasn’t your sprightly startup. It was a 15-year-old giant, with $15 billion in sales and 10,000 employees and heavy on hierarchy and process. Aside from its roots as a telecom company, SFR is also a major IT supplier: So its IT department had its own standards. This was going to take some thinking outside of the box.

The Chocolate Factory

So … we broke our offices walls and created what we called the “Chocolate Factory.”

It started with a new working space for the small executive team that would launch this cloud project. First, we created an open-plan working space — almost unheard of among large French companies (closed-door offices are the norm). We wanted to make sharing, openness, collaboration more important than rules. We saw this as new way of managing. Almost all conversations and phone calls were made in the open. Targets, projects, ideas, crises, decisions, everything — we discussed all collectively.

In the middle of the Chocolate Factory sat a large oval table. It became the workplace for the 10 managers on our team. A few work counters lined the edges of the room. We also had some bean bags. No doors. No more boundaries. No meetings.

One of our principles was availability. An open, inviting place makes for open minds. Anyone from each of the executive’s teams — some 250 employees — or from even the wider SFR corporation in general — thousands of employees — could come and ask questions. We pledged to always take time to answer.

Shortly thereafter, last November, we decided to attend VentureBeat’s CloudBeat event in San Francisco. It was a critical juncture for us: We met a number of partners there, listened closely to the great conversations about where the cloud was headed, and came away with the conviction and authority to implement our strategy. More on how that unfolded in a second.

But we arrived back to our Chocolate Factory in France and surfed daily on the extraordinary collective energy we’d unleashed within our offices. We’re still surfing.

The benefits and challenges are numerous. First, on the beneficial side, whenever a new challenge comes up, it’s immediately on the table — and so is every new idea to address it. With all of us there, we can put the pieces of the puzzle together instantly.

However, this also puts special demands on an executive team. They have to give up their accustomed comforts. Spacial privacy? None. They have to be unusually agile: able to manage their own existing organizations (outside of the Factory room) while also working 100 percent as a team (within the room). This requires multitasking — an ability to instantly pop on to team subjects and then to organizational ones.

SFR team at CloudBeat 2011

It requires responsibility: Someone in the Chocolate Factory should always be there to make decisions on behalf of the team. And they need to do that, regardless of their specific responsibility, be it marketing, sales, R&D, or HR. Indeed, interchangeability is another key principle: Anyone present can decide for the others if not present, and we then collectively support their decision. This builds emulation and deep solidarity when problems surge. We like to run the business our own way: a very short paperboard meeting every Monday morning to share each of our priorities for the week, frequent short and improvised discussions, and regular debriefings.

With our minds brought into this highly mobilized and hectic state, well, we often need to breathe — and we do that with the help of our chocolate. Members of the team bring in dozens of different sorts of chocolate, and it’s always on the oval table. This chocolate often spurs creativity. You can see it on the walls: pictures, drawings, achievements, key figures, serious slides and not-so-serious slides — all a good way to build a collective spirit!

We also actively seek to open this up to others in the wider organization: Happy hours take place in the Chocolate Factory every Thursday evening, where we share and exchange with our wider teams on progress and new ideas. Fun at work is also key: Decoration is fun, BYOD is common, and, of course, our chocolate!

Chocolate Wall

OK, so about the cloud!

To change a big telco company like ours — a major IT user itself — and make it move to the cloud with both its customers and employees, you need three things: a bold and heavily sponsored strategy, expertise, and a kick in culture and environment.

• Our strategy was, and is, clear: We have delivered an end-to-end cloud solution, complete with service-level agreements and IT/Telco bundling. This became even clearer after our trip to Cloudbeat 2011, the conference where everything came together for us. Among other things, we met storage provider, Scality, which became our storage provider.
• Our expertise is sharp: Our team has 10 years of IT experience, and we’d also had three years of a strategic partnership with HP on our public cloud platforms. We have built our own cloud solution based on HP Operations Orchestration, and it will soon evolve to OpenStack.
• And the kick came from the Chocolate Factory, as mentioned.

And it’s working! While we keep on selling our cloud offerings and developing our new Saas and storage offerings, we launched a new company, Numergy, this September. Numergy is a key new player in the European Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) sectors. It also has the French state behind it. Together, SFR, the French state and another IT partner, Bull, have invested $300 million into the company.

It took us four months to build the company and get the first customers in. With both public and private investors on the board, it’s difficult to believe we got things done that quickly. None of this would have been possible without the Chocolate Factory!

Join us at CloudBeat 2012 and forge relationships with over 500 industry executives, with a mix of business and IT decision makers, analysts, investors, marketers, big brands/retailers, press, and more. Register now!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Rackspace, the top cloud infrastructure provider after Amazon, has significantly upgraded its core offerings with a new next-generation public cloud powered by OpenStack, the company said Monday.

