KnowledgeTree, a provider of cloud-based document management solutions based in Raleigh, North Carolina, today announced that customers on their enterprise payment plan will be able to download copies of documents, workflows and associated metadata for local backup.

As Krish noted over on CloudAve when the company recently announced their single sign-on capability, these are hardly groundbreaking advances. They are, however, important incremental enhancements and an indication of growing product maturity. To move beyond early adopters and niche use cases, ‘basic’ features such as integration with enterprise identity management processes and effective – tangible, almost – backup procedures are simply essential.

According to the release,

“With this feature, customer content is available for immediate download via secure HTTP, FTP and rsync connections, ensuring a quick and efficient backup. Downloads are encrypted and password-protected. Documents, while still available anytime and anywhere via the cloud, can now have backup versions housed on an organization’s own servers.”

This new backup capability goes further than the product’s existing ability to offer ZIP downloads of customer documents, as it preserves workflow, audit trails, and associated metadata.

I spoke with CEO Daniel Chalef ahead of the announcement, to learn a little more about the company’s direction. He was, of course, keen to stress that provision of this download capability should in no way be seen as a reflection on the robustness of either the Cloud or KnowledgeTree’s own (Amazon S3-powered) infrastructure. Rather, Chalef pointed to the continuing (mis-?) perception that auditory and compliance requirements may more easily be met by companies that are able to lay their hands upon local copies of key data.

With a focus upon customers in legal, financial and HR-type roles, KnowledgeTree has transitioned from providing on-premise solutions toward a mixed economy in which the product is available as either Software as a Service (SaaS), or as an on-premise installation typically addressed toward larger customers. The SaaS offering is updated on a 3-4 week release cycle, with the traditional on-premise version updated more slowly. A new version is due early in 2011, which will bring feature parity with the current SaaS release. Chalef argued that the company continues to grow both branches of the product, but I can’t help wondering how long it will truly remain cost-effective to offer – and maintain – both?

Chalef suggests that the company’s focus upon providing turn-key solutions designed to address the needs of its defined customer groups differentiates it from the competition. These, he argues, are primarily SugarCRM and Microsoft Sharepoint, both of which tend to present rather more of a blank canvas upon which customers (or VARs) are expected to build. A turn-key solution, especially deployed from the Cloud, should enable customers to realise value from their investment relatively quickly. The more significant investment in on-premise installations, bespoke development and VAR engagement may result in eventual cost savings or better alignment with business requirements, but it’s a long-term – and risky – bet. Press Releases over the past few months suggest that KnowledgeTree continues to innovate, fleshing out the feature set on a product that shows no sign of slowing.

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Sun Microsystems used the CommunityOne East event in New York City this past March to unveil their Cloud Computing offering. I spoke with the company’s Juan Carlos Soto recently, to learn more.

Today, David Douglas (Senior VP, Cloud Computing) opened CommunityOne West in San Francisco discussing ‘Communities, Open Source Platforms, and Clouds.’ I joined the live webcast to see what he had to say.

Dave Douglas kicks off, talking to the importance of ‘community’. He stresses the underlying value of open – source code, protocols, formats, ideas.

“‘Open’ lowers barriers to adoption and innovation.”

A lot of the ideas he’s highlighting are similar to Tim O’Reilly’s call to ‘do stuff that matters;’ but oddly Dave doesn’t mention this.

Lew Tucker, Sun’s Cloud CTO, gets up on stage to talk about Sun’s Cloud Computing with Dave. Their opening gambit is around the on-demand nature of the Cloud, with its ability to pull up (and shut down) Cloud resources on demand, with a credit card. Lew argues that the Cloud doesn’t create lock-in, as it’s based upon open software such as Apache, Solaris and Linux.

Sun’s Storage Service, announced in March, is still on track to be available this summer… so no surprise unveiling from the stage today.

Lew shows some demonstrations of the Sun Compute and Storage Services, building upon those we saw in March to manage resources in the data centre via GUI.

Dave mentioned that ‘several thousand’ Sun staff currently use the Sun Cloud internally, every day, “in Open Office” and elsewhere. Is this ‘just’ Cloud-based file storage, or something more?

On an intriguing mix of laptops, other examples from Sun Partners include Vertica and webappVM. The examples definitely leaned towards the sysadmin and developer crowd, and I look forward to seeing some user-facing apps down the line. Dave cites ‘dozens and dozens’ of partners, as their logos flash up on screen behind him.

Lew suggests that the Cloud introduces a change from ‘Download -> Install -> Config’ to ‘Deploy,’ with the implication that this will always be easier.

Turning to Security, Lew points to a new ‘secure hardened VM for OpenSolaris,’ available on Amazon S3 today. The Center for Internet Security has assessed this new VM and verified it as secure.

Eric Baldeschwieler from Yahoo! gets up on stage, to talk about the ways in which Apache Hadoop is being used at Yahoo! – and their use of the Sun Cloud.

I look forward to hearing more, face to face, during June’s Semantic Technology and Cloud Computing tour around Silicon Valley; Menlo Park is already on my itinerary, along with sojourns to San Jose, San Francisco and Sunnyvale. Anyone else got things they want to show me, June 14-21?

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It began, as so many things do these days, with an idle tweet.

On 21 November, Amazon Web Services‘ Deepak Singh pointed to a new page describing the company’s ‘Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services.’

Lidija Davis covered the news for ReadWriteWeb two days later and on 4 December Amazon issued its formal press release, prompting a flurry of coverage from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, Larry Dignan at ZDNet, Krishnan Subramanian at CloudAve, and many others.

Alongside broader discussion of this move, members of the W3C-backed Linking Open Data project delved into the synergies via their public mailing list and Linking Open Data enthusiast Kingsley Idehen‘s company issued a Press Release suggesting ways in which their products might fit within this shifting data landscape.

