Structure 2012: Launchpad: Jason Hoffman – Founder and CTO, Joyent, Matt Howard – General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners, Aaref Hilaly – Partner, Sequoia Capital

And the finalists are:

28msec: With offices in Palo Alto and Zurich, this startup aims to streamline the task of writing complex queries against your MongoDB database of choice.

Appscale Systems: This open-source implementation of Google App Engine (GAE) can run on a developer’s laptop, on Amazon Web Services or the Google Compute Engine.

Factor.io; This service lets developers knit together their tools of choice — for source control system, for PaaS, for testing — into a coherent, flexible workflow using an “if-this-then-that” interface.

Metrica: Metrica’s service lets folks use SQL queries against their MongoDB data, cutting the time it takes to create histograms, time series, and scatterplots and other data visualizations.

Saltstack:  This startup tool aims to speed up devops tasks including cloud orchestration or in-house server automation and infrastructure management.

Synapsify:  The company’s text search and analytics capability can help companies find the most important and relevant content for their needs.

Structure is GigaOM’s flagship conference that focuses on the future of cloud computing and internet infrastructure. For the past seven years, it’s convened the most influential speakers, buyers and vendors for two days of discussion, reporting, and debate.

Startups less than 12 months old with innovative technologies in cloud computing, internet infrastructure, or big data applications were eligible to apply for LaunchPad. The finalists will present their business plans on stage at the Structure conference in San Francisco, June 19-20. Follow @GigaOM on Twitter (#structureconf) to keep apprised of new speakers and sessions.

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• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• PaaS market accelerators, 2012–2013
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

We see it clearly in companies such as Google or Facebook, where the cost of computing has a direct impact on the cost of goods sold. But it’s also becoming the case in banks, retail shops and other sectors of the economy where mobile,  digital or cloud strategies all are facets of the same issue: an attempt to wed the business to technology and an understanding that technology is the business.

We get it. That’s why this year’s Structure conference, on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco, will have speakers like Kevin Scott of LinkedIn. He’s going to share what he learned throughout the process of re-architecting the social networking site to brings its costs in line with its growing scale. Scott is part of a new generation of IT professionals who aren’t just trying to solve business problems with technology but are building architectures that are integral parts of the business.

Jeff Dean at Google is doing something similar — although he’s thinking at a much larger scale. The computer scientist who co-wrote the search giant’s MapReduce paper is responsible for rethinking Google’s architecture for the new era of the web, where the hardware and software must support real-time distributed systems, capable of interacting naturally with people. It’s a tall order, but he’ll talk about where IT is going and how to build systems that can handle that future.

Finally, we have a familiar face in a new role. Bob Muglia, who is the executive vice president of Juniper’s Software Solutions, will talk about how he plans to shift one of the innovators of the switching era as its business is disrupted by both the new OpenFlow protocol and the development of software-defined networking. Already, Muglia has forced the $9.65 billion company to change its business model and how it sells some of its hardware. He’ll discuss software-defined networks and what it means to be able to program the hardware infrastructure on demand and without having to physically touch the hardware.

The entire IT industry is poised between the promise of awesome opportunities as computing becomes cheaper and our ability to capture data expands, and the fear of disruption as open source hardware and new layers of abstraction threaten to tear down the barriers to entry. It’s a crazy time in IT and Structure speakers will help you capitalize on it, either from the business side or with deep dives into the future of technology. Register today so you can join us in San Francisco on June 19 and 20.

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• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

But even without a cute name, the distributed infrastructure that underlies the web services that we turn to day in and out is just as important. And this year as we gear up for our sixth Structure event (June 19 and 20), dedicated to the infrastructure that serves both the internet and the cloud, we’re thinking about what’s changed in the last year and what’s ahead.

Last year, we spent a lot of time discussing software-defined everything — broadly, the abstraction of the physical hardware from the applications and even operating systems running on top of them. We had tiffs and debates over different platforms and whose APIs are really open. We even had a group hug.

