We’ve been generating some great crowds for our summer webinar series.  As a quick recap we started this campaign in May 2010 shortly after the release of the much anticipated book – The Execs Guide to Cloud Computing.

We thought it would be beneficial to cover some of the chapters of the book through a series of webinars because there is surprisingly little information available about cloud computing from the enterprise IT executive. 

The third installment of the series will be held on July 22, 2010 and will discuss Cloud Modeling, Architecture and Design

Date: Thursday, July 22, 2010
Time: 11:00 PST/1:00 CST/2:00 EST

This next session we will discuss modeling and architecture techniques to help facilitate your cloud planning, implementation and migration.

This session will provide you with a Cloud Reference Model, a Cloud Reference Architecture, and a repeatable Cloud Modeling Approach to help you identify patterns and support your business objectives.

Join us on Thursday, July 22, 2010 to:
• Learn about the cloud reference model and architecture, and how it will facilitate the implementation of your cloud architecture.
• Discover how to identify and document cloud patterns that meet your organization’s business requirements.
• Learn how to document cloud patterns using a standard set of symbols mapped to the cloud reference model.
Join us for this live event as we share our successes leveraging these cloud modeling and architecture approaches and learn how to apply them to your enterprise.

Seminar Series Schedule:
1. 5/6/10: Strategic Implications of cloud computing and why executives should care!
2. 6/17/10: The Cloud Adoption Lifecycle
3. 7/22/10: Cloud Architecture, Modeling and Design
4. 8/12/10: The Move Towards Big Data

Hopefully you saw our big announcement this morning!  We are excited to announce strategic alliances with several of the leading Hadoop ecosystem vendors including Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga.

So what does this mean and why is it important you ask?
We are really excited to announce these partnerships because each of these vendors add unique value by simplifying the development of analytical applications on Hadoop and hiding the complexity of the underlying MapReduce framework.

If your following corporate trends, you’ll see that  “Big Data” is playing a more strategic role in helping enterprises understand and serve their customers. As a result, a broader set of users now require a more reliable and robust file storage system that is both easy-to-use and works with their existing Hadoop applications.  In the simplest terms, our partnerships with leading Hadoop vendors make this vision of a more robust storage system possible.

Under the terms of the partnership, each of these vendors’ products has been validated against Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition, which offers plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and each will work with Appistry to support joint customers using CloudIQ Storage in place of HDFS.

Without any changes to their applications, users of the Concurrent, Datameer and Kitenga products can choose Appistry CloudIQ Storage as a more robust file system for their enterprise-grade Hadoop deployments. CloudIQ Storage is fully decentralized and offers higher availability and greater reliability than HDFS, whose “NameNode” is a single point of failure and network bottleneck.

Be sure to check out the full announcement

Here is a quick overview of the partners and their offerings:
• Concurrent develops software to help enterprises realize the full benefits of parallel computing clusters. Concurrent has released the Cascading open-source project, a layer over MapReduce that allows developers to rapidly create complex data processing and computing applications through a straightforward Java API. Cascading provides simpler abstractions to define applications and glue them together, as well as interfaces to work with external systems.
• Datameer offers the a big data analytics solution built on Hadoop that helps business users access, analyze and use massive amounts of data. Founded by Hadoop veterans in 2009, the company’s breakthrough product, Datameer Analytics Solution (DAS), provides unparalleled access to data with minimal IT resources. DAS scales to 4,000 servers and petabytes of data and is available for all major Hadoop distributions including Apache, Cloudera, Yahoo!, IBM, and Amazon.
• Kitenga provides an innovative multi-media content mining solution for non-programming professionals, designed to reduce or eliminate the complexity, risk and cost typically associated with implementing massively scaled-out multimedia content mining solutions. Kitenga’s ZettaVox application combines ready-to-run content processing elements with a full-fledged content mining/analytics solution that distributes processing over cloud and cluster-based computing assets by leveraging the open-source Hadoop framework. The entire process can be monitored, batched, and the results analyzed using sophisticated visualization and analytics tools.

