Traditional performance monitoring tools may be fine for keeping tabs on what’s happening in house, but not so great at what’s happening outside.  At least that’s the thinking behind ThousandEyes, a San Francisco startup emerging from stealth Wednesday at GigaOM Structure.  Built from the ground up to attack this distributed performance monitoring problem, he claimed ThousandEyes does a better job than older tools. In that camp, it competes with offerings from IBM/Tivoli, CA, HP, and NetScout.

ThousandEyes’ says it can look at all your internal application stacks but the rest of infrastructure and also push beyond all that to check out the internet path between your site and your SaaS providers and even look into their stacks to see if the problem originates there, ThousandEyes co-founder and CEO Mohit Lad said in a recent interview. Of course that means ThousandEyes has to sell into two constituencies, the end-user company and the major SaaS providers.

The company is already doing that, Ladsaid. Several of the top SaaS providers, including “a very large” but unnamed CRM vendor are aboard, he said. Other customers include Evernote, Priceline, ServiceNow, Twitter, Zendesk and Zynga plus some Fortune 500 companies. ThousandEyes also just garnered $5.5 million from Sequoia Capital and angel investors to keep building out its service.

There are two delivery models.  Public agents for use by cloud providers, banks and other online sites to monitor their own infrastructure are priced per test run. Private agents, for use by  enterprises in their branch offices, cost a flat fee per month and can run as many tests as capacity allows.

To foster cooperation rather than finger pointing between internal IT staff and SaaS vendors, ThousandEyes also makes it easy for an admin to take a snapshot of what he or she is seeing on the console and share that with the vendor personnel via a shared URL. A Twitter-like message thread also lets different teams keep track of who’s doing what about the issue.

Mohit and his  co-founder and CTO Ricardo Oliveira were both Ph.D’s in computer science at UCLA.

It seems clear that companies will keep using more off-site SaaS services along with their own internal applications so tools that can troubleshoot both sets of IT should be attractive going forward.

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Every tech vendor on the planet is now officially targeting the Chief Marketing Officer with IT products and otherwise doing everything in its power to make it easy for marketing departments to buy its stuff. That must be kind of hard for the person who was the traditional gatekeeper for the IT strategy and budget.

Now IBM is getting in on the act, offering a new marketplace of 100 SaaS applications divvied up into categories for different cadres of IT buyers. And (IBM being IBM) that list is extensive, leading off with the CMO but also including sales and eCommerce leaders; customer care and support executives; Chief Procurement Officers; Chief Supply Chain Officers; General Counsel; Chief Financial Officers; Chief Human Resource Officers. Oh yes, and then Chief Information Officers.

This list speaks to a certain amount of title inflation: I was surprised not to see Chief Innovation Officer, one of the newer C-level buzzword bingo titles on that list, but give it time.

Target: Chief Marketing Officer

IBM’s move to make its SaaS apps more easily found and purchased by CMOs comes a few weeks after Salesforce.com dropped a cool $2.5 billion on ExactTarget, an email marketing company that also focuses on marketing execs. Just this morning, SendGrid, which traditionally sells to developers of web applications, launched an email tool for marketing pros that will compete with MailChimp. Marketo  last week launched its first product since its IPO, which uses machine learning to tailor email pitches according to customer activity.

And don’t forget that Oracle bought Eloqua, a marketing automation company, for nearly $900 million in December. NetSuite got into marketing automation early, having purchased a couple professional services companies, Retail Anywhere, Order Motion, and Element Fusion over the past few years and is now touting a big customer win with Williams Sonoma. Clearly there’s a trend here.

Is the CMO really in charge of IT? Should he or she be?

But all this “buying-power-goes-to-the-CMO” talk, which we covered back in September, still smacks of a fad to me. Someone at the customer organization needs to have a holistic picture of what’s being bought and deployed if only to make sure that the company gets the best volume discount for any SaaS service used.  That person may not be the CIO but it better be someone with a firm grasp not only of technology per se, but a working knowledge of service level agreements and compliance issues. I doubt that most CMOs want to take that on, but I could be wrong and I’m sure you’ll let me know.

At the MIT CIO Symposium last month, Michael Relich, EVP and CIO of Guess Inc., said that in a perfect universe “CMOs and CIOs should be best friends,” because CMOs need data and to get it they need point-of-sale and e-commerce systems that are all about IT. But when asked if CMOs will get more IT budget than CIOs, Relich said: “Over my dead body.”

