Dave:   Gartner: SaaS market to grow 17.9 percent to $14.5 billion

Global spending on SaaS (software as a service) will rise 17.9 percent this year to $14.5 billion, according to figures released Tuesday by analyst firm Gartner.
SaaS market growth will remain strong through 2015, when spending on the software is expected to hit $22.1 billion, according to Gartner.

The spending rise is attributable to greater familiarity with how SaaS works, growth in related PaaS (platform as a service) offerings, and IT budgeting considerations, Gartner research director Sharon Mertz said in a statement. SaaS products are typically sold via subscription, allowing companies to avoid large up-front licensing fees and capital costs.

North America is the most mature and largest SaaS market, expected to generate $9.1 billion in revenue this year, compared to $7.8 billion last year.



JP:   DevOp/NoOp

Jeff:   
Will Google Big Query Transform Big Data Analysis?
By Doug Henschen InformationWeek

BigQuery offers the following features:

• Speed - Analyze billions of rows in seconds

• Scale - Terabytes of data, trillions of records

• Simplicity - SQL-like query language, hosted on Google infrastructure

• Sharing - Powerful group- and user-based permissions using Google accounts

• Security - Secure SSL access

• Multiple access methods - Connect to BigQuery using the BigQuery browser, the bq command-line tool, the REST API, or Google Apps Script

BigQuery is also ideal for:

• Ad-hoc analysis

• Standardized reporting

• Data exploration

• App prototyping

Oldy, but a goody.    

The basics of cloud computing interoperability, including portability and use of standards.    

Dave

News Topics:      

Dave:   Amazon comes out on top in cloud data transfer speed test

A study investigating the amount of time it takes to transfer 12TB of data from one cloud to another shows there can be up to a 25 times difference in transfer speed among providers.

Nasuni, which provides cloud storage using various public clouds, tested how long it took to transfer the data between Amazon Web Services S3 (Simple Storage Service), Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace. The company used 22 million files of mixed sizes, with each file having an average size of 550KB. Transferring into AWS from Microsoft Azure was the fastest and transferring data from AWS to Rackspace was the slowest.

For example, transferring from one bucket of AWS's S3 servers to another set of S3 servers took four hours. Transferring from S3 to Azure took 40 hours, and transferring from S3 to Rackspace took 115 hours, or almost five days. Nasuni also tested data transfers into S3 and found that migrating the data from Azure to S3 took four hours and moving it from Rackspace to S3 took five hours. Nasuni did not perform Azure to Rackspace or vise versa testing.

Chris: OMGPop scaled to 36 million users in three weeks

OMGPop can thank the cloud for its acquisition by Zynga on Wednesday. The gaming startup, whose Draw Something iPhone app used cloud computing and a NoSQL database to scale from zero (relatively speaking) to more than 35 million downloads in three weeks and never miss a beat.

Derrick Harris met with Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold, whose company worked with OMGPOP to scale its implementation of the Couchbase database as demand started growing.

Details:

• OMGPop is hosted in the cloud, but “they’re not on Amazon.”
• Draw Something has been downloaded more than 35 million times. Players have created more than 1 billion pictures and are creating around 3,000 pictures per second.
• To handle the incredible traffic spike, OMGPOP had to reconfigure its Couchbase cluster, scale it into the many tens of nodes, and many terabytes of data and increased throughout into the tens of thousands of operations per second.
• Throughout all this, Draw Something didn’t experience any downtime.

This type of load really stresses a system, Wiederhold said, and if it wasn’t for its decision to use cloud computing and NoSQL technologies, “their game would have fallen over.” EA recently removed its “The Simpsons: Tapped Out” game from Apple’s App Store after server problems prevented users from being able to login. It’s not clear what, exactly, caused EA’s problem, but it speaks to the importance of having components that are able to scale as apps go viral.

