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It's been a given for some time that businesses, including startups, should have a presence on and connection with Facebook . With over 400 million active users, chances are your potential investors and customers are already there. Fan pages have been a simple way to generate interest and engage customers, and Facebook Connect has quickly become a standard in signing up and signing in users. In his keynote at f8 yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually mentioned startups in his opening remarks, stating that they "are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences." Sponsor Whether or not Facebook is a "requirement" for startups, there are some things new businesses should think about based on yesterday's announcements. "Facebook Connect On Steroids" Facebook announced a major overhaul to its API and introduced three new components yesterday: social plugins , the Open Graph protocol , and the Graph API . By using the tags specified in this protocol, any website can now become part of the Facebook ecosystem. If a Facebook user visits your site and Likes your page, you have the ability then to publish information into that user's stream. In addition, implementation of the code on your site will give you access to administrative tools and analytics just like any Facebook fan page owner. As we wrote yesterday , this will take analytics to the next level, providing an incredible amount of demographic data about users who like and link their profiles to your site. However, this information will reside with Facebook, not on your own website, making them a de facto owner of your visitors' social data. Applications & Virtual Currency: Where the Money Is? While many businesses will likely integrate their websites into the expanding Facebook ecosystem, there is likely still room for growth within the platform itself, namely with application development. There are over 550,000 applications on the site, a number that continues to grow - and to encourage return visitors. To coincide with the growth of the application market, particularly in the area of social gaming, Facebook also announced the expansion of its official virtual currency, Credits . Last year Paypal processed over $500 million in virtual goods last year, with social gaming company Zynga becoming Paypal's second largest merchant (following eBay). Clearly Facebook seeks to stake a claim in the virtual currency market. Facebook Credits are currently in beta with over 100 applications, and will roll out to the entire network soon, Zuckerberg said yesterday. Credits will allow users to purchase one currency for all transactions on Facebook, rather than have to enter their credit card information with each purchase. By facilitating online payments, Facebook hopes to increase the percentage of users willing to purchase virtual goods to between 8% and 20% David vs. Goliath? Despite repetition at f8 yesterday that these changes were meant designed "for developers," it remains to be seen how the announcements will play out for developers and for users alike, the latter of whom are notorious for protesting changes to the site. In particular, continued concerns about privacy might not be well received, particulary given Facebook's past history with opening user data. Privacy concerns might not be the only thing that gives some businesses pause about Facebook's direction. Facebook also announced yesterday " instant personalization " yesterday, giving three "preferred partners" - Yelp , Pandora , and CNN - instant and additional access to Facebook profile information when users visit their sites. For startups in these areas, namely restaurant recommendation, music sharing, and news delivery, the "preferred partner" program might make industry in-roads more difficult and could adversely impact user adoption. As the "preferred partner" program expands beyond the three selected for launch, it remains to be seen the effect of being sanctioned - or not - by Facebook. The buzz yesterday was that Facebook had just " seized control of the Internet ." Comments on how you think the f8 announcements might play out for startups welcome! Discuss
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David vs. Goliath? An F8 Overview for Startups
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Tomorrow, GroundWork Open Source Inc. and Eucalyptus Systems will be announcing that they have partnered to deliver monitoring and management of applications running in a Eucalyptus private cloud environment. If your enterprise is running private cloud powered by Eucalyptus, you now can plug your cloud into the GroundWork's monitoring solution. This allows you to join your view of resources from Amazon and other servers in your enterprise with your private cloud solution. Sponsor What is Eucalyptus? We covered Eucalyptus recently in an interview with the company's founder and CTO. The company is a first-mover in helping organizations build private clouds that can achieve parity with Amazon's EC2. The company's enterprise addition will allow you to run an Amazon instance on your VMware infrastructure, effectively joining your virtual infrastructure and the Amazon cloud. "Detailed monitoring and management of private cloud applications can give Eucalyptus users important real-time information to increase productivity and reduce costs," said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. "Through our partnership with GroundWork Open Source, Eucalyptus open source users and Enterprise Edition customers can now benefit from a proven, open source solution to monitor private clouds as part of their overall network environment." GroundWork's newest solution offers the ability to monitor topology of your private cloud and to plug the results into the monitoring you are doing with other servers and the Amazon public cloud infrastructure. In the briefing we attended with company