We encourage you to check out our additional resources to learn more about Appistry CloudIQ Hadoop Edition:

Appistry CloudIQ Storage, Hadoop Edition is available for free download through Appistry’s Peer2Peer community:
http://www.appistry.com/community/go/cloudiq-community-edition-download.
Appistry Web Site: www.appistry.com
CloudIQ Storage Product Page: http://www.appistry.com/products/cloud-iq-storage
CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition Page: http://www.appistry.com/products/cloud-iq-storage/hadoop-edition

Hopefully you’ve heard about our summer webinar series – The Execs Guide to Cloud Computing.  Just in case you missed Part 1,  you can catch the replay Part 1 – Strategic Implication of Cloud Computing at: http://www.appistry.com/media/execs_guide_strategic_implications/

As a quick reminder we assembled this webinar series because there is surprisingly little information available about cloud computing from the enterprise IT executive. And we thought this series would be a great way to cover topics taken from the just released book:  The Execs Guide to Cloud Computing

We are now promoting the second installment of our webinar series titled Exec’s Guide Part 2: The Cloud Adoption Lifecycle

Join us on Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 PST/1:00 CST/2:00 EST as we discuss what IT and Business leaders need to know about cloud computing to be successful.

Just to give you a little background, this next webinar about the Cloud Adoption Lifecycle webinar will discuss effective and efficient methodologies for adopting cloud computing.

Key takeaways from the webinar include:

• Uncover the various stages of the cloud adoption lifecycle from initial proof-of-concepts, requirements gathering and implementation of an enterprise-scale cloud computing strategy.
• Understand the major milestones and best practices in the cloud adoption lifecycle
• Learn cloud adoption best practices and common pitfalls to avoid as you begin your journey with cloud computing.
Here is a quick look at what we have in store for the summer!

Seminar Series Schedule:
1. 5/6/10: Strategic Implications of cloud computing and why executives should care!
2. 6/17/10: The Cloud Adoption Lifecycle
3. 7/15/10: Cloud Architecture, Modeling and Design
4. 8/12/10: The Move Towards Big Data

Appistry is thrilled to announcement the  general availability of Appistry CloudIQ Storage and Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition. With this announcement we also announced the release of version 4.3 of our flagship Appistry CloudIQ Platform.

If you don’t recall from the first Beta announcement,  CloudIQ Storage is software that creates a scalable, reliable and highly cost-effective file storage system with no single points of failure, using only commodity servers and networking. Hadoop Edition adds plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.3, in addition to providing support for CloudIQ Storage, adds new APIs for log file, user and group management and includes a number of performance enhancements and bug fixes.

The new products are available for free and immediate download from Appistry’s Peer2Peer community portal at http://www.appistry.com/community.

Be sure to check out the full announcement!

Appistry will host a webinar next Thursday,  May 20, 2010 at 1:00 CST/2:00 EST titled “PaaS, Chapter 2 – The Future of Application Delivery.”

This free webinar will feature industry veteran and Forrester vice president, John Rymer, as he explores platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and its role as the future of application development, deployment and delivery.
We are excited to report there are over 250 registrants already.  I think this is reflective of the continued interest in the PaaS market.  In fact, according to many industry experts and analysts, PaaS continues to hold the attention of enterprise IT executives for its ability to accelerate time-to-market. Yet adoption of the first crop of public cloud PaaS offerings has been slow due to the lack of control, visibility and portability.

And that’s exactly what this webinar will explore - A new breed of solutions dubbed “PaaS, Chapter 2” which offer the best of the 1st generation of PaaS without the limitations that have hampered enterprise adoption.
So what are the takeaways you ask??

Attendees will learn about the next-generation of platform-as-a-service offerings, and how they can help enterprises:
1. Accelerate application development and reduce time to market, while preserving existing investments in tools and skill sets
2. Deliver more agile, scalable applications able to react to fluctuating market conditions
3. Decrease capital and operational costs for new and existing applications without vendor lock-in
4. Select the best deployment option for your application, including both public and private clouds

To register for the webinar, please visit: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/478990352

Here is a great article about Appistry, GoGrid and one of our joint customers – Presidio Health.

Note the offer at the end of the article.  For the next 90 days, GoGrid is offering a US$100 credit to Outsourcing Journal readers who reference this promotional code: GGAPPO

http://www.outsourcing-journal.com/may2010-healthcare.html

Outsourcing Journal – Outsourcing saves buyers money through lower cost. Outsourcing really saves money if the service is free.