Structure 2012: Marten Mickos – CEO, Eucalyptus Systems, Chris C. Kemp – CEO, Nebula and Co-Founder, OpenStack, Sameer Dholakia – Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix

This year’s focus: The physical cloud

Looking ahead, we’re peeling back some of the software-defined abstraction to focus on the physicality of the cloud. Like how do we build special-purpose architectures for our apps? What happens when we scale beyond the confines of the data center with dark fiber or other distributed resources?

We’ve got some amazing speakers signed up already: from Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who will undoubtedly hit upon the business side of the cloud, to Adrian Cockroft of Netflix, who will talk about some of the practical issues associated with supporting a giant movie streaming service on Amazon’s cloud. And of course, we’ll have Amazon’s Werner Vogels back for his sixth appearance onstage, where he’ll defend the online retailer’s title as the king of the cloud. Just kidding, this isn’t a boxing match, it’s an infrastructure conference. So please, no wagering.

Structure 2012: Christofer Hoff – Chief Architect, Security, Juniper Networks, Simon Crosby – Co-Founder and CTO, Bromium, Stacey Higginbotham – Senior Writer, GigaOM

Meet the people getting their hands dirty with deployments

And for those who have moved beyond the public and private cloud debates, or the “Is the cloud secure enough?” worries, we’ll have several practitioners discuss how they operate their businesses in the cloud. The CIOs of The Clorox Co., Revlon and Pabst Brewing Co. will all be onstage. We’ll also have tips for making sure your software is built to scale without breaking the bank, and processes for building out IT infrastructure in a more flexible manner.

One of the emerging trends we’re seeing in applications is that their architecture is no longer this static set of code, but is actually evolving not just with little tweaks, but with wholesale architectural rewrites. Speakers including Kevin Scott, an SVP of engineering at LinkedIn and Sam Schillace, a VP of engineering at Box will share their experiences building new application architectures to meet both scale and business needs. It’s not enough to keep your application from breaking. It needs to run efficiently for the business too.

So join us on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco at our Structure conference. We’re going to have something for everyone, from the business team to the developer community. Register now and get $500 off the regular ticket price with our earlybird discount. See you in San Francisco.

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• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Think about this like Hadoop’s greatest hits, but know that there will be more to come. Although the big data discussion is moving away from Hadoop somewhat, it’s still an integral — if not the integral — part of the discussion around data infrastructure. We have two great panels on Hadoop at our Structure:Data conference March 20-21 in New York (which include participants from Facebook, Platfora, Continuuity and EMC’s Pivotal Initiative (whose leader Paul Maritz will also be speaking), among others) and will keep up with all things Hadoop and data for the next 10 years.

The biggest news

1. Hadoop-focused startup Cloudera raises $5 million (March 15, 2009)
2. Friends on the move: Hadoop, AOL & PayPal  (Aug. 10, 2009)
3. Survey: Hadoop is great, but challenges remain (Sept. 29, 2010)
4. Yahoo suggests MapReduce overhaul to improve Hadoop performance (March 17, 2011)
5. Meet MapR, a competitor to Hadoop leader Cloudera (March 24, 2011)
6. EMC makes a big bet on Hadoop (May 9, 2011)
7. Exclusive: Yahoo launching Hadoop spinoff this week (June 27, 2011)
8. Microsoft’s Hadoop play is shaping up, and it includes Excel (Feb. 28, 2012)
9. VMware aims for Hadoop on VMs with ‘Serengeti’ project (June 13, 2012)
10. Cloudera makes SQL a first-class citizen in Hadoop (Oct. 24, 2012)

