At Austin Cloud Camp on Saturday I ran into Ubuntu linux developer and Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland. Dustin is on the server developer team at Canonical and, as he explains it, focuses on various aspects of virtualization, the plumbing layer below cloud computing. I grabbed Dustin for a few minutes and chatted with him about last week’s release and what he’s been working on.
Michael Cote of Redmonk welcomes us all. (credit Dave Nielsen)
This past Saturday, Cloud Camp Austin was held down on the UT campus. There was a very healthy turnout and a lot of great discussions were generated.
Sequence of Events
After opening salutations, camp got underway with a series of six five-minute lightening talks delivered by the camp’s gold sponsors.
My lightening talk: Mapping Processes in the Cloud (credit: Dave Nielsen)
The Main Event
From there, Dave Nielsen, the man who originally developed the cloud camp format (and who took most of the pictures in this post — see them all), guided us through the process of coming up with topics for session discussions. That process, appropriately enough given that this was an unconference, began with an “unpanel.”
The Unpannel: Michael Wilde of Splunk, (not sure), Dustin from Canonical, Cote, myself (credit Dave Nielsen)
All Together Now
The way it worked was the room first brainstormed a list of topics they were interested in discussing/learning more about. Anyone who thought they were an expert on one or more of these topics got to get up from their seats and form a five person panel at the front of the room. Each member of the panel then answered two questions from the board and as the question was answered the audience was asked if the topic had been covered by the answer or if it warranted further discussion in an afternoon session
(L->R) Dave Nielsen leads us through our unconference set up. Canonical's Dustin Kirkland and hero-for-hire John West lend a hand.
A Schedule is Born
After the panel, as a group we all decided what the final sessions would be and who would lead them. To lead a session you could either be knowledgeable in the area or completely clueless but wanted to learn about it.
The completed schedule: three sessions ran at a time and there were three time slots (credit Dave Nielsen)
Coming Soon
While at camp I did a couple of video interviews, one with Dustin Kirkland of Canonical and one with Todd Morey of Mosso/Rackspace. I should be posting those in the next few days. I also found myself on the other end of the microphone being interviewed by Mr. Cote. That should be appearing in the near distant future on his blog.
To get some insight into the release and what it means, I grabbed some time with Simon Wardley of Canonical. Simon, who joined Canonical near the end of last year, is the person tasked with looking into cloud computing for the company in order to figure out what it means for them, what it means for the industry and ultimately, determining what Canonical should be doing about this change that’s occurring in our industry.
Simon Wardley, setting the controls for the heart of the cloud.
Some of the topics Simon tackles:
How did Simon get his present job and what was he doing before?
When looking at adopting cloud computing three risks need to be evaluated
The risk of doing nothing (which should be balanced against the next two)
Transitional risk
Out sourcing risks
Cloud standards will emerge through the marketplace rather than via committee
Why Ubuntu went with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.
Today’s release is a technical preview, “a starting point in a journey.”
For the “Karmic Koala” release due in October, they will be focusing on persistency, policies and portability. They are also working with a bunch of management tool providers to allow users a choice of how they want to manage their environment.
Whats coming next year in the cloud space:
A hybrid model: Private clouds that allow bursting between them and public clouds.
Portability between providers will become a big issue.
A lot of standardization at the infrastructure layer of the stack
An explosion of innovation
The IT department will face real governance issues
Open source will continue to be critically important
Devin Rickard is a Senior Director of Business Process Improvement at Symantec, the company best known for its Norton line of security products. The team that Devin belongs to acts as internal process consultants at the company and they’ve adopted Lombardi Blueprint as the common process modeling tool for the group. What they found however is that Blueprint has a wide appeal beyond their group.
I caught up with Devin to learn about process improvement at Symantec and how his team was using Blueprint.
Devin Rickard of Symantec's Business Process Improvement team
Some of the topics Devin tackles:
Symantec has grown through rapid organic growth as well as acquisition. This has led to processes being executed in islands. Devin’s group works with the islands to try and “pull them together into a single continent.”
The team practices “stealth six sigma.” They have adapted the processes and tools from Six Sigma so that they fit the Symantec corporate culture.
What started as a nice tool for the practitioners has ended up becoming the core catalyst that brings together individuals and helps them to visualize what they are trying to improve upon for Symantec customers and partners.
As business owners or process managers become engaged they are becoming aggressive adopters of Blueprint. They find it gets them a picture of their business that they’ve never had before and they want to find the areas within their own processes that they can make improvements to.
The interest/involvement of the business has noticeably shortened the time to improvements.
Some of the projects Devin and team have used Blueprint for: transforming the quote to cash process and the procure to pay process (Blueprint helped to cut the time to pay employee expense reports from 3-5 weeks to 2-3 days) as well as working on ways to make the process of integrating acquisitions smoother.
Rackspace, Microsoft and Sun find themselves in good company
As an application that leverages all the agility and reach that the cloud provides, we thought it only appropriate that Lombardi Blueprint help sponsor Cloud Camp Austin 2009.
Along with lesser known companies like Microsoft, Sun and Rackspace, Lombardi Blueprint is a gold sponsor of the event (actually since I took the screenshot to the left, Aserver, Rightscale and Zeus have also joined the golden ranks).
