Last week GoGrid officially launched our new European headquarters as well as opened our Amsterdam data center. We are already in the process of granting early access to select VIP GoGrid customers as well as opening up access to new GoGrid customers. If you are interested in using our new European data center, you can find out more information on the early access program in this blog post.

Podcast Interview with GoGrid

As part of the launch event, we were also sponsors of Cloud Expo 2012 which took place in London. During the show, GoGrid CMO Jeff Samuels and Senior Product Manager Rupert Tagnipes participated in a podcast interview with the MHF Tech Network.

The following topics were covered in the podcast (“MHF Specials Episode 5: Cloud Expo Europe 2012 Part 1″):

• Partnerships and services that GoGrid provides
• Out-of-the-box solutions and services from GoGrid
• What differentiates GoGrid from other vendors in the marketplace
• Thoughts on the future of cloud computing in 5-10 years
• Ideas on what the “next great thing” will be in the cloud hosting marketplace
• What the future will bring for GoGrid

The podcast can be played directly below and is also available on iTunes.
Note that the GoGrid interview begins around timestamp 3:45 and ends around 11:25.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

We would like to thank the MHF Tech Network team for spending the time to let us discuss cloud computing, the current and future state of GoGrid and how we view the marketplace. If you have any questions about any of the commentary in the podcast, please feel free to leave a comment on this article.

It’s exciting times at GoGrid this week as we announce another milestone in our company’s history—the opening of our European Headquarters. GoGrid AMS BV is located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and will provide our customers with fully integrated, on-demand, global cloud infrastructure services through any of GoGrid’s data centers, including our new Amsterdam location as well as San Francisco, CA, and Ashburn, VA.

Why now? Why Amsterdam?

The appetite for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is rapidly growing worldwide. With Gartner predicting that the IaaS market will soon account for a quarter of the overall hosting department, the opportunity seemed ripe to take the next step in our continued global expansion. Amsterdam was the perfect choice when looking to set up our HQ thanks to its central geographic location, which makes it attractive to businesses operating or looking to operate within the EU, as well as its rich infrastructure, its reputation as a high-tech center, and its talented workforce.

Interested in learning more?

If you’re attending Cloud Expo Europetomorrow and/or Thursday, be sure to pop by the GoGrid booth (1013) where you can chat with me and other key members of the team: Craig DeMartini, head of sales, VP of Operations Bobby Brown, and Senior Product Manager Rupert Tagnipes. We can tell you more about the opening and the benefits that this expansion brings.

At the show there’ll also be the opportunity to hear about Condé Nast Digital Germany’s success hosting its magazine content on GoGrid’s infrastructure (25 January at 14.20 – Cloud and Virtualization Infrastructure and Platforms Theatre) and why Martini Media chose GoGrid’s cloud technology for its multi-data-center solution (25 January at 16.35 – Cloud and Virtualization Infrastructure and Platforms Theatre).

It’s set to be a great show, so we hope to see you there!

If you can’t make it down to Cloud Expo Europe, please contact GoGrid’s new European HQ at emea-sales@gogrid.com for more information. To learn how cloud computing can help your business and to access our Cloud Computing 101 Toolkit, go to http://go.gogrid.com/amsterdam_launch/.

“What are the benefits of cloud computing?”

Easy question to answer, right? Cost savings. Increased performance. Scalability. The list goes on…

While these are great benefits of cloud computing, I’d argue that the most important aspect of Infrastructure-as-a-Service is the flexibility and versatility of the platform. Why? Because no two companies share identical IT environments – every company is unique and has unique infrastructure needs – and the cloud allows for flexibility and uniqueness. This is your Cloud Fingerprint.

The Cloud Fingerprint is the distinctive identifying characteristic of your IT environment. Your Operating System, the applications craft and use, how your infrastructure is networked, compliance requirements, database type/usage and peak usage times are all components of your Cloud Fingerprint. Knowing this will help you build an IT environment tailored to your specific needs.

What’s your Cloud Fingerprint?

The first step to truly benefiting from cloud computing is to build an environment that is fully customized to your specific needs. That’s why GoGrid is helping companies all over the world discover their Cloud Fingerprint. If you’re interested in learning what infrastructure best suits your business, we have several ways for you to connect with a GoGrid Cloud Expert:

• Stop by our booth at the Sys-Con Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA. GoGrid Cloud Experts will be in booth #709 ready to help with your Cloud Fingerprint. Getting your Cloud Fingerprint also enters you for a chance to win a MacBook Air! Sys-Con Cloud Expo: November 7 – 10, 2011. Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.
• Connect with one of our Cloud Experts online by filling out the Cloud Fingerprint Checklist or by participating in a Live Chat.

Last week, the 4th annual GigaOM Structure conference was held in Northern California and GoGrid was part of the show in many ways not only as a sponsor but also active in a variety of panels. This was our 4th Structure conference that we attended and 3rd that we have sponsored…so I guess you can say that we have been there from the start and support the efforts of the GigaOM team. Structure is GigaOM’s “flagship conference on Cloud Computing and Internet Infrastructure” and we have seen the conference grow from a single day to this year’s two day sold-out conference.

