Dr. Chris Harding leads the SOA Working Group at The Open Group - an open forum of customers and suppliers of IT products and services. In addition, he is a Director of UDEF Forum, and manages The Open Group’s work on semantic interoperability.

Recognizing the importance of giving enterprises quality information at the point of use, Dr. Harding sees information interoperability as the next major challenge, and frequently speaks or writes on this topic.

Dr. Harding has a Ph.D in mathematical logic, and is a member of the British Computer Society (BCS) and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Dr. Harding can be reached at: c.harding@opengroup.org

      Dave Rosenberg, CEO and Co-founder

Prior to founding MuleSource, Dave Rosenberg served as Chief Information Officer for Glass Lewis & Co., a leading investment research and proxy advisory firm. Rosenberg also served as Principal Analyst for the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux.

Previously, Rosenberg was Programs Director for LinuxWorld and Comdex and held technology and marketing positions at Sprint, OmniSky and NorthPoint Communications. At OmniSky his work on wireless provisioning systems was awarded a U.S. Patent. He contributes regularly to leading industry and business publications, including BusinessWeek, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, CNET, ZDNet, Release 1.0, Slashdot and IBM DeveloperWorks. He authors the Negative Approach blog on CNet.com.

Rosenberg holds a BA from Rutgers University and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

      Eugene Ciurana is the Director of Systems Infrastructure for LeapFrog Enterprises,

where he and his team designed and built a 100% SOA-based system that enables millions Internet-ready educational products and services.  In 2006, he led the official adoption of Linux and other open-source technologies at Wal-Mart Stores Information Systems Division as chief liaison between Walmart.com Global and the ISD Technology Council.

Eugene has contributed to Java, Linux, and OS X open-source projects and has architected main line of business applications and real-time systems for the largest companies in the world, including Wal-Mart, Bank One/Chase, National Oilwell Varco, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Univex/Celanese, Nexis/Lexis, etc. He's the author of over 50 feature articles and editorials for major publications in the United States, Mexico, and Europe.  He's currently writing books about the Google App Engine and about how to build scalable enterprise systems.

Derek Gottfrid is a Senior Software Architect and Product Technologist at The New York Times. At the Times, he leads the development of TimesPeople, which adds a social layer to NYTimes.com. He also created Times Machine, a collection of digital archives built on Hadoop and Amazon Web Services, and he built the search engine that powers the NYTimes.com Article Search API. Other projects include DBSlayer, a database connection-pooling layer. Derek is a frequent contributor to the Open blog athttp://open.blogs.nytimes.com and is fond of four-letter words (including "open" and "code").

Eric Knorr is Editor in Chief at InfoWorld. He brings 20 years of technology journalism experience to the planning, development, and execution of feature articles that serve the needs of enterprise IT managers. Eric is the former editor of PC World magazine, the creator of the best-selling The PC Bible, a founding editor of CNET, and a veteran of several dot-com follies. A winner of the Neal and Computer Press Awards for journalistic excellence, he has written hundreds of articles on desktop and enterprise technology. He has a bachelor of arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Hasan Rizvi Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware Products

As senior vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware Products, Hasan Rizvi is responsible for the company's Service-Oriented Architecture, Application Server, Communications and Identity Management and Security product development, product management and architecture. Previously Mr. Rizvi was vice president of Oracle Enterprise Manager responsible for the company's Data Center Automation products.

Prior to returning to Oracle in 2001, Mr. Rizvi was vice president of Engineering for Corio, Inc. where he led the development of key technologies to enable efficient delivery of software as a service. Prior to that, Mr. Rizvi served as director of OLTP technologies for Oracle, where he was instrumental in development of transaction processing, messaging and queuing and high-end scalability technologies for Oracle Database products.

Mr. Rizvi has a M.S. in computer science from Rutgers University and an M.S. in engineering management from Stanford University. He also holds eight patents in the database management area.

Adam Messinger Vice President, Development Fusion Middleware

As Vice President of Development in the Fusion Middleware group at Oracle, Adam Messinger is responsible for managing the Coherence, JRockit, WebLogic Operations Control, and web tier products.  Prior to joining Oracle, Adam worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.  Previously, Adam was a founder of Gauntlet Systems, a software development tools company that was acquired by Borland. Prior to that, Adam was a member of the original WebLogic team and later served in a number of technical leadership roles at BEA. In the distant past, Adam ran the engineering practice at Organic Online and was a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute.  Adam is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was a Sloan Fellow and of Willamette University where he was a G. Herbert Smith Scholar.

Steve Harris Senior Vice President, Product Development, Server Technologies

Mr. Harris has degrees from George Washington University and UC Berkeley.

