Appistry will be exhibiting and presenting this week at the Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara, California on March 15-18, 2010.Cloud Connect pulls in today’s leading experts on cloud computing technology and platforms to discuss the new opportunities in cloud and its future use for data-centric enterprises.

Appistry, and Appistry customer Presidio Health, will be sharing insights on achieving success with cloud computing both today and in the future. Company and customer executives are participating in tracks focused on migrating to cloud computing, the ROI of cloud computing, and the future of cloud computing.

In addition, Appistry board member and former CIA CTO Bob Flores will deliver a keynote presentation on “Cloud Computing and Government.” Appistry will be exhibiting at booth 210. We encourage participants to stop by our booth or listen in on any of the events below, in which Appistry or Appistry customers are participating in.

Tuesday, March 16th from 1:30 – 2:30 PM.
• Tom Gregory, CTO of Presidio Health, will participate in a panel discussion on “Moving to Clouds: It’s Not All or Nothing” which explores the differences between public and private clouds, and the factors that need to be considered when planning a migration to cloud-based IT. Tom will draw from his experience deploying Appistry CloudIQ Platform to deliver his company’s software-as-a-service offering in a HIPPA and PCI compliant hybrid cloud environment.

Tuesday, March 16th from 9:00 AM – 12:00 PM.
• Bob Flores, Appistry director, former CTO of the Central Intelligence Agency, and founder and president of Applicology, Inc. will deliver a keynote presentation titled “Capitolizing on Clouds” during the conference general session. Bob’s presentation will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly of cloud computing for the U.S. Federal government, and review a number of compelling Federal cloud use-cases.

Tuesday, March 16th from 4:00 – 5:00 PM.
• Bob Lozano, Appistry founder and chief strategist, will be participating in a panel looking at “New Pricing Models: How Will They Impact ROI?” which brings together industry leaders to address cloud pricing and market system evolution and what it will mean for ROI.

Thursday, March 18th from 10:45 – 11:45 AM.
• Sam Charrington, vice president of product management and marketing at Appistry, will join industry thought leaders to discuss “Ubicomp is Here: Pervasive Connections, Cloud Computing, and Universal Interfaces” on a panel in the “Cloud Futures and Roadmaps” track.

If you are participating in the Cloud Connect event we hope you stop by booth 210 to learn more about Appistry and how to better understand the transformative impact of cloud computing on IT and business.

Use the code CNJRCC13 when you register to for a guaranteed 40% off your Expo Pass and an opportunity to attend the conference for Free!

For the 3rd installment of our webinar recap series, we dive into what the future holds for cloud computing. In particular, will look at the role of platform-as-a-service in the broader cloud ecosystem. In particular, will 2010 be “the year of PaaS?” Read on for more about why platform-level services will be hot in 2010, and who we felt would be the big winners this year as the focus shifts from the infrastructure to the platform

2010: The Year of Platform as a Service

Michael: 2010 is going to be the year of the platform layer. If we look back at the predictions in 2008 going into 2009, people were getting excited about cloud. People were talking very much about virtualization. People were talking very much about renting resources and tying them all together.

That was great, and we saw that come together in 2009, a lot of excitement out of Amazon and VMware with their various solutions for public and private clouds. A lot of users are coming. When we talk to our customers and various users around the country, I hear a lot of application developers come and say, “But wait how do I tie all of this together? What tools are there for me to take advantage of this new paradigm?” That’s really the core of this prediction.

The platform tools are there. We have our platform tools that assist developers to put together these large applications so they can focus on their value add. There are frameworks such as Hadoop where with just writing a couple of functions of code, you get this massive platform for churning through terabytes or petabytes of data across your infrastructure.
These are the tools. This is the next tier up on the cloud technology stack. This is what people are going to be looking for. I think it’s interesting that if you look back in 2009, you see this come. I see two big points that really drive this.

First of all, there was the VMware acquisition of SpringSource. VMware is still all about the private clouds for tying together your resources and being able to control them dynamically, but you could tell they saw that, to them, the VM is still just a black box that they manage.

They really don’t have the insight into what the application is doing, and they needed those tools to go one tier up. So, here they look at SpringSource. They have more control on runtimes. They have the Hyperic monitoring system to see what’s going on inside the VM, and they can control it at a tighter level.
We talked about standards for 2009. Here at the end of 2009, I’ve seen the first talk about not standards at the infrastructure layer, but standards at the platform layer, about how to try to keep these tools together. So it’s time. People need to move up that stack.