To allow organizations to take advantage of low-cost IT infrastructure outsourcing, Appistry provides a software solution that helps companies move their applications to the cloud. The company provides its software at no cost to small and medium-sized users. “We wanted to create an easy way to use our product without the hassle of establishing a commercial relationship with us,” explains Sam Charrington, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for Appistry.

Appistry is a software company specializing in private cloud computing. It has partnered with GoGrid, which provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS), to present a complete offering. “We make our software available on GoGrid’s infrastructure,” explains Charrington. Since Appistry’s software sits preconfigured on top of GoGrid’s infrastructure, outsourcing buyers can deploy their applications on demand in the cloud “with just a few clicks of a mouse,” says Jack Duffy, GoGrid’s Executive Vice President of Sales and Business Development.

Appistry CloudIQ Platform consists of three offerings:
1. CloudIQ Manager helps enterprises manage their applications within a cloud environment.
2. CloudIQ Engine helps companies cloud-enable their applications, providing scalability and reliability.
3. CloudIQ Storage allows organizations to harness inexpensive commodity storage.

“Companies use our products because they don-t have to run their applications on big iron hardware,” explains Charrington.

Traditionally, Appistry focused on private clouds where companies operate their own data centers. Charrington says Appistry’s core customer base is large-scale users; some customers include FedEx and U.S. government agencies. “They use our products on hundreds of servers,” he reports.

Two years ago the software company launched its Open Distribution program and Appistry CloudIQ Platform “Community Edition.” Charrington says Appistry offers this software free “to lower the barriers of entry and help smaller companies get started easily.”

Why give away your products in this recession-wracked economy? “We wanted to give back,” answers Charrington simply.

How Presidio Health uses the free service
Presidio Health is a small, start-up, software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider in the healthcare industry. Its market is emergency room physicians. Typically they are contractors, not employees of the hospital where they work. Presidio Health’s application helps them track the cash payments and insurance reimbursements from the patients they see in the ER.

“Once the patient leaves the ER, a doctor has a 20 percent chance of collecting the money owed,” points out Tom Gregory, CTO for Presidio Health. One of the company’s applications helps the physicians collect their fees.

Under the current insurance system, if one item in the reimbursement document is incorrect, the insurance company will refuse payment. One of Presidio Health’s applications, which sits between the facility and the third-party billing system, collects the demographic and clinical data needed to correctly complete the requisite forms. “The application also shows the doctors where they are leaving money on the table,” adds Gregory. In addition, it analyzes treatment trends to help the physicians make their diagnoses.

Success and an expanding business resulted in growing pains in 2008. These growing pains translated into issues of infrastructure capacity. First came the decision to outsource. “We wanted to focus on the software we were developing for hospitals,” Gregory explains. “We didn’t want to support a full IT staff around the clock to manage the hardware. By using an external provider, we didn-t need to worry about downtime or redundancy. Outsourcing fit our business needs.”

Outsourcing also offered a way to reduce capital expenditures. “We wanted to get more computing power at a lesser price than if we had invested in the necessary hardware and software ourselves. And we wanted the ability to expand the computing power at will,” explains Gregory.

Presidio Health began exploring cloud computing “because you can get more horsepower in the cloud than building your own rack,” Gregory continues. In addition, cloud computing would allow the company “to grow quicker.” The five-person company currently processes 150,000 patient records a year. By the end of 2010 Presidio Health wants to process 16 times that, says Gregory. (That growth is possible because the provider is introducing two new products.) GoGrid’s Duffy says in the end Presidio Health chose an external provider “to control costs, grow capacity as needed, and get to market faster while ensuring HIPAA and PCI (credit card) compliance.”

Selecting a hybrid approach for security
“We have to be HIPAA compliant,” says Gregory. The service provider hosts its own database in its own cabinet to meet HIPAA security requirements; the company sends no data to the cloud. Instead, it uses the cloud solely to host its applications.
Duffy labels this “a hybrid hosted model.” Presidio Health firewalled all its sensitive data while sending only the front end to the public cloud. “If your underlying database requires a high level of security or compliance, it’s best to use a hybrid model,” he notes.

