GoGrid‘s Channel, Partner and Reseller Programs have already received notable recognition and today we released news of our participation in the new Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace (http://www.ingrammicrocloud.com).

The following Press Release was released today and is available online here and here as well:

GoGrid to deliver Cloud Hosting Solutions through new Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Leader to Enable Ingram Micro Channel Partners with Pioneering Cloud Computing Capabilities

San Francisco, CA – November 22, 2010 – GoGrid, a leading cloud infrastructure provider, today announced a strategic marketing alliance with Ingram Micro (NSYE: IM), the world’s largest technology distributor . GoGrid is among the first cloud service providers to be featured within the Ingram Micro Cloud, a new reseller enablement platform and online Cloud Marketplace (http://www.ingrammicrocloud.com) from Ingram Micro. GoGrid is committed to providing best-of-breed cloud infrastructure solutions, resources and enablement tools to Ingram Micro’s extensive and growing network of IT Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

GoGrid is focused on delivering innovative infrastructure solutions in the cloud and doing it second-to-none,” said Jack Duffy, Senior EVP of Sales and Business Development at GoGrid. “We are committed to investing in our partners in this early stage of adoption and we truly value the role and importance that Ingram Micro and their channel ecosystem bring to the market. We are confident that working together, GoGrid and Ingram Micro will further drive cloud adoption and enhance partner profitability.”

GoGrid’s award-winning reseller programs will support Ingram Micro VARs and MSPs through two significant industry transitions:

1.    Fulfilling the strong demand to migrate customers’ on-premise IT environments to the cloud and create financial and technological efficiencies
2.    Helping resellers adapt their business models and support mechanism to ensure scale and sustained profitability

Ingram Micro has proven itself to be the leader in cloud offerings and the new partnership with GoGrid is further confirmation of the distributor’s commitment to identifying leading cloud vendors that understand and thrive around the channel partner community,” said Patrick Ciccarelli, President & CEO of Varsity Technologies and Ingram Micro reseller. “GoGrid’s cloud technology and service to the channel will enable Ingram Micro’s partners to find new opportunities with existing and new customers.”

GoGrid is providing channel partners essential resources and educational information through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. For many channel partners, this site is both the initial introduction to cloud solutions and an ongoing destination for cloud computing research. The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace provides Ingram Micro’s VARs and MSPs throughout the U.S. and Canada access to an aggregated group of cloud-based computing and communications services providers.

The GoGrid Partner Program is well designed for cloud-centric MSPs who want to provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service, leverage free cloud demonstration accounts in a ‘try before you buy’ sales model, and meet their own profitability goals,” said Ed Becker, President of BeckITSystems.  “The GoGrid Partner Program definitely helps MSPs who want to grow their business and who are willing to contribute to success through mutual participation in demand generation activities with GoGrid.”

GoGrid’s participation in the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace exposes customers to best-of-breed technology, infrastructure and cloud solutions. With over 10 years delivering solutions within the infrastructure space as well leveraging historical insights from over 10,000 customers worldwide, GoGrid has created a winning formula for channel success.

GoGrid has a great focus on the channel,” said Eric Adkins, President of Adkins Technologies. “And from a purely technical perspective, as rated by an independent 3rd party, GoGrid performs faster than other leading cloud infrastructure and platform players. In short, GoGrid’s support is better, their pricing is better, their hardware is better, their ease of use is better, their channel program is better, and my business is better for it.”

For more information about becoming a GoGrid Partner or Reseller, please visit: http://www.gogrid.com/partners/

About GoGrid
Thousands of leading IT experts choose and rely on GoGrid’s Cloud infrastructure services. GoGrid enables sysadmins, developers, and IT professionals to create, deploy, and control cloud environments and complex virtual and physical server networks with full administrative control. GoGrid’s industry standard specifications and robust service offerings are powering thousands of businesses globally to achieve previously unrealized efficiencies. Deploying a GoGrid infrastructure solution using a Standard or Partner Server Image, free hardware F5 load balancing, Cloud Storage, private VLANs and much more takes minutes via a web interface, API, or iPhone application. GoGrid provides users the control and advanced capabilities of a data center environment with the flexibility and immediate scalability of the cloud. www.GoGrid.com
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If you would like to get more information about GoGrid’s Partner Network and the various programs available to VARs, MSPs, Resellers, SaaS, PaaS, Infrastructure Resellers and the like, please visit our Partner Section.

