Thinking Out Cloud

Big Cloud Week Coming Up

Next week is shaping up to be a big week for cloud computing (again). 

Monday

Microsoft will be making an announcement in San Francisco about the launch of Online Services. I've been invited to attend that as well as a Blogger Roundtable that Microsoft is hosting for cloud computing bloggers. Should be interesting.

In the evening, Joyent is hosting Enterprise Cloud Computing Seminar: Addressing the Practical Questions of CIOs and CTOs. I will be participating in a a panel entitled The Future of Cloud Computing for the Enterprise, moderated by Jason Hoffman, CTO at Joyent.

Tuesday

On Tuesday (10 AM PST), GigaSpaces and CohesiveFT are hosting a joint webinar entitled Cloud Enablement with Security and Control. The highlight of this webinar is a wicked cool live demo of running a web application across two public clouds (Amazon EC2 and Flexiscale) with the ability to scale out on demand based on SLAs, fail-over, self-healing -- all in a secure environment. So as the Cohesive guys wrote on their blog, make sure to brush up on your cloud computing buzzwords, because we will show it all: cloudbursting, cloud storming, cloud spanning, virtual private clouds, hybrid clouds, interclouds -- you name it.

You can read more details on Nati's blog and Dekel's blog. Sign up here.

Wednesday-Friday

Sys-con's Cloud Computing Expo will take place in San Jose. Seems like everyone is coming in to the Bay Area for this one, so I am looking forward to meet a lot of the folks active in cloud computing at this event. There is also talk of another Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum get together around this event as well as a Silicon Valley CloudCamp.

So it's going to a fun week. If anyone wants to get together at one of these events, just let me know in the comments or via twitter.

Speaking at the Virtualization Conference

The folks at Syscon's Virtualization Conference accepted my speaking proposal for the conference (see abstract below). My session is on Monday, June 23, at 6:25 PM. It's at the Roosevelt Hotel in NYC. I will show a live demo of an application built on GigaSpaces running on Amazon EC2. Here's the abstract:

The Missing Piece in Cloud Computing: Middleware Virtualization — To achieve the full potential of 'cloud computing' we need a broader definition of virtualization, and that is the complete de-coupling of the logical components of an application (represented by the software stack) and the physical resources. In the case of middleware, whether it is data access, messaging or the business logic, the physical location of the resources should not matter to the developer and to the end user. This is not a trivial thing to do, especially when it comes to data-intensive, stateful (transactional or otherwise) applications and services. In this session we will explore the challenges and propose a solution, including a live demo.

QCon, Drinks on Tuesday

Looking forward to a great Qcon San Francisco conference this week. Kudos to Floyd Marinescu and the rest of the team for putting together a pretty cool speaker roster and agenda.

As Nati wrote, a bunch of us are getting together Tuesday evening for drinks and some tapas at the Thirsty Bear to kick things off. We'll start hanging out at 6:00 PM and see where it takes us. Everyone's invited!

Hope to see you there.

BTW, wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't mention the panel and presentation sessions given by GigaSpaces folks at the event. Check them out here. We'll be making a big announcement during this event. Stay tuned...

GigaSpaces Customer Conference: Blow-by-Blow

Nati wrote an excellent post with a "blow by blow" of the GigaSpaces European Customer Conference we organized in London a couple of weeks ago.

This is an interesting read because Nati gives brief descriptions of the many success stories of using GigaSpaces that our customers and partners presented there. Also gives you a sense of how widely applicable Space-Based Architecture is.

We're planning a similar event for the U.S. on October 9, 2007 in New York. More on this to come.

SIFMA & the GigaSpaces-Microsoft Joint Solution

Microsoft and us announced today our joint solution of GigaSpaces integration with Excel and Compute Cluster Server.

I've written before about the problem this joint solution solves in Grid Meets the Middle Office.

Here's an excerpt:

    The solution addresses two fundamental challenges grid users in capital markets are facing today. First, it allows organizations to move large volumes of data to compute nodes with low-latency performance, and, second, it eliminates the disconnect between the front office and the data grid. In addition, GigaSpaces' platform provides a highly scalable application architecture that enables organizations to keep pace with rapid growth.

    "In the financial services industry, large and fast-growing applications based on Microsoft technologies need to process high volumes of transaction data very fast," said Stevan Vidich, U.S. capital markets industry technology strategist at Microsoft Corp. "Our work with GigaSpaces supports those requirements by offering end users a way to process high volumes of low-latency data using Excel-based applications. Smooth interoperability between Java and .Net is an added bonus."

Congrats to my business development team at GigaSpaces, and specifically Amnon Raviv and Dekel Tankel, for making this happen.

Come check it the solution at our SIFMA booth (#1419) this week:

    GigaSpaces and Microsoft will preview the combined solution, providing live product demonstrations,  June 19-21 in New York City at SIFMA's Technology Management Conference. Additionally, a white paper published by the two companies will be available on Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) Web site in late June.

Hope to see you there.

