Jason Abrahamson

It has been something of a year hasn’t it? 2009 ushered in the end of an era and the start of a new one. 2009 is the end of another decade, and much like another decade end 80 years ago, 2009 evaporated a significant amount of wealth in the world. Unemployment rose to a staggering and baffling 10%. The highest since Regan took office in 1980. We elected the first African American President — which though might not sound like a feat in the land of the free and home of the brave keep in mind, 50 years ago this country still practiced segregation.

2009 also brought us something else you never thought you’d see in the free-market home of Wal-Mart — nationalization of General Motors, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG. In an effort to keep the heavily over leveraged US Economy from collapsing — and taking most major world economies with it — the US government took over 4 of the largest corporations in danger of collapsing. Hard to believe General Motors — once the largest automaker in the world — collapsed. Though the government intervention has cost the US tax payer over $1 trillion dollars, it has seemed to stop the free fall it was on.

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke was named Time’s Person of the Year for 2009. Since he truthfully is the only person left who can make sense of the economic pickle we’re in.

Most importantly though is what 2009 has brought for me personally. It didn’t start out good with the passing of my beloved Aunt Pat, but, as she would so eloquently tell me, “I’m fine, how are you?” Having to recover pretty significantly both emotionally and financially I think it all worked out. 2008 ended with me pretty heavily battered from the stock crash of 2008, only to get even more battered from the stock crash of 2009. Investments I had made in some small businesses proved to tumble and collapse with me being left picking up the pieces. I came back though, secured steady *knock on wood* work for myself and started rebuilding. I recall words of wisdom once instilled upon me by a very successful and wealthy business man, “I made a ton of money in Oregon real estate when I was your age. I could walk into any bank in the state and secure a loan with just the grin on my face. I lost it all when the real estate market imploded during the 80′s. I picked myself up and told my wife that we were going to get wealthy the right way, hard work and real long time.” So I’m heeding to this advice, and to kick it off, the wife and I purchased our first home in Santa Clarita Valley. Which leads me to perhaps the most important and life changing thing that happened to me. July 11th, 2009 is the day I got married to the love of my life, Elizabeth. In 2005 if you asked me if I thought I was going to married in 2009 I would have laughed at you.

With that, I’m going to go reign in the New Year. Everyone raise your glass and drink to 2010. Happy New Year everybody, and God Bless!

Cloud computing is the future of business, where as SaaS isn’t necessarily the future of business, as much as it is a business/design concept. There is this common misconception that “cloud” computing is hosted applications or services. That is not cloud computing, that is SaaS.

SaaS stands for “Software as a Service” a basic example of “SaaS” is webmail. If your organization has email but offers a fully functional webmail client then, they’re offering software (email client) as a service that is not dependent on your computer.

NOW, your webmail may exist in a Cloud – confused yet? Well before the internet became useful – by useful I mean fast and utilized for something other than email and that other thing, we had “clustering.” Clustering was essentially taking identical hardware (server or appliance) and having them work together as a team or as a backup for each other. This is how the world existed before VM.

Yes, in walks virtual computing, the concept that you can have multiple servers running on a single piece of hardware all independently. With the perfection of VM and dramatic increase in server performance IT managers are able to implement “clouds” which is essentially a cluster of virtual servers. The cloud can be tied locally and external through the use of high speed wan connections. Web hosting companies have been building clouds for quite some time and continue to improve upon them to this very day.

I am over generalizing the cloud concept in this blog; however, if I were to write about it in detail then it would go on for pages and be less of a blog and more of an article.

Cloud computing is the future of business. The growing number of ways that IT departments are looking to cut long term investment costs while maximizing ROI makes cloud computing and the scalability of cloud computing much more lucrative. The concept though is being confused with that of SaaS and it is worth noting they’re two very different concepts. You can have a SaaS running in a cloud – thus maximizing your flexibility, scalability, and ROI of a particular application.

So in closing, Cloud computing is a cluster of virtualized appliances/hardware whereas SaaS is nothing more than a hosted application. One can over generalize it and say that Cloud computing is the new clustering, and SaaS is the new Citrix. Neither of which is really a new fandangled concept, as my boss so eloquently put “SaaS use to be called on-demand”

Do you remember those shiny plastic CD’s in the mail? You know the one’s I’m talking about, you got one every week it seemed like. Personally I had a rather extensive collection of coasters made out of AOL cd’s that had been mailed to my house. AOL mailed out so many that they started to be themed by the season. Someplace I still have an entire set of Christmas designed AOL coasters. Perhaps I’ll turn them into ornaments for my Christmas tree this year.

Yes, it’s been quite some time since we all opened our mailbox to junk from AOL. The midnight wedding to TimeWarner and failure to capitalize on the broadband business has most of is in the IT community going “huh?” AOL was a leader and pioneer in the consumer internet business. They made the concept of a “Screen Name” not only cool, but a necessity. They got fat dumb and happy during the boom years of the .com’s and dial up internet – so fat that TimeWarner thought they’d make a nice Thanksgiving turkey and eat em’ right up.

It would be prove to be one of the worst mergers in the history of modern business. TimeWarner successfully screwed up AOL, or AOL successfully screwed up TimeWarner – don’t really know which there – but what we do know that from the date of merger to December 2009 AOL’s worth went from 226 Billion to about 20 billion, and 30 million subscribers worldwide to 10 million subscribers worldwide.

Yes, TimeWarner realized they had been duped and demanded a divorce from the marriage. As of December 10, 2009 AOL is again an independent company. What does that really mean for AOL though?

AOL has tried to re-event themselves as a “content provider” removing the focus off of their ISP business and into delivering content online. The difficult part is re-branding them, as the saying goes, you can’t teach an ol’ dog new tricks. AOL has a long and difficult road to overcome the identity of a plastic CD and “Welcome, you’ve got mail.”

There is really only one online company that has built an entire empire on giving everything away and completely funding it through ad revenue – Google. The problem is replicating this business model. Can AOL do it? Will AOL do it? With Apple focusing so much attention on providing content through iTunes, and Google essentially caching the entire internet one has to wonder where does that leave AOL? Yahoo re-branded themselves and Microsoft completely changed MSN online — it proved to be costly and eventually succumbing to joining forces in their fight against Google.

Is there room left for AOL in the content providing world? Can they really sustain a company going down this path? Time will soon tell, but for now, one of the worst marriages in the history of business has finally ended in a messy bitter divorce – bet they wish they had a prenup.