CumuLogic is ready to provide PaaS services for your enterprise

CumuLogic is a cloud computing company founded by Sun Microsystems’ alumni. The company has developed a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software that makes it easier and faster to develop and deploy Java applications (apps) in the cloud. By automating the management of the runtime environments for developing and deploying Java apps in the cloud, including automated scaling, CumuLogic’s Java PaaS can reduce the current time these steps take from upwards of multiple weeks to under a day. Cloud computing is not just about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The cloud is about the applications, and getting them to your customers in a timely and effective way.

CumuLogic’s Java PaaS is now in beta with general availability coming soon. Their offering provides a no-lock in PaaS solution for Java apps that works on either public or private clouds. An enterprise can easily move apps between their own private cloud and a public cloud if needed. CumuLogic PaaS supports Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Citrix/Cloud.com CloudStack, OpenStack, and VMware private clouds. The architecture is flexible, cloud agnostic, hypervisor agnostic, offers mix-and-match infrastructure components, and has IT integration points. The beta product supports the following open source web servers, app servers, and databases: Ngnix, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss, Jetty, GlassFish, MongoDB and MySQL. The product also supports connections to an Oracle database. CumuLogic PaaS architecture is designed for high availability and failover. Fault tolerance is built in at every tier of the platform to meet the needs of mission critical applications.

Unlike today’s PaaS platforms like Google App Engine or application server-based approaches such as IBM WebSphere or Oracle/BEA WebLogic, Cumulogic recognizes that enterprise applications often exist in a tightly integrated ecosystem of highly varied and version dependent infrastructure components such as databases, web servers, libraries, and the like. Infrastructure component choices and their versions are often dependent on the goals of the executing application. The same is true for different application deployment scenarios where the choice of components is dictated by the specific service goals to be achieved.

CumuLogic is the first and only PaaS offering for application service development and deployment that supports full choice of an application’s infrastructure components regardless of whether they are open source, purchased from ISVs, or built in-house and proprietary. Existing PaaS platforms give limited choice of infrastructure components while application server vendors require significant component knowledge, integration, and testing to guarantee and maintain application functionality and integrity. CumuLogic PaaS provides freedom of choice for a wide selection of infrastructure components automating the otherwise costly integration of those components into a fully functioning application environment. CumuLogic PaaS also allows those applications to function on a CumuLogic platform(s) hosted on one or multiple internal sites and/or external service providers. Additionally, CumuLogic’s PaaS addresses enterprise security and compliance issues. Applications that require isolation can be managed separately to execute in isolation if required. Other applications without this requirement can share infrastructure components.

With the above features, the benefits of CumuLogic are dramatic:

• Enhanced developer productivity,
• A twenty to thirty percent cost savings in application lifecycle management, and
• Increased overall business agility.

Check out CumuLogic’s Java PaaS at www.cumulogic.com for your cloud computing application needs.

Useful Links

• Data sheet
• White paper
• Demos
• Beta registration

Related articles

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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an all-volunteer group of developers, stewards and incubators of technology. They bring us many of the technologies powering our enterprises and consumer solutions and are continuing to innovate in ways that are absolutely amazing and enjoyable to try to track. One of the greatest projects at the ASF is Hadoop, a capability that may turn out to be the greatest innovation of the century. I have been accused of hyperbole for emphasis in the past, so please dig into the facts of this capability and judge for yourself. As for me, something that holds the potential of letting us make more sense of more data holds great promise. It is contributing to our understanding of genetics, medicine, healthcare, defense, crime/crime-prevention and so many other fields.

Whether or not it is the innovation of the century, only time will tell. But one thing for sure, it will pay for IT professionals to track this topic closely.

With that introduction I will not copy below a release from the Apache Software Foundation Blog:

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Hadoop™ v1.0

Open Source “Big Data” Cloud computing platform powers millions of compute-hours to process exabytes of data for Amazon.com, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, HP, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, Twitter, Yahoo!, and more.

4 January 2012 —FOREST HILL, MD— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache™ Hadoop™ v1.0, the Open Source software framework for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. The project’s latest release marks a major milestone six years in the making, and has achieved the level of stability and enterprise-readiness to earn the 1.0 designation.

A foundation of Cloud computing and at the epicenter of “big data” solutions, Apache Hadoop enables data-intensive distributed applications to work with thousands of nodes and exabytes of data. Hadoop enables organizations to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, process, manage and analyze the growing volumes of data being created and collected every day. Apache Hadoop connects thousands of servers to process and analyze data at supercomputing speed.

