Structure News: Oracle's "sinners," SuperMicro's success, and Alphabet soup

Where "C" Always Stands for Cloud August 14th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Oracle's curious approach to security issues, super times for SuperMicro, and whether Google deserves an A for its big corporate move. STRUCTURE NEWS NEW AT STRUCTURE 2015: ALEX POLVI OF COREOS AND ERIC BREWER OF GOOGLE What a year for containers. So much has happened so fast in this world, and we're proud to host a joint session featuring Alex and Eric, two important voices in the development of this technology. But that's not the only container-related guest...   A NEW ADDITION FOR STRUCTURE 2015: DOCKER ENGINEERING HEAD MARIANNA TESSEL   ...as we're also proud to announce that Marianna will be joining us. Docker has had perhaps the most amazing ride among the container ecosystem companies, and we're looking forward to hearing about how her team is growing and setting the tone for the container world.   Register for Structure 2015 INDUSTRY NEWS ORACLE TO 'SINNER' CUSTOMERS: REVERSE ENGINEERING IS A SIN AND WE KNOW BEST A blog post this week by Oracle CSO Mary Ann Davidson went viral, but not in the way she probably was hoping. Charlie Osbourne at ZDNet dissects the now-deleted post, which attempted to argue that Oracle's EULA prevents customers from looking for security vulnerabilities among other statements that bemused and angered the security community. DOCKER CONTAINERS AND THE NEXT GENERATION OF VIRTUALIZATION  Wondering about what Marianna and Docker are working on but were too afraid to ask? Sandeep Khuperkar of Ashnik put together a nice high-level interview over at Red Hat's opensource.com with Docker's Jerome Petazzoni on why container technology has drawn so much interest. THE SECRET TO SUPERMICRO'S QUIET, STUNNING SUCCESS  There's at least one server vendor that's winning as the public cloud takes over: SuperMicro. Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Platform profiles the company, which is more nimble than the big server companies and large enough to fill huge orders: both things that modern datacenter managers covet. GOOGLE CLOUD CHALLENGES AMAZON FOR THE HEARTS OF GAME STARTUP CEOS When you're the underdog in a market where the leader well established, you've got to look for niches to make your mark. Dean Takahashi at Venturebeat has a nice look at how Google Cloud Platform (don't miss GCP leader Urs Hölzle at Structure 2015) evangelists are courting game developers with features tailored to their needs. THE TECHNOLOGY BEHIND PREVIEW PHOTOS  I always find these looks behind the engineering curtain interesting: Brian Cabral and Edward Kandrot of Facebook share a little bit of the thinking behind the work that went into making sure you can load photos on weak or slow connections. CISCO'S FIRST EARNINGS REPORT WITH NEW CEO GOES SMOOTHLY  New Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins crossed off the first instance of a dreary-yet-important ritual -- the quarterly earnings conference call -- with aplomb this week, although he and Wall Street are still in the honeymoon phase. Jonathan Vanian at Fortune notes that while Cisco revenue and profits grew quite modestly, at least they grew: IBM and EMC would have settled for modest growth. BIG PICTURE                                    In what was easily the biggest news of the past week, Google reinvented itself as the modern-day tech conglomerate, announcing plans to create a new holding company called Alphabet that will sit above the search giant. By now you've digested all the takes and struggled to picture Larry Page as the new Warren Buffet, but amid all the hubbub we don't have a lot of insight into what this move means for Google's cloud computing strategy. It appears that Urs' organization will (for now) remain underneath Google Inc., now headed by the very capable Sundar Pichai (Structure veteran. Just sayin'.) But the question becomes one of focus: will anything change under a new leader? Will Google's cloud team still have the support and flexibility of the broader organization to go after this important future market? Although Google, I mean, Alphabet (this is going to take a little while) has likely been planning this move for a long time, the cloud group probably wasn't on the list of initial priorities. And that makes sense: even though Google Cloud is facing a tough market competing against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, it's growing, and shaking things up right now doesn't really make much sense. At some point, however, Google's infrastructure group seems like exactly the type of business that could emerge under Alphabet as a separate company.  If Amazon one day spins off Amazon Web Services and Microsoft continues to invest in Azure as one of its crown jewels, a separate, focused Google Cloud group removed from Google Inc. might provide the best environment for it to grow and attack all kinds of as-a-service business models. And it would have quite a sales pitch to public cloud doubters: "Hey, Google runs 100 percent on us!" This is not going to happen for a while: Google and its infrastructure are extremely intertwined, and Google probably doesn't want to break out its cloud revenue and profits as part of Alphabet, preferring to hide them within the overall Google pie as the group gets going. But such a company -- with amazing infrastructure at its disposal and a cash machine to fund investment -- could be a formidable cloud services competitor in the coming years.     DISCOVER MORE   Unsubscribe subbusmr.enjoyment@blogger.com from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 702 Oak Grove Avenue 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