After more than 10 years in scientific and engineering computing and consulting areas, he spent three years working on document management and systems integration.  In 1993, he co-founded a software startup providing an object-oriented database product to Smalltalk developers (a precursor to Java).  He sold the company to ParcPlace-Digitalk and served as VP of Engineering of that publicly-held company.  He joined Oracle in 1997 to manage development of the Java virtual machine for the Oracle8i release.

Since then, his role has expanded to include the entire J2EE platform in the Oracle Application Server and Web Logic Server product.  This includes EJB, Servlets, JSPs, JDBC drivers, SQLJ,  TopLink, and web services support in both the application server and database.

Hemesh Yadav is a Lead Systems Architect at Wachovia Bank, leading architecture portfolio of segment of retail banking applications - specializing in designing and architecting advanced SOA Implementation, real time Business Activity Monitoring(BAM), Application Service monitoring and service virtualization on Real Time Infrastructure. Hemesh is also a key contributor building Unisys SOA vision and driving and/or participating on various workgroups to build SOA Maturity Model, SOA Reference Architecture and developing system engineering blueprints on different products and technologies. Hemesh has 16 years of professional experience managing the engineering, design, implementation, and administration of global, large-scale, mission critical distributed and Integration systems with specialization in banking/finance domain Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)and Infrastructure (SOI) implementation.

Len Fehskens is the Vice President of Skills and Capabilities for The Open Group, a vendor-neutral IT consortium. Len joined The Open Group in September 2007 after 23 years with Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq Computer Company and Hewlett Packard, where he led the worldwide Architecture Profession Office for HP Services. Len majored in Computer Science at MIT, and has more than 40 years of experience in the IT business as both an individual contributor and a manager, within both product engineering and services business units. He is the lead inventor for six software patents on the object oriented management of distributed systems.

Ian Robertson is Director of Architecture at Overstock.com, a leading website for outlet shopping.  His duties include determining the company's application stack, helping to coordinate between different development groups, and aiding in design and coding challenges faced by development teams.  Ian holds a Bachelors in Mathematics and History from Oberlin College and a Masters and Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Jane Varnus is an Architecture Consultant for the Enterprise Architecture Department of a Canadian financial institution. She has been engaged in various capacities of IT support for the organization, including technical systems audit, developing requirements for organizational change, and information and technical architecture. She is also Vice Chair of The Open Group Architecture Forum, which focuses on development of open methods and tools for IT architecture at the enterprise level. Jane holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brock University. She is TOGAF 8 certified.

Peter van Hoof is Principal Enterprise Architect at Sasol, a global energy company headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa. His primary responsibility is for Sasol’s business architecture domain, which involves the maintenance and embedding of all aspects of governance. In his career spanning more than 20 years, he has been a systems engineer, business unit manager, program manager, business consultant and enterprise architect. Peter holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Electronic Engineering as well as a Masters Degree in Business Leadership.

Tim Vibbert (aka the SOA Chief) is an internationally known system integration and service-oriented architecture (SOA) expert.  Tim serves as an SOA Architect for the Lockheed Martin Integrated Solutions & Global Services (IS&GS) business area where he provides expert support to many projects and proposals for government customers.

Miko Matsumura is author of the wiley book “SOA Adoption for Dummies”. He is Vice President and Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Software AG, which he joined through the acquisition of webMethods and INFRAVIO, a SOA startup. Prior to his work in the SOA space, he was Chief Java Evangelist at Sun Microsystems, focused on ISV relations and technology platform marketing.

When the Business Software Alliance raids your company, don't say I didn't warn you that your cloud computing operations might get you in hot water.

Let's say you've decided to move an application into the cloud. Perhaps it's a departmental app that you don't want to dedicate resources to, or maybe it's an application that has sporadic demand spikes that make it perfect for the elastic resources you can get from, say, Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service.

Once you've decided the cloud service fits your need, is secure, meets your service-level requirements and works with your budget, you move the app and pretty much forget about it. But you should do one more thing before you let it slip your mind.

Check the software licenses associated with the application.

I was chatting with Adam Kerrison, chief technology officer at Tideway, Inc. in New York. His company has agent-free software called Foundation that historically discovers assets in your data center and increasingly is being used to pinpoint what you own in the cloud.

When Foundation is rummaging around your data center, it can associate what kinds of servers your software assets are running on. If you have software licenses that are tied to hardware capabilities, such as Oracle databases that can be licensed based on the number of CPUs in a server, it's easy for Foundation to let you know whether you're in compliance with the license restrictions.

However, if the software is running in the cloud on machines that may change from day to day, moment to moment, over which you have no control, there's no method currently for you to ascertain whether your app is running on an 8-CPU server or a 2-chip machine.  

So, before you merrily send your apps flying into the cloud, check their combined software licenses. If there are CPU restrictions in any of them, maybe those apps should remain grounded in the data center.