For quite some time, Amazon has outpaced Rackspace as the top dog for providing cloud infrastructure to companies. But Rackspace, which has a reputation for sterling customer service and leading the curve for cloud technology, wants to be the clear alternative for any business that wants to stay on the cutting edge of cloud.

“This collection of products is our biggest release ever,” Mark Interrante, VP of Products at Rackspace, told VentureBeat. “This launch is accelerating the company. Our goal is to deliver innovate cloud technology for our customers and we’ve been doing that for 10 years.”

The company highlights the following new offerings:

• Cloud Servers, powered by OpenStack – available with limited availability, based on the latest OpenStack compute release, this solution is fast, reliable, scalable and is accessible via the new OpenStack API as well as via an easy-to-use, intuitive control panel. Limited availability sign-ups are open now and Rackspace will begin providing access on May 1.

• Cloud Control Panel – available with limited availability, the new Control Panel was built from the ground up and with the customer in mind. It is simple, fast, intuitive and flexible. The new control panel also features multiple enhancements, including server tagging and multi-region capabilities.

• Cloud Databases, powered by OpenStack – available in early access, gives customers API access to massively scalable, high availability MySQL database that is based on SAN storage for high performance and provides automated management of common database tasks.

• Cloud Monitoring – available in early access, helps customers easily monitor their infrastructure and applications proactively, including OpenStack Clouds.

• Cloud Block Storage, powered by OpenStack – available in preview, this new solution is designed to give customers highly elastic raw storage and a choice between a high performance (leveraging solid state disks) or a standard lower-cost block storage solution.

• Cloud Networks, powered by OpenStack – available in preview, this solution is designed to allow customers to manage logically abstracted network services programmatically. Software-defined virtual networks provide flexibility and agility in addition to enhanced security via network isolation and port filtering.

San Antonio, Tex.-based Rackspace now serves more than 170,000 businesses and counts 60 percent of the Fortune 100 as customers. Rackspace doesn’t reveal too many specifics about the size of its cloud, but Interrante told us that the company now has around 80,000 physical servers.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Original photo: basketman23/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Industry analysts like to refer to 2011 as “the year the cloud arrived.” But now that it’s here, what are we going to do with it?

We’ve got a few ideas.

Vendors are tripping over themselves to bolster their product lineups with cloud-hosted software and services, while customers in the public and private sectors alike are realizing the cost saving benefit of letting someone else worry about their servers and applications. And that’s not even mentioning the burgeoning consumer cloud market, where even Apple sees ample opportunity.

Despite the hype, there’s a lot of substance to the cloud. Here are five trends that you’ll want to keep an eye on this year.

Hybrid clouds

Pop quiz: You’re an IT administrator at an insurance company, where strict internal mandates and Federal regulations alike require you to keep sensitive customer data on-premises and in your care. But you want to take advantage of affordable, scalable, externally-managed public cloud services, too.

Enter the hybrid cloud. Every vendor has their own definition of what exactly “hybrid cloud” means, but at the core, the idea is that on-premises resources and the public cloud are joined for the best of both worlds. That way, data and applications that need to stay local can do so, while those apps that can be outsourced can get many of the benefits of the public cloud. As cloud computing picks up steam in 2012, more and more businesses are going to find that they need this mixed approach to meet their security and privacy guidelines.

And vendors are ramping up to meet the challenge. On stage at CloudBeat 2011, Oracle technology product marketing VP Rick Schultz listed hybrid cloud enablement as a key priority for the recently-unveiled (and succinctly-named) Oracle Public Cloud. And speaking of CloudBeat, a survey we took at the event found that IT pros had hybrid clouds on their minds. Also, Cloud operating system Nimbula makes hybrid cloud management its specialty.

With this much momentum, it seems likely that plenty of other vendors are going to be putting the hybrid cloud model into the spotlight this year.

Consumer cloud services

Unlike hybrid clouds, this is a trend you can see every day. Chances are pretty good you already have a Dropbox or a Box account for cloud file storage and sharing. Everyone has their choice of Google Apps or Microsoft Office Web Apps for everyday document creation and editing in their browsers. Android devices can choose between Amazon Cloud Player or Google Music for MP3s on the go. And perhaps most influentially, the Apple iPhone 4S brought with it the Apple iCloud, enabling the hordes of iOS customers to keep their music libraries, bookmarks, calendars and other files in sync wherever they go.

As XKCD presciently pointed out, people are increasingly finding that all they need is a browser to get stuff done.

If you need proof that 2012 is only going to make that ball rolling, then just look at this month’s CES coverage. As usual, where Apple goes, the technology market follows, and Acer took the lid off AcerCloud, its shameless iCloud competitor. LG and Gaikai are teaming up to bring video gaming straight from the cloud into your television set. Even Mercedes-Benz is putting a cloud-connected console straight into the dashboard. And so on.