“This release is the culmination of a lot of hard work and cooperation from a vibrant Apache community group of dedicated software developers and committers that has brought new levels of stability and production expertise to the Hadoop project,” said Arun C. Murthy, Vice President of Apache Hadoop. “Hadoop is becoming the de facto data platform that enables organizations to store, process and query vast torrents of data, and the new release represents an important step forward in performance, stability and security.

“Originating with technologies developed by Yahoo, Google, and other Web 2.0 pioneers in the mid-2000s, Hadoop is now central to the big data strategies of enterprises, service providers, and other organizations,” wrote James Kobielus in the independent Forrester Research, Inc. report, “Enterprise Hadoop: The Emerging Core Of Big Data” (October 2011).

Dubbed a “Swiss army knife of the 21st century” and named “Innovation of the Year” by the 2011 Media Guardian Innovation Awards, Apache Hadoop is widely deployed at organizations around the globe, including industry leaders from across the Internet and social networking landscape such as Amazon Web Services, AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, HP, LinkedIn, Netflix, The New York Times, Rackspace, Twitter, and Yahoo!. Other technology leaders such as Microsoft and IBM have integrated Apache Hadoop into their offerings. Yahoo!, an early pioneer, hosts the world’s largest known Hadoop production environment to date, spanning more than 42,000 nodes.

“Achieving the 1.0 release status is a momentous achievement from the Apache Hadoop community and the result of hard development work and shared learnings over the years,” said Jay Rossiter, senior vice president, Cloud Platform Group at Yahoo!. “Apache Hadoop will continue to be an important area of investment for Yahoo!. Today Hadoop powers every click at Yahoo!, helping to deliver personalized content and experiences to more than 700 million consumers worldwide.”

“Apache Hadoop is in use worldwide in many of the biggest and most innovative data applications,” said Eric Baldeschwieler, CEO of Hortonworks. “The v1.0 release combines proven scalability and reliability with security and other features that make Apache Hadoop truly enterprise-ready.”

“Gartner is seeing a steady increase in interest in Apache Hadoop and related “big data” technologies, as measured by substantial growth in client inquiries, dramatic rises in attendance at industry events, increasing financial investments and the introduction of products from leading data management and data integration software vendors,” said Merv Adrian, Research Vice President at Gartner, Inc. “The 1.0 release of Apache Hadoop marks a major milestone for this open source offering as enterprises across multiple industries begin to integrate it into their technology architecture plans.”

Apache Hadoop v1.0 reflects six years of development, production experience, extensive testing, and feedback from hundreds of knowledgeable users, data scientists, systems engineers, bringing a highly stable, enterprise-ready release of the fastest-growing big data platform. It includes support for:

• HBase (sync and flush support for transaction logging)

• Security (strong authentication via Kerberos)

• Webhdfs (RESTful API to HDFS)

• Performance enhanced access to local files for HBase

• Other performance enhancements, bug fixes, and features

• All version 0.20.205 and prior 0.20.2xx features

“We are excited to celebrate Hadoop’s milestone achievement,” said William Lazzaro, Director of Engineering at Concurrent Computer Corporation. “Implementing Hadoop at Concurrent has enabled us to transform massive amounts of real-time data into actionable business insights, and we continue to look forward to the ever-improving iterations of Hadoop.”

“Hadoop, the first ubiquitous platform to emerge from the ongoing proliferation of Big Data and noSQL technologies, is set to make the transition from Web to Enterprise technology in 2012,” said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, “driven by adoption and integration by every major vendor in the commercial data analytics market. The Apache Software Foundation plays a crucial role in supporting the platform and its ecosystem.”

Availability and Oversight

As with all Apache products, Apache Hadoop software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache Hadoop release notes, source code, documentation, and related resources are available at http://hadoop.apache.org/.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees nearly one hundred fifty leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server — the world’s most popular Web server software. Through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as “The Apache Way,” more than 350 individual Members and 3,000 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation’s official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(3)(c) not-for-profit charity, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including AMD, Basis Technology, Cloudera, Facebook, Google, IBM, HP, Hortonworks, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, PSW Group, SpringSource/VMware, and Yahoo!. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/.