And that brings me to Structure this week where GigaOM will host a panel by CIOs on their role in the modern IT organization. I’ll be sure to ask them what they think of this marketing automation extravaganza and the purported rise of the CMO.

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There has been a free tier of the AWS service for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running Amazon Linux or other “unpaid” versions of Linux for some time, but SUSE and Red Hat did not fall into that category. Now Red Hat Linux, which has become the Linux standard for most corporations, is part of the free tier. Users can get 750 hours of free Red Hat usage, but here’s some fine print: 

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers, and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. You will not be eligible for the Offer if you or your organization create(s) more than one account to receive additional benefits under the Offer or if the new account is included in Consolidated Billing. You will be charged standard rates for use of AWS services if we determine that you are not eligible for the Offer.

It will be interesting to see if this move shifts the composition of operating system share on EC2. According to the Cloud Market, Ubuntu makes up over half of all AMIs running in AWS. “Other” Linux,which is presumably Amazon or other unpaid Linux, is at 23.2 percent; Windows at 8.4 percent and then there’s Red Hat at 5 percent (see chart).

This just the latest example of cloud coopetition. Red Hat is working on its own flavor of an OpenStack cloud, still in preview but likely to become generally available this week at the Red Hat Summit. It is tailored for enterprise users and would challenge AWS for those the enterprise workloads that Amazon so clearly wants.

There may be a micro battle raging between the various flavors of Linux but the war lies ahead  as companies from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, HP and Red Hat fight to make their respective clouds the destination for corporate workloads.

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Dell Cloud for U.S. Government builds on Red Hat’s OpenStack implementation and Dell’s platform-as-a-service component will be based on Red Hat’s OpenShift. That choice of OpenStack as basis is interesting because Dell recently nixed plans to offer an OpenStack-based public cloud but also said its private cloud offerings would still draw upon the OpenStack open-source stack. For the record, Red Hat’s OpenStack is technically still in preview although it’s likely that general availability will be announced this week at its Red Hat Summit.  OpenShift became generally available yesterday.

The importance of security clearances

The vendor is working to attain FedRAMP security certification for its platform. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program accreditation makes it easier for a company to deploy its technology across agencies and organizations without having to repeat a lot of the processes. Autonomic Resources and CGI Federal were the first vendors to get the FedRAMP nod. Amazon’s GovCloud made the grade in May and Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed got the nod last week. More than a dozen providers are expected to clear the FedRAMP hurdle by year’s end with many more expected to do so by 2014 when FedRAMP certification becomes mandatory.

These Dell clouds were designed to meet specific requirements for government work, a company spokesman said. There will be a FedRAMP-grade multitenant cloud on the docket as well as an implementation that meets Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements for protecting data security — an interesting concept at a time when the NSA’s PRISM surveillance scandal roils around us.

Still, there’s a ton of money at stake — the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that a quarter of the total $80 billion government IT budget is moving to the cloud. That, and the fact that every legacy IT provider and a raft of newer cloud companies are all angling for action, means the competition for this business will be fierce.

Photo courtesy of Flicker user chucka_nc

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Coopetition run amuck?

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

This is all interesting because not all that long ago, HP was Oracle’s bestie in x86 servers . Of course that was before HP fired Mark Hurd for cheating on expense accounts and inappropriate interaction with a female contractor and before Larry Ellison blasted HP very publicly for doing so, and HP sued Mark Hurd and … well you get the picture.

Now, before it got into the server — er engineered systems —  business by virtue of buying Sun Microsystems for $7.5 billion in 2010, Oracle courted most of the major hardware guys with the exception of archrival IBM. HP CEOs Carlie Fiorina then Mark Hurd and Michael Dell, typically keynoted at Oracle OpenWorld, for example, touting their respective servers as the best possible hardware to run Oracle databases and applications.

As an enterprise software company, Oracle needed good relationships with server companies at least in part to compete better with IBM which offered servers and databases. In fact, the very first Oracle Exadata engineered system, which came out before the Sun deal, was an HP box. But  with its ownership of Sun and its server lineup, relationships with other hardware vendors got more complicated.

As one Dell partner at last week’s confab told CRN’s Joe Kovar: ”The last thing I ever expected at this event was to see Mark Hurd’s face.” I mean, come on:  A customer buying a Dell box running a raft of Oracle software isn’t likely to buy an Oracle engineered system. And, as I’ve reported for a while, Oracle hasn’t exactly hit the cover off the ball selling hardware – hardware revenues have headed south since the Sun acquisition — although Oracle would argue that the hardware it does sell is highly profitable.

