In the mean time, their customers are flocking to Amazon for the real deal, he said at GigaOM’s Structure Europe Tuesday morning.

These companies say they’re standing pat because customers aren’t asking for  cloud. That’s short-sighted, in his view. “They should be focusing on what’ s coming instead of what’s happening now.” The implication being that if they don’t, it will soon be too late.

Lucas comments contradict views expressed by OnApp CEO Ditlev Brehdahl earlier in the day. Brehdahl said in Europe at least, he sees a reluctance to use the “c word” because it spooks risk-averse customers.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

From GIGAOM STRUCTURE 2012: After Software-defined Networks, the Software-defined Data Center
Once we have virtualized networking in the data center, we will have a powerful platform for delivering computing to a wider audience without the involvement of systems administrators. So begins the freedom to program data centers to optimally perform whatever applications we want to run on them.

From GIGAOM STRUCTURE 2011: From Openflow to Virtualized Networks
One of the hottest technologies around is virtualized networking. Based on the futuristic OpenFlow work from Stanford University, the technology promises a shake-up of the network infrastructure world. We talk to some of the leading startups in this area about deploying the technology in a big way. We ask what the technology is, what its applications are and what makes it so insanely great.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
• The promise of software-defined networking

ThroughPuter President Mark Sandstrom, founder and CEO of ThroughPuter, explained the company’s vision to me as solving a fundamental problem in today’s IT’s world. While more applications are expected to both run faster and run in the cloud, the cloud computing infrastructure underlying those apps isn’t up to the challenge. As Moore’s Law slows down, multicore chips are replacing faster clock speeds, but, Sandstrom said, neither new chips nor the clouds running them were really designed to execute parallel processing workloads.

On the contrary, ThroughPuter has developed a hardware architecture and OS that are designed to execute parallel programs in cloud environments. That means developers can write high-performance applications that run in parallel across many cores, and can actually expect them to run optimally on a cloud platform that has been designed to support them.

However, building a cloud platform and audience to go along with it isn’t easy, and Sandstrom doesn’t think one-time hardware sales to cloud providers is a great business model. That’s why he’s looking to partner with platform-as-a-service providers to make their platforms designed for sequential processing more conducive to parallel processing, as well as with the infrastructure-as-a-service providers on whose clouds most PaaS offerings run. Sandstrom sees the possibility for a revenue-sharing model in which cloud providers deploy ThroughPuter’s hardware architecture to serve customers that want to deploy parallel applications, and ThroughPuter takes a cut of the revenue from those services.

If it can get the right relationships in place, ThroughPuter’s vision might have legs. There’s definitely a desire to move enterprise applications into the cloud, and to the extent that companies are writing their applications to compute in parallel, having in place an architecture designed to run those applications could be a big draw. And it isn’t such a crazy idea — as the emergence of solid-state drives, high-performance computing clusters and other specialized architectures in the cloud have shown us, some providers are already willing to build custom services for custom applications.

If you missed, watch ThroughPuter and our other 10 Launchpad competitors present their visions to the judges at Structure 2012:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• How direct-access solutions can speed up cloud adoption
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center

Kannan and Srikanth, who would become the CTO of the startup, decided to build a global, federated marketplace for cloud services which became ComputeNext. By September 2010 they had started the Seattle-based company, and by June 2011, they got busy with product development. ComputeNext launched at our Structure 2012 conference, and was one of the Launchpad finalists.

Kannan argues that while Amazon has done a great job as a leader, “in promoting cloud consumption and solving business problems, but they do not have a compelling reason to meet diverse needs of all the customers.”

“In the AWS marketplace we are able to choose a number of applications and configure and deploy them in the cloud but the IaaS provider is AWS. In ComputeNext’s marketplace, you not only have a choice of applications but also in the IaaS providers,” he said. That element of choice is one of the main reasons why Kannan feels confident about his company’s future.

The company has raised about $2 million in funding, and has attracted many partners such as ScaleXtreme, a server automation software provider, NewVEM, a cloud analytics provider, and Cloudability, which offers cloud resource management, for its cloud marketplace.