Scalability, of course, is one of the primary calling cards for both cloud computing and NoSQL providers. NoSQL databases, which broke onto the scene a few years ago by claiming to solve the scaling problems inherent in many relational databases, are hugely popular among those building web applications. One of the early poster children of cloud computing was Animoto, who launched its Facebook app in 2008 and scaled to about 250,000 members and about 3,400 Amazon Web Services compute images over the course of a week.

Chris 2: High Performance Computing Division Launched by Patriot Technologies

Patriot Technologies has launched a High Performance Computing (HPC) Solutions division that provides customized hardware solutions designed to enable the best-designed configuration at the lowest possible cost of ownership to support even the most demanding technical computing environments -- including the Cloud and Hadoop.

Patriot Technologies solutions include Turn-key Clusters, High-Performance Workstations/Servers, GPU Solutions, Enterprise Storage and Cloud Computing. In addition, the company specializes in crafting Hadoop Clusters Solutions. Hadoop is an Apache Open-Source Project, which represents the largest open-source Big Data technology on the market today. It origin dates back to 2004, and it is quickly becoming the de-facto standard for analysis of unstructured data. [Patriot offers] a complete line of rackmounts servers/cloud servers as the building blocks to turn-key Hadoop Cluster deployments.

>Share thoughts around purpose-built hardware (e.g. routers) and examples from SOA (hardware based service gateways) - hardened and optimized OS layer but will it succeed?  Time will tell.


jeff:  

Supersize me: Hadoop upgrade will handle even bigger data

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/supersize-me-hadoop-upgrade-will-handle-even-bigger-data-187800

The key objective of this upgrade  (0.23) is to increase the number of nodes within a given Hadoop cluster from 4000 to 6000, rewrite the MapReduce framework (version 2.0) to allow for higher throughput on larger node clusters and an upgrade to HDFS to allow high availability of data across a given cluster nodes.

Hadoop is no longer a “big data” technology but a “massive data” technology…this is a first here by the way. With this level of scalability; a “wide area” distributed data warehouse performance is no longer an issue, granted there is dependency on network performance. In addition this upgrade makes the HDFS more stable and highly available because you can now configure the “Name Node” as an “active/passive” cluster enabling a failover capability for high availability. 

Dave:

Gartner: “The Personal Cloud Will Replace the Personal Computer as the Center of Users' Digital Lives by 2014”

Building on the fact that the use of cloud computing is freeing us from dependence on a specific device, Gartner may be spot on.   

According to Gartner, the personal computer as the sole access device is coming to a close by 2014.   What’s replacing it?   The personal cloud.   Okay, what the hell is a personal cloud?

“Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity. However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users.”

Actually, this is building on the topic of my last blog, which I produced without seeing this release.    The concept being that the use of cloud-based resources is providing use with the flexibility to use many different devices, and thus the rise of the personal cloud that becomes the new center of our digital universe.     

Chris: Cellnovo's Cloud System Monitors Diabetes in Real Time

An insulin pump, attached to the body with Velcro, connects wirelessly to a touch-screen activity monitor that resembles an Apple iPhone but doesn't make calls. Cellnovo has disabled the voice capabilities of the mobile monitor as a safety feature.

"We have many sensors on the pump that measure the temperature of the insulin," said McKeon. "All of that information is constantly being communicated to the handset, and once that information is on the handset, that information gets moved up over the mobile network."

By wearing the pump as a patch, patients don't have to keep a journal, according to Cellnovo.

Cellnovo is conducting trials with 100 type 1 diabetes patients in 10 leading diabetes centers in the United Kingdom to determine how connecting a wireless insulin pump to a wireless data-transfer system will help them regulate their diet and take the proper amount of insulin.

The usability trial allows patients to share data and caregivers to evaluate it remotely in real
time.

Professor John Pickup of King's College London School of Medicine is the principal investigator for the trial.

"The Cellnovo system provides us immediate access to the clinical status of all our patients on a single screen," trialist Stephen Greene, a professor at the University of Dundee, said in a statement.

The Cellnovo diabetes management system is part of a remote-monitoring trend in health care, according to McKeon. Mobile technology will become embedded in medical devices on a regular basis, he predicted.