Today let's talk managing complexity. At a recent conference I heard an argument that boils up far too often:

"Manage it internally. It's the only way."
"No! Outsource it. More cost-effective."
"No, manage it internally. Otherwise you just end up managing the outsource partner."
"Outsource it!"
"Take care of it yourself!"
"Throw it over the wall!"
"Wuss!"

And then, fisticuffs ensue and eyeglasses and pocket protectors go flying. OK, not really, but wouldn't conferences be exponentially more interesting with IT death matches? Seriously, though, the folks who think outsourcing to the cloud will eliminate complexity puzzle me.

So I sat a couple of those folks down and quizzed them. I assumed that they meant to say that outsourcing to the cloud would eliminate or reduce internal complexity. I was shocked to discover that these two professionals, very well-versed in their craft, had been drinking the Kool-Aid. They'd been snowed by several cloud providers who convinced them that the infrastructure on the other side was more efficient and far less complex. Really? What magical aspect of the cloud eliminates the complexity inherent in a large-scale infrastructure?

There's not one. It's an optimistic assumption, and you know what happens when we assume.

Let's look at historical examples. Tivoli Systems didn't eliminate the complexity of the sneaker net. They simply transferred it to a larger software framework. Likewise, it could be argued that VMware didn't eliminate the complexity of x86 servers sprawling across a huge datacenter. They just transferred it to software, replacing server sprawl with "VM sprawl." Back in the day, server virtualization fans were rabid for VMware. A company with 20 physical servers might be able to reduce that number to 15 or even, gasp, 10! In almost every case that required an increase in the number of VMs per physical machine.

The same company might now have 50 VMs running on those 10 servers, a substantial increase in the number of operating systems and application components to manage. So was complexly eliminated? Decreased? Increased? The answer's subjective, but I think most pros would agree that some amount of management complexity is inherent with increased virtualization.

These are two quick examples of times where we celebrated a technology before we understood its repercussions. Now let's examine the cloud against this same Law of Unintended Consequences. Will moving components from your internal infrastructure to the cloud reduce complexity?

Probably not. It'll brush them under the rug, or draw the curtain and hide them from view, but they'll still be there in some form. "Out of sight, out of mind" sounds good until it's the foundation for your IT infrastructure. I know some of you are going to think I'm hashing on the cloud again, and I appreciate your opinions. I'm not saying the cloud is inherently bad or that people shouldn't use cloud resources. I'm just saying that every business case is different, and people should be given the facts when making their purchase. It may make things easier for you, but the cloud's IT staff faces your complexity multiplied by the number of customers they've sold.

So I'll end today with a taste of irony. I write most of these blogs in Google Docs. When I went to share this particular blog with my editor, I received the following error:

Somewhere behind that OK button, there's a member of Google's IT staff that knows exactly where the complexity went.

It isn't all laziness, I swear! There is some value in viewing others' communications about IT outages. With that, today's post is just a paste of my email to my employees regarding Tuesday's Gmail outage (with some good news thrown in to temper the tempers). Feel free to cut and paste it to your employees if you need to relay the same message and you are as lazy as me:

Bonjour a todos,

Tuesday's Gmail outage lasted from 2-4 hours from 9:30GMT until things started getting cleaned up around 12:00GMT. It only affected the Gmail interface, not Entourage or Outlook or mobile devices. I, of course, missed the "event" because I was sleeping, but if something like this should happen again, Google has a website where you can check to see the status of Google Apps:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#

They are pretty quick to update the site if things go awry. If there is no issue, and you are still unable to get email/calendar/docs/etc, please file a help desk request.

Google sent an email to all Apps System Administrators which I've pasted beneath this message. I hope this is more that enough information to fill your curiosity.

But, there is some good news. Google today implemented a system which you can now attach many files at once to a Gmail.

Up until today, it's been a little tedious to send large or multiple attachments with a web email. You had to select each attachment individually and you never knew how long it would be before those bigger files were ready to send.

As of today, they've made some changes to the way Gmail attachments work. If you want to send a few files from the same folder, simply hold down the Ctrl key (Cmd on OS X) and click on each file you want to attach to your message. You can also hold down the Shift key to select a continuous list of files. A definite time saver!

You'll not only save a few mouse clicks selecting files, but you'll also see progress bars on each file as it uploads.

If you have any questions please visit: http://it.xxx.com or contact me.

Best,
Seth

Dear Google Apps customer,

Between approximately 9AM to 12PM GMT / 1AM to 4AM PST on Tuesday, February 24, 2009, some Google Apps mail users were unable to access their accounts. The actual outage period varied by user because the recovery process was executed in stages. No data was lost during this time. The root cause of the problem was a software bug that caused an unexpected service disruption during the course of a routine maintenance event. The root cause of this unexpected service disruption has been found and fixed.

Additional Details

A few months ago, new software was implemented to optimize data center functionality to make more efficient use of Google's computing resources, as well as to achieve faster system performance for users.

