At Under the Radar we’ve been asking our startups to give us more insights into their company than just their technology innovations.  Chad Arimura, the CEO and co-founder of Iron.io, uses humor to explain how his company is more than just simplifying cloud computing.  Read on to hear about the inside culture at Iron.io.

Definitely IronMan. We’re creating powerful hosted services to help developers fight the crime of dealing with infrastructure when doing big things with big data. Plus we can fly and crack witty jokes.

We are making huge amounts of computing complexity simple to even the smallest teams. Our customers are doing things in such quick timeframes with such shortened cycles it would have been almost impossible to imagine this just a few years ago. At this pace, what’s possible in 5 years? 10 years?

Robert Downey Jr. from our answer to the first question… of course.

Have passion. Have fun. And don’t expect your first idea to be where you end up.

Platforms such as Heroku and AppFog are paving the way towards a new computing paradigm  and developer brands such as GitHub have made the lives of developers better by providing great services that are fun to use.

It’s hard not to give props to our investors who have been successful founders as well. Steve Anderson from Baseline stands out in that he founded his fund against the odds and has continued to produce hit after hit while maintaining a real humility and dedication to working with us to make us successful.

Hackernews but not as much anymore. Facebook and Twitter for about 2 minutes. And that’s about it. Any important news that I need to know will come from my friends through those channels. The rest is noise.

Zadara Storage is presenting at Under the Radar to show how they are changing the way storage is being done with cloud flexibility and economics.  They also have a very interesting team culture that Mark Spowart, co-founder and CEO, mentions in a quick interview.

1.    If your company was a movie, which one would it be and why?

The Matrix – a passionate, close-knit team delivers the world from IT bondage

2.    If you could give a TED Talk, what would it be about?

How in the age of the Cloud it is 10X easier to start a new company, which means unleashing a torrent of new innovation. By the end of this year, 20% of all companies will have no IT whatsoever.

3.    What Hollywood star would play your CEO?

Tom Hanks – Calm, level headed. Think Jim Lovell getting Apollo 13 back on the ground. Also, equally at ease in serious and funny roles.

4.    What one piece of advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?

Be ready for the challenge of your life. You move from Sales to Marketing to Engineering all within 3 emails. There is no room for anyone that thinks they need a defined role. yet it’s the most rewarding when you start with a few solid folks, create a market and ultimately make it a business you want to continue to work with. Getting it sold isn’t bad either.

5.    Which other internet startup do you respect the most?

Amazon – $1B of revenue in a category that didn’t exist in 2009….

6.    Who’s the most impressive founder you’ve ever met and why?

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider – he has changed (and continues to change) the entire world wide web, with a team of only about 100 people.

7.    What’s the first website you check out every day?

LinkedIn. See what the folks are doing and how we can make their day.

8.    What’s your company’s theme song?

“We’re Off To See The Wizard.” The stuff we make possible in the Cloud is so advanced it feels magical – and makes traditional IT seem black and white, like Kansas in the Wizard of Oz.

9.    Whose Twitter feed inevitably makes you laugh?

I follow a few, but Steve Duplessie is usually over the top.

10.  What’s been your favorite moment since starting your company?

That first customer email that said, “wow!”

Come and see Mark and other present at Under the Radar next week.  As a special thank you to our blog readers, enter promo code: “utrblog” when registering to receive $100 off your ticket!

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Is OpenStack all that?  We think so.  So much that we invited Piston Cloud Computing to present at our Under the Radar Conference on April 26th. Piston gives businesses a complete, end-to-end solution for building a secure and private OpenStack compute and storage cloud.  Before you watch them pitch, learn a few things about their unique company culture. Gretchen Curtis, Chief Strategy Officer, answers a few questions on what makes Piston Cloud a great company.

Chris Weitz, Deloitte Director of Technology Strategy and Architecture, is no stranger to technology innovation.  He has over 25 years experience advising global software vendors, hardware companies, service providers, enterprises, and government agencies on disruptive computing solutions.

He is currently focused on all things cloud, claiming it as a major game changer.  In a way, it is disruptive to computing in a way much like the AK-47 changed the military balance across the world . Read on to find out how.

Is Cloud Computing Changing the Balance of Power?

Sophisticated computing isn’t just for large enterprises anymore. “All of a sudden computing is for rent,” said Weitz. “Before you had
to buy and run it by yourself.  Now you can just pay for what you use.”    Cloud computing is part of a “mega-trend” in which business, political, and social power is moving from large institutions to smaller, more agile organizations.

