Wednesday, November 16, 2011

ServiceMesh Fires It Up with $15 Million From Ignition Partners


Frank Artale Joins ServiceMesh Board of Directors

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – Nov. 16, 2011 – ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading enterprise cloud platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced that it has completed a funding round of $15 million through Ignition Partners. Frank Artale, a partner at Ignition, will join the ServiceMesh board of directors. ServiceMesh will use the capital from this funding to accelerate its global market penetration and partnerships.
Founded by former Microsoft and McCaw Cellular executives, Ignition Partners focuses on emerging and future leaders in communications, Internet, software, and services across business and consumer targets. The firm boasts a pedigree team of partners including Artale, a former executive at Citrix, Microsoft, XenSource, and VERITAS; John Connors, former CIO and CTO at Microsoft; and Brad Silverberg, a founding partner and a former senior vice president and member of Microsoft’s nine-member Executive Committee.
“Through ServiceMesh, we believe the promise of enterprise-scale cloud computing is finally becoming a reality,” said Artale. “To successfully derive business value from these technologies, organizations must be able to provide flexible access to cloud environments under a unified SLA, governance and compliance framework. Further, organizations need a transparent mechanism for departmental chargebacks and usage analysis. The ServiceMesh platform is unique in its ability to deliver these capabilities and enable businesses to rapidly derive optimal benefit from a cloud deployment in a customizable yet tightly controlled environment. We see an immediate market opportunity for ServiceMesh in businesses of all sizes, including the largest enterprises and governments, because ServiceMesh is the only way to ensure that these organizations achieve significant business value from their cloud investment.”
The ServiceMesh Agility Platform helps enterprise customers unlock the business value of cloud computing, including the empowerment of business units with self-service provisioning and management of standardized and fully governed IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings that improve business agility and lower operating costs. The Agility Platform enables companies to compress the time-to-delivery for enterprise applications, allowing them to move fast on fleeting business opportunities, while governing and securing a company’s most sensitive applications and data across internal and external clouds, keeping the business safe.
“The investment community now recognizes that we are at the beginning of a massive and long-term transition to a cloud operating model,” said Eric Pulier, CEO of ServiceMesh. “But enterprises must be able to turn raw technology into business value. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform provides the unique missing link by bringing business IT services directly to users while at the same time keeping the environment safe and controlled.  With this round of funding, Ignition Partners has affirmed ServiceMesh as a leading player in this rapidly expanding market.”

About ServiceMesh
ServiceMesh provides the industry’s leading enterprise cloud platform that enables Global 2000 clients to compress the time-to-delivery of enterprise business applications while governing and securing those applications and data across internal and external clouds. ServiceMesh also delivers professional advisory services and market-ready solution accelerators for common cloud usage scenarios.
Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care, and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

About Ignition Partners
Ignition Partners (www.ignitionpartners.com) is a premier private investment group with offices in Bellevue, Washington and Shanghai, China. Ignition Partners’ affiliated family of funds includes Ignition Ventures and Ignition Growth Capital in the U.S. and Qiming Ventures in China. The investment group’s three categories of funds – early stage venture, growth capital and China ventures – brings together an unparalleled combination of domain focus, functional expertise and global operational experience with partners from leadership positions at Microsoft, McCaw Cellular Communications, AT&T Wireless, Cisco, Starbucks and other industry leaders.