This week, Gartner, Inc released their list of the top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009. This information stems from research performed within the Technology sector and factors in their client and research feedback. This list, released at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo, is considered to be potentially “disruptive to your environment or market in some way,” says Gartner analyst David Cearley.

While I sometimes find some of Gartner’s commentary on trends in technology a bit conservative and missing other critical data, this 2009 list does represent current trends that I have seen and mirrors many of my own expectations. Just last week, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington declared that Web 2.0 was dead. I think that many of us have already moved well beyond Web 2.0. My view, for some time, has been that Web 3.0 (for lack of a better term) will be a combination of Integration and Standards and the coupling of the two, with other enabling technologies such as Cloud Computing providing the necessary lubrication. We saw the term “mashup” become prevalent during the past year or so, where companies sought to integrate similar services (or even disparate ones) in a new service delivered via the Web. A could of quick examples of this is evident with the numerous Twitter services that use Twitter data and either present this data in different ways or full integration into other services, or the advent of Yahoo!’s Pipes.

Key to Integration is making the connections easier through the use of public APIs. As more companies expose their API’s to developers, the wheels for integration become even more greased. This is all fine and good provided that these API are carefully documented, but more critical is that APIs must adhere to some sort of standard. Unfortunately, the “standards” requirement is a lot harder to require and maintain. At a recent Cloud Computing Interoperability meeting that I participated in, most attendees agreed that Standards are a huge priority, however, defining these standards would be a daunting task to undertake. But this interop was a clear step forward by the leaders in the industry towards defining these standards. If you step back a few years, you could view Web Services as a precursor to the API movement we see now (API’s are a subset of Web Services), and XML standards helped to propel the acceptance of Web Services and Integrations in general.

I feel that those companies who are currently working to aggregate (or integrate) various API’s into their business model are well positioned to be the ones who can help drive these standards. Case in point, GoGrid has a public API and recently signed up various Cloud Aggregators (such as RightScale, Appistry and GigaSpaces). These companies use a variety of other Cloud Infrastructure providers within their management services. The more that I thought about it, the more I realized how important these Cloud Aggregators’ roles are in driving some Cloud standards. They have views into all of their partner API’s and can easily find similarities and differences between these API’s. Any API’s that these aggregators come up with themselves are one step closer to a standards-based API that could potentially be generic enough for use by many if not all providers.

What is also interesting, is that this concept of Integration and Standards actually does apply to our current World Financial Crisis as well. We have a bank and financial institution pandemonium with mergers seemingly occurring daily. These institutions will need to integrate diverse systems in order to succeed and the government will be forced to derive some standards to govern their vested interest in these institutions. Sure, this is a fairly broad application of these terms in this comparison between Web 3.0 and Finance, but the ideas are similar.

But back to the Gartner predictions for 2009. First, we need to take off our rose colored glasses here. Any time you make a prediction, the odds are that you could be wrong in the long run. I realize that this is a bit pessimistic, but just look at our Economy right now. There were plenty of naysayers who told us that we were going down the wrong path, but we still proceeded ahead, ignoring these predictions. Technology trends are no different than Economic ones; you can make an attempt to predict based on the past however, the difference here is that technology seem to be a lit less volatile compared to the economy.

So, let’s take a look at Gartner’s 2008 and 2009 Strategic Technologies list:

I’d like to dive into these lists, not all topics but just the ones that caught my attention. Interestingly, I find that several of the items on these lists seem to have blurred boundaries while others clearly stand alone.