This means that garage start-ups can try out their technologies on a shorter innovation cycle without heavy infrastructure investments.
“The cloud is like the AK-47 – a cheap, effective weapon that is widely available to any small group, which allows them to compete against the world’s most sophisticated organizations on an equal or better footing.  Computing is now available at low costs  at a mass scale,” he said. “With its ability to improve agility and reduce the need for capital expenditures, it’s becoming a competitive differentiator
against the ‘old guard’ tech companies.”

What are the challenges the ‘Old Guard’ Face in Cloud Adoption?

New companies frequently start with a cloud computing model and never look back.  For established tech companies, services providers, and enterprises, however, switching to cloud computing is a big change, and challenge.   “ It becomes a business risk calculation for older companies,” said Weitz. “They have to think through what level of risk they are willing to take to change their business model.”

Transitioning established services to achieving new efficiencies and flexibility with cloud is complex in itself.   Key risk areas also include new issues with data privacy, security, and resiliency, with different risk exposures and tolerances in each industry.  There is also trust issues when it comes to the public versus private cloud.  “You must trust that the vendor‘s security is better than your own.”

Where Does the Cloud Offer the Biggest Potential for Disruption?
“The computing pie is being chopped up by cloud vendors,” Weitz said. He mentioned that servers, storage and networking are all at an
inflexion point, especially as more and more data transfer happens over mobile devices.  “We are gravitating away from corporate data
centers to smart phones.”

Is OpenStack All That?
“OpenStack has potential but it’s still early, like Linux was five to ten  years ago.”  Weitz explained that it might be some time before it
achieves “enterprise class” and has the stability that many large enterprises require.  “If you are a large financial firm you cannot
take the risk of a server failing for a day,” he said.

However Weitz does think that OpenStack can create major opportunities especially in how it affects hardware.  “Companies won’t have to be locked into a specific hardware player and thus can pick from multiple (sometimes cheaper) vendors,” he said. “The market has been over served. Not everyone needs the fancy gold plated options, but rather one that is good enough.”  Thus CIOs are being incented to move away from high-cost best of breed component products, and toward cloud services whose “parts” are unknown and undifferentiated.

If you want to meet Chris Weitz and learn more about what he’s working on he’ll be at our Under the Radar Conference along with other IT
executives on April 26 in Mountain View, Ca.
About Chris Weitz: Chris Weitz is Director of Technology Strategy and Architecture at Deloitte Consulting LLP, and also serves as the global leader in Deloitte’s Cloud Computing practice. He works with clients to develop new computing solutions using leading processes and technology.

According to Gartner Group, the IaaS market is expected to more than double by 2014 hitting $10.5 billion.  As webscale companies embrace the flexibility and cost savings that the cloud provides, traditional businesses watch closely, wondering how they can capitalize on the benefits while integrating with their existing architecture.  It’s not about moving to the cloud anymore, but how.

With OpenStack pulling together a global community of developers, the software behind infrastructure clouds is becoming more of a shared commodity with quick adoption potential.  It has many hardware backers, including Citrix, HP, Dell, and possibly IBM. Critics of OpenStack, however, still question its quality and security levels.

What should IT directors consider in choosing the right solutions for their business? Why does OpenStack matter and is it for everyone?  How will new technologies address security issues?

Come to Under the Radar to hear from emerging companies that are tackling some of these questions.  Our favorite IaaS kissers are Piston Cloud Computing, Nodejitsu, Cloudscaling, Zadara Storage, and PuppetLabs.

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When it comes to cloud computing, ‘Private’ versus ‘Public’ is ongoing debate as companies scale.  Many companies benefit from having a hybrid model; utilizing both private and public clouds like AWS. This allows  their cloud infrastructure to flex with spikes and dips in customer usage. For example, e-commerce sites need extra bandwidth around the holiday season. However, once some companies reach a certain size, moving more data to the private cloud may optimize performance.  Zynga is making the move to private-in fact 80% of its game traffic is now on their own private, “zCloud” as reported in their recent earnings call. (This is opposite of last year when 80% of operations were in AWS.)

Why Zynga is Moving to Private:

1.  Efficiency: zCloud is about 3 times more efficient  than AWS.  At the Cloud Connect Conference, Zynga said that it could eliminate one in three servers since moving its operations from AWS to its own private cloud.  It can also have 1,000 servers up and running in 24 hours.