ServiceMesh Contact:
Elyce Ventura
Eastwick
408-470-4870

Ignition Partners Contact:
Heather Fitzsimmons
Mindshare PR
650-947-7400

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

What are Enterprises Really Doing in the Cloud?


by James Staten on October 25, 2011
You know there are developers in your company using public cloud platforms but do you really know what they are doing? You suspect it’s just test and development work but are you sure? And if it is production workloads are they taking the steps necessary to protect the company? We have the answers to these questions and you may be surprised by how far they are going.
It’s tough being an infrastructure & operations professional these days. According to our ForrSight surveys for every cloud project you know about there could be 3 to 6 others you don’t know about. Business unit leaders, marketing and sales professionals and Empowered developers are leading the charge. They aren’t circumventing I&O as a sign of rebellion – they simply are trying to move quickly to drive revenue and increase productivity. While every I&O professional should be concerned about this pattern of shadow IT and its implications on the role of I&O in the future, the more immediate concern is about whether these shadow efforts are putting the company at risk.
The bottom line: Cloud use isn’t just test and development. In fact, according to our ForrSight research there’s more production use of IaaS cloud platforms than test and development and broader use is coming (see Figure 1 below). The prominent uses are for training, product demonstration and other marketing purposes. Our research also shows that test and development projects in the cloud are just as likely to go to production in the cloud as they are to come back to your data center.
So how much should you be concerned about this trend? Well first off, you can probably forget about trying to stop it. Your focus should be on determining how much risk there is in this pattern and this may take a leap of faith on your part because as of right now, your developers know more about how to use public cloud platforms than you do. This means they are more knowledgeable than you about what it takes to make them highly available and secure. This experience deficit is a much more problematic issue than anything else because when you start asking your developers what they are doing to ensure the availability of their applications on IaaS, you don’t really even know what to ask.
Sure, you can ask what they are doing to ensure availability but do you even know what the availability options are on the leading clouds and how best to leverage them? Do you know what data replication takes place by default and what options they could turn on?
At the same time, you can’t just trust the developers to care as much about data integrity, BCDR and availability as you do because, normally, they entrust this to you. So rather than engage in a frustrating back and forth that risks misunderstanding by both parties, let’s see if we can accelerate your learnings, bring these cloud efforts out of the shadows so you can learn exactly what is going on and how much you really should be worried.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Dynamic Cloud Security: Test Driving the Benefits


Cloud security represents a spectrum of capabilities that you can tailor to your needs

Many IT organizations assume that security risks increase with a shift to cloud computing. The reality, however, is not so clear-cut. In fact, many of these same organizations will be surprised to learn that adopting cloud operating models with appropriate governance and security controls can actually reduce the level of risk relative to their current IT environments. Here's why:
IT professionals frequently develop unwarranted security concerns regarding cloud computing primarily because cloud environments are dynamic and enable new levels of workload portability that are very different from what they're familiar with. In cloud environments, application workloads can be moved to totally different physical infrastructure or service providers from one deployment to the next. The underlying application data can move even more frequently, depending on the type of instance and persistent storage options you've selected.
This means your security boundaries have to be dynamic too. They have to move with the workload and the data, and self-configure themselves in new environments in a consistent and automated manner.
Taking Cloud Security for a Spin
A simple analogy can be made between securing cloud workloads and securing a car. When you park your car in your home garage, typically you just close the garage door and that's it. You assume your car is safe inside your garage along with your other belongings, so you typically don't worry about locking your car doors or taking other precautions.
However, when you park your car somewhere else, you typically lock the doors to secure it. There are several ways you can do this. The door locks could be activated by a remote, a keypad on the door, or the proximity of an RFID tag in the key fob. You may decide to upgrade your security by adding a factory alarm system, steering wheel lock, LOJACK tracking system, or other security system depending on the car's value. Finally, you can also decide where to park your car depending upon your risk tolerance. For example, you may accept your favorite restaurant's offer of valet parking in a monitored lot instead parking down a secluded street.
The point is that you can create a portable security boundary around your car that can be equal to or even more secure than your garage. Cloud security is similar in concept where portable cloud workloads offer a wide range of options to establish a very effective portable security boundary. In fact, cloud workload security has an additional important benefit over the car analogy, which is that security configurations can be completely automated and policy-driven. Using the car analogy, this means you no longer have to worry about forgetting to lock your door or arming your alarm system in the parking lot, because the car will automatically do it for you.
Under the Hood: Cloud Security Options
This new approach to securing a moving workload is a big departure for many IT groups that are used to working in more static and controlled environments (similar to the home garage). These IT groups are used to working with physical data center infrastructure, traditional firewalls, mostly static networks, and familiar resources that they own and control. The idea of moving workloads in and out of new environments they don't control is a big concern, especially knowing they've expended tremendous time and attention manually configuring their own environment.
However, today a broad range of proven technologies can deliver consistent, automated security for portable cloud workloads. They include virtual private networks, encrypted data storage, host intrusion detection systems, hypervisor-based firewalls, and federated identity management systems. These systems can complement each other to provide an end-to-end security solution that encompasses instances, data, network, and role-based access as desired.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Lack of Cloud Governance: A Potentially Fatal Flaw in Enterprise Cloud Adoption


