I am sure this business will be soon a hit.

We wonder what would be DBA tasks in the future when the Cloud Computing Era starts.
Other than the above, there are some responsibilities which will be taken care of Cloud Provider, but the actual DBA task would be more in terms of reducing Service provider’s bill by using Technologies and techniques like – Reducing CPU cycles to Run a query and Reducing data storage costs. That will be more interesting for a DBA to prove cloud service provider’s bill was reduced by 10% after tuning the database.

I am really looking forward to how this computing era will change at the end of the day. Do you think we only have couple of big heads who will provide cloud and all businesses will depend on them? Or these providers will increase like hosting service providers?

If one application needed develop for a corporation in this example I would take launching Order Processing, Distribution and Customer service ERP application for a Manufacturing company .which takes following infrastructure and Man hours of developing ,testing and making production.

I am talking about

As Google and Amazon.com become preeminent sellers of tech services, companies from Accenture to Microsoft and Xerox must adapt to cloud computing

By Arjun Sethi and Olivier Aries

In the next five years outsourcing as we know it will disappear. The legion of Indian service providers will be sidelined or absorbed. U.S. and European companies that pioneered this corner of the high tech industry will suffer similar fates if they don’t wake up. Who will emerge as the new leaders? Google (GOOG) and Amazon.com (AMZN), brands that we associate with search and retail, will become better known for outsourcing.

Ludicrous? Not if you follow this industry. Desktop computers yielded to laptops. Web portals AOL (AOL), MSN (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO) are giving way to social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Software once distributed by disk is now available as apps over the Web—often for less than the cost of a slice of pizza. And so it goes. The same Darwinian process is creating a fresh ecosystem in outsourcing, one that will usher in an era of consolidation and a new way of working with clients.

Traditionally, outsourcing companies sell customers deals that can span a decade and easily run to tens of millions of dollars. The service provider takes on the expensive, time-consuming task of building and operating the digital tools that the customer requires to vanquish the competition, often involving development of custom software to get the job done. To do that, service providers need aisles of powerful computers, armies of programmers, and lots of applications, which are housed either at the client’s site or located at a third-party data center that’s usually owned and paid for by the client but managed and maintained by the outsourcer. Accenture (ACN) is a good example of the old model of outsourcing, which involves long-term contracts; customized software, legacy software, or both; and on-site systems integration work.

RUTHLESSLY SEEKING ECONOMIES OF SCALE

In the new model, outsourcers provide standard, off-the-shelf software on a “pay-per-drink” basis. For that, they will leverage so-called cloud technology, which lets users tap into computing power available via the Internet, rather than on a desktop or computer server housed locally. The appeal is scale, flexibility, and efficiency: Thousands of server computers can attack a task more quickly—and cheaply—or handle a patchwork quilt of different technologies that companies use to run their businesses. This approach will let businesses outsource entire tasks such as the tracking of inventory, paying only for the information accessed or used.

Why is this happening now? Let’s start with the relentless pressure to cut costs. Outsourcing is about saving money. Sure the pitch usually revolves around improving business processes, but no client is going to pay more for the service than what it already costs to maintain their systems. Unfortunately, outsourcing vendors have maxed-out efficiencies, both from automation and from moving the work to lower cost-of-labor destinations, also known as “labor arbitrage.” To get to the next level of savings, a ruthless search for greater economies of scale is necessary.

That’s where the cloud comes in. It shifts the center of gravity in outsourcing from physical ownership of assets and process expertise. It focuses on the skills necessary to efficiently manage computing operations that can scale and at the same time are flexible enough to handle scores of different tasks.

These factors will set off a wave of global consolidation in tech services. There are too many companies in this space. Consolidation will be about protecting or building market share or adding technical skills, from connectivity and networking to deep expertise in the delivery of services-on-demand. This is why most Indian outsourcing companies are investing to get up to speed on the cloud. How quickly can they build sufficient scale?

It’s not merely Indian companies wrestling with these changes. Let’s handicap the winners and losers in the race to become players in the evolving outsourcing business.