Today, it seems everyone who has been offering platforms-as-a-service (think Google App Engine), is moving into selling infrastructure-as-a-service (think AWS) and vice-versa. Kannan sees his company becoming an uber-aggregator of IaaS offerings and then selling those to platform-as-a-service providers. The company will be offering its API to PaaS providers and other companies, he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

Tempo’s Justin DeLay

Once we connect 50 billion devices to the web, as Ericsson’s CEO thinks will happen by 2020, what will those devices talk to? Chicago Startup Tempo hopes those sensors will take to its database as a service — depositing their tiny bits of time series data inside its custom database. The company, which was a Structure 2012 Launchpad finalist, has built a specialty database for data that consists of two items, time and a data point.

So perhaps it’s time plus a temperature. Or time plus an indication that a parking spot is full. Regardless, the startup lets customers store billions of data points for as long as they need to and renders it quickly searchable. Traditional MySQL databases can’t keep as much information as some of these sensors can generate — a thermostat that checks temperature four times a minute would generate 5,760 rows of data a day, even if the data is fairly small. Other data stores are more general purpose.

But Justin DeLay the co-founder of Tempo thinks the Internet of Things will need this special-purpose database to serve all the sensors that will be deployed. In most cases the Internet of Things is a cool concept with a variety of startups working on the component side, a few building platforms in specific verticals such as Nest or tech giants hoping to track medical devices, cars or even inventory.

But DeLay, who has raised $750,000 for the company from a variety of angels, says that Tempo has the opportunity to be the hub in the middle of a network of sensors connected to his database by different platforms. If the sensors are the edge of the wheel then platforms from vendors will be the spokes leading back to Tempo.

In his mind, the opportunity is huge. Beyond the smart grid and energy management space he sees manufacturing operations as a logical place where adding sensors and intelligence will help improve efficiency. “We’ve got to get our manufacturing plants online,” he said. And while he’s unsure if the end user will be his actual customer, or if his customer will instead be a platform provider or a systems integrator, DeLay sees an opportunity that could support a huge company. He’d like Tempo to be that business.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How devops can reduce cycle times
• Cloud computing’s impact on chip and hardware design
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Ofer Bengal, Co-Founder & CEO of GarantiaData

I can guarantee your favorite web sites use memcached and/or Redis as part of their back-end infrastructure. Both technologies are popular ways to store data that needs to be easily accessible, but both require compromises (as any technology does). GarantiaData, a Tel Aviv-based startup, wants to eliminate some of those compromises, namely by perfecting a way to compress the data stored in both Redis and memcached.

The startup, which was a GigaOM Structure LaunchPad finalist, has built a service hosted on Amazon’s Web Services that provides a way to scale out a memcached or a Redis data store “infinitely” without adding latency. With this promise it has raised $3 million in funding from European angels since its founding in March 2011.

Ofer Bengal, the co-founder and CEO of GarantiaData, explained to me that the company’s software is better able to compress the unstructured data that companies store in memcached or Redis, which then makes it possible to run those as a service using Amazon EC2. The software also manages the deployment of new EC2 instances so the data store can grow as needed based on the customer demand. For memcached, Bengal says the software can compress the data up to 90 percent as opposed to the roughly 10 percent compression most people can deliver on memcached servers. Compression of data isn’t offered on Redis, although people do compress their data before they put it in Redis.

The compression means that Garantia can charge per gigabyte for storage and still make money by actually compressing and storing less data, while it also gives customers access to Amazon’s platform. And if that platform is big enough for Netflix, it’s probably elastic enough for most. The service just launched its public beta, and prior to that launch Bengal said the service had about 25 customers storing up to 10 Gigabytes each. That pales in comparison to the terabytes stored in Facebook’s memcached servers, but this is a service more likely to appeal to a startup that wants to scale out on an as needed basis while it tests the waters for its app.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

Data centers don’t have to be powered by a solar farm, or cooled by seawater, to be smart about their energy consumption — often times it’s the far less glamorous choices that can lead to big energy savings. And those are the choices that Belgian startup Cluttr is looking to help data center operators make.