Many enterprises realize that successful cloud implementations require the adoption of new IT capabilities, such as automated workload management, self-service provisioning, cloud security, and others. Yet, many of these organizations still don’t recognize a critically important challenge they must also address to avoid it becoming a fatal flaw in their efforts to deploy business workloads into the cloud. That fatal flaw is insufficient cloud governance. Even companies experiencing good results with their virtualization management efforts rarely have a solid understanding of cloud governance. That needs to change, because cloud governance ultimately enables many of the core business benefits of cloud adoption.
It’s About Time to Market
The real value of cloud computing is achieved when it can streamline the entire enterprise software development and deployment lifecycle, and dramatically reduce time to market for software projects. The agility that cloud computing creates for IT can then be extended throughout the organization to directly benefit business users. IT will be able to respond more quickly to their needs and deliver new applications and software updates rapidly, which in turn helps them achieve their business goals faster and reduce time to market for their products and services, significantly reducing opportunity costs.
IT-intensive industries and global enterprise are full of examples where IT agility equates directly to market share, revenue growth, and profitability. Examples include traditional insurance carriers that need to quickly roll out the latest policy rate/quote functionality to their websites to avoid hemorrhaging customers to more nimble competitors with a direct sales model; or the global bank that needs to rapidly roll out customized consumer and commercial services in a new geography faster than competitors to grab market share. Regardless of the specific example, it’s clear that business units stuck with slow moving IT organizations delivering in six or nine-month software development lifecycles can be at a huge disadvantage.
Many organizations are starting to recognize that cloud computing can provide self-service access and on-demand deployment of IT resources to increase agility and competitiveness. However, they tend to limit their view of governing these new capabilities in the context of their traditional IT operations, which often consist of partially automated virtual machine provisioning processes along with manual processes still in place for VM configuration and approvals. They may view cloud as a relatively simple extension of these existing IT operations, and believe they are already well positioned to deliver all the significant business benefits of cloud computing to their organizations.
But as cloud computing begins to support more diverse business workloads, the complex relationships among all the stakeholders and types of projects and workloads, along with multi-layered regulatory and cost constraints, create an intricate policy maze. Trying to enforce consistent policies on this complexity with semi-manual processes or inadequate governance tools can jeopardize the benefits of cloud computing we’re seeking in the first place including:
·         Immediate self-service access to cloud services. That is, exposing services to end users to achieve true self-service functionality, which requires automated policies enforcement to prevent unauthorized access, security breaches, and cost overruns.
·         Automatic configuration and scaling of cloud workloads up and down to meet changing demand. This requires the ability to impose policy-defined boundaries and restrictions around elastic scaling behavior to balance performance, costs, and risks.
·         Optimizing the placement of portable cloud workloads and leveraging an organization’s mix of internal private clouds and external private and public clouds. This requires the ability to restrict deployments to satisfy cost, performance, regulatory compliance, or other parameters.