Moving to the Appistry/GoGrid solution increased Presidio Health’s computer power by 70 percent without increasing the budget, reports Gregory. “This solution lets us grow while reducing our reliance on IT,” Gregory concludes. “We now know growth will be less painful as we continue to improve our offering.”

Lessons from the Outsourcing Journal:
• One way small-to-medium sized businesses can weather growth spurts easier is to move their applications to the public cloud.
• Enterprises that have to worry about security can adopt a hybrid hosted solution, which keeps the sensitive data firewalled in their facilities while sending the applications to the cloud.
• Suppliers forming interlocking relationships help buyers by preparing easy-to-configure options.

Click here to read the full case study

For the next 90 days, GoGrid is offering a US$100 credit to Outsourcing Journal readers who reference this promotional code: GGAPPO.

It’s official!  Earlier this week Appistry and AgilePath announced the release of the much-anticipated cloud computing book:  The Executives Guide to Cloud Computing.  After only a few days on the market the publishers are already talking about the next release!  So a big kudos out to Bob Lozano and Eric Marks for all their hard work putting this book together!

You can purchase it on Amazon now!

To give you a little background, we started this initiative because there is surprisingly little information available about cloud computing from the enterprise IT executive perspective.  With the enterprise emerging as the next battleground for the cloud, we hope for this book to service as the go-to resource covering the steps for tackling the issues and concerns specific to the enterprise

“Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing” provides the critical information that business and technology executives need to understand cloud computing, and then to plan, invest, and deploy cloud computing solutions to achieve targeted business results.

AgilePath and Appistry have developed a proven partnership in providing cloud computing solutions and services leveraging AgilePath’s Cloud Computing Playbook™, Cloud Computing Reference Model, and CloudSprint™ Methodology, as well as Appistry’s best-in-class solution, Appistry CloudIQ Platform.

To support the release of “Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing,” AgilePath and Appistry announced a series of joint Webinars to focus on key themes from the book, such as the compelling value proposition of cloud computing, how to get started, and how to achieve agility, scalability and efficiency with both private and public clouds. These will be scheduled during May – August 2010, and focus on the following topics:

The first webinar was held today and had over 250 registrants!  Strategic Implementation of Cloud: May 4

We hope the audience continues to grow as we move through the series!  Stay tuned for more information on the next webinars.

• The Cloud Adoption Lifecycle: June 17
• Cloud Architecture, Modeling and Design: July 15
• The Move Towards Big Data: Aug 12

This is one webinar series you don’t want to miss. And with over 200 registrants – apparently many others feel the same way!  Hurry cause there is only a week left to register!

Appistry and Agile Path have joined forces to provide a roadmap for enterprise execs to learn about the technology behind cloud computing and how to apply it to the enterprise

Date: Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Time: 11:00 PST / 2:00 EST

We have assembled this webinar series because there is surprisingly little information available about cloud computing from the enterprise IT executive perspective. With the enterprise emerging as the next battleground for the cloud, two industry veterans, Bob Lozano and Eric Marks, have come together to discuss steps for tackling the issues and concerns specific to the enterprise.

Join us for the Executives Guide to Cloud Computing Webcast Series. Topics we will be exploring have been taken directly from the just-released book: The Executives Guide to Cloud Computing

Seminar Series Schedule:

Tuesday, May 4: Strategic Implications of cloud computing and why executives should care!
Thursday, June 17: The Cloud Adoption Lifecycle
Thursday July 15: Cloud Architecture, Modeling and Design
Thursday, Aug 12: The Move Towards Big Data
Don’t miss Bob Lozano, Appistry founder and advisor, and Eric Marks, CEO of AgilePath, in this live webinar on Tuesday, May 4 at 11:00 PST/1:00 CST/2:00 EST.

Learn from recognized industry experts as they tackle Part 1 of the webinar series – Strategic Implications of Cloud Computing

1. Learn why cloud computing must be a top priority on your company’s IT roadmap
2. Discover how the drive for scale, lower costs and great agility is making cloud computing a fiscal and technolical must.
3. Learn practical steps for planning, executing and measuring incorporation of cloud computing into your organization.

All webinar attendees will be entered to win a copy of the book: The Execs Guide to Cloud Computing!