The company, which was one of the LaunchPad finalists for GigaOM Structure last week, has developed software and a service that takes a deep dive into a data center’s energy use and makes it a whole lot smarter. The startup, founded by entrepreneur Frederik Van Hecke when he was studying at the Ghent University, audits an existing facility, provides its Power Waste Reduction (PWR) suite of software, and monitors everything to make sure the facility is reducing its energy use.

The software manages the data center’s power use in real time. When there’s less load on the servers (say it’s the middle of the night), the software dials down the energy use, and when the load turns back up, the software adjusts in real time. The company describes this as enabling “the power consumption to actually scale along with the amount of work being processed.” Silicon Valley startup Power Assure has developed a similar type of software.

Van Hecke tells me that the amount of energy, and money, that can be saved via the software depends on the type of workloads that the servers do. But generally, Van Hecke says, Cluttr is seeing energy reductions ranging from 20 up to 40 percent — that’s a savings of $300 to $600 per server per year based on European electricity prices, and $115 to $230 per server per year based on U.S. electricity prices, says Van Hecke. The company’s audit tool helps them estimate the potential savings for a customer before actually deploying the solution.

In addition to energy savings, year-old Cluttr also helps companies deploy hardware based on the OpenStack open source cloud project, which can be a more efficient way to manage IT. OpenStack is a project that uses open source software on commodity machines, and enables companies to create and run both public and private cloud services.

Currently Cluttr is in private beta, but it plans to launch publicly in September of this year. Largely the software has been used in research scenarios. The research group Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology (IBBT) seed funded the company, and Cluttr plans to raise another round closer to launch.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

Companies looking for easier solutions for managing big data might be interested in Cirro, which offers an interesting set of products that allow non-technical analysts to manage large sets of data and access them through basic desktop applications like Microsoft Excel. Their mission is to “bring big data to the desktop,” and the company was featured as a finalist in the LaunchPad competition last week at GigaOM Structure.

Mark Theissen, Cirro’s CEO, said the company wanted to make it simpler for analysts to access large sets of data and empower them to compare information without needing the help of IT professionals.

“One of the biggest challenges with big data is that people couldn’t easily explore the data, they’re overloaded,” he said. ”As you go forward from an IT perspective, you need to make it easier for your users to get to the data, you need to create more transparency between your data sources.”

Cirro was founded in 2010, and just launched its full set of products for the desktop in conjunction with GigaOM’s Structure conference. It also provides a cloud-based data store for the staging and management of data.

Cirro’s tools allow users to analyze and compare data from heterogeneous sources all in one place, giving them greater freedom to compare and draw conclusions. While plenty of companies focus on providing analytic tools for big data, Cirro’s specific focus on making that data manageble for non-IT professionals makes it unique.

“In the world of big data, things are changing and moving very; fast, need a flexible approach and flexible architecture that lets you move with that,” Theissen said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• A near-term outlook for big data

Running a web business that stores data in the cloud is becoming more and more popular, but many of the security aspects of a large user base — the authentication of users, the handling of passwords, audit logging and so on — are things that companies still want to do on their own premises, and connecting that to the cloud in a secure way is not an easy task. Stormpath, a startup that won the “people’s choice” award as part of the Launchpad at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco, was founded to solve that problem, CEO and co-founder Alex Salazar said in an interview last week at Structure 2012.

Stormpath provides a cloud-based security API that developers can integrate into their services and apps as a plug-and-play solution. It handles all of the authentication processes, including the management of passwords, and provides analytics that both large companies and startups can use to see how their service is performing. And it prevents companies who are focused on other things from having to reinvent the wheel, which Salazar says can lead to embarrassing security screwups.

“Even companies like Sony have problems with this kind of thing — one of the vectors they got attacked on was their password reset process,” he said. “And LinkedIn was storing passwords in a really insecure way. This stuff is hard.”

