Because of the threats like Conficker brought to our computer, security remains a top concern for Windows users.That’s the reason why Panda Security, publishers of Panda Internet Security and Panda Antivirus, is set to take antivirus where it hasn’t been yet: into the clouds. Panda Cloud Antivirus beta bets that nearly three years of development can pay off into a better protection system for users. To that end, Panda’s willing to make the client free for personal use–even after it leaves beta testing. Continue Reading The Original Article Here

Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions, and uTest, the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services, today announced a Webinar on how crowdsourcing and cloud-based technologies can help companies launch higher quality applications, while reducing time to market and controlling costs. The Webinar, “Better Apps with Crowdsourcing & The Cloud,” will be held on Wednesday, February 11, at 11AM PT / 2PM ET.

Across the software industry, companies are trying to do more with less. For C-level execs and their tech teams, this means dealing with flat or shrinking budgets, while still trying to get new versions to market quickly and maintaining application quality. Companies are now turning to online communities and cloud-based infrastructure to get the job done while reducing capital and operational expenses.

Topics covered in this Webinar include:

--  How crowdsourcing and cloud computing can be used together to improve
    the application delivery process
--  Examples of how leading companies are using crowdsourcing and cloud-
    computing to achieve their goals
--  Best practices for using these solutions to launch higher quality apps
    and control costs

To register for the Webinar, please visit: http://www.skytap.com/events.

Don’t think cloud computing is a wonderful thing? Wait until everyone and their mother has a netbook in hand.

Yeah, you know, those small Wi-Fi-happy machines sporting 8-13” screens, flash-based storage drives, Intel Atom central processors, etcetera, etcetera.

For a large portion of the global population, even those in well-developed regions, this might seem like really loose premise. Netbooks for everyone? Why not get an full-on laptop? You can do more with your dollar! And any simple tasks on the Web can be done with some of the smartphones making the rounds on hardware review sites, right? Well, I’m not so sure.

Here’s the thing. Web apps aren’t meant to be simple. At least not in a utilitarian sense. Yes, developers serious about the craftmaking of such services go to considerable lengths to ensure greater sense of intuitiveness and ease of use than might ordinarily be the case with any equivalent desktop-based program design. Things at the backend need to be “thinner and lighter” in size and weight, too.

But to think we can rely on our iPhones and T-Mobile G1s and BlackBerry Bolds and Storms and whathaveyou to fully engage with office and social media applications seems a tad impractical. Mobile software designs are good and are getting better by the month, but the kind of pixelated real estate you can comfortably stuff in your pant pocket can only provide for so much interactivity. Of course, the outlook for power for the mobile phone market is as rosy as can be right now. But for the foreseeable future, there remains a place for bigger things.

Not so much bigger, though. We recently shared a few notes on the netbook space and how things are progressing in the field, both in hardware and software. It’s safe to say that in recent months, apart from the requisite dotage on Apple’s lineup of philosophically conventional MacBook and MacBook Pro products, the market of netbooks has transferred to a semi-front burner position in terms of attention grabbed and attention earned.

And its quite clear why that is. The class of gadgets led by the Asus EEE PC has performed in ways that would not be the case two or three years ago, and it’s mark as something of a phenomenon largely comes down to price. Consumers can grab a fairly well-equipped netbook from the current crop of options for an average of $300-500. (According to recent news, Asus may launch a $200 offering next year.)

What’s more, users are no longer hindered by absurdly small screen sizes, as was the case for the first run of 7” designs from Asus.

Now…for the credit crisis trick!

It’s said time and time again that in times of economic distress, the consumer doesn’t cease to be a consumer. This is true. He/she only becomes more aware of expenses, paying careful attention to comparisons between products and giving greater voice to his/her needs than his/her wants. Thus, in the present environment, it’s not hard to imagine that the performance of netbooks relative to larger PCs will be strong. Surprisingly strong, perhaps.

Renewed focus and development by manufacturers has brought the budding netbook market from something strictly meant to be an accessory to consumers’ computational lives - and a fantastically high-cost accessory, at that - to something that may very well replace a good amount of activity in the PC arena simply due to its convenient arrival at a near perfect ratio of power and price. The evolution of Web apps, both for productivity and entertainment purposes, into engines that, given a solid broadband connection from server to client and back around, can all but negate traditional norms insofar as “getting things done.”