GigaSpaces European Customer Conference

On June 12, we will be hosting our first European customer conference in London. What is particularly cool about this is that most of the presentations will be given by GigaSpaces customers on how they are using the product.

We'll have presentations by (in chronological order) Andy Doddington of Bank of America, Neil Vernon of Smartstream, Alejandro Ramallo of British American Tobacco, Baruch Chasid of TraderTools and Sebastian Titakis of Commerzbank.

In addition, a few of our partners will be presenting including Koen Van den Brande from the Microsoft Financial Services group, Biju Potty from the Infosys MiFID Solution Group and Steve Colwill from PSJ Solutions.

And of course, there will be GigaSpaces presenters, namely Yaron Benvenisti (CEO) and Nati Shalom (CTO).

If you can make it to London that day, please join us!

We will keep updating on the event details on this wiki page. (As a matter of fact, we will probably be moving to a bigger more centrally located venue due to demand...). You can also register for the event on this page (space is extremely limited at this point).

Hope to see you there.

P.S. We'll have a similar event in New York in September.

Extreme Talent

We have a lot of kick-ass talent at GigaSpaces, but it's not every day you get an email like the one we got about Owen Taylor, one of our main technical evangelists. We got this from Atif Aziz, one of the organizers of the Swiss .Net Microsoft User Group (published with Atif's permission):

 

I just wanted to drop some feedback about Owen's presentation to the user group. Frankly, I am not exaggerating the slightest by saying the attendees (myself included) were completely blown away. I am really grateful that he put all his passion and enthusiasm in delivering the talk (even after such a long flight), which went to demonstrate his own conviction of the subject matter and consequently made the audience more receptive to newer ideas. Owen is a rare gem in that he possesses some very unique and exceptional presentation and story-telling skills. He took a subject that was fairly new to the audience and delivered it very effectively, building momentum as he went along. He presented the problem space in its historical context and then slowly moved over to the solution without missing any of the essences along the way.

I would end there, but I think the attendees were even more amazed when he managed address all of the technical concerns and queries that were brought up during and afterwards. Really, I know something changed in that room that day. :)

Here are the exact words of one of the attendees that I received by e-mail the following day. “I just wanted to thank you for bringing this "inspiring" and "delicious-food-for-thought" talk to the community. It was great and I enjoyed it a lot. thanks again”

Owen tirelessly travels the globe, spreading the word about Space-Based Architecture, GigaSpaces, Jini/JavaSpaces and all things distributed computing.

Besides his own excellent blog, Owen's been featured multiple times on TheServerSide.com and other sites, sharing his deep technical knowledge. But what really sets Owen apart is that he is a natural born performer. He was a performer on Broadway for many years and that combined with his tech knowledge and passion -- well, it's dynamite.

To check out Owen in an event or Java/.Net user group near you, go tour Upcoming Events. To see how Owen has been tirelessly spanning the globe, see our Previous Events...

Grid Meets the Middle Office

Found this City#Grid Special Report via Matt Davey's blog. Lots of interesting real-world cases on how banks are using grids of all sorts. Not surprisingly, I especially liked the piece on page 12 in which Andy Doddington from Bank of America describes how they used GigaSpaces to scale and simplify a middle office applications for P&L analytics.

One the interesting things Andy raises is a very common thing on Wall Street, which is the extensive use of Microsoft Excel among middle and front office users (traders, quants, etc.) in investment banks. Whatever you think of it, Excel is the de facto standard front-end for many-many apps in the securities industry.

While it is a flexible tool, and one that many users are familiar and comfortable with, it also creates many difficulties from an enterprise point-of-view around management, maintenance, disjointed data silos, etc.

In this particular case the solution was to use the GigaSpaces in-memory data grid and replace the client (Excel) with a rich client. That works. But one of the things we are working on with Microsoft is how to have the best of both worlds: the low-latency and central synchronized data grid with the familiar Excel.

I can't spill the beans just yet, but we'll be announcing and demoing what we've been up to together with Microsoft at the SIFMA show (formerly known as the SIA show) in June in New York.

Come see us there!

JavaOne

Off to Moscone Center for JavaOne. Come see us at the GigaSpaces booth #620. We'll have some of our stars there, including Owen Taylor and Guy Korland.

See you there!

Dealing With Technology

I'm participating on a panel at the Dealing With Technology (DWT) event in London this week on Thursday (May 3).

It's an interesting group and interesting topic. The rest of the event seems pretty cool too. Come check it out, if you can.

11.00 – 12.00 Panel discussion: Tackling grid management

• Managing compute grid resources
• Implementing application servers within a grid environment
• Addressing the file-management bottleneck
• Improving SOA performance in the grid environment

Moderator: Barry Childe, Director, Head of High Performance Computing, BARCLAYS CAPITAL
    Carey Jack, Grid Architect, Investment Banking IT, CREDIT SUISSE
    Pramod Srivatsa, Product Manager, Server Virtualisation Business Unit, CISCO
    Geva Perry, Chief Marketing Officer, GIGASPACES