Stormpath, which was founded in the fall of last year by Salazar and his partner Les Hazlewood, raised $200,000 from a number of angel investors including Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront and co-founder of Benchmark Capital (who was one of Salazar’s professors at Stanford business school), and then closed a $1.5-million seed round in March from a group of investors including Flybridge Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates. The company offers a freemium service in which users get a certain number of features for free and can then pay a monthly subscription for added functionality or customization.

In order to make communication between on-premise systems and cloud servers easier and more secure, Stormpath mirrors all of its clients’ data on its own secure infrastructure and then handles the communication back-and-forth between the two, Salazar said. The company’s hardware and software offers military-grade security, he said, and is much more secure than most companies would be able to build themselves.

Salazar said that the company is focused on solving problems for developers — either working on their own services, or within larger corporations — because “they have the biggest pain.” The chief information officer of their company may direct that they use the cloud, but doesn’t have to deal with the difficulties of implementing or managing user security. Using Stormpath allows them to provide a secure and efficient way of adding those abilities to an existing service without having to deploy a lot of extra development resources.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media

Satya Nadella, President, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Businesses wanting to put more workloads into the cloud are concerned about vendor lock-in. And at least some cloud vendors hear that loud and clear.

Satya Nadella, who leads Microsoft’s Azure cloud effort, said he would welcome the chance to sit down with Rackspace president Lew Moorman to hash out how to make it easier to move workloads between the two companies’ respective clouds.

“Customers don’t want to be locked in,” said Nadella, president of Microsoft’s server and tools group, during a quick chat after his Structure 2012 panel.  The issue, in his view, is that true interoperability requires that data centers on both sides of the transaction be very similar.

“We need to define what we mean by interoperability,” he said. For things running in Azure to carry over to another cloud, the other cloud has to replicate what’s going on in the Azure data centers, he said. That’s a bigger discussion than API support.

Moorman made waves earlier in the week by blasting the notion that cloning popular cloud APIs solved the interoperability issue.  The problem is that Amazon’s EC2, S3 and other APIs cover only a small fraction of Amazon’s infrastructure and services, he said.

Nadella’s comments bear out the notion that cloning APIs only gets you so far. The force looming over this discussion is, of course,  Amazon Web Services, the dominant public cloud. Amazon’s take is that companies that support its APIs will work just fine with AWS. Eucalyptus, a private cloud infrastructure provider, agrees. Rackspace clearly does not.

Fear of lock-in drives concern

Moorman’s contention — and one shared by other companies including some Amazon customers —  is that as businesses use more of Amazon’s higher-end services, they get locked into Amazon’s stack and cannot move. In the old days, customers could take their application and move it to new hardware. In cloud that is no longer the case, he said. “You date your hardware provider, you marry your cloud,” he said.

Amazon’s standard reponse to this is that customers are free to pick and choose which of many Amazon services to use or not use.

Tier1 analyst Carl Brooks said much of the API discussion, if not the interoperability debate, is overblown. “Fundamentally, APIs don’t matter that much. The whole point of APIs is that they are easy. Nobody needs to or should clone anyone else’s unless their customers want it, at which point, they should. Also, OpenStack is  AWS API compatible, on purpose, so I’m not sure Lew’s on the firmest ground here,” Brooks said.

What Nadella says about data center homogeneity rings true, but remember, Brooks cautioned, Microsoft wants to sell its SystemCenter system management and Hyper-V virtualization to everyone, so it’s in his interest that outside data centers use Microsoft technologies.

And interoperability is in the eye of the beholder. Users can already move data from Rackspace Cloud Files to Azure BLOBs and/or run VMs in Azure and Rackspace that talk to each other, Brooks said.

“I can speculate that setting up an Azure service node might be a interesting avenue for Rackspace; [it would] be a real twist on co-opetition. Like Starbucks setting up shop inside a Dunkin Donuts. Maybe good for everybody … maybe not so good,” Brooks said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Examining open hybrid cloud options for the enterprise
• Metered IT: the path to utility computing
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud