I really enjoyed reading author Ken Hess and his assessment of the top 10 server technologies for the new decade. It was a great read, not only because he’s a good writer with the ability to speak (that is, write) plainly, but also because it covered just about every IT trend that will save money for companies, promote green computing, and make life easier for IT folks and end users. Here are a few:

- Virtualization technology – which will touch every data center in the world. Virtualization promises that companies can save on IT costs by converting their infrastructures to virtual hosts and guests or moving to an entirely hosted virtual infrastructure. The migration to virtualization will in turn put pressure on computer manufacturers to “deliver greener hardware for less green.”

- Cloud computing – Hess predicts that “savvy technology companies” will use cloud computing to market their products and services to a global audience at a fraction of the cost of current offerings. (This doesn’t just mean platform providers like Amazon and Azure but also companies that offer such services as website transaction monitoring.) And, despite some pretty high-profile outages this year, cloud computing providers will increasingly move closer to offering an “always on” philosophy. Hess says “entire business infrastructures will migrate to the cloud during this decade.”

- Mobile computing – Any available web connection is what’s needed here for a rapidly expanding army of mobile workers, plus hardware that’s lightweight and easy to use (meaning no complex set-up) and that can pull data, apps, even your computing environment (or operating system) from the cloud.

- Virtual Desktops – Virtual desktops have been in the news lately with the development of fully functional cloud-based desktops and other neat gadgetry, for example, USB-enabled virtual desktops.  It’s all about leaving behind resource-needy local desktop operating systems and migrating to virtual ones housed in data centers. Hess predicts that desktops will be based in PCs, data centers and the cloud for the next few years, but eventually will all be non-local by 2020. He rightly points out that virtual desktops will help companies lower maintenance bills and help eliminate errors associated with desktop operating systems.

- Digital Libraries – Personally speaking, I like my books on paper (In one day, I look at the computer screen for more than is good for my eyes.) But Hess predicts that by the end of this decade “printed material will all but disappear” and that, someday, libraries will function more as museums to house historic and valuable volumes and to show kids how people used to read.

Of course, Hess writes a lot more about technology, including the advance of open-source migration, online storage and web-based apps.  To read more, check out his article.

Chief information honchos at companies are hot for cloud computing and virtualization in 2010, says a new report by Gartner.

In the study, Gartner asked CIOs to list their top technology priorities for 2010, and respondents ranked virtualization as their top area of focus. Next came cloud computing and web 2.0. That makes sense because Gartner researchers predicted that firms will invest more in hosted solutions this year and less in hardware – as budgets continue to shrink and be constrained.

And what are CIOs most concerned about? At the top of the list: business process improvement. The next biggest concern is reducing IT costs, according to the study.

I’m very happy to see that CIOs, the ones who hold the purse strings, are not just paying lip service to the cloud and virtualization. In fact, in a story I read elsewhere, Gartner has boldly predicted that one-fifth of all businesses will own absolutely no IT assets come 2012 – due to migration to cloud computing.

CIOs are getting more serious about incorporating cloud tools into their cost-saving strategies. Seems everyone wants a piece of the pie, as cloud computing and virtualization solutions continue to prove big money savers for companies, and more companies invest in the technologies.

Chipmaker Intel Corp. says that a corporate IT spending wave is about to hit, and much of it will come from the cloud. Intel’s interest in the cloud stems from its recognition that cloud computing will require a whole new kind of chip — cheaper and more energy efficient. And the company believes it’s well-suited to take up the challenge.

I’m ecstatic that the industry is talking about spending — and therefore recovery — again. “We remain in an excellent position to benefit from the build out of cloud infrastructure as well as the reconfiguration of existing data centers for power performance efficiency improvements,” CEO Paul Otellini told analysts on January 14th, when the company posted a huge earnings jump during the fourth quarter ($2.3 billion during Q4 2009 versus $234 million in the same quarter last year). Included in those stellar numbers was a strong jump in sales for the company’s data center business group, which makes chips for servers, workstations and data storage systems.