The masses of developers don’t want to be distributed computing experts. They want a tool set to assist them on top of this tremendous infrastructure we’ve built, and I really see it all coming together with another round of great tools for application developers to build upon.

Sam: So, this is almost a standard question that I’m starting to ask. Winners, losers who benefits from this shift? Who’s put out from this shift? What about the big guys?

Michael: Yeah. I get this question a lot. There are people who lock into just one technology stack, and those are going to be the losers here. There are those that have batch tools. There are those that think that cloud is just about virtualization. There are those that look at pure Scylla. Anybody who locks into just that single tier is going to be a loser here because it is the unification, and thereby extension, of a lot of these efforts that are really going to allow the winners to evolve.

I’ve been talking I was at a cloud camp just recently and developers were starting to ask me about, “I’m an expert in ESB; I’m an expert in operations management. What is this next tier? What is the paradigm shift? Because I don’t want to get left behind.” So that’s where the winners will separate themselves.

Those that are willing to take that slight shift and realize that building an app for the cloud is very much like building an old app, but not exactly like building an old app. Those are going to be the winners as we come forward here, through this shift.

Register for a free download of the full webinar here. After registering you will be able to watch the full event online, view the slides, download the audio, or even grab an iPhone-compatible version for your next flight.

Stay tuned for our next installment, “Data in the Cloud”. See you then!

Appistry added another impressive milestone to an already strong year by being named as a finalist in the GeoTec Innovator Awards.

Appistry has a longstanding history of supporting the GEOINT community. Our partnership with the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) has helped us contribute to the promotion of the geospatial intelligence tradecraft and building a stronger GEOINT Community across industry, academia, government, professional organizations and individual stakeholders.

Appistry customers like GeoEye, the NGA, and FedEx who rely on geographic data in their applications each day, have helped shape our company and allowed us to bring the benefits of cloud computing to the Federal sector.

About GeoTec

GeoTec Event 2010 is Canada’s premier geospatial technology conference. Now in its 24th year, the 2010 event continues the tradition of offering an exceptional program focusing on the latest trends in technology and applications.

The event takes place in mid-April in Toronto and Appistry is excited to be counted among the many worthy companies that will be attending and the few companies selected as a finalist for the Geo Tec Innovator Award.

Appistry’s Involvement

For GEOINT, Appistry has provided cloud computing long before it reached hot topic status. This includes work for the NGA, with industry solution providers AGI and GEOEYE, and systems integrators NJVC and Northrop Grumman. As a result, these organizations can deliver high quality imagery in less time and at lower cost utilizing Appistry CloudIQ platform.

We only hope to sustain this incredible momentum through 2010 and beyond and to spread the benefits of cloud computing in the enterprise community.

Vote for Appistry

To vote for Appistry and learn more about the GeoTec Innovators Award, visit the website here.

Last week we introduced a new series of blog posts in which we look back on our Appistry Predicts 2010 webinar and pull some of our most insightful conversations to share with our readers. For the 2nd installment of this series we will dive into the conversation of 2010 growing pains, a specific challenge that many cloud professionals expect to experience in the coming year and the how these challenges will pave a new road for cloud computing.

Cloud Growing Pains in 2010

Sam: I think that’s a great segue to the next prediction, which is yours, Bob. There’s certainly a lot of great things going on here, but, I get the sense you don’t think it’s going to be 100-percent rosy.

Bob: Well, I don’t think it can. I think there’s kind of three inevitabilities that we’ll see this year in a more apparent way. First, of course, is that the adoption is continuing and spreading out. And that’s not such an enormous insight, but I think it’s happening at a couple levels, right?

One is, with the enterprise adoptions we’ve been talking about, that, we’re seeing real guys, and that’s going to up the ante for the part that we’re talking about here, where we’re seeing lots of customers starting to actually put this into day to day practice, one way or another. And of course, at the personal lives, everybody’s impacted. But what does that mean? It means that when things fail which, itself, is inevitable it’s my second of the inevitabilities, it really hurts.

Now, that’s exacerbated by the fact that with the interest, with the hype, and just culturally, people who watch are a lot more inclined to be critics, right? So when there’s a failure, then everybody just goes crazy and just jumps up and down and almost celebrates it. Which, it’s unfortunate, but it isn’t necessarily all that meaningful, in a way.

