GoGrid continues to build out our Executive Team with the announcement that Mark Worsey has joined GoGrid as Chief Information Officer.

The following Press Release was distributed today:

GoGrid Names Mark Worsey Chief Information Officer
Infrastructure and Internet Veteran Joins Cloud Hosting leader

San Francisco, CA – July 21, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced that it has appointed Mark Worsey as Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President of Technology. Worsey brings to the GoGrid team expansive industry expertise ranging from technology platform development to world-wide network operations. Worsey will be responsible for all technological and architectural advancements as well as managing the operating strategies for GoGrid’s products and services.

We’re proud to have Mark’s leadership driving GoGrid’s innovative engineering, technology and operations departments,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “We will look to Mark’s technological vision and expertise to enable GoGrid to continue to surpass the expectations of our thousands of customers every day.”

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GoGrid was a sponsor and exhibitor at the recent Structure 2010, a Cloud Computing industry event that took place on June 23 & 24 in San Francisco.

The event topics covered a wide range of Cloud subjects, with many industry leaders discussing their views on the subject matter at hand. Topic titles included:

• Dealing with the Data Tsunami: The Big Data Panel
• Cloudonomics: The Value of the Cloud
• Guru Panel: Web Infrastructure for Real Time and Critical
• Hitting Reset: Reinventing Core Internet Technologies
• Analytics and Management Layers
• What Comes After the Blade? Architectures for the Cloud
• Fatter and Faster: Reducing Latency and Increasing Capacity on Broadband

There were several panel sessions as well.

GoGrid’s CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy, was interviewed by GigaOM Pro’s Derrick Harris. John answered the following questions:

• “GoGrid is a cloud provider, can you explain the GoGrid service?”
• “Cloud computing is a hot topic right now, how is GoGrid’s business?”
• “One of the keys to GoGrid’s success is your strong Partner program. Can you talk a a little bit about your Partner program and why it is important for Cloud providers to have one?”
• “Do you find that a lot of your Partners bring a lot of business to GoGrid?”
• “Another unique thing about GoGrid is your background in managed hosting and dedicated servers. Can you talk about how that enables GoGrid to offer a hybrid cloud option?”

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Want to see a quick list of the top 10 Cloud Computing players in the space? (And yes, GoGrid is obviously one of those otherwise I wouldn’t be mentioning this article.) Yesterday, Jeff Vance published an article titled “Ten Cloud Computing Leaders” on Datamation where he briefly describes his thoughts on the leaders in the Cloud Computing space.

As Vance writes about each Cloud provider, he breaks down his analysis into answering a few key questions:

1. Why they are a leader today
2. Why the could be on top in years to come
3. Who the Key Executives are
4. Who their Customers are

I have always found that doing comparisons of Cloud-related companies to be quite a difficult task since products and services can vary so dramatically. And, obviously, there are other factors and metrics that simply cannot be listed in these types of “summary” articles, things like hosting experience, feature-to-feature comparisons, breadth & depth of product and services offerings, etc. However, if you are looking for an organized snapshot of the current leaders, you might want to give Vance’s article a good read.

Companies listed in this top ten are: (more…)

GoGrid is pleased to announce the appointment of Jeffrey Samuels as GoGrid’s new Chief Marketing Officer.

The following press release was distributed today:

GoGrid Names Jeffrey Samuels Chief Marketing Officer
Internet Infrastructure Executive to Drive Cloud Hosting Market Adoption

San Francisco, CA – May 20, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, today announced that it has named Jeffrey Samuels as Chief Marketing Officer. Samuels brings a proven executive track record in marketing, sales and product management to GoGrid’s leadership team. In this role, Samuels will be responsible for managing and expanding GoGrid’s cloud hosting businesses and driving market adoption at a global level.

Jeff’s impressive energy, vision, and track record make him a great addition to GoGrid,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “His experience is uniquely anchored in scaling cloud-based business-to-business product lines. As GoGrid continues to innovate and increase market share in the cloud infrastructure market, Jeff’s leadership will be vital.”

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Yesterday, Lead411.com published their list of the fastest growing technology companies in San Francisco and GoGrid was chosen as a winner. Lead411 is a provider of information, news and research about U.S. companies and their executives and they track company news in order to alert customers about venture financing, new hires, hiring plans and other information.

The list of San Francisco companies also receiving the award is impressive, including names such as:

• AdBrite
• BitTorrent
• Clickability
• Cloudmark
• Federated Media Publishing
• Jaspersoft
• Mashable
• Mashery
• Mulesoft
• New Relic
• OpenTable
• Posterous
• Reddit
• Seesmic
• SlideRocket
• SocialMedia Networks
• Stitcher
• Technorati
• GigaOM
• Twitter
• UserVoice
• Yammer
• Yelp
• …and many others

We at GoGrid appreciate the recognition:

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John Keagy, CEO and Co-Founder of GoGrid, spent some time with Detecon’s Thorsten Claus in March 2010 and the interview was recently published in DMR, The Magazine for Management and Technology. In the interview titled “Future of Cloud (IX) – Interview with John Keagy, CEO and Co-Founder of GoGrid and ServePath“, John discusses why he believes that Telcoms will get marginalized if they only concentrate on network buildout as well as what potential partnerships and services could look like.

The full article and interview are available on the Detecon-DMR site as well as below:

GoGrid is one of the most innovative “full service” Cloud providers for over 2000 business customers in more than 100 countries worldwide. Clients include small to medium technology companies, large enterprises, International, Federal, State and local government agencies, and web hosting resellers. Together with GoGrid’s parent company ServePath, GoGrid is able to offer dedicated hosting, public clouds, and a highly flexible hybrid solution, plus a wide variety of managed services that are usually fairly complex and costly to provide, such as disaster recovery, content delivery networks, or load balancing, paired with a “10,000%” Service Level Agreement (SLA) – six minute service outage means ten hours of service credits. Recently GoGrid made its proprietary cloud computing operating system dubbed ‘SkySys’ publicly available to transform existing datacenters into Clouds, allowing multi tenancy including billing, real-time reporting, and support.