Google's software is designed to allow maintenance work to be done in data centers without affecting users. User traffic that could potentially be impacted by a maintenance event is directed towards another instance of the service. On Tuesday, February 24, 2009, an unexpected service disruption occurred during a routine maintenance event in a data center. In this particular case, users were directed towards an alternate data center in preparation for the maintenance tasks, but the new software that optimizes the location of user data had the unexpected side effect of triggering a latent bug in the Google Mail code. The bug caused the destination data center to become overloaded when users were directed to it, and which in turn caused multiple downstream overload conditions as user traffic was automatically shifted in response to the failures. Google engineers acted quickly to re-balance load across data centers to restore users' access. This process took some time to complete.

The recently launched Apps Status Dashboard includes greater detail on this February 24th incident, including actions we are taking to continually improve performance. For a direct link to this Incident Report, visit http://www.google.com/appsstatus/ir/1nsexcr2jnrj1d6.pdf (English only).

For ongoing service performance information, please access the Apps Status Dashboard at http://www.google.com/appsstatus (English only).

We are very sorry for the inconvenience that this incident has caused. We understand that system problems are inconvenient and frustrating for customers who have come to rely on our products to do many different things. One of Google's core values is to focus on the user, so we are working very hard to make improvements to our technology and operational processes so as to prevent service disruptions. We are confident that we will achieve continuous improvements quickly and persistently.

We will be extending a full 15-day SLA credit to all affected Google Apps Premier customers for the month of February. This credit will be applied to customer accounts automatically so there's no action needed on the part of administrators.

Once again, we apologize for the impact that this incident has caused. Thank you very much for your continued support.

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Apps product or account.

Google, Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

As Google innovates Apps at break neck speed, it needs to take on some of the non-core Office functionality. One such capability that google doesn't yet have is clip art and drawing capabilities that exist in Microsoft Office. Tony Ruscoe at Blogscoped found some interesting code in some of the Google Docs that seem to not only indicate that drawing will be a future functionality of Google Docs, but that it will have the same type of automatic versioning as well.

Using the following URLs, I was able to view different versions of a Google Docs drawing by adjusting the rev parameter to see various revisions, and the w and h parameters to adjust the width and height of the image on the fly (I’m not entirely sure what the ac parameter is for yet – perhaps “auto-crop” as it seems to remove the white-space from around the drawing):

docs.google.com/drawings/image?id=5c605&w=267&h=267&rev=2&ac=1

docs.google.com/drawings/image?id=5c605&w=267&h=267&rev=3&ac=1

docs.google.com/drawings/image?id=5c605&w=150&h=150&rev=3&ac=1

docs.google.com/drawings/image?id=5c605&w=267&h=267

It still isn't clear what this image is doing here, and as of this writing, it was taken down from Google's site.

However, you can see the versioning and the changes over time. Will we soon have the capability to add/edit/create our own clipart into Docs? It is only a matter of time.

Twitter is on a serious roll lately. It really seems that everyone is Twittering. The latest to board ship? Google. Besides buying them out - which doesn't seem out of the question, Google couldn't have endorsed Twitter any more than by joining the fray. As of this week, Google is now on Twitter at the following locations:

I found a great video endorsement for apps (fast forward to 12:50-16:00) on the Google Apps Twitter feed. This guy really articulates well the advantage to Google over Exchange.

The YouTube feed already has more than 14,000 followers according to Google OS.

Google IO - The Cloud developer conference has its own feed.

Google Data updates information about Google's storage APIs

Blogger feed for users of Google popular blogging software.

Google Reader has a feed for users of the popular RSS Aggregator

The App Engine feed is for those developing applications on Google's platform.

If you want the Google is evil perspective (and who doesn't need some balance in their life?), there is the GoogleSatan Twitter feed.

By the way, the binary message above means: I'm "feeling lucky"

Now you can follow Google, just like they are following you ;)

Google's recent announcement that it was asking the European Union's Competition Commission to let it join the anti-trust agency's investigation of Microsoft is one of the more ironic acts of recent economic history. Why? Because Google itself may become the target of U.S. anti-trust regulators. Call it the battle of the bulging monopolists.

Computerworld reports that the EU is investigating Microsoft for "shielding Internet Explorer (IE) from competition by bundling it with Windows." The newspaper reports that as a result of the investigation:

Microsoft could be fined, forced to let users choose alternate browsers to install in Windows or ordered to allow users to disable IE if a different browser is desired.

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software ASA originally filed the complaint in 2007. Mozilla, which makes Firefox, has been granted "interested third-party" status, which Computerworld says means the company can "submit arguments to regulators ... see the charge sheet the commission sent Microsoft and ... participate in a face-to-face hearing if Microsoft requests one."

