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Tim: Híŋhaŋni wašté (Good day) and welcome everyone to Episode 1 of “Business in the Cloud�?, where we are examining how organizations are leveraging cloud computing to enhance and improve and revolutionize their business. This podcast is bought to you by Red Eagle Services. I’m your host, Tim Vibbert. My special guest in this inaugural episode is Cordys Chief Marketing Officer, Hans de Visser.

Hans: Thank you, Tim. It’s a pleasure.

Tim: Hans, my first question is to as you who Cordys is. Some of our listeners may not have heard of Cordys before. Can you give us a little background on Cordys?

Hans: Cordys is a software company founded by Jan Baan. He has been a successful entrepreneur who had also founded Baan Company - one of the dominant ERP players in the 90’s. Jan was also an investor behind Toptier (a portal vendor which got acquired by SAP) and Webex (the company who kind of invented online meeting).
Cordys has developed a software platform which allows organizations to build and deploy process centric solutions to improve their business operations with greater speed and flexibility than traditional platforms.
We are active in North America, Europe and ASIAPAC (especially in China and India); and we focus on the enterprise market with on-premise and cloud based offerings, as well as a hybrid model.

That’s as far as a quick introduction is concerned.

Tim: Great, thanks for that introduction. Hans, you mentioned that Cordys provides solutions to assist organizations in improving business operations by focusing on their business processes by improving flexibility and speed. Can you give the listeners a little bit more in depth description on Cordys solutions around the Business Operations Platform?
Hans: Yes absolutely. What we’ve done is leverage the unique opportunity to build the platform from scratch. Cordys has integrated three distinct technology domains into a single service oriented platform: The world of Integration (through an Enterprise Service Bus running on a grid foundation), Business Process Management and the world Composite Application Development. And that’s all from a single environment.
We are fanatic about the model driven approach to design and develop solutions, so you will find a lot of graphical models e.g. to design processes, cases, UIs, business rules, KPIs, dashboards etc which gives transparency on the set up of a solution (reducing traditional coding) and allows for flexibility in changing the solution for progressing needs of the business. Typically, what we also see if that through working on models, you can align Business and IT people who are working on joint development on a solution so both functions can collaborate on the same version of the model. And in our deployment, we really focus on fast iterations to deliver value to the business, by abstracting and re-using already existing IT assets.
If you look at the Cordys offerings, we basically have 2 offerings.

One is the Business Operations Platform, for sophisticated process oriented enterprise solutions, and Cordys Process Factory to compose dynamic business applications, MashApps, in the cloud.
The Business Operations Platform is available on premise and for the private cloud. Cordys Process Factory runs in the cloud on Rackspace as well as at Getronics, a leading data center and workspace management company owned by KPN.

Tim: You indicated that Cordys takes a hybrid solution to cloud computing. Can you also give us examples of how customers have implemented your cloud solution?

Hans: The Cordys Process Factory is used by SMEs to quickly build applications that are tailored to business needs. Through web services, they might be integrated with on premise solutions or just run as stand-alone apps. Examples are Human Resource Management, Procurement, CRM etc.
More and more, we also serve enterprises who have Gone Google and are seeking business process management and support for dynamic business applications in the cloud. For example, we are currently serving a large globally operating supplier in the automotive industry who is replacing their on-premise LotusNotes applications with the Cordys Process Factory.
Recently, The Telegraph Media Group in the UK also decided to start using the Cordys Process Factory. TMG has a very advanced and explicit cloud strategy. Their CIO explained that he sees Cordys as the “Swiss army knife�? of the cloud. Which means it can do a lot: integration, BPM and fast development of applications.
And the beauty of Cordys is that we do more than just integration, or application development in the cloud. We offer BPM in combination with integration and application development capabilities.

As far as the Business Operations platform is concerned: in the US, Cloud Harbor offers Cordys Business Operations platform in a private cloud. Companies, like PHNS, who offer solutions for the healthcare sector are using Cordys through Cloud Harbor as a platform provider.
This summer, Capgemini launched a very exciting initiative “Capgemini Immediate�?, a cloud proposition which gives their customers access to a series of best-of-breed cloud technologies. Cordys is included in that offering. And they are, for example, Capgemini introduced the Royal Mail Group as one of the first customers on “Capgemini Immediate�?.

So here you have a couple of examples of customers using Cordys both onpremise and in the cloud setting.

And because of the fact that we can do both onpremise and in the cloud operations, that you could move “onpremise to the cloud�? and “the cloud to onpremise�?. So you’re not bound to one provider in that sense.

Tim: So you’re not bound to a particular hosting provider?

Hans: Exactly. There are a number of hosting providers we see a strong traction: parties who would like to have a cloud offering look to us to provide that depth of breadth of our platform that runs perfectly on premise and the cloud.

