Our next Silver Lining Cloud Users Group meeting is June 9^th.

 We will be taking the summer off (July & August) and have a planned Cloud Entrepreneurial Forum which will be a sponsored event in September. We are also planning on running a CloudCamp sponsored by the CloudCamp organization - keep checking back for updates on these events!

 This month we have three speakers from Cloud companies - One is a SaaS company, one is an open source software company that is making their first public debut and makes storage into cloud storage, and one is a company that extends or migrates applications to the Cloud.

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location change:

Directions: http://microsoftcambridge.com/About/Directions/tabid/89/Default.aspx

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Companies presenting: 

AppZero  http://www.appzero.com/

Twisted Storage    http://twistedstorage.sourceforge.net/

Aerva  http://aerva.com/

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Aerva - http://aerva.com/

Sanjay Manandhar, CEO & Founder

 Sanjay is the founder and CEO of Aerva, a pioneer in cutting-edge digital signage technology, enabling real-time interactivity between mobile applications and digital displays networks globally.

 Sanjay’s early career was in developing software solutions both in product development and advanced development labs of companies like Sun Microsystems, Olivetti, NYNEX, Siemens.

Sanjay also has international finance experience from working in technology investments both in public markets as well as in venture capital in London. Later, as VP of Innovation of a UK technology company, Sanjay took the responsibility of building the Innovation Centre and conceived the themes and built the teams that created solutions in wireless applications, search-and-retrieval, natural language and 3D characterization.

Sanjay has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Master’s degree from MIT Media Lab and an MBA from INSEAD, France. 

AppZero  http://www.appzero.com/

Greg O’Connor, President & CEO

Pioneering the Virtual Application Appliance approach to simplifying application-lifecycle management, Greg O’Connor is responsible for translating Appzero’s vision into strategic business objectives and financial results. O’Connor has over 25 years of management and technical experience in the computer industry. He was founder and president of Sonic Software, acquired in 2005 by Progress Software (PRGS). There he grew the company from concept to over $40 million in revenue. At Sonic, Greg O’Connor evangelized and created the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) product category, which is generally accepted today as the foundation for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). O’Connor earned a B.S. in Computer Science at Purdue University. 

AppZero^TM is software to create, control, and maintain virtual application appliances (VAA) VAAs decouple an application from the operating system (OS) and its underlying infrastructure. The result is a discrete object that encapsulates an application with its dependencies such as: executable libraries, files/registry, configuration settings, machine/network identity, and services.

Twisted Storage    http://twistedstorage.sourceforge.net/

You are invited to a “coming out” presentation by Twisted Storage’s founder Chuck Wegrzyn at the June 9 Silver Lining Could Computing User Group meeting at Microsoft’s Cambridge, MA research facility.

Bio on Chuck Wegrzyn Chuck Wegrzyn is a fixture in the Boston technology area. He iscurrently the CTO and founder of Iteration N, a storage company thatsince 2003 has been researching and developing cloud storage systems. Hehas worked in areas ranging from manufacturing diagnostics to fiber ringnetworks to re-hostable compilers and real-time kernels. Chuck was partof the team at Compaq that made the company into a powerhouse supplierin the enterprise and internet and was offered the position of Directorof Network Devices. He later became involved in health care IT where hewas the CIO of HealthDialog, a company that was recently purchased byBUPA UK, one of the largest non-profit insurance companies in the U.K.In the past few years he was CTO and a member of the founding team atAuthentica, a DRM company and Vice President of Engineering and CTO atIPeria, a unified messaging platform provider. Since 2003 he has beenworking on cloud enabled storage systems and in 2005 released the firstopen source cloud storage platform called “Twisted Storage.

Twisted Storage’s open source software converts separate storage silos into a hardware-independent Enterprise Storage Cloud. It provides integrated, policy-driven, storage management capabilities for fixed content including: de-duplication, archiving, backup, indexing, global search, retention management and ILM (information lifecyclemanagement).

Twisted Storage is a distributed system that can scale to multiple petabytes across numerous geographic locations. Its uses open-standards to build heterogeneous systems that liberate data from closed systems and changes the way large-scale storage systems are structured, scaled, and managed.

Hello all! It’s that time again. 

This just in! - we just confirmed that theNew England based Cloud startup company still in stealth mode - CloudSwitch, as a second speaker at this months meeting. CloudSwitch is funded by Matrix Partners and Atlas Ventures.