The Losers: Mid-tier Indian outsourcers will be acquired by larger, more aggressive companies. Indian outsourcers are attractive because of their current client list, operations in low-cost countries, and process expertise. Most of them are too small to build enough scale and expertise in the backbone capabilities required in the cloud.

Leading Indian players like MphasiS (MPHL:IN) and eServe (ESV:AU) have already fallen prey to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and TCS, respectively. Some larger players such as Infosys (INFY) and Wipro (WIT) are at risk of losing their competitive advantage. Even the largest Indian companies are still several orders of magnitude smaller than their U.S. competitors—HP, Xerox (XRX) Microsoft, and Google. These include companies such as Patni (PTI), L&T Infotech, and Satyam (recently acquired by Tech Mahindra. Therefore we expect Indian vendors to try to gain scale via acquisitions or alliances among themselves.

The Winners: Amazon and Google are the future leaders in outsourcing. They are already providing services to such enterprises as Eli Lilly (LLY) and Pfizer (PFE). They own data centers on an enormous scale and know how to operate them efficiently. They will gain capabilities they don’t yet have—such as industry-specific know-how and low-cost workforces—by acquiring Indian or other global outsourcers. Meanwhile, Google announced a partnership with Computer Sciences (CSC) and Amazon announced a similar one with Capgemini. Indeed, Amazon has made so much headway in cloud technology that this area of their business will generate, according to an estimate recently published by UBS (UBS), something in the order of $750 million in 2011.

Then there’s the generational issue to consider. Amazon and Google are household brands for the generation of managers and leaders that is now rising in U.S. management ranks. In their youth, these leaders entrusted personal e-mails, music files, pictures, and social interactions to these companies. We believe it will be a logical extension for this generation to hire these companies as trusted managers and hosts of their corporate services.

The Possible Winners: Software giants such as Microsoft, Oracle (ORCL), and SAP (SAP) have knowledge around enterprise platforms and applications that can unlock further efficiencies for clients. They also have robust and captive client portfolios. Their success will depend on the speed at which they build up capabilities they are currently missing in connectivity, infrastructure, and experience in the cloud itself. It will also depend on their appetite for risk. We are talking here about nothing less than reengineering their DNA. For example, even Microsoft has begun to forsake its license-based software to introduce new, cloud-based, office software. At the same time, Salesforce.com (CRM) has aggressively grown by shifting its CRM applications around this cloud-based model.

Those on the Fence: Xerox, HP, and Accenture have the technical and financial resources to expand their capabilities. Recent acquisitions—HP/EDS, Dell/Perot Systems (DELL), and Xerox/Affiliated Computer Services—show that they see the writing on the wall. Nevertheless, it’s uncertain that these behemoths will shift seamlessly from large integration projects to cloud-based solutions. Unless companies such as HP, Xerox, and Dell continue to increase their momentum into the cloud, they may find their multibillion-dollar acquisitions go to waste.

The outsourcing market is on the verge of experiencing its most massive transformation since the concept arose more than 20 years ago. For outsourcers, cloud computing creates an unprecedented opportunity to reshape how services get delivered. For clients, it opens up a new era characterized by the arrival of new players that are eager to build relationships and showcase their capabilities. That means more choice and a new model that will sustain the price advantage that outsourcing has hitherto provided.

Honestly the way this book brings out new waves of thought. These new thoughts will help any one creating compelling strategy for their business. One can learn how to position their business uniquely.
This book can help creating differentiators and use innovative methods to separate your their business from Red Oceans.

This book is useful to any Industry and its worth reading. No wonder why this book is the best seller world wide. If you a get a chance to read. Save this book, to your reading list.

About the Book.  Blue Ocean Strategy Authors: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

check out their website http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/

Here is an excellent article which every one should if you are interested exploring opportunities or using for your projects in the future. This article is written by Mr. Slavik Markovich founder of Sentrigo databae sercurity Firm.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/How-to-Secure-Sensitive-Data-in-Cloud-Environments/

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation using a 2-cpu server with 8gb ram, SATA drives, Windows 2008 and 2 CPUs of SQL Server Standard at list price puts me around $15,000.  (Yes, enterprises get dramatically discounted stuff, but enterprises don’t need SQL Azure at rack price either.)