Enforceable Business Policies
In addition to governing core capabilities above, an enterprise solution for cloud governance must be unified across all possible clouds, workloads and all potential end users to deliver consistent and uniform policy enforcement across the enterprise. It must also be extensible and flexible enough to meet the needs of any particular group or department within the organization.
The scope of policy-driven cloud governance includes:
  • Security policies – This includes the ability to have pre-configured, zoned security models for different types of workloads. For example, prohibiting HR data from being stored on external public clouds.
  • Regulatory policies – This includes the ability to impose geographic constraints, such as those required by EU regulations to restrict the storage of personal information about EU citizens outside of the EU. It also includes industry-specific policies, such as the requirement that sensitive personal financial or health-related information be stored only in data centers that meet specific security requirements.
  • Organization-specific policies – This includes an unlimited number and form of specific departmental, business unit, or cost center requirements. For example, a particular cost center may need to rely exclusively on open source solutions because there is no budget allocated for licensed software alternatives. In a self-service environment, this cost center cannot be allowed to choose to have workloads moved onto a virtual machine running licensed software.
In many organizations, the demand for cloud computing is accelerating. One unfortunate consequence is that business units and departments frustrated with the slow response of corporate IT are bypassing them and accessing cloud services directly with their credit cards, resulting in dangerous ungoverned cloud usage and growth. IT organizations need to quickly get ahead of this trend before regulatory compliance and security risks catch up to them, and so they can lead the charge to delivering the full benefits of the cloud for their organization.
The Ideal Cloud Governance Solution
The only way to ensure that cloud adoption takes place with the required level of security, privacy, regulatory compliance, and cost controls is through a powerful policy-driven governance platform with the following characteristics:
  • A policy engine that is flexible enough to support the myriad conditions and attributes across the organization, and that is also easy to use for business analysts who understand the relevant business drivers for these policies and should be directly involved in cloud management and governance efforts.
  • Integration with an organization’s cloud management platform so that the policies created are directly enforceable at the level of the VMs and the workloads provisioned on them.
  • An open platform that is able to connect with other tools and platforms in the enterprise to streamline and automate required activities such as identity management, accounting/chargeback, auditing/reporting, and more.
Cloud adoption is inevitable for large enterprises, and organizations must make a choice. They can allow adoption to occur in an ungoverned environment with policies that are unenforceable—then struggle to clean up the mess after finding themselves with cost, performance, and possibly embarrassing and expensive compliance or security violations. Or, they can get ahead of the problem and immediately begin rolling out fully governed cloud-based services that deliver the agility that software developers and business users need while controlling costs and ensuring compliance.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Enterprise Cloud Governance: Policies and Metamodels


The LawJames Urquhart wrote a good piece for CNET yesterday, titled Regulation, Automation, and Cloud Computing. In it, James comments on a blog by Chris Hoff discussing some of the downsides to automation. Originally, Chris had pointed out that heavily automated environments don’t leave a lot of room for human intervention when things go wrong and rapid automatic response can actually lead to cascading failure when the world fails in a way that was not expected by the automation creator. James then made the point that automation also interacts with the legal and regulatory spheres. James says:
If we are changing the very configuration of our applications–including location, vendors supplying service, even security technologies applied to our requirements–how the heck are we going to assure that we don’t start breaking laws or running afoul of our compliance agreements?
 
It wouldn’t be such a big deal if we could just build the law and compliance regulations into our automated environment, but I want you to stop and think about that for a second. Not only do laws and regulations change on an almost daily basis (though any given law or regulation might change occasionally), but there are so many of them that it is difficult to know which rules to apply to which systems for any given action.
 