Now Google is trying to get into the act as well. In the Google company blog Sundar Pichai, Google Vice President Product Management said that Google is applying for third-party status. Here's the core of his argument:

... the browser market is still largely uncompetitive, which holds back innovation for users. This is because Internet Explorer is tied to Microsoft's dominant computer operating system, giving it an unfair advantage over other browsers. Compare this to the mobile market, where Microsoft cannot tie Internet Explorer to a dominant operating system, and its browser therefore has a much lower usage. The value of competition for users (even in the limited form we see today) is clear: tabbed browsing, faster downloads, private browsing features, and more. Even greater competition will drive more innovation within browsers themselves -- as well as in web design, enabling sites to load faster and offer new kinds of interactive tools and applications.

Putting aside the merits of his argument, it's ironic that Google is going after Microsoft for monopolistic behavior, when Google itself may be similarly targeted in the U.S. As I've written about in a previous blog, the U.S. Justice Department may eventually put Google in its cross-hairs for an anti-trust investigation.

Christine A. Varney, President Obama's nominee to be the next anti-trust chief, has warned that Google already had a monopoly in online advertising. At a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute, she warned that Google "has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising." She also said that the company may be gaining the same monopoly in overall cloud computing as well. She's a vigorous advocate of aggressively enforcing anti-trust laws, and in fact, had lobbied for Netscape to investigate Microsoft for anti-trust violations.

Google is also building its dominance in overall Internet search, reaching 63.5% of overall market share by the end of 2009. More important, it was able to garner 90% of all the growth in Internet search in 2008, according to comScore.

So while Microsoft is being investigated overseas for anti-trust violations, Google may see the same thing here in the U.S.

Recently I spoke at the BIL conference in Long Beach, Calif. One of the other presenters was Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Brad is widely known on the Internet (and in the legal community) for writing about political and social issues related to network computing. He's also the author of "10 Big Myths about Copyright Explained," and he coined the term "spamigation" in response to the massive lawsuits undertaken solely for the purpose of harassing and intimidating defendants.

At BIL '09, Brad gave a presentation entitled "The Evils of Cloud Computing: Data Portability and Single Sign On." I wanted to give Brad the opportunity to discuss the problems he sees and propose solutions to the cloud computing community, so I asked him a few questions. This way we won't speculate or judge what Brad means when he calls cloud computing "evil."

[ It's good to figure out the "evil" quotient of the cloud now because cloud computing is shaping up to be the big trend for 2009. ]

Do you think cloud computing is inherently evil or just inherently dangerous?

I use the word "evil" as hyperbole. [Cloud computing] has many positive attributes, but right now, people are taking it as entirely positive. It is the hot thing, the "obvious" way to design new applications. What is important is that people understand some of the dangers, see if they are worth it, and see if they can avoid them.

You wrote, "Cloud computing is time-sharing -- we run our software and hold our data on remote computers and connect to them from terminals. It's a swing back from personal computing, where you had your own computer, and it erases the Fourth Amendment by putting our data in the hands of others." That sounds evil to me, but I'm not sure cloud computing is so well defined. Propose a definition that wouldn't "erase the Fourth Amendment."

The term is typically used to describe an application design where the computers doing the real work, and storing the data, are "in the cloud" (ie. remotely accessed over the internet.)

The 4th amendment protects your personal data when it's in your house, and other places where you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" to use the legal term. Unfortunately, the courts have ruled that you put information in the hands of 3rd parties, even if only for a very specific purpose, you can lose that expectation. So the DOJ regularly acts to seize data in 3rd party hands without warrants -- for example from webmail providers -- and this will surely expand to all sorts of cloud data.

Sometimes data in the cloud is protected by statutes. E-mails and medical records have their own statutory protections, which is good, but not enough. We need a push to insure that my data (such as a spreadsheet I make in Google docs) is counted as "my papers" and fully protected by the 4th amendment even though it sits on a Google owned server. I'm not saying your cloud files are totally unprotected today, but the standard is much less than the protection given the files on your own computer -- we would like it raised.

It's also important to understand that even when they do need a warrant to get at your data, the warrant will be served on the hosting company, not you. Many hosting companies will fight for your rights, but nobody is as interested in challenging the warrant as you are. When data is outside your hands, you can lose that opportunity.

If we can't get a general expansion of the expectation of privacy, we may be able to see if the courts will accept contractual nuances. Perhaps we can define it so that Google is renting me, or even selling me, a strip of disk, making it mine the way a rented appartment is mine. But this is tough. The law has to change -- or people designing cloud applications need to worry about this.

Strictly I am talking about applications and data hosted in a cloud. The more basic definition of cloud computing, where one company rents computing resources by the hour from a big hosting company, that doesn't have quite as many negative consequences. It's more like outsourcing.

Several people have proposed a "partly cloudy" solution to cloud privacy, where user data is stored locally but processing occurs in a cloud. What's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's opinion of this approach? Is it a solution or just a Band-Aid?