“Apache”, “Apache Hadoop”, and “ApacheCon” are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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On Monday, December 5, Bob Gourley went on the Enterprise CIO Forum to explain Big Data and why it matters. First, he defined Big Data simply as the data your organization cannot currently analyze. Though some technologists give more precise definitions, this sums up the challenge enterprises now face. If you can deal with all of your data now, you don’t have a Big Data problem, but as soon as you have more data than you can effectively manage to finding the answers you need fast enough to use them, you need a Big Data solution. Structured data and relational databases can also be Big Data but what we’re really talking about is the type and volume of information that exceeds traditional methods. New solutions include MapReduce, originally developed at Google to analyze and index the entire Internet, and Hadoop which grew to use those new methods.

We see Big Data solutions daily through tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn, which analyze massive amounts of information from user accounts and actions to perform searches and generate content in real time. Twitter, for example, looks at millions of tweets fast enough to determine what topics are currently trending, and LinkedIn can analyze your networks and profile to suggest people who you would want to connect with.

Big Data doesn’t have one tool or even a toolset, it has a framework. For example, there is a growing and evolving ecosystem around Hadoop, shepherded by Cloudera, including a variety of capabilities for structured and unstructured data. Hadoop itself allows the use of commodity hardware to efficiently store and process massive amounts of unstructured data.  According to Gourley, Hadoop is the essence of the current Big Data phenomenon, though there are other niche solutions out there. At the moment, government, finance, energy, and science are all turning to the Hadoop family for their Big Data solutions. Hadoop, formally known as Apache Hadoop, is an open standard managed by the Apache Foundation, and is combined with software such as HBASE, Hive, and Flume in distributions, such as the popular Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop.

Big Data has created a “Cambrian Explosion” of capabilities and uses. For example, by analyzing social media and messages, organizations have distilled member’s “digital characters” to find criminals, rogue traders, and unusual behaviors. Other use cases include detecting cyber attacks and better internal search results and recommendations to clients, such as the federal government’s USASearch.

Initially, major IT companies were cautiously exploring Big Data solutions, but now many have jumped on the Hadoop bandwagon. Microsoft showed great agility when it recently abandoned its proprietary software Dryad to contribute to the open source Hadoop community, and many major companies have their own Hadoop distributions such as SGI, IBM, EMC, and Dell. Users now have the choice to download Cloudera’s distribution and use its management tools to configure and run Hadoop, or purchase an incredibly powerful piece of hardware from SGI that already has Hadoop configured and guaranteed to run. That same firm will sell you training and services while providing patches, making it a good option for an enterprise CIO.

In the next year, expect to see the continuing evolution of management tools for Hadoop clusters. Currently, Cloudera’s configuration manager is the dominant tool and will continue to evolve as well. Dozens of firms are also beginning to provide applications on top of Hadoop, which will allow analysts to interact with Big Data themselves rapidly, without the help of the IT department. And as Hadoop grows more prevalent, now is the time to go out and get training.

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Last week I was fortunate enough to sit down with Power Assure’s CTO and co-founder, Clemens Pfeiffer. Power Assure provides data center data center infrastructure and energy management tools, but their expertise with data centers carries far beyond just power management. Clemens spoke to me about how Power Assure can help any data center identify weaknesses and move to an energy efficient modern data center.

Power Assure can help CTOs identify a baseline of functionality and capability in their data centers. They provide monitoring, managing, analysis and automation for all types of data centers. The federal government has been mandated to lower their PUE (power usage effectiveness) to under 1.6. However, Clemens has worked with some customers with PUE ratios of over 3.

Clemens and I talked extensively on the future of data centers – where he sees them in 5 years, and how proper data center management can provide disaster relief, cybersecurity protection and overall peace of mind. Data center management starts at the power and resources required to run the data center and ends with computing cycle management and virtualization.

Instead of focusing on merely physical design, Clemens sees a movement to distributed, multi-data center virtualization as the data center architecture of the future. This design uses excess server resources to provide on-demand capabilities – without need for forklift upgrades. The distributed data center design allows for computing resources to be provided from many locations (preventing catastrophes or cybersecurity issues from shutting down operations). Distributing computing resources – yet making them available to centralized programming can enable a huge amount of flexibility when it comes to computing. If a certain data center location loses power – or the cost of energy goes up in that area, the virtualized server can be re-provisioned to draw resources from any other data center.

Today, Clemens and Power Assure are working with NASA to help their data center design. As one of the largest cloud providers in the federal government, NASA has huge data centers that need management and Power Assure is on the front lines of helping them move in line with government mandates.

If you have data centers that are a mess (or just want an audit to see where you stand), look to Power Assure to help you achieve your data center goals. Find them on the web here.