Register Today! 

Appistry’s very own Michael Groner, Chief Architect, will be a featured speaker at the Cloud Lab virtual conference, to be held April 19-23, 2010. Michael’s session, “Dealing with the Data Deluge: Cloud Computing for Big Data” takes place at 3:00 – 4:00 pm EST on Tuesday, April 20

Michael will present a number of practical “big data” case studies, exploring the application and storage requirements of each. He will discuss the cloud-based approaches that helped these organizations manage and process large volumes of data, and he will provide a set of core guiding principles for delivering your own architecturally sound solutions capable of petabyte-scale data processing.

You might have heard of this conference before under a different name.  It was formerly called Cloud Slam.  This conference is a global cloud computing event, covering the latest trends and innovations in the world of cloud computing. Conference panels, workshops and tutorials are selected to cover a range of the hottest topics in cloud computing. For further event details, or to register: http://www.cloudslamevent.com

We are excited to announce another award to add to our many accolades!  As the saying goes…”Don’t take our word for it!”  See what the industryis saying about Appistry CloudIQ Platform!

So here is the scoop: Earlier this week we got word that Appistry has been recognized by AlwaysOn as an OnDemand 100 winner for our innovative and totally cool cloud application platform – CloudIQ Platform!

And no we didn’t pay for this award!….Appistry was selected from among hundreds of companies after a rigorous three-month selection process conducted by industry experts and the AlwaysOn editorial team.  Selection was based on five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

So what’s this award really about??? This award recognizes companies for leadership among their peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. 

Appistry was awarded in the Cloud Application Platform category, a market segment the company helped pioneer with its flagship product, Appistry CloudIQ Platform. Appistry’s platform enables the next generation of platform-as-a-service (PaaS), allowing organizations to take full advantage of cloud computing in private, hybrid and public cloud environments while reducing capital and operating costs and achieving enhanced application scalability, reliability and performance.

Appistry and the OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies will be honored at AlwaysOn’s OnDemand event on April 19th, 2010, at Hewlett-Packard’s Worldwide Headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. For more information about the event or to view the full list of OnDemand 100 winners visit: http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/34759.

Learn how to Reduce TCO and Enhance Performance for Data-Intensive Applications with a Private Cloud Approach to Storage

Don’t miss our next webinar on April 7 at 11:00 PST as we explore Appistry CloudIQ Storage, the latest addition to the Appistry Platform.

Storage is an integral component of today’s data-centric applications. However, traditional approaches to storage are a major contributor to the high costs and limited performance often seen with data-intensive applications. Appistry is excited to introduce a new product that helps enterprises create a scalable, reliable and highly cost-effective distributed file storage system, using only commodity servers and networking.

You don’t want to miss this webinar if you are concerned about the costs of delivering scalable, high-performance storage for unstructured data or if you need a cloud-based architecture for attacking large-scale data-intensive problems.

Join us for this live webinar on Wednesday, April 7, 2009 at 11:00 PST and learn how Appistry CloudIQ Storage can help your organization deliver scalability, reliability and performance for data-intensive applications, at unprecedented cost savings.

See CloudIQ Storage in action, and learn how to achieve:
• Unmatched price-performance for high-volume, data-intensive applications
• Slashed overall TCO
• Reduced up-front investment without loss of control
• Simplified development of web scale applications
• Increased application up-time
• Ensured business continuity through geographically aware disaster recovery
• Accelerated time-to-market
• Hadoop and HDFS compatibility

Register now – space is limited

Welcome to the 4th installment of our webinar recap series. In the wake of our recent cloud storage announcement, today’s installment in which we recount the conversation around data, storage and the cloud seems particularly appropriate.

Read on to learn more about our thoughts on architecture, cloud-friendly storage and other points relating to data-specific challenges in the cloud.

Data in the Cloud

Sam: So, Bob, I know this is one of these areas that you care pretty deeply about, please feel free to jump in. Last year, we joked about a blog that was written, that referred back to a presentation you made, and the blogger talked about you calling, you kind of predicting, I guess, the death of Oracle and the traditional relational database. That wasn’t in our predictions webinar per se, so we are not going to hold you accountable for that particular prediction, but what are you thinking here, in terms of data, storage, cloud, how do all these things mesh together?