Yes, there are exceptions to be made. The most outstanding one being reliability of routers and so forth. But methods to diminish the impact of disruptions are becoming more and more commonplace. This goes as much for document editing as data storage and media strangers - both upstream and downstream.

Cloud computing has been “the next cool thing” for at least the past 18 months. The current economic climate, however, may be the thing that accelerates the maturity of the technology and drives mainstream adoption in 2009.

This economic crisis is very different from the normal ebbs of the business cycle we have grown accustomed to. The difference lies in how rapidly sources of capital have dried up—whether that capital is coming from venture capitalists, angel investors, or banks. Capital markets are frozen, and companies needing to make capital investments to continue operations or grow are facing a daunting challenge.

A lack of capital creates a lack of flexibility in leveraging technology to operate and grow a business. If you can’t get access to a bank loan, you have to use your company revenues to buy new servers. Using company revenues can damage cash flow, harm valuations, and put otherwise healthy businesses at risk.

Typically, when a company wants to grow its IT infrastructure, it has two options:

• Build it in house and own or lease the equipment.
• Outsource the infrastructure to a managed services provider.

In both scenarios, a company must purchase the infrastructure to support peak usage regardless of the normal system usage. One Valtira client, for example, has fairly low usage for most of the year, but sees usage equalling millions of page views/month for about 15 minutes each quarter. For both of the above options, they are faced with paying for an infrastructure necessary for only about 1 hour each year when something much more minimalist will support the rest of the year.

Let’s assume for this customer that two application servers backed by two database servers and balanced by a load balancer will solve the problem. The options look something like this:

For this calculation, I assume fairly baseline, server-class systems with a good amount of RAM and on-board RAID5 such as a Dell 2950 and a good load balancer. The 3-year cost assumes a 10% cost of capital. I also assume a very cost-efficient managed services provider. Most of the big names will be at least three times more expensive than the numbers I am providing here.

Under this scenario, managed services saves you a nice 13.5% over the do it yourself approach (assuming you don’t get taken to the cleaners by one of the big managed services companies). Of course, it does not consider at all the impact of a server outage at 3am, which is where managed services will shine.

What is particularly appealing about managed services, however, is the lack of capital investment. The $40,000 up-front for an internal IT approach is a terrible burden in the current economic environment. Even if you can get credit, the cost of the loan makes that $40,000 much more expensive over three years than $40,000.

Good argument for managed services? Yes, but a better argument for the cloud.

The cloud enters the picture looking like this:

Cloud savings over internal IT jump to 29% without getting into the discussion of buy for capacity versus buy what you use!

Between managed services and the cloud, the cloud provides 18% savings.

While 18% and 29% savings are nothing to sneeze at, they are just the start of the financial benefits of the cloud. It goes on.

• No matter what your needs, your up-front cost is always $0
• As the discrepancy between peak usage and standard usage grows, the cost difference between the cloud and other options becomes overwhelming.
• The cloud option essentially includes a built-in SAN in the form of the Amazon Elastic Block Storage. The internal IT and managed services options would go up significantly if we added the cost of a SAN into the infrastructure.
• Cheap redundancy! While the above environment is not quite a “high availability” environment, it is very highly redundant with systems spread across multiple data centers. The managed services and internal IT options, on the other hand, have single physical points of failure as the application servers and database servers are likely located in the same rack.

Let’s say, however, that you need 10 servers to handle peak usage for 1 hour each year and just 2 to operate the rest of the year. Ignoring the impact of the cost of capital:

• Internal IT adds another $40,000 in total costs over 3 years.
• Managed services adds another $144,000 in total costs over 3 years.
• The Amazon Cloud adds about $24 in total costs over 3 years.

No, that was not a typo. That’s forty THOUSAND dollars against one hundred forty-four THOUSAND dollars against 24 dollars. And as I mentioned earlier, this setup is based on an actual Valtira client that was considering a dedicated managed services option before Valtira began deploying customers in the Amazon cloud. It is not some contrived example.

