Sprint is one of the last few major carriers that still offers consumers unlimited voice and data plans, which company execs tout not only as a differentiator but one of the better ways to addressing the needs and experiences of customers.

Unlimited plans are about simplicity and value, said Stephen Bye, Sprint’s chief technology officer, while speaking at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 summit in San Francisco on Monday afternoon, adding that it’s not easy to talk about tiered plans and costs to customers.

Bye also offered the caveat that if a mobile provider does not have unlimited plans, they’ll have to deal with a larger support structure as they’re most definitely going to receive more calls, comments and complaints from customers.

However, Bye admitted that Sprint is “open to different business models” in other ways with different pricing models and devices divided up by demographics and brands (i.e. Virgin Mobile and Boost), but also other products such as the Google experience on the Nexus S 4G and Cricket’s Muse music service.

But with unlimited data plans and just the growth of data activity on mobile devices in general, that begs concern for the evolution of these networks.

“Network modernization enables us to look at a future where data dominates how we build networks,” Bye said, explaining that in the past, it was driven by voice plans. When you look at the world of data by user, location, or the time of day, Bye continued, the way you build that network is very different and challenging.

If you look at what Sprint is building today, including the rebuilding of its 3G network, it’s a data-focused design.

“It brings us back up to a new generation of technology on the network,” Bye asserted, adding that it allows Sprint to position itself as a partner for spectrum hosting and networking sharing. He acknowledged that this is unusual in the United States but common in other countries.

Here enters cloud computing and the opportunity it presents for mobile technlogies. Bye posited that there are a handful of forces at work right now that enable a relationship between the cloud and mobile. It starts with the devices and how they’re becoming incredibly more capable when it comes to processing power, storage capabilities and more.

The power of 4G and low-latency is also a contributor as the challenge, historically-speaking, has primarily been the network. Then there’s security, which is a major challenge that the cloud can partially address when other factors are considered.

But rather than serving as a host, Sprint sees its part in this cloud-based world as an “enabler.” Bye said that if a business has needs for cloud services, Sprint will enable it. The mobile provider is not in the business of selling software, he added, but explained that Sprint can provide care and support to customers and utilize its partnerships with device vendors.

Of course, at one point the discussion turned towards the proposed ATT and T-Mobile merger.

“I can’t speculate too much, but for us, we look at our cost structure and how do we compete against people that have a greater scale than we have,” Bye said. He added that it’s arguable whether or not consolidation is needed to get that scale (which is what ATT is arguing for), but don’t take that as a sign of understanding or favor for the merger.

Bye affirmed that Sprint has “a lot of respect for T-Mobile,” and that when you listen to ATT’s arguments, “they just don’t gel.”

As has been the case for the last half-dozen years, VMworld — the 2011 version of which opens Aug. 29 and continues through Sept. 1 at the Venetian and Wynn hotel convention centers in Las Vegas — is going to be about as newsy as any IT show in the world this year.

Tickets for attendees are going for as much as $2,200 for the four-day conference and expo.

Tier 1 IT providers such as Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, EMC, NetApp, Symantec, Accenture, Brocade and VMware itself will be providing most of the headlines.

Dell has decided to announce some new cloud-related news at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco. IBM and Oracle (with a competing hypervisor, this is no surprise) are quiet on the VMware front.

Lesser-known companies like NEC, NTT America, Datalink, Wyse, Tintri, Nexenta, Savvis, Cleversafe, Eucalyptus and others are among those will release new products or have some other tale to tell.

Overall, the conference focuses on the latest virtualization IT along with strategies to help organizations add private or hybrid cloud computing to their current systems. The central news that affects most everything else is that VMware’s vSphere v5.0, which was announced back on July 12, will be made generally available Aug. 29.

Underlying News: vSphere v5.0 Goes GA

vSphere 5′s newest spin is that it now has the ability to allow virtual machines to use a whopping 1TB of memory running 32-way symmetric multiprocessing. Conference planners have scheduled about 150 sessions devoted to how to manage all that power, deploy and secure the new version of the system, and use it effectively with existing IT hardware and software.