In fact, I long ago figured out that we will never codify into automation the laws required to keep IT systems legal and compliant. Not all of them, anyway. This is precisely because humanity has built a huge (and highly paid) professional class to test and stretch the boundaries of those same rules every day: the legal profession.
Chris is right.
James is right insofar as he identifies the problem and then says that it’s impossible to codify every single law and regulation into the automation system.
But, while we can’t codify everything, that also isn’t an argument to avoid codifyinganything.
The basic problem is that with cloud, we’re no longer building control systems strictly for IT operations personnel. I believe that the whole BIG IDEA with clouds is that we can decentralize and democratize the control systems that drive IT resources. Right now, the IT department controls all IT systems. You want something done? You talk to IT. If and when IT can get around to it, you might get what you want. And ultimately, that’s a slow, inefficient way to run a railroad. There are many ideas that business units have that simply can’t be executed on because the amount of time and energy spent trying to get IT to deliver the right resources is too high. But with that slow inefficiency also comes a control point such that we can enforce enterprise governance requirements. Today, there are enough human review and approval processes in place to put the brakes on most ill-conceived ideas that would violate laws or regulations.
With cloud, however, we have the opportunity to make IT completely self-service. And that’s wonderful for creating increased business value because it means that business units no longer have to beg and plead with the IT department to execute on projects that are important to the business. Rather, the business can make use of self-service resources to do whatever they need. By cutting out the IT middleman from the daily requests, the speed of the solution delivery lifecycle (SDLC) increases, and, if the business is doing its job, so does business value creation.
The challenge with the self-service model is not technical. We can build all the automated systems to execute a self-service model fairly easily, and there are many examples. The big problem with self-service is governance.
If you’re running a large, multinational financial institution of the kind that ServiceMesh deals with every day, is it reasonable to expect every business-unit developer or mid-level manager in the USA to understand all the laws governing financial information in Germany or Hong Kong? Do users and developers in London understand the laws and regulations in Tokyo? The answer is most assuredly not. But with a single click, we could move a workload or dataset across the planet, violating the laws of multiple jurisdictions at the same time.
So, James says that it’s unreasonable to expect to codify the legal system into our automation systems. But it’s equally as unreasonable to expect non-lawyers (and frankly even lawyers) to understand the legal and regulatory posture of a company across all its geographies. So, what can we do?
Do we really have to achieve 100% fidelity between automated infrastructure and a constantly changing legal structure. And if we can’t, does that mean that any attempt at control is inevitably fruitless and should not even be attempted?
I don’t believe so. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform was constructed with a very richpolicy management system that goes far beyond simple user-based or role-based access control to individual resources. The Agility Platform policy management system was created to allow layering of possibly multiple conflicting policies, created by a diverse group of governance people. The policies are sorted out, prioritized, and the right things happen. The policy management system operates on a customizable meta-model which allows every high-level object type within the Agility Platform (applications, stacks, scripts, clouds, etc.) to be tagged with attributes that can then be inspected as part of policy decisions.
Thus, we can create policies as rich as something like, “Bob is allowed to deploy workload X into Cloud Y. But because X requires SSAE 16 (the follow-on to SAS 70), X can only be deployed into datacenter Z, which has SSAE 16 certification. And all network traffic to and from the workload must be encrypted. And all storage must be encrypted. And only into the non-production environment. And only on Tuesday.” And even more complex than that. Or a lot simpler than that. If you want, you can just specify that Bob is only allowed to deploy things in Cloud A and be done with it.
In short, almost anything can be expressed in the Agility Platform policy system — it’s that rich. And that’s critically important when, as James says, you’re trying to track the whims of lawyers across the world.
Agility Platform policy editorIt’s another matter keeping all those policies up to date, however. James points out that the laws are constantly changing. That’s one reason it would be foolish to hard-code them into the automation system itself, whether that’s a standard management system, a low-level run-book automation oriented orchestration package, or a Perl script. With the Agility Platform, we made policies stackable and easily editable by mere mortals (AKA governance and compliance personnel) with a WYSIWYG graphical editor, rather than relying on coders. This means that the job of creating and maintaining policies can be delegated and distributed to those people who are in the best position to implement them. Policies are then checked at the appropriate times by the platform, automatically.
Is this a perfect solution? No. James is right in that the problem is hard and I can’t conceive of a 100% solution. We still rely on humans to codify laws and regulations and those must be kept up to date and applied correctly. But we’re not creating a brittle, completely unmaintainable system where the policies are “baked into” our scripting. We have a system where policies are stacked and interact correctly. In short, it’s built to scale and about as clean of a system that I can imagine.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Focus on Architecture First Before Moving to the Cloud

“The point of enterprise architecture is to look beyond the silos and create a blueprint for the business’ big-picture strategy.” Read more.

