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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• Speaking at Capital Connection 2010

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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On June 2nd, Matt Tavis, Solution Architect from Amazon Web Services has delivered a talk to the Cloud Computing community in Bangalore. The session was hosted by ThoughtWorks. Despite being a working day, we had about 40 attendees who made it an interactive session.

Here are a few interesting links covering this event -

• Notes from the session compiled by Manarajan Pradhan
• Q&A from the session
• Slide deck used by Matt

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 two weeks have been incredibly busy. Preparing and delivering a session at TechEd has become an annual ritual for me. Right after TechEd India 2010, it was the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 that kept me busy.

This was my 10th TechEd as a speaker and I can’t believe that I have been associated with this brand for a decade! I delivered only one session this year and that was on Windows Azure Service Management API. I am fascinated by the Programmable Infrastructure paradigm and this session gave me a chance to explore the Azure Programmability. I wanted to highlight the power of this API through a real world scenario. I signed up for Twilio and did a mashup of Twilio REST API and Azure Service Management API to control the Cloud applications through SMS / Text messages. The audience volunteered to send SMS that changed the state of the App from ‘Suspended’ to ‘Running’. It was fun to see a SMS swap the applications between ‘Staging’ and Production’ slots. I will share the sample code in the coming posts.

My session at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 was about deploying Java apps on Windows Azure. I had a lot of fun building the demos for this session. The whole idea is to make the Java developers think of Azure Storage like a portable flash drive that they can access from any of their apps and to treat Azure Worker Role like a Run.cmd to bootstrap the JRE and finally run the Java app. I built a simple Jukebox app built using Swing that uploads a MP3 as a BLOB on Azure with the ID3 tags as the BLOB metadata. A Java Servlet hosted on Apache Tomcat reads the ID3 tags and the album art from the MP3 and plays the audio file. Eventually, this Servlet along with the Tomcat container moves to Azure and gets hosted in the Cloud. I went through the challenge of positioning Azure to Java developers and then walking them through the code for the demo scenario all in 40 minutes!

You can download the slide decks from the Talks section of my website.

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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• K-MUG DevCon 2010
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• CloudCamp Bangalore & Hadoop Summit
• Eclipse India Summit
• Tech.Ed 2009 Speaker Ratings

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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• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?