This month we also have, Newton, Inc., a West Coast SaaS company that provides recruiting technology to corporations globally.  Having evaluated moving their services to the Cloud, Newton’s Chief Product Officer, Steve Hazelton, will explain his decision to forego the Cloud for now and why.  We will also get a demonstration of their product, one of the first enterprise Rich Internet Applications, and learn how companies are turning to this type of solution to build better internal recruiting capabilities. 

Looking forward to seeing you there!

-Wayne

Date: May 12, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7pm
Meeting: 7-9pm

NEW LOCATION!!! Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Directions:  Microsoft

CloudSwitch

Ellen Rubin, Founder and VP Products for CloudSwitch

As a founder and VP of Product, Ellen in the process building an innovative enterprise software product that delivers the power of cloud computing seamlessly and securely, so companies can dramatically reduce cost and improve responsiveness to the business.

Prior to joining CloudSwitch, Ellen was VP Marketing at Netezza (NYSE Arca: NZ), the pioneer and global leader in data warehouse appliances that power business intelligence and analytics at over 200 enterprises worldwide. Ellen was a member of the early management team responsible for growing the company to over $125M in revenues, profitability and a successful IPO in 2007. Ellen has an MBA and BA from Harvard University.

Newton On Demand

Joel Passen, Co-Founder and COO of Newton On Demand.

Joel is our lead product evangelist and is in charge of Sales and Marketing. Prior to joining Newton, Joel co-founded GravityPeople and served as Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Business Development where he led sales for Gravity’s recruitment outsourcing business unit. During his tenure, Joel led GravityPeople to be named to the San Francisco Business Times “Top 100″ for fastest growing companies in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. Joel received a degree in Political Science from The Ohio State University. You can email him at joel at newtonondemand dot com.

Hello all! It’s that time again - and again we have a SaaS type company that provides services to companies who want to offer SaaS services in the cloud and a full service cloud offering from Microsoft.

Date: April 14, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7pm
Meeting: 7-9pm

NEW LOCATION!!! Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Directions:  Microsoft

For this months cloud meetup we have two confirmed speakers  - Treb Ryan from Opsource - a web service operations company that delivers Cloud SaaS services including PCI and SAS70 compliant environments and Bob Daniels, is an Industry Technology Strategist with Microsoft who is going to talk about Microsofts Azure Cloud Services.

BIO - Treb Ryan

Chief Executive Officer

Prior to co-founding OpSource in 2002, Mr. Ryan was President of the Americas for Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN). He was responsible for integrating the sales and delivery organizations of the company’s Internet businesses-hosting, IP networking, and managed services - providing customers with an integrated network and IT infrastructure solution.Mr. Ryan joined MFN from SiteSmith, a company that he co-founded in 1999 and ultimately sold to MFN in a deal valued at $1.4 billion. Prior to co-founding SiteSmith, Mr. Ryan was Vice President of Professional Services for GlobalCenter, a pioneer in the hosting and Internet services marketplace. Mr. Ryan has been a guest speaker at numerous industry events, including CIO, venture capital, Internet, hosting, and software conferences. He attended UCLA and is an advisor to the UCLA CLAS fund.

BIO - Bob Daniels

Industry Technology Strategist

Bob Daniels is the Industry Technology Strategist for the Microsoft Professional Services verticals which includes Building Services, Accounting, Legal, and Managed Services. By specializing in collaboration, knowledge management and service delivery he looks at the requirements and trends in industry. From there he helps Microsoft’s customers with deployment strategies that best fit their current business and potential future directions with software solutions that may also comprise technology from Microsoft partners. Previously he was part of Microsoft Consulting Services delivering on engagements for infrastructure and application development. He has been with Microsoft for 8+ years and has worked in technology for over 20 years. Starting his career at AT&T Bell Labs and worked at MASSCOMP, Stardent, Radionics, Hewlett Packard, and iCOMS. He graduated  from Wentworth Institute of Technology with a BS in Computer Science in 1985

At last months (March) cloud meeting a cloud based company called Twinstrata  presented their cloud offering called Clarity AP.

Imagine being about to perform ”what if” scenarios during the design phase of your infrastructure. For example design A is going to use all local storage on traditional SAN architecture with vendor XYZ with only one primary network in place. For design B you consider using cloud storage again with one network connection. The Twinstrata product allows you to compare the risk and the costs of each scenario before making the investment.