So what have Amazon done, what does it mean, and how does it ‘bring the Cloud of Data closer’ as the title of this post suggests?

Amazon’s web page describes their offer quite succinctly;

“Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.”

As Krishnan noted in his post,

“By doing this, Amazon is helping research community save money on storage and bandwidth costs associated with assessing these public data from any EC2 instances they use in their research. When the data in question is in hundreds of terabytes or petabytes, we are talking about huge cost savings here.”

In addition, OpenLink’s press release gives an indication of the efficient manner in which services and data already hosted by Amazon can be plugged together as needed;

“As a vital contribution to the momentum behind the burgeoning Web of Linked Data, [OpenLink's product] Virtuoso provides a simple deployment mechanism for highly integrated knowledge bases emerging from the Linking Open Data community. For example, it is now possible to deploy personal or service-specific renditions of DBpedia within 1.5 hours, compared to an 8 – 22 hour effort when performed from scratch.”
(my links)

By offering free hosting for public data, then, Amazon are doing the wider community a huge service. Much of the data there today is reasonably readily available from other sources, so the biggest immediate benefits are those of speed and cost outlined above by Krishnan and OpenLink. For existing or potential users of Amazon’s Web Services to power their applications, this is yet another reason to consider Amazon.

Harvard Medical School‘s Dr. Peter Tonellato was quoted in Amazon’s release, and he is unlikely to be alone;

“Public Data Sets on AWS will enable me and many of my colleagues to collaborate with each other by sharing our commonly used data sets, research environments and tools. We can set up a controlled environment in minutes, run our computational analysis for a couple of hours, and shut down the environment. Our results are completely repeatable. I only pay for the compute time I use, and more importantly I can spend more time focusing on research, not downloading and setting up computational infrastructure.“

The bigger long-term contribution of this Amazon initiative may actually lie with data that are difficult or impossible to find online today. In a previous existence at the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), for example, my colleagues and I were always being contacted by individuals and organisations with data that they wanted to see online; individuals and organisations that lacked the skills, resources or mandate to mount and maintain the data themselves. How many of those organisations will beat a path to Amazon’s door now… and what sort of resource might we see emerge as a result?

However…

Krishnan concludes his post with a reality-check, commenting;

“this data stored on AWS servers are useful only if the researchers use Amazon EC2 for their computing needs… even if they could tap into it from external platforms, it doesn’t mean much if these public datasets are accessible using some kind of API from their original source itself.”

In other words, much (most? all?) of the advantage Amazon is offering evaporates if developers then have to pull the hosted data off Amazon’s servers and into their own applications running locally or via a competing Cloud provider such as Google.

Although the way in which it is recognised and monetised is finally shifting, data is still valuable, and Amazon (and others) clearly recognise the benefits of enticing users to entrust data to their offering, whilst (almost) imperceptibly making it that little bit more painful to use the data somewhere else.

Kingsley Idehen is quoted as saying,

“The Web’s potential as a globally distributed information space that plugs into disparate databases has never been in question. What has remained unclear is how a federated Web of linked databases would be delivered in a manner consistent with the Web’s core architecture, without compromising its simplicity.”

It is in moving us toward this open vision that Amazon’s offering (although undoubtedly an important step along the way) is ultimately lacking. For that, we may well require the open and linked approach of Semantic Web offerings from companies such as Talis and Kingsley’s OpenLink. These recognise the futility of expecting all data to migrate to a single service provider, whilst still ensuring that those on the ‘inside’ may gain the benefits of proximity on the network, pre-computation of certain indices, etc. Amazon and its services clearly have a place within that emerging ecosystem, but it is a place that they will need to share with others.

The worthwhile philanthropic aspects of Amazon’s announcement apart, the company is certainly doing its part to evangelise the benefits of moving data to the Cloud, and this is to be wholeheartedly welcomed.

CIOs are recognising the benefits of Cloud-based computation, and their resistance to the loss of control implied by individual cost centres’ embracing of SaaS solutions such as Salesforce is diminishing. The proposition of accessing data in the Cloud, at will, is even more profound, and the benefits to be gained require careful and compelling explanation in the face of inevitable fears regarding issues such as data integrity.

Showing everyone the benefits to be gained in sharing disparate public data sets is one more step along the way to widespread acceptance of the value in easing restrictions over access to more sensitive resources.

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Deepak pointed to an Amazon page, which briefly reported that;

“Developers and businesses can now run their Amazon EC2 instances in the EU to help achieve lower latency, operate closer to other resources like Amazon S3 in the EU, and meet EU data storage requirements when required. The new European Region for Amazon EC2 contains two Availability Zones enabling you to easily and cost effectively run fault-tolerant applications with the same scalability, reliability and cost efficiency achieved with Amazon EC2 in the US.”

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Evangelist Jeff Barr were close behind, using Twitter to share the same news, and pointing to longer blog posts on Werner’s blog and the Amazon Web Services Blog. A nice example of Twitter at work.

As for the news they were reporting; it’s good to see local availability for EC2 resources join the existing European sites for S3 storage.

Werner’s post outlines a three-part rationale for the move, broadly characterised as;

• lower latency (faster) access to the servers for customers in Europe,
• cheaper use of data stored in the European parts of S3,
• compliance with European regulatory requirements regarding storage of personal (and other) data outside Europe.

All are useful, and different customers will certainly emphasise each differently. I wonder which was the most commonly cited? ‘Compliance’ was a major stumbling block to using EC2 with certain data in the past, but I wonder if customers for whom that was an issue have traditionally been that important in the grand scheme of things at Amazon?

So; speed, price, or privacy?