Structure News: Highlights of Structure 2015

Where The Countdown To Structure 2016 Begins November 20th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll recap the week that was at Structure, the cloudiest tech conference this side of Colorado. STRUCTURE NEWS It's hard to believe it's over already, but Structure 2015 is a wrap. Over 600 people packed into the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco over two days of great discussions and talks from some of the leading minds in the cloud world. These were just a few of the highlights: THE GUY WHO PUSHED NETFLIX INTO THE FUTURE SAYS WE'RE STILL UNDERESTIMATING AMAZON Adrian Cockcroft's "state of the cloud" presentations are always a highlight of Structure, and this year was no exception. While the best part was probably the IT-companies-as-battleships metaphor, Business Insider sums up several other predictions and observations from his talk. HOW COREOS TOOK GOOGLE-STYLE INFRASTRUCTURE TO NEW HEIGHTS Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, made his Structure debut this year alongside Eric Brewer of Google to talk about container management and the future of app development. SiliconAngle caught up with him on the sidelines for a wide-ranging interview on this very interesting startup. THE U.S. GOVERNMENT WANTS IN ON THE PUBLIC CLOUD, BUT NEEDS MORE TRANSPARENCY If you needed any proof that the public cloud is practically mainstream, even the most security conscious parts of the federal government are eyeing these services. Arlette Hart, chief information security officer of the FBI (below right, with Barb Darrow of Fortune), likes much of what public cloud services have to offer but is quite concerned about the "trust me" approach to security often employed by those companies, as IDG News Service reports. INTEL WILL SHIP FIRST XEON CHIPS WITH INTEGRATED FPGAS IN Q1 2016 First announced at Structure 2014, Intel's programmable Xeon chips are slowly winding their way to market but will arrive next year, Diane Bryant told Structure attendees first thing Wednesday morning. Amazon Web Services and longtime Intel buddy Microsoft are likely the first two customers, according to Venturebeat. INSTAGRAM IS EYEING VIRTUAL REALITY TO LET USERS TELEPORT AROUND THE WORLD One nice thing about having a parent company like Facebook is that it allows you to think quite differently about the distribution of your app compared to just about anybody else. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger said Thursday that collaboration between his group and the Facebook-owned Oculus team could allow Instagram users to unlock some amazing virtual reality experiences, as Variety noted. GOOGLE'S HÖLZLE ENVISIONS CLOUD BUSINESS ECLIPSING ADS IN 2020 As AWS continues its amazing growth and emerges as a more compelling business than Amazon's web store, Google's Urs Hölzle thinks his company might go through a similar transition. He reiterated a goal to have cloud revenue at Google outpace ad revenue by the end of the decade, as reported Wednesday by Bloomberg, but a lot is going to have to change at Google in order for that to happen. (More on that in a minute.) INVESTOR KHOSLA SAYS DELL-EMC MERGER WILL "SET BACK INNOVATION," PARTNERS UNMOVED Vinod Khosla's trademark bomb-throwing style made its return to the Structure stage this year, and his target was the legacy IT companies that his startups are hoping to take down. When asked about the proposed Dell-EMC merger, Kholsa said he believes the deal will actually retard innovation at the merged company, according to CRN. (Bonus points to CRN for a snarky follow-up line from a partner of Dell and EMC: "Didn't Sun (which Khosla co-founded) fail?"   INDUSTRY NEWS GOOGLE PICKS DIANE GREENE TO LEAD ITS CLOUD BUSINESS While most of the cloud-industry news of the week happened at Structure, as noted above, Google dropped a bit of a bombshell Thursday afternoon with the announcement (graciously donated to the New York Times) that VMware founder Diane Greene has been appointed as the new head of its cloud business. This is a bit of a re-org that will see all Google cloud products report into Greene, and likely paves the way for an eventual spin-out of the group under Google parent company Alphabet. BIG PICTURE After a whirlwind few days in San Francisco, it's nice to catch a breath. But seeing the Structure crowd back together and passionately debating the direction of this still fast-growing industry was a wonderful experience, and only the first of many such experiences that all of us at Structure want to continue to provide over the coming years. There were definitely a few themes that emerged in the conversations both on stage and the equally valuable ones taking place over lunch and cocktails. People are wary about lock-in. I'm pretty sure the phrase "vendor lock-in" wasn't mentioned once at Structure 2014, but this year, I heard it dozens of times. From what I gathered, no one feels currently locked into their cloud service provider, but they are watching closely to see if the new powers of this era fall to the temptations of the steady, bookable revenue and profits that defined the product-development cycles of a previous generation of enterprise software companies. 2016 is the year containers will be used on production workloads across a much wider range of companies. Depending on who you talk to, containers are either old news (Joyent's Bryan Cantrill's entertaining talk was well worth the price of admission) or The One True Path Forward for app developers. But I noticed a uptick in attendees who have played around with containers in test environments during 2015 enough to express confidence about making the leap in 2016. Everybody either hates the Dell-EMC deal or finds it hilarious. What would be the largest merger in tech history was a running punch line during the show, as everyone from Khosla and Cockcroft to the very entertaining panel featuring Luke Kanies of Puppet Labs, Bob Muglia of Snowflake Computing, and Jay Rossiter of Yahoo got a few shots in at Michael Dell's expense. Should Dell find a way to pull this off by Structure 2016, there will be a lot of surprised folks in attendance. We'll have much more to say about Structure 2015 in the coming weeks as we upload video of the sessions and have some more time to think about the trends and themes that emerged. This week was an excellent foundation for the new home of this vital conference series, and we'd like to thank everyone who helped contribute to its success.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. 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Structure News: It's almost show time!