executives, several things emerged that we're considering. First, it was pointed out that private clouds are "where the action is" for large enterprises. What we heard is that some companies, like pharmaceuticals that GroundWork currently has in its portfolio simply won't be able to move all of their data out to the public cloud yet. But, they do want to get the benefits of cloud computing internally. Second, we learned that one thing GroundWork's offers is a flexible hosting model, where your monitoring infrastructure can be hosted internally, or in the cloud on a managed EC2 instance. Recently, we checked out CloudKick , another cloud monitoring startup that also can monitor servers in the cloud and in the enterprise. The GroundWorks solution that is launching in beta both offers topology view of the private cloud and flexible hosting options that may be attractive to enterprises that plan on keeping most of their assets internal. From what we can see, CloudKick is positioned to companies that are starting on the cloud for scaling purposes, and GroundWork seems positioned towards companies where the center of gravity is inside the data center and now the private cloud. "More and more of our customers are investigating and investing in private cloud usage. Eucalyptus gives incredible power and cost savings to IT teams building out cloud services. Coupled with GroundWork's automatic instance and application monitoring, this partnership provides a robust cloud solution with clear ROI that enterprises can take advantage of quickly," said Peter Jackson, GroundWork Open Source President and CEO. What is GroundWorks private cloud solution? GroundWorks offers the premise that if you are running a private cloud, the monitoring solution needs to be aware of your architecture (topology, software stacks, and servers). Here is a visual representation of how the company envisions cloud aware monitoring: Here is a screenshot of the GroundWorks monitoring solution: Here is a bit more from the companies on the beta program: The GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud for Eucalyptus beta program offers: "GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Cloud usage to cover on-premise, public or private cloud hosted applications and infrastructure Access to Eucalyptus EE, including VMware support to implement private clouds in existing environments The opportunity to provide direct feedback to the engineering and product teams, helping define the future of IT operations in the cloud Engineering and technical assistance for the duration of the beta program. Participants will gain these benefits with the combined GWOS and Eucalyptus Quickly and easily build and monitor private and hybrid clouds with your existing environment and other public clouds Run Amazon Machine Image (AMI) instances on VMware-based hypervisors within your Eucalyptus private cloud Seamlessly manage environments with multiple hypervisors (Xen, KVM, vSphere, ESX™ and ESXi™) under one management console and transition applications without any modifications Manage service performance and availability based on IT monitoring insight trend and usage reports across environments" More information available about the beta program at http://www.gwos.com/products/Enterprise_Cloud_beta.html It is becoming clear that private clouds are increasingly becoming an important part of the enterprise. Eucalyptus has a real opportunity as a first-mover in deploying them with its tools. From experience, we know that where enterprise-class computing exists, monitoring follows. GroundWork and Eucalyptus are working together to make a seamless offering that plugs into the private cloud deployment process in this beta release - and they are asking for feedback from administers interested in the program. Does deploying a private cloud change your view of administration tools and monitoring? Discuss
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Cloud Aware Monitoring: GroundWork and Eucalyptus Offer Private Cloud Beta Program
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Cloudkick is a cloud monitoring start-up that helps system admins manage cloud servers. Today, the company announced it is getting physical, bringing its cloud monitoring capabilities to internally hosted servers and virtual machines. The company has had a lot of success in helping companies who startup in the cloud and start to achieve scale. It already has a host of hot startup companies including Posterous , Bump Technologies , and Urban Airship . Through listening to users, the company decided to offer local server support to merge its view of all server assets for these organizations. Sponsor What is CloudKick? Cloudkick enables a company to manage internally hosted servers and run the Cloudkick's agent and report into the same console as your cloud computing infrastructure from AWS, RackSpace, SliceHost and others. When installed, the CloudKick agent will respond to status checks from the Cloudkick monitoring solution, which itself is a distributed cloud application. Cloudkick supports a host of cloud provider solutions and shares a report of feature. We met with the company at their offices in San Francisco. Upon entry to the warehouse, called " The Farm " near the Mission District, we realized that was a true technology startup , founded by system administrators trying to make their jobs easier. The team participated in Y-Combinator and has received an initial capital infusion by Avalon Ventures. The Cloudkick system offers consolidated server reports and shows server events by polling registered clients in cloud (and now data centers) and piping them to Cloudkick's multi-tentant event aggregator. The tools are modeled after administrative tools like Cacti, Nagios, and Munin, but are delivered on on top of an agent-driven real time view of the underlying assets of server infrastructure. When checking out the demonstration, we also noted that the browser