However, McKeon believes that eventually the device will matter less and the real value is with the cloud-based platform. In a way, it mirrors how the iPod became less important as Apple's iTunes moved toward a more cloud-based model.

"That's the real seismic shift, moving from MP3 players to iTunes," said McKeon. "The device has become less important. What's most important is in the cloud, and it's the same way with managing a patient."

"In five years when we're talking about medical devices, people are going to look back to when patients would drive to a diabetes clinic or cardiovascular clinic four to 10 times a year when a [wireless] radio could have done that for us," McKeon explained.

Following trials in the United Kingdom, Cellnovo will show the diabetes management throughout Europe and then seek 510(k) clearance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to try to begin selling the device by midyear in the States, said McKeon.

With the real-time data provided to doctors, McKeon hopes that more diabetes patients will be able to avoid losing limbs and eyesight. By using software to record blood sugar and diet numbers and by connecting to cellular radios to transmit the data, people could possibly live longer and healthier "without the burden of this disease," he said.  

JP:  

Jeff (pick one story Jeff):

Microsoft courts big data market with SQL Server update

http://www.infoworld.com/d/computer-hardware/microsoft-courts-big-data-market-sql-server-update-188123

Guess who is invited to the big data party….its your favorite desktop buddy Microsoft. With Azure issues behind them, Microsoft is touting the next release of SQL Server (2012) RDBMS as a “big data” platform. In short, Microsoft…a late comer to the “big data” movement is showing signs of wanting a piece of the action. According this article by By Joab Jackson from IDG News Service
Microsoft, customers can use SQL Server 2012 as a connector to Hadoop to access harvested data from Hadoop data sources.

In my opinion why go through an intermediary system to access Hadoop aggregated/harvested data when there are tools out by several vendors to access the data directly. In addition many of BI vendors are now building Hadoop connectors within their BI stack to access Hadoop data sources.

Supersize me: Hadoop upgrade will handle even bigger data

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-explosion/supersize-me-hadoop-upgrade-will-handle-even-bigger-data-187800

The key objective of this upgrade  (0.23) is to increase the number of nodes within a given Hadoop cluster from 4000 to 6000, rewrite the MapReduce framework (version 2.0) to allow for higher throughput on larger node clusters and an upgrade to HDFS to allow high availability of data across a given cluster nodes.

Hadoop is no longer a “big data” technology but a “massive data” technology…this is a first here by the way. With this level of scalability; a “wide area” distributed data warehouse is possible. In addition, it makes the HDFS more stable and highly available because you can now configure the “Name Node” as an “active/passive” cluster enabling a failover capability for high availability. 

Dave:

Google drops the price of Cloud Storage service

It also announced several partners who have built commercial products using Cloud Storage

Amazon Web Services enacts 'significant' price cut

Reserved Instances of EC2 will cost up to 42 percent less

Chris:

Sony division drops AWS, goes OpenStack

PlayStation Network and Qriocity services inside of Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) that suffered a cyberattack last year, which led to a major PlayStation network outage and sensitive customer data being compromised, has dropped Amazon Web Services for at least a portion of its cloud hosting and computing in favor of an OpenStack platform hosted by Rackspace.

SCEA's decision to embrace OpenStack, which is an evolving open-source platform to launch cloud environments, is "big news" for the OpenStack community, said Marc Brien, an analyst with Domicity, who tracks the OpenStack movement.

Started last year by Rackspace and NASA, OpenStack has gained momentum in recent months and now includes more than 140 companies. Most of those, Brien said, are service providers that offer cloud products to customers, including Rackspace, Citrix, Dell and recently IBM. For a big-name end user to sign on to the project is a positive sign for OpenStack, he said. SCEA joins Disney and CERN, the European nuclear science group, as users committed to using OpenStack.

"It's a big announcement. It raises the question, is this the water beginning to pour over the dam?" he said. Brien expects that within a few years, or sooner, the OpenStack project will have advanced to a point where it will attract a large number of users, but it's not quite there yet, he said.

