Originally posted by: TonyPearson
Continuing my coverage of the ITSO Cloud Social Media Residency, day 3 was filled with strategic and technical sessions on private, hybrid and public cloud solutions from IBM.
This blog post is part of a five-part series:
But first, a quick story.
A few years go, I was at the [Venetian hotel in Las Vegas], and took their famous [gondola ride] in a flat-bottom boat along a canal, partly in the hotel, and partly outside.
The gondolier propels the boat with an oar, and stopped rowing a few times to belt out beautiful Italian songs.
Truly impressed, I asked the gondolier how long was the training for this job. "Six weeks!" he answered. Wow! Where can I learn to sing like that in six weeks?
He clarified. No, the Venetian hotel hires competent singers, and then spends six weeks to teach them to row the gondola. Duh!
I asked Vasfi Gucer, our ITSO project leader for this residency, why there were so many Cloud topics on the agenda for this social media training. He explained it was just as important to emphasize "why" people need to be passionate about Cloud, in addition to the "what" and "how" of blogging.
This reminded me of this quote from fellow author Hugh MacLeod. I highly recommend his series of books.
"Blogging requires passion and authority. Which leaves out most people."
--- Hugh MacLeod.
Vasfi had invited Cloud experts who already have the authority to blog, and the point of this residency is for the residents to become passionate in sharing their expertise.
Here are some of the people that spoke on Cloud:
- Ric Telford, IBM VP of Cloud Services
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Ric Telford shared with us IBM's point of view of where the Cloud industry is going. He has been in this job position since 2009, and shared with us the history of how the IBM Cloud business has evolved in the past four years.
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- Jane Munn, IBM VP Business Line Executive for Cloud hardware
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As the Center of Competency on Cloud for all 12 IBM Executive Briefing Centers in my group, I had to report to Jane Munn on a frequent basis. I was pretty candid on those calls on what we should change, and I am glad to see that many of my suggestions have been implemented, or being considered for 2014.
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- Michael Fork, IBM Lead Architect for Hosted Private Cloud
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Michael Fork gave two great presentations, one on [IBM SoftLayer] Cloud services, and the second on IBM's support of open standards, such as [OpenStack] and Cloud Foundry.
Last month, [IBM and Pivotal announced they were joining forces] to further collaborate on [Cloud Foundry], an open source Platform-as-a-Service that can run Java, JavaScript, Ruby, PHP and Python applications.
To learn more about Cloud Foundry, Michael recommends a great post by James Watters titled [Essential Elements of an Enterprise PaaS].
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- Hans Zai, IBM Cloud Service Line Leader; and Odilon Magroski Goulart Junior, IBM Technical Solution Architect
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All the residents had to present in front of the class on their expertise. Hans and Odilon presented their work on [IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications]. Hans is from Sweden, and Odilon from Brazil, so their perspectives on this was quite interesting.
When IBM renamed LotusLive to [SmartCloud for Social Business], I thought this would be the naming convention for all of our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.
But SmartCloud for SAP Applications is a Platform-as-a-Service, providing the SAP environment as a platform, which allows clients to then deploy their customized SAP applications on this platform.
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What did I present on for my "Share your expertise" session? IBM System Storage, of course! Storage is a critical part of Cloud!
So, my gentle readers, what topics do you want me to write about that combines Storage and Cloud? Enter your suggestions in the comments below.
technorati tags: IBM, Las Vegas, Venetian Hotel, gondola, Vasfi Gucer, Hugh MacLeod, Ric Telford, Jane Munn, Michael Fork, Hans Zai, Odilon Junior, SoftLayer, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, SmartCloud, SAP, Social Business, System Storage, LotusLive
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