Anecdotal evidence is that most people who buy Exa-boxes are doing so at discount and are not necessarily loading up those boxes with new Oracle software but consolidating what the software they already own on new hardware. Anyway, my thesis is that if Oracle truly were happy with its hardware sales and profitability it wouldn’t be snuggling up to Dell.

NSA spying, fallout for cloud computing adoption?

For folks worried about putting private information on consumer oriented services  like Facebook  clearly had more reason to worry this week as news broke about the U.S. National Security Agency’s monitoring of internet and cell phone data. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram did a great job updating this story all week  and David Meyer outlined the huge ramifications this could have in Europe where data privacy is a key concern.

You’ve got to wonder if this will have a chilling effect on  various “cloud first” initiatives. Earlier this week, I wrote that Amazon Web Services might deploy ”mini me” GovClouds outside the U.S. for workloads that government agencies — or even businesses  –  would prefer to keep in-country.  Since posting that I’ve had several emails from people who would know that AWS is, in fact, doing this.

Given that AWS,  one of the few internet powers not named in the NSA story — is U.S.-based, could there be pushback from other countries that otherwise would consider an Amazon GovCloud implementation?

Meanwhile, Amazon finally acknowledged the existence of a “secret” contract to build a private cloud for the CIA but it took IBM to get it out of them. IBM contested the contract award to the General Accountability Office which ruled in IBM’s favor and recommended a “re-do” of the process. Kudos to Federal Computer Week reporter Frank Konkel for keeping ahead of this story.

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IBM, which has a large government-contracting business, charged that the CIA improperly awarded the deal to Amazon Web Services  by failing to evaluate all the pricing scenarios. Long story short, the GAO told the CIA to re-open the bid and evaluate comparable offerings for a contract valued at up to $600 million over four years for its initial period.

If you like the longer version, here’s the e-mailed statement by Ralph White, GAO’s managing associate general counsel for procurement law:

“On June 6, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) sustained, or upheld, portions of a protest filed by IBM U.S. Federal, of Bethesda, Maryland, challenging the award of an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to Amazon Web Services, Inc., of Seattle, Washington.  The challenged contract, awarded under request for proposals No. 2012-12041000001, provides for commercially-managed cloud computing services for the intelligence community.

The CIA doesn’t have to follow the GAO recommendation but in general, most federal agencies do so.

Update: Responding to an earlier request for comment, an AWS spokesman said via email:

“Providing true cloud computing services to the intelligence community requires a transformative approach with superior technology.  The CIA selected AWS based on its superior technological platform which will allow the Agency to rapidly innovate while delivering the confidence and security assurance needed for mission-critical systems. The Agency conducted a very detailed, thorough procurement that took many months to award.  We look forward to a fast resolution of the two issues raised by the GAO so the Agency can move forward with this important contract.”.

Stakes are high for both companies. IBM has a large government sector business it must protect and it wants prove that it’s own mettle in cloud computing. Amazon is trying to prove that it’s technology passes muster for sensitive data of all kinds, and a CIA contract would show that it’s ready for prime time.

Theoretically, the next step will be the re-opening of the bid process but longer term this could be just the first skirmish in a long running battle as AWS and legacy IT vendors square off for the same workloads.

This story was updated at 4:23 PDT with AWS comment.

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Here’s one I think the company will pursue, if it’s not doing it already. In the U.S., Amazon’s GovCloud is a separate region that complies with regulations above and beyond what other regions do so that federal, state and government agencies can use it. Given data privacy concerns in Europe and some other regions, it would be fruitful for Amazon to think about setting up analogous secure clouds outside the U.S.

Currently, the AWS Europe region runs out of Dublin, but if the German or Swiss or French governments (or businesses in those countries) face legal restrictions or even just prefer to deploy locally, Amazon could set up servers inside secure co-location facilities to  offer secure GovCloud-like services for a premium price.

Does an Amazon Mini-Me makes sense?

Unconfirmed reports — which I believe to be true — that AWS is building what amounts to a private cloud version of its service for the CIA are relevant here. If it is doing that, the company is open to different deployment models. There’ s nothing to keep it from dropping a containerized mini-AWS into a secure data center for a customer willing to pay the freight which includes real-estate, power and physical security costs. Some in the industry say AWS is already deploy “mini regions” like this on the down-low for select customers.

Right now, I should note that AWS had no comment on this story which is, after all largely speculation. But others who know data center technology and customer requirements agree this game plan makes sense. “There are lots of government workloads out there that require special handling — to protect citizen information etc. There’s a market for this,” said David Ohara, GigaOM Pro analyst and founder of Greenm3.