This improves things, in that your data is only out there in 3rd party hands temporarily. It needs a strong warrant (a wiretap) to get at it. But your data is still out there where others can get it, without having to go through you; without giving you the right to legally oppose their seizure of it.

My personal view is we might want to go a step further. Do your storage locally and your processing locally, but take in the software code and other needed data from the cloud. I call this approach "data hosting." If you owned the server on which it took place, that would give you Fourth Amendment protection. If you just bought services on that machine, it might not, but it seems like that's an easier fight to win, where rental facilities count as yours. (After all, a rented home is your home as far as the Fourth Amendment is concerned.)

There is another advantage to data hosting, as it turns out: Any new application can scale without effort if the users are providing the CPU and bandwidth resources for it, one by one. And in addition, a user who wants better performance can pay for it. The hard part is security.

The EFF spends a good deal of time advocating for Internet users' privacy rights and educating people about modern threats to their privacy. Do you see consumer behavior changing as cloud computing becomes more popular, or do you only see a larger threat to individual privacy?

Unfortunately, consumers tend to only care about privacy issues after they have their privacy violated. When it happens distantly to somebody else, people don't put a lot of energy into it. Education helps, but only so much. I believe that people architecting systems must realize that they are writing policy when they do this, and they should think if they are creating the policies and practices they really want. Both for themselves and for people who will use the code and its successors in other countries like China or Saudi Arabia.

Many startups are using cloud computing resources as a way to bootstrap their business. In your opinion, what effect does it have on consumers' right to privacy if the company they're doing business with may not have any real control or influence over what happens to their data? Does cloud computing become uber-evil if I start my business in the cloud, sign you up as a customer, and never consider my legal obligations regarding a third-party that has access to your data?

This is a big risk. It's happened many times that companies have gotten lots of your data and then sold to another company with different motives. Or just gotten poor and ready to throw principles out the window to stay afloat.

Companies have always collected data about us, of course, and it has been subject to this risk. Cloud computing, however, starts moving all of your personal data out of your house and into the hands of third parties. This shifts the balance and shifts it a lot. It's something we should realize we're doing even if we decide in the end we like the advantages so much (roaming, scaling) that we are going to do it. Let's not do it blind.

I recently wrote to President Obama and proposed the creation of a national computing cloud focused on fostering research and development innovation at smaller colleges. What are your thoughts on this proposal?

That sounds more like just renting computing by the hour. The only big issue with that is this: If you are holding data for other people (such as your users), now this data is out somewhere else, under not just your control, but this other hosting company's control. Your ex-husband's divorce lawyer now has three places to try to get it, not just two or, more ideally, just one -- you.

Where do you see yourself in the dark future when computing resources are consolidated under the iron fist of a small evil cartel? (Just kidding.) If cloud computing explodes, and succeeds where similar attempts have failed, what would your perfect balance between consolidated computing resources and individual privacy protection look like? What's your best vision of cloud computing in the future?

I would like to see both a change in the law so that the Fourth Amendment covers your data on other people's disks and more physical security as well. For example, if your data is not needed when you are not logged on with a session, your data should be encrypted on the other party's disk. When you are logged on, the data would be decrypted on the fly, the keys erased when you log off. This is harder to do, but it's not impossible, and it provides good strong protection -- even the hosting company's corrupt employee can't read your data if you don't log on.

I would also like to see the final step -- let me host my data and processing where I can so it is fully under my legal and technical control.

Are there any articles on protecting privacy in the cloud that you would recommend?

We have a series of articles on privacy efforts at our Web site, including a somewhat old article on the subject. Note that we focus first on free speech. Privacy is important, but not our No. 1 issue. Some other groups, like EPIC and Privacy International have it as their No. 1 issue and have written some good guides.

Reports say that Microsoft may still be interested in buying Yahoo or parts of it. Even though Microsoft may be able to buy at fire-sale prices, it should avoid Yahoo like the plague.

The Associated Press reports that there's renewed speculation that a Microsoft-Yahoo deal may be in the offing because Yahoo's CFO  said the company is "not opposed" to selling its search business. He added, though, that it would be tough to sell just the search business --- clearly, he'd like to sell the whole thing.

Ballmer previously this week said that Microsoft is still interested in talking with Yahoo.

Microsoft should stay away. It's this simple: Microsoft will never catch Google when it comes to search. It shouldn't spend billions of dollars trying.

Instead, Microsoft should focus on where it's stronger than Google, in the application business. It should create online versions of its applications such as Office, and fight Google there. Microsoft also has many very good online applications that few people have heard about, such as Live Mesh and Live Sync. It should pump money into them as well.

Buying Yahoo would waste billions, force Microsoft to spend up to a year to integrate the company with it, and still leave Microsoft well in back of Google.