Another aspect which I would like to highlight is that we see a need for Cloud Provisioning solutions. Our customers are not just taking services from one cloud offering, but they might use a variety of services. Based on the practical experience that we have gained ourselves in running Cordys Process Factory, we have developed a highly flexible solution for Cloud provisioning – and that supports delegated management of tenants, users and metering of that usage.

Tim: How might someone find out more information on your solution and success stories?

Hans: First of all, I’d say take the opportunity to join Cordial in the Netherlands on the 14^th and 15^th of September – which is actually a week from now. Obviously, that’s not feasible for people around the world.

Next to that, our website is a great source of information on our value. Join the Cordys Community to interact with a lot of Cordys professionals and our partners - and get their views on how Cordys can help in getting you on the cloud.
You can also go to the Cordys Process Factory, and - in two mouse-clicks or so - sign up for a 30 day trial period to experiment and experience it yourself. You can find the Cordys Process Factory directly on our website as well as on the Google Apps Marketplace.

Tim: Great! That are several different information sources there.

Hans: Yes, exactly.

Tim: That concludes this episode of “Business in the Cloud�?. I want to thank my guest Hans de Visser from Cordys.

Hans: Thank you very much! It was a real pleasure

Tim: Pilámaya (Thank you) for tuning in, and be sure to tune in for future episodes for “Business in the cloud�?

Another aspect of the cloud is the integration between clouds.  If one has their primary operations using the Amazon cloud and does their disaster recovery using say the Rackspace Cloud, then there must be integration between the two in order to make the synchronization easier and maybe even automated.

The emphasis on a hybrid cloud model came to light this week with the IBM announcement on Monday, at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, that is was acquiring Integration-as-a-Service provider Cast Iron Systems.

There has been much industry, analyst, buzz around this acquisition and it seems to be mostly good.  Such analysts as Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates and Dana Gardner, principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions, LLC were quoted by Jack Vaughan, editor of SearchSOA.com and ebizQ.net, as saying:

“Cast Iron gives IBM a great set of services for integration between clouds and between clouds and on-premise applications�? and “IBM middleware is integration but it is not integration as a service. That is why the Cast Iron purchase is complementary�? respectively.

I can see the financial, health care, and government sectors signing up to the hybrid approach due to their privacy and security concerns as well as simply the sure immense amount of legacy systems and data stores.  We will have to see where this acquisition leads the leaders in such sectors as they consider migrating to and integrating with cloud based solutions.

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Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

TV: Híŋhaŋni wašté. (Good day) and welcome to the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. I'm your host Tim Vibbert. This podcast series is being conducted by Red Eagle Services in conjunction with the ebizQ Cloud QCamp Virtual Conference being held April 7th. I would like to welcome my guest today, Darren Cunningham, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Informatica. Welcome Darren.

DC: Hey, good to be here Tim, thanks.

TV: Darren can you tell us a little bit about Informatica for those who might not be familiar with Informatica?

DC: Sure. Informatica is the number one independent leader in data integration. We are a publically traded company, 500 million in revenues in 2009 and our singular mission is to enable organizations to gain competitive advantage by being able to deliver timely relevant and trustworthy data for all their business imperatives.

TV: Great. I kind of did a little bit of research on Informatica and you guys provide data integration-as-a-service solution. Can you give us a brief description on the Informatica solution?

DC: Absolutely. So Informatica has really been recognized as the pioneer in the data integration-as-a-service space, which is really an emerging market as cloud computing adoption continues to grow. As more and more businesses move toward Software-as-a-Service business applications we recognized about five years ago that going in and offering and selling an on-premise, powerful, developer-centric data integration platform really wasn’t going to meet all of the emerging requirements of more of the line of business CRM administrators in many cases, if you're implementing Salesforce.com, and the kinds of people that were really moving ahead in the early days of Software-as-a-Service. So Informatica did something I think is pretty unique. We created a very separate line of business and a very separate product line called the Informatica Cloud, and we have a website, InformaticaCloud.com. It really goes through all of the different capabilities that we're offering in the true Software-as-a-Service model.

TV: Great. Can you give us an example of a customer maybe who has implemented your solution?

DC: Sure. We actually have now well over 500 companies that are implementing and running Informatica Cloud Services. And it it's probably worth breaking it down into some of the primary use cases we've seen for data integration-as-a-service and then I'll give you a few specific customer examples. So the first use case we see primarily out of the gate if you're moving toward a cloud application like a Salesforce.com or an Eloqua, or some Software-as-a-Service solution is the need to migrate your data - to load data into that system. So we have some specific extraction and loading capabilities delivered in the cloud for that use case.