Bob Lozano: Well I think Michael made a key point that for many of us in the business, an app developer, management, executive, whatever, the assumption of put things into the database, and by that, meaning relational database, has just been a given, and it really has not even been something you could discuss. What has happened is the cost of that, is that we have built in a priority limits to scale, and so on.

A great example, and I have seen this now in many industries, a whole class of applications of processing things that just happen, you know, settling out customer accounts, processing insurance claims, settling out payment transactions, whatever, we give it zillions, and zillions, and zillions of things to do. Well what we have done, historically we always throw it into a database, and then we wonder why we have trouble scaling those applications, they are expensive, they are costly, and they are crucial.

I think that we have already seen some examples, as Michael said, if we just take that assumption out, and say, is there a better way to do this, what we are finding is a whole host of better ways to do that, that at the same time are far more cloud friendly. So, I agree that this is the year they become mainstream.

I think we will start thinking about broad classes of applications, not as technologies, but as places where the relational database does not have to be, if there is a cloud friendly storage layer underneath it. I think that is, also, very inevitable for this year. It is some of the bigger payoffs we will see anywhere in the cloud world.

Michael: Yes, I think today when you hear people talk about cloud computing, people will talk very aggressively about commoditization, and multi tenancy, and high utilization rates, that you can get with just virtualization, and pay by the hour or usage based accounting, and those tend to be the issues that get discussed.

I think one of the things that we have believed from the very beginning is that as people get comfortable with cloud computing approaches and cloud computing implementations, that they are going to see that the greatest value is in the architectural shifts that are enabled by this approach. I think that this is a great example of where, I think in 2010 we are going to be talking a lot more about architectures and new approaches, then just some of the underlying…

Bob: And with a particular emphasis on the data related issues, right? I mean that is…

Michael: Right

Sam:  So Michael, a technical, this question came in, that I will address to you. One of our audience members is really looking to understand these NoSQL solutions, and is wondering if they are based on a new base concept of transactional consistency, as opposed to traditional action, and you touched on this but maybe you can elaborate on it.

Michael:  Yes, I can drill in just a little bit. Not to take too long and to get too “geeky” with everyone.

[laughter]

Michael:  We can do another Podcast just on this, if we wanted to. There is this interesting theory running around, about how computing in cloud architecture that is referred to as the CAP theorem, where you can talk about consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, the ability to survive having multiple data centers running as a single application. Of those three concepts, that you can take two, but you are going to lose the third every time.

This relates directly to active properties as it relates to databases, because usually what you see in cloud architectures, usually what you see, is a relaxation of the consistency argument, right at the C enacted, obviously. We keep all the other active properties in tow, but we relax consistency, and you hear the term “eventual consistency” a lot.

Where changes may happen on one side of a data center and we try to propagate it to the other side as fast as we can, but maybe not immediately, and that is really the mind‑shift that you have to take with cloud computing. When we are talking about databases, you also, in cloud computing, you get a lot of relaxation of normalization.

When we are talking about big, expensive databases, normalization is key, because we want to hold as little as possible to maximize the space on the machine. When we talk about cloud architectures doing duplication in order to facilitate the scale and speed, is often a correct thing to do, especially when you have cheap resources available to you.

So getting back to that principle, I heard a great talk, I believe it was Pat Hanlon did at Tech Ed, a couple of years ago, and he was talking about some of the understanding in Amazon when they were talking about relaxing the consistency of databases. He had this great example about, imagine that there was a single book on the shelf for sale at Amazon, and that you had your database behind it, and that you want to have that perfect consistency that the one book is really that one book, and we spent all this time and effort for that one book.

If a user was to come along, or if a customer was to come along and buy that book, and in the process of the individual‑‑who actually picked the book off the shelf and dropped it into a package to send to you‑‑that book fell on the floor and got run over by a forklift that was running through the warehouse. Then, what good was all that perfection, and effort, and time, that you put into consistency? They are still going to have to send out a letter to the customer saying, “Oops, something went wrong, we promise to fix as fast as we can.”

