Matthew Weinberger

February 8, 2012

3 Min Read
Prepping for Cloud Connect: The Day the Cloud Stood Still

Your humble correspondent has a confession to make: It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much trouble finding something to say about the cloud services market. The reason is obvious: Every vendor, from giants such as HP to startups such as ActiveState, are using next week’s Cloud Connect conference — which I’ve mentioned before — as the platform for new product releases, momentum statements, version updates, partner strategy realignments and more.

But before you shed a tear for this blogger, know that all is not lost. The Cloud Connect conference issued a press release indicating that the following vendors are for sure, 100 percent showing off new products or services in Santa Clara, Calif.:

  • Apica, showing off a new version of its Apica LoadTest cloud testing/performance monitoring portal.

  • Ecessa Corp., promoting the opportunity to get $500 in trade-in credit toward one of its appliances by mailing the company a competitor’s WAN link controller.

  • Flexera Software is launching a new version of its FlexNet Producer Suite, aimed at helping developers migrate applications to the cloud.

  • GigaSpaces Technologies is announcing the general availability of Cloudify, its application platform the company says can bring mission-critical apps to any cloud without any code change.

  • IGLOO Software will debut an update to its social business software, bringing “microblogging, polling and personal dashboards.”

  • ITpreneurs is showing off its vendor-neutral cloud computing educational portfolio — something we’ve already seen previewed in the announcement about CompTIA’s cloud computing certification exam.

  • Similarly, Mirantis will be demonstrating its new OpenStack educational courses.

  • OpSource is demonstrating its new Cloud Software billing model, which charges per hour for software license usage (for instance, Microsoft SQL Server or SharePoint) in a similar fashion to how customers are already charged for the underlying infrastructure/platform.

  • Phoenix NAP, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, is at Cloud Connect to promote Secured Cloud, “a state-of-the-art approach to cloud computing that integrates enterprise technologies with user-friendly systems.” Mysterious! Or just a lot of buzzwords, maybe.

  • Supermicro is flipping the script by showing off server hardware — namely the 2U Twin² SuperServer, a cloud platform based on the next-generation Intel Xeon E5 processors.

  • Colocation provider Telx is announcing a partnership with Appcore to give its 1,000 customers access to turnkey hosted private cloud (my least favorite term) solutions based on the Citrix Cloud.com Cloudstack platform.

  • Finally, storage specialist Vembu Technologies will be launching cloud BDR solution StoreGrid Cloud and cloud file sync solution SyncBlaze Cloud.

Those are just the exhibitors that are actually making big announcements (that we know of thus far). It’s worth noting that essentially every other cloud company in attendance will be showcasing their current flagship or most recent products — notably, HP Cloud Services is there specifically to promote its new line of OpenStack-based IaaS offerings.

If there’s already that much news ahead of Cloud Connect, I’m starting to do push-ups to make sure I’m in shape when the actual show arrives in Santa Clara next week. It sure sounds like I’m going to be doing a lot of running around.

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