The second is then once you've got your data into those systems is to make sure you're synchronizing it with the on-premise applications. So a use case there would be the example of say you've got Salesforce CRM, you've got your sales reps looking at accounts and opportunities but you've got billings, bookings, financial data sitting in an on-premise ERP system. So what you want to be able to do is provide your sales team a single view of their customers and have it nicely integrated in a single record. So data synchronization is really a key – it is probably the primary integration use case once you’ve adopted and moved toward SaaS applications.

And then there's, of course, data quality. We have some data quality technology delivered in the cloud.

And then replication, so the ability to move data from a cloud application back to your on-premise systems maybe for a business intelligence data warehousing requirements, compliance, those kinds of needs. So we have customers that are kind of running the range of small to medium size companies all the way up through to large enterprise accounts. And really, you can go to the InformaticaCloud.com website to see some case studies and some customers like TransUnion, Telegraph Media Group and others that really speak to their use case directly.

TV: Yeah, that was one of my other questions. How can someone find out additional information on the Informatica offering as well as case studies so it’s a good thing to know?

DC: Sure. And I think the other thing to add is that because we are delivering data integration at a multi-tenant service, you can actually go and get started right away with the trial. And that's just the amazing thing of this model, the whole try it before you buy, the ability to really get going and a live production implementation before deciding if you want to move forward with the solution.

TV: Great. And one final question for you and that is how would I know or would I know who your direct competitors in the data integration-as-a-service sort of space?

DC: I think the primary competitor in this space is always going to be this thinking inhouse or within a company that, hey, we can hand code this ourselves, we can get a developer or two, hire them with some skills and get them to write some code to hopefully connect a couple of different systems. So the primary competitor is always that idea that you can do it yourself. There's also some free tools out there. Informatica, we actually have our own free tool. We call it our data loader service and we use that as a way to get people started with some basic bi-directional data integration. But Salesforce.com also has a data loader; many applications do so that tends to be a competitor.

And then as you kind of move up the stack if you will, if you move through the complexity and volume requirements that you may have, you may consider on-premise solutions. Informatica has a whole host of powerful data integration technology as part of our core on-premise platform but those require resources, those require expertise, time and budget so that's where I think you're seeing this emerging space of data integration delivered as a true on-demand service and Informatica has really been kind of a leader and pioneer in this area.

TV: Great. I think that is all the questions I have for this particular session. So if you don’t mind, we'll conclude. So that concludes this particular session of the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. I want to thank my guest Darren Cunningham. Pilamaya yelo (thank you) for tuning in and be sure to tune into our next session in the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. Thank you.

Announcer: This has been an ebizQ podcast.

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Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

TV: Híŋhaŋni wašté. (Good day) and welcome to the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. I'm your host Tim Vibbert. This podcast series is being conducted by Red Eagle Services in conjunction with the ebizQ Cloud QCamp Virtual Conference being held April 7th. I would like to welcome my guest today, Rick Nucci, Senior Director of Product Marketing from Boomi. Welcome Rick.

RN: Good morning, how are you?

TV: Rick can you tell us a little bit about who Boomi is for those who may not be familiar with Boomi.

RN: Yeah, absolutely. Boomi is provider of cloud integration so we are focused exclusively on integrating SaaS and cloud applications and services primarily with on-premise applications residing behind customer's firewalls.

TV: Great. Now you mentioned that Boomi provides Integration-as-a-Service solutions and they cover best of breed applications as well as web services technology. Rick can you give the listeners a brief description of the Boomi solution?

RN: Yeah, absolutely. Effectively what we built is a platform whereby from web browser you can sign-up, and login, and work in a web based developed environment and you're presented with a library of connectors to applications and it would be -- on the SaaS, I [indecipherable] usual suspects, Salesforce, NetSuite, RightNow, Taleo, SuccessFactors, all of the sort of common or popular SaaS applications and then correspondingly on the on-premise side, additional connectors for those applications. And what the connectors do is they provide effectively pre-built or packaged connectivity to those apps so that you as the Boomi user don't have to learn the details of those technical APIs.

And then from that browser you orchestrate the movement of data if you will between these applications. And so we're doing things like application integration or things like data integration and automating the movement of data. At the end of the day, we kind of look at it holistically as enabling business processes so we are sort of the app-to-app integration layer that can make a lead-to-cash business process work. And we do integration sort of from the front to the back of that type of business process as a good example. So from marketing automation on the front end, to CRM, to finance, to project management, shipping systems, things like that, there'd be anywhere from 2 to 12 different applications that might comprise that lead-to-cash and Boomi will help customers plug into all those different apps and integrate all those -- data crush all those systems.

One of the big focuses or differentiators for Boomi is the fact that we built the product with the specific requirements of integrating SaaS and cloud in mind. In other words, we didn’t take a traditional integration product and build out connectors for Salesforce.com. So there's a lot of inherent differences and capabilities as a result of that. And one of the best examples of that is this idea of the fact that a lot of companies are operating in a hybrid environment and they will for a long time. Where they're going to have a number of assets residing on-prem and a number of assets residing in the cloud and how do they mediate those firewalls, integrate those applications in a secure and auditable way and be able to have the same type of real-time integration in things that are critical to make these business processes work.

