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• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
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The cloud technology providers are banking that these legacy players have tried to build their own cloud services and realized that it’s easier and more productive to base those services on a cloud expert’s technology. So they’re rolling out bundles and packages tailored for that constituency.

Case in point: On Wednesday Tier 3  announced the “Reseller Edition” of its Enterprise Cloud Services.  The Bellevue, Wash.-based company built its own management, controls and services atop VMware vSsphere and packaged all that up for third-party providers from VARs to  telcos.

And Thursday, Dell and OnApp announced joint offerings that are pre-tested to enable service providers, MSPs and telcos ro roll out cloud services as fast as possible.Last month, Rackspace pitched its own cloud infrastructure as a short cut for telcos, MSPS – the usual suspects — to build their own clouds.

Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz has repeatedly used wireless carriers as a key target market for the big data-oriented cloud platform his company is building.

So if carriers are gearing up to build clouds atop third-party IP, why is it happening now versus say, six or nine months ago? Tier 3 CEO Jared Wray thinks it’s because they see the market maturing. “Before recently it just wasn’t defined and there wasn’t a huge de facto open source initiative going on,” Wray said. Now, with OpenStack, in particular, that has happened.

“OpenStack has the fanfare and momentum, so the telcos see a defined, evolved ecosystem and it’s looking like they understand what the key components are,” Wray said. “The idea now is to use the colos and wires they already have and layer value added services atop all that.”

Wray attended last month’s OpenStack Summit to see for himself. As to whether Tier 3 will add OpenStack support he was noncommittal.

This is, of course, all very self-interested by these cloud providers to say. But there is evidence that hosting companies, data center providers and telcos really are getting pressure from their customers for the sorts of cloud services that come from Amazon Web Services and others, said Carl Brooks, cloud analyst at The 451 Group.

To be fair, not all the old line companies have given up on building their own technology for the cloud era. Thirty-year old MetaSwitch is open sourcing it’s new IMS core software to ease cloud development.

But whoever’s technology ends up in the mix, as raw connectivity and compute get ever more commoditized, the secret to profitability — and happy customers — is truly useful services and cloud seems the deployment model of choice.

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The attraction of the multi-vendor Cloud Foundry effort is that, in theory, it would provide customers an array of compatible PaaSes from different vendors. If they don’t like their experience with one, they can move their code elsewhere. But now the prospect of a “fork” looms with some other vendors thinking of splitting off and doing their own iterations. Worst case scenario: that could negate any promise of compatibility. And that raises the old bugaboo of vendor lock-in which even PaaS providers say has restricted business demand for PaaSes.

Some background: late last year, VMware turned over the Cloud Foundry effort and related projects to the Pivotal Initiative spinoff. Since then some of the third-party Cloud Foundry crowd have complained that they have not gotten information  they need from Pivotal. And, they worry that Pivotal or VMware will push its own commercial, competitive version of Cloud Foundry. And so they privately discussed forking the Cloud Foundry code. Any fork or forks raises the specter of a fractured standard.

Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, a non-Cloud Foundry PaaS, raised a ruckus last week when he posted his take on the impact of any fork or forks on Cloud Foundry. (Long story short: it will be bad for customers, Schuller wrote.) That caused a kerfuffle which Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady addressed in his  blog post. O’Grady tried to downplay the negative impact of forks, writing:

“We reject the notion that forking is an undesirable outcome. Forking is, to the contrary, provably beneficial to modern open source projects – at least from a developmental perspective.”

But O’Grady also conceded that, because Cloud Foundry is not licensed under the General Public License (GPL) — as Linux was — it faces different issues;

“Compatibility, ultimately, is the key to determining whether the forks which are so beneficial to development are a problem for customers. Java, for example, had multiple distinct implementations, which ensured competition and thus continued innovation to benefit customers.”

In his own blog post, cloud pundit Ben Kepes cites “tensions in the Cloud Foundry world, ” and maintains the possibility of a fork should concern customers.

“Quite simply a fork, or even worse multiple forks, too early in a project is a sign of bad governance and questions the validity of the entire initiative. Let me reiterate – these are very early days and any doubt that factions in the community sow in end users minds are wildly damaging to the community. This is especially the case since, from what I’m hearing, some of the conversation around forking is happening for all the wrong reasons – it comes down to vendors making the right decisions for the right reasons.”

I’ve asked Cloud Foundry and some of the third-party PaaS providers for comment and will update this when they get back to me.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist

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

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New investor Intel Capital led the round. Current investors Ignition Partners and Madrona Ventures ponied up $8.5 million in an initial funding round in March, 2011.

The Bellevue, Wash. based company is one of a growing number of players chasing the enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) market.

Developers — both within and outside companies — like to use these platforms to build and test out applications. But not all corporate IT executives are thrilled about actually deploying mission critical applications on PaaSes — especially those running on public cloud infrastructure.

That’s the kind of thinking companies like Tier 3, ActiveState, Appfog, Red Hat (with OpenShift) would love to blow up.

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Just because companies want to offload some compute tasks to third-party providers, doesn’t mean they don’t want precise management of those jobs or a way to track and monitor them. The race is on among the cloud service providers to offer the granularity of control enterprise customers need.

“Right now it’s very hard to manage server sprawl and to manage and maintain permissions across servers and roles,” said Jared Wray, CTO and founder of Bellevue, WA.-based Tier 3. That’s a problem every cloud provider from Amazon on down is hearing about from customers. Amazon just announced new cost tracking options to help customers better monitor their Amazon compute and storage workloads.

With Tier 3′s new Cloud Server Group Management features, IT can set up and run batch maintenance and software installation jobs. And, they can make sure that permissions allocated to a group do, in fact, get rolled out to all group members.

Wray said customers can also set default settings on their preferred machine sizes to keep a lid on over-provisioning. Service providers using Tier 3′s resources to support their customers can also set up groups for each customer then monitor and manage them all from a single monitor.

Tier 3, which has made a bit of a splash offering enterprise-class cloud infrastructure and platform as a service to enterprise accounts. exemplifies what Carl Brooks called a new breed of IT infrastructure provider.

“They started with the premise of cloud/infrastructure as a service and delivered services all the way up the stack,” said Brooks, who is the IT infrastructure and cloud analyst for Tier1 Research (no relation).  More mature competitors like Savvis and Terremark, on the other hand, started out as more old-school data center service providers that then added IaaS/PaaS capabilities to the mix.

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The beauty of Github is that it lets groups of developers collaborate on projects without stepping on each other’s work.  Team members working on a single project can sync changes to make sure they are, in fact, working on one project, rather than multiple versions of the same project. That becomes very important as the size of the development group grows. Github also facilitates work on private or public projects so that new developers can look at and learn from code posted by their forebears.  As one developer put it recently, Github is “the social network of coding.”

The Github post announcing the news Monday morning said it all:

Ever wish there was an easy way to get up and running with Git and GitHub on your Windows computer? Turned off by command line utilities and setting up SSH keys? Want to join the incredible world of open and closed source collaboration that happens on GitHub.com every day?

Today we are releasing GitHub for Windows which is available immediately as a free download.

With the new Github for Windows, engineers can develop on Windows, share on Github. This is just the latest indication that Windows development is still in huge demand, even in precincts where the whole .NET/Windows world was looked on with disdain in the past. Amazon recently added managed SQL Server services and .NET support to Elastic Beanstalk. Tier 3 added .NET support to its Cloud Foundry PaaS implementation.

Ray Ozzie, the former chief technologist for Microsoft, gave Github a ringing endorsement at a Geekwire event a few months ago.

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