Pretty soon, there’s going to be no escaping the cloud, whether you’re at home, at the office, or even in between.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

Before CES, I would have pegged this as another enterprise-focused, behind-the-scenes kind of avenue of cloud innovation. But then OnLive, best known for streaming video games from the cloud, debuted OnLive Desktop, and opened the door for the consumer, too.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is an acronym that pretty much what it sounds like: Essentially, it gives you a remotely-accessible virtual desktop that simulates a computer that doesn’t (physically) exist. For businesses, the value can be immense: Rather than buy five hundred desktops, just build a VDI cloud or contract one out from a third-party provider, and a dozen people can share one computer’s worth of resources.

As an added benefit, employees can often log on from any computer that has an Internet connection and have their exact same work desktop waiting for them wherever they go. And when the size of the workforce changes, it’s easier and cheaper to provision and delete accounts than it is to buy a new machine or reformat it for a new user. Plus, in the rising “bring-your-own-device” era of IT, the ability to run any enterprise app on a tablet or smartphone is too good a bonus to pass up.

OnLive isn’t the only company that sees market potential here. Startup dinCloud kicked off 2012 by raising a cool million in seed funding for its cloud-hosted VDI service, with investors no doubt drawn by the fact that it launched with support from major players like NetApp. But that’s small potatoes next to the $70 million Goldman Sachs invested in AppSense in the early part of 2011, as it predicted that the VDI market would hit $2 billion over the next several years.

And as the Google Chromebook, the Apple iPad and other mobile devices continue to rise in popularity this year, VDI is in a good place to help make them business-worthy, since what’s under the hood matters a lot less than the strength of the network connection.

Open source and open standards

The OpenStack open source cloud platform may have started in 2010, but 2011 was the year that it really kicked into high gear. Built on community-contributed code, OpenStack aims to let any enterprise deliver its own infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform on standard hardware. OpenStack project founders Rackspace and NASA were joined by a community of over 110 other vendors, including heavyweights like HP, Dell and Citrix, as it debuted no less than three major feature releases. And while OpenStack’s leadership openly admits that there’s still a ways to go before it can compete with entrenched vendors like Microsoft and VMware in the data center on its own terms, the platform is maturing quickly and 2012 is going to see many companies build real, functional, salable cloud offerings on top of OpenStack.

But OpenStack isn’t the final word on open source in the cloud by a long shot: Apache Hadoop came out of beta earlier in January, giving companies tools to manage huge amounts of data, and the Oracle Big Data Appliance is already using it. The Open Data Center Alliance is going to continue its mission of improving and standardizing more efficient cloud facility designs. Node.js is only getting more popular for developing web applications. Even US Federal Chief Information Officer and Administrator Steven VanRoekel has publicly trumpeted the development of open standards in the cloud as a priority for his office.

And there are many more initiatives out there, besides. Vendors are moving to both open up and standardize the cloud, with an end goal of completely eradicating the concept of cloud vendor lock-in – which has stood as one of those major obstacles to cloud adoption mentioned before.

Cloud legislation

Here’s where things get a little sticky. There’s a reason Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier was originally slated to testify against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) on January 18th – though with the January 17th announcement that the debate over the controversial would be tabled for a month, Napier never wound up following through.

As a prominent cloud service provider, Rackspace stands to suffer in unforeseen ways under the act. If a customer stores infringing material in their cloud, is Rackspace liable? If so, would they be required to turn off that customer’s access with no warning? And so on, and so forth. SOPA is problematic in many ways, and 2012 is going to bring a lot of confusion before it brings answers.

Meanwhile, across the pond, European businesses are rethinking their own cloud migrations for a reason you may not expect. It turns out that any data stored with a cloud provider based in the USA is legally vulnerable to the Patriot Act, granting American authorities essentially unlimited license to potentially sift and analyze it without ever letting the customer know. Microsoft signed the EU model clauses for its Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity suite as a way to quell fears, but several analysts have found it to be an insufficient safeguard against that kind of privacy breach. 

The debate over legal issues in the cloud is only going to heat up as we find more questions and fewer answers. And it seems only a matter of time before someone somewhere introduces legislation to try to address these issues.

What do you think?

The cloud’s a busy place these days, and there’s more going on than just five things. Where do you see the cloud going in 2012? Let us know in the comments below.

[Image courtesy of NASA/Flickr]

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform backed by Rackspace and NASA, is “battle-tested and ready to go,” Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer and president of cloud for Rackspace, said today at the CloudBeat conference in Redwood Shores, Calif.

(We’re live-streaming the CloudBeat conference, so you don’t have to miss a thing.)

140 companies have joined the project and are working to improve the OpenStack code base, Moorman said in a fireside chat with VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall.

