Great to see the launch of OpenStack being announced. This is a great idea for everything in the cloud stack to be open sourced, including management tools, provisioning etc. This does really fulfil the things Open Cloud Manifesto is asking for.
This is being backed up by many leading companies which is great to see. To find out more go have a look at their website or see Glyn Moody's article which has many good links.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Microsoft increases the pace of their cloud offerings
Microsoft have realised for a while that they cannot be left behind by the cloud and have put a lot of efforts into areas such as Azure. Today they went further with the announcing of Aurora and further updates on other projects.
Steve Ballmer came out and said that partners shouldn't find this and enable their customers to move to the cloud. He is absolutely right here as Google Apps becomes increasingly viable to many firms.
Aurora is a version of Microsoft Small Business Server which allows services such as Exchange and Sharepoint to be run in the cloud. This makes a lot of sense as running a mail server or Sharepoint server is a lot of work and causes the most problems. Essentially Aurora will just be an Active Directory logon server with local storage which appears to be backed up in the cloud, and this provides authentication onto Microsoft hosted servers. I believe that in 5 years about 30-40% of organisations run their mail in the cloud and in 10 years it will be about 90%. Mail has become a commodity and there really is no need for most organisations to do it themselves any more.
Next on the list of items today was a second beta of InTune. InTune basically provides a management server for the PCs in your SME organisation. Again this is a pain point for this size organisation so it is a brilliant idea. Not so brilliant is that it only supports Windows 7, but hopefully this is a temporary limitation.
Microsoft have also announced other vendors such as HP, Dell, Fujitsu hosting Azure servers and the ability for firms to create their own private clouds (but not Azure). Personally I think there is more strength in Microsoft doing it themselves but this gives them quick reach and enables partners to build clouds such as for the government or tied to geographies that Microsoft may not otherwise cover.
To reflect all of this I have also updated my State of the Cloud page at Next Gen IT website.
It's good to see that Microsoft haven't lost focus with the cloud and my personal opinion is that they have timed it about right to make a run.
Steve Ballmer came out and said that partners shouldn't find this and enable their customers to move to the cloud. He is absolutely right here as Google Apps becomes increasingly viable to many firms.
Aurora is a version of Microsoft Small Business Server which allows services such as Exchange and Sharepoint to be run in the cloud. This makes a lot of sense as running a mail server or Sharepoint server is a lot of work and causes the most problems. Essentially Aurora will just be an Active Directory logon server with local storage which appears to be backed up in the cloud, and this provides authentication onto Microsoft hosted servers. I believe that in 5 years about 30-40% of organisations run their mail in the cloud and in 10 years it will be about 90%. Mail has become a commodity and there really is no need for most organisations to do it themselves any more.
Next on the list of items today was a second beta of InTune. InTune basically provides a management server for the PCs in your SME organisation. Again this is a pain point for this size organisation so it is a brilliant idea. Not so brilliant is that it only supports Windows 7, but hopefully this is a temporary limitation.
Microsoft have also announced other vendors such as HP, Dell, Fujitsu hosting Azure servers and the ability for firms to create their own private clouds (but not Azure). Personally I think there is more strength in Microsoft doing it themselves but this gives them quick reach and enables partners to build clouds such as for the government or tied to geographies that Microsoft may not otherwise cover.
To reflect all of this I have also updated my State of the Cloud page at Next Gen IT website.
It's good to see that Microsoft haven't lost focus with the cloud and my personal opinion is that they have timed it about right to make a run.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
State of the cloud
I've just finished putting together an article on the state of the cloud. You can go over and read it here.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Supporting the Open Cloud Manifesto
Over on the Symbian Blog you can see a new post by me about Symbian supporting the Open Cloud Manifesto.
Openness is going to be an increasing issue as more people move to the cloud. Just as closed virtualisation formats hurts enterprises with a mixture of formats, so does closed clouds.
One thing that is interesting is who has, and who hasn't supported the manifesto. It is a real shame not to see Amazon, Google or Microsoft in the list. It is encouraging to see Rackspace there though as they are proving to be a strong player in the cloud also. IBM, HP, VMWare are on the list - but they don't have much cloud market share yet (VMWare does have mind share though). My take on this is that the big players who have not yet locked in market share are wanting to be open so they can stay in the game, and the ones that do have market share (with exception of Rackspace) are just not interested.
Openness is going to be an increasing issue as more people move to the cloud. Just as closed virtualisation formats hurts enterprises with a mixture of formats, so does closed clouds.
One thing that is interesting is who has, and who hasn't supported the manifesto. It is a real shame not to see Amazon, Google or Microsoft in the list. It is encouraging to see Rackspace there though as they are proving to be a strong player in the cloud also. IBM, HP, VMWare are on the list - but they don't have much cloud market share yet (VMWare does have mind share though). My take on this is that the big players who have not yet locked in market share are wanting to be open so they can stay in the game, and the ones that do have market share (with exception of Rackspace) are just not interested.
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