The best analysis

1. The data mining renaissance (April 10, 2009)
2. Is Hadoop champion Cloudera the next Red Hat? (Oct. 2, 2009)
3. Meet the big data equivalent of the LAMP stack (Aug. 1, 2010)
4. As big data takes off, the Hadoop wars begin (March 25, 2011)
5. Hadoop’s civil war: Does it matter who contributes the most? (Oct. 7, 2011)
6. 5 low-profile startups that could change the face of big data (Jan. 28, 2012)
7. What it really means when someone says Hadoop (Feb. 6, 2012)
8. Hadoop jumps through hoops, becomes mainstream (March 3, 2012)
9. Why the days are numbered for Hadoop as we know it (July 7, 2012)
10. A few stats, rumors and stories on Hadoop’s rapid growth (Nov. 9, 2012)

The coolest users … aside from Yahoo

Taking Hadoop to the stage

The Hadoop Meetup (May 1, 2008)

Cutting (center) flanked by Baldeschwieler and Om Malik at GigaOM’s Hadoop Meetup in 2008.

Next-generation data stores (Structure 2008; start at 57:00)

Hadoop, NoSQL and webscale data (Structure 2009)

The big data tsunami (Structure 2010)

Hadoop and beyond (Structure: Data 2011)

What’s next for Hadoop? (Structure: Data 2012)

Mike Olson on Hadoop (Structure: Data 2012)

Analyzing data with HBase (Structure: Data 2012)

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• How search can unlock the power of big data
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Gelsinger participated in many of the biggest shifts in computing in his first career at Intel, where he oversaw the development of the lines of chips that eventually became the mainstay in commodity servers. It may be hard to imagine, but prior to the late 90s, most servers ran on specialty Sun- or IBM-designed chips, while Intel’s processors were relegated to personal computers. Gelsinger also helped push Intel into the wireless radio standards world, and even helped create the Intel Developer Forum.

In 2009 Gelsinger left Intel and joined EMC, where he helped drive a new architecture for EMC’s storage gear that allowed users to virtualize their storage, placing a lot of data in storage arrays and taking advantage of the existing compute there for some processing. This wouldn’t work for all big data analysis but it might work for some. Now after gaining the top spot at WMware in September of last year, he has seen many of the trends driving the current shift from their infancy.

Hopefully this will help him push VMware into a mainstay of the new world of IT — a position that isn’t guaranteed. While VMware was the catalyst for this shift with its virtualization software, the rise of open source alternatives and enterprise-class clouds that obviate the need for VMware’s corporate customers to buy their own servers present a challenge to the $39 billion company.

But VMware isn’t standing still, buying startups to offer cloud-based services for enterprise customers as well as buying infrastructure startups and pushing a vision for the software-defined data center, where the compute, the storage and the network are all abstracted from the underlying hardware. The company is also making its way into the mobile world, ready for the post-PC era, a concept VMware’s previous CEO Paul Maritz defined at our Structure 2010 conference.

So when Gelsinger takes the stage in San Francisco next June, I’m eager to hear what he has to say about VMware’s place in the changing IT ecosystem, as well as how the software-defined data center will come about. If you’re eager to hear from one of IT’s greats, make sure you get tickets to the show on June 19 and 20. The earlybird rate is $995, and you can now buy a special discounted season pass to all three of our Structure events in 2013. Check out our our Structure 2013 page for more on the lineup for this year’s event.

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• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud

We’re proud to present Structure:Europe, our first conference outside of the U.S. Om Malik, Derrick Harris, and Stacey Higginbotham have put together a great lineup of speakers and presenters in Amsterdam who will highlight how cloud computing is changing Europe (and the rest of the world), and how Europe is changing cloud computing. Highlights include Amazon’s Werner Vogels, Marten Mickos of Eucalpytus Systems, and the guys who handle IT for The Large Hadron Collider.

The event will be livestreamed, and that video can be found here alongside live updates from GigaOM reporters. We’ll also update this page with stories as they emerge from Amsterdam on both Tuesday and Wednesday.