Shlomo Swidler, president of cloud consultancy Orchestratus, agreed. ”Data protection laws are not the only data regulations that government entities need to follow,” Swidler said via email. “Local regulations covering governments themselves vary by country so building in-country clouds, AWS would need to add additional capabilities to attract those .gov workloads.”

On the flip side, as Swidler notes, AWS is extremely market driven and would target countries with the largest public sectors.

Swidler took public GDP numbers and correlated them to available figures for the size of the public sector as a percentage of a GDP and found that Germany , France, the U.K. and Italy would be the most attractive markets — although he acknowledged that the most recent numbers available were from 2007 — which means they don’t factor in the recent economic crisis.

Anyway, AWS ain’t talking so we are free to speculate — and to ask Amazon CTO Werner Vogels about this at GigaOM’s Structure in two weeks. In the meantime, what do you think? Use comments to say whether you think mini GovClouds make sense.

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At its core, the new standard — which encompasses the MongoDB API, data representation (BSON), query language and wire protocol — appears to be all about establishing a way for mobile and other next-generation applications to connect with enterprise database systems such as IBM’s popular DB2 database and its WebSphere eXtreme Scale data grid. MongoDB is already immensely popular among web and mobile developers who must deal with semi- and unstructured data, but its lack of transactional integrity (among other things) means MongoDB isn’t often deployed for “mission-critical” applications that require ACID compliance and consistent performance.

In theory, the new standards would MongoDB-based applications easily and securely access mission-critical database systems. This could usher in a new wave of flexible applications that add significant value by spanning multiple data systems. According to a press release, “Customers can begin to use these new features later this summer by pairing eXtreme Scale with MongoDB, and by running their MongoDB applications on DB2 directly.”

The companies are also seeking participation from other parties interested in developing standard methods for interacting with MongoDB.

However, there’s a bigger shift at play here than the development of a new database standard, and it has everything to do with IBM’s planned acquisition of cloud provider SoftLayer, also announced on Tuesday. If IBM wants to remain relevant as server sales and application platforms move to the cloud, it has to embrace the new business and application-development models that come along with cloud computing. IBM’s stable of enterprise developers might not be deploying mobile apps on Parse or Google any time soon, but they will look for alternative platforms if IBM doesn’t at least try to keep up with a changing landscape.

Coincidentally, SoftLayer and 10gen already have a strong partnership around hosting MongoDB applications in the cloud.

If IBM is still an IT kingmaker, that bodes very well for MongoDB, as well as for the OpenStack cloud computing platform that IBM is also backing. If IBM’s influence in this realm is slipping, though, one could argue that IBM needs MongoDB and OpenStack more than they need it.

I am awaiting comment from IBM and/or 10gen for more details on the scope of their partnership and this standard, and will update when I hear more.

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It would be in IBM’s best interest to keep things simple and consistent for existing customers — it could make IBM look like it cares — but it’s hard to say if that will happen down the line. Complications could stem from the integration of SoftLayer into IBM. Asking users to migrate workloads could pose lots of problems — or the shift could mean little more than administrative tweaks.

David Mytton, CEO of SoftLayer customer Server Density and one of our Cloud Trailblazers for GigaOM’s Structure Conference later this month, wonders how things will turn out in the long term.

I’d hope they’re planning to use the Softlayer infrastructure to offer/host their own cloud services and in that case, we probably wouldn’t see any change. But given that SL will exist under the Cloud Services Division rather than an entirely separate entity (e.g. Tumblr or Youtube) and it’s not just being run within IBM but being combined with their existing SmartCloud into a global platform, that suggests changes might be afoot.

If Mytton doesn’t like the direction IBM chooses to go in, that’s all right — his company pays by the month and could relocate to another cloud provider.

Derek Schoettle, CEO of Cloudant, a SoftLayer (and Rackspace, Joyent and Amazon Web Services) customer, is more bullish on the deal. He thinks that migration “is going to be smooth sailing” and that good things are in store for SoftLayer customers, from support to services. Indeed, it looks like IBM’s backing of SoftLayer will give current SoftLayer customers access to a larger ecosystem of services and partners to work with, including IBM Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) programs.

Now that IBM is taking greater steps to provide rich cloud services, more enterprises will be more inclined to jump on board, Schoettle said. It’s important for IBM to do this, with enterprises going more toward cloud computing, particularly onto Amazon Web Services. And Google’s ramping up can’t be good news, either. Competitive pressure is real, Schoettle said. “They (IBM) want to become a dominant player, because I don’t think they believe in third. They want to be first or second.” That won’t be easy, however.