Green IT, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Computing Fabrics/Servers – Beyond Blades, and the Web Platform/Web-oriented Architecture, in my mind, are Technologies where this “blurring” is clearly evident. Cloud Computing obviously is the buzzword of 2008 as well it should be. One can actually lump the others in this short-list under “the Cloud.” Fortunately (or unfortunately), this all-encompassing term is used in every technology conversation nowadays. The problem is, because it is being used as such a generic term, many people are having trouble really understanding what “the Cloud” truly is. Some points:

• The Cloud is definitely “Green” in that there are obvious power and energy savings compared to traditional rack & stack servers.
• Green works hand-in-hand with Virtualization. While power and energy efficiencies can be gained through hardware optimizations (e.g., green chips, reduction of power-hungry servers), these efficiencies can be more dramatically realized through virtualization of hardware appliances and components.
• Similarly, Cloud Computing employs the use of Computer Fabrics; instead of partial resource utilization of a bare-metal server, with Cloud Computing one can target just CPU or memory aspects (infrastructure resources and components) and gain efficiencies through their isolated uses.
• Finally, if you plug in the Web as a Platform or Architecture provider and delivery mechanism, one can clearly see how Computing resources can be delivered via said architecture as opposed to traditional methods (e.g., architect in and deliver via the Cloud vs. bare metal and more static and rigid infrastructures).

Back to my earlier point of Integration being a key driver of Web 3.0, Gartner lists (Enterprise) Mashups as another Strategic Technology to watch. I heartily echo this. It will, undoubtedly, take the Enterprise much longer to realize this from a concept point of view as well as the actualization of this technology, but we do know that integration is critical. Why not leverage experts from various practices and bolster your own services or products through integration with these experts. Mashups is a Web 2.0 buzzword that I would recommend be dropped for a more encompassing term of “Integration.” Mashup has the connotation of being very Web-centric (e.g., only visible on the web). Integration, on the other hand, can be applied to both Web-centric delivery but also to more behind-the-scenes channels of Web Services and specifically, APIs. Integration using APIs will give companies clear competitive advantages versus those SMBs or Enterprises that opt to maintain closed systems. Integration of systems can also help drive BPM (Business Process Management) as well as BI (Business Intelligence). By overlaying dissimilar data sets, new conclusions can be made based on the analysis of the data intersections or relationships, thus presenting more distinct and unique offerings.

Lastly and perhaps the ugly duckling of the group, Social Software and Social Networking, I believe will be core to 2009. During any economic crisis or recession, Companies immediately look to slash Marketing and PR budgets above all other Departments. Prior to Web 2.0, Marketing and PR was all about blasting your product or service messages out to the masses. Web 2.0 introduced the idea of engaging in conversations with groups of users and understanding the needs of those users. More recently, with the huge adoption of Social Networking by all types of users (business and personal), the message became even more targeted, reaching almost a 1:1 conversation. This has evolved into Social Marketing using Social Networking/Software as the delivery mechanism. While more difficult to do well and somewhat hit-and-miss at times, Social Marketing is potentially more efficient than dropping gobs of money on keyword buys, sponsorships, or events. Enterprises are already moving towards engaging their prospects or customer base through community-based outreach and social networking channels. Doing it right, however, is a completely different beast. It’s good to see that Gartner views this as a critical technology component of 2009.

We still have to maintain a clear perspective in all of this though. If the Global Recession truly hits as it seems that it will, the items on the list that directly and positively impact the bottom line of companies will naturally rise to the top. Maintaining a cost-effective, competitive advantage in the future will be much more difficult to achieve. I dare say that adopting Cloud Computing as a primary technology strategy will be one of the main catalysts for technology-savvy business to not only stay in business, but also be successful in the long run.