Let’s say I use this server for five years – that’s $416 per month.  That does not include:

• Power
• Connectivity costs (but neither does the Azure $9-$99 price, either.  Remember that bandwidth costs extra for Azure.)
• Management (but neither does Azure, since you still have to roll some of your own utilities.  Remember that Azure doesn’t support things like Profiler.)
• Backups (but neither does Azure, and no, Microsoft telling me “it’s backed up” doesn’t count.)
• Clustering or geographic high availability.  I probably wouldn’t achieve three nines of uptime with this configuration, but if I wanted to go for that, I’d add a second server in another location with SQL Server’s database mirroring.

The tough part of all this is the future:

• Will SQL Azure’s costs go down? Hardware prices always go down, so it’s interesting to try to compare long-term pricing between the two.
• Will SQL Azure add more features? I can back up a locally hosted database easily, but backing up Azure is going to be a little tricky for now.  If I want to add filestream data or TDE, that’s a piece of cake with local databases, but not with Azure.
• Will SQL Azure stick? If I had a dollar for every piece of technology built then Microsoft abandoned, I’d be Steve Jobs.  The nice thing about developing for SQL Azure is that it’s a subset of SQL Server anyway.  Worst case scenario, Microsoft abandons SQL Azure – you just light up your own SQL Server and deploy your app there anyway.

So when an enterprise start using cloud does that mean that company does not require any more DBAs to look after Disaster Recovery and Performance issues. In the same way do they also Sysadmins to manage Operating systems and other issues with the server.

In my opinion DBAs and Sysadmins still required in an Enterprise

Lets assume this way there are 2 big players providing Data Services in cloud. 1) Microsoft 2) Amazon

but those Cloud Service providers provide only infrastructure to run computing cycles.
they will not provide any service towards tuning your database or reducing CPU cycles on those queries in fact the worst code and worst queried will bring money for them because customers pay for their usage on CPU cycles and Data storage etc.

I feel DBA job will continue to be there but DBAs will have to manage the cost cutting on bills which corporate gets on monthly basis for the database server.In simple words we buy electricity from utility company we pay monthly based on usage at the same time some one at home will take lead to save the energy at home or office to cut the cost to make sure they get less bill from utility company. The same way if there is no DBA a corporate will spend more money on CPU cycles and Datastorage. This process will create value for DBAs as the cost cutters who will looks after each query which was getting executed in the cloud to minimize the monthly bill from service provider.

I strongly agree with the article written by Brent Ozar   Long Live DBA

Jason Massie (aka StatisticsIO.com) wrote a blog post this week called The Death of the DBA.  He talks about why the coming cloud computing craze creates career chaos.

I have the exact opposite opinion: I can’t wait for databases to move toward the cloud because it makes database administrators even more vital.

Reason #1: Cloud computing costs real money, and DBAs can help cut costs.

When you move your database into the cloud, your cloud vendor starts billing you on a per-month basis for CPU time, memory, and storage space.  Normally, when DBAs say they cut costs for a company, they’re talking about funny money: if we optimize indexes and cut storage space by 10%, we don’t suddenly get cash back.  When software is a service, though, we will see real savings, a real reduction in our next monthly cloud bill.

Cloud vendors won’t get involved in tuning indexes, cutting storage space, optimizing memory and cleaning up CPU cycles because they make money off bad application design and bad production decisions.  Want to make a bunch of duplicate indexes on your Amazon EC2-hosted MySQL server?  Knock yourself out – Amazon’s happy to let you do it, and they make more money off every bad decision.  Go long enough without a DBA, and the applications will start racking up big monthly bills.

Reason #2: Disaster recovery becomes even more important.

How many of us have been shafted when some kind of third party provider suddenly closed up shop in the middle of the night and disappeared?  Think back to the online storage craze in the initial dot-com boom: everybody and their brother was offering online storage space for free or for cheap.  Some of the providers are still around, but most of them folded up and died, taking user data along with them.