In a story that I read on The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, several financial industry analysts predicted some pretty positive trends for both cloud computing and virtualization. For instance, an analyst with JMP Securities gave the thumbs up for Intel “towards the higher end of guidance” because he was confident that cloud computing and virtualization trends “will drive increasing data center upgrade cycle demand across the balance of the year.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that Intel is well positioned as an influential player in the cloud infrastructure, after all, most cloud providers get their chips from the giant. And the trends toward smaller budgets and more computing power are here to stay, and will grow. While Intel is only expecting modest pick up in spend for corporate PCs, the company is seeing potentially robust growth in the market for chips for server computers.

Hold on, though. Let’s not get too carried away. I like that one analyst quoted in the piece acknowledged that cloud computing is in its early stages — stating that the infrastructure is just being built in Asia and Europe.

Yet it was odd that no one in the piece mentioned the concerns that companies and end users have with cloud security and reliability issues.

Mental note: get a hold of those MarketWatch reporters to give them my take on this trend and the resulting demand for cloud-based services such as website monitoring and cloud provider monitoring

I bet you thought that Los Angeles’ deal to use Google Gmail was big news. No; the biggest cloud deal yet is between Panasonic, the electronics giant, and IBM.

According to a story about the cloud-computing deal that I read, Panasonic will stop using Microsoft Exchange, messaging and collaborative software, for IBM’s LotusLive cloud services – within Panasonic’s internal corporate structure for web conferencing, file sharing, project management and instant messaging.  In addition, Panasonic will also use LotusLive for social networking between employees, partners and supplier.

Panasonic will apparently take a phased approach. To begin with, it will roll-out LotusLive services for 100,000 employees. But in a few years, the company will use the service for about 300,000 employees, partners and suppliers. 

The company chose IBM’s cloud service because it wanted an integral vehicle that enables it to work with customers and business partners as “a globally integrated enterprise,” a Panasonic executive was quoted as saying.

While both companies wouldn’t say how much the deal was worth, it’s easy to guess at the scale: 300,000 users for one company. Compare that to Google Apps, which has over 2 million business users in total with an average of 10 users per account.

Don’t feel so bad for Microsoft, though.

This news follows on the heels of a recent announcement by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft of a $250 million deal (over three years) to develop both hardware and software focused on management and virtualization solutions for data centers, pre-packaged solutions for data warehousing technology and the Windows Azure platform.

Looks like 2010 is roaring toward being the year of the cloud!

I’m really loving a phrase that I read recently about cloud computing. It came from the CIO of Avago Technologies, a San Jose, CA-based semiconductor maker, which is gradually migrating its data and apps to the cloud from its internal servers – including recruiting, human resources, e-mail and web security.

According to Bob Rudy, CIO at Avago, migration has saved the company millions of dollars by eliminating hardware needs and software licenses and improving security, speed and storage. Moving to the cloud has also freed up employees from annoying and trivial tasks like managing their e-mail, enabling them to focus more on their core jobs.

But Bob phrased a simple description about the pull of cloud computing that I’d like to share: “The days of owning software are coming to an end.”

Bob was featured in a recent story in the San Francisco Gate about the rise of cloud computing, which called Bob’s statement “an increasingly common sentiment.

“As 2009 draws to a close, cloud computing is floating past that threshold between curiosity and convention, or as Gartner Research put it, `beyond the pure hype stage and into the beginning of mainstream adoption.’ Mainstream like Comcast Corp., Genentech Inc., Kaiser Permanente and the Obama administration, which formally embraced the approach in September as a means of cutting government waste. They’re among the millions of new business customers, organizations and consumers demanding software that runs and stores data on the Internet rather than on the desktops or servers in their building.”

I liked, too, what the story said about why the Cloud has such particular relevance today. The savings angle of the Cloud has long been praised, as in the “pay as you go” approach. But what’s different today is that conditions are ripe for mass adoption:

a) the growth of devices that continually connect to the web, such as smart phones and netbooks,

b) the emergence of newer, better and safer tools,

c) success stories of early adopters,

d) and the new frugality born from the economic downturn.

Yet, as the article says, not all express uncontrolled optimism. There are legitimate concerns about cloud security and reliability of cloud service – spawned by failures like Gmail outages several times in 2009, and the recent downtime at Rackspace.

Overall, I think Bob Rudy’s assessment is right on the mark, however. Businesses will overcome their hesitancies about putting – if not all – at least some of their apps on the cloud, and cloud providers will get better at mitigating risk and ensuring more reliable service.

