Unisys, the IT services company, today became the latest with a set of products aimed at helping customers create their own internal clouds. And in a month it will offer a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service product that will deliver computing and storage on demand and on a per-instance basis. Like many of the traditional IT vendors, Unisys is investing in a hybrid cloud strategy, which will involve customers revamping their own data centers through heavy virtualization to create an on-demand environment for IT workloads, while Unisys provides a pool of compute resources that a customer can dip into when needed.

To distinguish its offerings from those of other vendors such as  Sun Microsystems, IBM or Microsoft, Unisys is pitching security. CSC says it is doing the same thing, although it will be a while before we see widespread product deployments from many of these vendors. Continue »

Last week, we hosted our second annual day-long infrastructure conference, Structure 09, in San Francisco. The sold-out event brought together some of the industry’s leading minds to discuss the issues surrounding web infrastructure. If Structure 08 was about the what and why of cloud computing, Structure 09 not only looked at the progress made over the last 12 months, but also focused on use cases and the methods of improving the fast-evolving cloud computing paradigm. The increased presence of the who’s who of the technology industry — IBM, HP, Microsoft, EMC and Akamai — is a sign that the cloud is no longer a mere curiosity. You can also read the complete wrap-up of the conference and its key takeaways over on our subscription-only service, GigaOM Pro.

And while Structure 09 was crammed with incredibly insightful moments, the participants made sure things never got too intense. Marc Benioff, the CEO of SalesForce.com, mocked the Zen-like utterings of his mentor, Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of Oracle. He also drew hearty laughs from the audience when he labeled Azure, Microsoft’s cloud effort, “AZune.” Zune is the much-vaunted digital music player Microsoft launched to compete with Apple’s iPod, though it has failed to unseat the iPod from its perch just yet. Continue »

IBM announced it would begin offering cloud computing infrastructure to large companies just two weeks ago. Willy Chiu, VP of IBM’s Cloud Labs, talked briefly about IBM’s move to cloud computing.

Chiu, who started working with IBM’s cloud computing team three years ago, said IBM has made a major investment in its cloud push. IBM took a startup approach and let its employees incubate the company’s cloud technology. Chiu led IBM’s Blue Cloud project and talked about the success of the company’s recent collaboration with various international clients in Vietnam, South Africa, China and Qatar. He said cloud computing provides a way for companies to efficiently serve clients even when they lack resources and skilled employees.

Chiu said its clients’ reaction to its IBM CloudBurst product (a pre-integrated set of hardware, storage, virtualization and networking) has been positive and clients are stunned that it can install in just one hour. However, Chiu acknowledged that businesses will not it adopt its cloud computing services overnight.

Video of the mininote is here:

Photo by James Duncan Davidson.

Which venture capital firms are “eating their own dog food” and consuming cloud services, asked Paul Kedrosky of a panel of VCs who invest in web infrastructure. You can just wave your hands if you’re running your firm on the cloud, he said. Let’s just say the hands did not go flying up. Nary a panelist would admit they are not using products from good old Microsoft.

“It’s a function of the age of the partner in the firm,” offered Peter Fenton of Benchmark. The issue is, IT is always afraid losing control and not being able to provision and manage, said Ping Li of Accel.

What the VCs did agree on is that they see opportunity to invest in infrastructure companies, especially — and here’s the kicker — if they’re not capital intensive. So in essence, most of them want to invest in companies that run on top of Amazon.

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SAP, not exactly an early cloud adopter, thinks cloud computing will factor significantly into large-scale computing services, said SAP CTO Vishal Sikka in conversation with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham at the Structure 09 conference in San Francisco today. But that doesn’t mean enterprise services of the future will be any simpler, said Sikka. Continue »

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff sat down with Om during this afternoon’s keynote to talk about his company’s success and how cloud computing technology is socially impacting the world. To start, Benioff joked about how Oracle CEO Larry Ellison shifted his perspective on cloud computing. Ellison “said something very zen” during Oracle’s earnings call earlier this week, Benioff said.

But Ellison’s view on cloud computing isn’t the only thing that’s changed. With the rise of Twitter, Benioff said, more customers are demanding the ability to “make and develop in real-time,” and companies should be prepared to deliver on that demand. He warned that companies that don’t will “not be tolerated by a customer much longer.” Continue »

Faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous bandwidth has spawned a decade of new applications that depend on it as a platform: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Hulu. The bigger pipes, the richer the application. What will higher bandwidth speeds, wider-reaching networks and cheaper access to connections produce in another decade? Well, if the panel made up by service providers and infrastructure gear makers at Structure knew for sure, they’d be on their way to producing the next Google. But a decade of bandwidth growth “will change the world another time,” said Kenneth Duda, VP Software Engineering Arista Networks. “We cant even imagine the possibilities,” said Tobias Ford, Assistant VP of IT AT&T, but suggested possibly bandwidth-needy applications like telepresence and telemedicine.

In a decade, the panelists, and members of the audience, said they hope that the bandwidth discussion moves away from focusing on speed — basically the speed is so high it’s no longer an issue — and moves towards the user interface and applications. In that world, when as much bandwidth as possible is readily and instantly available, service providers could start offering “broadband as a service.” David Yen, EVP and GM of the Data Center Business Group, Juniper Networks, thinks broadband as a service is on its way as service providers face a challenging market of escalating traffic and flat sales. Service providers need to offer more services to recoup the investment of the network buildout, said Yen, and “broadband as a service” can provide that. As soon as it does get here it will be “enormously valuable,” noted AT&T’s Ford.
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