Mike Grandinetti
April 30, 2008

Talk about tapping into a hot trend. While I was aware of the currency of cloud computing, I was caught off-guard by both the sheer volume and the global nature (largely out of band) of the response to my previous post.

Over the past several weeks, while I have been traveling overseas, several major announcements have occurred which served to further validate and accelerate this rapidly evolving phenomena. A few highlights include:

-Google announced Google App Engine (April 7, 2008) which allows developers to build and host web applications on Google’s scalable infrastructure, taking a “Fast Follower” approach in the category of horizontal platform services behind Amazon Web Services

-Google announced integration between Salesforce.com and Google Apps (April 13, 2008). This offering will compete directly with Microsoft’s CRM software, which is integrated with its own Office suite in an attempt to more aggressively challenge Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar Office franchise.

-Not to be outdone, Amazon announced its plans to transform EC2 into real online virtual infrastructure (April 16, 2008) – specifically by supporting persistent raw block storage devices stored within Amazon’s own S3 storage cloud. This capability, which is currently in Beta, is planned to be made available by year’s end. This represents an important step forward

Other related announcements were made by Microsoft as well as IBM which I will outline in the next post.

As I discussed in the last post, SMEs are quite clearly the early adopters around Cloud Computing infrsatructure. As if on cue, Colin Bannister, the Director of Strategy in the UK for CA, a supplier to large and very large enterprises, wrote in a contributed article to the Financial Times, “ The problem for me is that, in my experience, the successful businesses are the ones that see IT as fully integrated into their success and core to their strategy.” Exactly! Colin’s point of view, based on his company’s large scale customer base, is consistent with my own observations of the bifurcated adoption behavior.

Markets are comprised of segments. Innovators, like Virtual Iron Software customer XCalibre, target classic early adopters in the SME space. This is exactly where salesforce.com found its early traction and where Google Apps is now finding market validation and acceptance. In the case of UK – based XCalibre, their customers, including web site design and training firm Cosmic, online portal 3Sacrowd and European football club Celtic FC Limited are all deriving significant operational and economic benefits from use of XCalibre’s FlexiScale platform.

According to Tony Hamilton, Head of Multi Media for Celtic FC, “We switched to XCalibre in 2007 for a few reasons; the are a progressive, local company; understand exactly our needs both nationally and internationally; are very capable of coping with the huge Celtic traffic; are on call round the clock in the rare instances we need support or advice. Moving to XCalibre was a brilliant business decision.” This is entirely the point- compared to Amazon’s impersonal approach, locally and regionally - focused innovators like XCalibre provide a more attentive level of service.

Domino Duhan, Technical Director of 3sacrowd, has had a similarly positive experience. His perspective – “As existing customers of XCalibre Communications, we approached the company for a web hosting solution for our new online glossy www.3sacrowd.com. We quickly saw that the flexibility and scalability of Flexiscale as an ideal solution for our high traffic volume, social networking site. XCalibre have worked in partnership with us to launch the Three's A Crowd Online portal and provided valuable technical assistance. Overall we have an excellent working relationship with XCalibre and wouldn’t hesitate to use Flexiscale for future projects.”

What is behind these very positive customer sentiments? XCaliber, founded in 1997 and ranked as a Top 20 UK hosting provider, had a clear vision when it conceived of FlexiScale. The mnemonic, SASHA describes it briefly:

-Simple
-Affordable
-Scalable
-Highly Available

More specifically, XCalibre’s focus was on delivering SASHA to developers and ISVs to enable them to focus on their own core value propositions without the need to worry about data center elements including networks, server hardware, storage, operating systems or the myriad details required in managing data center infrastructure.

Some key design principles include:

-Extensive use of (Virtual Iron) virtualization
-Fully Integrated Provisioning and Billing
-Full Redundancy and Automatic Self Healing
-Linear Scalability
-Intelligent Load Balancing and Self - Optimizing

In comparison to Amazon EC2, XCalibre provides:
-Existence of an SLA
-Windows OS Support and integrated licensing
-Truly static IP addresses and multiple IP’s per server
-Each customer gets their own VLAN
-Standards – based ISO boot images vs. a proprietary AMI
-Persistent, scalable and highly available storage architecture that copes with heavy sustained IOPS ( per above, Amazon announced a piece of this, although it will not be GA for many more months)
-Automatic fail-over in case of a HW fault
-Automatic load equalization across a cluster
-Integrated fire walling (now in Beta)
-Integrated Load Balancing ( coming soon)

Talk about a differentiated offering to the 800 pound gorilla. So much so that I was recently approached by a Boston area entrepreneur looking to launch a new venture that is planning to standardize, at least in part, on XCalibre’s advanced FlexiScale Cloud Computing platform. Pretty impressive.

Mike Grandinetti
April 30, 2008