bruce.armstrong wrote: Somebody just said it better than I did, and with more chops to say it:
Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg & Facebook Mobile
May. 8, 2012 02:11 PM EDT
| By Roger Strukhoff | Article Rating: |
|
| May 31, 2011 06:05 AM EDT | Reads: |
2,647 |
Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos became well-known as CEO of MySQL, a popular open-source database company that was sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in February 2008. The Finnish native then stayed on with Sun for another year.
Then a year or so ago Marten was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, which provides open-source infrastructure for the implementation of Cloud Computing on computer clusters. With Cloud Expo approaching, I was able to fire a few questions at him, which he quickly and graciously answered.
1. Eucalyptus claims 25,000 cloud starts for its on-site IaaS Cloud solution. What sorts of users are these? What size companies? What vertical markets? And in which countries?
Marten: Those Eucalyptus Clouds are all over the world, some in the smallest and most remote places. As one would expect, the USA, Japan and Germany are big.
And China and India stand out as enormously active.
We see a lot of universities, research institutions and government agencies. We see large companies - in fact, 21 of the Fortune100 companies started a Eucalyptus Cloud in 2010.
We also see telecom operators and telecom equipment manufacturers. And then a whole lot of web/mobile/SaaS operations. Generally, our users are the innovators and visionaries of the industry.
As for size, they range from the smallest to the largest. Some run clouds on just two or three servers; some have hundreds or thousands of them.
2. What advice can you give technical entrepreneurs who wish to take academic, research-oriented projects and leverage them into commercially viable companies, as your team has done with Eucalyptus? What major hurdles will they face? What surprises might they find along the way?
Marten: (As you know,) Eucalyptus started as an NSF-funded research project at UC Santa Barbara in 2007. It was spun out as an independent company in 2009, with the
university as a shareholder.
The benefit of a research project is that you typically have the best technology in the world and you are well ahead of the rest. The challenge is that going from a research basis to a commercial basis is a real change in how the organization functions, and not every researcher is ready for it.
There is a small but strong community of business angels and tech executives in Santa Barbara. These people helped the Eucalyptus team get going and switch to a commercial agenda. I think that was a crucial moment, and my advice to other technical entrepreneurs would be to make sure they are helped early on by well-intended and helpful business people who have done it before.
3. You recently wrote about "the 10X effect," that is, the coming massive growth of data that will be driven by proliferating devices. It seems to me this presents two sets of challenges: one challenge to companies that need to develop their apps for the mobile cloud, and a separate challenge to be able to handle the data mobile devices will
create. Is this accurate? And what advice are you giving to your customers about these coming challenges?
Marten: Yes, I think we will continue to see exponential growth in data. We will also see the number of connected devices grow exponentially.
Today's smartphones are very sophisticated, and the networks offer reliable high-speed connections. For these reasons, the number of mobile apps will grow enormously. Powering those applications, we will see cloud-based back-end systems.
And, yes, those systems will deal with amounts of data that easily are 10-100 times bigger than what traditional applications have dealt with. Fortunately, the underlying hardware and software is evolving fast, and all of this is today possible. It is just us human beings who must leave some old concepts behind, and start thinking in terms of elastic cloud applications.