Twinstrata does their development in the cloud and includes cloud infrastructure profiles for ROI and Risk analysis. A free trial can be downloaded to kick-the-tires on the product or a full enterprise version can be purchased for $500 which seems like a bargain for the architect looking at moving their infrastructure to the cloud.

For more details - listen to the cloudcast and take a look at the slide presentation. Also if you were wondering what Twinstrata means - dual clouds.

Cloudcast can be heard here: Twinstrata_MP3

Presentation can be viewed here: twinstrata-clarityap-cloud

At our last cloud meeting the EMC Atmos team came out to speak and provided some insight into their new category of storage called “Cloud Optimized Storage” or COS which EMC defines as:

• Massively Scalable - not just inside a datacenter but on a global scale.
• Global Distribution - policy driven so that you can automatically place data where it needs to be based on demand or a need for improved protection (aka disaster protection)
• Efficiency at Scale - to make information available when needed and where it is needed the platform has to be smart enough to copy data where it is demanded and reduce the copies when they are not in use.

I’ve attached the Atmos presentation they presented and the cloudcast from the meeting both of which you can find here:

Atmos Presentation

Atmos Cloudcast

This last meeting had two very different cloud companies - with the only constant being they both were cloud SaaS companies!

SnapLogic:

Mike Pitaro from Snaplogic spoke first and introduced the concept of “cloud-to-ground” information integration. Snaplogic builds a data integration server that connects and transforms information from SaaS, Web, and more traditional applications in the datacenter (kind of like an ESB/ETL service for the cloud).

SnapLogic uses REST and has an open API that allows a developer to built their own connectors to applications that SnapLogic hasn’t built yet. The ease of use, a free sandbox, and an Open Source version all qualify this as a cloud-friendly product. SugarCRM, Salesforce, and NetSuite are the core applications that connectors have been built for so far with standard Web 2.0 elements such as XML, RSS, and an HTML scraper included. Snaplogic also integrates more traditional data such as delimited files, databases, and spreadsheets making this very versatile to integrate the old and the new seamlessly - while connecting the datacenter apps to the cloud services all coming together in your browser.

Snaplogic is certainly worth a look if you want to be able to quickly integrate SaaS with your current infrastructure without having to face a total migration/rewrite and without having to jump with both feet into the cloud.

The slide presentation can be found here: SnapLogic PDF and the cloudcast can be found here SnapLogic mp3

Tamale Software

Tamale Software was a company targeted at financial services companies. I say ‘was’ because they were acquired by Advent Software back on October of 2008. The combination of Tamale’s “front office” capabilities for the analysts and researchers combined with Advent’s mid/back-0ffice services seems a natural fit.

John Fawcett from Tamale spoke about the new product that they have been building and testing that takes their offer to a new level - as a hybrid “cloud” offer. What makes it hybrid is their unique architecture that protects the privacy of the end users data while still leveraging common services.

For example - there is a main server that sits in the “cloud” - which is repsonsible for pushing software updates and upgrades non-disruptively and logs software problem/bug events - but does not have any end user information on it. All the user/company information is located on a local server and on the individual clients. The more private the data the closer to the source it remains with very fine grain protections at the field and user access level.

By using a hybrid SaaS model - the software services are provided and managed by Tamale while the data is kept inside the firewalls of the company using the service and not accessable by even the service provider.

The Tamale cloudcast can be found here: Tamale mp3

Welcome!

Once again we have a great lineup for the New England Cloud User Group meeting:

5th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: February 10, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7
Meeting: 7-9

NEW LOCATION!!!

Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Directions:  Microsoft

Each meeting we try to have two presenters. The January meeting had two great presenters - Greg Arnette, CTO at Sonian (http//www.sonian.net) and a Cloud vendor Sun, represented by Angelo Rajdurai. We finally figured out how to post the meeting summaries, slides, and podcasts in the cloud! They are linked here: Sonian and Sun.  The conversation continueus to evolve and we are always finding new ways to leverage the cloud as we listen to entrepreneurs, investors, and established vendors share their views and ask great questions.

This months meeting we have two interesting speakers - Mike Pitaro, Found and CCO from SnapLogic and John Fawcett, CTO  from Tamale Software. 

