If you've been following the most recent BlueLock blog posts, you know that a good number of the BlueLock team members returned to Indianapolis this week after spending last week in Las Vegas for the VMware Partner Exchange. With milestone achievements like winning the VMware Cloud Service Provider of the Year and the launch of the BlueLock CloudSuite, there was a ton of excitement.
Luckily for you, the BlueLock marketing team was well-equipped with their Flip video cameras and documented the adventure. For your viewing pleasure, I created a quick video montage, complete with Fat Boy Slim conference-esque soundtrack.
My favorite quote is near the end of the video when, after the VMware Partner of the Year award is announced, John Qualls (our CEO) is asked, "What are you going to do next?" John's Resopnse:
Jason Langone did a recent review of the five official VMware vCloud Express providers. Langone is a tried and true user of Amazon EC2, and therefore was somewhat skeptical of vCloud Express (although he's a VMware expert and a fan of most all of their products).
When vCloud Express was announced at VMworld 2009 in September, it was was showcased as a portal that will allow for cloud-based virtual machines to be easily configured from a virtual hardware perspective. What's the big deal? Well, there are millions of VMware users who can now extend their existing virtual infrastructures into a hosted and secured VMware cloud. That's a big deal.
Langone tested all five vCloud Express cloud computing providers, including BlueLock.
His intent was to test ease of setting up an account, total time to have an instance running, basic input/output (I/O) metrics and overall user experience while using AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) to measure against.
To all of you Mac lovers, or to those of you who can appreciate the Mac vs. Microsoft commercials, VMware put together a nice little spoof to shed some light on why VMware virtual servers are so much better than your traditional production servers.
Here at BlueLock, we get it. We know that VMware is the new, cool and hip product to be using - but its also got the technological now-how behind it to stick through just being "trendy." VMware virtualization technology has been a key agent in the overall movement towards virtual cloud computing and BlueLock is proud to run a VMware cloud in our facility.
While overall spending is declining, as IT managers adjust their budgets in light of the current recession, cloud computing continues to grow. Why? I think there are several key drivers behind this trend. The first is the convergence of a maturing technology with a correlating market need. Cloud computing offers significant cost savings at a time when IT managers are looking to reduce costs. With major players like VMware continually improving their VMware Cloud (vCloud) with increased functionality, responsiveness and reliability makes the transition to infrastructure as a service a natural choice.
The second factor is the dramatic increase of companies developing Software-as-a-Service products which require SaaS hosting solutions. While Salesforce.com led the way, we are seeing many other companies moving to the cloud. For example, 5Buckets by Right On Interactive which integrates marketing applications and systems clients already have in place such as ExactTarget and Salesforce.com and WebLink connect a membership management software program (link to client sites or case studies) have chosen the BlueLock Cloud for their infrastructure so they are free to focus their time and resources on product development, not infrastructure management.
And even as the economy continues to recover I believe smart IT managers, having seen the benefits of cloud computing, will continue to make this transition to fuel their growth and manager their costs.
Like many software as a service companies, WebLink's infrastructure grew rapidly to keep pace of the growing popularity of their product. As they evaluated their business model they found that using traditional servers was time-consuming, difficult to maintain and not cost-efficient. BlueLock was able to consolidate their servers into the BlueLock Cloud. Powered by VMware, BlueLock's virtualization solution allows WebLink to grow infrastructure on demand, adding servers, RAM and CPU's in a matter of minutes.