Beyond the press, beyond the discussion, the pain and the failures will occur. The fact that everybody talks about it, so what? So there’s going to be things like the botnet, the much publicized. I mean, there’s going to be this constant litany of things. I mean, at one point, I had an interest, and probably took it up again every once in a while, of a blog post just highlighting some of the more crucial mistakes. Not to celebrate them, but to lead to, I think, the third inevitability, which is the adaptation to get better at it.

And it’s interesting because, when I think back to let’s pick kind of two different examples real quickly here the series of Twitter failures early on, and in fact they became so chronic that we were just kidding about it earlier, how these features come and go. And they’re better at it now, but the point is a lot of that was architectural. It wasn’t so much cloud; it was the application. And so that was a point where criticism really was helpful because people could look at it, adapt, and be better at it.

The underlying ones, where somebody breaks in through security or, like in the case of the Amazon EC2 outages last week, where there was a power failure in a data center and people who had instances only there were gone, well, I mean, that’s going to happen for the next 100 years. If your architecture doesn’t adapt, if you’re susceptible to failure in one place, well, that’s just the way it goes.

So I think those are the three things that we can see. The adoption continues hard. But when things fail, if we just ignore all the commotion and look at what’s underneath it, we can do better. And that will happen this year.

Sam: So, Bob, you’ve been a very strong proponent of taking different approaches at the software layer and not counting on the infrastructure existing. Do you think that cloud supports those ideas? Do you think that that catches on more? What’s the interplay between these two ideas?

Bob: That’s a great point. I think that for a lot of folks, when they first think about cloud, they think that anything out there, that’s fine, we don’t have to worry about it. But the reality is that, as you mentioned, if we don’t assume failure, then we will be vulnerable to things like the EC2 outage last week.
But the applications use that one as a specific example the applications that assume that things would break at the infrastructure layer, and it had a strong platform, or perhaps handcrafted it into their application to survive that in an elegant, reliable way, well, I mean, they’re the ones that are going to be, I think, the mainstream of cloud computing. If not this year, it’s certainly possible this year, but I think expectations will be set between this year, next year, and maybe the year after that, where it’s not OK to fail anymore.

We still, in many ways, give cloud apps a pass. It might be historical because of the early roots in search; if search didn’t work, you tried it again. But there’s no reason to allow that pass anymore. Infrastructure will fail, cloud or internal. Just deal with it at the platform, the application level.

Michael: Yeah, if I could piggyback on that. It is still early in understanding, from the technical point of view, the cloud architectures and how we as application developers need to put things together.

The accomplishments over the last few years are extreme. We have much to be excited about. But again, we’re learning. The building blocks are coming together. We’re running through the whole crucible of ideas of what fits and what doesn’t. We may stumble and trip from time to time, but each time, we come back better and better.

Twitter still has its problems, but it’s miles ahead of where it was originally. We see things happening, EC2 and Amazon Responds. Our customers, we see them learning about building cloud applications, and it doesn’t take them long to get those early concepts and build upon them. So I think…

Bob: Hey, you know, Michael, that reminds me of one of my favorite books, “To Err Is Human: The Role of Failure in Engineering Design.” It’s about that adaptation process. I think this year, that kicks in overtime in cloud world.

Michael: Yeah, it’s going to happen. We hear the stories, but it improves. It gets better, and by the end of 2010, we should see just absolutely stellar applications running with all of the cloud attributes that we’re looking for, the reliability, the scalability. You’re not going to know what really is running behind there with all of the pieces that we, as application developers, designers and such, are putting together for you.

Sam: So, quick, for anyone who wants to take it one of our audience members here asks if 2010 is going to be the trough of disillusionment in the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Michael: I just saw the Gartner Hype Cycle the other day. It caught cloud computing right at that top point, right before the trough.

Sam: Right before the trough.

Michael: I think, to a degree, that’s…

Bob: I don’t know. There’ll be people that get disillusioned, but those are people who don’t actually understand how to fix it, I guess. If you’re living off the fluff of the hype, and not seeing the substance of reality, then I think you fall in the trough. I think it’s also easy just to blow past it and move on.