2.  Tailored: According to a Venture Beat article, Zynga tailored zCloud design and eliminated every bottleneck in server components such as microprocessors, storage, and memory.

3. Intelligence: Because they own the infrastructure, Zynga has inside information on how they servers work and the computing experience that players have-allowing them to measure and adapt accordingly.  According to Tech Crunch, Zynga has created custom monitoring and management tools.

The cost question is still out there…but a private cloud can provide enormous savings if performance increases and usage consistently grows.  Zynga still has a relationship with AWS for flexibility although that may change as zCloud expands.  In fact, some have asked if zCloud could ever become a mini AWS in itself.

The open source software Hadoop is creating a lot of buzz in the big data world.  It’s commonly known as the MapReduce algorithm on which Google built its empire.  Forrester Research calls it, “The Open Source Heart Of Big Data.”

However, as the buzz builds the term is thrown around recklessly, leaving many confused as to how it works and where it is used.  Derrick Harris of GigaOm authored an article explaining Hadoop terminology and top uses.

Derrick writes, “Hadoop is an Apache Software Foundation project consisting of two primary subprojects — Hadoop MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System. MapReduce is the parallel-processing engine that allows Hadoop to churn through large data sets in relatively short order. HDFS is the distributed file system that lets Hadoop scale across commodity servers and, importantly, store data on the compute nodes in order to boost performance (and potentially save money). “

Three Ways Hadoop is Used

Distribution: Distribution refers to the way in which large data sets are moved between Hadoop clusters and other environments. Companies like Cloudera and the new HortonWorks play in this space.

Management Software: These Hadoop products act as an operating system and help you trouble shoot.  There aren’t many unique vendors in this space. Derrick writes, “Such products are usually sold or offered by companies peddling Hadoop distributions because even when commercially packaged, Hadoop is still a complex architecture…”

Application software: Application software resides on top of Hadoop distribution and improves processing and/or performs analytics.   Derrick mentions Karmasphere Analyst, Hadapt,  and HStreaming. Jeff Kelley from Services Angle also calls out a few others “Hadoop applications of the future” such as Datameer, Tresata and Tidemark.

To learn more about how Hadoop is used, read Derrick’s full article in GigaOm.  To discover more emerging Hadoop companies transforming the world of big data, come to our Under the Radar Conference on April 25-26 in Mountain View, CA.

Big data.  It’s all Silicon Valley is talking about.  And it’s all our Under the Radar judges seem to care about.  Of course the term ‘big data’ has become about as nebulous as the word ‘cloud.’  A few months ago we authored a post called , What the f*ck is Big Data? highlighting all the ways it’s used from monitoring to processing to storage to analysis.  In talking to CIOs and VPs of Technology at Visa, Citigroup, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Levi’s and WebMD, two things popped to the top of the list as major priorities:

#1 Processing big data (in terms of database scalability). Startups like MemSQL, ScaleArc, NimbusDB all play in this space to improve performance.

#2 Analyzing big data. Companies like Datasift, Chart.io, and Metamarkets are all working toward gathering and analyzing internal and external data sets.

Do you have a technology solution that tackles big data?  Our judges are interested in you!  Apply to present at our Under the Radar conference!

Cloud computing provider and our Under the Radar alum, Joyent just secured $85 million in their Series D round!  According to a TechCrunch article, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent.

With more and more money being poured into cloud software and services, investors are betting that corporations will abandon their back room servers and trust more of their data in the cloud.

All Chips In?

However, not every company is transitioning their data over as fast as Joyent’s customers.  According to Michael Driscoll, CEO of predictive data analysis start-up MetaMarkets, “There is still a cultural obstacle with cloud.  Although companies trust their private data with large banks or physical boxes in their back room, some are still hesitant to move it into the cloud.”

What makes enterprises finally place a bet on the cloud?  How will they resolve data privacy concerns? What other emerging cloud startups will provide such valuable benefits that keeping data in the “back room boxes” is no longer an option?

Although many companies are moving their services over to the cloud (Symantec just bought Live Office in efforts to bolster cloud offering in email archiving), others warn that the ‘cloud’ isn’t all castles in the sky.