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IBM‘s Watson, an artificial intelligence computer system which famously defeated two all-time Jeopardy! quiz show champions, may soon go from playing games to answering questions in the workplace and call centers as IBM looks to modify the technology for business.

Watson was powered by distributed computing technologies such as Apache Hadoop, which was used for pre-processing, to answer the game’s queries on diverse subjects from science to popular culture by searching through 200 million pages of structured and unstructured information taking up 4 terabytes of disk storage. It had to do so faster than the three second time limit, and had to understand the show’s host, Alex Trebek. In other words, Watson was capable of understanding complex spoken queries and finding results rapidly from massive databases.

The practical application of such technology is diverse and vast. One of the first fields IBM set to apply Watson was medicine, where eight universities are working on turning the system into an automated physician’s assistant, hearing a patient’s symptoms and then firing back questions to narrow down possible diagnoses. Another proposed use has been as a replacement for “phone trees” at call centers. Currently, automated call centers mean that customers have to choose from limited, numbered options then wait for a new set of choices until they reach their specific query, which is imprecise, frustrating, and time consuming. Watson-like technology would allow them to list what’s wrong as if they were speaking to a person while the computers search through documentation and past problems. Another proposed application is allowing marketing departments rather than statisticians, programmers, and data whizzes work with business intelligence and analytics, as Watson would allow them to phrase their queries in natural language and then dive into the Big Data for them.

Yet these are only the few possible applications of such technology currently in the media. By solving several common problems, from speech and language recognition to fast Big Data analysis, Watson could be applied to almost any field, such as intelligence, helping analysts quickly test  hypotheses. or law, sifting through past cases for precedent faster than any paralegal. With data everywhere growing constantly bigger and more complex, technology like Watson has the potential to revolutionize how we ask and answer questions.

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The celebration of IBM’s 100th birthday this month has focused the spotlight squarely on Big Blue. In an industry where companies fail all the time, IBM’s ability to stay relevant is impressive. So how does a company like IBM manage to stick around for so long?

As the ERP market analyst at Software Advice, I typically write about trends related to manufacturing software. But IBM is such a fascinating company and so pervasive in enterprise technology that I just had to dig deeper into what’s keeping Big Blue on top of their market.

It’s hard to put a finger on it, but one aspect is definitely their willingness to purchase hot tech companies that mesh well with their portfoilio. IBM is never far from a conversation about tech M&A; and for good reason – they completed over 100 acquisitions in the last decade alone. Their purchases range all over the map of enterprise technology, from professional services to data management to application performance management.

With much of the media focus squarely on IBM’s history this month, I thought it’d be fun to try and divine their future. I honed in on their M&A strategy and decided to dig deeper. The first order of business was pulling together the last ten years of purchases. Putting this into a spreadsheet doesn’t do much to help visualize their history so I decided to make an infographic instead. You can find my infographic here.

To nobody’s surprise, IBM has bought a lot of professional services (14 to be exact) in the last ten years. Another obvious area of focus is in business analytics, which includes the $5 billion purchase of Cognos.

After laying it all out, it’s pretty obvious that they like to purchase fairly deep in the technology stack. I looked out at the landscape of companies working in the vast infrastructure market and started to come up with potential targets.

Here are a few of the markets I can see IBM shopping in:

• Network & Service Assurance
• Virtualization
• Data Warehousing

Network & Service Assurance

This is one area that hasn’t been a huge focus for IBM but it makes sense given their presence in the data center. In face, it’s one of the few areas that they don’t manufacture their own products in. Their purchase of Blade Networks in 2010 could be a sign that they are going to change that.

In this market I see two targets that IBM could go for, Juniper and Broade. I think IBM goes for Juniper if they are looking to compete with Cisco and HP (who just bought 3Par). If they want to get in the market but don’t want to taint their existing relationship with Cisco, Brocade is a reasonable play that would send fewer shockwaves through networking.

Virtualization

IBM has stood by while their competitor EMC has dominated this market. Of course IBM has supported EMC’s virtualization competition, but it hasn’t had much of an impact. Instead VMware has only grown more dominant.

I think Citrix is a viable target for IBM if they want to step up their game in virtualization. Citrix is no stranger to M&A themselves and could bring a lot of technology beyond virtualization it IBM’s portfoilio. On the other hand, IBM may just make an offer to EMC to own VMware. This is a little bit out there because it would be such a costly move, but IBM is one of the few that can make this deal happen.