It's an instance where one plus one doesn't equal two: It equals zero. 

Even if you are not a cat, you may be one of the many happy Roomba users, one of the world's most popular robots. But if you have a problem with your Roomba, or any of the many other consumer robots made by iRobot  Corp. of Bedford, Mass., you may get your best support from robot lords and not necessarily iRobot customer support staff.

According to Maryellen Abreu, director of global technical support at iRobot, that's just what the company wants. With over one million hits per month to its customer community site, iRobot's tech support staff couldn't possibly meet the needs of every consumer. That's where the robot lords come to the rescue.

Robot lords are iRobot customers who, apparently, love the company's products so much that they patrol the company's customer community forums to assist users in distress. More important to iRobot than their affection is that robot lords know the ins and outs of products and are happy to share their knowledge, answering questions, giving advice and soothing the feathers of frustrated buyers who visit the virtual rooms looking for help.

Abreu says the robot lords use the social networking forums on iRobot's site provided by Lithium Technologies Inc., a software as a service provider out of Emeryville, Calif. The service lets users rank advice given by other community participants. Those with the highest rankings get a special icon and the robot lord designation.

But only the elite get to be called robot lords, says Jeff Porter, director of business development at Lithium. He says that his company's experience with social networks indicates that only one or two percent in a given community can achieve a "super user" status like the robot lords in the iRobot world.

Naturally, at times, even a robot lord can't answer every question. So, after two days, if a question is not resolved, the Lithium service kicks the query into the tech support queue. At that point, the iRobot staff have an integrated view of the customer's profile through the customer relationship management service from RightNow Technologies Inc. of Bozeman, Mont. They can see what conversations have happened in the social network, what products they have registered as well as any past issues, so the support pro can have an answer ready in the right context.

Abreu says the robot lords have "decreased the call volume to tech support considerably," saving the iRobot money as it has grown its business. She also says that the company would like to move the community support service to other parts of business, such as the military, which uses iRobot machines to thwart terrorist bombers in dangerous parts of the world.

It looks like the domain of the robot lords is destined to expand into new territories.

In this well-written article in Network World, James Kobielus explores the exploding use of cloud computing by enterprises and the fact that the expanded use of cloud services is causing issues around existing SOA governance policies and mechanisms.

But cloud computing is causing discomfort among some IT professionals, who are concerned that cloud-based services may fall outside the scope of established service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance initiatives.

The issue is around the growing use of cloud computing providers that may be had for the small price, or no price at all, and the fact that enterprise applications, known as "rogue applications," are being built outside of the control of IT. Many at the department level are finding that they can avoid waiting for mission-critical business systems that need datacenter space by leveraging cloud computing resources, and they see it as an easy way to work around any established governance. After all, you just need a browser and a credit card.

Simply put, cloud services can circumvent even the best-laid service governance practices. By enabling rapid no-touch outsourcing of many or all IT functions, cloud services make it very difficult for enterprise IT to enforce policies governing service composition, integration, security, management, and other key functions.

The trick here is to accept the fact that some cloud computing services are going to be part of the architecture and modify your SOA governance strategy and technology to accommodate this shift in platform. I suspect that many in IT will attempt to shut down the use of cloud services, perhaps sighting governance and security. However, that's analogous to stopping the use of the Web back in 1993 -- eventually you're going to lose.

Some suggestions from a guy who's going through this right now:

1. Create and publish policies on the use of cloud computing resources. Don't deny the use. However, place around it reasonable polices that are easily understood and followed.
2. Make sure to use SOA approaches when leveraging cloud computing. They are linked concepts.
3. Promote the evaluation and use of cloud services by IT, including proactively assisting application development and the incorporation of cloud-based services.

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Posted by Dave Linthicum on March 2, 2009 11:20 AM

Twitter makes you think. Last week, hundreds of tweets were flying when a cloud host had connectivity issues with one of its datacenters. I know intermittent IT infrastructure issues are nothing new, but I started wondering: What happens when something fails and you don't own the infrastructure?

Thanks to Twitter, I got to watch the journey from frustration to satisfaction firsthand. Around 3:50 p.m., the host's engineers started working on the issue, and to their credit, they posted regular status updates to an external blog for their customers right up until 4:25, when service was restored. So what started as a minor service outage lasted approximately 35 minutes. That's 35 minutes of downtime for a customer. If I were a customer, I'd think 35 seconds of downtime was an issue.

And it wasn't just one customer. Even if there were only 100 customers on this infrastructure, that's roughly 58 hours of aggregate downtime. 58 hours! What if those 100 customers hosted their entire business on the cloud?

[ Downtime issues will become even more important as cloud computing is looking like the big trend for 2009. ]

Is this cloud computing's limiting factor? Maybe. And maybe selecting your business's IT infrastructure is like investing for your retirement: You never want to put all your eggs in one basket. Some small businesses are doing just that to get off the ground.