Venture Beat wrote an article reminding us of the downside of cloud computing.  In the article they mention 4 reasons for not drinking cloud flavored kool-aid:
1. Loss of control: When something goes wrong you cannot just log into your own servers.  “You are at the mercy of someone else,” states the article.
2. Prioritization is thwarted: The cloud levels the playing field so the CEO cannot get special requests done any faster than someone lower down the food chain.  There is no hierarchy in the cloud.
3. Limited customization: According to Venture Beat, current offerings are mostly a one size fits all solution.
4. You still need an IT staff: Moving to the cloud doesn’t always mean you can get rid of all of your staff.  You still need them to support the new infrastructure.

The question isn’t will the cloud go away, but rather how will it change to address these concerns?  As we are still in the beginning of a new era, will customization and prioritization features be added? Who will be the top players to do so?

With the word “cloud’ being used to describe an increasingly large assortment of companies and services, many often wonder if the term isn’t as challenging to define as a fluffy image in the sky.

Venture Beat interviewed Joyent CTO and founder, Jason Hoffman to provide more clarity on the term.  Joyent is a global cloud computing software and service provider that was founded in 2004.

In the video interview, Hoffman described two types of clouds

1. The enterprise cloud that utilizes compute and memory space as a commodity and network bandwidth as a utility

2. The consumer cloud, which he described pretty much as “The internet”

However, the two clouds are intricately connected.  For example, as enterprises use memory to improve latency, consumers benefit from faster service times.  And as consumers use their personal devices for work applications, enterprises will have to ensure their cloud infrastructure can support the shift in doing business.  What will be the new technologies that merge the clouds together? And will we see a whole term new arise as the ‘cloud’ is starting to mean almost everything?

Joyent from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

We’re always looking for predictions, and when we find good ones, we like to share.  Below are the  five cloud predictions for 2012 of John Engates, CTO of Rackspace.  He was interviewed by Ken Hess of ZDNet and you can read the entire post HERE.

Five Cloud Predictions for 2012

1. The Future is Mobile
The iPhone and iPad are the first true cloud devices.  You basically can’t do anything but play Angry Birds on these devices without the Cloud.  Mobile devices will grow with the Cloud and vice versa.

2. The Clouds Will Open
Companies will recognize the need for more flexibility and interoperability in the Cloud.

3. No One Size Fits All  -(Hybrid model grows in popularity)
Companies will realize the benefits of “mixing and matching” cloud solutions and look at implementing a combination of dedicated and cloud (hybrid), public and private cloud, on-premise and off-premise solutions.

4. Cloud Doesn’t Have to be DIY  - (Bigger role of managed cloud services)
Managing Cloud solutions can be complex and time intensive, especially for organizations with limited resources.  Managed Cloud services will take on a bigger role in 2012.

5. SaaS Options Fill Out
The “Dinosaurs” are dying, as big companies realize they need the Cloud to survive.  Large SaaS companies will start to build out their Cloud presence.  We’re starting to see it with Oracle’s recent purchase of RightNow Technologies and more acquisitions like this are likely to follow.

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“The Cloud is for everyone but not everything.”  Speakers at CloudBeat 2011 stressed that not everyone will use the cloud in the same way and choice and flexibility were paramount.

Although some companies operate completely in the cloud, many are still shifting between data centers and the cloud.  And those that use the cloud for data management have varied needs throughout the year.  Adam Selipsy, VP of Marketing, Sales, and Product Management and Support at Amazon Web Services (AWS) said, “AWS isn’t one size fits all.  We are flexible as a platform.  We also know that not everyone will move *everything *over to the cloud so we build a lot of hybrid models.”

Retailers especially need flexibility when it comes to hosting.  Said Tomas Kelly, Enterprise Architect for Cloud Services at BestBuy, “May is not November!   Before the cloud we had to build the entire infrastructure to meet black Friday even though it was one day a year!”  In addition it was difficult to maintain and support as they grew and thus they eventually brought their infrastructure into the cloud so that they could flex between busy and slow shopping times.

Not only do many companies move between their own data centers and the cloud, they also want to take advantage of both public and private clouds for different applications.  Rick Schultz, VP of Technology Product Marketing at Oracle said, “It’s crucial for our customers to be able to move between on-premise and the public cloud.”  Oracle will be launching its own public cloud next Spring.  We wonder if Larry Ellison is eating his past words, “The cloud is water vapor.”

It’s more that that—it’s a flexible object that shape changes as we need it to.

