Vaibhav Srivastava's WebGlitch

The future looks to be one where we access most of our data and applications from remote data centres, not from our personal hard disk or internal server rooms

Later this month, IBM will launch what it calls the Blue Business Platform, a system designed for small and medium enterprises to access a host of software applications and services remotely. The project has been piloted internally, and the first launch will be in India.
    The system will enable SMEs to access applications like ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), inventory management, payroll management, and services like storage, back-up and recovery, and remote administration. They can access the services when they want it and for the period they want it. And pay only for the period of time they use the service.
    What that means is SMEs wouldn’t have to buy these applications and install them in their own hardware. In fact, this latter option is often so expensive that many SMEs today avoid using most software applications. It also involves keeping a large IT staff just to manage that infrastructure, which adds to costs.
    Under the Blue Business Platform, IBM will maintain the entire hardware and software in a remote data centre location, and all that customers have to do is to look at a “nice user interface” and click for whatever they need.
    “You can order it online and pay for it online. It provides for great ease of management,” says Rod Adkins, senior vice president in IBM’s systems and technology group, which is driving the initiative.
    Such systems are what today is popularly known as cloud computing. All your data and resources reside in a remote location — the cloud — and you access them from any device at any time. And since the cloud can be a huge data centre or a set of connected data centres with thousands of servers, the compute power that you could potentially have access to is exponentially more than you as an individual or a small company can have if you were dependent on only the hardware you own.
    Diptarup Chakraborti, principal research analyst at Gartner, believes countries like India that do not have legacy systems will find it particularly easy to deploy cloud computing systems for storage, desktop, server and other applications. “There’s a huge opportunity in this. It helps to reduce cost and to scale without hassles of handling assets such as hardware infrastructure,” he says.
    Balu Balasubramanya, country manager for Institute of Engineering & Technology, adds that in a cloud computing environment, you wouldn’t need to fear obsolescence of software and hardware, and believes that the market in India for software delivered as a service (from a cloud) will touch Rs 1,000 crore by 2010. Gartner predicts that more than 25% of business software will be delivered as a service by 2011.
    Many companies are seen to be scrambling to offer products based on cloud computing or software as a service (SaaS). Microsoft has a subscription based model for SQL servers (for database management) for SMEs. The servers are available on the basis of a per month or per user charge. Salesforce.com offers CRM solutions using the SaaS model. Oracle has partnered with Amazon Web Services environment to offer its software and database in the cloud. SAP is entering the arena with an online tool for companies to select and manage suppliers.

Clouds for individuals

Clouds are coming into play very strongly for individuals too. Already, many of the applications we use come from clouds, be it emails, photo storing/sharing apps like Yahoo’s Flickr or Google’s Picasa, music banks like iTunes and social networking apps like Facebook. Microsoft’s Windows Live gives you the instant messenger, blogging, and file sharing functions. Google gives you document applications over the internet, so that you don’t have to install one in your hard disk. But companies are now working on more comprehensive and sophisticated functionalities.
In March this year, in these pages, we brought you the story of Pi (now an EMC company), which is working to enable you to put all your personal information and data on a cloud so that they are available to you 24/7 and you can use them the way you like and when you like, be it on your laptop, cellphone, PDA, or any other device. Arathy Kundapur, GM of the Bangalore division of Pi, where much of this work is going on, says that since March, the project has made a lot more progress and EMC is likely soon to make announcements regarding specific services. “We are discussing issues like how to go to market,” she says.
The service, Kundpur says, will function like a bank. “Just as a bank takes your money, gives a guarantee of safety, and then offers services around it, like paying your bills, we will be like a bank for personal data, ensure safety of that data and then have functionalities around it,” she says. The possibilities are phenomenal. You can have your phone fully backed up on the cloud so that even if you are moving to another phone, you can have access to all your data in the first phone. If your travel plans are on the cloud, you can link it to a travel agency that can give you relevant information about hotels etc. If you are traveling and you want to play your music playset, you don’t have to worry about carrying the playset with you since you have it on the cloud. Pi is also working on a method to store all kinds of info in a common way, so you can see almost everything — photos, documents, emails, etc — on a single browser. “We are removing the folders metaphor, so you can organise things any which way you want,” says Kundapur.

