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tied up in out-of-date hardware and software.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.
Geir Ramleth is CIO of Bechtel,
where he provides cloud services for internal company use. Prior to his current