EnjoyTech

Elevators suck. They are not smart enough to know which floor you might want to go. They aren't designed to avoid crowding in single elevator. And they make people press buttons twice, once to call an elevator and then to let it know which floor you want to go to. This all changed during my recent trip to Brazil when I saw the newer kind of elevators. These elevators have a common button panel outside in the lobby area of a high rise building. All people are required to enter their respective floor numbers and the machine will display a specific elevator number that they should get into. Once you enter into an elevator you don't press any numbers. In fact the elevators have no buttons at all. The elevator would highlight the floor numbers that it would stop at. That's it! I love this redesigned experience of elevators. It solves a numbers of problems. The old style elevators could not predict the demand. Now the system exactly knows how many people are waiting at what floor...

Yesterday, Amazon announced a new orchestration service called Simple Workflow Service . I would encourage you to read the announcement on Werner's blog  where he explains the need, rationale, and architecture. The people I spoke to had mixed reactions. One set of people described this as a great idea and were excited that the developers can now focus on writing domain-specific code as opposed to writing plumbing code to orchestrate their actual code. The other set of people felt that this service creates a new cloud lock-in making it difficult for the developers to switch from one cloud to another as well as being able to interoperate at the orchestration level. I believe this is a brilliant idea for a variety of reasons. Orchestration has always been painful. Ask the developers who have been involved in managing task execution across a cluster that required them to code for load balancing, handling exceptions, restarting hung processes, tracking progress etc. This is not a core c...

Today, Cloudera announced a new $40m funding round to scale their sales and marketing efforts and a partnership with NetApp where NetApp will resell Cloudera's Hadoop as part of their solution portfolio. These both announcements are critical to where the cloud and Big Data are headed. Big Data going mainstream: Hadoop and MapReduce are not only meant for Google, Yahoo, and fancy Silicon Valley start-ups. People have recognized that there's a wider market for Hadoop for consumer as well as enterprise software applications. As I have argued before Hadoop and Cloud is a match made in heaven. I blogged about Cloudera and the rising demand of data-centric massive parallel processing almost 2.5 years back, Obviously, we have come a long way. The latest Hadoop conference is completely sold out. It's good to see the early signs of Hadoop going mainstream. I am expecting to see similar success for companies such as Datastax (previously Riptano) which is a "Cloudera for Cass...

I am very passionate about the idea of giving developers the control over parallelism without them having to deal with the underlying execution semantics of their code. The programming languages and the constructs, today, are designed to provide abstraction, but they are not designed to estimate the computational complexity and dependencies. The frameworks such as MapReduce is designed not to have any dependencies between the computing units, but that's not true for the majority of the code. It is also not trivial to rewrite existing code to leverage parallelism. As, with the cloud, when the parallel computing continues to be a norm rather than an exception, the current programs are not going to run any faster. In fact, they will be relatively slower compared to other programs that would leverage parallel computation. Robert Harper, a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University recently wrote an excellent blog post - parallelism is not concurrency . I would encourag...

The Dealmaker Media has published a list of their favorite Cloud, SaaS, and Tech bloggers . Once again I am happy to report that I made the cut. I am also glad to see my fellow bloggers Krishnan and Zoli on this list who are the driving force behind Cloudave . I was on a similar list of top cloud, virtualization, and SaaS bloggers that they had published in the past. Under The Radar is one of the best conferences that I go to. This is the best place for disruptive start-ups to pitch an get noticed. They make a great attempt to connect entrepreneurs with investors and blogger like me. I have blogged about the disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups as well as the disruptive start-ups in the categories of NoSQL and virtualization . Most of these start-ups have either had a good exit or have been doing well. The best example so far is Heroku's $212M exit . I met the Heroku founders at Under The Radar a couple of years back. I am looking forward to soaking up even more in...

This post is co-authored by Manish Garg and Chirag Mehta Drupal is widely recognized as a great content management system, but we strongly believe that Drupal offers a lot more than that – a framework, a platform, and a set of technology – to build and run enterprise applications, specifically on the cloud. This post is an attempt to explore the benefits and potential of Drupal on the cloud. Elasticity One of the last things the customers should worry about their websites is the performance degradation due to sudden spike in the traffic. For years, the customers had to size their servers to meet the peak demand. They overpaid, and still failed to deliver on promise, at peak load. Cloud solves this elasticity problem really well, and if you are using Drupal, you automatically get the elasticity benefits, since Drupal’s modularized architecture - user management, web services, caching etc. - is designed for scale-up and scale-down on the cloud for elastic load. PaaS If Heroku’s $212 mi...

I met James Lindenbaum, a founder of Heroku, in early 2009, at the Under The Radar conference in Mountain View. We had a long conversation on cloud as a great platform for Ruby, why Ruby on Rails is a better framework than PHP, and viability of PaaS as a business model. He also explained to me why he chose to work on Heroku at Y Combinator. I was sold on their future, on that day, and kept in touch with them since then. The last week, Salesforce.com acquired Heroku for $212 million . That's one successful exit, which is good news in many different dimensions. PaaS is a viable business model PaaS is not easy. It takes time, laser sharp focus, and hard work to build something that the developers would use and pay for. A few companies have tried and many have failed. But, it is refreshing to see the platform and the ecosystem that Heroku has built since its inception. Heroku did not raise a lot of money, kept the cost low, and attracted customers early on. I was told (by Byron, I thi...

In my previous post “ While Entrepreneurs Scale On The Cloud The Angels Get Supersized ” I wrote about how cloud computing is disrupting the VC industry. Continuing on the thread of entrepreneurship I am seeing more and more entrepreneurs building applications who do not belong to any formal organization, start-up or otherwise. The definition of what used to be a start-up itself is changing, primarily because of two reasons - simple and easily accessible PaaS tools to design, run, and maintain applications on the cloud and access to a market place to sell the applications. We have been witnessing this trend for the mobile applications for a while - Android as well as iPhone and now iPad. I see the same pattern for the cloud-based applications. I have seen many useful, productive, and successful applications that are designed by individual developers with no affiliation to any organization. Google has done a great job in designing the tools for the developers to build applications that ...

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...