DMR: How do you position GoGrid in the market?

John Keagy: From the telecom provider perspective we are next to Amazon the largest Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider with a feature-complete offering. What I mean by that is that we are offering both Linux and Windows servers in the Cloud with integrated cloud storage, integrated load balancing, hourly billing, and we’re doing it for nearly 10,000 customers.

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Network World this week published a comprehensive review of 3 GoGrid Partners titled “First-ever test of public cloud management wares” and how their services can be used to monitor and manage Public Cloud resources including GoGrid. In the article, Thomas Henderson and Brendan Allen put RightScale, Tap In Systems and Cloudkick through some fairly rigorous testing to show the strengths (and weaknesses) of each Cloud Management vendor.

Source: NetworkWorld.com

The point of the article is pretty clear to me. We (and Cloud Infrastructure providers Rackspace and Amazon) have been providing Cloud Infrastructure for several years now with 100,000′s combined customers actively using our respective clouds. Obviously, depending on the provider, this process can be quick and easy or a bit more involved. But once you have your infrastructure deployed in the Cloud, how do you monitor and manage it effectively? The authors take this challenge of deploying, managing and taking down jobs hosted in the cloud and discuss their findings within the article.

Summing it all up in a quote:

Our findings in this test are that RightScale impressed us most with its overall control and deep understanding of specific cloud vendors like Amazon. Tap In Systems has more breadth in terms of different clouds that can be used, it’s just not as easy to use. And we liked Cloudkick for its simplicity and ease of use.

My opinion of these three Cloud Management vendors is that each have various specialties and are better at one function than another. Also, each vendor handles integration and control of specific Public Clouds in different ways. Be sure that you conduct some due diligence when choosing one as well as when selecting a cloud for them to manage. Regardless, I do recommend that you give the article a read as it provides some pretty good insight into these three vendors and how their products works with the 3 leading cloud infrastructure providers out there. (more…)

An interesting article was posted to the Outsourcing Journal that is relevant to anyone considering using the Cloud as a viable infrastructure strategy. There are plenty of important topics & points in this article, especially as many companies begin moving full infrastructure to the Cloud. Using cloud infrastructure hosting provided by GoGrid and the CloudIQ platform by GoGrid partner, Appistry, companies can move their applications into the cloud for free^[1].

The Appistry CloudIQ platform consists of 3 offerings:

1. CloudIQ Manager helps enterprises manage their applications within a cloud environment.
2. CloudIQ Engine helps companies cloud-enable their applications, providing scalability and reliability.
3. CloudIQ Storage allows organizations to harness inexpensive commodity storage

The Appistry CloudIQ platform is currently available on GoGrid as two Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers which have been recently updated as well:

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1. standard GoGrid hosting costs still apply – For the next 90 days, GoGrid is offering a US$100 credit to Outsourcing Journal readers who reference this promotional code: GGAPPO [↩]

This week, ChannelWeb/CRN published their editorial teams’ choices for the 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors. The lists will also appear in the next printed issue of CRN. Each of these “coolest” lists are broken down into a few vendor subcategories including:

• Cloud Platform
• Cloud Security
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Cloud Productivity Applications
• Cloud Storage

We are pleased to announce that GoGrid is listed under the “20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors“:

The other vendors mentioned include: Amazon EC2, Appistry (a GoGrid partner), AppScale, AT&T, Engine Yard, Enomaly, Flexiscale, GCloud3,  Gizmox, Google, LongJump, Microsoft, OrangeScape, RackSpace, Salesforce.com, Terremark, Ubuntu, VMware and Verizon.

While we typically categorize ourselves as Cloud Infrastructure (along with AWS and Rackspace), we truly appreciate the inclusion in the “Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors”.

Sometimes it is important to reflect back on activities and achievements of the past year in order to focus on the road ahead. 2009 was a year full of “firsts” and exciting announcements for GoGrid and I thought that I would quickly summarize and highlight a some blog posts of interest.

I have personally enjoyed documenting our achievements, analyzing trends, reviewing opportunities, showcasing new clients and partners as well as musing about Cloud Computing in general. Much of the writing on the GoGrid blog during 2009 was my own, however, the people who have helped provide me inspiration are countless, ranging from those within GoGrid to others creating the cloud community at large.

The journey through 2009 has definitely been an exciting one. Looking back on 2009 should make all users, creators and consumers of the cloud very proud. We have done a tremendous amount in 2009! So without further ado, below are a few selected posts of interest from the GoGrid blog for each month during 2009.

January 2009

• “Cloudcenters Are Datacenters In The Sky” – in this post, Randy Bias outlines his vision of what the “cloudcenter” meme truly is and how it is unique
• “Building A House In The Cloud – Cloudcenters Vs. Infrastructure Web Services” – in this post, I tried to simplify some of the differences between our new term of “cloudcenter” and “infrastructure web services” using a comparison to building a house.
• “GoGrid Releases API Specification To The Cloud Computing Community Under Creative Commons License” – GoGrid released our Application Programming Interface (API) under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License which allows users to share, distribute, display and make derivative works based on our API
• “New Windows Server 2003 & 2008 Images Added To GoGrid” – we continued to build out our Windows Server 2003 and 2008 image offering as the first to market with Windows Server 2008 in the Cloud
• All January posts are here

February 2009 (more…)