Day One

• Do federated clouds deliver?
• Joyent: Data centers are the new factories, making and moving bits
• The new cloudonomics or how you can spend less and get more with cloud
• Why cloud washing is evil, or at least annoying and potentially harmful
• Cloud, consumerization of IT makes life tough for CIOs
• For big data, does cloud beat business-class fabric?
• Hadoop isn’t just for web companies any more
• A truly open cloud has to be open source, says OpenNebula
• BYOD bringing more value and challenges in a Post-PC world
• Software-defined networks: All about the application
• Observing the software-defined network in the wild
• VCs hope Europe’s cloud will produce a $1 billion exit

Day Two

• Salesforce.com chief scientist how and why the cloud is here to stay
• Facebook has 220 billion of your photos to put on ice
• What the shift to the software-defined datacenter means
• PaaS adoption is the same everywhere (at least in the U.S. and Europe)
• Don’t look to Europe to create an Amazon rival
• Cloud trading markets could be the “Expedia of web services”
• Red Hat wants more competition
• Even tiny tweets can be big data
• Wanted: Shiny, happy APIs (with a business rationale)
• Don’t put all your eggs in one cloud
• Storing big data in the cloud is easy — getting it there is hard
• Getting to grips with big data’s challenges
• Why you should care about data-flow computing’s big comeback
• Distrust of outsourcing, Patriot Act slowing cloud adoption in Europe
• Europe’s giant science cloud: Give people data and good things happen

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• A near-term outlook for big data
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape

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• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
• IT spending update, third quarter 2012

(L to R) Derrick Harris, Stacey Higginbotham, and Om Malik of GigaOM
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Five years ago we started bringing together the best technical minds and entrepreneurs in information technology to discuss at Structure how the growing importance of the cloud was changing their worlds. Now, it’s clear the cloud has arrived: but what impact will it continue to make on the hardware, software, and services industries that help businesses across the world continue to reap the benefits of this historic shift?

Today and tomorrow at Structure 2012, we’ll host a comprehensive and compelling discussion about these vital issues, bringing together some of the biggest and best companies and executives in the field alongside scrappy startups just waiting to make an impact.

Our livestream of the event can be found here and kicks off Wednesday, June 20th with opening remarks from conference co-hosts Om Malik, Stacey Higginbotham, and Derrick Harris at 8:30 a.m. PT. The festivities resume Thursday, June 21st at 8:50 a.m. PT.

We will be blogging the onstage sessions throughout both days and including all the links in this post. Please join the conversation on Twitter (use the #structureconf hashtag and follow @gigaom).

Day 1:

• Why CIOs are learning to stop worrying and love the cloud
• Security still the ‘No. 1 obstacle’ to cloud adoption
• The data center has blown up
• Real-time cloud juggling speeds flight to users
• VMware CTO: Say goodbye to the “server hugger”
• 4 things Werner Vogels sees in the next 5 years of cloud
• IBM’s Watson for “important” decisions where you need an advisor
• How Bromium lets bad guys in and still keeps data safe
• Google’s Pichai: Apps are the seed for a Chromebook future
• Cores in the cloud: Does brawny or wimpy win?
• Why building SaaS well means giving up your servers
• Fat databases, small pipes: The problem of data inertia
• Zynga CIO: “We need more innovation on power consumption”
• You think the internet is big now? Akamai needs to grow 100-fold
• How far is too far to invest? Your plane’s Wi-Fi may dictate new growth

Day 2:

• Like Netflix, Facebook is planning its own CDN
• Microsoft’s Nadella: We will democratize big data
• If AWS is the WalMart of cloud, is OpenStack the Soviet Union?
• Kundra: Democratizing data means a fundamental shift in power
• Enterprise CIOs: Have you met your ‘shadow IT’ department yet?
• Where in the world is my data center?
• Is OpenFlow an answer looking for a problem?
• Netflix exec: The master copy of our data is in the cloud
• When it comes to big data, don’t forget about video
• The infrastructure of the future will be programmed
• Vendor lock-in and the challenge to Platform as a Service
• 3 things I learned about Node.js at Structure 2012
• How dataflow powered Mozilla’s real-time download counter
• To SQL or to NoSQL: the database dilemma
• Box’s Aaron Levie: The recession has helped enterprise cloud adoption
• Will using Dropbox put your CEO in jail?

