Posts tagged cloud apps
VMware to Collaborate with Google on Cloud Computing
May 20th
Companies Address Need for Cloud Portability by Harnessing VMware vCloud Technologies, SpringSource, Google Web Toolkit, and Google App Engine to Simplify Modern Application Development and Deployment
SAN FRANCISCO, May 19, 2010 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced a series of technology collaborations with Google to deliver solutions that make enterprise software developers more efficient at building, deploying and managing applications within any cloud environment; public, private and hybrid. Announced today onstage at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco by Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, the two companies will bring together technologies and expertise to help accelerate enterprise adoption of cloud computing.
“Companies are actively looking to move toward cloud computing. They are certainly attracted by the economic advantages associated with cloud, but increasingly are focused on the business agility and innovation promised by cloud computing,” said Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware. “VMware and Google are aligning to reassure our mutual customers and the Java community that choice and portability are of utmost importance to both companies. We will work to ensure that modern applications can run smoothly within the firewalls of a company’s datacenter or out in the public cloud environment.”
VMware and Google are collaborating on multiple fronts to make cloud applications more productive, portable, and flexible. These projects will enable Java developers to build rich web applications, use Google and VMware performance tools on cloud apps, and deployments of Spring Java applications on Google App Engine.
“Developers are looking for faster ways to build and run great web applications, and businesses want platforms that are open and flexible,” said Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of developer platforms. “By working with VMware to bring cloud portability to the enterprise, we are making it easy for developers to deploy rich Java applications in the environments of their choice.”
Spring, Google App Engine, and SpringSource Tool Suite
Google is announcing support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine as part of a shared vision to make it easy to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, developers can build Spring applications in a familiar and productive way and have the flexibility to choose to deploy their applications in their current private VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud partner clouds, or directly to Google App Engine.
Spring Roo and Google Web Toolkit
VMware and Google are working together to combine the speed of development of Spring Roo, a next generation rapid application development tool, with the power of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build rich browser apps. These GWT powered applications can leverage modern browser technologies such as AJAX and HTML5 to create the most compelling end user experience on both smart phones and computers.
Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer
The two companies are also collaborating to more tightly integrate VMware’s Spring Insight performance tracing technology within the SpringSource tc Server application server with Google’s Speed Tracer technology to enable end to end performance visibility of cloud applications built using Spring and Google Web Toolkit.
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Cloud Computing Developer Workshops
Mar 9th
Monday, March 15
Cloud Computing IT Workshops | Developer Workshops | Developing for Microsoft Windows Azure Platform
Attend developer workshops with experts from the leading cloud computing platforms. It’s the only place where you can, in theory, build three cloud apps on three different clouds, guided by the folks behind that cloud, in a single day. BEST VALUE–Register for a Flex Pass to attend the conference (including developer track) plus pre-conference developer workshops.
| 9:00 AM–12:00 PM |
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Building on Google App Engine
Google’s App Engine cloud platform differs from many infrastructure-centric cloud technologies in that it is an Application Platform as a Service (APaaS) and thus, requires only code to build and deploy apps onto the cloud. Google App Engine provides a free usage entry path which can accommodate most modest web site/service deployments. Sites requiring more industrial strength scalability and bandwidth can enable billing and pay as needed to handle increased growth. Google App Engine distinguishes itself by offering development in either Python or Java. This workshop will be run in two tracks in both Python and Java with the same programming goals. You Will Learn:
Instructor – Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google
Speaker – Ikai Lan, Developer Advocate, Google
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Cloud Performance Optimization
Cloud environments are shared environments, which means that despite your best efforts, someone else can impact your performance and uptime. What if a cloud neighbor doesn’t play well with others? How can you be sure that your users are getting the availability you’ve promised, and the application performance to keep them happy and productive? You Will Learn:
Instructor – Hooman Beheshti, Vice President of Products, Strangeloop
Instructor – Hon Wong, EVP of Business Development and Marketing, Coradiant
Instructor – Imad Mouline, CTO, Gomez
Speaker – Robert Rounsavall, Director, Product Development, Terremark Worldwide, Inc.
Speaker – Don Green, Senior Vice President of Product Management, OpSource, Inc.
Speaker – Joe Hsy, Vice President of Technology and Advanced Development, Coradiant
Speaker – Bernd Harzog, Analyst – Virtualization Performance Management, The Virtualization Practice
Speaker – Seth Redmore, VP of Products, Lexalytics
Speaker – Steve Shah, Principal, RisingEdge Consulting
Speaker – John Allspaw, VP of Technical Operations, Etsy
Speaker – Hal Kalish, Industry Marketing Director – High Tech, Akamai
Speaker – Ron Warshawsky, Founder and CTO, Enteros
Speaker – JL Valente, CEO and President, Rivermuse
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RightNow Tries to Change SaaS Contract, Pricing Game
Mar 5th
CRM vendor RightNow announced a new SaaS (software as a service) pricing and licensing model on Thursday that it says provides customers with fairer, clearer deals. The company also issued a “Cloud Challenge” to competitors, urging them to adopt similar principles.
