Who would protest the coming of Cloud Computing?  The staff it replaces.  And, many times they are the ones who are involved in evaluating a large move to the cloud.

MSNBC has an article that discusses the privatization of the TSA service to improve customer service vs. Federal TSA staff.

Airports toy with the idea of tossing the TSA

Privatizing security won't affect cost or protocol, but could bolster efficiency, customer relations

Jeff Chiu  /  AP

A security contractor pats down a traveler at San Francisco International Airport last year. Security checks at San Francisco International are conducted by private contractors, not federal TSA agents.

By Harriet BaskasTravel writer

A new year has brought new resolve for airport managers who are fed up with the Transportation Security Agency.

"The TSA has grown too big and we're unhappy with the way it's doing things," said Larry Dale, president of Orlando Sanford International Airport. "My board is sold on the fact that the free enterprise system works well and that we should go with a private company we can hold directly accountable for security and customer satisfaction."

Dale isn't alone. Airports in Los Angeles, the Washington, D.C. metro area, Indianapolis, and Charlotte, N.C., are also considering tossing the TSA.

How many end users feel this way about their IT departments?

'People at the top are idiots'
"The screening partnership program may be a step in the right direction, but ultimately, it doesn’t change the fact that people at the top are idiots. The real problem is that TSA needs to be totally rebuilt," said aviation consultant Michael Boyd, of Colorado-based Boyd Group International.

So, what happens?  Stalling.

Cindi Martin, airport director at Glacier Park International in Montana, said her airport sent an SPP application in October of 2009. They, along with three other Montana airports, are still waiting for action.

The delay is creating a new set of problems. Knowing that a private contractor will eventually take over, "[Transportation Security Officers] are retaliating against authority and the airport management staff," Martin said, "and we’re getting no help from TSA management."

So, even though the Cloud has momentum.  Don’t think there are people out there like the TSA who want the problem cloud to go away.

This will frustrate the end users of IT services even more as others make progress faster.

Think of all those start-ups who own no data center assets and everything has been in the cloud since day 1.  Many times it has been said the greenest action in data centers is keeping from building your next data center.  Many start-ups wouldn’t even consider building a data center.

Can a company who uses the cloud claim they have a green data center?

Could Amazon or some other cloud provider give an environmental impact statement as part of their cloud use?  I think someone in Europe will do this before the US.

Amazon Web Services is a benchmark in cloud computing.  They have added DNS services to improve the performance of AWS clients.

With Route 53, you can create a “hosted zone” to add DNS records for a new domain or transfer DNS records for a domain you currently own. Route 53 is also designed to work well with other AWS offerings, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). By using AWS IAM with Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records. In the future, we plan to add additional integration features such as the ability to automatically tie your Amazon Elastic Load Balancer instances to a DNS name, and the ability to route your customers to the closest EC2 region.

Route 53 is also designed to be fast and simple. It uses a global network of DNS servers to respond to end users with low latency and has an easy-to-use, self-service API. There are no long-term contracts or minimum usage commitments for using Route 53 – you pay $1.00 per month for the hosted zones you manage, $0.50 per million queries for the first billion queries, and $0.25 per million queries above a billion. To learn more about Amazon Route 53 visit the Amazon Route 53 detail page or the Getting Started Guide.

Performance of cloud computing solutions is where the top guys are fighting it out.  Why? The top clients find latency and performance of their services has a direct impact on business and value of their services.

Equinix is one choice to improve the performance of applications.

Applications are not all one and the same. You need to be able to set, measure and achieve individual application performance targets to successfully empower customers and employees. Identifying and prioritizing latency-sensitive applications is key to end-user satisfaction.

You can maximize performance for business-critical and latency-sensitive applications by deploying Application Performance Nodes in Platform Equinix sites, which are strategically placed close to major population centers and key user groups.

Equinix provides the widest metro-level coverage of key business and population centers across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific—over 6 million square feet and growing.

Another alternative ramping up is from the Telcos.

One report from Ovum discusses the role of Telcos.

Major telcos will be strong force in cloud computing, experts predict

The major global telecommunications companies will become strong players in the cloud computing market as interest from previously cautious end users increases rapidly over the next two to three years, Ovum has predicted.

A new report* by the independent telecoms analyst states that AT&T, BT, Orange Business Services and Verizon Business have made considerable progress in the arena in just over a year, and in terms of services, can now compete with established players from the IT industry.

According to the report, these companies have led a ‘competitive march’ from telecoms into cloud computing, and now have widely acknowledged credibility in the field.

As companies like HP, Cisco, IBM, and Dell build solution stacks that go across their products.  Another integration paradigm is to integrate the network operator with the cloud operator.

Peter Hall, report author and Ovum principal analyst, said: “The major telcos have a long heritage in providing managed data center services and hosting and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for cloud computing services.

