Seattle is the Cloudy City, Oracle joins, HP, Amazon, & Microsoft for Centers of Cloud Development

Today the weather shows clouds.

This is what the clouds look like now at 5:38a.  See those little strands of clouds?  Today is partially cloudy.

This morning I saw that Oracle is starting its Cloud Development Group in Seattle.

We're landing in Seattle. 

Oracle is building the next great cloud computing environment, from the ground up. We’re committed to building the best high-scale, cost competitive, multi-tenant cloud where the Fortune 1000 will run their businesses.

If you’re a rock star engineer and want to build cutting edge, innovative new services, come join us.

We are building a team of the very best software engineers with expertise and passion for distributed systems, virtualized infrastructure and highly available services.
Our aim? To provide our customers with best in class compute, storage, networking, database, security, and an ever expanding set of foundational cloud-based services.

Thanks to Amazon starting AWS, and Microsoft joining in there a large concentration of cloud talent to raid to start up a cloud development group.  HP recruited Bill Hilf from Microsoft.

Bill Hilf — who also served as general manager of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud service — left Microsoft for HP this summer, and now serves as HP’s ‎vice president of converged cloud products and services. That means he oversees strategy not only for the HP cloud service — a direct competitor toWindows Azure and the leader in the cloud game, Amazon Web Services — but also for the HP software and hardware tools that let businesses build private cloud-like services in their own data centers. 

With Oracle and others looking to start-up cloud efforts, Seattle is one of the first choices to start development groups.  It is bit ironic that one of the most famous cities being Cloudy is the center of Cloud Software Development. 

The Tough Question for the Titans of Cloud, How is Your Team Better than the Competition?

Gigaom’s Barb Darrow asks for a question you would ask the Titans of the Cloud - Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Rackspace, Red Hat, VMware, and Microsoft.

Top 5 questions for the titans of cloud

by Barb Darrow

photo: (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

SUMMARY:

If you had Amazon’s Werner Vogels, Google’s Urs Hölzle, IBM/SoftLayer’s Lance Crosby, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, Rackspace’s Taylor Rhodes in one room, what would you ask?

There are 5 questions listed.  Being an insider and seeing how stuff works behind the scenes I have a tougher question than the readers sent in. 

Tell me how your team is better than the Competition?

Anyone who knows how things work know there are teams of people who work on the Cloud infrastructure.  If you trace cause of outages the human factor is hard to miss.  The Cloud automation is created by teams of people as well.  

HBR has a post on The New Science of Building Great Teams.

The New Science of Building Great Teams

by Alex “Sandy” Pentland

If you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.

And one of the insights on team performance.

Patterns of communication, for example, explained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.

Here is the HBR video on Team Performance.

 Here are Barb’s 5 question from readers.

 1: When will all the major clouds support the same set of APIs?

2: When will they support migration of data/workloads from one cloud to another natively?

3: What comes after the race to the bottom in cloud storage prices plays out?

4: When will we see a true cloud exchange? 

5: How can we be sure our data is safe in your cloud from prying eyes?

The Cloud, The Fast Food Experience of IT, Users are tired of the waiting, and waiting, and waiting

The Cloud is old, yet new.  I have a good friend who was smart enough to join AWS in 2006, close to the beginning.  Hey, that was almost exactly 8 years ago.  So, Cloud is old.  But, it is still new in IT years for many even though it is popular.  What is behind the popularity of the cloud?  OMG you could go on and on, and it is so confusing.

How about this?  The Cloud is the Fast Food Experience of IT.

:  of, relating to, or specializing in food that can be prepared and served quickly <a fast–food restaurant>

2

:  designed for ready availability, use, or consumption and with little consideration given to quality or significance <fast–food TV programming>

...

Fast food is the term given to food that is prepared and served very quickly, first popularized in the 1950s in the United States. While any meal with low preparation time can be considered fast food, typically the term refers to food sold in a restaurant or store with preheated or precooked ingredients, and served to the customer in a packaged form for take-out/take-away.

IT used to be the in-house experience.  Collecting requirements.  Asking everyone what they want to eat.  Prepare a menu.  Discuss the menu.  Make a shopping list.  Go to store.  Put everything away for cooking later.  Time goes on.  Get ready to prepare meal.  Realize you forgot something.  Go back to the store.  Running out time. Start cooking.  Family sees what you are cooking.  Makes new input.  Ewwhh, I don’t want to eat that.  Make a decision modify the meal plan or tell your family you will eat what is on the table.  You finish cooking.  But family is not all home.  Food sits in the oven, staying warm, degrading the quality and look.  Eventually everyone gets together to eat, and no one talks about how good the food is.  Clean the kitchen, put away the left overs.  Fast Food seems so much easier and the family gets what they want.  Never mind the cost, the quality is not as good or better depending on how good of a cook you are, the sugar, the fat and salt content are beyond your comprehension.  As your families health deteriorate and they gain many more pounds, they get used to fast food.

Fast Food is part of everyone’s diet.  The Cloud is too. 

Who has the best Quality Cloud?

The pricing of the cloud is highly competitive between Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, making the rest fall in line.  So you feel like you are getting good value, but are you getting good quality?

: how good or bad something is

: a characteristic or feature that someone or something has : something that can be noticed as a part of a person or thing

: a high level of value or excellence

McDonald’s rose through its belief in quality.  A consistent experience where your food tasted the same at any McDonald’s you went to.

Consistency, quality and success

Ray Kroc opened the Des Plaines, Illinois restaurant in 1955, and with the first Golden Arches, launched a legendary brand. He saw the value of a restaurant system that could be famous for offering consistently prepared, quality food that tasted the same in every location, every time. In 1958, McDonald’s sold its 100 millionth burger.

One of the things that insiders know is the inconsistent qualities of the cloud between different locations.  Price is the same, but performance and quality is different.  This is shrugged off by most of the providers, but from a customer’s perspective it puts the ownership on you to measure the quality of the cloud.

Sounds wrong.

At some point someone is going to pull a Ray Kroc and focus on quality of the experience and win customers.

Is Rackspace up for sale?

Gigaom’s Barb Darrow posts on the difficulties Rackspace is having and how Morgan Stanley has stepped in to help.

Ruh-roh. Rackspace brings Morgan Stanley aboard to evaluate its options

by Barb Darrow

11 HOURS AGO

7 Comments

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photo: Rackspace

SUMMARY:

Faced with cut-throat pricing by cloud giants, you had to wonder how Rackspace, with its service-centric approach, could keep up.

And, Rackspace pops with news of who is looking to buy them.

Rackspace Pops On M&A Signal; AT&T, HP, Cisco Loom

By REINHARDT KRAUSE, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

 Posted 08:25 AM ET

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AT&T, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), EMC (EMC), Cisco Systems and IBM loom as possible buyers of Rackspace Hosting (RAX), whose stock jumped late Thursday after the company said it had hired Morgan Stanley to explore strategic options, including a sale or partnership.

Rackspace's stock rose 14% before the market open in the stock market today. Shares in Rackspace popped 7% on Thursday — mostly on last-minute spike — after Bloomberg reported that Rackspace made a regulatory filing. Rackspace said in the filing that "multiple parties" had approached the company about a takeover or alliance.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/technology/051614-701130-rackspace-stock-pops-cloud-company-explores-sale-partnership.htm#ixzz31tpZVPg3 
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