Obviously, most organizations have either seasonal peaks or daily peaks (or both) with a less dramatic cost differential; but the cost differential is still quite dramatic and quite impactful to the bottom line. In addition, the ability to pay for what you use makes it easy to engage in “proofs of concept” and other R&D that requires dedicated hardware.

Shelton stressed to me that VMware could have taken the route of setting up its own physical data centers and offering cloud computing itself, as many other services have done. But they chose instead to continue working with their partners and add value to what cloud computing services offer.

Technically, the vCloud promise of giving you interoperability and the chance to switch cloud vendors follows the path pioneered by Cleversafe, a company  profiled in 2006. Our data is less subject to arbitrary legal and privacy risks if we spread it around.

vCloud is intended to let VMware insert itself as the intermediator between vendors and customers alike, thus keeping its relevance in the cloud computing age. Shelton, however, claims that “We are entirely focused on enablement, not intermediation. VMware will operate entirely ‘out of band’ in relation to transactions, migrations, and other arrangements enterprises and service providers who are part of vCloud ecosystem.”

Economically, vCloud represents a familiar activity found in many industries. Every company would like to introduce some regularity and predictability into its relationships with suppliers. But Shelton said VMware is trying to be careful not to introduce too much standardization. They don’t want to cut off innovation or leave their partners without a way to differentiate themselves. But if vCloud is successful, it will make clouds more responsive to user needs, as well as keeping VMware relevant.

Preeti Somal of VMware discussed the challenge of bridging the interoperability gap between on- and off-premise cloud computing, as this is emerging as a key requirement for enterprise adoption. This session at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo 2008 West revealed how VMware and others are addressing this challenge to make seamless enterprise cloud computing a reality. View technology offerings that deliver smart applications for on- and off-premise clouds. Whether you’re a business building a cloud, considering cloud services, or developing for the cloud, this session revealed how applications will traverse the clouds and why it will change the game.

Preeti Somal is Vice President of R&D at VMware with responsibility for vCloud - VMware’s Cloud Computing solutions. She has an extensive background in applications and systems management.

Why “Cloud” computing?

There may be a vast array of reasons as to why an individual or business might use cloud computing. Some reasons include:

It’s simple:

• Scalable
• Flexible
• Reliable
• Fast Setup
• Affordable Enterprise Solution
• Environmentally More Efficient

Cloud computing increases capacity or adds capabilities on the fly without having to purchase and maintain physical hardware as well as the space to store it reduces overhead costs, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Connectivity costs are falling and hardware is becoming more efficient at scaling. It also allows for scaling up/down easily to provide reliable services to customers.

Those are just a few possible reasons why cloud computing may be a viable option, but one thing is certain, making a decision as to which cloud service to use is not an easy task.

Rackspace today announced they are purchasing Jungle Disk and Slice Host in an event that’s going on now.

What does this mean?

Rackspace is competing with Amazon’s Web services. Microsoft is expected to launch other similar services next week at its PDC event. Rackspace will announce several new services both today and over the next few months.

Rackspace’s employees tell me they are making their services open so that their customers can leave and go to other company’s services.

Who is Jungle Disk? They are a service that’s wholly on Amazon’s Web services right now and offer their customers backup and storage. You pay per gigabyte per month to back up your hard drive. They will announce new storage services and will give their customers a choice of using either Rackspace data centers or Amazon’s. Or both. Now you will have access to your data even if Amazon’s servers are unavailable for some reason.

Who is Slice Host? They have thousands of VPS Hosting customers who are mostly web developers who want access to super fast and super reliable cloud services. They compete pretty directly with Amazon’s EC2 services.

More as I live blog the event, keep refreshing to see more over the next hour, or watch the live event.

Earlier this year I got a tour of Rackspace’s new headquarters and met several of its leaders in a video.

DISCLAIMER: Rackspace is one of the sponsors of my blog and FastCompany.tv.

UPDATES: They just announced that Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud services, will be renamed “Cloud Sites.”

We’ll do more live blogging on FriendFeed here because that lets me interact with people a lot faster than my blog does.