Where It's Structure Time November 13th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about a cool tech conference happening next week, and some other stuff that's almost as important. STRUCTURE NEWS A LOOK BACK AT THE STATE OF THE CLOUD, AND A FEW NEW PREDICTIONS FOR 2015 It's finally here! Next week we'll put on Structure 2015 for the first time under our new company, and it's looking like a great show. Thanks to everybody who has already purchased a ticket, and if you haven't, I know a place you can. This week we invited Adrian Cockcroft of Battery Ventures to write a guest post previewing his now-annual "State of the Cloud" presentation (which he'll present Wednesday morning) and revisiting some of his predictions from last year. As might be expected, he did pretty well: but in a fast-moving industry such as this one, we'll have to come back again next year and see how his 2015 predictions work out. Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS BLUE COAT ACQUIRES CLOUD SECURITY STARTUP ELASTICA FOR $280M As more and more businesses wade into cloud computing services, technologies and companies that can help save them from themselves will only grow in value. Venturebeat reports that Blue Coat, a maker of hardware that helps companies understand what's running on their networks, will play $280 million for San Jose-based Elastica, which extends that visibility to cloud services. RACKSPACE ANNOUNCES BETTER THAN EXPECTED Q3 RESULTS, INCLUDING REVENUE OF $509M, PLANS $350M DEBT OFFERING For a while there, it looked like Rackspace was going to be in serious trouble, but it delivered some good news this week with its third-quarter earnings. As Techcrunch notes, initial reaction was mixed to Rackspace's better-than-expected earnings but hefty debt offering, perhaps because its growth rate continues to decline while Amazon Web Service's revenue skyrockets. WHAT DOES CISCO GAIN BY PARTNERING WITH ERICSSON? Cisco's announcement that it plans to hook up with Ericsson on a technology and services-sharing deal is just the latest in a series of partnerships the venerable networking company has struck this year in hopes of staying current as the shift to cloud computing changes demand for on-premises networking equipment. Fortune reports that Cisco is interested in Ericsson's mobile networking smarts and army of consultants, although I'm a little confused about what Ericsson is getting in return. FIERCE 15: DEL MONTE FOODS SET UP A BRAND-NEW, CLOUD-ONLY INFRASTRUCTURE IN LESS THAN A YEAR Sometimes being forced to start from scratch is the best opportunity you can have. Del Monte Foods had to scramble to implement its own infrastructure following a corporate split, and chose to migrate a to of on-premises software to an all-cloud infrastructure, as Fierce CIO shows in this case study. DELL'S EMC DEAL COULD FALL APART ON TAX RULE Believe it or not, the largest proposed corporate merger in tech history is a complicated matter. Recode reports that Dell insiders are concerned about what the IRS thinks about certain provisions of the deal, which could throw a wrench into the proceedings by making the deal significantly more expensive for Dell. HOW INSTAGRAM SOLVED ITS JUSTIN BIEBER PROBLEM Oh, the Belibers, capable of bringing even the most thoughtful startups to their knees. Wired revisits a fun story from Instagram's past about how fans of singer Justin Bieber would overwhelm its infrastructure with millions of likes. The solution, which we'll try to get Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger to expand on next week at Structure? "Denormalized counters."     BIG PICTURE When we set out to build this company five months ago, we weren't entirely sure what to expect. Sure, we knew that Structure was a well-known event that has been around basically since the beginning of the cloud-computing era, but as most of you know, any new venture requires you to accept a certain amount of risk. That's why it's so gratifying to see how the cloud community has responded to Structure 2015, with former big-name speakers like Google's Urs Hölzle, Facebook's Jay Parikh, and Intel's Diane Bryant enthusiastically signing up once they heard the event was coming back and press coverage planned from our official media partner, Fortune, as well as The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch. There are not very many cloud computing conferences organized by companies that aren't trying to sell you their cloud services, and we think that's an important function to provide to this community. That role becomes even more important as more and more businesses outside of Silicon Valley realize what cloud computing can do for their companies and a new generation of tech power brokers attempts to part those outsiders from their money in creative ways. Next week is going to be a great showcase of some of the best and brightest minds this world has yet produced, and we also hope you'll learn something about where this still amazingly new industry is headed. Thanks for your support of Structure, and we hope to see you in downtown San Francisco next week.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Six new speakers added to Structure lineup

Single-day tickets are available to purchase beginning today. Structure 2015 is a week away and we’re gearing up for an amazing two days of speakers, workshops and extracurricular activities. We recently added six new speakers:  Rachel Chalmers – Principal, Ignition Partners Quentin Clark – CBO, SAP SE Tim Kimmet – VP of Platform & Systems, WalmartLabs Ken Owens – CTO, Intercloud Services, Cisco John Roese – SVP and CTO, EMC Jay Rossiter – SVP of Product, Engineering, Science & Technology, Yahoo These speakers join Facebook, Intel, GE, Google, the FBI, GE, Walt Disney, Virtustream, MongoDB and more. Key highlights from our program include: Security for the FBI Everything containers with Google, CoreOS and Docker Curating a cloud-first culture with Pinterest Machine learning with Microsoft Data centers with Intel Pick up your ticket here.   SPEAKERS   RACHEL CHALMERS Ignition Partners QUENTIN CLARK SAP SE TIM KIMMET Walmart KEN OWENS Cisco JOHN ROESE EMC JAY ROSSITER Yahoo   SPONSORS   HEADLINE     PRIMETIME     SHOWTIME     HEADLINE MEDIA PARTNER     PARTNERS     NOVEMBER 18 – 19, 2015 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.