As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...| By Jesus Rodriguez | Article Rating: |
|
| January 3, 2012 06:00 AM EST | Reads: |
3,120 |
Open source platform as a service (PaaS) platforms are one of the most exciting topics in the software industry nowadays. Following the $212M acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, we've seen how, in a matter of months, platforms like dotCloud, VMWare's Cloud Foundry or Red Hat's OpenShift have emerged with complete PaaS suites based on popular open source technologies.
The value proposition behind this type of PaaS offering is very simple: these platforms will enable the foundation to host, manage, provision and scale solutions based on some of the most renowned open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, and MySQL.
When we start exploring these technologies in detail, we will quickly realize that they could have a profound impact on the enterprise software industry, changing the economics and cultural aspects of the open source model.

For the last 20 something years, open source technologies have been fighting an uphill battle to gain a wide adoption within traditional business that favors commercial software alternatives. Lack of support options, poor documentation, or vendor commitment are some of the reasons (or prejudices J ) that are often seen as limitations of open source technology stacks. Those years of anti-open source religion have had a deep influence on the software markets. If you think about it, other than JBoss, MySQL or SpringSource, we can't cite many other big exits of open source technology vendors. While it is true that the number of exits or acquisitions is not in direct correlation to the viability of a business model, it's a pretty good indicator of the health and stability of a specific market segment.
Can open source PaaS platforms change this? I definitely think so. Let me try to explain.
Cloud Open Source != Traditional Open Source
At its core, open source PaaS platforms provide an elastically scalable, self-manageable environment to host applications built on open source technologies. By definition, the dynamic of this model removes a lot of the friction that companies experience when adopting open source technology stacks. Think about it, would you still be concerned about using Ruby or MySQL if Heroku, VMware, Red Hat or dotCloud provisioned, hosted, managed and scaled the technology for you in a very elastic, self-healing infrastructure?
We have to think about open source PaaS beyond the technology landscape and see it as a phenomenon that can change the economic dynamics of the open source model. To put it in very simple terms, open source PaaS platforms have the opportunity to erase a lot of the non-technical advantages that, sometimes, were attributed to commercial software compared to open source alternatives.
What Does This Mean for Commercial Software Vendors?
The emergence of open source cloud platforms will force commercial software vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle or IBM to focus more on innovations with their cloud stacks and less on the advantages of their delivery model. At the same time, commercial software vendors will now have to compete with complete technology stacks that group a large variety of open source technologies. Similarly, we are already seeing various open source technologies such as Hadoop or Node.JS being adopted in commercial software vendor's cloud premises.
What Does This Mean for Enterprises?
I think open source PaaS should be a primary option for companies when considering embracing cloud computing. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that it will take some time for organizations to get rid of the same anti-open source prejudices that were common when evaluating on-premise open source technologies. In any case, we have to trust the influence that software communities can have in the industry.
As explained in previous sections, the open source PaaS model will offer enterprises a unique opportunity to embrace the level of unique innovation provided by open source technologies without incurring the management, maintenance and upgrade challenges of open source solutions. In addition, enterprise will be able to leverage new versions of open source technologies without having to incur the costs of upgrading the application infrastructure.
Do Open Source Communities Need to Change?
I don't think open source communities will change drastically in this cloud computing era but I do believe we need to start considering open source PaaS platforms on the roadmap of the different open source technologies. For instance, I believe open source communities should be very influential regarding which features should be enabled on the different open source cloud platforms and, at the same time, guide the path of the technology in a way that won't harm the platforms that are enabling those technologies in a cloud environment.
All for One, One for All
Relying on a small set of companies has traditionally been seen as one of the "advantages" that enterprises attribute to commercial software vendors compared to open source technologies. Basically, it seemed simpler to rely on an Oracle or IBM application server instead of on a variety of open source technologies from different companies. With open source PaaS platforms, now developers have access to a plethora of open source technologies in areas such as databases, messaging technologies, web development frameworks or even programming languages using a common underlying infrastructure.
Who Will Win the PaaS Wars?
I believe we will have multiple winners. Microsoft has a head start and a fantastic platform with Windows Azure. I believe VMware's Cloud Foundry and Salesforce.com's Heroku can leverage their strong presence in the virtualization and business software aspects to grow its adoption. In addition, Red Hat is in a unique position given its strong presence in the data center market.
Summary
Open source PaaS platforms represent one of the fastest-growing cloud computing models. With vendors like VMware, Salesforce.com and Red Hat leading the way, open source cloud platforms enable the benefits of cloud computing on some of the most popular open source technologies in the market. By providing a model to host, deploy, scale and manage open source solutions, this model overcomes some of the major challenges that have prevented big enterprises from widely adopting open source technologies. While it is too soon to predict who will prevail in the PaaS wars, open source will definitely play a strong role in the future of PaaS and cloud computing adoption in the enterprise.
Published January 3, 2012 Reads 3,120
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Jesus Rodriguez
Jesus Rodriguez is a co-founder and CEO of both Tellago Studios and Tellago, two fast-growing start-ups with a unique vision around software technology. Jesus spends his days working on the technology and strategic vision of both companies. Under his leadership, Tellago and Tellago Studios have been recognized as innovators in the areas of enterprise software and solutions, achieving important awards like the Stevie Awards’ American and International Business Awards.
