Under the Radar – Not So Live Blogging Of The First Two Sessions

Here is a recap of the first two sessions at Under the Radar.

The first session was a panel discussion where David Powers of Eli Lilly, Mark Bagley of Bristish Telecom and Steve Heck of Getty Images offered their take about Cloud Computing from the enterprise perspective. They discussed about the expectations and concerns of enterprises as they approach the idea of using the Clouds. Some of the takeaways from the session includes

• Companies have some expectations about how the cloud providers manage their infrastructure and its security. They are eager to know more about their operations before they commit to a provider.
• Even if the costs are not a major advantage, like McvKinsey Report tries to claim, the panelists felt that the speed of deployment advantage itself is good enough reason to move to clouds
• McKinsey Report was debunked using the Rental Car analogy put forward by Joe Weinman of AT&T. Panelists seemed to agree with this comparison
• It was felt that time to market is the key and Cloud plays a big role here
• David Powers nailed it about the question of putting the critical data on the Clouds. It is the mental shift stupid.

After the panel discussions, the first set of companies offered their presentations under the session title Cloud Platforms. I was pretty interested in this session because two of the Open Source companies presented here. The three companies that presented in this session are Abiquo, Eucalyptus and Zimory.

I will list out some interesting titbits from the vendor presentations here.

Abiquo: Looks like they are the onloy company to support Open Virtualization Format. They support Open Source and Open Architecture. They plan to make money by offering support services and some premium offerings. The installation of their software can be done in under 2 minutes.

Eucalyptus: The Open Source company incubated in the Univerisyt of California, Santa Barbara is now a commercial entity. They support multiple APIs including Amazon. Under Linux, it can be installed under 5 steps. They are pretty excited about Ubuntu’s move.

Zimory: They are not an Open Source company unlike the previous two but they have an unique offering. They help manage computing capacities. The interesting part is they also act as a marketplace for companies to buy and sell computing resources. It is possible to manage internal and external resources. The interesting titbit, which was aptly noted and termed forward thinking by one of the judges, is that it is possible for enterprises to share unused resources with other enterprises who are in need of such resources. In a way, they can help every enterprise do what Amazon is doing, selling the unused resources and make some extra bucks.