SCEA's migration from AWS to Rackspace's OpenStack cloud platform was "relatively quick," said the email from the PR agency, taking approximately six days, and it was done in a way that end users would not notice a difference. It's unclear how much of SCEA's cloud-based services have already migrated away from AWS products. The news was originally going to be announced last week, but representatives from the companies involved said they would wait until next week to speak about the move. Sony officials have not responded to questions related to the topic.

AWS said that Sony continues to be a "strong and growing customer," but a spokeswoman for the company said she could not speak to the status of individual business units of Sony. AWS itself has been the subject of outages, including ones in April and August.

IPO VIEW - Demandware to test cloud appetite

(Reuters) Demandware follows a string of successful public offerings from other cloud-based technology companies; all priced within or above their expected range, and then saw their shares soar.

The Burlington, Massachusetts, firm, which makes software [that] businesses use to maintain their e-commerce sites, plans to raise an estimated $74 million during its IPO under the new ticker "DWRE" on the New York Stock Exchange. It plans to offer 5.5 million shares in a range of $12.50 to $14.50.

"Timing is everything, and if you're a cloud operator the timing is perfect," said independent IPO analyst Tom Taulli. "We've had a lot of hunger for cloud deals as it has become a huge trend for businesses."

Guidewire Software Inc, a San Mateo, California-based cloud computing company geared toward the property and casualty insurance industry, saw its January IPO price at $13, above its expected range of $10 to $12 a share. Shares of Guidewire closed Thursday at $22.08, up 70 percent from the company's offer price.

Austin, Texas-based Bazaarvoice Inc, which makes software for businesses to communicate with customers, also priced above its expected range in February. Shares of Bazaarvoice closed Thursday at $15.43, up 29 percent from the company's IPO price.

Shares of video platform provider Brightcove Inc are trading up 42 percent from the company's February IPO.

Jive Software Inc, which makes social networking software for businesses, has seen shares gain 96 percent after its December IPO.

H.P. Attempts to Take On Amazon’s Cloud Service

(NY Times) Within two months, Hewlett-Packard will offer a large and powerful cloud computing service similar to Amazon Web Services, but with more business-oriented features, according the head of the project.

“We’re not just building a cloud for infrastructure,” said Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services. “Amazon has the lead there. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services.” Among the first software applications available as part of the Hewlett-Packard cloud, he said, will be both structured and unstructured databases, and data analytics as a service.

“We won’t pull (Amazon’s) customers out by the horns,” he said, “but we already have customers in beta who see us as a great alternative.” He did not say how much the computing services would cost, but said “we are not coming at this at ‘8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents,’” which even at the initial price could undercut Amazon. While Amazon tends largely to have a self-service model, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud will also offer more personalized sales and service, he said.

H.P. also plans to offer a number of tools for developers to use popular online software languages, like Ruby, Java, and PHP, as well as ways for customers to provision and manage their workloads remotely. The service will also include an online store where people can offer or rent software for use in the Hewlett-Packard public cloud. Mr. Singh said the company would take precautions to ensure the quality and security of these software offerings from third parties by providing services like user authentication and billing.

“We want to make it hard for an I.B.M. or an Oracle or anyone to come in,” he said. By offering a lot of tools for developers and business-ready software to corporations, H.P. could find ways to undercut existing enterprise offerings, while surviving against Amazon, a notoriously low-margin competitor.

Though the data centers presently supporting H.P.’s cloud are located only on the East and West Coasts of the United States, H.P. plans to scale the program by installing small data centers across the globe. This small and dispersed approach is a break from the goliath data centers run by cloud companies like Amazon and Google. The project will run almost entirely on Hewlett-Packard technology.

As ambitious as the program sounds, Mr. Singh said the revenue from the public cloud business will have little initial impact on H.P.’s annual revenue, which are in excess of $100 billion. His project will be judged, he said, as much on how well it helps other parts of Hewlett-Packard’s business as it is on its own revenue. “We do everything from laptops to cloud computing,” he said. “This will leverage our whole sales channel.”