Disaster recovery no longer just means preparing for your own business failures: with cloud computing, it means preparing for the failures of your cloud vendor too.  No cloud vendor is too big to experience problems: check out the Amazon S3 outage in July 2008 and the Amazon S3 outage in February 2008.

Reason #3: Web hosting hasn’t killed the need for sysadmins.

Web sites have been hosted at third party hosting providers for more than a decade, but try calling your hosting company and getting good help with a problem.

I just recently chatted with a sysadmin who sat through a grueling contract renegotiation with their hosting provider.  They’re spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on hosting, and the hosting provider touted all kinds of advantages like redundant internet connections across multiple datacenters.  Come to find out – they only had a single datacenter, and were thinking about growing to another one.  The hosting provider also mentioned that they had the right to move machines between datacenters at any time without warning as part of planned maintenance windows.

Without a skilled sysadmin, these unfortunate problems wouldn’t have come to light, and the poor client would have only found out when their machines went down and came back up with new IP addresses.  This is a huge security risk for the client, who has to pay external security auditing firms to verify that their private data is in good hands.  They would have to redo their security audits and fork out big bucks.

Does third party hosting solve solutions and offer value?  Absolutely.  But does it eliminate the need for administration, security auditing, day to day maintenance, planning, and app design?  No way.

Reason #4: The economy of scale means it can be cheaper to manage your own servers.

Say three companies came out right now offering SQL Server hosting services:

• Company A offers no-frills hosting for $X per month
• Company B offers hosting with backups & restores for $X * 1.5 per month
• Company C offers managed hosting with backups, restores and performance tuning for $X * 3 per month

Your company has to evaluate each hosting option, and the larger you get, the more sense Company A makes.  At a certain number of databases, you’ll save money by doing the management yourself.

Company C can’t offer management features without paying for DBAs.  The DBAs have to work somewhere, and you can bet that Company C will heavily mark up their DBA costs because everybody has to make money somehow.

Reason #5: Security & SOX compliance.

I did a short stint at a major financial firm who wouldn’t even allow their employees to get their email over the web.  Imagine putting their financial data on databases in “the cloud” – no way.  Private companies might be able to get away with it, but after a couple of security scares (think lost tape backups) the paranoia will set in.

I can already visualize the ads for consulting companies.  “Think your data is safe in the cloud?  How do you know Mr. Hacker Guy isn’t connecting a USB drive to your server right now?  Pay us and we’ll find out.”

Reason #6: Do you stand next to your servers now?

The good DBAs I know don’t work in the datacenter (except when it’s time for OS reinstalls, and these days a lot of that is handled with imaging and deployment tools).  They work from a cubicle, office, or coffeeshop miles away from their servers.  We don’t have to put our hands on the servers, and they could be anywhere.  I’d love for my databases to move to the cloud, because it makes it easier to justify telecommuting.  Preferably from a beach.  With margaritas.  (Might be able to expense those during meetings, too.)

Bottom Line: The cloud is coming, but it’s not going to rain on the DBA party.

Now is a great time to be a DBA, and while I think there are disruptive computing forces on the horizon, I don’t think the cloud is going to put an end to the DBA career.

So what about the future is going to change the DBA career in say, five or ten years?  Well, as RAM and solid state disks get cheaper, I can foresee the day where databases run entirely in memory and just back up to disk.  Performance tuning becomes less of an issue, and we get to focus on functionality instead of the number of bytes an index will take.

Think back ten years ago in general computing & programming: people were still writing programs in assembly because they needed the speed.  Now, raw speed of an app isn’t as much of an issue for general programmers and they get to focus on which cool new language will make the programming faster, not the code execution.

To me, that’s really cool and exciting.  It means in a few years, we might be able to do more data mining and predictive analysis with even the most basic, everyday databases.  I might be able to say, “Man, remember when we had to worry about the number of indexes on a table?  Wow.  Yesterday sucked.”  That’s awesome!

After started thinking about using Cloud computing for database services I keep getting so many questions in my self.

If this is some thing related to web services i think an enterprise would take a step further and giving a shot because there is not much privacy data stored in Webservices . Because web services will fetch data from database when ever needed.