Kevin: I think 2011 will be the…

[laughter]

Michael: Again, people might over-hype things too much, but there is so much value in this effort.

Register for a free download of the full webinar here. After registering you will be able to watch the full event online, view the slides, download the audio, or even grab an iPhone-compatible version for your next flight.

Stay tuned for our next installment, “The Role of the Platform Layer”. See you then!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that Bob and Eric had reached a major milestone for Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, having turned in their final edits. Well we just learned that the book’s cover is off to the printer, and well, I’ll take pretty much any opportunity to congratulate them on this herculean effort.

They’ve also received some great back-cover accolades from a nice cross-section of clouderati and industry, which I’ve included below. (You can also click on the images to enlarge.)

Congrats again, guys!

“A very timely and invaluable resource for CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects . . . extremely relevant information that will serve readers well now and far into the future.”
—Bob Flores, President and CEO Applicology Inc.; former CTO, Central Intelligence Agency

“The authors have done a great job in explaining the cloud concepts. They give historical and technical background to show that cloud computing is really an evolution of numerous technologies and business strategies. It is the combination of these that enables cloud and these new business strategies to happen. This makes the fuzziness of the concept come into focus. The ‘technical’ chapters show the CIO and technical architect a model for building your own strategy within the business and a path from concept to deploy- ment with governance and business models thrown in. Darn, I keep hoping for ‘the answer.’ Now my questions can dig into the real value for our enterprise and a strategy for moving forward. Great book!”
—Dave Ploch, CIO, Novus International

“‘Executive’s Guide’ is not a code-phrase for an introductory text, but a comprehensive guide for the CIO, IT decision-maker, or project leader. The authors, both entrepreneurs and pioneers in the field, speak from substantial real-world project experience. They introduce the topic and related technologies, highlight cloud drivers and strategy, address relationships to existing initiatives such as Service-Oriented Architectures, detail project phases in the implementation of and evolution to cloud-based enterprise architectures, and offer many reasoned insights along the way.”
—Joe Weinman, Strategy and Business Development, AT&T Business Solutions

“Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing is a crystal ball into the future of business.Not a technical treatise but an insightful explanation of how cloud computing can quickly deliver real business value. This book is an instruction manual on how to win business in this ‘born on the Web’ world.”
—Kevin L. Jackson, Engineering Fellow, NJVC, and author of Cloud Musings (kevinljackson.blogspot.com)

“There’s cloud computing for dummies and cloud computing for rocket scientists. This book is for the rest of us. Great book!”
—John Willis, VP of Services Opscode, Inc. JohnMWillis.com, co-host Redmonk’s IT Management Guys podcast

Appistry co-founders Bob Lozano and Michael Groner will be speaking this week at the St. Louis Innovation Camp event this week. The St. Louis Innovation Camp is a weekend event that focuses on entrepreneurship and company development in the St. Louis area. Marketers, developers, programmers and innovators from all different industries will be sharing their start-up secrets.

Mike, chief architect here at Appistry, will be speaking at 9:00 A.M. on Friday. His presentation will discuss bringing new and existing applications to production using cloud computing technologies. It will include an overview of the Appistry cloud computing technology stack and focus on using Appistry CloudIQ Platform to deliver highly-scalable applications and facilitate deployment.

Bob has two sessions at the event, which he’ll be presenting along with ITEN’s Jim Brasunas. On Saturday at 10:00 A.M., Bob and Jim will discuss “Managing Company Formulation,” focusing on the early and critical steps in developing a valuable company. Bob and Jim will take the stage again on Saturday at 11:00 A.M. to present “Issues of Growth and Evolution” which will help young businesses manage the difficult task of develop their brands and companies over time.

This should be an exciting event for all those involved and Appistry is happy to support the St. Louis start-up community and share our experiences with budding entrepreneurs. To learn more about the St. Louis Innovation Camp visit the website at www.stlinnovationcamp.com.

Interested in joining us at the event? Well, there is still time! Register here.

If you listened to our annual Appistry Predicts roundtable, you heard Appistry’s Kevin Haar, Sam Charrington, Bob Lozano and Michael Groner give their two cents on some of the key issues the cloud computing community will face in 2010. We had some great discussions sparked by lively audience interaction and Tweeted questions that we just couldn’t keep in the vaults.