The analytics Hewlett-Packard will offer will be derived from its earlier purchases of Vertica and Autonomy. H.P. has previously talked about offering these pattern-finding capabilities in its computer servers. In addition, it hopes to use the public cloud, which like other clouds will interoperate with the computing resources inside companies, as a way to showcase its latest servers, which Mr. Singh said outperformed cheaper commercial offerings in areas like power usage and computing capabilities when H.P. was designing the system.

Dave:  Microsoft Azure stabilizes after leap year glitch

Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and development service was apparently running nearly trouble-free on Thursday, following a series of outages on Wednesday that affected multiple aspects of the system.

The Azure service health dashboard showed only one problem at 3 p.m. GMT, a "performance degradation" in the south-central U.S. Compute zone. "Our recovery efforts to restore compute service to impacted customers in this sub-region are complete," Microsoft said in a message on the site. However, "a small number of customers in this sub-region may face long delays during service management operations," it added.

Azure's service management component fared the worst during the outage, going out worldwide starting at 1:45 a.m. GMT on Wednesday. The dashboard showed the service management system running normally at 3 p.m. GMT on Thursday, as were other previously affected pieces of the Azure platform, including Reporting, Marketplace and Access Control 2.0.

Microsoft provided some insight into the outage's root causes in an official blog post.

"Windows Azure operations became aware of an issue impacting the compute service in a number of regions," wrote Bill Laing, corporate vice president of server and cloud. "The issue was quickly triaged and it was determined to be caused by a software bug. While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year."

Chris:   ActiveState Launches Stackato 1.0 Private PaaS Offering

ActiveState announced the availability of Stackato 1.0, an application platform for creating a private platform as a service (PaaS) using any language on any stack on any cloud, company officials said.

From the desktop to the data center, Stackato makes it easy to develop, deploy, migrate, scale, manage and monitor applications on any cloud, the company said.

“This is a great day for developers and enterprises looking to the cloud,” said ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland in a statement. “Stackato delivers on the promise of the cloud—convenience, cost-efficiency—with the security, control and compliance the real-world enterprise demands.”
With Stackato, developers can simulate a production environment on a local machine, code, test and then launch an application to the cloud. Enterprise IT can achieve new levels of data security, reduce time to market, save money, ensure compliance and gain greater control over the cloud.

Stackato supports three key functional objectives for developers and enterprises: the setup and scaling of a cloud environment, the development and deployment of apps for and to the cloud, and the management and monitoring of application performance. With Stackato, users can create an auto-configuring private PaaS on top of a private cloud or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environment in minutes. They also can deploy new and migrate existing applications to the cloud in three simple steps, and manage updates and upgrades, and monitor application performance.

The Stackato offering features a Web-based management console for administrative control, an app store that offers a one-stop shop for easy install of common applications, a persistent file system service that enables compatibility with applications like Drupal, and performance monitoring technology from New Relic to deliver application management visibility.

“Stackato is about freedom, control and ROI,” Copeland said. “Developers have the freedom to work with multiple stacks; use the best-suited tools; configure, test and deploy faster; and ultimately build more apps. IT managers get control: They can create new apps and migrate existing ones; eliminate the risks of data silos or rogue clouds; ensure tighter security and compliance; and deploy to the cloud model that’s right for their enterprise, whether that cloud is public, private or a hybrid of both. And CIOs get return on investment: More-efficient private-PaaS app development means shorter time to market and better use of resources. Stackato offers an escape from vendor lock-in. And, ultimately, lower costs.”
Stackato is available in Enterprise, Micro Cloud, and Sandbox editions. Stackato Enterprise is priced per VM per year. Stackato Micro Cloud is available free for use in single node on a desktop client. In addition, Stackato is also available as a free 45-day trial running on the Stackato Sandbox service.

Stackato also is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Users can set up a private PaaS in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) without having to download a virtual machine

JP:   Strata Conference Highlights