The Telcos are ramping up to be cloud computing players.

In Data Centers a “Fight Club” metaphor can be used to describe the secrecy behind a competitive group.  Where little is said out in the public.  The big fight in 2009 was a Google vs. Microsoft for PUE and efficient data centers.  PUE is now a common term and even used by some to specify data centers. 2010 Facebook has emerged as a competitor, and there are many other companies that tops in their category like Twitter, Skype, and Zynga.

TechCrunch discusses the talent wars for top engineers.  Data Centers are not mentioned in the article, but none of these companies can exist without data centers.

Begun The Talent Wars Have – Why Twitter needs a London HQ: Google Engineers

by Mike Butcher on December 30, 2010

We’ve reported before about how the escalating warfor talent in Silicon Valley is effectively creating a kind of arms race between tech companies.

For example, Google is offering employees a 10% pay increase for 2011; companies like About.me are getting acquireddays after launch; and job postings in the IT industry are shooting to astronomical levels. Even Google’s Eric Schmidt has admitted to this battle.

Facebook, Google, Zynga and Twitter are hiring like crazy – and this insatiable desire for staff is likely to spill over into other countries. And perhaps the obvious first target outside of the Valley is London: English speaking, and a magnet for existing tech people in Europe working for US multinationals. And the latest to consider extending its reach there is Twitter. Europe is highly attractive to Twitter, since its advertising markets, particularly the UK where Twitter has exploded in adoption, are waiting to be milked.

Twitter’s first office outside of the US, will be headed up by Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s head of international strategy. Stanton was recently in London, where the UK government has been going all out to try to woo tech companies with its ‘East London Tech City’ policy.

What gets little press is the talent battles these companies have to find the best data center staff.

WSJ has an article on behavior that strikes fear in retailers.

Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers

By MIGUEL BUSTILLO And ANN ZIMMERMAN

Tri Tang, a 25-year-old marketer, walked into a Best Buy Co. store in Sunnyvale, Calif., this past weekend and spotted the perfect gift for his girlfriend.

Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.'s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.

Brian L. Frank for The Wall Street Journal

Tri Tang uses his mobile phone app, TheFind, to scan product bar codes and immediately troll online for the best price at various retailers.

Mr. Tang bought the Garmin from Amazon right on the spot.

"It's so useful," Mr. Tang says of his new shopping companion, a price comparison app called TheFind. He says he relies on it "to make sure I am getting the best price."

What first came to mind when I read this is the set of people I know in the data center industry who I can reach out to get a 2nd, 3rd or 4th opinion on almost any part of a data center project.  No one person can know it all, but if you have a network you can tap you can make different choices.

Retail shopping has changed as retailers can no longer count on spreading out high margin products in the midst of selling the power of a big merchant’s buying power.

Until recently, retailers could reasonably assume that if they just lured shoppers to stores with enticing specials, the customers could be coaxed into buying more profitable stuff, too.

Now, marketers must contend with shoppers who can use their smartphones inside stores to check whether the specials are really so special, and if the rest of the merchandise is reasonably priced.

While many holiday consumers refuse to pay full price, retailers are trying to outdo one another by encouraging shoppers to spend more, but without giving away the store. Elizabeth Holmes discusses some of retailers' most popular discount tactics.

"The retailer's advantage has been eroded," says Greg Girard of consultancy IDC Retail Insights, which recently found that roughly 45% of customers with smartphones had used them to perform due diligence on a store's prices. "The four walls of the store have become porous."

Integrated HW, SW, Networking, Storage, and manageability is the popular way to sell services.  And, even Larry Ellison has changed his position on cloud as cloud is a great way to sell an integrated stack.

Oracle Rolls Out Private Cloud Architecture And World-Record Transaction Performance

Posted by Richard Fichera on December 6, 2010

On Dec. 2, Oracle announced the next move in its program to integrate its hardware and software assets, with the introduction of Oracle Private Cloud Architecture, an integrated infrastructure stack with Infiniband and/or 10G Ethernet fabric, integrated virtualization, management and servers along with software content, both Oracle’s and customer-supplied. Oracle has rolled out the architecture as a general platform for a variety of cloud environments, along with three specific implementations, Exadata, Exalogic and the new Sunrise Supercluster, as proof points for the architecture.

Cloud vendors are busy partnering and buying companies to build cloud stacks, but what happens if the buyer wants choice?  The answer most will give is you don’t want to do that because the stack works best with our products.  Or worse we can guarantee performance if you buy only our products.

Imagine what Apple would look like if the iPod or iPhone only worked with the Mac.

People expect choice.  Even in Cloud Infrastructure.

No vendor wants this in the same way Best Buy would love to be able to disable cell phones or more specifically smart phones that are hitting shopping sites.

All of this creates a good opportunity to be disruptive.