The GigaOm Structure 2012 conference kicked off on 20 to 21 June in the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. CloudTimes was proud to be an official media sponsor of the show – just as last year. We reported live on Twitter – see also some photos from the event here.
The fifth edition brought together top experts in their fields to discuss the opportunities presented by society’s growing cloud computing. Specially, the theme of the show was “What happens to the Cloud in the next five years?”
Over 1000 attendees from companies like American Express, Amazon, Rackspace, Facebook, Google, IBM, Comcast, Credit Suisse, eBay, Fidelity Investments, General Electric, Mediabrands, Microsoft, and hundreds of other companies have attended the sold-out event.
The attendees were provided real-world case studies of organizations on this year themes, which were based on how Big Data will drive the network to become the computer, the rise of learning systems and how databases confront the cloud.
GigaOM has gathered several current as well as future trends of cloud market for discussion including practical uses for PaaS products in the enterprise and how companies can move toward deploying them, CSPs adoption of cloud services, the current and future tools and technologies that drive data analysis, cloud computing role in chip and microprocessor design, and how the market for virtualization and cloud computing is shifting with regard to compliance.
Leaders View
No doubt, every leader had different answers and approach. From Amazon’s expectation that cloud services will continue to have lower prices to Rackspace’s vision of an OpenStack future.
Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO and vice president, said that cloud has changed the role of the CIO. “CIOs are changing dramatically. They always wanted a seat at the table, but they’re always charged with cost-cutting,” he said. “You’ll see a continuous evolution. We’ll continue to drive costs down and lower our pricing, and continue to innovate.”
“IT was seen as the blocker. Now, they have the opportunity to be the hero of the organization. I also see them realizing how they got into that situation. The old vendors were nailing them down with long-term contracts. They see a new world of IT where they are in charge. They are in control of software instead of the vendor.”
Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace, discussed the future of OpenStack in cloud platforms. He said organizations today implement two solutions to cloud lock-in – the first one being to clone the cloud APIs and other is to use open standards-based cloud platform. Moorman hinted Rackspace’s cloud hosting services would be moving to go with open standard OpenStack platform.
“Our industry has been obsessed with API standards,” said Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace. “I’m here to say this is not going to happen. First of all, there’s the basic fact that APIs are nothing more than an interface to real technology. They’re a bridge and a protocol. Cloud is not a protocol, it is a set of incredibly complex technologies. If your strategy is to clone the APIs, you need to be able to clone that technology, but everything behind the cloud is not exposed in proprietary clouds.”
Vogel said cloud is transforming the way companies do business now and regardless of whether a platform is open or closed, it will scale services.
“If you look at the world of young businesses and how they’ve changed in the past five years, it’s amazing,” Vogel said. “Look at just the past five months. Look at Socialcam, Pinterest and Instagram. All of these have been helped to build on the cloud. Would they have been able to build that in a traditional world of hardware and infrastructure? I’d like to believe not.”
OpenStack is gaining momentum. CapGemini’s VP and CTO, Joe Coyle, said, “Open Stack is going to give everyone a run for their money, even Amazon.”
VMware’s CTO and senior vice president of research and development, Steve Herrod, said that future data centers will be pooled where all the hardware, storage and networking equipment would be available as a resource.
Future Cloud Products
At the conference, Garantia Data revealed a beta version of its new database service. The company’s CEO Ofer Bengal said the cloud software offers offer a scalable and reliable database service by the combination of Memcached and the Redis key-value.
Red Hat released JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 and Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6, both cloud ready products would give developers to build transaction-heavy cloud applications.
Eucalyptus unveiled version 3.1 of their cloud offering, extending the deployment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KVM and VMware’s virtualization software.
In March, CloudTimes sponsored GigaOM Structure:Data, which was focused on the growth of big data, data analysis, and storage needs.