is updated in real-time as events are polled. This keeps the information fresh without having to re-check and brings the best of browser based real-time communication to system administrations. Cloudkick's implementation is simple and elegant. The young company is demonstrating product leadership by living the mantra of simplicity and utility. Here's a sample of the graphs from CloudKick's feature inventory . Monitoring Every Server The goal of this release is to bring servers from the datacenter to power of cloud monitoring. It allows a larger and larger region of infrastructure to rely on outside controls to monitor it's health and well being. One feature we we intrigued by with Cloudkick was the ability to tag and filter groups of hosts, and to then set rules across them. For example, tagging all servers "web apps" allows a rule to quickly set custom rules for checking up time. The company offers an API for its services and uses 2-legged OAuth for API authentication. OAuth is "an open protocol to allow secure API authorization in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.". The company also offers a proxy service that streamlines and secures the connections for hosts that will connect to the Cloudkick services. Cloudkick is a cloud company monitoring clouds and shows us in many ways the architecture of the future. In one of the blog posts from company, they share " love affair with cassandra " and how multi-master database technology is an enabler for co-location of server assets in infrastructure clouds. Where does Cloudkick go from here? Discuss
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Cloudkick Broadens its Scope: Now Monitors the Datacenter
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Early this morning, we received an announcement from Amazon the company is launching a pilot for EC2 customers to allow your enterprise organizations to move existing Microsoft Windows Server licenses to Amazon and receive a proper discount for the new EC2 instance. The offer is open until September and is being called a pilot by the companies to test the waters and pattern for hosting Windows within Amazon. Sponsor The note from Amazon is on the Windows Server license mobility prompts immediate action: "Dear Amazon EC2 Customer, We are excited to announce the immediate availability of the Microsoft Windows Server® License Mobility Pilot, which enables customers with Microsoft Enterprise Agreements (EA) to migrate their existing Windows Server licenses to Amazon EC2. By moving existing licenses to the cloud, you can leverage licenses that you have already purchased to reduce your cost of running Windows On-Demand or Reserved Instances by up to 41%. Microsoft will stop accepting new enrollments for the pilot on September 23, 2010 so it is important to act quickly. To participate in this pilot, Microsoft requires that your company meet the following criteria: * Your company must be based (or have a legal entity) in the United States * Your company must have an existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) that is valid for a minimum of 12 months after your entry into the pilot * You must already have purchased Software Assurance from Microsoft for your EA Windows Server Enterprise, Datacenter, and Standard licenses * You must be an Enterprise customer (Academic and Government institutions are not covered by this pilot) Once you have enrolled in the pilot, you will be eligible to run your Windows Server licenses in Amazon EC2 for the next 12 months following your sign-up. You will still be responsible for maintaining the appropriate number of Client Access licenses and External Connector licenses needed to operate your EA Windows Server licenses. To learn more about this pilot or sign-up, please visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/windows-license-mobility-pilot . We hope that you take advantage of this new pilot!" By clicking that
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Act Now. Amazon and Microsoft Launch Windows Server License Mobility Pilot
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As ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus reported in 2006 , 3Tera is a company to watch: "3Tera strikes me as a company to keep an eye on - they're tackling a complex problem and they have a lot of potential customers out there." CA must agree. The companies have entered into a definitive agreement for CA to purchase 3Tera , adding it to CA's growing list of cloud acquisitions. Sponsor Simplifying Deployment 3Tera's focus is simplifying the deployment of environments. The tools also helps synchronize capabilities between cloud providers and so-called "private clouds" hosted inside a company's data center. The company has a GUI based application to help visualize, manage, and deploy solutions in the cloud. This is an important thing to solve, especially if time is of the essence in getting your cloud-based application supported by your IT team, and keeping your choices open after it is deployed. The Cloud is Mainstream As self-reported by the 3Tera team in their blog , this acquisition represented cloud computing becoming mainstream in IT. CA sees a need to fill in this piece in their portfolio and IT leaders are asking for tools to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure assets. "We started 3Tera to radically ease the way IT deploys, maintains and scales - MANAGES - applications. Our AppLogic® cloud computing platform provides the foundation of our partners' orchestration of cloud services for public and private clouds around the world. Today, we're taking the next step in moving toward making cloud computing mainstream by joining CA." It looks like cloud computing is becoming essential to the enterprise. Is it in yours? Discuss
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Sometimes it Pays to Solve Hard Problems: CA Acquires 3Tera
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