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The term ‘cloud’ has become so commonplace, it’s about to become obsolete.  While businesses used to have to invest in expensive hardware to grow, scaling today has become affordable and seamless.  Want to add 10,000 more users to your contact management system?  Just use a cloud-based service provider like Salesforce.com and you’re done.  You no longer have to think about the logistics, you just trust in the power of the cloud.

The elusive ‘cloud’ has taken away the hassle of buying expensive equipment, hiring IT managers, and dealing with infrastructure failures.  It’s no longer your problem.  You can leave those details to the high level cloud gurus.

While information used to be expensive and hard to come by, today it’s a wide open playing field with resources for everyone.  Access is everywhere.  As written in a recent VentureBeat post, “To take one relatively minor example, Stitch Labs’ inventory management system gives small-time Etsy sellers the ability to get sales-channel reports and customer insights that you used to only get if you were willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an enterprise resource management system.” Examples like this are everywhere.  DropBox, Evernote, Salesforce, Flickr, Mint, Eventbrite, Square, etc.  The more data you need stored, the more options become available to you.

So, here’s where the “cloud will become obsolete” statement comes in.  Just like we don’t send each other “Internet emails,” we soon won’t be buying “cloud services.”  We’ll just be buying services.  The cloud is everywhere.  (I’ll avoid using some cheesy metaphor about the cloud since I know we’re all sick of them by now.)  To read more about this theme, check out Dylan Tweney’s recent Venture Beat article HERE.

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Cloud based systems management startup, ScaleXtreme, has announced the launch of their early access program! Since presenting on the Under The Radar stage in April, and winning BOTH the judge’s and audience choice awards, many of you looking for serious infrastructure solutions have been waiting to crack open the ScaleXtreme offering… Now’s your chance!

According to their blog, the early access provides:

- Installs in just a few minutes, no consultants required – unlike the older generation of products from the “big 4″ vendors like BMC, IBM, CA, or HP, our products can install in minutes and we even have auto-installers for Amazon EC2, Rackspace. You can get 100′s of machines installed in under 5 minutes. Unlike other heavy-duty enterprise software companies that make tons of money off of “consulting services”, our products are for IT operations and admins to use and deploy themselves. It is that simple.

- Full support for Linux and Windows – yes, our Windows support is real and not in “beta”. We give you equal support for both operating environments and in many cases you can even pull off operations between both systems through the same interface.

Click here to read GigaOm‘s piece on ScaleXtreme‘s launch or here to read an interview with CEO Nand Mulchandani from CloudTimes.org. You can also watch Nand’s winning Under the Radar presentation and slide deck here.

Congrats to Nand and the team and we expect to hear more great things in the coming months and years!

At Dealmaker Media, we were over the top when we first met Daniel Saks and Nicolas Desmarais from AppDirect. With the explosion of business and cloud apps crowding the internet, it only made sense that someone out there would make it easy to find and pay for applications that make it easier to get up and running with your business. With massive acquisition potential and a growing following after a huge presence at Under The Radar, AppDirect has announced a $3.25M round led by iNovia Capital. As a local business, with roots in Canada, we are huge fans of AppDirect and know you will be too.

Read more

Chirag Mehta, cloud computing blogger and software vetaran, has begun a blog series based on Under The Radar startups and we’re happy to feature his cloud-focused blog posts on our blog. His first installment is about NimbusDB, who walked away from UTR as the audience favorite in the scalability category! Their personalized M&Ms may have had a little to do with being the audience favorite, but we guess it had more to do with their technology.  NimbusDB delivers the key requirements for cloud-style environments, including dynamically adding or deleting nodes from a live system, unlike existing SQL databases. Watch NimbusDB CEO, Barry Morris, present at Under The Radar here.  Stay tuned for more of Chirag Mehta’s blog series, and check out Part 1: NimbusDB here.

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Startups typically engage in some pretty cool marketing tactics. Often founded by young entrepreneurs who were raised with computers in their cribs, most of their marketing efforts are web-based with clever graphics. Of course, we all love when the efforts are of the chocolate kind like the lime-green NimbusDB M&Ms at Under The Radar!

Sometimes a company  does something completely unexpected… UTR alum, HipChat, and founder, Pete Curley have wheeled and dealed their way onto a highway 101 billboard! What better way to reach thousands of technologists at once than to put a billboard just steps from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, and all the money on Sand Hill Road.