TV: Great. Quick question. If I have kind of a homegrown on-premise application that web services based, following all the web services standards, can Boomi allow me to take that application and integrate it with as you said a cloud based, say like a SaaS application, Salesforce or something along those lines? Are there APIs that I can take and understand from the technical sense to do that integration?

RN: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And the nice thing is if it is web services based as you mentioned then we have connectors that understand those standards already and can enable you as the user to point to those web services, import things like WSDLs to be able automatically setup the business object that you want to interrogate or write to that application. [Indecipherable] the need to have to learn complex technical APIs and even systems that sort of pre-date web services or just don’t support web services.

In a lot of cases, we built and package connectors so that you kind of get that same benefit of not having to learn the technical details of the API, but in that case, it's obviously not a web service based approach. I mean we've done everything from [indecipherable] JMS to [indecipherable], whatever the app exposes from an interface standpoint we'll be able to support. And we provide an open STK so if you think about that universe of connectors we have, and it now is something north of 75. We actually only build half of the new connectors that come out. Our community is building the other half and so you kind of go back to the traditional EAI days.

One of the big problems that faced these integration vendors is they get on the connector treadmill because they'd have to build more, and more, and more connectors and then maintain more, and more, and more connectors. And what happens is they end up choking their ability to innovate their own platform because they have to put a lot of their engineering resources on their connector maintenance. For Boomi, I have less of an issue with that because, again, I can rely on the community to build applications that they have core competency in and maintain their individual connectors as the applications change.

TV: Now you mentioned the community, when someone builds --when someone in the community builds a kind of customized connector, do they add that back into the overall community or is it just kind of [indecipherable] sort of thing?

RN: Yeah, so it's really up to them so we do support a publishing capability. So we built a whole layer of functionality around the idea of doing a publish of your connector so the entire community has access to it. And then there's a formal security review process that Boomi conducts to ensure both the quality and the security viability of the connector before it goes into our community. But the other benefit of doing that for the connector author is they then get a revenue share every time that connector get utilized by any of our other customers so it gives the developer a nice incentive to keep their connector up-to-date and provide a third level of support if needed that Boomi may need to escalate to them.

With that said; if they prefer to keep it private which some of our partners do, then they certainly can do that and we have a notion of a private community as well where only their specific customers will see the connector.

TV: Speaking of customers, can you provide us with an example of how a customer has implemented a new cloud solution?

RN: Yeah, absolutely. I'd say there's sort of two broad categories of customers today, Boomi, so I'd kind of take a good representative example of each categories. So we have customers that are where we're selling kind of to the line of business and they have a -- they're buying CRM, maybe Salesforce.com. They need to connect that with something on-premise. And then the other category would be a more IT or centralized approach where a customer is looking to connect a number of things across department and there you're dealing more with sort of a central CIO type of resource.

And so customer like Kepware would be a great example whereby they're running Microsoft Great Plains internally, they're buying Salesforce.com for their CRM, and they need to automate the order-to-cash workflow. And so using Boomi, they’re able to connect that SaaS application, Salesforce.com to on-premise environment, Microsoft Dynamics, Great Plains in this case. And that type of project they'll typically be able to complete in under two weeks. I'm not talking about setup because the setup will just take a couple of days. I'm talking about actually being able to bring that into production, do testing, do organizational readiness, everything that needs to be done to make that work so it's an extremely rapid timeframe.

And then, another example where you'd see a more centralized deployment of Boomi would be a company like Ingres. And Ingres is also among other SaaS customers a Salesforce.com customer. They also run [indecipherable]; they run Xactly, and ADP. And basically, what's gotten Ingres a lot of press is they have moved something like 95% of their applications to the cloud at this point.

So from their perspective, they're looking for a central integration strategy so that they can connection -- that line of business example is I need to quickly bring my Salesforce.com implementation live. I need to have it integrated. I need a fast solution. This is a very different approach where, hey, I have cross-departmental need to integrate over time dozens of applications and I need to do some in a faster and reliable way. I need a total cloud based approach. I can't be installing on-premise software packages, or hardware appliances, things like that so utilize Boomi to connect from HR to sales department to marketing, all the different applications resident in those departments together.

TV: Rick how might someone find out additional information on your solutions and success stories?

RN: Yeah, the best thing to do is our website, which is Boomi.com, B-O-O-M-I.com. There's a customer's link front and center right on the website. We definitely put a ton of energy into making sure our customers I have an awesome experience with Boomi and then encouraging them to talk about it and let us represent their case studies so that there's a ton of information there. There's also a free 30-day trial right on our website. Within an hour, you can have an integration setup and working. You can login, sign-up, begin using the product right away. And we also have a lot of other assets, white papers, demos, things like that.