Friday, July 15, 2011

These guys are cool in the cloud

I just published a blog from the web site talking about a speaking op they gave at Cloud Expo NYC. Other Meshians might find it interesting, particularly if you have customer-facing roles. The blog links to the Cloud Expo presentation which was video taped.

Blog: http://www.servicemesh.com/posts/searching-for-the-big-win/
External link to the video: http://downloads.sys-con.com/download/wc_cc11e_servicemesh

VMware price war

Folks, as some of you probably know by now, VMware changed its pricing structure for vSphere 5 earlier this week. Whether a given customer is affected or not, this would be a good time to highlight the fact that ServiceMesh Agility Platform can help customers create contestability to in turn help isolate them from some of these changes. The cloud market (whatever that means) has a lot of evolution to go through and more of these shocks are certainly going to happen in the future. Agility Platform customers, while not totally immune to anything, will certainly be able to weather the storms better than those who bought into all-VMware or all-any-other-large-vendor solutions.

I just drafted a blog to describe some of the strategic thinking here and highlight this. Feel free to call your customer's attention to this:
http://www.servicemesh.com/posts/word-of-the-day-contestability

Friday, July 8, 2011

7 Self-Inflicted Wounds Of Cloud Computing

Don't let poor planning and half-hearted decisions doom your promising cloud projects.

By Charles Babcock InformationWeek
July 06, 2011 01:30 PM

Anthony Skipper at ServiceMesh assembled a comprehensive list of the common holes in companies' approach to cloud computing for his presentation at Cloud Expo in New York in June.
Skipper is VP of infrastructure and security at ServiceMesh, a supplier of IT service management and lifecycle governance. His presentation was titled, "Cloud Scar Tissue: Real World Implementation Lessons Learned From Early Adopters." It was also cited by cloud blogger Andrew Chapman.
Read more of the story here:

Saturday, June 11, 2011

“What planning is needed for initial cloud projects?” – Q&A from the Trenches Series