Perhaps that subject was not strong enough. The Financial Sector is currently weathering a hurricane, recently suffering the largest drop since 9/11. Merrill Lynch fell into the hands of Bank of America. Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy and looking for a buyer with Barclays buying some of their assets. The Airline industry is failing. AIG and other financial companies are looking for some sort of an economic bailout. HP is eliminating 24,600 jobs. And this was all over just a few days. If one extends the look a bit further, the perspective is just a grim: gas prices going up, the dollar losing value and housing going down. One simply cannot be surprised by any of this.

The Tech Sector is getting hammered as well, but this time, it isn’t “our fault.” The Dot Com bust managed to drag down the other sectors last time, but we learned our lesson. Long gone are unproven businesses and their associated models. Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors are taking long looks at business, not just getting in the car for a drive but doing a full check under the hood, looking at the road both ahead and behind and fully vetting the drivers and passengers. To get money as a start-up is truly an accomplishment nowadays. You have to have a proven business model, installed user base, and a clear direction of where your company and your industry will go.

I recently attended TechCrunch 50 which showcases 50 startups and allows them to present their business or service to a panel of experts. I saw about 1/2 of the companies’ presentations and I noticed that the companies where they couldn’t articulate or prove their monetization strategy, these companies got an earful of criticism from the experts. Similarly, at a meetup in San Francisco, the question asked every presenter is “How are you making or going to make money?” It’s a very simple question, but one that must be answered or the company loses credibility.

Perhaps we should apply these same simple questions to the Financial, Housing and Airline Industries? I guess the markets are already doing that.

It will take a long time before all of these markets start to recover, and corporations and businesses are currently challenged to prevent the hemorrhage of money and capital expenditures within their IT infrastructure. I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal called “Cutting Tech’s Energy Bill” by William M. Bulkeley that discusses how large companies are looking at ways to cut electricity usage within the Enterprise. With energy costs directly and indirectly rising, it’s critical for the embattled IT manager or director to make fiscally sound and environmentally responsible decisions to keep their business moving forward will simultaneously ensuring that their technology progresses.

Bulkeley gives several examples:

• IBM has launched a “Green Data-Center Services” business line to help customer redesign their datacenters
• HP purchased a company that specializes in designing datacenters with a focus on energy-efficiency
• EMC has worked to eliminate unneeded equipment and use their cooling infrastructure more efficiently
• Hartford Financial Services Group has shut down 6 of 7 datacenters and host within a “green” IBM facility
• IBM and HP has introduced water-cooled servers and others are hard-selling blade computers that use significantly less power than traditional servers

Outsourcing one’s infrastructure is a core way to tighten your belt of your IT Budget. If you can allow for a managed hosting provider to run your IT infrastructure, you save on capital expenditures as well as human capital running it. Colocation and dedicated hosting were all the rage a few years ago and, while it may be losing its sex appeal nowadays, there are still plenty of IT traditionalists who demand it.

Towards the end of the WSJ article, Bulkeley starts to discuss virtualization as a Green technology that can help cut costs. This is where I pick up the thread and run with it. Virtualization is a key component to helping Corporations reduce their IT expenditures significantly. The ability to consolidate multiple low-end servers onto one or handful of higher-end servers is an obvious and logical cost and energy-savings option. The heavier adoption of virtualization technologies such as Xen or VMware or even Hyper-V is giving corporations or even those self-same outsourced data center and dedicated hosting providers a way to stretch their money and efficiencies even further. To over simplify, reduce the number of servers through virtualization and your datacenter space demands go down, your dependency on IT staff to manage those locations reduces and your CapEx shrinks, giving you efficiencies immediately.

This is where the Technology Sector is starting to get “Cloudy.” I’ve used this metric before to illustrate my point, simply look at the Google (Insights for Search) chart comparing “cloud computing” against “dedicated hosting” keyword searches:

Dedicated hosting will not go away. It’s a viable outsourced technology option that companies depend on. It makes fare more sense (cents?) than doing it yourself within your corporation. There are only a niche of companies that can afford to make the technology and capital investment to support large-scale IT infrastructures, and even those (as exemplified in the WSJ article) are looking to re-architect their infrastructure.