A software scientist by background, Jesus is an internationally recognized speaker and author with contributions that include hundreds of articles and sessions at industry conferences. He serves as an adviser to several software companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, and hold several technology awards. Jesus is a prolific blogger on all subjects related to software technology and entrepreneurship. You can gain valuable insight on business and software technology through his blogs at http://jrodthoughts.com and http://weblogs.asp.net/gsusx .
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...Feb. 23, 2012 09:00 AM EST Reads: 1,924 |
By Pat Romanski “Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...Feb. 23, 2012 09:00 AM EST Reads: 627 |
By Elizabeth White Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,010 |
By Elizabeth White Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:45 AM EST Reads: 1,692 |
By Pat Romanski Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...Feb. 23, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,979 |
By Liz McMillan The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...Feb. 23, 2012 08:30 AM EST Reads: 1,648 |
By Jeremy Geelan With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 23, 2012 08:15 AM EST Reads: 854 |
By Jeremy Geelan With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...Feb. 23, 2012 08:10 AM EST Reads: 1,065 |
By Pat Romanski The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 884 |
By Liz McMillan Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...Feb. 23, 2012 08:00 AM EST Reads: 2,567 |
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Asprey – Trend Micro
- Big Data in Telecom: The Need for Analytics
- Big Data Gold Mine in Cloud Governance and Automation
- Drool, Britannia? Is the UK Failing the Cloud?
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bernard Golden – HyperStratus
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mårten Mickos – Eucalyptus Systems
- Thoughts on Big Data and Data Virtualization
- What Motivates Open Standards in the Cloud?
- What to Expect in 2012: Cloud Computing and Open Source Software
- End-User Participation to Provide Unique Forum for Peer Collaboration at 2012 Technology Convergence Conference
- Will PaaS Finally Bring Open Source Love to the Enterprise?
- Ten Hot Trends in Cloud Data for 2012
- Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2011
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Asprey – Trend Micro
- Big Data in Telecom: The Need for Analytics
- i-Technology in 2012: Five Industry Predictions
- Big Data Gold Mine in Cloud Governance and Automation
- Drool, Britannia? Is the UK Failing the Cloud?
- 9th International Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley – Photo Album
- Microsoft Tries Hadoop on Azure
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Bernard Golden – HyperStratus
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mårten Mickos – Eucalyptus Systems
- Thoughts on Big Data and Data Virtualization
- Cloud Computing: A Comparison of Computing Models
- What is Cloud Computing?
- The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
- Six Benefits of Cloud Computing
- Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV
- What's the Difference Between Cloud Computing and SaaS?
- GDS International: Global Warming Scam?
- Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing
- The Future of Cloud Computing
- The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem
- SOA 2 Point Oh No!
- Cloud Expo Europe 2009 in Prague: Themes & Topics
- A Brief History of Cloud Computing: Is the Cloud There Yet?








“Big data represents a sea change of capabilities in IT” notes Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. McLarty continued: “In conjunction with mobile and cloud, I think Big Data will provide a technological makeover to the typical enterprise infrastructure, drawing a hard API border in front of core business services while blurring the line between logic and data services.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. ...
Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best...
The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to rea...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
While the notion of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) may seem a bit far-fetched, Shadow IT, where users essentially bring unauthorized cloud services into business environments, has become an increasing corporate concern as highlighted in a recent CFO.com article. The risk of Shadow IT is that it comprom...
What happens when technology converges? When old meets new?
A fine example of what might happen is what has happened in the carrier space as voice and data services increasingly meet on the same network, each carrying unique characteristics forward from the older technology from which they sprung. ...
For many of the same reasons IPv6 migration is moving slower than perhaps it should given the urgent need for more IP addresses (to support all those cows connecting to the Internet) is the sheer magnitude of such an effort. Without the ability for IPv6-only nodes to talk to IPv4-only nodes, there’s...
The trade off between security and performance has long been a known issue across IT organizations. One of the first things to go when performance is unacceptable is a security solution. This isn’t just an IT phenomenon either; consider how many of us have disabled endpoint security solutions like a...
Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the next generation...
To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive.
Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this...
We’re starting a new series of articles here called ‘Cloud Leaders of Tomorrow‘ – The objective of which is to showcase the movers and shakers of the Canadian Cloud industry.
Our first profile is Kevin Crowe, Director Cloud Services for Long View, and this is a perfect start because within our over...
Hybrid tools try to resolve the debate of … “Should you write a mobile web application which will render on multiple platforms without significant change but won’t be able to take advantage on native features?” Or “Should you create platform specific native application to fully utilize the power of ...
Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs up...
What’s actually in a Cloud SLA, or what should be in such an agreement, is all over the map. Ask the public IaaS providers, and they’ll give you one answer. Ask SaaS or PaaS providers, and they’ll tell you something different. And what about private Clouds? SLAs take on an entirely new meaning there...