Mega Power

Clouds also become critical for computationally intensive jobs. Your search queries on a Google or Yahoo give you almost instantaneous results because clouds consisting of thousands of servers are processing petabytes of data. Rajeev Rastogi, head of Yahoo! Labs, Bangalore, says this same level of computational intensity is what allows a Yahoo to match ads with users. “The system needs to quickly understand what the query or page is about, what the characteristics of the user are — age, gender, location, past behaviour — to target the right ads. This is critical for our revenues,” he says.
What this power also allows is to give you more computing capacity when you need it. Thus, a bank could ask a service provider for extra capacity on days when, for instance, they have a loan mela, says Satish Babu, IT architect at IBM’s India Software Lab. “Or if somebody runs out of space to expand their data centre, they could access a cloud,” he says. Accordingly, different cloud service models could emerge — like those offering more security (which banks may want), or faster responsiveness (necessary for call centres).

The PLATFORM

Cloud computing, strictly speaking, is not merely about hosting applications that anybody can access. It is about putting a platform onto the cloud that not only enables customers to access software that they need, but also can be accessed by independent software vendors (ISVs) to create and host applications that support the core offering. Salesforce’s AppExchange is one such, which allows third party developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main Salesforce application and are hosted on salesforce.com’s infrastructure. As of September 2008, there are over 800 applications available from over 450 ISVs. IBM Blue Business Platform, similarly, will allow ISVs to host applications targeted at the SME market. Microsoft’s dot net platform is expected to be available on the cloud soon. Moorthy Uppaluri, director (developer and platform evangelist) in Microsoft India, says the database, storage and APIs (application programming interface) will be available for users to build custom applications around it. “For example, an insurance application can be built using the platform from the cloud. The developer just needs to bring in the domain expertise,” he says. Rajeev Rastogi, head of Yahoo! Labs, Bangalore, says a developer can write an application as though he is writing for a single machine. “He does not have to worry about things like how many machines the application will run on, how it will run, what would happen if a machine fails. All that will be taken care of by the cloud computing software,” he says.

Serena moves to the CLOUD

As part of an effort to cut costs, Serena Software has moved from Microsoft Exchange to Google’s Gmail for all their e-mail needs. Some 50 employees have already made the switch and by the end of 2008 the transition is expected to be complete. The company has planned for issues such as security, backup and possible outages. The emails from the company will appear to be coming from their domain, Serena.com. With over 800 employees worldwide, the company sees this as a good way to reduce resource and infrastructure costs. “We are spending almost a million dollars a year, as much as nearly 10% of our R&D budget, on buying products. Moving things like email to the cloud will help to reduce that,” says Ren Bonvanie, senior VP for worldwide marketing in Serena Software. The next move is towards a server-less organization — by shifting every possible aspect of its operations to cloud computing solutions. Munindra Kumar Bharatee, MD of Serena, says this will not only reduce costs on the hardware, software, network, installation and further upgrades, but also remove the complexity of maintenance. The company will then pay only for what they use and not the ownership costs. “This will also allow us to be as nimble as our customers expect us to be,” says Bonvanie.

Vaibhav Srivastava's WebGlitch

404 Error Pages Collection

Google Video Chat

About voice and video chat

IIS7 Request Routing and Load Balancer Release Candidate Available for Download

Balance loads more efficiently across servers to maximize resource utilization

Increase Security and Scalability of Application Servers

Manage and monitor multiple server farms more easily through IIS Manager

Optimize and scale server capacity through client and host name affinity

Features

Apple iBangle

Cloud Computing

Clouds for individuals

Mega Power

The PLATFORM

Serena moves to the CLOUD

IPhone Registration And Activation Screenshots

Mozilla Firefox 3

Tabbed browsing

New features for end users

Windows Vista SP1

Quality Improvements

Security

Reliability

Performance

Administration Experience

Emerging Hardware and Standards

Evaluating Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Deploying Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Summary

Windows XP SP3 (Build 3205) Released – Analysis Included

Windows Live Messenger 9 Beta