Microsoft Open Source Chief Goes to the Cloud

Sam Ramji has turned up at five-year-old cloud start-up Sonoa Systems

Oct. 1, 2009 09:30 PM

Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s open source defector, whose imminent departure from the company became widely known when Microsoft set up its own CodePlex open source foundation a few weeks ago, has turned up at five-year-old cloud start-up Sonoa Systems, where he will head product strategy and business development.

Sonoa, which has little open source exposure so far, does something called ServiceNet, which is supposed to set security and scaling policies for cloud-based services, acting as a proxy server between the service provider and the consumer.

It says it provides the visibility, management and governance required to make cloud services and APIs as robust, compliant and scalable as internal on-premise applications.

It uses a network-router design that supports the high concurrency required by the cloud with extremely low latency. The stuff’s configured and administered without writing code and available as either on-premise software, a hardware appliance or an on-demand service.

Imagine a Sonoa appliance capturing information about transactions in real-time and making visible analytics such as who, from where and frequency.

Sonoa, whose founders like Ramji come from BEA, claims MTV Networks, MySpace and Guardian Life Insurance as customers.

It’s backed by Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners, Third Point Ventures and SAP Ventures. Its B and C rounds totaled $26 million.

The former head of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group, responsible for interoperability and collaboration, Ramji will remain head of the newfangled CodePlex Foundation until it sorts itself out and gets permanent staff.

The 4th International Cloud Computing Expo is co-located at the Santa Clara Convention Center with the 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo.

Sponsors and Exhibitors:
Early sponsors and exhibitors of the upcoming 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo include:

Oracle (www.oracle.com / platinum sponsor)
Unisys (www.unisys.com / platinum sponsor)
Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com / platinum sponsor)
Adaptivity (www.adaptivity.com / gold sponsor)
Bycast (www.bycast.com / gold sponsor)
EMC (www.emc.com / gold sponsor)
Sybase (www.sybase.com / gold sponsor)
3Tera (www.3tera.com / silver sponsor)
Akamai (www.akamai.com / silver sponsor)
Rackspace Cloud (www.rackspacecloud.com / silver sponsor)
CloudTest SOASTA (www.soasta.com / silver sponsor)
StoneWare (www.stone-ware.com / silver sponsor)
ExactTarget (www.exacttarget.com / bronze sponsor)
New Relic (www.newrelic.com / bronze sponsor)
ParaScale (www.parascale.com / bronze sponsor)
The Planet (www.theplanet.com /bronze sponsor)
RightScale (www.rightscale.com / bronze sponsor)
Vizioncore (www.vizioncore.com / bronze sponsor)
CloudSwitch (www.cloudswitch.com / bronze sponsor)
Tranzition (www.tranxition.com / bronze sponsor)
Altor Networks (www.altornetworks.com / exhibitor)
LSI (www.lsi.com / exhibitor)
M/Gateway (www.mgateway.com/ewd.htm / exhibitor)
Zetta (www.zetta.net / exhibitor)

Sponsorship Opportunities:
Sponsorship and exhibit opportunities can be obtained from Carmen Gonzalez by email at events (at) sys-con.com, by phone 201 802 3021.

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Keynote & Breakout Session Speakers at the combined event at the Santa Clara Convention Center include:

DAY ONE KEYNOTE - November 2, 2009 The Time is Right for Enterprise Cloud Computing by Richard Marcello, President of Systems & Technology, Unisys Up to now you may have been reluctant to move your Enterprise application workloads to the cloud, fearing a lack of security in the cloud, compliance issues such as data location regulations and having to rewrite your applications. During his keynote, Rich Marcello will discuss the latest technologies and approaches that help knock down these barriers, creating the opportunity for attendees to now consider cloud managed services as part of their data center journey to secure "IT as a Service".
DAY TWO KEYNOTE: November 3, 2009 Cloud Computing Services at the Scale of the Internet by Shelton Shugar, SVP Cloud Computing at Yahoo! Yahoo! Cloud Services store and deliver web content, personalize content for consumers, optimize Ad selection and placement, improve search results, provide scalable virtual computing environments, and process and store enormous amounts of data to improve consumer experiences and drive innovation. This keynote will elaborate on how Yahoo! and consumers benefit from the Yahoo! Cloud Services that are in production today supporting web-serving properties and data processing environments.
DAY THREE KEYNOTE: November 4, 2009 Cloud Computing: Separating Hype from Reality by Richard Sarwal, SVP of Development for Oracle Enterprise Manager Enterprises large and small are drawn by the advantages of cloud computing - pay-for-use, self-service, elastic scalability tegration, compliance, lock-in, and long term costs of public clouds. Private clouds for the exclusive use of one enterprise can mitigate these concerns by giving the enterprise greater control. This keynote will explore how enterprises are likely to adopt public and private cloud computing, building on a foundation of virtualization infrastructure and management systems

Published Oct. 1, 2009— Reads 1,627
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About Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.

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