Data Warehousing

Analytics is such a focus for IBM that it’s hard to imagine that don’t continue in this space. The future is in big data – we’re drowning in data today and it’s just waiting to be mined. Who better to hammer down this market than Big Blue?

Informatica is an attractive target for IBM. They excel at data warehousing and have integration features that fit well into IBM’s middleware portfolio. At a market cap of $5.7 billion it wouldn’t be cheap, but it would be worth it. A little less likely but even more valuable would be SAS. Jim Goodnight is getting to retirement age these days. If he’s going to let go of SAS there aren’t any other big tech companies that I can see him selling to.

Of course, this isn’t the only area a company of IBM’s scale could shop in. I’ve included some more possible targets on my blog at: IBM Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Next? We’re hosting a poll over there so please stop by and make your voice heard. If you have a better idea than what I’ve listed, feel free to suggest it in the comments section. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be publishing the results.

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Earlier, I wrote on the use of Hadoop in the exciting, evolving field of Bioinformatics. I have since had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Ron Taylor of Pacific Northwest National Library, the author of “An overview of the Hadoop/MapReduce/HBase framework and its current applications in bioinformatics“, on what’s changed in the half-year since its publication and what’s to come.

As Dr. Taylor expected, Hadoop and it’s “ecosystem” including MapReduce are the dominant open source  Big Data solution for next generation DNA sequencing analysis. This is currently the sub-field generating the most data and requiring the most computationally expensive analysis. For example, de novo assembly pieces together tens of millions of short reads (which may be 50 bases long  on ABI SOLiD sequencers). To do so, every read  needs to be compared to the others, which scales in proportion to n(logn), meaning, even assuming reads that are 100 base pairs in length and a human genome of 3 billion pairs, analyzing an entire human genome will take 7.5 times longer than if it scaled linearly. By dividing the task up into a Hadoop cluster, the analysis will be faster and, unlike other high performance computing alternatives, it can run on regular commodity servers that are much cheaper than custom supercomputers. This, combined with the savings from using open source software, ease of use due to seamless scaling, and the strength of the Hadoop community make Hadoop and related software the parallelization solution of choice in next generation sequencing. Hadoop and Hadoop databases like HBase are also attractive because they can store and analyze any sort of complex data, allowing researchers to combine diverse forms of data such as nucleotide sequences, scholarly articles, and X-ray crystallographs showing molecular structure. Access to multiple forms of data allow for a more complete view of gene activation and disease pathways.  In many areas, however, traditional HPC is still more common and Hadoop has not yet caught on. Dr. Taylor believes that in the next year to 18 months, this will change due to the following trends:

The growth of Hadoop, software, and services :

The initial delay in the adoption of Hadoop for Big Data was mostly due to a lack of information and inertia within the community. Those researchers who knew about Hadoop still saw it as untested and were concerned about stability issues. As Hadoop gains exposure and grows more stable through patches and new releases, researchers will become more comfortable using it. Also, new Hadoop-related software will extend its applicability to other areas of bioinformatics. Dr. Taylor gave the example of Mahout, a Hadoop machine learning library, that can be used for classification (the automatic labeling of data) and clustering (forming groups of similar data within a larger set), both useful in bioinformatics.  The Hadoop and MapReduce paradigm is also being explored for automated reasoning and rule engines, which have tremendous potential.  IBM’s Watson on Jeopardy! has already used Hadoop to pre-process large unstructured datasets for automated reasoning.

The community around Hadoop is also developing, increasing researcher confidence. Already, helpful users, the wealth of related software, and growing availability of support make Hadoop the open-source solution of choice, and new related projects are on the way. Services for larger and more complex deployments ia also growing, with Cloudera as the leading provider. Dr. Taylor expects that as projects upgrade their clusters and new clusters come online, more and more will be running Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which is free to download, open source, and simplified.

The evolution of bioinformatics:

Currently, Hadoop is used mostly in next generation sequencing because that’s where most of the Big Data is generated. As techniques advance, however, other fields are performing complex analytics on ever-expanding data sets, requiring innovative data solutions. New work on subjects like clustering, classification, and microarrays, which represent a tremendous amount of biological information in 2 dimensional arrays, is creating a need for parallelized analysis.  High-throughput expression data for genes, proteins, and metabolites is also used for topological network analysis, the inference of biological network not yet mapped out, and can benefit from Big Data analysis. As Hadoop and software in its ecosystem like Mahout and HBase develop these capabilities and researchers develop tests, algorithms, and applications, scientists in bioinformatics will turn more and more to Hadoop to solve new problems.  Dr. Taylor predicts an explosion of papers in the next year on applying Hadoop to bioinformatics in novel ways, which will both further the spread of Hadoop and advance the field of bioinformatics.

