We had a great turn out at the Cloud Operators AppLogic Bootcamp, with a great deal of interest in another from folks for who weren’t able to attend. Therefore, we’re excited to announce the next AppLogic Bootcamp will be October 13th to 15th in Tysons Corner, Virginia. This time we’ll be focusing on building, operating, and scaling your applications in the cloud:

Day 1: Basic AppLogic for Cloud Applications
Take full advantage of the AppLogic platform to design, architect and deploy applications. It also provides an introduction to the AppLogic architecture, appliance and application template catalog. Topics include:

Day 2: Intermediate AppLogic for Cloud Applications
Learn how to monitor, scale, customize and provide fault tolerance for applications.

Day 3: Advanced AppLogic for Cloud Applications
Create custom catalog appliances and templates as well as advanced labs.

You can get more information or sign up here.

As our ecosystems of partners around the world grows, we want to ensure we’re providing the most up to date technical and market data to help service providers succeed. The latest addition is AppLogic Bootcamp, an intensive three-day hands-on training program for IT professionals who maintain and provision AppLogic based cloud computing infrastructure. The course is designed specifically to give service providers and advanced enterprise users a deep and clear understanding of the features and capabilities this powerful cloud computing platform provides.

Audience
Specifically designed for IT Administrators, Data Center Staff, System Administrators, Systems Integrators

At Course Completion
After completing this course, students will be able to:
− Install AppLogic in local and remote datacenters
− Add and remove resources
− Obtain and apply hot-fixes
− Integrate external hardware into cloud systems
− Use metering data for billing and charge-backs
− Perform crash recovery and debugging
− Configure a virtual run-book
− Build and use appliances
− Create template applications

Prerequisites
Course attendees should be familiar with datacenter OSs, Linux command line utilities/operations such as yum, screen, vi, ifconfig, ping, nslookup, ssh, rsync and scp. In addition, attendees should have knowledge of:
− L2 and L3 networking configuration, routing, VLAN and STP
− Use of public key-based authentication for ssh access to servers
− SSL certificates and DNS setup
− Disk layout, partitioning schemas, RAID configurations
− Local and remote server management

When and Where
The first Bootcamp will be June 23 through 25, 2009 at the Double Tree Hotel in Irvine, CA and you can sign up here.

What a difference a few years can make. When we launched AppLogic and described how IT could use resources outside their own data centers to run their apps, many folks were initially very skeptical. Although Nicholoas Carr had written and spoken about this for a couple years already at that point, more than a few told us we were nuts. Our ideas on packaging operating systems into appliances was even more controversial at times, prompting some heated blog posts. It all reminded me of the old quote “If (your idea) is original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

Of course, today cloud computing has become one of the hottest topics in technology, and the current economic climate is only accelerating that interest. As IT shops in companies large and small try to do more with less resources, they are looking to cloud computing for its flexible resource usage, low capital costs and ease of management.

Join 3tera and Forrester Research Principal Analyst James Staten for a free Webinar on March 4th as explore the new frontier of global cloud computing. Jame will discuss what he’s learned from enterprises that are looking to build their cloud strategy about their concerns and considerations. In addition, we’ll also demonstrate some capabilities of the global cloud live, incorporating both public cloud services and private clouds behind the corporate firewall.

This one’s been eating at me since September 17 at 10:09 AM.   That was when a speaker from Tier 1 Research concluded a presentation at the 4th Annual Hosting Transportation Summit (HTS) at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas.

HTS is a great event for anyone involved in the hosting industry.  It was attended this year by about 400 people representing everything that’s anything in the U.S. hosting industry.  Attendees, for the most part, have profit and loss responsibilities and were there to find new weapons for their arsenals to increase revenues.   I love these focused conferences.  Having them in Las Vegas is really smart.  That makes it easy to gauge attendees’ interest by seeing how much of the audiences at the various sessions are lost to the casino.  The sessions at HTS were well attended!

By contrast, that week was VM World, right across the street (which in Vegas means only a 15 minute stroll) at The Venetian.  VM World was impressive – close to 15,000 attendees, I am told.  My sense walking around there, though, was that the majority of the attendees were more technology oriented – looking for cool new technology – but were not the people in their organizations responsible for P&L, who make spending decisions, and, most importantly, who make strategic business decisions.

So, what happened at 10:09 AM Las Vegas time on 9/17?  I just finished watching and listening to a very well researched and prepared presentation by a Senior Analyst at Tier 1, who organizes the event.  He very thoroughly described how the Cloud people, the compute on demand people – people like Amazon and Google, were kicking the hosting providers’ butts as they remain a commodity whose ability to compete with these Cloud giants is starting to wane.

What he didn’t do, though (and this is no criticism of him – he did his job), was talk about what the hosting providers can and should do to combat this.