TV: Its good to know. Well, that concludes this session of the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. I want to thank my guest Rick Nucci. Pilamaya yelo (thank you) for tuning in and be sure to tune into our next session in the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. Thank you.

Announcer: This has been an ebizQ podcast.

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Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

TV: Híŋhaŋni wašté. (Good day) and welcome to the Cloud QCamp podcast series. I'm your host Tim Vibbert. This podcast series is being conducted by Red Eagle Services in conjunction with the ebizQ Cloud QCamp Virtual Conference being held 7 April. I would like to welcome my guest today, Snehal Antani, Lead Strategist and Architect at IBM. Welcome Snehal.

SA: Thanks.

TV: IBM has a vast cloud computing strategy ranging from platforms and infrastructure to development and analytics. The IBM strategy covered both public and private clouds. Snehal, I have a couple of questions I'd like ask. First question is what is cloud and how did we get here?

SA: Sure. So if you look at the characteristics of a cloud where we really think about this as the characteristics of an evolved middleware infrastructure. We want our middleware infrastructures to be responsive where resources can be allocated on the fly to meet demand. We want our infrastructures to be resilient where can reduce the probability of a failure, isolate the impact of those failures and recover very quickly from those failures.

We want to ensure that we're virtualized and maximizing system resources and lowering our overall ownership of the applications and the underlying technology, the level of management where they're self-service, significant levels of automation, and very much policy driven management approaches versus the traditional point and click and the automated, decentralized levels of manageability. And then finally, a level of agility where we're able to better align our IT capabilities with the business needs. And so these are the characteristics that we're trying to pursue. There's a number of ways to get -- there's a whole thought or methodology for how to get there.

And if you think about cloud as essentially falling into this notion of cloudonomics where we are taking our understanding and expertise within virtualization, within standardization, and automation and brining those together to reduce cost and increase flexibility. And cloud really brings these three sets of topics together in a more comprehensive solution where we're able to just build better middleware infrastructure, right. And so one of the things is how do we get here? Well, we think about the previous push within data centers where what we wanted to do is help out customers take their IT services themselves as business services and adhere to throw principles around decoupling, reuse, preparation of concerns, clearly define roles and responsibilities, use standards and interoperability to get different services to interact with one another.

We're able to then as a complement take those same principles that we learned from an application perspective and start to apply them to the infrastructure, the IT infrastructure itself where we decomposed the IT infrastructure from what was a conglomerate, holistic, very large monolithic middleware solution to infrastructure and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Where we've got our hardware storage and networking, managed, virtualized, and served right as one extraction layer on which we've got our Platform-as-a-Service layer as a second extraction layer, where we've got our middleware, our databases, JAVA runtimes, Web 2.0 runtimes, whatever else, virtualized, [indecipherable] managed, automated, policy driven [indecipherable].

And then finally, the third layer -- the third level of extraction being the applications themselves and delivering software in and as a service models. So then here, we've got, for example, collaboration, or CRM, or industry specific solutions. And so we've evolved quite a bit, where we went from -- when we talk about evolution we talk about the evolution of the data center, to adhere to these types of principles and pursuing these types of middleware characteristics, or its responsiveness, resiliency of virtualization, manageability and agility.

TV: And you give a nice overview. As far as IBM goes, what is WebSphere's cloud strategy?

SA: Sure. So within the cloud strategy broadly for WebSphere, there are three pillars. So there is providing infrastructure for building clouds and then providing IBM middleware services in the cloud, in a public cloud, a private cloud and then providing connectivity among clouds. What we'll focus on here is the infrastructure for building clouds. So think about a private cloud example. Think of this as customers today what they would do if they had a collection of hardware, 25 boxes dedicated to your analytics workload, 50 boxes dedicated to your transactional batch, 30 boxes for OLTP, or whatever else.

It was very decentralized independent workloads, very siloed types of architectures and very siloed types of applications. And when we talk about building private clouds within the data center and thinking of this as a evolutionary thought, what we talk about is taking all this hardware, disparate hardware within a data center federating them into a single management domain where we're able to provide some level of server consolidation, improve utilization, centralize management, and then being able to carve out using workflow management technologies and autonomics, the different types of workloads running within this virtualized pool of hardware.

So then, we're able to dynamically determine how many resources should be allocated for our batch workloads, or our analytics workloads, or real time workloads, or OLTP workloads based on workload priority, application priority, resource consumption, demand for a particular application, so and so forth. And so in order to do that, a couple of things have to happen. So first, customers themselves have to evolve their data center where they move from siloed decentralized and dedicated world into a centralized and shared and highly efficient world. They pull that out pursuing things like standardization of their middleware, consolidation of their middleware and virtualization.