With v5.0, vSphere’s high-availability architecture has also been upgraded for better scale-out ability. Storage distributed resource scheduling (DRS), profile-driven storage and automated host deployment are also new features in the software.

The theme this year is “Own It. Your Cloud.” Keynote headliners will be two of the usual VMware suspects, meaning CEO Paul Maritz (Monday, Aug. 29 at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time and 8 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 30) and CTO Steve Herrod Thursday, Sept. 1 at 9 a.m.).

Topic tracks include: Cloud Application Platform, Business Continuity, Cloud Infrastructure: Management and Operations, Security and Compliance, Virtualizing Business Critical Applications, vSphere, End-User Computing, Partner (for VMware partners only; held at the Wynn), and Technology Exchange for Alliance Partners.

Here’s a grid schedule for all the events, both social- and business-related. Good luck on deciding an agenda. And here is a link to the overall content catalog.

Oh, yes. The Killers are performing Aug. 31 at 7 p.m. at a big party for all attendees.

VMware has plugged the open source RabbitMQ messaging system into Cloud Foundry, the “platform-as-a-service” it introduced in beta form earlier this year.

RabbitMQ provides a means of facilitating communication within and between applications and services. “RabbitMQ is now a first class citizen of Cloud Foundry,” VMware spokesman Al Sargent tells The Reg. “It can be used to communicate between Cloud Foundry services and with other applications on Cloud Foundry, and to connect to third-party services like Twitter or PayPal.”

VMware acquired Rabbit Technologies – the UK-based outfit that originated RabbitMQ – in April of last year, and it previously rolled the messaging system into a suite of development tools it calls vFabric.

vFabric is for those who wish to build applications here on earth, while Cloud Foundry is for those looking to create, deploy, and readily-scale their applications in the proverbial heavens. Based on an open source platform designed from scratch by VMware, Cloud Foundry is a platform-as-a-service or “development cloud” along the lines of Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, or Red Hat OpenShift.

Running in a data center that once belonged to backup outfit Mozy, the service is still offered as a free beta, and VMware is gradually adding various sister services. Cloundry Foundry already offers services based on three open source databases – MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis – and now, RabbitMQ has joined these three on VMware’s command line.

VMware’s Al Sargent tells us that the company plans to add more services “over time”, and though he did not specify what services are in the works, he did say though the core Cloud Foundry platform will remain completely open source, VMware is considering the addition of sister services that are not open source. The company could, say, offer a proprietary Oracle database service alongside Cloud Foundry.

RabbitMQ is based on the AMQP standard, a messaging protocol originally developed by JP Morgan, and it’s open sourced under the Mozilla Public License. Most notably, the system underpins NASA’s Nebula “infrastructure cloud”, where it’s used not only to communicate between virtual machines but to push information to end user browsers.

“Imagine you have a VM and you don’t know where it is. It’s just some virtual resource in the cloud. It’s just in one of many containers in a massive data center,” Rabbit Technolgies man Alexis Richardson told us when VMware acquired the company. “How do you get the right information to the right VM to execute the right command for the right user at the right time? The answer is messaging.”

Sargent declined to say when Cloud Foundry is due to emerge from beta or how many developers are using the service. “We’ve very much happy with our growth figures so far,” he told us. ®

Call it a personal cloud or a digital locker. People like keeping stuff online.

Four out of five people are aware of the terms “personal cloud” or “digital locker,” and only one in 10 didn’t have any idea what those services might be for, according to a survey from Funambol. However, those who are aware of the terms are also big users of the “Facebook cloud” (at 76 percent) and the “Google cloud” (at 75 percent). Essentially, the survey looked not at clouds as the title suggests, but measured how comfortable people are with keeping their data and files online.

It turns out most folks are very comfortable with doing this: Even when asked about more “pure-play” cloud services such as Dropbox, 47 percent of those asked were already using such services. Funambol, which provides white-label online storage services, asked 232 people from its email list a few questions about personal clouds (only 5 of those surveyed used the service). The respondents were mostly males in their 30s.

