However, amidst all the debate there really is only one who owns this special crown of the “greatest”. The “One” who shatters records beyond reasonable possibilities. The “One” who in the face of uncertainty chomps at his competition. This unlikely hero reigns from the rigorous and exhausting sport of “Competitive Eating”. This hero while only standing at a mere 130 pounds is often referred to as the miracle that is Takeru Kobayashi. This giant among men was born in Nagano Japan and is the undisputed king in his respected sport. Yep, Henrik Zetterberg of the Detroit Red Wings may throw a bad-ass cross check and is great at setting up power plays, however; can he eat 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes? In fact in Kobayashi’s rookie debut at the 2001 Nathan’s Coney Island hot dog-eating contest he doubled, yes doubled, the previous record of 25. Even the “Great One” Wayne Gretzky, never doubled Esposito’s total goals in one season. Trust me, the “The Minister of Defense”, Reggie White might have been a horror for quarterbacks but image how you would feel if you were a hot dog when Kobayashi steps up to the table. So hopefully today the earth will get back to normal when Kobayashi re-claims his crown and again he will stand alone as the greatest athlete in the history of all sports.

UPDATE: Say it ain’t so … two years in a row…  Kobayashi looses in a “Speed Dog Eating Overtime”  after tied n regulation at 59 dogs in 10 minutes.  However, he still holds 6 of the last 10 titles and better luck next year.

IBM Buys Its Way Out of Antitrust Trouble

IBM mainframe acquisition raises antitrust concerns

IBM Tightens Stranglehold Over Mainframe Market; Gets Hit with Antitrust Complaint in Europe

Citigroup entertaining IBM and others to run its BPO in India

• 125k instances launched
• 4k instances in one 24 hour period
• 100+ paying customers
• 5k registered users

We also talked a little bit about what Benchmark is brining to the table to help with these new partner relationships.  Then we end up with a discussion on cloud standards.

Listen to the Podcast Here

I wanted to add a special thanks to Florence Neal for the artwork and Mike Colletti for the music. If you find any of their works interesting, please feel free to link their sites and contact them directly.

1. SOAP
2. WSDL
3. RDF
4. vCard
5. Doc Book XML
6. FIXML
7. SVG
8. Dublin Core
9. XForms
10. UBL

• Part 1 - Velocity, Cloud Camp, Structure
• Part 2 - You Think It’s Bad Now: Get Ready for Cloud-* - Defining Cloud Computing
• Part 3 - Know Your Cloud Consumer: ISV or Enterprise?
• Part 4 - Don’t confuse SaaS with Cloud Computing - Cloud Conference Week
• Part 5 - Cloud Standards and Open Source
• Also, I actually detailed most of my thoughts in last week’s IT Management Podcast. But for those of you who can’t put with that medium, there’s plenty of text in the blog here.

1) It’s not secure.

Cloud computing is not an all or nothing game. Enterprises have been sharing data outside the firewall for many years. The “Big Switch” concept is not how enterprises will migrate to the cloud. They will choose parts of their IT to run behind the firewall and others to run outside the firewall. I have talked to quite a few vendors and enterprise customers who are already using the cloud for non sensitive data. The biggest issue with the “Enterprise” and the cloud is that most global 5000 companies don’t want to disclose that they are using a public cloud. As far as compliance and regulation goes, I have talked to at least one huge financial institution that told me (off the record) that they do a cost analysis on the fine vs. the cost of the regulatory implementation. In some cases they opt for the potential fine instead of implementation costs associated with the regulation. Cloud computing costs will have some impact on those type of decisions. In the early 1990’s the Gartner’s of the world were convinced Linux would never play in the enterprise due to security concerns. Also not all cloud computing is public. Vendors such as 3Tera, Cassatt, and IBM provide public cloud infrastructures.

3) It’s not platform agnostic.

Neither is AIX, HP, or Sun. Also, AWS is not strictly built on the LAMP stack it just happens to be one of the most wildly used stacks. There are successful businesses using Java stacks on Amazon. I am not really buying into the “Lock-in” argument on Amazon. There are plenty of vendors today proving Ruby-on-rails EC2 clouds and is an application running on one of those engines considered a lock-in? At the core of EC2 it is just Linux images. Also, how is managing clouds for an enterprise any more difficult than managing AIX vs. Dell server farms. However, I agree, today, Google App Engine is a lock in.

4) Reliability is still an issue.

If you are implying that enterprises that do geographic fail over are more reliable than public clouds than I agree wit you. However, IMO, at the application level it is a wash and entirely based on the design of the application.

5) Portability isn’t seamless.

Here again if the argument is that moving an application from one cloud to another isn’t seamless than I agree. However, I don’t see that being more complicated than moving an application from AIX to Sun or even worse AIX to Windows. If your argument is that getting data from one cloud to another then I say ditto on the aforementioned application design comment.

6) It’s not environmentally sustainable.

That is absolutely not true with private clouds. Take at look at IBM iDataPlex and Cassatt for great examples of managing power requirements. Also, I suspect the cost of running the famous NY Times TIFF2PDF migration would have yielded a much higher electric bill than $240 dollars.

7) Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers.

I totally agree with you on this one. However, this should just create a larger ecosystem of regionally based cloud vendors. .

The need for speed still reigns at some firms.

Versus the need for cost savings? Here again not all applications will be a good fit for enterprise cloud solutions.

9) Large companies already have an internal cloud.

I believe you are stretching the term “cloud” on this one. Very few large IT shops that I have worked with (around 100 a year for the last 10 years) do not have “cloud” in the way of IBM Blue Cloud, 3Tera, or Cassatt. A lot have huge virtualized pools and some autonomic provisioning however, those are the exception and not the rule. Many of the large financial institutions have been running Grids for many years but here again I am not sure I would consider them the same as what are today calling a “cloud”.

10) Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans.

Agreed most large organizations are riddled with bureaucracy, however, there are bleeding edger’s out there. Enterprise IT leaders that see IT infrastructure as a completive advantage will, IMHO, force the use of clouds. I always say, that when the Mad Money guy on MSNBC starts pointing out IT costs line items for his stock picks the clouds will start rolling in.