New projects are also developing that will require Hadoop, such as the Department of Energy’s knowledgebase. The DoE is working to build a predictive understanding of biological systems behavior by using microbial and plant genetic data, high-throughput analysis, modeling, and simulation, with the goal of solving energy and environmental problems. To do so, they are constructing a knowledgebase, a clustered cyberinfrastructure containing data, organizational methods, standards, analysis tools, and interfaces. The DoE knowledgebase will employ Hadoop and cloud computing to provide the bioinformatics community a freely available computational environment. Use and discovery within this space will both continue to advance bioinformatics and encourage the use of Hadoop.

This is just the beginning

Hadoop is already key to delivering on the promise of bioinformatics. But the very near future holds some even more incredible contributions. Because of its ability to store and process complex data of almost any kind, Hadoop provides a platform that makes it easier to integrate and analyze not just nucleotide sequences, but also PubMed articles, X-ray crystallography showing molecular structure and other highly valuable laboratory data and analyses. Combining diverse scientific data on Hadoop provides a huge opportunity for new approaches to understanding molecular function in gene activation and disease pathways.  We will explore those and other potential future capabilities in coming posts on this Big Data topic.

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The DoDIIS Conference Agenda is now up at the conference site, and it really looks to be a great one. The confernece will be great for technology leaders in government, technology providers from industry, and the mission-focused executive leadership who seeks to guide both. If you want to shape the future, come to the DoDIIS conference and see what secure enterprises with advanced analytical missions are up to.

I’ve pasted the full agenda below, but some key highlights include:

• An overview by DIA’s CIO and Director of DS, Mr. Grant Schneider.
• Insights into secure collaboration provided by Mr. John “Mike” McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence and a mentor to legions of us who have long revered him.
• An overview of the mission needs put on the DIA technology team, provided by the Director of DIA Lieutenant General Ron Burgess.
• Insights into the human element of the system provided by noted professor and thinker Robert Axelrod.
• Deep dives into successes in innovation and information sharing, “CIA Style” presented by champion innovator Mr. Geoffrey Fowler, Director and Managing Editor of the World Intelligence Review (WIRe).
• Many breakout sessions are scheduled, including a wide range of mission-focused topics and advanced technology deep dives. I personally plan on hitting the ones on Hadoop (of course, since “Big Data” is an issue we should all be accelerating into our enterprise). I’ll also attend the “Data Center for the Future” talk since DoDIIS planners are always at the forefront of datacenter design and I’m sure I’ll pick up some good tips there.  I also noticed a breakout on the “Egyptian Revolution and Twitter” that might be insightful.

I hope to run into about 2000 of my friends at the event. I’ll also be blogging a bit from there, as will Ryan Kamauff and Chris Barnes.  And look for us on Twitter as well. We are at: @bobgourley, @Ryan_Kamauff, @ChrisBarnesCP

And, consider this a pre-announcement: we are putting the finishing touches on a site meant to pull together our evals of DoDIIS technology and twitter feeds/etc during the event. Find it at http://dodiistech.com

For more details and to register see: http://www.ncsi.com/dodiis11/index.html

Here is the DoDIIS agenda:

Sunday 1 May

Evening reception/strategy sessions/networking.

Monday 2 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0830

Keynote Speaker

Mr. Grant M. Schneider Deputy Director for Information Management and Chief Information Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency

0830 – 0915

Secure Collaboration — Technology to Support the Mission

Mr. John “Mike” McConnell Executive Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton

0915 – 1000

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1000 – 1045

Keynote Speaker

Lieutenant General Ronald L. Burgess, Jr.Director, Defense Intelligence Agency

1100 – 1145

Vulnerabilities of Wetware Professor Robert Axelrod Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding, University of Michigan

1145 – 1300

Networking Break/Technology Exposition/Lunch

1300 – 1345

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1400 – 1445

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1445 – 1545

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1545 – 1630

Breakouts / Learning Labs

Tuesday 3 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0845

The Real Business Value of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value