rganizations typically conduct a lot of research on cloud providers and enabling technologies before making the decision to embark on their first cloud project. However, sometimes this extensive research and vendor selection effort gets confused with the actual project planning required for success of that initial cloud project.
After the decision is made to move forward with a cloud initiative, sometimes the urge to get our “stuff” on the cloud quickly is hard to resist. There hasn’t been a time in recent memory with more opportunity for IT but, with great opportunity comes great risk! We’ve all heard the saying that goes something like “automate a bad process and make bad stuff happen more quickly”. Cloud brings a myriad set of options for improving how your enterprise utilizes IT and executes its business objectives, but implementing it without sufficient upfront planning can bring serious risk and bring it very quickly.
Some of the biggest gaps I see in cloud project planning occur in the areas of Security, Policy and Governance. These are important considerations everyone should include in the review and planning portion of any project, before moving applications and workloads on to a cloud.
First let me say that I’m not an expert in security, policy or governance. If I have to be classified as an expert, it’s on the ownership and management characteristics of IT infrastructure. So, I’m not going to give you a detailed technical strategy for implementing your security or policy framework. Rather I’m going to focus on the planning and “ownership” point of view, both of which encompass having a clear set of goals and objectives for its implementation, management, and lifecycle.
Security: Planning here should include a well understood set of security requirements and usage characteristics for the project:
Who uses it?
Where and how will data be stored, shared, backed up, etc.?
Who will be supporting it?
What are the individual roles required?
Will it be a private cloud, hybrid cloud, or public cloud?
What are the characteristics of the network?
What experience does your internal network team have with cloud or highly virtualized environments? What are the current skill gaps & where can you get help?
What tools do you already have? Have you compared them against newer products/services on the market that are focused on security in a cloud?
Do your tools allow for automated policy enforcement on new instances?
What type of reporting and auditing will you have?
What about identity management? Is it integrated with your cloud management platform?
What are the partner requirements? Do you have the right partners, with appropriate experience? Should you audit current and proposed service providers? Have you evaluated team skills to identify gaps and training opportunities?
Where and how has security been factored in to your business continuity planning? Security, like an earthquake or a hardware failure, can be a threat to your availability. As such, your security strategy should match enterprise objectives for availability.
Governance and Policy: This includes governing how an instance is created, why it’s created, by whom, and under what restrictions it operates.
Governance and approval work flows should be well understood.
Document and enforce regulations/restrictions regarding data availability, storage location, and performance.
Establish a governance lifecycle that includes the creation and enforcement of policies for cloud workloads as they are planned, built, shared, and deployed.
Where will your instances reside and under what context or situations while they be put there or moved?
What is the performance criteria to determine right placement of workloads?
Define role-based access to assets and environments.
Ensure that automated approaches to scale, distribution and shutdown encompass enterprise policy controls.
What are the guidelines for allowing scale? How is scale approved?
How are Business Critical priorities mapped against threshold limitations
Change management strategy.
Roles and ownership
Who’s responsible for the delivery of cloud services
Who’s responsible for the cloud environment?
Are all the roles well defined?
Many times, the most valuable time spent on a project is the time spent during planning. Moving to cloud is no different. Make your move in a well-planned and controlled fashion so you can more rapidly benefit from new services, while not putting your team or the enterprise at risk.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Live From NY it's Cloud Expo 2011!

WOW sorry folks i have not kept this site up and running properly I thought everything was feeding and wow what a suprise i got yesterday when I was told it was not...bad me I am sorry.

Well Cloud Expo 2011 is at the big J in NY.  great time seeing everyone and looking forward to day 3 today.  See you their for @andimann at 9am and @servicemesh at 135 for sure the rest of the time i will be speaking, meeting and taking in all the information i can to assist you the buyers...


After a jam-packed Cloud Tuesday here in New York, Cloud Wednesday now begins!

Cloud Expo New York presents just as full a program today as it did yesterday, perhaps even more so. Which I why I'm sending you this note to encourage you to plan your choices carefully amid the myriad sessions and activities going on at on Day Three.

Welcome too to all those who are at the Javits to enjoy the RightScale User Conference, which is also in full swing all day today.

Registration to the Largest Cloud Computing Event in the World, and to the User Conference,.is open from 7:00AM here at the Javits, at the North side of the building. Come early and avoid those inevitable last-minute lines!
 Show Daily Sponsored By:
Join Epic: smart, motivated, and principled people working to make an impact on healthcare. We build software that works — the stakes are too high to do it any other way.

You will make an impact on our company and our customers within months – or even days – and push the limits to be at the leading edge of software design.
8:15AM

We begin with a round of technical sessions this morning, so you have a choice from seven different sessions across seven different tracks. There is also our signature Cloud Computing Bootcamp, led by our 2011 Bootcamp Instructor Larry Carvalho. (Bootcamp is located in the large room under the escalator, as it were - 1A03.)


9:05AM

In the main keynote room, join the ever-popular Andi Mann, of CA Technologies, for a General Session in which he will be advocating that you "Follow YOUR Path to Cloud Computing" - Should you take an evolutionary path and transform your existing IT environment to a cloud of service computing…or do you jump to the “head of the cloud”, and revolutionize your approach with a comprehensive cloud solution…or both?