Pete Curley is quick to note in the following peHub article, that he is not, however, looking for funding, but he loves stopping by VC offices during lunch. There must be some great lunch spreads on Sand Hill! Check out Alastair Goldfisher’s peHUB article here.

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Trying to wrap your head around cloud computing can be a hard feat to accomplish. First off, it’s a nebulous term to begin with (does it just mean a new business model?), and to boot – the cloud computing ecosystem is growing and reshaping itself daily… New SaaS, PaaS, Virtualization and Infrastructure startups come on the scene, seasoned technology giants roll out cloud offerings, and more and more people stamp the word “cloud” on their offering like that did with the term “Web 2.0″ a few years ago…

Last year, we (Under the Radar) set out to create a Cloud Computing Ecosystem map to try to organize and understand all of the players – in all levels of the stack.

This year (thank the cloudy heavens!) a group of cloud computing experts launched CLOUDBOOK - and online directory of all things cloud, as well as a home for thought leadership and information sharing.

Their search-able directories cover cloud products and services, research clouds, government clouds and cloud groups (so you can find like-minded folk). If you have a company or service that should be listed, you can add yourself to the CloudBook directory here.

As for the community of experts they’re gathering, it looks pretty impressive. CloudBook rolls up all of their contributors’ blogs into one of the most comprehensive cloud news streams I’ve seen. Want to be a contributor? Just sign up.

Check them out.

Wrapping your head around “The Cloud” can be baffling enough in an online world of definintion debates… So leading up to our Under the Radar conference, we’ve gathered the best bloggers and journalists who’ve distilled this foggy space down to a well-defined, understandable sector. In no particular order, here’s my list of the Cream of the Crop who got me up to speed:

(let us know who your go to guy is)

Independent Bloggers:
Rough Type, Nicholas Carr – http://www.roughtype.com/
Thinking Out Cloud, Geva Perry – http://gevaperry.typepad.com/main/
Cloud Computing, Chirag Mehta – http://cloudcomputing.blogspot.com/
IT Management and Cloud, John M Willis – http://www.johnmwillis.com/
Cloud Ave. – http://www.cloudave.com
Virtualization.com, – http://virtualization.com/
All Things Distributed, Werner Vogels – http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/
SandHill.com, MR Rangaswami – http://www.sandhill.com/news/news_topic_more.php?topicId=77
Craig Balding – http://cloudsecurity.org/
Cloudpundit, Lydia Leong – http://cloudpundit.com

Information Week:
Plug into the CloudJohn Foley – http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/
Start-up City – http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/startup_city/index.html?subSection=Startup_City
Virtualization – http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/virtualization/index.html?subSection=Virtualization

CNet:
Wisdom of the clouds, James Urquhart – http://news.cnet.com/wisdom-of-clouds/
Outside the Lines, Dan Farber – http://news.cnet.com/otl/
** CIO Sessions (Video Interviews) http://video.zdnet.com/CIOSessions/

ZDnet:
Between the Lines, Larry Dignan, Sam Diaz, Tom Steinert-Threlkeld – http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/

GigaOm:
Infrastructure – http://gigaom.com/category/infrastructure/

ComputerWorld:
Mark Everett Hall – http://blogs.computerworld.com/hall

Network World:
Jon Brodkin – http://www.networkworld.com/Home/jbrodkin.html
John Fontana – http://www.networkworld.com/Home/jfontana.html

CIO:
Jarina D’Auria – http://www.cio.com/author/156200/Jarina+D%27Auria
Michael Bullock, Contributor – http://advice.cio.com/user/michael_bullock

InfoWorld:
Cloud Computing, William Hurley – http://weblog.infoworld.com/whurley/

Sys Con:
Cloud Computing Journal, Jeremy Geelan – http://jeremygeelan.sys-con.com/
Cloud Computing Journal, Alan Williamson – http://alanwilliamson.sys-con.com/

“Are companies getting funded?” The answer still appears to be yes. As long as the market opportunity is solid, the company has an “A” team (or is close to achieving that), and they’re solving real pains for known, addressable customers, the funding still seems to be flowing. Here are a handful of companies in the space that have received funding in 2008 and already in 2009.

So while you are ramping up early customers, keeping your burn rate low, and learning as much as possible from your early customers, (and if it makes sense to take venture capital which is a whole separate post), then you probably want to keep pitching to prospective investors. It might take a little while longer but if you have the right ingredients there is funding out there.