Mr. Richard Hunter Vice President Distinguished Analyst, Gartner

0845 – 0930

Disruptive Innovation in Computing, and Mission Impact in the Next Decade

Mr. David McQueeney Vice President of Software Research, IBM

0930 – 1030

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1030 – 1115

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1130 – 1215

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1215 – 1330

Networking Break/Technology Exposition/Lunch

1330 – 1415

Potential for Two-Way Collaboration

Mr. Terry Kline Vice President and Chief Information Officer, General Motors

1415 – 1515

IC Executive Board: Integrating the Intelligence Mission through Technology

Moderator:
Mr. Al Tarasiuk Assistant Director of National Intelligence and Chief Information Officer, Intelligence Community

Panelists:
Mr. James Beagles Acting Director, Chief Information Officer, Department of Homeland Security

Mr. David DeVries Principal Director, Office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence

Mr. Dean E. Hall Associate Executive Assistant Director and Deputy Chief Information Officer, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Mr. Kelly A. Miller Deputy Chief Information Officer, National Security Agency/Central Security Service

Mr. Paul E. Muench Deputy Chief Information Officer, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Mr. Grant M. Schneider Deputy Director for Information Management and Chief Information Officer, Defense Intelligence Agency

Mr. Neill Tipton Director, Information Sharing and Partner Engagement, Department of Defense

Ms. Jill Tummler Singer Chief Information Officer, National Reconnaissance Office

Ms. Jeanne C. Tisinger Chief Information Officer, Central Intelligence Agency

1515 – 1615

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1615 – 1700

Breakouts / Learning Labs

Wednesday 4 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0845

Unifying Intelligence Strategies — The Central, Critical Node to Achieving Integrated Intelligence

Mr. Robert Cardillo Deputy Director for Intelligence Integration, Office of the Director of National Intelligence

0845 – 0930

Innovation in Information Sharing — CIA Style

Mr. Geoffrey K. Fowler

Director and Managing Editor, World Intelligence Review (WIRe), Central Intelligence Agency

0930 – 1030

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1030 – 1130

Services Panel: Secure and Collaborative Intelligence to Support the Warfighter

Panel Moderator: Mr. James R. Martin Director, ISR Programs, Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence)

Panel Members:

Mr. Robert “Bo” T. Martin Deputy Director, ISR Capabilities, U.S. Air Force

Mr. Gregory B. Palmertree Chief Technology Officer, Marine Corps Intelligence

Ms. Lynn Schnurr Senior Technical Advisor, Army Intelligence Chief Information Officer, Information Management, Deputy Chief of Staff, G2 Headquarters, Department of the Army

Mr. Jack Y. Gumtow Chief Information Officer, Office of Naval Intelligence

1130 – 1215

The Path to Secure and Agile Cloud Computing

Mr. Michael Capellas Chairman and CEO, VCE, The Virtual Computing Environment Company

1215 – 1315

Networking Break/Technology Exposition/Lunch

1315 – 1400

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1415 – 1500

Breakouts / Learning Labs

1500 – 1545

Networking Break/Technology Exposition

1545 – 1630

Breakouts / Learning Labs

Thursday 5 May

0750 – 0800

Announcements

0800 – 0845

NIST Cloud Computing Program: Useful Information for USG Cloud Adopters

Ms. Dawn Leaf Senior Advisor, National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Technology Laboratory and Senior Executive for Cloud Computing

0845 – 0930

Keynote Speaker

Mr. James Stout Senior Director, DoD Customer Executive, Avanade Federal Services

0930 – 0945

Networking Break

0945 – 1030

Intelligence Studies: What Academia Provides

Professor James Breckenridge Dean of the Walker School of Business and Chair of the Department of Intelligence Studies at Mercyhurst College

1030 – 1100

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Friends at FedScoop have a tremendous reputation for helping the community think through today’s challenges.  One way they are doing that is by bringing together government/industry/academia and citizens to dialog directly and then capturing the results in blogs and video.  I expect that model will deliver a great day of cyber security discussion on Thursday 24 February 2011 when their Cybersecurity Summit is held in DC.

For more information please visit http://fedscoop.com/fedtalks

I hope to see you there!

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• Feds initiate program to beef up cyber-security (calgaryherald.com)
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Are you striving to know more about federal approaches to cyber security?  In what looks to be one of the best conferences on this topic for 2011, the American Institute of Engineers (AIE) and the Technology Training Corporation (TTC) are presenting  Cyber Security: Missions, Initiatives, Opportunities and Risks in Washington DC from 16-18 March 2011.

The agenda indicates this will be a great session, with a slate of interesting speakers from government and industry.

