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