Tech industry takes cloud-computing roadmap to Washington
Aug 1, 2011 4:23 PM, By Michael Grotticelli
The roadmap will help guide the federal government’s efforts to adopt cloud computing technologies, and institute policies and practices.
TechAmerica Foundation, a non-profit lobbying group representing the U.S. technology industry, has put together a commission of company executives and other industry representatives to make recommendations to the Obama administration on the correct deployment and use of cloud computing. It is also recommending the development of public policies that will help drive U.S. innovation in the cloud.
The TechAmerica Foundation commission has also put together a “Cloud First Buyer’s Guide for Government” that makes it easy for any business to intelligently consider the benefits of cloud-based services.
On its website, under the heading “The Cloud is Unstoppable,” the group says that “the U.S. Government is on the brink of a major shift to cloud computing. Like the private sector, the Government has realized that cloud computing can dramatically reduce IT costs while significantly improving performance and accelerating innovation.”
In the past three months, a collection of 71 executives, called the “Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2),” has developed a “cloud computing roadmap” that provides detailed recommendations regarding the optimal deployment of cloud-based solutions across a broad array of government programs and agencies.
The group — led by execs like Marc Benioff, co-chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com; Michael Capellas, chairman and CEO of VCE; and John Mallery, of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT — said the roadmap will help guide the federal government’s efforts to adopt cloud computing technologies, and institute policies and practices that “will keep the United States on the forefront of computing innovation.”
Among the 45 companies involved in the TechAmerica Foundation commission are some of the biggest names in technology, such as Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, EMC, Google, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman and Verizon.
Last week, some members of the group presented its report in person to Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer. Commercial-facing recommendations were also shared with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Commerce Under Secretary Pat Gallagher.
One of those members was Peter Csathy, CEO of Sorensen Media, a compression technology provider in San Diego, CA. Sorenson Media was the only video workflow solutions company invited to participate on the CLOUD2 commission, with Csathy serving as commissioner and David Dudas, the company’s vice president of Video Solutions, as deputy commissioner for the project.
Since the company’s formation in 1995, Sorenson Media has been at the forefront of video innovation, creating foundational video technologies that established video within Apple Quicktime, Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash and YouTube. Now the company is playing a similar role in the development of video cloud computing by bringing its Sorenson Squeeze encoding engine and related technologies to the cloud with Sorenson Squeeze Server and Squeeze Solution Pack, both enterprise-level cloud-based video encoding and delivery solutions.
“We need to be practical and pragmatic,” Csathy said. “We cannot be ‘pie in the sky.’ A memorialized roadmap moves the government beyond mere pronouncements and into the realm of reality.”
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