Cloud Marketing, IBM Does it Wrong (personal letter attached)

IBM bus signs aws reinventThe 102 year old veteran IT company seems to have taken countless steps toward the development of CloudSmart, the IT giant’s proprietary cloud that, despite its large investments, has not demonstrated any sort of progress… until now, that is. In July, IBM upped its game by announcing its acquisition of Softlayer, an open cloud platform based on both Cloudstack and OpenStack. Although it is being perceived as an enterprise grade IaaS offering, it is still an immature cloud offering. Additionally, IBM cloud marketing guys have been taking the Steve Jobs approach to marketing (against IBM), circa 1984, belittling AWS in every way possible.  While IBM benefits greatly from its trusted name, to me, this strike seems a bit old and not relevant anymore, making me question where my trust actually lies.
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AWS re:Invent 2013 Top Best of Show

Do you have an amazing application or service on the verge of discovery?
AWS best of show
Be one of this year’s Best of Show at AWS re:Invent 2013!
`I am OnDemand` and `Business Disrupted`, two of the most celebrated blogs in the cloud industry today, will be nominating the most innovative and skillful developers, technical leaders, startups and established companies at the event. The 10 Best of Show will then have the honor of being featured in both of the blogs, reaping the countless benefits of their far reaching community channels.
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5 Recommended AWS re:Invent Breakout Sessions for Scalability and Optimization

reinvent logoI’m OnDemand is heading to Las Vegas for Amazon’s official cloud show – AWS re:Invent. In my honest opinion, the show is the most significant conference in the cloud and IT industries, and includes a number of fantastic educational sessions.  To navigate the sessions, Amazon has provided conference attendees with a great tool that helps them sort through more than 286 sessions (up from 150 last year).
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Dome9 Cloud Street View for AWS Security: The Exponential Cloud Growth Visualization

Dome9 Cloud ClarityConfidence is key when it comes to managing large IT systems. The tricky part is when a CIO tries to generate the trust and confidence of a company’s IT environment. Complete transparency is the answer. As you may recall, I’ve written about the need for transparency concerning Newvem’s services in the past. As the cloud industry market matures, the AWS cloud continues to grow at ground-breaking speeds, in addition to the usual individual cloud deployment. In either respect, transparency becomes an issue.
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#devopsdays TLV and TDD = Test Driven Dev

devopsdays logoLast two days were extremely interesting at the Devops Days Conference in Tel Aviv. It was impressive to see the amount of professionals that attend and the amazing energies that supported a great open space sessions and networking. The successful conference was initiated by the great Gigaspaces team led by the honorable (and a very good friend) Mr. Nati Shalom, CTO at Gigaspaces. You can also check these recorded sessions.
Following is just a quick taste of a great presentation done by @aviranm discussing Continuous Delivery at @wix

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Datapipe Acquires Newvem: My Take

newvem we analyze you optimize I began my journey in the world of cloud computing roughly about 9 years ago, leading cloud and SaaS products and development teams. Two years ago, as part of my position as Cloud Evangelist for Clicksoftware, I had the pleasure of meeting two progressive entrepreneurs, Zev Laderman and Ilan Naslavsky.  At that time, they had just begun developing cutting edge technology that supported AWS cloud users, optimizing usage and utilization. They had asked me to test this innovation, which was in its early alpha stage. So, being the optimistic and supportive early cloud adopter that I am, I immediately gave them the AWS keys (back then, you had only one option – the full right keys). Ilan, who came up with the idea, went over the AWS account Newvem’s analysis with me.  During his explanation, we came across a single Windows SQL EC2 instance that sat underutilized in the region of Japan.  Apparently, it had been running for nearly 5 months, resulting in approximately $6000 worth of Amazon operating costs. Eventually I managed to save around 40% of the AWS bill (tens of thousands of dollars).
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The Purely Public Cloud Deployment: The Perceived Risk

In this post series, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment”.
Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES. 
The Pure Public Cloud
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Ravello Systems: The MVNO of Cloud

Ravello Systems LogoThe cloud market is young, despite AWS’ growth and current worth of a few billion dollars. Most of the enterprise’s IT resources are still hosted on the organizational premise of using VMware hypervisor. The enterprise hybrid cloud challenge is hidden in the cloud utility model’s basic notion of hardware as software, whereas legacy application performance and usages are still based on physical resources capabilities. This difference is the greatest factor when it comes to discussing the evolution pace of the `enterprise grade cloud`. The CIO today is required to show cloud adoption and IT operations’ efficiency. This is consequentially triggering new startups to evolve in efforts to facilitate IT resources to close this existing gap. What follows is a story of such a startup that, in my opinion, has a real chance at becoming a leader in this intermediary cloud adoption phase and the hybrid cloud ultimate enabler, Ravello Systems.

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The CloudChronicle Show: VMware, Ravello and Openstack (birthday party)

cloudchronicleI recently joined forces with  Patrick Pushor of CloudChronicle.com to discuss timely news in Cloud Computing.

In this episode we discuss VMWare. Based on recent article in GigaOm, “VMware Hotseat Getting Hotter by the Minute”. We end up  discussing how the virtual machine changed its nature to become a cloud instance and how the cloud quickly takes the place of the expensive traditional VMWare layer. That takes the discussion straight to an interesting new startup –  Ravello  that already made start up financing round of $26M . Ravello allows you to encapsulate a complete application (load balancers, app servers, web servers, databases, etc.) AND it’s environment (networking, storage, etc.). The result is complete portability across clouds and between on-premise and public clouds.

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