RightNow contends that while SaaS has changed the way companies use IT, providing benefits like faster implementations and quicker innovation, contractual engagements are wracked by the same problems as on-premises software, such as underutilized or excess user seats, hidden fees and restrictive contractual terms.
Under RightNow’s Cloud Services Agreement (CSA), which is now standard for all new business conducted by the vendor, customers receive fixed pricing for three years. They also have the ability to renew for another three years at a cost determined at the time the initial contract is signed.
Users who sign multiyear agreements can cancel on an annual basis for any reason, said CEO Greg Gianforte .
Another key aspect of the CSA sees customers buy a pool of “seat months” that are consumed on an as-needed basis, Gianforte said.
Customers can adjust the number of seat months each year. This will help put an end to shelfware, and particularly benefit customers with seasonal spikes in business, such as an online retailer, Gianforte said.
RightNow is also pledging to give back part of customer’s subscription fees if it fails to meet service-level agreements. The company is also offering 90-day pilot programs with unlimited capacity.
“It’s time for a change. The best thing that could happen is that the industry responds and everyone adopts the Cloud Challenge,” he said. “These are reasonable expectations and if you’re not getting them, you’re being taken advantage of.”
The announcement is “absolutely the right step and right direction from the point of view of SaaS and SaaS vendors,” said Ken Harris , CIO of natural nutrition products company Shaklee, a RightNow customer for more than five years.
Shaklee has a current contract with RightNow and therefore can’t immediately take advantage of the CSA, but the new terms reflect a number of provisions the company negotiated for in past years, he said.
The CSA’s use of “seat months” will be a big help, as Shaklee’s business is somewhat seasonal and underutilized seats do present “a real problem,” he said. “With any software that’s seat-based, you have to build the church for Easter Sunday but the rest of the days it doesn’t fill up, as the old saying goes.”
RightNow is just one of nine SaaS applications Shaklee currently uses, Harris said. The CSA “is going to give us a lot of leverage. A number of things that are in here, we’ve been trying to negotiate in all of our deals, not always successfully.”
Analysts also praised RightNow’s announcement.
“RightNow does go some way to address likely user pain points around adopting cloud apps, particularly in relation to guaranteed pricing over a multi-year period,” said 451 Group analyst China Martens via e-mail. “Having to pay over the odds for both compute power and storage for some versions of vendors’ CRM software have given some customers some nasty surprises.”
“There’s a lot to like in this announcement,” said Frank Scavo , managing partner of the IT consulting firm Strativa, in an e-mail. “For example, the cash level credits. With many providers, SLAs are weakly written or only offer token concessions. RightNow’s terms and conditions look like they put real teeth into RightNow’s SLAs.”
The announcement speaks to a new front in the software industry’s pricing wars, he added.
“Vendors have been discounting for years to win specific deals. The price competition is now moving to long-term maintenance and support, where the real money is,” Scavo said .”We’ve already started to see it with on-premise vendors such as Infor and Microsoft Dynamics, who seem to be emphasizing their maintenance and support programs these days as a way of differentiating themselves from SAP and Oracle. Now we’re starting to see it in the cloud.”
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Cloud Computing Wish List For 2010 – Amazon, Google, Microsoft
Dec 15th
As hard as I tried I couldn’t resist the lure of doing some type of year-end/new year type cloud blog. However, I decided to forgo the route of giving you a recap of what happened this year in cloud computing or attempting to guess where the rapidly expanding and changing cloud market is going via a list of 2010 cloud predictions. Instead, I’ve decided to give you my very own 2010 cloud computing wish list. Mind you, the things on this list aren’t predictions for what’s going to happen, nor is it made up of items that have a direct tie to any particular offerings. This is simply a list of what I’m hoping to see happen in the cloud computing space over the next year.
1) Application-centric cloud platforms: This is something I wrote about earlier in the year and truly believe is necessary for adoption in the PaaS segment to continue to grow. In many PaaS offerings today, things like servers and application containers are the primary resources that users configure and provision into a cloud. In reality, these resources are many times just a means to an end, which is the hosting of applications and services. A higher level of value would be realized if users could define an application along with it characteristics and dependencies and then have a PaaS solution provision the necessary infrastructure under the covers based on the application profile. In this way, platforms are truly rendered as a service.