Three-quarters of those surveyed said they expected to use such digital lockers in the future, mostly so they could access their files, music and contacts across a variety of devices (89 percent cited that motivation). Seventy-one percent also thought that it made a nice backup, and 48 percent said it made it easier to share information. So it seems that people want access to their own media on all of their devices, don’t want to lose it when a hard drive dies and less than half are thinking about collaboration or sharing content. If the driving factor of cloud adoption in the enterprise is agility, for consumers it’s about convenience.

But consumers need to feel their data is both secure (75 percent cited this as a concern) and kept private, even though a mere 2 percent of folks surveyed said they won’t use the cloud because they were worried about privacy. For the most part, convenience was the biggest factor in cloud use, combined with a desire to get as much storage as possible for the cheapest amount: A little over two-thirds — at 67 percent — were willing to pay for their access to a digital locker, with the most popular price point being $5 per month. That prices assumes that a personal cloud account provided a sufficient amount of storage, with 50 GB being the most common example.

Rather than provide new insights with regard to personal clouds, the survey confirmed what many of us already know: that people want to store stuff online, for it to be kept secure and to not have to pay a lot for it. And this set of desires has only gained in urgency as people carry around smartphones and tablets that are also connected to the web and thus able to offer access to more content and applications.

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Cloud startups are having a great week, despite the turmoil on Wall Street, as a host of cloud upstarts kicked off with big dollar funding injections.

The largest of the loot-lucky lot is Okta, an on-demand and identity access management service, which raked in $16.5 million in Series B funding this week, funds the company said it will use to light a fire under enterprise cloud adoption. New Okta investors Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures joined previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Floodgate in the Okta ramp-up.

San Francisco-based Okta, which makes on-demand identity access and management services for enterprises to speed the secure adoption of their Web-based apps in the cloud and behind the firewall, will continue its aggressive growth strategy in a bid to make it easier for enterprises to adopt cloud applications.

“This new investment from Greylock and Khosla is a huge validation of our vision for a Cloud First IT enterprise,” Todd McKinnon, Okta CEO, said in a statement. “We truly believe that leveraging the cloud is simply better for business — it enhances productivity, cuts costs and opens up new opportunities. We’re making cloud applications more accessible and easier for enterprises to manage — something our customers are demanding … [W]e look forward to continuing our growth and helping organizations of all shapes and sizes reap the benefits of the cloud.”

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) player Apprenda also kicked off the week with a serious cash windfall, bringing in $10 million in Series B funding led by Ignition Partners with participation from previous investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and High Peaks Venture Partners (HPVP).

Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Apprenda said it plans to use the new capital to accelerate the product roadmap and spin up marketing and sales initiatives around its private PaaS framework. Apprenda calls itself as the deploy-anywhere PaaS stack for .NET.

Apprenda fits snuggly into the growing cloud PaaS market, which by some estimates is expected to grow 113 percent by 2014, hitting almost $460 million. Over the past year, Apprenda has added 2,000 new installations and is looking to help organizations embrace the cloud.

Another cloud up-and-comer, BigTime Software, maker of cloud-based productivity tools for professional services firms, added $2 million to its coffers with Series A financing with LTC Partners, Geneva Venture Investment Management, Hickory Grove LLC and Howell Capital LLC participating.

Founded in 2002, Chicago-based BigTime makes time, bulling and practice management software that integrates with Intuit’s QuickBooks financial platform for SMBs. BigTime said it will use the proceeds from the funding boost to build up its sales channel, expand marketing and product development and explore partnership opportunities beyond its existing OEM and reseller channel opportunities.

“Our flagship product is continuously being enhanced to meet the needs of our growing customer base and partner network,” E. Jeffrey Lyons, BigTime Software president, said in a statement. “With this round of financing, we are poised to take our cloud-based, scalable solution to the next level of growth, both as an independent company and as a strategic partner with other industry leaders.”

Lastly, it was also a big week for Minus, a file sharing startup that brought in $1 million in investment capital from IDG Capital Partners. New York-based Minus, which lets users leverage the cloud to share photos, documents, music, video and more, said it will continue build out its team and technology infrastructure and continue to beef up its file sharing platform.