SnapLogic provides the glue to tie Enterprise applications to Cloud SaaS offerings such as SalesForce. Tamale Software provides a shared research space for financial services organizations  that includes work-flow and collaboration tools.

 Speakers Bio’s:

Mike Pittaro
Founder and Chief Community Officer, SnapLogic

Mike started SnapLogic with Gaurav with the goal of simplifying data integration through a fundamentally new approach.

Mike has worked in the data analysis and data integration space for the past 12 years. He built his first financial data mart in 1996, and later worked on pool selection analysis for the asset-backed securitization industry. Mike joined Informatica in 1997, where he worked on product advocacy and developed the support infrastructure for the Global Support Organization, which used a mixture of commercial and Open Source software to enable collaboration and resource sharing across five distributed support centers. Before Informatica, Mike worked in the high performance computer industry, optimizing Fortran and C programs for massively parallel computers. Mike graduated from the Sligo Institute of Technology in 1983.

John Fawcett
Chief Technology Officer, Tamale Software

John is a Tamale founder and its first employee. Launching Tamale in September 2002, John led the development of Tamale RMS, the class-defining research management solution that also broke ground as a truly packaged enterprise solution. Before starting Tamale, John worked in Boston as a hedge fund analyst covering the software industry. Prior to joining the hedge fund, John worked as a consultant building combined data and video systems. His work included the design of an integrated live stats and video system for Major League Baseball. John graduated Cum Laude from Harvard College with a degree in Mechanical Engineering

  We had two speakers at the January 13, 2009 cloud user group meeting in Boston. The first speaker was from Sonian (yes - they chose a nickname from Smithsonian) was Greg Arnette their CTO. Sonain is a startup company that built a cloud based service offering to archive email to the cloud. The complete stack lives in the cloud and they use Ruby-on-rails and Erlang for their IDE.

•  Started in 2006 http://www.sonian.net/
• They only have 10 employees and only needed $1M in angel funds because they claim they didn’t need the other $4M in technicians and infrastructure that startups traditionally used. This allows them to focus on their intellectual property and getting those key reference accounts before they even have to consider venture capital or other financial instruments (and give up the equity to go with it).
• They have 75 customers, 7 Vars signed, and 5 OEM agreements.
• The 75 customers range from 200 to 10,000 email boxes.
• Sonian runs on Amazon Web Services using EC2, SDB & MySQL, EBS and S3, SQS, UI is served via Apache (on AWS), and ERlang, RabbitMQ,, and Map Reduce for the ESB and processing.
• Their service supports all major email engines: Exchange, GroupWise, Notes, IMail Server, Zimbra, Scalix….
• $36/year/mailbox compared to standard offerings in the $120+/year/mailbox range. Each mailbox gets 2GB/User/year for that fee.
•  All data is stored with an MD5 hash and encrypted and is fully searchable for eDiscovery.
•  All data is replicated to 8 AWS datacenters for access and protection

             Greg’s presentation was very interesting … and he got lots of questions from the crowd! Security and architecture were the hot topics as was how the service works - customer (email/system administrator) configures the policies for extracting and sending emails in a batch to Sonian Services on AWS via SSL. Administrator has a client that runs in the cloud that uses SSL and all Sonian components are in the cloud allowing Sonian to rely on AWS for security and robustness.

             For security they use the data encryption services provided by AWS with .509 certificates. They also only use their own AMI images and do not use or advocate using the public ones due to the potential of trojans or leaks. One thing they do in addition is they have their AMI’s reviewed using Ouncelabs or Vericode to make sure their code is “certified” as secure.

             Greg did a great job presenting the companies service offer and it was useful to see the value in shifting from a traditional “product” acquisition to a cloud SaaS model for enterprise email archiving.

             One other note is that from the four cloud meetings we’ve had so far – we’ve had two startup companies speak so far – both of which (Sonian and Pixily) have built services that “sell” to their customers (one enterprise and one consumer/SMB) storage/archiving in the cloud.  Security was a common theme during the Q&A’s. It will be interesting to see if the trend of startups, SaaS, Archive/Storage, and security continue to be the early issues and services chosen by entrepreneurs.

 Here is the sonian Podcast (MP3) and here is the sonian_cloud_archiving presntation (PDF).

