Microsoft India is one of the sponsors of IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference in Pune. I had the privilege of delivering the Keynote on day 2 (21^st August).

Windows Azure Keynote

I had about 40 attendees who were business decision makers, developers, architects and IT managers. My objective was to introduce Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and explain Windows Azure architecture. I covered the concepts of Windows Azure Compute and Storage services with a brief introduction to Web Role, Worker Role and Storage components like Tables, Queues and Blobs. I showed a quick demo of developing an Azure application using Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Dev Fabric. The demo ended with a walk through of the Azure portal and deployment options. I thought this was the best way to introduce Windows Azure to attendees in the limited window of 45 min.

Simone Delivering the AWS Keynote

Right after my keynote, it was Simone Brunozzi (@Simon) from Amazon Web Services APAC who delivered his talk. AWS was one of the sponsors for this conference. Simone covered the key concepts of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and did complete justice to the topic within the limited 45 min. slot. His session was highly interactive and I realized that there quite a few AWS customers in the hall.

PuneTech has been live blogging this event and Arun Gupta (@arungupta), Java EE Evangelist from Oracle (who was one of the speakers) has a good coverage of this event on his blog.

The slide deck that I presented can be downloaded from here.

I have been associated with IndicThreads.com brand for the last 3 years as a speaker and like the professionalism of the organizers. I appreciate Harshad Oak and Sangeeta Oak for their passion in making these events a success!

All the presentations from this event are available from Slideshare and below is an embed of the same –

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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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• A Case for Private PaaS
• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?
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A couple of weeks back, at the IBF Panel discussion on PaaS, we were discussing the opportunity for a Private PaaS. While a Private Cloud is typically associated with IaaS, I started to ponder on the value of a Private PaaS offering.

Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Azure Appliance at WPC underscores the significance of the Private PaaS. This appliance will remove the overhead of maintaining and running an environment to host applications. VMware is aggressively positioning it’s Spring framework on both Private and Public PaaS offerings. AppScale, the open source implementation of Google App Engine on EC2 and other standard VMs has a huge potential to become a Private PaaS. IBM WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance is another implementation of the Private PaaS. These appliances come with complete self-service capabilities and reduce the provisioning of development, test and production environments from days to few hours.

Let’s take a look at the scenarios and potential customers for the Private PaaS –

• Service Providers / Managed Data Centers – These are the next generation ISPs and companies who are into managed data center operations. By deploying PaaS in a box, they can focus on delivering the service to its customers vs. managing it. The multi-tenant capability which is core to the PaaS appliance will provide an isolated snapshot of the environment to the PaaS consumers.

• System Integrators – Large System Integrators who offer turnkey IT solutions can now offer PaaS to their strategic customers. This will enable SIs to deliver an end to end solution to the customers. System Integrators can now offer SLAs which are covered by the PaaS appliance providers. Customers will see value in this deal because the SI will own the entire lifecycle of the solution. This will also address the data security and compliance issues by keeping the sensitive data within the political boundaries of the country. I personally see this as a huge opportunity for the System Integrators in India.

• Large Enterprises – Large automotive, manufacturing and finance companies with presence all over the globe will be able to benefit from these PaaS appliances. By deploying a few in strategic locations, they will be able to reduce the maintenance cost of running Line of Business applications.

• Government – One of the niche customers of the PaaS appliance would be Government. By deploying state level appliances, the government will be able to create a secure Government Private Cloud. Since this runs within the premises of the government data centers, compliance and regulatory issues will not be a concern. Government can confidently store the data and run applications running a set of appliances deployed across the country.

This is an interesting space to watch. Do you see the potential for Private PaaS?

[This article was originally published in the Cloud Computing Journal]

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

• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com

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.

Related Posts

• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• A Case for Private PaaS
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?
• IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference

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

• IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Speaking at Capital Connection 2010
• Download The eBook – Demystifying The Cloud
• CloudCamp Bangalore & Hadoop Summit

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.

Related Posts

• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• K-MUG DevCon 2010
• CloudCamp Bangalore & Hadoop Summit
• IndicThreads.com Cloud Computing Conference
• A Case for Private PaaS