Mosso, RackSpace’s subsidiary which uses the cloudcomputing space, The site is updating the way they charge customers. Previously, the company’s $100/mo plan was capped at 3 million requests, and charged users $.03 for every thousand requests after that. The big problem with this model was illustrated by Travell Perkins, a developer who is currently hosting with Mosso:

“We live in a CPC ad world, at least when a service is starting out. Furthermore Mosso was counting all requests, not page requests. A standard media rich page can make 50 - 100 requests before it loads. Only the page itself is ad supported, so most web applications would not be able to cover the costs through ads. API based web services aren’t even an option. A developer would have to pass the $.03 CPM directly on to consumers of the API to stay out of the red.”

The new pricing structure, outlined in the email to customers that I’ve embedded below, eliminates the request metric and instead charges based on “the compute cycle - a measurement of the processing time your application requires to run on The Hosting Cloud.” Here’s how Perkins explains the significance of this change:

“It basically means you can build standard LAMP/.NET applications with file based caching solutions and compete against the big boys. Amazon EC2 is closer to the metal and not really meant for two man developer teams. You need IT management experience to really make it hum. Mosso in short is really shared hosting taken to the next level, built to scale. Now the pricing structure matches. With creative developers who understand caching you can move CPU utilization to storage utilization and have a really cost effective and scalable solution.”

The cloud computing space has become crowded over the past year, with leader Amazon being joined by Mosso, Nirvanix, and Google App Engine, among others. Will the new pricing structure give Mosso an edge in luring developers?

A couple of months ago, Hugh Macleod created a bit of buzz with his blog post The Cloud’s Best Kept Secret. Hugh’s argument: that cloud computing will lead to a huge monopoly. Of course, a couple of weeks ago, Larry Ellison made the opposite point, arguing that salesforce.com is “barely profitable”, and that no one will make much money in cloud computing.

In this post, I’m going to explain why Ellison is right, and yet, for the strategic future of Oracle, he is dangerously wrong.

First, let’s take a look at Hugh Macleod’s argument:

…nobody seems to be talking about Power Laws. Nobody’s saying that one day a single company may possibly emerge to dominate The Cloud, the way Google came to dominate Search, the way Microsoft came to dominate Software.Monopoly issues aside, could you imagine such a company? We wouldn’t be talking about a multi-billion dollar business like today’s Microsoft or Google. We’re talking about something that could feasibly dwarf them. We’re potentially talking about a multi-trillion dollar company. Possibly the largest company to have ever existed.

I imagine many of my friends who work for the aforementioned companies know all about this, and know how VAST the stakes are.

Windows vs Apple? Who cares? Kid’s stuff. There’s a much bigger game going on… And for some reason, its utter enormity seems to be a very well-kept secret, at least to non-combatants like myself.

The problem with this analysis is that it doesn’t take into account what causes power laws in online activity. Understanding the dynamics of increasing returns on the web is the essence of what I called Web 2.0. Ultimately, on the network, applications win if they get better the more people use them.

Cloud computing, at least in the sense that Hugh seems to be using the term, as a synonym for the infrastructure level of the cloud as best exemplified by Amazon S3 and EC2, doesn’t have this kind of dynamic.

Of course, it is true that the bigger players will have economies of scale in the cost of equipment, and especially in the cost of power, that are not available to smaller players. But there are quite a few big players — Google, Microsoft, Amazon — to name a few, that are already at that scale, with or without a cloud computing play. What’s more, economies of scale are not the same as increasing returns from user network effects. They may be characteristic of a commoditizing marketplace that does not actually give outsize economic leverage to the winners.

I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the following remark, since I heard it secondhand, but it was from a thoughtful, informed source: Jeff Bezos is reported to have said that he welcomes cloud competition from Google and Microsoft, because they’ll subsidize their cloud services with profits from other part of their business, while Amazon will always have to make it pay. “We’re good at commodity businesses,” Jeff is reported to have said, and the facts bear him out.

If cloud computing is a commodity business, then the outsize profits that Hugh envisioned are not going to be there. This is a business that will be huge, but it may be more similar to the web hosting and ISP markets, which are also huge, but not hugely profitable.

But because one of my goals at Radar is to help people think about the future, I wanted to spend some time on the possible futures and strategies that could turn cloud computing into the kind of massive monopoly that Hugh envisioned.