Communications - August 2009

practice

DoI: 10.1145/1536616.1536633

article development led by queue.acm.org

The age of cloud computing has begun. How can companies take advantage of the new opportunities it provides?

behind cloud computing and highlight some of the key issues and opportunities that arise when computing moves from in-house to the cloud. Our sincere thanks to all who participated in the roundtable, and to the ACM Professions Board for making this event possible.

BY mAche cReeGeR
cTo
Roundtable:
cloud
computing

mAny people ReADinG about cloud computing in the trade journals will think it’s a panacea for all their IT problems—it is not. In this CTO Roundtable discussion we hope to give practitioners useful advice on how to evaluate cloud computing for their organizations. Our focus will be on the sMB ( small-to medium-size business) IT managers who are underfunded, overworked, and have lots of assets tied up in out-of-date hardware and software. To what extent can cloud computing solve their problems? With the help of five current thought leaders in this quickly evolving field, we offer some answers to that question. We explore some of the basic principles

Participants

Werner Vogels is the CTO of Amazon. com, responsible for both e-commerce operations and Web services. Prior to working for Amazon he was a research scientist at Cornell University, studying large, reliable systems.

Greg Olsen is the CTO and Founder of Coghead, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendor on both sides of the cloud equation. Coghead sells cloud-based computing services as an alternative to desktop or client/server platforms and is also a consumer of cloud services. The company built its entire service on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and Simple Storage Service (S3). Previously, Olsen founded Extricity, a company that provided business-to-business integration.

Lew Tucker is CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems. In the 1980s he worked on the Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer that sparked his interest in very large-scale computing. He spent 10 years at Sun as VP of Internet services running Sun’s popular Web sites. Tucker left Sun to go to Salesforce.com, where he created AppExchange (http://www. salesforce.com/appexchange/), and afterward went to a start-up called Radar Networks. Recently he returned to Sun to lead its initiative in cloud computing.

Greg Badros is senior engineering director at Google, where he has worked for six years. Before that he was chief architect at Infospace and Go2Net. He earned his Ph.D. in constraint algorithms and user experiences from the University of Washington.