To quote Dave Girouard, Google’s president of enterprise, from the story: “There was a time when people thought it wasn’t safe to do business over the telephone.”

In the meantime, don’t underestimate the power of independent monitoring of cloud providers to help you manage your applications and data on the cloud.

When I go to visit a prospective client, I’m often asked to explain why it’s better to have a single website monitoring service to oversee that company’s websites and other public services externally, as well as its networks and servers internally? Why a single solution rather than two or more? Wouldn’t multiple solutions be better apt to handle the many problems that arise?

Well, for one, your IT department will have a much simpler job. A single solution will literally alter the way that IT operates.

Let’s look at it this way. When you’re driving your car to a new destination, you’re typically required to watch a number of things in order to drive safely – for example, the dashboard to check on speed and remaining fuel plus a map to make sure you don’t’ get lost. In fact, to coordinate it all, you have to pull over every so often to check the map, ask for directions if needed, get gas and make sure your car’s running properly.

But if you have technology like a GPS navigator – you get a single solution that handles multiple tasks: a map that knows your speed and current location, and it eliminates the need for you to stop to coordinate multiple tasks. You always know where you are and, by setting your destination, you’re sure about the route you’re taking and how long it will take you to get there.

Think of it this way, too. A GPS allows you to save time and have more fun and less stress on the road. When you are late, you can focus on driving, but if you’ve got more than enough time, you can find points of interest along the way, without having to worry about getting lost.

So, why not consider a single product for monitoring IT networks, one that combines the understanding of delivered service levels provided by external monitoring systems with the knowledge of resource use you get from internal server and network monitoring. You’d wind up with the detailed picture, combined with an accurate assessment of the end-user experience.

Choosing the right, single solution, you can track:

• The uptime and speed of websites
• Servers, including those that are virtualized or housed on the cloud
• Desktops, including assets monitoring
• Applications such as email, VoIP, databases, business applications, processes, transactions 
• Networks, including switches, routers, VPN, firewall, DNS, VoIP
• Printers
• Notifications, including email, SMS, IM, Twitter, RSS

A single website, network and server monitoring service can handle a multitude of tasks efficiently – leaving IT managers to better focus on more pressing issues.

Young Chinese people are actually putting memorial flowers and candles outside of Google’s headquarters in Beijing, China, mourning the company’s declaration that it will stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship. It is considering shutting down its operations in the country.

The kids laying down flowers and lighting candles are upset because it would mean a loss of a major web tool, indeed an institution, to connect with the rest of the world.  “The government should give people the right to see what they want online,” said a woman in a New York Times story about Google’s decision. “The government can’t always tell lies to the people.”

Google has set up shop in China since 2006, a country of 300 million web users, and it has been voluntarily working with the communist government there to purge its Chinese search results of banned topics. I guess Google figured it should either do that or do no business at all in China.

Has it been worth it? Well, Google earns an estimated $300 million in revenue there. But it has been criticized by human rights activists for aiding a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online.

I guess Google reached its breaking point.  It’s now going to try and renegotiate with Chinese officials for a new arrangement to provide uncensored results on its search site, google.cn.  And if it can’t reach an agreement, Google will vacate the giant consumer and business market.

That would be too bad, indeed, as many of its customers there have come to rely on its cloud-based Gmail service, too.  That would stunt its growth, not just in search engine revenue, but also in its cloud business. (Google’s main rival in China is a home-grown search engine called Baidu, which has close ties with the government there.)

Cyberattacks Aimed at Activists

Aside from its mounting concerns over censorship, and how the gag is curtailing its business, Google said it was subject to a series of damaging cyberattacks on its computer systems, and that it suspected the attacks were aimed at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

The attacks took place last week, Google said, directed at about 34 companies or entities, most of them in Silicon Valley, CA, according to the story in The New York Times. The piece also reported that the hackers may have penetrated elaborate computer security systems and obtained important corporate data and software source codes.  However, Google said it did not itself suffer losses of that kind.

My point of view on this is that, in this age of free-flowing information globally, it’s a losing battle to try and censor information to keep a whole country in the dark. Indeed, it seems that if Google leaves China, it’ll be China that is cutting its relationship from the world – rather than the other way around.