Minus and others are among a recent crop of cloud computing companies to get massive monetary muscle.

Last month, Boston-based cloud PaaS startup CloudBees nabbed $10.5 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with Matrix Partners participating.

Okta, a startup that makes identity and access management software for enterprises, has closed $16.5 million in new funding, which it may need since VMware earlier this year announced it, too, would get in on this space. San Francisco-based Okta says it will put the money toward “an aggressive growth strategy” in the months ahead.

Single sign-on (SSO) solutions like Okta’s have become increasingly attractive to the enterprise as businesses continue to put more data in the cloud and have employees accessing them from multiple devices. Instead of running programs on a single “work” machine, many employees nowadays bring tablets, phones, laptops and other devices into the workplace, or perform work while they are on the go.

Okta’s software enables multiple people within an enterprise to sign in to the company’s web-based applications, whether they’re in the cloud or behind a firewall, while employers control employee access to programs through an app market-style interface. In May 2011, VMWare entered the space with a product called Horizon, which is billed as a  “user-centric management service for accessing cloud applications.”

Okta launched publicly in January 2011, and its customers currently range from Internet radio company Pandora to oil pipeline giant T.D. Williamson. The new funding round brings Okta’s total venture capital investment to approximately $27 million. The company’s investors now include Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Floodgate.

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Network World - Cloud management tools are as varied as cloud uses. For this test, we chose five tools that each attack cloud management from a different perspective.

We looked at Symplifed for identity management exclusively targeted to SaaS-based apps, Puppet Labs for virtual machine deployment, HP for building and managing private clouds, Abiquo for IaaS platform management and TurnKey Linux for low-cost cloud backup.

Cloud complexity

Symplified Identity Management and SinglePoint

Symplified Identity Manager (SIM) provides administrators with a way to deal with Web-based application identity and passwords. This is done through an “identity router” called SinglePoint. The SIM product, in turn, manages identity for users with SaaS applications.

The SaaS applications covered include LinkedIn, Google Apps (the business version), Salesforce and many more. Almost any Web app that has a login screen can be included, using HTTP federation.

With SAML-based SIM and SinglePoint, all of the construction of authentication is “behind the scenes” to users. Administratively, we found SIM and SinglePoint to be a little tough, but very usable once constructed.

SIM develops an identity vault that stores passwords and identities for selected websites. These identities can be linked to local in-house user stores such as LDAP or Active Directory via the included SimpleLink connector.

The identities and passwords are stored in a centralized vault that is encrypted with AES128, using a rotating encryption key. The vault is stored on the Identity Router, which can be installed locally or hosted by Symplified (ours was hosted).

The identity router becomes a middleman to connect the user to the apps. Single sign-on (SSO), access control and centralized auditing are some of the benefits of SinglePoint. But it must be emphasized that Symplified is only for Web-based apps.

Setup and configuration

SIM needs a virtual machine (VM) to connect your credentials (like Active Directory or LDAP) to the Symplified cloud-hosted proxy authentication system. The VM instance uses CentOS 5+ or Red Hat Linux. We used CentOS and only installed an SSH server on it.

After that we installed SimpleLink RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) kit. Symplified usually helps customers with this portion of the install; we tried doing it ourselves. After we had a setup call, we got help linking our Active Directory to Symplified’s cloud platform. There is a local Web interface for uploading the credentials. The SimpleLink server then connects our infrastructure with its Identity Router(s), and behind the scenes SimpleLink uses openVPN to secure the channels.

SinglePoint Portal is the cloud-based admin Web portal where everything is set up and configured. SinglePoint Portal is a Flash-based app and is responsive, although the fact that it uses Flash will give some organizations security concerns. The portal allowed us to add user stores or entries of logon IDs and passwords. We could create application groups and links to the applications themselves. HTTP Federation or SAML type apps can be discovered, but it’s also possible to manually configure HTTP-based apps that log users on.