Really, is there value in being that perfect for every application? Now of course, sometimes the answer is yes, but it is not always yes, and when we can relax it and take advantage of these cloud systems, things become more simple, more reliable, and more scalable. So I hope I touched on all the points you are looking for. I am happy to… Again, we could spend an hour on this subject alone.

Sam:  It is an interesting possible segue to an interlude here on the topic of books. One of the folks out on Twitter‑‑KillingComputer‑‑asks, is there any recommendations for a good soup to nuts book on, presumably on cloud computing.

I am not sure how I did not hit this in the introduction, but one of the things that none of us in our wildest dreams could have predicted in 2009 was that our very own Bob Lozano would co‑author a book, The Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, which is going to be published by Wiley in April of next year. Bob, do you want to take a minute to kind of touch on your perspective on the book, and maybe pitch it to our friend, KillingComputer, here?

Bob:  Sure, that would be great. As Sam mentioned, we did finish the manuscript for Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, and we really had a broad range of audiences in mind. We took kind of a book within a book approach. Kind of the beginning and the end of the book, really makes a case of why cloud computing has to happen, and how fundamental it is. It is not just marketing hype and so on, but there is very underlying structural reasons, and we elaborate on those.

We spend a chunk of time talking about this data transition, and what it means. It comes at the high level, and then in the interior of the book is a section a little more focused at the IT practitioner, at the CIO, and that was primarily driven by my coauthor, Eric Marks, who has a long history in doing modeling, and thinking about adoption models, and so on. So you can kind of pick and choose, or take all of the above.

We are pretty satisfied that this will give a good, basic overview introduction, and a good set of answers to the questions, why should I do this now, should I care, is this just hype or is this real, and how fundamental is this? I think we make that case. It will be out, physical and electronic, I think, in the first or second week of April. So, there will also be a website that goes with it, Exec’s Guide to Cloud, we have a splash page up there now, but we will host a bunch of resources there as well.

So I am pretty excited about it. I have gotten a lot of real nice feedback. We have, I think, a conference that is going to hand it to every customer. We have another person taking a look at it for a course, and so on, and so forth. So, it has been a lot of fun. It has been a real great chance to sit back and think about how the industry is going, and why it is happening. I came out of that process far more convinced then I went into it, that this transition is one of the two or three big ones that have occurred in the history of computing.

Sam:  So, let’s keep going with the audience questions, here. We have got another one on the topic of data and some of these new approaches. It seems to be a very lively topic here, both in the Q&A Panel and Twitter. To Michael and Bob, are there any tools or processes that you can recommend to help application owners start to think about whether their apps are appropriate and amenable for these news types of approaches? What should they be looking for?

Michael:  You know it is funny, it is almost, I almost just started to look at that question in the opposite. I almost see in every case the ability that you can move it to the cloud, except in those extreme consistency cases, find a need to say, that a NoSQL style solution is wrong. So, I don’t look for problems that are good for the cloud, I look for specific features in applications in which I know I have to be more careful, because of that consistency requirement.

Again, you see any application that has reliability needs, strong storage needs, these NoSQL cloud architectures often make things easier to put these applications together. I can’t tell you how many developers that I have talked to, who come eager to figure out what they need to do to be in the cloud.

As they understand that it is really not something more complicated, and in a way it is actually simpler, but you need to have that awareness of, can my application run on multiple machines? Do I have an expectation of a single data element that I am running up as a counter, or as a central flag in the system? Is there a way to relax that flag so that every machine can have it’s own counter, it’s own flag, it’s own way of dealing with the data, without having to constantly interact with other machines on the network.

As I run through these, I hope it doesn’t sound too much of a challenge, it actually can often be approached directly and simply, once you get familiar with that idea. Think about your application running on a hundred notes. What is different, what no longer acts the same way, and how can you get those systems to work in isolation, and yet together, to a common goal? Once you do that, and…

Bob:  Or a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand.

Michael:  Or a thousand or ten thousand, as Bob likes to kid me all the time. Once you relax that goal, you’re there, and strangely enough, it is often an easier solution

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Stay tuned for Kevin’s 5th and final prediction about the “put up or shut up” year for cloud and startups.”, where we will dive into our final predictions of the year and how Appistry sees the future of private vs. public clouds.

You won’t want to miss it, so check back with us later this week to learn more.