The "Summer of Cloud Computing" Begins...

On June 6-9, when the doors to Cloud Expo New York open at the Jacob Javits Center, IT infrastructure and operations professionals from around the world will be able to see with their own eyes that the "Summer of Cloud Computing" has well and truly begun.

With company participation from every level of the cloud computing ecosystem and a non-stop, 4-day technical program, Cloud Expo New York features expert speakers from every top Cloud player, including Abiquo, Amazon, Amplidata, AppZero, Aprimo, AT&T, Backupify, CA Technologies, Capgemini, Cbeyond, CiRBA, Cisco, City of Portland, CloudCamp.org, Cloud.com, Cloud9, CloudSwitch, CodeFutures, Dell, Dell Boomi, Desktone, Eucalyptus Systems, FastIgnite, Fiorano, Full360, Fusion-io, Global Digital Forensics, GoGrid, Google, HP, HyTrust, IBM, iGATE Patni, Impetus, Interactive Intelligence, Interxion, KPMG, KuppingerCole, Layered Technologies, Layer7, LogLogic, McAfee, Microsoft, MIT, Monster.com, Mycroft, National Reconnaissance Office, NetDialog, The New York Times, NJVC, NYSERDA, OpSource, Oracle, OutSystems, OxygenCloud, Parabon, PayPal, PerspecSys, Ping Identity, Pitney Bowes, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Quest Software, Racemi, Rackspace, Red Hat, RightScale, Rise Partners, Riverbed Technology, Robust Cloud, Roundarch, Servoy, SnapAppointments, Spoon, Stoneware, Sybase, Telx, 1010data, Terremark, Trend Micro, UShareSoft, Virtela, VMware, Voxel, WidePoint, Xiotech, Yahoo!, Zapthink, Zetta and Zeus Technology.

On the Expo Floor, with over 100 booths, leading technology solutions providers will be showcasing a welter of technologies aimed at making cloud computing reliable, stable and manageable for customers large and small.

The quality of the speakers is best evidenced by the fact that they include:

• Co-Founder and CTO of Dell Boomi - Rick Nucci
• President of Dell Services - Steve Schuckenbrock
• CEO of Abiquo - Pete Malcolm
• CEO & Co-Founder at RightScale - Michael Crandell
• Sr. VP of the Application Platform Division at VMware - Rod Johnson
• CTO of Rackspace - John Engates
• CEO of Backupify - Rob May
• CEO & Founder of GoGrid - John Keagy
• CTO of Worldwide Services at Microsoft - Norm Judah
• Group VP of Software Cloud Strategy for Oracle Fusion Applications - Chris Leone
• VP of Global Cloud Computing at Yahoo! - Todd Papaioannou
• Technology Evangelist at Amazon - Jinesh Varia
• Developer Advocate at Google - Chris Schalk
• Sr. Software Engineer at IBM - Doug Tidwell
• Director, Cloud Global Practice at HP Enterprise Business - Marc Wilkinson
• CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office - Jill T. Singer
• CTO at PayPal - Scott Guilfoyle
• CTO & Co-Founder of Eucalyptus Systems - Rich Wolski
• Sr. Director of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat - Tobias Kunze
• Co-Founder & CEO at OpSource - Treb Ryan
• VP, Cloud Services at Terremark - Bill Lowry
• CEO of FastIgnite - Simeon Simeonov
• CTO & Co-founder of UShareSoft - James Weir
• Advisor Lean IT & Cloud Computing at CA Technologies - Gregor Petri
• Distinguished System Engineer at Cisco - Jim French
• Sr. Mgr. of SaaS Products & Cloud Solutions at HP - Neil Ashizawa
• CTO McAfee Content & Cloud at McAfee - Scott Chasi
• Business Development Director at Oracle - Arturo Pereyra
• Co-Founder of CloudCamp - Dave Nielsen
• Director at KPMG - Bhargav Shah
• Sr. VP of CRM at Oracle - Anthony Lye
• CTO & Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies - K. Scott Morrison
• Partner Engineering Consultant at Spoon - Lee Murphy
• CTO of Sybase - Irfan Khan
• CTO of Vordel - Mark O'Neill
• CEO of AppZero - Greg O'Connor
• Founder & CEO of Oxygen Cloud - Peter Chang
• VP of Cloud Architecture & Services at Virtela - Ron Haigh
• Co-Founder & CEO of Fusion-io - David Flynn
• Co-Founder of The Rackspace Cloud - Rackspace
  