For all those who missed the webinar or are keen on the written word, we had the session transcribed and will be featuring our discussions on this blog in a 5-post series. Over the next few weeks will be sharing some of our most insightful conversations on the future of cloud in the enterprise. Topics discussed will include: “Cloud and the Economy,” “Cloud Growing Pains in 2010,” “The Role of the Platform Layer,” “Data in the Cloud” and “A Word from the Audience.

Cloud and the Economy

Sam:  Let’s jump into the predictions for 2010. The first is yours, Kevin. You get an opportunity here to make up for the HP one. And it’s really all about where do you think market’s going, the big picture. Talk about that for us.

Kevin:  Yeah. And this one will be hard enough to prove one way or the other next year, so I’ll be able to declare victory.

Kevin:  But I think, even if the economy just shows modest signs of life, I think that in 2010, we’re going to see some pretty interesting dynamics in the cloud‑computing space. And that’s especially true, I think, given our focus on the enterprise and the Fortune 1000 environments, where I think you’ll see a lot of movement.

The economy has really caused people to hunker down for the last couple of years, and the focus has really been on eliminating costs. And that’s been more so finding any way to throw costs overboard, anything that’s not nailed down. It’s not really been in terms of major shifts in technology for the enterprise. And I think, as the economy improves just a little bit, that’s going to start to change, as I think people look for ways to see more benefits by making some more fundamental shifts to lower costs.

And you would think that more buyers would typically drive prices up. But I don’t think that’s true in a market that’s commodity‑driven and capital‑intense, like the infrastructure‑as‑a‑service marketplace. In that marketplace in particular, I think you’re going to continue to see, it’s the race to zero relative to the CPU hour, and more activity’s going to really increase that pace, as people try to work hard to fight for market share. Because, in the end, what’s going to drive that business is people capturing market share and capturing just customers.

I think there’s also an issue relative to software and support charges, because I think customers in 2010 are going to get more cloud‑savvy, and I think they’re going to push for pricing to be more attentive to real usage. And that’s where I think that the idea of perpetual licenses, or even annual subscription licenses and annual support, or even enterprise licenses, those concepts will probably still hold.

But I think, as you peel away the onion on that pricing, that people are going to have to be a lot more sensitive to what has become the real time constant, which is the hour. Maybe it’s the minute. Maybe it’s the week. But it’s a much shorter time frame, and I think people want to understand how they’re getting benefits for these acquisitions relative to usage hours.

Sam:  So, one of the things you hear about a lot in cloud, that in some ways is supported by this whole race to zero, is the idea that in the end, at least when we’re talking about public cloud, the world kind of consolidates to a handful of public cloud providers. And the list is usually Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and the last one or two are usually occupied by whoever’s making the claim, right? They put themselves in that list of survivors. Do you see that happening? Or what’s your picture of reality there?

Kevin:  I think, for the next 10 to 20 years, to me that’s kind of akin to the feeling in the mid to late ’80s, early ’90s, that AOL would dominate the Internet, right?

Sam:  [laughs]

Bob:  Well, that’s one that you can be right on that it didn’t happen, right?

Kevin:  Yeah. And I predicted that in 1999.

Kevin:  But anyway. Yeah, I just don’t see that happening. And it may happen for certain application types, so you may see it in certain verticals. But, overall, I think that that general trend or that general belief in the marketplace is misplaced, to be polite.

Sam:  So who do you think wins here? Who do you think loses? Certainly, some of the bigger, more established vendors, how are they even going to adjust to this whole new pricing notion?

Kevin:  When you look at software vendors in particular, and you look at the way the mindset will shift because of cloud computing, I think it’s a pretty tough transition for software suppliers.

So, whether you’re selling support, subscriptions, perpetual licenses, I just think that when you get to the point where customers are thinking about being able to do cloud bursting or have hybrid clouds and being able to, as some of our customers are doing, jumping out and grabbing 900 cores of processing power for a half a day and then leaving it alone, that just takes a different kind of pricing model. And I think it’s going to be very difficult for the software industry to figure out exactly how to deal with that.

Register for a free download of the full webinar here. After registering you will be able to watch the full event online, view the slides, download the audio, or even grab an iPhone-compatible version for your next flight.

Stay tuned for our next installment, “Cloud Growing Pains in 2010.” See you then!