What struck me and my colleagues most about this show is the professional and technical level of the attendees. This was not a show of cloud or IaaS “tire kickers”, these were people and businesses who knew their stuff about cloud computing and who were bringing value to the cloud (not diluting the term “cloud” like we are seeing in the mainstream media, in TV commercials and elsewhere). This was a partnership-making event. You could just feel the deals being drafted out in the hallways between sessions.

(image source: GigaOM)

But Structure 2011 was also an educational event, with carefully chosen speakers and panels providing thought-leadership ideas and commentary to a captive audience. I’m not going to discuss each and every session in this article, simply because GigaOM already has that covered. However, because GoGrid was an active in the event, I did want to provide a brief recap of two sessions that we were part of:

• “Dedicated, In More Ways Than One: The IaaS Panel”
• “The What, How and Why of Secure SaaS Delivery – GoGrid and Orange Business Services Discuss the Hosted Private Cloud as the Enabler”

The IaaS Panel was hosted by Paul Miller, Founder of Cloud of Data. On the panel with Paul was our very on John Keagy, Executive Chair and Founder of GoGrid; Chris Pinkham, Co-Founder and CEO of Nimbula; and Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer. You can watch the full panel discussion in the video below.

More businesses are demanding dedicated infrastructure (not sharing hardware with other tenants) on the grounds that it is more secure and offers better performance. The panel discusses the merits of this reasoning and highlight the fact that you aren’t getting the true benefits of cloud computing using solely dedicated hardware. While public clouds, as multi-tenant environments, may make more sense financially, it’s still met with trepidation from “hardware huggers”. The speakers all believe that dedicated infrastructure will grow over the next 5 years, but will ultimately serve as a gateway to public and private cloud infrastructures.

The panel also talks about the mentality towards applications. For so long, developers were adamant about which hardware and operating systems they built their applications on. Now the types of cloud and OS aren’t as important as they used to be. The experts claim that cloud computing users should focus on the application and need to find solutions that best meet the needs of that application.

Finally, the video highlights and discusses the current trend away from virtualization – John Keagy even declares that, “The party is over for virtualization,” essentially, that cloud computing is not virtualization alone. As John states, the type of virtualization software that is used by a cloud provider usually doesn’t matter (unless it is costly to the vendor and that mark-up is passed on to the end-user – my side note) when the customer is shopping for a cloud and it will matter even less in the future. (For those interested, GoGrid uses opensource Xen and a proprietary management layer.)

The GoGrid and Orange Business Services Workshop was a question and answer panel moderated by Paul Miller. Panelists were: Lee Cardona – Director, Orange Business Services, Michael Mascia – Director, Technology Partners, Platform Engineering and Development, Orange Business Services, Mario Olivarez – VP of Products, GoGrid and Jeffrey Samuels – CMO, GoGrid. GoGrid and Orange recently implemented a private cloud using GoGrid’s Hosted Private Cloud service. Soon, GoGrid will be releasing the Orange Case Study which goes into more details of the reasoning behind Orange choosing GoGrid as their solution provider.

Did you attend or watch the livestream or recorded videos of Structure 2011? I would love to know what you thought of the event, the content, the speakers, the sessions and what you gained from it.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve seen me ask (and answer) the question “what is cloud computing?” I continually focus on this question because “cloud” has become a buzzword that means many different things to different people – even in the IT industry. Many people have asked that question. And the answers 2-3 years ago were vague. But it does seem that people are fine-tuning their thoughts on what it means nowadays.

(image source: pyramid.GoGrid.com)

A few weeks ago, I set out to clear up this cloud confusion, at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, CA., by asking several experts “what is cloud computing?” Hear what they had to say in the video or read highlights below:

Martin Tantow – President of Amiro Consulting

Martin Tantow reminds us that cloud computing is a concept we’ve been familiar with for well over a decade. Hotmail, founded in 1996, was a web-based e-mail service that could easily be referred to as one of the original cloud services. Martin believes cloud is a movement where businesses are moving their data storage to the Web and removing the need to store data centrally.

Sven Hammar – CEO of Apica

Sven Hammar contrasts the differences between cloud infrastructure and hosting your own physical servers. Some of the benefits he listed were:

• No upfront capital expenditure
• Scaling on demand without worrying about physical dependencies
• Creating elasticity by circumventing server failure by switching backup data centers

Siddhartha Agarwal – VP of Americas Field Operations, Zend Technologies

Siddhartha Agarwal shares what cloud means for the developer community. Siddhartha points out that developers are not infrastructure people. Cloud computing is valuable because it enables developers to test and deploy their applications quickly without having to worry about infrastructure. Using cloud gives developers peace of mind and let’s them focus on what they are best at.

George Reese – CTO enStratus

George Reese states that cloud computing is on-demand self provisioning of IT resources (virtual, hardware, software, platforms, etc.). He believes that this evolution alters the way we use IT and foresees that this technology will completely change the way businesses use infrastructure.

I believe that it is important to continually ask this question and track the evolution. From 3 years ago, definitions were more nebulous – now, they are much more defined and people can truly articulate what they believe the cloud to be.

What is your definition of cloud computing? Leave a comment!