And then the next step thereafter is building out a private cloud or pursuing a private cloud that is responsive, resilient and agile. And to do that you got to focus on automation, intelligence, and providing more intelligence into the system, focusing on scaleability, and being able to hook into auto scaling types of features and so on and so forth. And so to talk about this in more detail terms, there are a number of things that customers have to consider in that evolutionary path. [Indecipherable] and private clouds, six pillars or so, the first is virtualization, automation, and cloud shaping where customers are going to have different sets of capabilities within that pillar and they got to recognize that if you want to build out a private cloud you got to be mature in your virtualization automation aspects of your middleware infrastructure.

And then there's a systems management pillar. There is cloud enabling your applications themselves to ensure that you are, for example, staple -- what applications are conducive to running within the cloud and how you manage [indecipherable] becomes interesting or for your batch applications ensuring that those batch applications run well within the cloud. And there you talk about writing, for example, single [indecipherable] code, that can be highly [indecipherable]. You got dynamic infrastructure, the ability to understand the demand for an application, and the autonomic responses to adjusting resources to meet that demand. Security services where you got to ensure that you're quite mature than your security domain of how you're doing your identity management, your single sign-on and your security propagation. And then connectivity service both within your data center among subsystems and across data centers or across clouds, we're talking about hybrid cloud connectivity.

TV: How might customers take advantage of clouds? You talk about evolving data centers, are there other advantages that customers can take and gain from say maybe a process sense?

SA: Right. What we should think about is customers today there's two very clear ways to leverage cloud and technology. The first is evolving their existing middleware infrastructure, to pursue those characteristics I talked about before, having responsive middleware infrastructure, resilient infrastructure, virtualized infrastructure for a lower cost, improved manageability so you'll lower your administrative costs and agility to better align IT capabilities with the business. And customers will leverage private clouds by pursuing those characteristics and this whole set of methodologies and technologies that they can pursue.

One thing that customers should understand is that it's not just a product thought. Products will help further enable or improve the capabilities of a customer's data center but there's also operational disciplines that they have to understand to take advantage of and change. There are application development disciplines that the customers need to understand and make changes to and adopt as well as expertise and services in how to build the right types of middleware architectures and designs. So that's the first part, evolving your middleware infrastructure.

And then the second part of that, there are elements of the application development lifecycle that are conductive to running within the public cloud for example. So think of this as transient workloads. So you may do your development on your laptop, for example, and your unit testing on your laptop but to do function testing, or to pursue system testing, or high scaleability testing where you got thousands of instances of your applications to ensure that you some level of linear scaleability. These are tests and elements of the app development lifecycle that require significant of resources or configuration and setup.

And its perhaps not in the best interest of the customer to actually go off and build those things or dedicate resources to those capabilities themselves or keep those resources dedicated all the time. And so you've got a couple of options. The first option is to leverage a public cloud type of technology, the IBM dev test cloud, Amazon EC2, or these types of transient workloads. So if you need to do a high scalability test on a thousand JVMs, rather than dedicate a thousand boxes to your application, you can create a thousand EC2 instances. And from a web server perspective, middleware services in the cloud is being one of the major pillars. We've got significant WebSphere support out on EC2. We just launched our IBM test dev cloud for a cloud just recently.

And so the number of things even from the app lifecycle process that become interesting for public cloud and cloud deploys. So let's say if a customer is to immediately take advantage of the cloud for those two topics to consider, evolving and incrementally enabling cloud functionality within the data center, and then better or streamlining the cost around application development so that they're able to move transient types of workloads out into the public cloud, for example, to reduce their time to value -- or improvement time to value reducing cost around testing ability and bringing their apps to production.

TV: Yeah, you mentioned disciplines and methodologies. I think those are going to be extremely critical in any sort of cloud adoption strategy. How might someone find additional information on the WebSphere cloud strategy and the overall components of IBM's offering?

SA: Sure. So one of the easiest things to do is just search IBM Cloud, two words, IBM and the word cloud and you'll get to the broader IBM cloud offerings. And if you Google or if you search for IBM WebSphere cloud, you'll get to -- there's a dedicated developer workspace that has all of our material for WebSphere specific topics around cloud. So you can start there and should be able to drill down and find other materials related to these topics.

TV: Thanks. That concludes this session of the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. I want to thank my guest Snehal Antani and pilamaya yelo (thank you) for tuning into this particular session. Be sure to tune in for our next session in the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. Thank you.

Announcer: This has been an ebizQ podcast.

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Announcer: Welcome to another ebizQ podcast.

TV: Híŋhaŋni wašté (Good day) and welcome to the Cloud QCamp podcast series. I'm your host Tim Vibbert. This podcast series is being conducted by Radio Services in conjunction with the ebizQ Cloud QCamp Virtual Conference being held 7 April. I would like to welcome my guest today, Chandar Pattabhiram, Vice President of Channel and Product Marketing from Cast Iron. Welcome Chandar.