The statement IBM issued announcing the deal notes that SoftLayer in recent months has taken on many gaming companies “migrating from commodity cloud platforms because of problems with cost, latency, availability and raw performance.” Surely IBM wouldn’t want to disappoint those customers by rolling out new prices or changing performance characteristics, but no one can say whether this will happen when SoftLayer gets moved into IBM’s Cloud Services division.

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Increasingly, IBM is not just competing with age-old hardware and software rivals like Oracle and HP, but also with Amazon. And, going forward, IBM will butt heads more with Google and Microsoft, which have staked big claims in public cloud infrastructure.

Armonk, we have a problem

IBM’s issue: It says it has a public cloud presence in SmartCloud but most of the world doesn’t know about it. Granted, IBM can sell SmartCloud to its existing (and large) customer base of Fortune 500 companies, but if it wants to be relevant at all to newer, nimbler and more innovative customer accounts, it needed to do something. And, despite IBM’s claims to the contrary, many of those big existing enterprise customers are also either thinking about or actually putting more of their work on AWS. As a recent Morgan Stanley report put it, AWS is a very real threat to IBM and the rest of the legacy IT superstars.

IBM says its current SmartCloud business — without SoftLayer — was expected to generate $7 billion in revenue in 18 months. Not too shabby on the surface, but I would bet that number derives from a melange of IBM hardware, software and services that others might not really consider “cloud” at all. Softlayer is privately held and the most recent available numbers had it reporting total sales of about $335 million for its 2011 fiscal year.

Dennis Quan, IBM’s vice president of SmartCloud, told me the plan is to build a “compelling IaaS layer that leverages IBM strengths in open standard-based private cloud, enterprise workloads and use of Openstack married with the speed and scale of what SoftLayer has today.”

To non-IBMers, this sounds like a matter of glomming together at least two disparate sets of technology. A Frankencloud of sorts.

No question, IBM had to move to shore up SmartCloud. A former IBM executive, who did not want to be named, told me that the underlying SmartCloud code is a nightmare mish mash of aging technology from IBM’s past. It could not compete with what Amazon’s AWS offers. As a result, he said, IBM started looking seriously at cloud acquisitions to remedy that situation. Both SoftLayer and Rackspace were on the list of potential targets.

There are lots of questions around the new IBM Global Cloud Services unit that will combine SmartCloud and SoftLayer efforts, as commenters to our earlier story pointed out:

1. SoftLayer caters to younger, smaller, cooler companies — game makers, database-as-a-service companies including Slideshare, Kixeye, SendGrid and Cloudant. IBM SmartCloud customers tend to be, well existing IBM customers — enterprises. Will culture shock result?
2. IBM has been a loud proponent of OpenStack since joining the OpenStack Foundation last year. SoftLayer offers an OpenStack Swift-based storage option but has strong allegiances with Citrix, which backs the CloudStack open source effort. So what happens there?
3. Will the new division start building or acquiring additional new services to compete with AWS and to attempt to lock customers in, as AWS does with its higher-level services?

Is it too late?

IBM said it will continue to support SoftLayer’s private, public cloud and bare-metal infrastructure options — which could appeal to enterprise customers who need more than “four different VM sizes” on a list of resources, as Erich Clementi, SVP, IBM Global Technology Service put it on a conference call on Tuesday.

Update: Lydia Leong, Gartner research vice president, said SoftLayer is a good opportunistic buy for IBM.  SoftLayer “offers dedicated hosting systems that IBM does not and is highly automated, highly agile, cost-conscious and fast. It takes credit cards and is SMB centric so there’s not a lot of product overlap with IBM,” she told me after IBM’s conference call. 

IBM is a big, important company, but its ability to turn out innovative  stuff has been constrained by a hairball of legacy technologies. The question now is whether it will take what is good about SoftLayer and infuse that into the rest of the IBM cloud (one hopes!) or muddies what is great about SoftLayer. And, to IBM’s point, we are still early in the cloud adoption cycle and the stakes are huge.

Gartner says the market for public cloud services will grow 18.5 percent to $131 billion in this year from $111 billion in 2012. That’s a big opportunity and IBM is right to try to accelerate its growth there. The question is whether Amazon’s head start and early domination of this market means IBM will be an also-ran.

SoftLayer CTO Duke Skarda will be on hand to talk about cloud adoption and the changing landscape at GigaOM’s Structure conference later this month.

This story was updated at 12:31 p.m. PDT with Gartner comment.

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