So, why now?  If it’s been eating at me 7 weeks, why am I writing about it now?

Well, for the last couple of months, enterprise interest in Cloud Computing seems to have emerged in spades (pardon the Las Vegas pun).  VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and others have all made announcements readying themselves for enterprise Cloud Computing.  Our own marketing efforts have been focused around the enterprise as, though we are largely used by hosting providers and our customers are largely hosted, we have a full Cloud Computing platform that can run behind a corporate firewall, and our number of customers who do that, particularly enterprise customers, are definitely growing.

So, let’s not forget our hosting providers.  They are not only the salt of the Cloud, but they will be an integral part of Cloud Computing’s future.  In fact, as Clouds begin to interoperate globally, it will be the hosting providers who jump on that bandwagon who will fuel it with much of its resources.

Note to Hosting Providers:

If you are worried about how you are going to cope with this new competition, there is something you can do about it.  This advice might sound like an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality, but it is far from it.  The mentality is more of the nature that you should join a movement that they, too, will eventually have to join.

Whatever people think, there will not be a single dominant Cloud from any of these guys.  Cloud Computing, like any other utility, will evolve into a series of Clouds that can interoperate among themselves and are connected globally.  These interoperating Clouds will be run by hosting providers, will be proprietary Clouds like EC2, AppEngine, etc. and will be corporate data centers.

So, how does a hosting provider get on board?

Hosting providers need to implement Cloud Computing platforms in their data centers (of course, I think that platform needs to be 3tera’s AppLogic – plug, plug – surprise, surprise).  They need to build product offerings on these Cloud platforms.  Once there is a critical mass of applications hosted in all of these Clouds, the leaders will start interoperating with one another as people will want to share and reuse technology components, and, more importantly, companies will want to effect business to business transactions with companies running in other Clouds.

It will be inevitable that businesses running applications in proprietary Clouds will want to have the same capabilities, and in order to do so, their Clouds are going to have to start interoperating in the same ecosystem that yours do.

And guess what.  Many of the new enterprise customers we are attracting are and are wanting to run their web applications in external Clouds - HOSTED BY YOU.  So, there’s a whole new customer base here ripe for the picking.

So, hosting providers unite.  Get on board the Cloud train and in time, and not a real long time, the Amazons, Googles, Microsofts, Akamis, Salesforces, etc, of the world will have to join you or be beaten by you!

I’m headed to LT Pact for the next couple days, Layered Tech’s customer gathering in Vegas. Layered has been a close partners and puts on a great event, with folks from all over the world interested in delivering web applications. Most, of course, host with Layered, but not all. It’s an open event, registration is free, and you don’t have to be a customer to attend.

The only downside is this means I’m in an airport AGAIN, for the third time in as many days, enduring that infinitely un-American intrusion into my life that is TSA. This morning’s line extended more than 100 yards outside the terminal itself. If either presidential candidate would commit to ending this assualt on our civil liberties they’d have my instant support. Any takers???

A few of us from 3tera will be at the  O’Reily’s Velocity Conference in San Francisco for the next couple days. In fact, this will be a pretty busy week. In addition to  Velocity, we’ll be presenting at Cloud Camp and LTpact, and will be attending the Structure 08 conference as well.

When I was in college the irreverant comic strip Doonsebury was in it’s prime. Because it featured college kids it was a favorite on campus. One frequent story line involved the young college kids workig as polsters during election years and in a particularly memorable line the polster responds to a woman who’d never heard of his candidate with “he’s never heard of you either.”

So, here I am going through that same dance with other startups at AjaxWorld. Sure, Oracle and IBM are here along with a few other industry stalwarts, but a large chunk of conversations between exhibitors is “so what do you guys do?” Ah, the life of a startup.

For startups, how you answer this question is an important decision, it’s your elevator pitch to use the venacular. What three sentences can you string together to convey what you do. If you’re building a faster, smaller, cheaper widget then your answer is pretty simple. On the other hand, if you’re building something new, as we believe 3tera has, then the job gets a little tougher.

Imagine showing a spreadsheet for the first time, a GUI, or maybe a mouse. I’m sure showing the first web browser stretched a few imaginations. Each of these is well understood today, but when first created the developers had to find a way to communicate. You search for a meme you can associate with.

I just did my video interview with sys.con.tv here at AjaxWorld and have a panel session this evening - all preparing for the day when no one will have to ask what we do.

Peter Nickolov, our President and CTO, was scheduled to speak at AjaxWorld on the 24th and 25th, but he’s been called out of town. So the audiences will have to put up with my blathering style of speech instead of his deliberate delivery.

The topics of Monday’s panel is still up in the air, so it should be interesting, but on Tuesday morning I’ll be talking about the development of our AJAX interface along with Stephen Quintero, one of our developers.