Google Moves Deeper Into the Enterprise

Host Om Malik asked Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome and Apps, Google, what he thinks is the most important adoption trend for cloud computing at this time. “The big thing that’s going to help cloud, with consumers and enterprises as well, was that previously, people were tethered to only one device [a PC] with a browser. Fast forward to now: This is why we launched Chrome and Android—and we have more to come. Almost all of us have a [mobile] phone, a laptop; many of us have tablets, at home and in the enterprise. The only way to get a consistent [application] experience across all of this is through the cloud. The advent of mobile and personal computing did a lot more to bring the cloud to people than the cloud itself.”

IBM is busy these days taking its celebrated Watson knowledge base and user application to the markets. The first three verticals it has targeted are health care, financial service and government. Project No. 1: diagnosing and treating killer diseases. “Watson is behind the scenes [when a patient goes to see a clinician]. The idea is to build a system that has all the information you as a doctor will need, because you can’t know it all,” IBM’s Dan Cerutti said. “Watson can do work behind the scenes and present to the doc some options of what might be ailing you.”

Simon Crosby, well known in the IT business for his virtualization work at XenSource and Citrix, has rejiggered data and application security with his new startup, Bromium. The company’s software isolates an individual application or work project with something called a Microvisor, which puts the application into a protective “bubble” called a Micro-VM. As a result, a user doesn’t have to worry about any outside influences from the operating system, email, the Internet or anything else.

Microsoft now believes its Windows Azure cloud platform has sufficiently matured from the gaming platform it was designed to be into a legitimate enterprise cloud system. Although many in the enterprise world had written off Azure as a non-player, “we now finally have in Azure that flexibility that’s needed for the broad developer and enterprise community,” said Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business. “In terms of infrastructure, it’s battle-tested, given all of our first-party apps.”

With the year-old Open Compute Project, Facebook is helping other enterprises build a new type of infrastructure for its needs and the needs of other Webscale companies that had been locked into a vendor-defined ecosystem. To this end, the company is open-sourcing specifications for its data center’s electrical and mechanical construction, including technical specifications and mechanical CAD files. But Facebook isn’t stopping there. Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s director of hardware design and supply chain, discussed how his group not only is building data centers for scale, but also about how to operate them at scale.

Vivek Kundra, appointed by President Obama as the first CIO of the United States in 2009, who now works for Salesforce.com as executive vice president for emerging markets, said that when he moved into the White House cabinet-level job in 2009, the federal government already had $27 billion worth of IT projects that were behind schedule and over budget. “The impetus in terms of a shift towards cloud was driven by recognizing that the current model of procuring IT in the government was fundamentally broken,” Kundra said. “For example, there was an ERP project in the Department of Defense that took 10 years and $1 billion, and it didn’t work.”

While Apple’s development tools for mobile applications work fine, they do not support server code, which is usually left to languages such as PHP or Ruby on Rails. The problem with those traditional languages is that they are dynamically typed languages whereas objective C is statically typed. A lot of bugs arise from that difference. Opa 1.0 is an advanced strongly statically typed framework for JavaScript, which could be the missing piece of the puzzle to improving programming iPhone apps.

Storage optimization software provider Atlantis Computing unveiled its ILIO FlexCloud 1.0. The new product makes it possible for enterprises and service providers to improve the efficiency, performance and economics of storage-intensive virtualized server and cloud applications, such as databases, big data and custom enterprise applications.

Garantia Data‘s dynamic auto-sharding technology virtualizes multiple cloud servers into an infinite pool of memory, enabling datasets to scale autonomously and continuously from gigabytes to terabytes—and even to petabytes scale—based on their actual size. The zero-management service frees developers from dealing with nodes, clusters, server lists, configuration, scaling and failure recovery, while guaranteeing absolutely no data loss.

Versant announced a free, pre-release version of Versant JPA (Java Persistence API) for the Cloud, a pure, cloud-based Java client for the Versant Object Database (VOD) certified for use on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). With this capability, enterprises can enjoy the cloud’s on-demand accessibility, Java’s ease of use and portability, and NoSQL’s performance and scalability.

The host’s 72-page report offers chapters on trends and IT to watch, companies to watch, the pros and cons of using platform as a service (PaaS), the advantages of using Hadoop as a central part of enterprise analytics strategy, software-defined networking and numerous other topics.

TransLattice, which provides application management software for enterprise, cloud and hybrid environments, announced a new version of its geographically distributed relational database package aimed at systems administrators.