As a gold sponsor we get to deliver a 5-7 minute lightening talk at the beginning of the event. The only restrictions are that it be cloud related and it can’t be a product pitch. I will be talking about the cloud and democratization of information.
What, When, Where…
The event takes place next Saturday, April 25th from 10AM – 4PM down at Austin City Limits on the UT campus.Here’s how the webpage sums up the event:
CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged you to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.
(Here are a few more thoughts regarding the event from co-organizer and Red Monk analyst Michael Cote.)
Free for All
The cost of the event is FREE and all you need to do is register online so they know how many folks are coming (heck, I bet if you showed up that day they probably wouldn’t turn you away.) So come on down next Saturday and enjoy and learn. And remember, since its an unconference that means anyone can propose and lead a session and we all learn from each other.
I love taking pictures of San Francisco, I think its one of the most photogenic cities in the world. I was back in the Bay Area a couple of weeks ago for Web 2.0 and I got a few shots as I was walking around downtown.
The obligatory cable car picture.
The Apple store on Market, conveniently located next to the Men's Wearhouse.
SF MoMA and the Bay Bridge thru my dirty hotel window.
Next month I’ll be heading over to Houston to attend APQC’s knowledge management conference. One of the talks I’m interested in checking out will be given by Bryant Clevenger, the global leader for IBM GBS’s knowledge sharing strategy.
On the KMedge blog, Bryant explains what they’ve been up to:
At IBM, leveraging knowledge has always been an important part of our business. Last year, we undertook a massive overhaul of the technology and approach we use for knowledge management, moving from a centrally managed, linear, taxonomy- and repository-based system to one that leverages the best of Web 2.0, including social software, user participation, and key market-driven concepts like sponsored links.
As a promo for his talk, Bryant put together the following video, complete with a rockin’ BTO instrumental soundtrack .
Some of the topics the video addresses:
How do you harness the expertise and leverage the knowledge that is spread across 387,000 people located in 170 countries?
1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer for less than 12 months.
People are using web 2.0 in their daily lives, they expect the same tools in the workplace.
The IBM employee knowledge portal allows users to
Search across multiple content repositories
Create social tags, peer ratings and tag content
Locate experts and contact them.
The portal surfaces: 1) the highest rated internal content, 2) Leadership priorities and 3 external competitor info.
Bryant’s “modest” vision for the portal: Unprecedented access to content and experts will shorten the sales cycle and will expand the reach of information…removing country and organization barriers and enabling the globally integrated enterprise.
Goodness for any size
Whether this project actually leads to the “enabling of the globally integrated enterprise” or not I think this effort will create considerable value. I also believe that you don’t have to be a huge multinational like IBM to benefit from the availability of Web 2.0-based tools in the workplace. Web 2.0 tools are built around the principles of linking, sharing, participation and collaboration — valuable elements for a company of any size.
Don’t touch that dial
BTW, If you are interested increasing linking, sharing, participation and collaboration in your organization you’ll want to check out our next Blueprint release, coming soon to a browser near you. Stay tuned
One of the more interesting people I met last week at Web 2.0 was Gaurav Mishra who is visiting the US from India as a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence. As a Yahoo! Fellow, Gaurav is doing research and teaching at Georgetown University in the field of social media. I was able to grab some of his time and learn what he’s up to.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics that Gaurav tackles:
Looking at social media from an international perspective and examining how businesses, civil society and governments make use of it.
The seminar Gaurav teaches is one of the 2 or 3 social media courses that Georgetown offers.
What Gaurav was doing in India before he got the fellowship.
Social media and activism
The analysis and measurement of social media and how to tie it back to business processes, civil society goals or government objectives.
Last week Rackspace announced the appointment of Lew Moorman as president of Rackspace’s Cloud Computing Efforts. As luck would have it, Lew was attending Web 2.0 and I was able to grab a few minutes of his time to shoot a video. Not only that but as added bonus, recent Rackspace conscriptRobert Scoble joined the conversation as well.
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Lew and Robert tackle:
What does it mean to be president of Rackspace’s computing efforts?
What’s “building 43” about and what is Robert’s mission at Rackspace?
How did Rackspace decide on hiring Robert and Rocky?
Rackspace added to the NASDAQ index (even though they trade on the NYSE)
Robert asks Lew about Slicehost and Rackspace’s plans there.
Lew out at Web 2.0 meeting with a lot of developers and looking to help them sell their tools to Rackspace customers.
I’m currently attending Web 2.0 here in San Francisco. One of the cooler talks I saw yesterday was given by Scott Monty, the head of Ford Motor’s Social Media efforts. I was so intrigued that I thought I would grab him for an interview. He graciously agreed and here’s the result. Enjoy
To watch in High Quality: after clicking play, click the “HQ” button that will appear on the bottom.
Some of the topics Scott tackles:
Ford’s goal of becoming one of the world’s leading social brands.
Setting content free.
Innovation is made up of small tweaks on existing platforms that build value over time.
How did Ford come to decide they needed a head of social media and how did they pick Scott.
The two things coming up that Scott is most excited about: the Fiesta Movement and the evolution of Fordstory.com into Ford’s social media hub.
BTW, If you want to follow Scott on Twitter, its @scottmonty.
Posted by Barton George 