August 07, 2011 | by Aulia Masna

Cloud Comparisons Part II: Other Cloud Services

(Screen shot of Dropbox.com)
Apple may have entered the cloud computing era as a veteran, but others who came in late have proven themselves to be more adept at figuring it out. It took Apple a decade before it was able to provide a service that seemed to resonate well with customers.

iCloud gives away 5 gigabytes of online storage for owners of Apple Mac computers and iOS devices, a far cry from MobileMe’s 20GB, although the older service costs $100 a year.

Fortunately, those who need more than 5GB will be able to purchase more storage at a more affordable cost than through MobileMe. An additional 10GB will cost $20 a year, an extra 20GB costs $40 a year, while 50GB more will cost $100 a year. Each of these are provided on top of the free 5GB space, although they are separate options.

This pricing scheme compares favorably to Dropbox, a popular online storage service that gives away 2GB for free, but charges $10 a month for an additional 50GB and $20 a month for 100GB more. Dropbox does, however, provide an option to raise the 2GB limit to 8GB through a referral program.

While iCloud is essential to anyone owning an Apple mobile device, Android users rely on Google’s cloud storage services — and lucky for them, it’s far more affordable than Apple’s iCloud or Dropbox.

Meanwhile, Gmail provides 7GB of free e-mail storage, Picasa allows up to 1GB of photo storage and Google Docs lets you keep up to 1GB worth of documents. Additional storage purchase, however, will apply to all the above services linked under the same account.

Google provides an additional 20GB for an annual fee of $5, or 80GB for $20, 200GB for $50, a 400GB upgrade for $100 and a 1 terabyte for $256. For Android users, this is clearly a no-brainer, especially since these options are also provided on top of the free service.

If those space options are not enough, for whatever reason, Google also offers additional packages of 2, 4, 8, and 16TB. The cost? Just multiply $256 by the corresponding amount of storage.

With Google+ entering the scene, Google’s previously separate services are on their way to becoming ever more connected, as all photos and images shared on Google+ are stored on Picasa. Without the extra space, images older than the last 1000 are removed from Picasa (though not from the device), making the additional storage increasingly important.

Those who use Microsoft’s Windows Phone have a pretty advantageous head start, as far as online storage is concerned. The company’s SkyDrive, which is linked to the Live mail service, provides 25GB of online storage for free, although it does not offer additional options. Windows Phone users may use this space to store e-mails, MS Office documents, photos and videos directly from the respective applications.

Unfortunately, mobile phones using Windows Phone are still very rare in Indonesia and the Marketplace application store is still not available locally.

For the most part, the choice of which online storage service to use depends on the mobile device. After all, the point of these services is to provide convenience in storing and accessing data while away from the computer, since mobile devices hold much less storage.

Aside from Dropbox, which has no vested interest in any particular mobile ecosystem, all the other services are locked in to their own environment. But the advantage of them all is that should you lose your device, your data, including photos, apps, videos and documents — and in the case of Apple, music, movies and TV series — is safely stored online to be retrieved on your replacement device.

Read: Cloud Comparisons Part I: Apple’s iCloud

Taipei, Aug. 7 (CNA) Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC Corp. was responding to pressure to expand its product portfolio in the mobile market when it decided to acquire mobile-web application company Dashwire Inc., a Taipei-based analyst said recently.

“It’s the right direction,” Joey Yen, a senior analyst at International Data Corp. (IDC), told CNA.

“HTC has grown to a scale that could not be supported only by existing research and development manpower, so the company had to expand its technological power and patent portfolio by merging or acquiring other firms.”

Facing fierce competition from rivals Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., the move will also save HTC RD expenses in launching ready-to-use products or services in the growing cloud market, she added.

HTC announced on Aug. 5 the acquisition of Seattle-based Dashwire for up to US$18.5 million (NT$536.7 million), saying that mobile communications and cloud computing technologies hold the key to the company’s future development.

Founded in 2006, Dashwire offers a range of consumer, social and device management software services for mobile operators, device makers and retailers. Its platform is available for Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian and RIM’s BlackBerry.