We will be able to announce more financing events soon from some new and exciting companies so stay tuned! Also, if you know of other companies getting funded, leave us a comment below or email us at <utr at dealmakermedia dot com>.

This April 24, 2009, we will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. in one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big media customers who are buying cloud services to let you see for yourself what the cloud REALLY MEANS…

What is Cloud Computing?

We have a very simple but broad definition of cloud computing:

Applications, services, platforms, or infrastructure that are highly abstracted or virtualized, web service enabled, able to be automatically provisioned, and generally charged on a pay-as-you-go model.

As the market evolves, we predict that there will be a number of clouds from a variety of vendors with a range of performance characteristics. They will vary by location, security, pricing models, supported “stacks”, degree of regulatory compliance, location, service level agreements, and many other dimensions.

Benefits of cloud computing

The key benefits of cloud computing are that it allows organizations to:

• shift up-front capital expenditures to ongoing operational costs which can allow businesses to provision more quickly or scale faster than if they had to deploy capital;
• provision infrastructure more quickly than by their traditional infrastructure purchasing and provisioning model;
• dynamically match computing capacity to demand more accurately, which means less wasted resources in low-traffic times, and less downtime during high-traffic times;
• test ideas with a lower threshold by deploying test environments in the cloud and then shutting them down when not in use;
• scale up to computing capacities that would have been impossible to achieve in any other way cost-effectively;
• decrease the time-to-value of new IT projects because of the faster provisioning and lower costs.

In short, it allows organizations to do more, faster, with less resources. In some cases, it allows organizations to do things they could never have dreamed of doing before. 

Current Issues with Cloud Computing

It is still early days for this next generation of computing. There are many issues to work through including: security; performance; vendor lock-in; cloud interoperability;  stack selectivity (only certain clouds will support certain technology stacks); cross-cloud portability, administration, and management; regulatory compliance (current clouds do not comply with many regulatory frameworks such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, data protection regulation or others), and even common metering and billing models.

We believe that this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to identify and fill those gaps by picking components of the stack and bringing them forward into this new era and we’re hand-picking the best ones to tell their story on April 24!

Early Bird Tickets are going fast. Register to be the first to meet and do deals with these innovators.

John Foley, InformationWeek editor and mastermind behind their “Plus into the Cloud” network of blogs and articles, today writes:

“…The past few days have brought new evidence that cloud computing can be used for more than lightweight and newly built Web applications. IBM, SAP, and Microsoft have just revealed efforts to use the cloud to move and manage the kinds of big workloads that are common in corporate data centers.”


So what’s happening that’s catching the eye’s, trust and dollars of enterprise companies?

- The cloud can be used for the types of data workloads that IT departments have been managing internally for years.

- On-demand computing capacity.

- Lowering data center energy consumption.

- The cloud allows enterprises with massive amounts of data to move and manage it without bogging down corporate data centers.

“Large companies are in the early stages of cloud computing, and IT pros are still evaluating the security, governance, and data-availability implications of the cloud model. Yet, as the examples are beginning to show, cloud computing holds promise for more than startups, SMBs, and Web 2.0″ companies.

Read John’s post here.

Under the Radar Conference

John is one of the judges for the upcoming Under the Radar conference in Mountian View, CA which will feature a full day of startups hitting the stage to display how they fit into the ecosystem and how companies – above and beyond “startups, SMBs, and Web 2.0 comepanies” – can benefit from their offerings.

Register for an Early Bird ticket now!
Check out the line up of “under the radar” startups here.

With an outage problem early this morning, “many” Gmail account holders found themselves Twittering their woes when their email was down at 4am. (ironic to Twitter about downtime, don’t ya think!?! LOLZ)

As Google tries to convince enterprises to buy in to the promise of cloud computing (ie: hosting apps in the cloud rather than in a company’s own basement sever room), is some Gmail downtime cause for alarm? Or is a dose of reality that when your info is in the “Cloud” some glitches are inevidable – just as they are when info is hosted on your own computer(s).

Is a 100% SLA realistic? I think not. Yet, as enterprises start looking more seriously at the promises of cloud computing, will Google’s lapse in service today stall progress?

On April 24 we’ll bring 32 could computing startups from around the globe to the Silicon Valley to tout their technology and explain how they fit into the world of cloud computing. It’ll be one heck of a showcase. Check out more info about UNDER THE RADAR: CLOUD here (Early Bird tix are still available!)