On the matter of cyberattacks. They’re damaging, yes, but we all have to be part of this world, and there is no sense in putting your head in the sand as a defense. That’s why ever more companies who use the cloud to store data and run apps are turning to monitoring systems to alert them when breaches or snafus occur for users. I expect the demand will continue as long as companies as giant as Google are subject to such attacks.

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here atMonitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

We’ve just got another “plug” within the IT industry.

This time it comes from prolific plug-in makers collectd – a daemon that collects system performance statistics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd also has over 90 plugins which range from standard cases to very specialized and advanced topics.

Well, it seems that collectd has just released version 4.9 of their open source tool for collecting, transferring and storing system performance statistics, and within that new version they’ve created a special Perl-based, plug-in for our free, fully hosted and cloud-based web monitoring service, Mon.itor.us – called, aptly so, Monitorus.

The plug-in queries statistics that Mon.itor.us produces, for example, on system usage or any end-user difficulties that may arise.

Now, you can add the plug-in to your admin area of your site, desktop or laptop.

Thanks, collectd, for joining us in our quest to make it easier for website owners to operate more safely and with more confidence!

IDC, the tech industry analysts, have come out with their predictions for 2010 – and it’s a model that heavily involves the development and growth of the Cloud.

First some general IT industry forecasts:

- growth is expected to return to the IT industry, and IDC is forecasting a more than 3% expansion for the year; the industry will see spending levels rise once again (but to 2008 levels) to $1.5 trillion;

- emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil will lead IT recovery, growing 8-13%, while mature markets like the U.S. and Europe are to remain relatively weak and vulnerable to risk factors;

- small and medium-sized businesses, another important form of “emerging market” for the IT industry, declined by about 3.5% this year…but expect this sector to grow in 2010 by 3.5%. Growth among SMBs will be higher than large enterprises.

What role the cloud will play:

- For the IT industry, 2010 will be a huge year for the continuing build-up and maturing of cloud services delivery and consumption, according to IDC. Look for “enterprise grade” cloud services to emerge in order to support the “more demanding security, availability, and manageability requirements of traditional IT” in cloud services.

- The year will be marked by seven distinct cloud trends:

• Platform battles will accelerate. The field will get more crowded, and IDC expects IBM and Oracle to play new roles. And Google will make its own platform more attractive to large enterprises. Watch, too, for Amazon, to develop an application platform.
• The next wave of hot public IT cloud services will rise and be centered around data/content (storage, distribution, and analytics), business applications (as adoption broadens for SaaS versions of enterprise applications), and personal productivity applications. These differ from today’s model of web hosting and collaboration services, for example, blogs, web conferencing and Twitter. Microsoft and IBM will play prominent roles in challenging today’s dominant player, Google Apps.
• Security concerns will give rise to more private clouds – and from all major IT providers.
• Along with private clouds, there will be an explosion of “cloud appliances” as a “very simple-to-adopt” packaging approach. IT companies like Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, Fujitsu, Hitachi — and chipmakers Intel and AMD — will partner with software vendors to create cloud appliance versions of traditional versions of software.
• Hybrid solutions will grow. IT product and service suppliers will develop tools to help customers “more cohesively and dynamically” manage their IT assets across internal servers, private clouds and their appliances, as well as public clouds.
• Just as there’s a hot market for accessories for the iPod (cases, headphones), expect a hot market for cloud accessories to develop. These will focus on overcoming adoption barriers and will deliver predictable network quality of service and security. Later, other functions such as data indexing and cloud asset management will be introduced. All will aim to make public and private cloud services faster, safer, more reliable, and more useful.
• Cloud players – in infrastructure, platform, application, and management/optimization cloud services categories – will develop API-based partner/solution ecosystems. API partners will add value to cloud providers’ offerings.

From my perspective as an observer and service provider in the cloud industry, IDC is right on the mark with some of these predictions, especially the one that predicts the growth of private clouds due to security concerns among today’s businesses that are considering making a move to the cloud.

As the appeal of the cloud grows in 2010, companies will be seeking all kinds of assurances that their computing is safe and reliable. And I predict that, just as a homeowner would install an alarm system in their house to warn of intruders, more and more companies will seek an extra measure of security in cloud-based monitoring services.