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• 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

Chipmakers have been busily adding cores to their servers, but getting those cores to communicate without creating bottlenecks is a huge problem. And as the Web scales to reach billions of people, who are spending more time using online services, the infrastructure supporting those services is reaching a breaking point. Data centers that used to be the size of a corner gas station are now the size of a WalMart distribution center. Inside those centers are more servers containing many, many more CPU cores.

But at that scale communications between servers and between compute cores within servers are a problem. That’s why the IT industry is so excited about the software-defined networks (sometimes called fabrics) and OpenFlow protocols that will help make communications between servers scale. And inside servers, a similar level of virtualization and a focus on fabrics is gaining attention: What’s happening at the data-center scale is also happening inside the box.

For example, SeaMicro, the server maker that was recently acquired by AMD, built a 1.28 terabit compute fabric inside its server, which contains 256 cores. One SeaMicro box could replace 500 machines from five years ago and run at 96 percent of the power consumed by the old machines, according to a presentation the company made in January when it launched its most recent boxes. Another startup in the server space, Calxeda, which is building ARM-based servers with HP, is taking a similar approach, spending its R&D efforts on the fabric the handles communications between the many ARM chips inside its box.

Now that AMD has bought SeaMicro, which was using chips from Intel, the world’s largest chip company might be looking to make its own play in the webscale server market (as well as beef up its ability to connect a lot of cores for the high performance computing market that Cray serves). In the past Intel has said webscale will be only 10 percent of the total server market, but I think it’s wise to ensure it has a fabric technology of its own now that AMD has SeaMicro and Calxeda is in bed with ARM, Intel’s rival on a growing number of fronts.

Hence buying the engineers, IP and expertise of Cray, which pioneered interconnect technology that allows thousands of chips to communicate at high speeds. Chips are always going to be important inside servers, but now it’s time for fabrics to shine too. It’s a topic we’re going to be talking more about at our Structure 2012 event with SeaMicro’s former CEO Andrew Feldman and AMD’s Lisa Su.

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• A near-term outlook for big data
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• From car to cloud: the future of the in-vehicle app landscape

(c) 2012 Pinar Ozger. pinar@pinarozger.com

The problem for many companies is that information about their users is spread across hundreds or even thousands of different fields in various databases, and it’s difficult to put it all together in real time. But doing that successfully is becoming more and more important as services become more personalized.

Kimball, whose company has been funded by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Ron Conway’s SV Angel group, said that WiBiData’s solution is to put together a platform that combines big-data aggregation and analysis tools like Hadoop and Hbase and Apache’s Avro, which can pull in and make sense of data coming from multiple databases in one location, and then make it easy for companies to extract and make use of that information in real time. In addition to tools that combine those services, WiBiData also has a user interface and dashboard that allow companies to pick and choose which data to use quickly.

Online users in particular have grown used to services like Amazon and Netflix, which provide real-time recommendations based on what a user has done in the past or other elements of their user profile, Kimball said. This not only saves a user time, but exposes them to items they may not have even known they wanted to search for — and thus creates a better user experience.

So if your company is selling hardware and a user puts a hammer in their online shopping cart, you want to be able to suggest that they buy some nails as well. But this has to be done in milliseconds if it is to be useful, and that requires manipulating large amounts of data in real time to update or alter the user’s profile and pull in the new selection.

“We are now capable of collecting and analyzing orders of magnitude more information than at any other time in history,” thanks to the database tools we have, Kimball said, but “the one constrained resource is understanding.” Users of online services now expect to have things personalized in real time, and if your company can’t provide that then you are going to be behind the curve, he said.

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• A near-term outlook for big data
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