Earlier this week, an article I wrote titled “Don’t Pass on PaaS in 2010” was published by eBizQ. The article provides an overview of PaaS for IT practitioners with particular emphasis on addressing the “so what?” question. In a follow-up blog post, I offered up the four PaaS characteristics outlined in the article as the “Essential Characteristics of Platform-as-a-Service.”

Here on the Appistry Blog, I’d like to walk through these PaaS characteristics and discuss how they align with the features of Appistry CloudIQ Platform. We’ll start that in a future post. For now, I present the Essential Characteristics themselves.

The Essential Characteristics of PaaS

1. Runtime Framework: This is the “software stack” aspect of PaaS, and perhaps the aspect that comes first to mind for most people. The PaaS runtime framework executes end-user code according to policies set by the application owner and cloud provider. PaaS runtime frameworks come in many flavors, some based on traditional application runtimes, others based on 4GL and visual programming concepts, and some with pluggable support for multiple application runtimes.
2. Abstraction: Platform-oriented cloud platforms are distinguished by the higher level of abstraction they provide. With IaaS, the focus is on delivering to users “raw” access to physical or virtual infrastructure. In contrast, with PaaS, the focus is on the applications that the cloud must support. Whereas an IaaS cloud gives the user a bunch of virtual machines that must be configured and to which application components must be deployed, a PaaS cloud provides the user a way to deploy her applications into a seemingly limitless pool of computing resources, eliminating the complexity of deployment and infrastructure configuration.
3. Automation: A PaaS environment is a bit like a swan on a pond — graceful and elegant above the water, and paddling its little legs off below the water. The aforementioned abstraction provides the elegant user experience “above the water,” while high levels of automation provide the “paddling” beneath the surface. PaaS environments automate the process of deploying applications to infrastructure, configuring application components, provisioning and configuring supporting technology like load balancers and databases, and managing system change based on policies set by the user.
   While IaaS is known for its ability to shift capital costs to operational costs through outsourcing, only PaaS is able to slash costs across the development, deployment and management aspects of the application lifecycle.
4. Cloud Services: PaaS offerings provide developers and architects with services and APIs that help simplify the job of delivering elastically scalable, highly available cloud applications. These cloud services provide a wide variety of capabilities, and in many instances are key differentiators among competing PaaS offerings.
   Examples of cloud services include services and APIs for distributed caching, queuing and messaging, workload management, file and data storage, user identity, analytics, and more. By providing built-in cloud services, platform offerings eliminate the need to integrate many disparate components and decrease time-to-market for applications on the platform.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these characteristics, and your experiences putting them into practice.

Wondering why organizations like FedEx and the U.S. Government have chosen to establish private cloud computing environments to support mission-critical applications? Curious about Appistry CloudIQ Platform and the role it plays in managing these environments and cloud-enabling applications?

Well, look no further. We invite you to check out the new Appistry video, “Appistry CloudIQ Platform and the Enterprise Private Cloud!”

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Congratulations to Eric Marks and the team at AgilePath, who were  just awarded a 2010 Kinetic Process Innovation (KPI) Award in the IT Architecture category. The KPI Award is granted to the firm whose technology and approach has made a significant difference in supporting business growth and achievement for their customers.

AgilePath was specifically recognized for “for its innovation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services and work with Appistry, Inc. to support cloud computing.” Sweet!

AgilePath is a management consulting and systems integration firm whose pioneering work in service-oriented architecture (SOA) is well recognized. Appistry and AgilePath first announced a partnership last year, with a goal of allowing joint customers to leverage their SOA investments and transition to cloud computing via a cloud computing modeling framework that will result in robust, cloud-based deployment options powered by Appistry. (Our companies had been working together for some time prior to the formal announcement.)

In addition, Appistry founder and chief strategist Bob Lozano, and AgilePath founder and CEO Eric Marks are collaborating on the forthcoming Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing, to be published by Wiley in Q2 of this year. In fact, Bob and Eric just completed their final milestone for the book, and it’s officially on its way through the production process.

Executive’s Guide to Cloud Computing Webinar

I hosted a great round-table discussion featuring Bob and Eric last fall.

We touched on many of the topics covered in their book, such as how to achieve the lower costs, greater scalability and agility that  make cloud a fiscal and technological imperative; the relationship between cloud computing, SOA, web services, and other relevant IT initiatives; and the strategic implications of cloud computing on the enterprise.

The recording is available on-line, and I encourage you to check it out.