Could “Cloud Computing” be the silver bullet to help corporations survive the financial hurricane? I think so. But there are challenges ahead for both the providers of the Clouds (and even traditional dedicated hosting providers) as well as corporations.

• For Cloud Providers, education of the “Cloud” concept and overcoming the “this technology is only for early adopters” status will be critical. However this can be achieved through collaboration with other Cloud Providers and Enablers as well as standardization of protocols and APIs, for starters.
• For the Enterprise to view the Cloud as a viable alternative to traditional or even self-hosted infrastructures and datacenters, the challenge is larger. While Cloud Computing may be obvious to many  in terms of “green-ness” and cost savings through zero CapEx, IT managers of the Enterprise tend to not quickly jump on board with the latest technology. Some might say they are a bit gun-shy and would rather someone else test the waters and learn from their mistakes. This wait-and-see attitude will be the end of many. Given the current financial weather and outlook, the Enterprise should be looking at the non-traditional and emerging technologies just as hard as within traditional practices.

While I may be sticking my head in the sand by saying that this financial storm will pass soon, I also  have my head in the “clouds” by stating that dedicated/outsourced hosting and Cloud Computing are viable alternatives to “doing it yourself” that all businesses should seriously consider and get on their short term strategic plans. To jump back into the car metaphor, it’s time to dump the old 1970′s gas-guzzler and get the 2008 Hybrid!

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area tomorrow (April 30th) we hope that you can attend StartUp SF, a meetup designed to help you “kickstart your startup.”

Speaker and Demo tables

Jonathan Cobb – Founder/CTO of Kiptronic (http://www.kiptronic.com)

Topic – “Genesis of a Startup: from Concept to Company”

• Early Validation — Before you start in earnest, you might wonder — What makes a good idea? Is yours worth pursuing? How do you size your opportunity?
• Covering the Basics — A handful of best-practices recommendations for general company administration: corporate formation, capital structure, legal, accounting, etc.
• Building the Core Team — How do you attract talent at this very early stage? What kinds of players will you need pre-funding? Post-funding?
• Market Validation — How do you execute to prove you have a winning idea? What milestones make sense for your business?
• Fund Raising — When should you raise money? Who should be your target funding sources? How much should you raise? What are common investment terms?

Demo table companies: Triggit, Askpedia and MotivePath. Also come see a demo of GoGrid, a definite “must have” for any startup.

Every attendee will receive:

• $100 GoGrid service credit which enables you to deploy, scale and load balance server networks instantaneously – More info about GoGrid

• Orrick’s Startup Kit CD which includes legal documents critical to every startup Venture – More info about Orrick

Quick Details:

When: April 30th, 2008 from 6pm to 9pm
Where: Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, 405 Howard St, SF at the 8th Floor Cafe
Who: Technologists, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Web 2.0-ers (over 21 years of age)
Bring: Business cards, elevator pitch, curiosity, legal dilemmas and hosting needs
Cost: $10 in advance / $20 at the door (all proceeds go to charity)

Register at: http://startupsf0408.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!

ServePath, the people who bring you GoGrid, is pleased to announce the latest and greatest meetup in the San Francisco Bay Area: StartUp SF. As regular attendees of meetups around the Bay Area, we have experienced first-hand what we think works and what people are looking for, so we have partnered with Orrick to bring you a new technology meetup, specifically designed to help “kickstart your startup!”

The format for this meetup is simple. Socialize, hear how other successful companies got that way, see demos of products, meet with venture capitalists, and generally have a good time.

You and your technology friends are cordially invited to inaugurate the StartUp SF Meetup on Wednesday April 30^th, 6 to 9PM at the spectacular offices of Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, 405 Howard Street, San Francisco.

