I was chatting with a good friend who I worked with at Apple, and we were discussing how cloud environments get built.  We both left Apple 20 years ago, and we have since spent time in the enterprise services space, but we had the fun of building OS solutions while at Apple with a lot of freedom.   So, we are used to making the trade-offs to build an OS.  A Cloud computing environment in many ways is a large operating system.

What is wrong with most cloud environments?  They take too long to build and they are too prone to human error.  Just like any other IT environment.

Now if you were going to change this.  What would you say if here is a new company with these people.

What is the performance of the solution?

What does a good cloud operating system look like?

Curious who can do this?  Nimbula is the company.

How many executives who are contemplating the purchase and valuation of Rackspace spend the time to figure out that there are scalability issues in their operations?  Almost everyone looks at revenue, growth, costs, etc.  And few look at the cloud computing build and deployment processes.

Imagine a company who chooses to build a cloud computing environment with Nimbula.

Ideally you want to have a very lean smart team to build a better cloud.  You don’t want a big team of people who have been building clouds with lots of sweat and effort. 

How much do you think Rackspace is worth now if you know there are companies out there able to use a fraction of the people Rackspace has building a more reliable cloud computing service?

oh yeh, I had the pleasure of meeting Willem and Reza at Gartner Data Center Conference, and I was quite impressed.

Willem van Biljon, co-Founder and Vice President of Products

Willem is a senior technology executive and entrepreneur who started his career building a unix-based operating system for mini-computers and the first retail debit card payment system for one of the largest retailers in South Africa. Building on that expertise, he co-founded Mosaic Software to build the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems. Mosaic became one of the world's leading EFT companies with operations in more than 30 countries and was successfully sold to S1 Corp. in 2004. Willem then joined Amazon to develop the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service business plan and to drive product management and marketing for the service. Willem is a graduate of the University of Cape Town.

Reza Malekzadeh, Vice President, Marketing

Reza brings solid enterprise software marketing experience to Nimbula. Previously, he was Senior Director of Products and Marketing at VMware in EMEA, where he was responsible for all marketing activities in VMware’s second largest theater. Reza had re-joined VMware in June 2007 following its acquisition of Akimbi Systems. He had previously been employee #10 at the company, fulfilling the role of Director of Marketing from 1998 to 2002. Prior to joining VMware, Reza was Vice President for International business at Akimbi Systems where he drove significant international growth, including sales, marketing and channel operations. Before working at Akimbi, Reza co-founded Twingo Systems, which he successfully sold to Cisco Systems in 2004. Reza holds an MBA in Marketing and Business Strategy from HEC in Paris.

Netflix wrote about its move to AWS and how well things worked.

5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS

In my last post I talked about some of the reasons we chose AWS as our computing platform. We’re about one year into our transition to AWS from our own data centers. We’ve learned a lot so far, and I thought it might be helpful to share with you some of the mistakes we’ve made and some of the lessons we’ve learned.

1. Dorothy, you’re not in Kansas anymore.

If you’re used to designing and deploying applications in your own data centers, you need to be

prepared to unlearn a lot of what you know. Seek to understand and embrace the differences operating in a cloud environment.

...

5. Commit yourself.

When I look back at what the team has accomplished this year in our AWS migration, I’m truly amazed. But it didn’t always feel this good. AWS is only a few years old, and building at a high scale within it is a pioneering enterprise today. There were some dark days as we struggled with the sheer size of the task we’d taken on, and some of the differences between how AWS operates vs. our own data centers.

As you run into the hurdles, have the grit and the conviction to fight through them. Our CEO, Reed Hastings, has not only been fully on board with this migration, he is the person who motivated it! His commitment, the commitment of the technology leaders across the company, helped us push through to success when we could have chosen to retreat instead.

AWS is a tremendous suite of services, getting better all the time, and some big technology companies are running successfully there today. You can too! We hope some of our mistakes and the lessons we’ve learned can help you do it well.

-john ciancutti.

Part of the commitment is international growth.  Here is a post for a Netflix International Engineering Director.

Director of Engineering – International Services

ECommerce and Systems Engineering | Los Gatos, CA

Send Jobvite

The opportunity is compelling: to lead the Internationalization of Netflix Services, a fast growing and highly admired company. Fueled by the broad appeal of being able to instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes, Netflix subscriber growth has been accelerating for the last several years and is now more than 50% year-over-year. At the same time Netflix is well positioned to expand internationally in 2011. Our upside potential has never been greater—both domestically and internationally. And never has there been a more promising time to join Netflix.

Zynga has made changes in their data center networks with solutions like peering in Equinix facilities with Facebook's equinix presence.  Low latency networks have three big markets - securities trading, gaming, and advertising.  Zynga plays in gaming and will in advertising.

Zynga just hired a Facebook advertising executive to head up Zynga's advertising strategy.

Mike Murphy Takes Senior Advisor Role at Zynga

by Kara Swisher
Posted on January 23, 2011 at 7:02 PM PT

Mike Murphy–Facebook’s first head of advertising sales, who left the social networking giant in October to take some personal time off–seems done with relaxing.

He is now taking a part-time, but significant, role at online gaming phenom Zynga to help formulate its advertising strategy.

In addition, Murphy is also close to formalizing a consulting relationship with Facebook.

Given there has been strong interest from more obvious Facebook competitors in retaining Murphy–including Google and Twitter–his move to Zynga is probably the best outcome for it.

Facebook and Zynga have an interesting relationship.

Although the relationship has been tense at times, Zynga remains one of Facebook’s major strategic partners.

Here is some news that discusses the relationship in more details.

Zynga has been a high-profile user of cloud computing services, using tools fromRightScale and NorthScale to run its gaming infrastructure on Amazon EC2. It’s not immediately clear how Zynga’s data center space will fit into its infrastructure or its growth plans.

The reports of the data center lease come amid rampant speculation of tensions between Zynga and Facebook, which could prompt Zynga to launch a stand-alone social gaming network. Even if Zynga and Facebook grow apart, their infrastructure would remain close. Facebook is a major tenant at ACC5, and will have thousands of servers in the same location as Zynga’s reported new data center space.

CNET news has a post on on Cloud Computing listing who the players will be Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, VMware, Amazon Web Services, IBM, HP, Hosting companies and Telcos.

Telecommunications and cable companies
One possible industry segment that may surprise us with respect to one-stop cloud services would be companies such as AT&T, Verizon Communications, Comcast, and BT--the major telecommunications providers. They own the connectivity to the data center, the campus, mobile devices, and so on, and they have data center infrastructures perfect for a heavily distributed market like the small-business market (where each small business may be local, but the market itself exists in every town and city).

The problem is the same as it has been for decades: business models and regulatory requirements of these companies make it difficult for them to address software services effectively. These companies have traditionally been late to new software market opportunities (with the possible exception of the mobile market). You don't see AT&T, for instance, competing with others in bidding for a platform-as-a-service opportunity. So until they show signs of understanding how to monitize business applications, they are not in the running.

One other area that the author James Urquhart misses is that gives Telcos an advantage. 

They have access to every account due to their network services.

Verizon says they have 200 data centers worldwide.  The number 200 is hard to imagine.  But, think of all the Verizon telephone switching rooms that are much smaller as technology has advanced.  All that power, air conditioned space in locations where network access is top in the industry.

Add to the list, Deutsche Telecom, Chunghwa Telecom, China Telecom, Singtel.  They all have this advantage and all are looking to add cloud computing.

My bet is Telcos are going to be big.