• President at Layered Technologies - Brad Hokamp
• SVP of Facilities Engineering at Terremark - Ben Stewart
• Founder/CTO of PerspecSys - Terry Woloszyn
• CISO for the City of Portland - Logan Kleier
• Co-Founder & CTO of Ajax.org - Rik Arends
• Engineering Fellow with NJVC - Kevin Jackson
• Founder & CEO, Parabon Computation - Steve Armentrout
• Managing Partner at ZapThink - Jason Bloomberg
• Sr. Sales Engineer at Eucalyptus Systems - Paul Weiss
• CEO of Servoy - Jan Aleman
• VP of Product Marketing at Oracle - Rex Wang
• Global Director for Global Application Outsourcing at Capgemini - Mark Skilton
• CTO at Ping Identity - Patrick Harding
• Corporate Business Development at Zeus Technology - Raja Srinivasan
• Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology - Steve Riley
• Product Development Lead at Rackspace - Josh Odom
• Co-Founder, CEO & CTO at Stoneware - Rick German
• VP of Community at Cloud.com - Mark Hinkle
• Software Manager at The New York Times - Paul Robbins
• Chief Solution Architect at Desktone - Danny Allan
• Director of Advanced Technology & Products for Quest Software - Thomas Bryant
• Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers - Brian Butte
• Java EE and GlassFish Evangelist at Oracle - Arun Gupta
• President & Co-Founder of HyTrust - Eric Chiu
• CTO & SVP, Operations at OpSource - John Rowell
• Co-Founder of KuppingerCole - Tim Cole
• Product Manager in the Cloud Division at Rackspace Hosting - Megan Wohlford
• Communications Director at Interxion - Jelle Frank
• Co-Founder of 1Plug Corporation - Penelope Everall Gordon
• Founder at SnapAppointments - Cody Harris
• Co-Founder of CiRBA - Andrew Hillier
• Co-Founder of SnapAppointments - Brock Holzer
• Director of Integration Solutions for Aprimo - Amelia Ross
• Executive VP at LogLogic - Bill Roth
• VP Engineering at NetDialog - Tim Rühl
• Developer, Web Services JBoss/Red Hat - Anil Saldhana
• Vice President, Products at Zetta - Chris Schin
• CIO, Enterprise Business Partners - Pradip Sitaram
• Sr. Director of Engineering and R&D at Impetus Technologies - Vineet Tyagi
• 2011 Instructor at Cloud Computing Bootcamp - Larry Carvalho
• Business Development Manager at Ajax.org - Lieke Arends

Social Comparison Engine Meets Cloud Computing & PaaS

One can add the word "social" to any other word in the English language right now, and somewhere, sometime, a group of software developers will turn the colloquy into some kind of a website or application.

Take "social" + "comparison" for example.

In 2006, whileon maternity leave, French-born Vanina Berger (pictured) - a senior software engineer - wanted to compare unusual things such as the best place to give birth. Realizing that it was not so easy to find comparison tables about things that were not products to sell, she began wondering if perhaps what was needed was a comparison engine, a tool that allowed one to collaborate with others to maintain a matrix with a lot of interesting details, advanced criteria such as ratings, etc. In short it would be very nice to have a generic, collaborative and social tool that helps everyone to create easily comparisons...about ANYTHING.

Vanina's partner Alexis Fruhinsholz found the idea interesting and started to work on the project at the end of 2008. The result was SocialCompare.com, a site I'd not heard of until the team behind it reached out to me yesterday to ask if I'd like to use it to conduct a comparative survey of PaaS/Cloud services.

The results are below. Let me know what you think about SocialCompare.com as an application. I am certainly intrigued.

It Is Time To Help the Web Be All It Can

May 1st seemed the perfect day to just take a few moments to pause and take stock. This is going to be the only year of my life (I hope!!) involving an escape from death, and in those circumstances it is difficult to prevent oneself from wondering how best to use the gift that has been handed to me: nothing less than the remainder of my life.

So let me report on the results...

First, a brief historical preamble. Eighteen years ago - on April 30, 1993 - CERN released the source code of the world's first Web browser and editor into the public domain. It was called WorldWideWeb, all joined together just like that, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee has some screen shots of it at his CERN page.

It would be very difficult to argue anything other than that, in the eighteen subsequent years, the technological trajectory that CERN's browser heralded has resulted in tumultuous changes in business, education, government, entertainment, and society. Did it cause them? Maybe not. Did it accelerate them? Hell, yes!!

"CERN's intention in this is to further compatibility, common practices and standards in networking and computer supported collaboration," wrote CERN in its accompanying note to the release of the code (pictured above). It was a phrase that resonated with me then, and it is one that resonates with me still today. "Computer supported collaboration" - on which I published a pioneering book in 1994 edited by the late Peter Lloyd - is, in my view, the philosopher's stone of the World Wide Web. Like that imaginary substance that people in the past believed could change any other metal into gold, "eCollaboration" has been touted throughout every one of those eighteen years as the real payoff from the Web....if only companies, organizations, governments and indeed society at large could figure out how to harness it.

Email is the world's most widespread form of computer supported collaboration. Facebook is another, far more recent one - as is YouTube and eBay and Skype and of course Twitter. Yet it is my view, and has been for many years, that none of these technologies or applications or sites unleashes the true potential of co-intelligence - the shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration (and competition) of many individuals.

So how can we get from TBL's browser to a truly co-intelligent world?

That, as I reflected on May Day in my book-lined, technology-rich work studio, is the crucial and most significant question of our time. It is also a question to the exploration and answering of which I am intending to devote a significant proportion of my efforts, moving forward.

"There is a quantitative element to human affairs," as H.G. Wells once famously wrote. "Doing something does not amount to very much if we do not do enough." [my emphasis]