CP: Thanks Tim; a pleasure to be here.

TV: Chandar can you tell us a little bit about who Cast Iron is for those folks who might not have heard of Cast Iron before?

CP: Yeah, thanks a lot. First of all, thanks for the opportunity today. And for those of us who haven’t heard of Cast Iron, we're the market leader today in connecting cloud based applications with the rest of the enterprise in all different kinds of on-premise applications. And then we provide a cloud integration platform called OmniConnect that provides both SaaS providers and customers everything they need to connect hundreds of cloud and on-premise applications.

So what we've known for in the market is the speed and simplicity for solution because cloud itself is simpler compared to the traditional on-premise software. The integration solution also needs to be simpler aligned to the same way the cloud applications are and that’s what we've known in the market for integrating these cloud applications with other applications in just days and save customers anywhere from 25 to 75% in their total cost of ownership.

What we're also known for in the market is our strategic partnerships with a number of SaaS and cloud providers, specifically, strategic integration partner for Salesforce.com, Google, ADP, Cisco, WebEx, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware, SuccessFactors, and more than 40 other cloud providers. And that’s what makes us unique in terms of how they partner with us to help integrate their cloud offerings with the rest of customers, IT and application offerings.

TV: Thank you for that overview. As you mentioned Chandar, you guys provide Integration-as-a-Service solutions for both on-premise as well as cloud solutions. Can you give us, the listeners, a brief description of really what that entails as far as your IAAS solution does?

CP: Sure, it’s a great question. So let's take an example and the best way to explain it is through an example. Let's just say that you have a company that has Salesforce.com and you're using Salesforce.com for sales and customer service in the cloud but then you also have on-premise applications like SAP, etc. for your back office financials. Now, the way our Integration-as-a-Service solution works is that it helps you bidirectionally integrate data between these cloud and on-premise applications in a real-time manner.

So in this example, a Salesforce.com sales rep may need access to information on orders, invoices, accounts receivable leads, etc. that typically is not housed directly within Salesforce.com but typically is potentially locked away in other applications like marketing automation or other applications like SAP in this example we talked about. And what our Integration-as-a-Service solution does is that it unlocks this information from these systems and provides a real-time visibility of this information for a user in the cloud application like Salesforce.com so that they can maximize their productivity in an application. And similarly, we can take data from the cloud application and we can move it to an on-premise application in real-time to provide that bidirectional flow of data.

And what's unique about the solution is that integration service solution can be done completely in the cloud so you can design in the cloud, you can run your integration in the cloud, or you can manage that integration in the cloud completely, or you can do it in an on-premise appliance too. So it gives you that flexibility of choice in terms of form factors on where you want to deploy this integration to solve the problem of connecting the hybrid world of cloud and on-premise applications.

TV: Yeah, I had heard of Cast Iron before and my perspective it was always the Cast Iron appliance approach. Quite interested in the new cloud offering that you guys have [indecipherable].

CP: Sure.

TV: Interesting approach.

CP: Yeah, we did announce OmniConnect our new cloud integration platform. And as part of that platform, one of the new areas of groundbreaking functionality we announced was the fact that you have the flexibility. So if you're a company that tends to be cloud centric, so in other words, if you're a company that has many applications in the cloud and a few applications on-premise, then you'd probably prefer your integration solution to be completely in the cloud with a limited on-premise footprint just for that secure data channel. And that's what the new Cast Iron Cloud2 provides which enables you to do your entire integration, design it, run it, and manage in the cloud.

Now, we do have larger customers like the Siemens and like the AmerisourceBergen's, the Fortune 200 companies who like or very on-premise centric who have a number of applications on-premise and a few in the cloud. And those scenarios, they tend to prefer the appliance form factor to be something sitting right next to where their ERP application sits. So simply put, that flexibility of choice is there to customers to do it entirely in the cloud or do it on-premise and it's entirely up to them.

TV: If you got, as you mentioned, of course, you got a kind of a hybrid where you got some in the cloud and some on-premise, you end up [indecipherable] your clients to kind of do that cloud to on-premise integration then.

CP: Correct. You can either use the appliance in this concept or you can use the cloud. So what's unique about solution is across these three form factors, you have the same user experience for designing and the same user experience for managing. So [indecipherable] you can actually be [indecipherable]. You can start off in the cloud, move to an appliance. You can start off in the appliance, move to the cloud and it's completely compatible in each of these form factors.

TV: You actually already answered my next question that if you can give us an example of someone's implemented either the on-premise or in the cloud itself.