Speaker and Demo Table details:

Jonathan Cobb – Founder/CTO of Kiptronic (http://www.kiptronic.com)

Topic – “Genesis of a Startup: from Concept to Company”

• Early Validation — Before you start in earnest, you might wonder — What makes a good idea? Is yours worth pursuing? How do you size your opportunity?
• Covering the Basics — A handful of best-practices recommendations for general company administration: corporate formation, capital structure, legal, accounting, etc.
• Building the Core Team — How do you attract talent at this very early stage? What kinds of players will you need pre-funding? Post-funding?
• Market Validation — How do you execute to prove you have a winning idea? What milestones make sense for your business?
• Fund Raising — When should you raise money? Who should be your target funding sources? How much should you raise? What are common investment terms?

About Kiptronic – “Kiptronic provides a software-as-service platform as a comprehensive solution for publishers of video and audio content. Our Media Services Platform allows our customers to dynamically deliver ads with their content, extending their reach to any device, with support for leading hosting platforms and formats. We support audio and video delivered both online, such as in a website video player, or offline to any downloadable media device.”

Demo tables

MotivePath - Robert Ficcaglia – Founder (http://www.motivepath.com)

About MotivePath – MotivePath®, Inc. provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to help marketers and advertisers quickly and easily reach highly targeted audiences for their product and service messages. The MotivePath technology platform empowers Everywhere Media™, and features a SaaS service core capable of serving targeted ad units and creative interactive content across web, social networks, mobile, video, and even connects to offline media such as print, outdoor and screen media. It features content management for tailoring content for different media types and channels, reporting, predictive models and analysis. It provides full campaign management, ROI measurement, scenario analysis, and Key Performance Indicators. In addition, the MotivePath open service platform enables clients and partners to integrate directly with MotivePath technology, resulting in the availability of best of breed solutions through the MotivePath partner program.

Triggit - Susan Coelius Keplinger – COO (http://www.triggit.com)

About Triggit - Triggit makes it quick and easy for web publishers to monetize their sites with advertising. Using a cross platform web application, publishers can now drag and drop ad units directly into their pages, optimize efficacy and track the results. Triggit takes the pain out of monetization.

Askpedia - Yong Su Kim (http://www.askpedia.com)

About Askpedia – Askpedia is an online knowledge marketplace for Questions and Answers. Users post questions with optional financial rewards for best answers. Others answer questions to earn rewards and establish their reputation within the community. All questions and answers, as well as users, are tagged and indexed with tags and location information to enable content and location based discovery. Askpedia also utilizes personalization technologies to match Q&A and experts to users based on interest and knowledge profiles.

More about the event

StartUp SF brings together technologists, entrepreneurs, technologies, services and solutions to meet, learn, socialize and network to success and monetization. We hope that you will join us for a fun professional evening. EACH MEETUP DONATES ALL TICKET PROCEEDS TO A DIFFERENT CHARITY. This inaugural event will be donating to Habitat for Humanity.

At the event, you will hear some tips and tricks from a successful startup, find a good crowd, demos of some thought-provoking leading-edge products and drinks and light snacks.

You will leave better connected and educated AND with the following gifts from us:

• $100 GoGrid service credit which enables you to deploy, scale and load balance server networks instantaneously – More info about GoGrid

• Orrick’s Startup Kit CD which includes legal documents critical to every startup Venture – More info about Orrick

Please join us for StartUp SF and tell your friends about it.

When: Wednesday April 30^th 6 – 9PM

Where: Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, 405 Howard St. San Francisco at the 8th Floor Cafe

What: StartUp SF Meetup, networking, knowledge, friends and schwag to kick start your startup.

Who: Technologists, Entrepreneurs and interested folks who are over 21 years of age

Bring: Business cards, elevator pitch, curiosity, legal dilemmas and server needs

How Much: $10 in advance / $20 at the door (all proceeds go to charity)

Bring yourself and your technology friends to meet like-minded, future-looking folks who may become your next colleague, customer, vendor or competitor.