Thursday, April 1, 2010

Cloud Solutions

The April issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Cloud Solutions" and the authors include:

David Linthicum is the CTO of Bick Group, an author, and thought leader on cloud computing. Dave's article starts with a discussion on the causes of the shift to cloud computing. He then clarifies the meaning of the broad term of cloud computing by identifying its key characteristics, different deployment models, and various components. Dave finishes with an important discussion on the value and economics of the cloud.

Fred Waldner is an independent consultant and a Certified Professional Project Manager. His article discusses how the shift to cloud computing mirrors the same challenges that we witnessed with the shift to enterprise adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. He identifies some of the adoption obstacles that must be overcome.

Daniel Crenna is an award winning developer, author, and active entrepreneur. Daniel articulates the value of open source in hosted solutions as companies adopt cloud computing. He examines the reasons why companies use established open source software or give away their proprietary code as the seeds of new open source projects.

Ronald Schmelzer is a Managing Partner at ZapThink LLC. His article addresses the debate about private clouds. There are many companies that are afraid of deploying critical applications and/or data in a public cloud environment. Instead, many are contemplating building their own internal cloud which goes against much of the value proposition of cloud computing and keeps their dependency on expensive commercial software. Ron argues that the concept of private clouds is a marketing term used by vendors rebranding their products.

Tom Lounibos, CEO for SOASTA, discusses how the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model allows SOASTA to simulate performance tests with loads that were simply not feasible in the on-premise world. Low cost, on-demand cloud computing services allow companies to deploy more reliable and scalable solutions because they can now afford to test peak loads and fix bottlenecks before they happen in the production environment.

John Crupi is CTO and Chris Warner is Vice President of Marketing at JackBe Corporation. Previous articles discuss how the lower levels of the stack are becoming a commodity and that IT's focus should be on business functionality. John and Chris provide some examples of how organizations are leveraging mashups to aggregate data from various locations into composite applications.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue of the OSBR is Communications Enablement and the guest editor will be Chris McPhee. Submissions are due by April 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

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