May 20, 2008

Cloud Computing at the Forrester IT Forum

I'm posting this blog entry during the afternoon break at the Forrester IT Forum. Okay, so I'm probably missing out on some chocolate chip cookies, but I really don't need them anyway. The third keynote I attended this morning was from Rick Lechner, VP Enterprise Systems at IBM. His talk was entitled "The New Enterprise Data Center: Enabling Business Innovation." As with any vendor talk, it was part annecdotal and part product pitch.

Here are some highlights from his keynote.
IBM sees three business drivers that are impacting IT today:
  1. The changing face of globalization (transformation from exporting to multi-nationals to truly distributed global enterprise).
  2. The rising tide of information (more devices, need for real-time analytics).
  3. New business models that are evolving as new technology arrives (B2B, B2C, new uses of the Internet, rise of social networking).
IBM has developed and deployed a cloud that is used internally by Researchers. From an internal portal, Researchers request a set of compute resources, they’re provisioned in minutes, and then provided to the Researchers. When done, the resources are returned to the cloud. (As an aside, one of our Cassatt customers is developing such an internal cloud using Cassatt Active Response and our programmatic interfaces.)

Lechner spoke about several cloud-computing efforts in industry, academia, and government:
  • Google, Univ of Washington, and 6 other universities are working on how to design apps for the cloud.
  • Vietnam has deployed some clouds to foster collaboration between the government and university.
  • China has deployed some clouds to provide compute resources to software start-ups.
Well, I'm done posting for now. I'm off to find that chocolate chip cookie now...

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