IBF Media has been running a series of events called Capital Connection 2010 which is focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs looking to connect with participants in the venture capital eco-system, technology executives, and to get access to capital and resources to help build their growing enterprises.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

The latest in the series was a panel discussion on ‘Cloud Platforms and Solutions: Business Models and Architectures for Value Creation in the Enterprise’. The emphasis was more on the value that Platform as a Service (PaaS) brings to an enterprise. The organizers managed to get the best PaaS providers in the business – Google, Microsoft and OrangeScape. While I represented Microsoft Corporation as the subject matter expert on Windows Azure, we had Rajdeep Dua from Google to provide the Google App Engine context. Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape PaaS (which incidentally supports both GAE and Azure) was also one of the panelists. The session was moderated by Raghavan Subramanian from Infosys who did a great job of asking very relevant questions to the panel and driving a meaningful discussion.

The discussion was very lively and made it interesting and valuable for the attendees and panelists. I want to share the answers to the questions that were asked in the panel. This represents only the points that I shared and not the views of other panelists in the discussion.

Q) What does your company offer in terms of PaaS? What are the key differentiators?
A) Microsoft’s PaaS offering is called Windows Azure Platform.

There are three key services within this –

• Windows Azure – The Cloud OS from Microsoft
• SQL Azure – Relational Database for the Cloud
• Windows Azure AppFabric – Bridge between on-premise and Cloud Services

Key differentiators –

• Based on familiar .NET Platform
• Great integration with Visual Studio and 3rd party tools
• Reliable SLAs for the enterprise
• Integration with on-premise assets
• Choice of storage between relational (SQL Azure) and non-relational (Azure Storage)

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) What is the threat faced from the layers above (SaaS) and below (IaaS) PaaS?
A) I believe the line drawn between IaaS and PaaS is blurring slowly. Windows Azure is clearly a meta-platform and customers can run Java, PHP, Perl along with .NET applications. Worker role and Native Execution mode enables to port legacy applications to Azure. Since Microsoft also plays in the SaaS layer through the Microsoft Online services, it is an opportunity for us rather than threat. We encourage ISVs to build SaaS offerings on Azure.

Q) Who is the target audience? Is it ISVs or enterprise?
A) Our target audience is the following –

• ISV – Offer SaaS based solutions of their existing or new applications
• Enterprise – Move seasonal and on-demand Line of Business (LoB) applications to Azure
• Start-up – Go live quickly by avoiding up-front investment in infrastructure
• System Integrators – Offer migration and integration of Cloud Services

Q) What is the role of standards for lowering the entry barrier?
A) Standards are applicable at multiple levels. Here are a few

• Security Standards – Azure is SAS70 complaint
• Industry Standards – Supporting industry specific standards like HIPAA
• Open Standards – Azure storage, compute and management APIs are based on open standards like HTTP, XML and REST.

Q) Are there Cloud friendly languages? Do programming languages need new constructs to target cloud capabilities like multi-tenancy?
A) Developers interact with the Cloud in one of the two ways –

• Consume APIs and interact with the Cloud through the management API
• Develop applications that get deployed on the Cloud platform

For consuming the APIs, any language with support for HTTP libraries will work. More than languages the frameworks like .NET and Java need to evolved to support Cloud. For example .NET developers are able to leverage the LINQ constructs to interact with the Cloud storage efficiently.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) How do you assure continuity of business? Are you a viable and reliable vendor for the enterprises to bet their business on your Cloud platform?
A) Microsoft has been in the data center business for 15 years. Hotmail was acquired in 1977, Outlook Web Access (OWA) was launched 11 years ago. Hosted Exchange processes more than 1 billion messages per month. More than 2000 institutions signed up for Live@Edu with millions of email accounts. Enterprise customers trust us as we have been a credible player for more than a decade. Windows Azure has the right level of SLAs defined which raises the confidence level of our customers.

Q) How about 3rd party components and licensing on the Cloud?
A) Most of the component vendors are aligning with the Cloud. Players like PayPal started to offer services for the SaaS developers by collaborating with PaaS providers. Companies like Twilio are bringing telephony to the Cloud. Most of the components will evolve to support the new paradigm.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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Last week, I had the opportunity to present at the DevCon 2010 event hosted by the Kerala Microsoft User Group. I am thoroughly impressed by the quality of the event. The event organizers handled it very professionally. I am impressed by the hospitality and the overall quality of the event.