This type of outage is fairly common -- we've all been there. But the very next day, those same engineers were alerted of another outage at 12:55 p.m. that they were still troubleshooting at 1:30 p.m. and that was still affecting customers intermittently at 5:16 p.m. That's more than 70 minutes in 48 hours. Let's be generous and say an hour. How much would an hour of downtime cost your business?

Last week I told you that Ynema Mangum and George Reese agree that deploying within the cloud saves an average of 29 percent over an internal IT department. So here's the question: At what point would the cost of downtime eclipse the savings?

I know you relish leaving me comments -- it's what I love about InfoWorld. This time, do some simple math for me before you pick this post apart, will ya? How many hours would your cloud host have to be down before the cost eclipsed 29 percent of your annual IT budget? Lead your comment with your answer, then pontificate away.

I have to admit that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of social networking. I was not looking for more stuff to do during the day, I really needed less. Moreover, the value of social networking was suspect to me.

However, today I'm among the converted. I Twitter, I LinkedIn, and I Plaxo, daily, and of course they are all linked together as well as with my blogs and podcasts. I'm one socially linked-up dude, for a geek.

Lately I've been mixing SOA with social networking within a few engagements, and I have to tell you that the value is clearly there. Thus, you can take the API from one social network, and perhaps a few others, and blend the information extracted with corporate information, such as sales data, to spot trends in what's being Twittered and what's being sold. Believe me, the links are there. In essence, you mix and match the data services (enterprise and social network) to create a business intelligence layer built upon services.

There are a ton of applications for enterprise SOA with social networking systems such as promoting upcoming events, selling products, or recruiting employees. Or, perhaps providing customer support and relationship management through a social network. It's all being done and it's a great bang for the buck.

[ InfoWorld's Gripe Line blog reveals how companies such as Hewlett-Packard and JetBlue are using social media to communicate with customers ]

However, those mixing their SOA with social networking APIs are younger, smaller, and thus more innovative companies. I've yet to see huge adoption from the larger players out there, with a few exceptions.

There is a clear opportunity to make your SOA even that much more valuable just by using the service management, abstraction, and monitoring capabilities to make your enterprise services talk to Facebook. You'll be very surprised at the results. Make sure to Twitter them to me.

Every page on the Worldwide Web is about to get its own social network. Naturally, the service will be free.

This morning at the DEMO Conference in Palm Springs Kutano Corp. will show its eponymous social networking tool now in public beta. The Burnaby, B.C.-based startup has a plug-in for Windows users of Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets visitors to a Web site leave commentary on any page that can be read by anyone else with the plug-in. (Linux and Mac users will get a Firefox plug-in in Q2.)

CEO Kevin Ishiguro says he hopes Kutano will foster intelligent discussions on a given subject by leaving out the threaded give-and-take that are common on many forums. He says by keeping the comments focused on the subject as opposed to observations by other commenters Kutano will be more useful. Commenters will rate and recommend each other, with the cream presumably rising to the top.

Ishiguro hopes that a distributed form of Wikipedia will emerge across the Web as informed and refined discussions blossom.

That's possible. It's also possible that Kutano will lead to scathing reviews left on vendors' Web pages where no product discussions had been planned, sending IT scrambing to block the plug-in. And I can envision other unintended consequences of Kutano's plug-in. But that's not what interests me most about it. What's fascinating about Kutano is its logical necessity.

While chatting with David Vap, vice president of products at RightNow Technologies Inc. in Bozeman, Mont. for a story on iRobot, he observed that vendors are often wary of letting any Web denizen post comments about products on their sites. Vendors want to control the message about what they sell, meaning only hosannas can be written about their wares, especially on the company's own site.

Kutano's plug-in undermines that effort totally. And, if what Vap and I discussed is close to the truth, that's a good thing.

He said watching social networks grow around products and services is crucial for companies in this day and age. And, with the exception of patently false and misleading information along with vulgarity, Vap argues, vendors are wise to let the commentary flow freely.

He reasons that products that cannot build communities of passionate users may not have markets to serve. If you can get droves of users to visit your site and make their thoughts known--from constructive criticism to promotional paens--you're likely to be perceived as having a successful product or service.

Although Vap would not go so far as to conclude that if a vendor's offering could not interest any commentary it needed to be deep-sixed, he did say the company might consider killing it before the move becomes all-too-obvious.

Vap also pointed out that engaging users need not be limited to complex or even new products. He noted that General Mills has created a fairly active social network around Cheerios. Who knew there was so much to say about a breakfast cereal that's been around since 1941? Apparently quite a bit, especially from users who care deeply about what they eat.

CIOs should be sitting down with their marketing executives to determine how they want their social networking service to work for their customers. If they don't, Kutano (or a company like it) will create that service for them anyway.