CA and 3tera have announced CA's acquisition of the innovative cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service vendor. This is a great thing for Computer Associates, and perhaps a bit sad for the cloud community in general. Why? It is hard to fit the energy and enthusiasm felt when walking into 3Tera's Aliso Veijo office into words. A tight group of committed entrepreneurs and innovators, with a bit of cockiness due to the unique stature they held in the cloud computing community.

Not that Computer Associates is a bad company. In fact, they have always been one of the best kept secrets in business and enterprise software. Rock solid systems, professional sales and engineering - just not as well known to the broader community as other large enterprise systems vendors.

AppLogic brought the cloud community many firsts. The first to integrate IPv6 into their provisioning system. The first to really simplify the drag and drop provisioning process. Perhaps the first to really test and prove the concept of globally distributed processing and disaster recovery models. And they are really great guys.

"If we look at cloud (service) in a global sense, not just as my service or your service, or my country or your country, then IPv6 is part of the future and the solution." (Bert Armijo, SVP 3tera)

IPv6 is hitting everybody in the Internet industry on a global scale. 3tera recognized early in the evolution of cloud products that IPv6 was critical for long term, and short term development of their AppLogic product within both public-facing Internet services, as well as cloud deployments within the enterprise. The need is real.

The IPv4 Reality 3tera Faced

Interop Las Vega can be boiled down to a single topic - cloud computing.  Lots of variations such as cloud security, cloud provisioning, cloud storage, cloud everything.   And SoCal companies were right in the center of attention.

Monday kicked off with the Enterprise Cloud Summit, which attracted nearly 300 attendees.  The speaker lineup was pretty impressive, with the focus on introducing the cloud concept and opportunity to business and enterprise users.  The conference also sponsored "Cloud Camp," which was a highly interactive training seminar for cloud students which ran well into the night.

Some very good speeches and presentations on the topic.  Two Southern California companies kept coming up in the presentations and discussions as being both thought leaders, as well as powerful factors within the cloud industry.