Enjoyment: 18 Sept 2015

Friday 18 September 2015

Structure News: Salesforce's party, Pinterest hits 100 million, HP's fight for relevance

Where The Party's On Howard Street

September 18th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about Facebook's big video transformation, Salesforce.com's spectacle in SoMa, and what could be the last shot for HP.

STRUCTURE NEWS

WHY ELLEN RUBIN AND CLEARSKY DATA ARE BETTING ON THE HYBRID CLOUD

For the second addition to our new Medium publication, I had a chance to speak with Ellen Rubin, co-founder and CEO of ClearSky Data, a new startup with an interesting approach to cloud storage. ClearSky's "global storage network" is a mix of an on-premises storage appliance, metro-area cached storage, and "cold" Amazon S3 storage. Ellen will be speaking at Structure 2015 and she had some pointed and pragmatic things to say about the current state of the cloud services market, so check out the interview here.

Remember, Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here.

INDUSTRY NEWS

HOW FACEBOOK IS PREPARING FOR THE VIDEO BOOM

Facebook kicked off the week at the @Scale conference by revealing some interesting details about how it is building the next generation of its infrastructure to handle an explosion in video content. Fortune got a behind-the-scenes look at the process with Facebook's Jay Parikh, who will be speaking at Structure 2015.

ACCENTURE ACQUIRES CLOUD SHERPAS TO ENHANCE CLOUD CONSULTING CHOPS, ESPECIALLY AROUND SALESFORCE.COM

As bigger and bigger companies contemplate moving their workloads to the cloud, they're turning to their old consulting friends to help them make the leap. Techcrunch reports that Accenture's cloud team grew a little stronger this week with the pickup of Cloud Sherpas, a 1,100-person strong consulting company born of the cloud era.

EVERYTHING ANNOUNCED AT DREAMFORCE 2015 SO FAR

Speaking of Salesforce.com, it took over a city block in downtown San Francisco this week (much to the annoyance of the locals) for Dreamforce 2015. While the event is mostly a commercial for Salesforce and a party for its customers, Venturebeat compiled a list of the product news and interesting talks showcased during the week.

PINTEREST CROSSES USER MILESTONE OF 100 MILLION

Little did I know back when I talked to Pinterest's Raj Patel (a Structure 2015 speaker) a few weeks ago that he had already been putting plans in place to scale Pinterest from 76 million users as of July to 100 million as of Wednesday. The New York Times interviews Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann about the milestone, noting that the company still needs to grow to live up to its valuation.

ORACLE SEES LIGHT AT THE END OF CLOUDY TUNNEL

While Dreamforce attendees were partying with Stevie Wonder, Oracle was releasing an earnings report that wasn't exactly an excuse to party. Fortune reports that while Oracle's revenue was lighter than analysts had expected, it is rapidly shifting its attention to the cloud software world, and even expects to produce margins akin to its Good Old Days. We shall see.

WHY WHATSAPP ONLY NEEDS 50 ENGINEERS FOR ITS 900M USERS

Few companies have scaled as quickly and smartly as WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app that connects the planet. Wired looks at some of the secrets behind that rise, which includes the Erlang programming language and a cultural focus on simplicity.

AWS RE:INVENT TO FOCUS ON CLOUD MANAGEMENT, SECURITY

While we like to think you can get everything you need to know about the cloud world at Structure, Amazon's Re:Invent conference is obviously a must-attend event on your calendar. David Linthicum (who will be moderating a session at Structure 2015) has four predictions for what you can expect to hear at Amazon's big show.

BIG PICTURE

At this point, it's a bit cliché to wonder what Bill and Dave would think of the fine mess that Hewlett-Packard has turned out to be over the last decade. Dysfunctional boards and an ongoing game of CEO musical chairs have allowed HP to miss out on most of the big transitions of the 21st century, including the explosion in mobile computing, the rise of cloud computing, and, amazingly, 3-D printing, a market which you'd think the company nearly synonymous with printing could have owned.

But after an analyst meeting this week in which HP CEO Meg Whitman shed a little more light on the company's plans to split itself in two next year (and announced plans to lay off 30,000 people), it seems pretty clear this is HP's last shot. I've always loved this Lou Gerstner quote: "No institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive." The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will make its debut just a few weeks before Structure 2015 kicks off, and it's sure to be a topic of conversation during the event.

One thing in HP's favor? The world might be more accepting of hybrid cloud than we once thought. Our interview with Ellen Rubin this week (see above) underscored that as cloud computing evolves, there won't necessarily be a one-size-fits-all model for large corporations with unique workloads that are starting to embrace the public cloud where it makes sense.

This is HP's bet, that its years of selling and installing servers for the datacenters of the world will help it find a niche in a new world with fewer datacenters but more complexity. "Hybrid" is a dirty word in a lot of cloud circles, and it's on HP to prove that the strategy involves more than stoking fear in the hearts of CIOs about a migration to cloud computing.

But one benefit of being a smaller organization is that HP Enterprise might find the breathing room to catch up to the cloud companies that stole its lunch while it was busy fighting the battles of the last century. Here's hoping: the tech industry is better when there are multiple strong competitors advancing into the future, and HP hasn't quite turned into the 21st-century version of Digital Equipment Corp. just yet.