View from the Edge

How You Might Get Started With Cloud Computing

In making the trans-Atlantic crossing from Europe to North America recently, I was reminded of “the cloud” in a somewhat different way. All flights from northern Europe were being diverted to the “northern route” due to volcanic activity in Iceland. How amazing and unexpected to be flying over Iceland (and Greenland) during the trip. As luck would have it, I was sitting on the left side of the airplane, so had a clear view of the cloud of ash being hurled into the air and sent eastward towards Europe as we flew north of the volcano Eyjafjallajökull (EY-ya-fyat-lah-YO-kut for those that want to impress their friends).

The cloud of ash got me to thinking about the recent Face2Face Progress Forums that I participated in during my visit to Europe, and the conversations we had around cloud computing. I think that it’s safe to say that people are just at the beginning stages of learning about what this new capability is, and perhaps are some time away from embracing how cloud computing can be applied to their own business situation. At the same time, there are pundits who believe that cloud computing is as significant of a technology trend as the move to client-server computing in the 1990’s- a disruptive technology change similar in some ways to the travel disruptions caused by volcanic ash clouds.

So what should OpenEdge users make of cloud computing at the moment? First, it’s probably not a passing fad but something that will become pervasive in the computing industry over time. Second, while it may not be obvious today exactly what the impact of cloud computing will be to your organization, the more you can learn now the better positioned you will be when it does become more obvious.

So practically speaking, what can you do to learn more about cloud computing? There is of course a wealth of information readily available over the internet, including papers available from Progress located on PSDN in Progress Communities (communities.progress.com). In addition, 2 low-risk events are becoming popular: holding training that involves hands-on lab exercises using cloud resources, and using the cloud to support the product demonstration phase of the sales cycle.

For training, rather than pre-configure a set of hardware resources that you own or rent, you can configure an image in the cloud and then on the day of the training you simply start up “n” machines in the cloud that use that image, something that takes just a few minutes. Each student has access to their own personal machine, and the cost to set up and run these resources is surprisingly low. If you are interested in seeing how this works, consider joining the Netherlands PUG (Progress User Group) workshop on GUI for .NET scheduled for June 3- it is free to attend and the labs will all be run out of the cloud.

For product demonstration, your sales team no longer has to maintain demo software on their personal laptops, but instead simply connect to the cloud from the customer location and access the pre-configured image that contains the demo software and related environment. The benefits are many, including improved agility in enhancing your demo and making that quickly available to the entire team. 

The next time you ponder the volcanic ash cloud that continues to be in the headlines, or simply the clouds drifting overhead, give some thought as to how you can get started with cloud computing.

Canada Tech Peaks and PUG Meeting

My journey to Canada began with a flight from Manchester New Hampshire to Toronto on a sunny and mild Tuesday afternoon. I was thinking how convenient it was to fly from my home airport rather than having to take the drive and fight the traffic around Boston. The plot thickened when I was led out onto the tarmac to board a twin-propeller plane that holds somewhere around 20 passengers. I especially enjoyed the baggage handler on the ground, who, once everyone was on the plane, boarded, took off their reflective vest, closed the cabin door, and took their seat as the co-pilot for the flight! With good weather on our side, the flight was smooth and uneventful.   

The turnout for the Tech Peaks meeting on Wednesday morning was excellent- around 25 or so attended. By a show of hands, many turned out to be long-time Progress customers, some for over 20 years. My presentation topic was the OpenEdge Strategy and Roadmap, and among other things, helped the audience understand why Software as a Service is something that will likely have an impact on their business over the next few years, if it hasn't already. The audience was most engaged in dialog on the upcoming Transparent Data Encryption for 10.2B, and the future OE11 multi-tenant table support. I was followed by Frank da Costa who gave an excellent presentation and demonstration of Actional monitoring an OpenEdge environment, a new capability for 10.2B. The audience gained an appreciation for how easy and fast it is, without having to do any coding changes, for Actional to automatically build a map of the transaction flows through the system, the level of detail that is available from the console, and the ease that rules can be established to, in real time, monitor and alert on things like Service Level Agreements.

Almost forgot to mention that the hotel conference room looked out on 2 sides to an indoor shopping mall. I especially enjoyed the people who stopped to stare in the window to see what was going on- maybe new potential cutomers! While this wasn't an actual photo from the event, there was a small boy around 3-4 years old that did spend a minute with us looking in.

My second stop was in Montreal for a Thursday afternoon Progress User Group (PUG) meeting. The attendance here was also good- in the 20's, and the presentation topics were the same. I was taken slightly by surprise when the PUG President opened the meeting speaking in French, with the follow on topic on the Progress corporate overview also delivered in French. It was interesting to try and follow along, but the jokes went right over my head.

I was pleased to see that many in attendance had already made the move to OpenEdge 10.2A, taking advantage of the latest features that we have to offer. With 10.2B coming out soon, and planning underway for a major new OE11 release, anyone who currently finds themselves working with an older version of Progress/OpenEdge should take a look to see what new features they could be using to improve their business, and how they can get up-to-date. Progress Communities is always a great resource for information.

Thanks to all who coordinated and supported these events- it's easy to overlook the work done behind the scenes to make these events both possible and successful.