CP: Yeah, so let me answer this in terms of giving you two specific examples. Cast Iron is used by two sets of customers. One is corporate IT who bring Cast Iron in to integrate their cloud applications with on-premise applications. The second set of customers are SaaS providers themselves who are powered by Cast Iron to help them solve integration for their customers and thereby increase the stickiness and the value of that SaaS provider's offering.

So one example would be Siemens. As corporate IT of Siemens Energy, is a large subsidiary of Siemens and they're using Cast Iron to integrate their Salesforce.com application with the on-premise SAP application so that their sales teams using Salesforce.com have real-time visibility of the invoices, the order status, as well as the pricing and product information that is housed typically in the ERP system and make it available in real-time to the sales users so that they don’t have to have that swivel chair approach of trying to log into multiple applications to get answers to data and rather have it in one place. So that's the example of corporate IT department like Siemens using it.

The other example I'll give you is a SaaS or a cloud provider who is now being powered by Cast Iron. An example for that I'll give you is ADP. And we all know ADP is a very large company. It’s the largest payroll processing service in the world. And what they're using Cast Iron for is they're integrating customer's payroll systems with ADP's Taxware services using Cast Iron. So if you're a large company that is doing payroll themselves but they don’t want to get into the business of trying to calculate taxes for state and local governments, ADP has a service that does that and they're being powered by Cast Iron to extract that payroll data from on-premise applications to move it to the payroll service that ADP provides to calculate the right taxes and file it with state and local governments. So obviously you see its mission critical data and its mission critical integration both for corporate IT like Siemens as well as leading cloud providers like ADP and many more.

TV: Thank you. How might someone find initial information about your solution?

CP: Yeah, so all information that I shared with you is available on CastIron.com. and specifically, we share information on customer cast studies on how customers are using it, the different end points they're connecting, the different business processes they're enabling using integration, as well as customers in different industries how they're using Cast Iron that's available in our website as well as some of the strategic partnerships that I talked about, about ADP and Salesforce.com and a number of other partnerships. You can find out more information about that on the partner's page of our website, which is again, on CastIron.com.

TV: Pilamaya yelo (Thank you). That concludes this session of the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series. I want to thank my guest, Chandar Pattabhiram, for a very informative session. And now, we will conclude. [Foreign Language]. Thank you for tuning in and be sure to tune-in to our next session of the Cloud QCamp Podcast Series.

Announcer: This has been an ebizQ podcast.

Consider this, most users don’t know or care if the database they’re using or their email is hosted down the hall, across campus, or across an ocean.  But they do care where their applications, like SaaS offerings, are hosted.  Migrating databases and email to cloud computing platforms to realize the benefits mentioned can be performed with virtually no impact on users.  Obviously this still requires proper architecture and implementation. David Linthicum refers to this as “the invisible cloud�?, for me I like to call it “Cloud 101�? since it is simply hosting commodity applications on cloud computing  platforms without to much change except in location.

As tax time in the US approaches I begin to look for any tax breaks that I can get having started my firm Oglala-IS in 2009.  You things like office furniture, computing hardware, small business credits, etc. 

To bad as David points out in “Businesses should demand a tax break for cloud computing�?, there isn’t a tax break for leveraging cloud computing.  As David mentions:

There are already tax incentives for using some types of computing technology…….If we’re providing tax credits for energy-efficient technology, then logically those using cloud computing should receive a tax break.�?  

Those of us you use cloud computing, especially small businesses, should start a petition and see if can’t get something started with this.

Oglala IS Parle Philadelphia : SOA & CC Evening Networking Event

22 April 2010 Philadelphia, PA

Event Description:

Oglala IS, in partnership with ZapThink, is pleased to announce the first Oglala IS Parle networking event being held in the city of “Brotherly Love�? Philadelphia.

Join colleagues, pundits, and a SOA/Cloud Computing Community of Interest for a night of relaxation, food, drink, and great conversation with a panel of distinguished guests.

 Special Guests, Experts, and Pundits in attendance:

More event detail and register here.  We're also still looking for sponsors for this event, so if you are interested, please let us know!

I could not agree more with the comments made on this panel session.  Incorporating a Cloud Computing strategy into to an Enterprise Architecture must be done with a business perspective.  Organizations run similar risks of deploying resources and assets to cloud computing platforms as they did with making everything services with SOA.  Cloud Computing is a nice complement to SOA which is an Enterprise Architectural approach.  EA is driven by desired business outcomes and requirements.  A sound EA,with good governance, is needed to fully achieve the promises of SOA and Cloud Computing.  Governance will become more critical when deploying to cloud computing platforms than ever.

This session stirred my cerebral juices and I began working on a series of webinars I think I’ll call it The CC Showcase. The series will spotlight major providers in the various taxonomical categories of Cloud Computing (i.e. PaaS, IaaS, SaaS, etc.)  Stay tuned for more information on the webinar series.