Here is more from the conference website:

DoD Government, and private sector networks endure the tireless onslaught of an estimated 400 million cyber attacks annually – and that number is only increasing. Through cyber espionage, data theft, and other means, China and other adversaries are acquiring DoD program plans and technologies, as was the case of the Joint Strike Fighter aircraft plans in 2010. The insider threat is also a growing concern, especially in the wake of the Wikileaks incidents. In yet another example, the issue of security goes beyond software. Hardware origination and safeguarding also needs to be accounted for. Our reliance on the Internet is only increasing. The new reality is a growing cold war of international cyber operations. It is critical that the US directly engage these threats.We are losing the cyber security battle. What are we going to do it about it? What role with your company play at this critical juncture?

The 2010 national cyber budget will be in the excess of $7 billion USD, but is that enough? Given our ever-increasing reliance on digital connectivity, and with the reality of intensifying cyber threats from states such as China and Russia, it is a national imperative that the US directly engages these threats in order to avert potential catastrophe.

This exceptional conference brings together senior level military, government and industry experts in cyber security and computer network defense to examine such questions as:

• What is the Way Forward for Interagency Cooperation between USCYBERCOM, DHS, FCC, etc.?

• What do Cyber Operators Need in Current and Emerging Cyber Operations?

• What are the Latest DoD and Government Cyber Security Plans, Initiatives, and Strategies?

• What is the Road Ahead for National Cyber Policy and Standards?

• What is the Best Course of Action for Mitigating the Current Array of Cyber Threats?

• What is Being Done to Protect Critical Infrastructure from Cyber and Other Related Threats?

Some of the Top Experts speaking:

• MG David Lacquement - USA Director, Operations (J3), US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM)

• RADM Edward Deets - USN, Commander, Navy Network Warfare Command (NNWC)

• RDML William Leigher – Deputy Commander, US Fleet Cyber Command / US 10th Fleet, US Navy

• Brig Gen Charles Schugg - USAF Vice Commander, 24th Air Force – Barksdale Air Force Base

• COL Jeffery Schilling, USA - Chief, Current Operations, Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER)

• Mr. Mark Orndorff, SES - PEO, Information Assurance/NetOps Program Executive Office (PEO-IAN), DISA

• Mr. Dave Weddel – SES - Deputy to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfare Integration (N6F) – invited

• Col Alford Cockfield – Commander, 26th Network Operations Group, 24th Air Force, USAF

• COL Frederick Henry, USA - Deputy Commander, NETCOM/9th Signal Command, US Army

• Mr. Tony Sager – Chief, Vulnerability Analysis & Operations Group, National Security Agency (NSA)

• Ms. Jenny Menna – Director, Critical Infrastructure Cyber Protection & Awareness, DHS NCSD

• Mr. Ray Letteer, USMC – Senior Information Assurance Official; IA Division Chief, USMC C4 Dept/CIO

• Mr. Brian Peretti, Esq. - Financial Services Critical Infrastructure Program Manager, US Treasury

• Mr. Don Proctor - Cyber Security Initiative Lead & Senior Vice President, Software Group, Cisco Systems

• Mr. Greg Alexander - Chief Information Security Officer, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services

• Mr. Robert Giesler - Vice President, Cyber Programs, SAIC

• Mr. Garet Moravec – Director, Cyber Security, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

• Mr. Paul Falkler - Vice President & General Manager, Cyber Security Solutions, BAE Systems

• Mr. Robert Giesler - Vice President, Cyber Programs, SAIC

• Mr. Steve Orrin - Director, Security Solutions, Intel Corporation

• Dr. Steven Bucci - Lead Cyber Security Evangelist, IBM Public Sector Services

• Mr. Steve Haynes - Director, Cyber Space/Security, Unisys

• Mr. Bob Gourley - Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Crucial Point LLC; former CTO, DIA

• Dr. Anup K. Ghosh - Founder & Chief Scientist, Invincea, Inc.

• Ms. Karen Goertzel - Lead Associate, Security Research Service, Booz Allen Hamilton

• Dr. Neil Daswani - Founder, Dasient, Inc.

• Mr. Roel Schouwenberg - Senior Researcher, Global Research & Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab Americas

• Mr. Philip Lieberman - President, Lieberman Software Corporation

• Mr. Ken Garrard - Chief Executive Officer, Aunigma Network Solutions Corp.

I hope to see you there!

Register at: http://www.ttcus.com/view-about.cfm?id=135

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• Cyberwar? What Cyberwar? (ctovision.com)

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