2011 - the year of massive cloud computing adoption

2011 will be the year of massive cloud computing adoption. Let me tell you why.

1. Data Security

Because Amazon AWS has gone through nearly all possible security compliance procedure (SAS 70 type II, PCI compliance). So now, you can consider Amazon as a possible supplier for hosting your credit card data or any other confidential data.
It offers security from day one ... Compared to what some companies should invest to get the same result on time within their datacenter, this announce could be a major game changer.

2. Data Management

Several offers exist on the market and are preparing for a major shift:

• Xeround, "The cloud database" offers mySQL in the cloud ... Easy ... Easy ...
• Amazon SimpleDB, and Amazon Relational Database Service part of Amazon Web Services set of cloud computing products and offers. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database, while Simple DB is a NoSQL offer.
• Salesforce launched Database.com "Build for the cloud" yesterday.
• Microsoft has a great offer with SQL Azure (SQL server like Database as a service) and Azure Storage solution.
• Cloudant offers NoSQL data Mgt in the cloud.
• Google is offering several solution for data storage as API: Big Table , Blobstore, and Google Storage (see a good description how how to use them here).
• And a new one: clearDB.

Preliminary Comparison of Database.com and SQL Azure Features and Capabilities is available in this excellent article.

Oracle will jump on this market more later than sooner, in order to not kill its existing product portfolio and already offers to install its product within Amazon infrastructure. The recent exalogic cloud offer is another step in Oracle Cloud Strategy: making companies buy more hardware and software to build private cloud (see Oracle Exec Details Potential Pitfalls Of Cloud Computing).

3. Platform As A Service(PAAS)

Great news on the Platform as a service. Oracle recent decisions concerning Java are making companies and the open source community look for next generation platform, in the cloud.

This was a great gift for:

• Google enhancements concerning Google AppEngine latest release, with 1.4.0 SDK. This SDK offers a Channel API, a bi-directional channel for communicating directly with user browsers by pushing notifications directly to the JavaScript running on the client, eliminating the need for polling). Android, Chrome OS, and Chrome Store will also be game changer in 2010.
• Heroku (bought by Salesforce), Engine Yard, Morph Labs, and PoolParty will target the Ruby language developer community offering them dedicated PAAS solutions. Read DigitalHobbit’s more in-depth review of some of these Ruby-specific PaaS offerings.
• Microsoft Azure Compute Service... with its impressive marketing power and its still amazing killer development IDE Visual Studio that integrates just fine with Azure. Microsoft also target PHP developers ...
• Force.com. Developers familiar with Java or C# could use it easily. The platform was well suited for businesses looking to develop business applications that could easily integrate with the SaaS tools. But since this year, a real platform did emerge to support more company online services. Now you can benefit from: appforce ("the fastest way to build enterprise apps"), siteforce ("the fastest way to build data-rich websites"), VMForce ("the fastest way to build enterprise Java apps" based on SpringSource), ISVforce ("the fastest way to bring commercial apps to market").

Niche players also exist like:

• WSO2 Stratos in alpha version offering only some specific services (identity service, portal service, gadget service).
• No big player yet for PhP PAAS, but interesting solutions from CloudControl, Baobapp, etc.
• JoyEnt’s Smart Platform is an open source, Javascript-based PaaS.
• Tibco Silver (Not sure it is more than pure marketing ... Waiting for it since years)

4. Internet Service Bus (ISB) and Cloud To Cloud (C2C)

Now that your data and applications are in the Cloud, how to exchange data between them? You need cloud to cloud solutions. Again, the offer is maturing and you will find tons of solutions in the future. Today the offer is mostly:

1. Queue based messaging systems:
• Amazon Simple Queue Service
• Microsoft Azure AppFabric
• Linxter ISB target="_blank"
2. Integration Platform in the cloud
• Talend Cloud
• Informatica Cloud

5. Mobile

To have great mobile app you need a great user experience and well defined services that you can call in JSON or REST (SOAP is not recommended for mobile com). That's why the new Mobile SDKs for Amazon Web Services could be a very good game changer ...

Two exist already: AWS SDK for Android and AWS SDK for iOS.

The Social Anti-virus

Do you like and use Facebook? So, you need a social anti-virus ...
Now you can protect yourselves with:

• Bitdefender Safego a solution from a real antivirus software company that needs to be installed on your Facebook account.
• a free Firefox plugin named Scanbook.

When your social graph will become portable, which is more sooner than later, I suppose that they will need an anti-virus also. In the social world, your connections, your applications, your post, your pictures, everything needs to be protected!

Web Scrapping: Search, Extract and Work with data from across the web

I read this excellent article from Marshall Kirkpatrick

Needlebase, Dapper and Extractive web tools are democratizing the ability to extract and work with data from across the web. They are to text processing what blogging was to text publishing.

For sure the now Yahoo-acquired Dapper, is may be the less impressive of the three tools. It enables to build an RSS feed from changes made to any field on any web page.

The brand-new Extractiv, is a bulk web-crawling and semantic analysis tool that seems very easy to use. It is free for up to 1,000 URLs per web crawl, 1 web crawl at a time and up to 1,000 docs/day. Other plans are not really expensive (99$ per month and 299$ per month).

Needlebase, sits in the middle, and its free. Needlebase was built as a side project of travel search company ITA Software (Google is currently in legal negotiations to acquire ITA). It is a great new point-and-click tool for extracting, sorting and visualizing data from across pages around the web. Needlebase allows you to view web pages through a virtual browser, point and click to train it in understanding what fields on that page are of interest to you and how those fields relate to each other. Then the program goes and scrapes the data from all of those fields, publishes them into a table, list or map, and recommends merges of cells that appear to be mistakenly separate. It's very cool and it lets non-technical people do things with data quickly and easily that we used to require the assistance of someone more technical to do.

Power is now on your side ...

Makara - Deploy, Manage, Monitor and scale your cloud resources

Makara, just bought by RedHat seems to be a great tool. It was created to help you Deploy, Manage, Monitor and scale your cloud resources.

It supports:

• Software: Apache, MySQL, PHP, Java, Tomcat, JBoss
• IAAS:  Amazon EC2 and VPC, vCloud and Terramark
• Virtual machines: Xen, VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation and ESX

Three editions and cost models are proposed:

1. Makara On-Demand Edition:  for Amazon EC2 cost is per Hour per Server
2. Makara Enterprise Edition Private, Hybrid or Virtual Private Clouds (Xen, vCloud) and is based on an Annual Subscription
3. Makara for Service Providers Edition: Private, Hybrid or Virtual Private Clouds (Xen, vCloud) and you need to contact their sales rep. 

Register and Give it a try

Pour Noel, Offrez le Petit Prince

Le Petit Prince est de retour. Même message humaniste, superbes livres avec des personnages très bien dessinés et un DVD magnifique. Alors, pour Noel, offrez le Petit Prince ...

End of the OTA merchant model?

In a recent article Max Starkov, chief eBusiness strategist at Hospitality eBusiness Strategies (www.hospitalityebusiness.com) is claiming that we are near to the end of the OTA merchant model.

"Over the next five years the OTA Merchant Model as we know it will disappear. It will be transformed into a “Commission Override Model” where OTA commissions will be tied to booking volumes in the form of commission overrides above the standard travel agency commission that exists at the time."

It's demonstration is limpid ...
Take the time to read it if you're interested by travel 2.0 and the way the ecosystem is changing.

Recommended.

Linkedin BrandYou - my results

I made the test here at http://brandyousurvey.com/

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