 -wayne

On January 13, 2009  we had another great New England Cloud User Group meeting! We had two great speakers - both providing a view into what a startup is doing to change the way we do email archiving (www.soniannetworks.com) and what Sun is thinking about – how to integrate what they build and sell today with the cloud

                Sun’s speaker was Angelo Rajadurai who is one of their evangelists for all things cloud working with startups. According to Angelo they are trying to reproduce their success in the dot.com era by being successful with cloud companies. Angelo spent the first part of his discussion on how great the cloud was for the future in terms of the business model - removing the capital investment requirements, reducing a startups focus on infrastructure and allowing startups to invest in their Intellectual Property and business readiness instead.

                Part II of the discussion was truly brilliant in that Angelo started talking about AWS specifically and got the heads nodding in the room. He talked about how great S3, EC2, and EBS were in terms of providing a great solution to the startups - easy to use, low cost of entry, and very rich in terms of services. Now he had the room hooked.

                Part III - Angelo started talking about ZFS … and at first I was confused - what does ZFS have to do with the cloud? ZFS is a file system that has some very interesting features in it. For one - it can automatically tier storage based on the storage type. Angelo explained that ZFS is designed with the equivalent of an MMU in it that takes blocks and places them in the appropriate memory location - only instead of an MMU it is a DMU (disk management unit) that can put high read data on an SSD and data that is more general on slower storage such as Tier1 or Tier2 and manages file system storage pools. Angelo’s tie in to the cloud was that he created a ZFS to S3 bucket file system - or a FUSE (file system in user space). Now you may be scratching your head - but consider this … what if you could marry localized file system and storage tiering to the cloud as the slowest (cheapest) tier?

                Part IV - Angelo then told us that what they have found is that the $/TB cost are one dimension but the IOPs cost for the cloud are also important. IOPs in the cloud need to be looked at differently because if the IOP results in the data being transferred into and out of the cloud the cost model changes dramatically based on the direction the data is headed. Sending data to the cloud is pretty cheap whereas getting data out of the cloud is very expensive. What SUN has been proposing is a TCO model that positions a SUN Unified Storage Array at a local datacenter (non-cloud) that is used to present cached data to the customers for high volume read and the cloud is used for the archive. For example Angelo referred to a popular photo storage/sharing site that used their own storage, then realized the cloud was cheaper, then found out that the downloads were killing them in AWS costs - so they now used a local cache by storing heavily read photo’s on a local array and use the cloud to persist the archive.

                Personally I think this is a great strategy to use existing storage technology and marry it to the cloud - allowing ILM to now include the cloud as one of the data stores.  Any thoughts or reactions from all you cloud folks?

Here is the presentation sun-cloudstorage and this is the sun-cloud-storage PodCast.

-wayne

Once again we have a great lineup for the New England Cloud User Group meeting:

4th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: January 13, 2009
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7
Meeting: 7-9
Location: Papa Razzi Wellsley MA (private room)
16 Washington St
Wellesley, MA 02481

Directions: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=16%20Washington%20Street,02481&hl=en

Last meeting we had two presenter - a vendor who is looking at the cloud (RSA) and a startup that is using the cloud to offer their service (Pixiliy). The conversation was lively and enlightening in what these companies viewed were their challenges - current and future.

This months meeting we have two interesting speakers - Greg Arnette CTO and co-founder from Sonian (http://www.sonian.net/) and Angelo Rajadurai is a Senior Technical Evangelist for Sun helping startup companies use SUN’s technology which includes the cloud.

 Speakers Bio’s:

Greg Arnette is the CTO and co-founder of Sonian, a two year old cloud compute application start-up that provides enterprise archiving services for compliance, e-disocvery and storage management. Sonian
has built it’s entire hosted infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, and was recently awarded a finalist position in the 2008 Start Up Challenge. Sonian uses AWS EC2, S3, SDB, SQS and EBS web services.

Angelo Rajadurai is a Senior Technical Evangelist specializing in application optimization at Sun Microsystems. Angelo has been with Sun Microsystems for over 15 years  where he has held various technical roles.  Angelo’s areas of focus have varied from working on the Solaris x86 kernel, to supporting Sun’s strategic partners and customers on various engineering and optimization projects.  More recently Angelo is addressing the technology challenges experienced by the Startup Community.  He has presented on web technologies to audiences worldwide.