Moorman also disclosed that NASA and Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibra.com are just two of many large organizations already using the private beta OpenStack infrastructure. Sony and PayPal have committed to substantial deployments as well.

OpenStack, now 18 months-old, is available as open-source code and applications that are free to download from the OpenStack website. But until recently there were few applications available from commercial vendors that used the infrastructure.

“We made the decision to make this platform and help the world have a standard,” Moorman said. “We’re getting it ready to be the replacement of our compute fabric … we’re proud of the state that it’s in, but it still needs adjustments for scale.”

So we’ll have to settle for the generic “coming soon” answer for now, but Moorman did add that we should see an “amazing number” of OpenStack deployments in the next six months.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that OpenStack was not available to the public. We regret the error.

Cloud-infrastructure startup Nebula envisions a day when every company will be able to implement cloud computing as easily as plugging into a an electrical utility.

By taking advantage of open source technologies, the company hopes to create hardware appliances with all of the necessary software for companies to create their own low-cost data center computers.

It fits with the revolution happening in big data, where the amount of data generated by applications such as Facebook is far exceeding the processing and storage capacities of most companies. Analyzing this massive set of data yields big insights for companies that can process the feedback and improve what they offer to consumers. But this “big data analytics” needs cloud computing infrastructure that can expand or contract, like a utility where you can dial up or dial down your electrical usage.

If it succeeds, Nebula could commoditize the major hardware makers and possibly any company that gets big margins out of data center computing. It will allow small companies to deploy data centers much like those run by the likes of huge companies such as Facebook or Google.

That may sound pretty ambitious, but the little startup already has a lot of firepower. The company was founded by Chris Kemp (pictured), the former chief technology officer at NASA, and other team members come from NASA, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It has backing from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners, as well as early Google investors Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton and Ram Shriram. The funding amount wasn’t disclosed.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is coming out of stealth mode today in a speech at OSCON, an open source conference in Portland, Ore. The appliances are based on OpenStack, a technology that Kemp created at NASA to basically create an “infrastructure in a box.”

“I’m pulling together the team that built that,” Kemp said. “We are powering the cloud for the rest of the planet. Anyone who wants to deploy a cloud can use our little black box.”

Nebula is creating a turnkey system, a box you plug it to create a private computing cloud. As such, Kemp said in an interview this technology can shift the fundamental economics of computing by allowing businesses to easily, securely and inexpensively deploy their own personalized data centers from thousands of inexpensive computers with minimal effort.

“Until today, this computing power has only been accessible to organizations like NASA and a small number of elite Silicon Valley companies,” said Kemp, who is CEO of Nebula, in a press release. “We intend to share it with the rest of the world.”

John Doerr, the well-known partner at Kleiner Perkins, said in the PR release, “Nebula will disrupt and democratize cloud computing.”

The whole point of OpenStack is to assemble standard technologies from open source software that can be combined into simple, scalable, fast and low-cost computers. It should benefit a wide array of potential customers, from makers of social networks to gene sequencers or manufacturing supply chains.

Big server vendors such as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others are selling servers as they seek to provide management layers for the infrastructure. While the underlying hardware is a commodity, the software that ties it all together and the service that goes with it can turn the cloud into a very expensive endeavor.

But Kemp said customers need a cheaper solution. Nebula seeks to level the playing field by delivering a large-scale computing platform with a turnkey appliance that can configure a private cloud in minutes. It relies on OpenStack software, which Bechtolsheim compares to the Berkeley version of the UNIX operating system that debuted in the 1980s.

“Nebula embracing OpenStack today is similar to Sun embracing Berkeley UNIX in the 1980s,” said Bechtolsheim. “Proprietary systems did not have a chance against open platforms. I see Nebula as the company that will bring OpenStack to the private enterprise cloud.”

Nebula will support standard commodity servers from the big server vendors. And it will also support Facebook’s Open Compute platform, which Facebook launched earlier this year with the goal of building efficient and inexpensive enterprise infrastructure.  Frank Frankovsky, head of the Open Compute Project, said the goal of releasing technologies into the open is to enable the whole industry to take advantage of and improve upon them.

Nebula is contributing to the Open Compute Project and building an appliance that can run OpenStack services. Product trials will begin in the fourth quarter with energy, finance, biotech and media companies. Nebula will certify reference architectures as Open Compute compliant. Each appliance is a cheap server that can control 20 compute and storage nodes. The design is a lot like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

“You buy 10 or 100 of our boxes and plug a whole rack of servers into our boxes,” Kemp said. “It is data center infrastructure, offered as a service. This is the kind of shift that has to happen if the data center revolution is going to proceed.”

Besides Kemp, Nebula’s co-founders include Steve O’Hara and Devin Carlin. The created the company in April and named the company after a project that Kemp started at the NASA Ames Research Center.