After thinking about how Cloud Computing can fit with in Database area. I came to conclusion by creating Hybrid Cloud Computing which In fact I was thinking to use some thing like this. Since I have worked in E Commerce Architecture for a long time. I always go back and think in E commerce database as an example when ever i was thinking of a database . Any how lets say we have E commerce Database in SQL Server 2005 how can we send this database to cloud  With out compromising any security or privacy related matters.

First of all why should E Commerce platform choose to go for cloud computing .

1) E commerce website traffic pattern and Users on the website changes drastically based on gifting or purchasing sensitive time.

During this time E commerce site may need extra hardware resources which the company should invest upfront for the use of those resources for couple of weeks in an year. So I feel it is good solution to start with cloud since cloud can work as elastic manner it can expand hardware resources on the spot when ever needed. Company is not required to invest on hardware does not incur upfront cost. Rather it will pay for extra usage when ever used in cloud.

based on all these points I strongly feel an E Commerce website can choose to go into cloud.

But now I have another question if we keep the data in the cloud . Do the company have control on its data security and can we guarantee privacy of User data.

May be we can guarantee user data privacy and security as long as the data is in our hands how can we guarantee when the data is sitting in cloud where the owners of the company nor any one knows who has access to it who does not have access to it. I am 100% sure cloud service company IT staff can have access to this data any time they need.

keeping in mind how can we use cloud for Database services with out compromising user privacy and data security. After thinking couple of minutes I feel that we can do this .

In any database there are types of Data 1) Secure and Privacy data 2) Non Secure and Non privacy data what i mean to say Privacy data means it will have customer personal information and other credit card information where as Non privacy data is Company owned data such as Product information ,pricing and availability of products.

any e commerce site if there are 100 users visited the site to buy some thing there only 30 to 40 people end buying maximum.
so 100 times products are queried and showed in the website . This means Non privacy data is queried more and also more hardware required to process the non privacy information .if Non privacy data is kept in cloud and Privacy data kept in company’s control . Cloud computing can be achieved it will cut no of resources required to use will reduce so intern ROI on cloud computer will be achieved in short term.

I am happy to support my contribution to such foundations where foundations bring change in peoples life.

Check her speech on TED  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8eyF4UWG38

Visit Parikrama’s website http://www.parikrmafoundation.org/

Home-run sluggers want to change the world in a big and obvious way, says serial entrepreneur John Warrillow. They are not thrilled with incremental success, and the trend toward serial entrepreneurship is not necessarily appealing to them. Sluggers would rather make a single business their life’s work, and make it big (if at all.) They are not as amenable to early exits or succession planning. Fred Smith of FedEx is an obvious example of a slugger.

On-base Hitter

Think of business owners who have a series of successful business start-ups to their name as you would hitters in baseball who have a high on-base percentage. Like the on-base hitter, these entrepreneurs are content to achieve success in bite-sized bits on a regular basis, rather than all in one flourish. Rene Lacarte fits this description. The founder of PayCycle and Bills.com has launched a serious of similiar businesses in the online payment field. Each has been a success, though none has been a bullseye.

Fact Finders
Fact Finders, as defined by the Kolbe personality test, are entrepreneurs who seek details before making decisions. Just as picking at a single yarn in an old sweater unravels it, each answer to a fact finder’s question triggers a new set of questions. The fact finder seeks out the answers to his or her questions before making decisions.

Follow-Through

Follow-Through entrepreneurs love systems, according to the Kolbe test. In fact, creating a system is how they react when confronted with the chaos created by any start-up enterprise. Follow-Through entrepreneurs think in a linear fashion, where Step 1 leads to Step 2 and so on. Their companies tend to operate by methodology (think Six Sigma) and to reward employees for continuous process improvement

Implementers

Implementers, the Kolbe test says, live in the physical world and enjoy building and fixing things. They are innovative by nature, and always looking to build the proverbial better mousetrap. Implementers thrive in environments that allow them to work with their hands

I thought it is useful to some people who can rate them as one of the above. I found this article on inc.com