Saturday, August 6, 2011

Episode 15 - "The Most Interesting Man in the Cloud" - show notes

The Cloudcast - Eps.15 - “The Most Interesting Man in the Cloud”
Date: August 7, 2011
Co-Host: Joe Onisick (@jonisick)
Guest: Peder Ulander (@ulander), Vice President of Product Marketing, Cloud Platform Group at Citrix Systems




Our guest this week has 20yr old Pappy VanWinkle on tap in his office, buys his BBQ by the pig and in 2008 was off getting the Cloud.com domain while the rest of you were off collateralizing your debt obligations. He is the most interesting man in the cloud, Peder Ulander, Vice President of Cloud Marketing at Citrix and the former CMO at Cloud.com.

  1. Before we get into anything about Citrix or the acquisition, Peder tell us about where Cloud.com was a couple months ago and how it's evolved its business over the last 18 months (# customers, # downloads, # versions of CloudStack, etc..)
  2. We talk for a little bit about running an Open Source business and what that financial model looks like. We also talk about business-lead vs. customer-lead models on how they are different in terms of downloads, community support, etc.
  3. Peder gives us some background on how the Cloud.com CloudStack was created and the specific challenges they tried to solve.
  4. Peder walks us through the Citrix acquisition of Cloud.com.
  5. In his new role, Peder is responsible for all things Cloud at Citrix, which a very interesting mix of products these days. XenServer, XenDesktop, Cloudstack, Project Olympus, various Netscaler platforms - so we dig into how he plans to pull them all together and move from pieces and parts to more complete solutions.
  6. Citrix was an early supporter of OpenStack and announced Project Olympus a few months back. Now they have CloudStack, which has also announced plans to support OpenStack. Peder explains how all those pieces fit together, where the overlaps exists and how they plan to explain to customers where the two paths may converge.
  7. Now that everybody has made an OpenStack announcement (Dell, Cisco, HP, Citrix, lots of start-ups, etc.), does that create too much confusion for customers? Does it create too much risk of fragmentation and proprietary extensions? Can CloudStack just compete as the “got our act together, OpenSource if you want it” solution? Peder gives us his opinions on these issues as well as some of his beliefs about why there are so many vendors signing up to support OpenStack.
In the wrap-up, Peder lets us know that he's speaking on three panels at Interop NY, as well as LinuxCon, in the coming months. And Joe Onisick plugged his blog and his writings at Network Computing magazine.