March 11, 2009
6:00 pm	to	9:00 pm

 Welcome!

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

6th Silver-lining Meeting – The New England Cloud User Group

Date: March 11, 2009  (Note: Wednesday)
Time: Meet & Greet 6-7 pm
Meeting: 7-9 pm

NEW LOCATION!!!

Microsoft Northeast District: Waltham, MA

Address: 201 Jones Rd., Sixth Floor Waltham, MA 02451 Phone: (781) 487-6400 Fax: (781) 487-6600

Directions:  Microsoft

 This next meeting (03/11/2009) brings two companies that provide Infrastructure related products to the cloud. Ed Beauvais, Sr. Product Manager from EMC Corporation will be talking about the new Atmos Cloud Optimized Storage. Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of Twinstrata will be talking about configuring infrastructure using private and public cloud technologies and how to avoid the risks in the design.

 

Ed Beauvais

Senior Product Manager

Cloud Infrastructure Group EMC Corporation

 

Ed Beauvais is Senior Product Manager in the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC Corporation and is responsible for EMC Atmos – the industry’s leading multi-petabyte information management solution for cloud storage environments.

 

Ed joined EMC’s Technology Ventures Group in April of 2007 with the objectives of creating innovative market solutions in emerging technology markets and creating business model innovation.  Prior to joining EMC, Ed was Director of Product Management for Fidelity Investments focusing on the development and improvement of a web based service platform for the Investment Advisor marketplace. 

 

Nicos Vekiarides

Chief Executive Officer

Twinstrata, Inc.

 

Nicos has spent 18 years in the data storage field, both as a business manager and as an entrepreneur and founder in startup companies. Most recently, Nicos served as Vice President of Product Strategy and Technology at Incipient, Inc., where he helped deliver the industry’s first storage virtualization solution embedded in a Cisco switch fabric.

 

Prior to Incipient, Nicos was General Manager of the storage virtualization business at Hewlett-Packard, where he managed a multi-site business, delivering several releases of network storage virtualization products and growing the business to include host-based products. Nicos came to HP with the acquisition of StorageApps where he was a co-founder and VP of Engineering. At StorageApps, he built a team that brought to market the industry’s first storage virtualization appliance. Nicos was instrumental in the sale of StorageApps to Hewlett-Packard for $350M in 2001. Prior to StorageApps, Nicos spent a number of years in the data storage industry working at Sun Microsystems and Encore Computer. At Encore, Nicos architected and delivered Encore Computer’s SP data replication products that were a key factor in the $185M sale of Encore’s storage division to Sun Microsystems.

 

Nicos holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

 

 

 

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