I delivered the keynote on ‘Cloud – The Platform of the Platforms’ and a session which was an end-to-end demo of developing a Cloud application on Azure. You can download the slide deck from the talks sections of my website.

Find the complete report on K-MUG.org.

My good friend and MVP from Bangalore, Vijay Raj (Popularly known as MSIGeek (@msigeek) also presented on App Compat in Win7 and Office 2010. You can find his trip report here.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

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• CloudCamp Bangalore & Hadoop Summit
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IBF Media is running a series of events covering various trends in Cloud Computing. This event presents and discusses one of the key challenges of cloud computing, which is defining successful business models and architectures for value creation in the enterprise. At this nascent stage both SMEs and large enterprises are just beginning to adopt cloud technologies, as CIOs and IT managers learn about how they can deploy the cloud in their organizations it will create business opportunities for startups and entrenched players to develop business models that are successful in serving their customers as well leading to the success of their own companies. The panel will be composed of successful venture investors from the Indian venture capital industry as well as founders of cloud startups and technology professionals from companies in India that are competing in this space to win customers.

The panelists include Suresh Sambandam – Founder & CEO, OrangeScape, Rajdeep Dua – Developer Advocate, Google India and Raghavan Subramanian – Associate Vice President, Infosys

I am glad to be one of the panelists in this discussion. Unlike conventional conferences, this is a panel discussion and not a presentation.

This conference is on July 8th at Hotel Royal Orchid, Bangalore. Visit the event website for more info – http://www.ibfmedia.com/ccjul2010.php

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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This post comes live from CloudCamp Bangalore & Hadoop Summit. After delivering CloudCamp across India, Dave Neilsen, Prem and the India team of CloudCamp reached Bangalore.

The event started with Yahoo! folks delivering the keynote on Hadoop and Cloud Computing. It was interesting to see the efforts of Yahoo! in this space.

After the keynote, there was an UnPanel. This was the first time that I have been a part of such an UnPanel. Dave called out for volunteer panelists from the audience. Whoever raises their hand gets to be a part of it! I managed to be a part of this panel sharing the dais with folks from Apache, Google, Samsung, VMWare, InMobi and Microsoft. The audience were asked to call out their concerns and questions around Cloud. The questions were typed in Notepad and put up on the screen as they were asked. After compiling 10 questions, the panelists were asked to pick a question and answer it in a minute. Every panelist got to answer at least one question. There were questions around security, standards, interop, data and SDLC. I answered questions on data and the hybrid cloud. Overall, I found this format to be very innovative and it has certainly added value to the attendees!

After the panel, Dave again invited the audience to propose a topic and also be the speaker. This is again in the true style of UnConference. 6 to 8 including me stepped up and wrote the topic name on a chart and handed it over to Dave. He then asked the audiences to vote for their favorite session by raising their hand in the support of session that he calls out. Quickly, there were about 6 sessions that got shortlisted and the agenda was again typed in Notepad that was projected on the screen. Amazing way of crowdsourcing the agenda and the topic!

Cloud Camp

After lunch, I went to one of the breakout rooms to deliver my session on Windows Azure. I had about 30 folks in my session. I got 40 min. to explain and demo Azure to the audience. The session was very interactive and I had a lot of questions on Google App Engine vs Azure. The feedback to Microsoft is that they should open up VM hours free to developers. Few also wanted to find how to send mail from Azure like the way they do it in Google App Engine.

After my session, I walked into the main auditorium to attend the Hadoop track. I am finding the sessions to be interesting but they are very research specific.

For those who attended my session today, you can watch the screencast of the demo that I have shown today. I also have an article on Microsoft Windows Azure that explains the basics of it.

You can download the slide deck from the talks section of my website.

I want to conclude this post by thanking Dave Nielsen, Prem Shankar and the team behind the CloudCamp. They truly inspired me!

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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After covering the key traits of a technology evangelist and why technology evangelism matters, I want to discuss personal branding in the context of evangelism.