Earlier in July, HTC purchased California-based graphics chipset designer S3 Graphics Co. Ltd for US$300 million (NT$8.64 billion) to expand its patent portfolio following a legal battle against Apple.

In February, HTC announced the acquisitions of London-based digital content provider Saffron Digital and U.S.-based on-demand gaming service provider OnLive, for 30 million British pounds (NT$1.4 billion) and US$40 million (NT$1.18 billion), respectively, to attract more customers through added services.

“These acquisitions may help HTC differentiate products in the cloud era and maintain a leading position over other Android device manufacturers,” Yen said.

The analyst doubted, however, whether HTC could offer as integrated a service as Apple’s iCloud service because Apple has created a closed ecosystem in which its supply-chain partners have to follow its own product customization rules.

(By Jeffrey Wu) ENDITEM/ls

A few months ago, I shared ideas with you on how to find the right partner to help you establish sales in cloud services. Now, I’d like to expand on the cloud opportunity by relating three specific actions you can take now to help your organization profit from the cloud computing revolution.

They include…

Action #1: Develop a common understanding of cloud across your organization.

Let’s face it: cloud computing is complex, and still evolving. Part of the complexity of cloud sales is that you’re typically not dealing with a single, tidy solution. Long-term success in cloud sales hinges upon confidently speaking to all of the private, hybrid and public cloud options available to help solve customer problems. To do this effectively, each member of your team must possess the same understanding of what the cloud is, as well as what the cloud can do.

In recent studies I’ve read, the need for employee training in selling cloud ranks among the top-five most reported cloud challenges. Another study I came upon indicated that only a few percent of enterprise IT shops today have enough experience to satisfy customers’ cloud computing needs. Clearly, if you want to sell cloud, training is a must!

Action #2: Engage with your customers to determine where cloud fits on their priority list (before someone else does).

At the heart of cloud computing demand today is the business need to do more with less. This quest for efficiency is common to organizations in all industries and goes hand-in-hand with many of their other goals, including reducing risk, optimizing service quality and increasing business agility. Cloud addresses all of these business challenges, making it a top IT investment priority for most organizations. But if your customers aren’t aware that you, as their “traditional” solution provider, can also help them solve business challenges through cloud technologies, they may be a ripe target for your competitors.

Now is the time to meet with your customers and learn about their goals. If cloud is on their mind, be prepared to discuss why you are the perfect advisor to help them reach their goals more cost-effectively through cloud solutions.

Action #3: Help your end customers get started on the path to cloud.

A growing number of CIOs rank cloud computing at the top of the list of technologies they are focusing on going forward. The reality is, however, that a wide gap still exists between where most enterprise IT shops are today and true cloud computing. You have a great opportunity to help close the cloud gap by offering your customers cloud workshops, or even cloud assessment services.

At Avnet, we work with our partners to set up billable consulting engagements with their end-user customers. These engagements provide a dynamic forum to identify and unify the end customer’s leadership around key cloud goals and determine next steps to achieving them.

For end customers ready to commit to the cloud, Avnet partners may recommend our Cloud Assessment Service. An assessment engagement lasts several weeks and provides the information needed for sound decision making in determining a go-forward strategy and migration path to cloud computing. Other companies provide cloud assessments too, but our vertical market focus and data center technology expertise makes Avnet an optimum cloud partner.

Vertical Market Impacts

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions are all around us. For the most part, SaaS—the first signs of clouds in our future—got its start as horizontal solutions aimed at solving fairly broad and common needs. While the SaaS market continues to grow, the scope of these solutions is expanding to encompass more verticals. As if that wasn’t enough to pique your interest, new cloud-based technologies are emerging every day. One of the newer cloud offerings you’ll want to keep an eye on is infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions. There’s already considerable interest in these solutions among IT leaders in the hospitality, healthcare and retail industries.

So remember: Solution providers who get in front of the cloud hype now and deliver impactful business solutions with their customers will remain in a leadership position for years to come.

Michael Houghton is VP of vertical market solutions for Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship. Read all of Houghton’s guest blogs here.

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