9:45AM

Abiquo CEO Pete Malcolm then gives today's Morning Keynote. His theme: "Ops or Apps - Who Will Own the Data Center of Tomorrow?" - Until recently, he will be telling us, Apps have been at the mercy of IT Operations to feed their need. However, with the advent of public cloud offerings, Apps can bypass Ops entirely and get the resources they need with just a few clicks and a credit card. So what's next?


10:30AM

Our booming Expo Floor opens, along with the Demo Theater, SYS-CON.TV live interviews, and the largest collection of Cloud solutions and services providers ever yet gathered in one place at one time. Enjoy!

11:45AM

John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, puts open source in the spotlight when he gives a General Session in the main keynote room on "The Inevitability of an Open Cloud"

12:30PM

For our full Conference Golden Pass holders, Luncheon is Served! Cloud Expo luncheons are legendary - pace yourself, there is a lot of food! :)
 Show Daily Sponsored By:
Wednesday,  June 8, 2:30 PM  RightScale User Conference, Multi-Cloud Track

Enterprise-Ready Private and Hybrid Cloud Computing Today, Dr. Rich Wolski - Founder and CTO, Eucalyptus

Learn about the use of Eucalyptus, Amazon Web Services,  and the RightScale Cloud Management Platform to build enterprise-grade hybrid cloud computing environments while effectively automating and managing this ensemble of technologies.
12:45PM

For those who like fast-moving content with the lunch we have a CEO Power Panel in the main keynote room. The question to be discussed, by some of the sharpest minds in the industry (if you ignore me for a moment, hehe!): "Enterprise-Level Cloud Computing: Far-Off Dream or Present Reality?"

1:35PM

In the first post-lunch General Session, Dave Roberts from ServiceMesh will be outlining what he calls "The Big Win" - put another way, he'll be telling delegates to "Stop Playing Small-Ball with Your Cloud Strategy." He'll offer some great perspectives on how leading enterprise cloud adopters are swinging for the fences and running up the score.

2:25PM-4:00PM  Technical Breakout Sessions

Again, remember, technical sessions will be taking place simultaneously on all seven tracks, with some great sessions to choose from - you will receive a handy Daily Schedule as you register.

4:00PM  EXPO FLOOR RE-OPENS
- complete with afternoon snack break!

5:35 PM

The final two rounds of technical breakout sessions round off the day. As ever at CloudExpo, there are great sessions right up to the last minute.

Enjoy Day Three of the show. Remember to tag it as #CloudExpo in your tweets. Enjoy your "Cloud Wednesday" in scorching hot New York City!

Jeremy Geelan
Conference Chair
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We are providers of customized software solutions aiming Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Data Integration, building software
GUIs and SOA-bridges in the Cloud/Distributed Computing scenarios for better usability of the data that otherwise would lie in the corporate silos. Working closely with our customers, we develop practical and right strategy for Data Integration and building Corporate and Market Intelligence, positioning them for better Return on Investment (ROI).
The key to succeeding in current market is by gaining wisdom from analyzing and generating models from existing Corporate Data. These models help companies in strengthening Research, Forecasting and Planning to state a few. For the Pharmaceutical industry, it helps identify the possible Drugs in the Compound Stage and will be helpful in targeting potential drug ingredients in early Discovery Stage. The use of data for Statistical Modeling can also be taken up in the pre-Clinical and Clinical Trials. In the Financial and Marketing industry, it can be applied to do some forecasting on Market Predictors and Market Behavior to plan the Long and short positions, hedging the risk through right options strategies. For the HealthCare industry, the modeling and intelligence can help Hospitals, Government Bodies plan for various disease control strategies and medicinal supplies and treatment plans and potential cost involved for such strategies. We are also planning to bring in software products into market for such industries.
In Data Exchange scenarios such as a B2B Exchange with other business entities and Regulatory Bodies), we specialize in converting the data into standardized format based on Information Exchange Standards/Guidelines offered to us by various International Standards Groups.