Before the interweb took over the print media, I grew up reading the tech. columns written by Yashwant Kanetkar, Dr. Nitin Paranjpe, Dr. Vijay Mukhi in Express Computer. In the mid 90s, I found the articles written by Atul Chitnis and Kishore Bhargava in PCQuest pretty interesting.

After I entered the college, it was Ray Duncan, Jeff Prosise, and Dan Appleman who caught my fancy. Their works really impressed me and motivated me to enter this field.

During the early days of my career, I started following Roger Sessions, Don Box, David Chappell and Charles Petzold.

In the current context, I admire Scott Guthrie, Mark Russinovich, Steve Jobs and Guy Kawasaki.

And, of course I have my own contemporaries and ex-colleagues like Vinod Kumar M, Harish Ranganathan, Raj Chaudhuri, Sanjay Vyas and Daniel Ingitaraj who mesmerize the audiences and walk away with best session ratings in any tech. conference.

So, what is common across Yashwant Kanetkar, Atul Chitnis, Jeff Prosise, Scott Guthrie, Don Box, Mark Russinovich and others in my list?

Apart from being authors, consultants and subject matter experts, all of them have a very strong personal brand that they have created over a period of time. All of them are also evangelists for the technology or the platform that they strongly believed in.

Not convinced? Watch Scott Guthrie’s keynote from Mix; catch Atul Chitnis in action during one of the FOSS.in events; Watch the video of Steve Jobs launching iPad or attend Don Box’s session on Distributed Computing. You will tend to agree with me.

Steve Jobs with iPad

So, what has personal branding got to do with evangelism? Remember that evangelism is all about influencing the decision makers. Influence comes with authority and confidence. Personal branding is an essential tool for reaching out to the world and positioning yourself as an expert in your subject.

There is a misconception that personal branding is all about ‘I-me-myself’ and shamelessly pushing the agenda. The truth is that personal branding is all about helping others and empowering them with the right information. In his book named Me 2.0, Dan Schawbel articulates this point very well. Personal branding is all about helping others to make them successful and not just promoting yourself!

If you carefully observe what is common across the personalities that I mentioned, you would notice certain attributes among them. Let’s discuss what those qualities are.

Top 5 attributes of successful personal brands

1) Creating a Niche – People with strong personal brands always associate themselves with a unique niche. You think of ASP.NET when you hear the name Scott Guthrie. Atul Chitnis is synonymous with the FOSS movement in India. Mark Russinovich is immediately identified with the Windows Internals. For most of the computer science students in India, it is Yashwant Kanetkar who created the ‘C’ programming language. It is essential that evangelists align themselves with a technology niche that will be strongly associated with them. In the longer term, this will help them gain the authority and establish their credibility in the community.

2) Being Passionate – Evangelists with successful personal brands always demonstrate passion for the product and the cause that they strongly believe in. Steve Jobs is extremely passionate when he launches a new product from Apple. Though it is tempting, they don’t attack the competition directly. Successful brands and evangelists know the art of being subtle in dealing with the competition.

3) Being Connected – It is extremely important to be connected with the audience. This could be through offline one-to-many presentations or online channels like blogs, podcasts and social networks. Scott Guthrie has 19K followers on Twitter and his blog enjoys a great subscription. Staying in touch with the community is the key thing to sustain the brand.

4) Being Consistent – It is important to be consistent in positioning and messaging your personal brand. Your blog, your tweets and updates should be speaking the same language. Evangelists should not switch their messaging often. If you are a web evangelist, be consistent in your messaging around web related technologies. If your blog has posts covering inconsistent content that doesn’t align with your niche, your brand value gets diluted. Each and every brand element of yours makes a statement and it is your responsibility to make them consistent.

5) Being Accessible – I once mailed Scott Guthrie requesting for a sample source code that he mentioned on his blog. I got an instant response. Mark Russinovich is equally accessible and responsive. Most of the individuals with a strong personal brand presence are surprisingly more accessible than we think. Successful evangelists with personal brands don’t let the branding come in their way in being accessible to their customers and audience.

So, evangelists and aspiring evangelists – start taking your personal brand seriously! It will not only add value your employer and the product, but will also give a big boost to your career!

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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