You could call it cloud computing meets a community cloud.
Several organizations that represent thousands of professionals in the metro Grand Rapids area will join together at the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park next week in what promises to be largest online social networking event ever held in West Michigan. Everyone is welcome to register for The Connections 2010 – CommunityCloud event that takes place next Thursday.
Organizers hope it will will provide a chance for local professionals who have met through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to now get to know each other face-to-face. More than 300 people who know each other largely through cyberspace have already signed up.
"We got it started, it's growing legs and now we're holding on to the tail," says Dawn Simpson, vice president for market development at Trivalent Group Inc. in Grandville that is sponsoring the event in conjunction with Grand Rapids Township-based CQL Corp.
"And it was all born out of an idea of Bob's thinking."
Meet Bob
The "Bob" in this case is Robert Karel, who carries the title of lead listener at CQL, a 16-year-old company that provides customized software, hosting, system integration, and network infrastructure services.
"Why is Grand Rapids the most sustainable city in the country? It's because of the networking that goes on," says Karel, a 39-year-old Byron Center resident who had been noodling about a community social networking possibility for months. He had been struggling on how to make it happen when he mentioned the concept to Simpson a few months ago.
As they talked, it became clear to Karel that the best opportunity to pull together some of the thousands of individuals who know each other only through the World Wide Web was at an event held by Trivalent Group annually for vendors and prospective customers. Trivalent and CQL have had a longtime business relationship, and Trivalent had set up its symposium on cloud computing and technology show with 30 vendors for next Thursday at Meijer Gardens.
Since Trivalent had the venue for its Solutions Expo already in place, "it just made sense" to add CommunityCloud to the day's offerings, Simpson says.
The resulting June 17 doubleheader at Meijer Gardens, 1000 E. Beltline Ave. NE, will be Solutions Expo 2010 – The Two Faces of Cloud Computing, from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with some overlap by Connections 2010 – CommunityCloud from 1:30 to 4 p.m.
Five local organizations that use social media platforms heavily are encouraging their members to attend the CommunityCloud: LinkedUp Grand Rapids; aimWest; the Grand Rapids Area Professionals for Excellence (GRAPE),LocalFirst of West Michigan and the Michigan Business & Professional Association.
Get active, get online
While the Internet is utilized for many things, social networking is becoming a primary online activity, says Max Trierweiler, a Trivalent marketing administrator and 29-year-old Grand Rapids resident. "I think the biggest thing is we're initializing the conversation."
For Karel, CommunityCloud is both natural and obvious.
"All we're doing is offering a venue because we have this space," he says, adding that organizers will be trying to grasp from participants how they intend to use social networking.
Trivalent, CQL and the groups involved see CommunityCloud as an opportunity to jump-start things with a business-to-business networking and social media event.
"We're pretty excited about this," says Michael Yoder, a social media strategist at Grand Rapids marketing firm Deksia and co-founder of LinkedUp Grand Rapids. "For me, I've been actually kind of in my head figuring on how we could come up with an opportunity to do something to work together with these groups."
LinkedUp Grand Rapids is a two-year-old networking group of LinkedIn users in Greater Grand Rapids and West Michigan, including Kalamazoo, Holland and Muskegon, counting 4,770 members and four subgroups.
AimWest is a nearly decade-old professional association started by three Web developers that supports and promotes the growth of interactive and technology industries in West Michigan. It currently has 360 individual and corporate members, says Daniel Estrada, the group's president and owner-president of D.C. Estrada, LLC, information technology consulting firm.
Grand Rapids Area Professionals for Excellence is a professional organization started in May 2009 organized primarily through LinkedIn. It offers monthly meetings on business-related topics, and currently has 595 members.
LocalFirst of West Michigan promotes businesses and the economy locally. The Grand Rapids-based group has more than 600 members and about 2,200 Facebook friends. Its seventh annual LocalFirst Street Party is 4 p.m. to midnight Saturday outside Bistro Bella Vista, 44 Grandville Ave. SW; the event is sponsored by Founders Brewing Co.
The Michigan Business & Professional Association is a trade group based in Warren that represents more than 2,000 small- and medium-sized companies. It is affiliated with the 3,500-member Michigan Food & Beverage Association.
"I think they're all great groups," Yoder says. "It's kind of why we want to work together on this. I think we have some common things we can build on: We're about West Michigan; we're about Grand Rapids."
CQL's involvement with Trivalent Group on CommunityCloud and Solutions Expo is a direct result of the companies' longtime relationship that includes partnerships on several projects.
Put simply, Trivalent is about the hardware, and CQL is about the software. Trivalent provides technology and communications services, and CQL offers software and application development services.
Privately-held, Trivalent employs 60 people, had $22 million in sales in 2009 and is headed by Chief Executive Officer Larry Andrus. In its 39th year, the company offers business-to-business Internet service and is the largest wholesaler of AT&T, Inc., services in Michigan outside of AT&T, Simpson says. It is big on cloud-computing options and related services, with data centers in Grandville, Kalamazoo, Portage and South Bend, Ind.
Also privately-held, CQL employs 25 people with Mark Lardieri as president; its latest sales figures were not disclosed. It is a Microsoft Gold certified partner that offers a variety of technology-related services, including business consulting.
Getting your head in a cloud
Cloud computing is about tying together virtualized data centers, a matter of logistics to gain capacity without massive infrastructure and related costs.
Much like social networking, it is about pooling resources. Cloud computing allows convenient and on-demand network access to shared computing resources that can be used quickly with minimal effort for management or service-provider interaction.
"Cloud computing is a utility; it's like water in a way," Karel says. "You can measure it up, and let it flow as you need to use it."
"We know we picked the right topic" this year, says Simpson, a Rockford resident. "There is much noticeable interest in this." Cloud computing was a $36 billion market globally in 2008, about 13 percent of worldwide software sales, according to The Associated Press.
Businesses typically own their software, which requires licensing, upgrades and installing on computers. Cloud computing allows for Internet-based software use, desktops without hard drives and shared hardware.
Kent District Library has undergone a transformation with a private cloud, of sorts, to help it deal with increased use of online resources, better utilize technology and save money, including on energy costs, says Jim Bruxvoort, director of information technology.
"The power-consumption difference alone is worth it," he says, noting a 40 percent reduction in those costs.
It virtualized data storage by consolidating from 40 servers to three Hewlett-Packard DL380 GG servers, also allowing more flexibility if a server has to be taken down for repairs or upgrades. KDL also replaced personal computers for 260 staffers with HP's thin client desktop (a PC minus a hard drive) powered by VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, he said.
KDL continues using Dell 620 workstations for its 360 public-access computers, Bruxvoort says. The two-phase project, nearing its completion and done through two contracts awarded to Trivalent, cost a total of about $400,000.
Rick Martinez reports on business and other topics. His work has appeared in newspapers including The Grand Rapids Press, South Bend Tribune, The (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette, The (Angola, Ind.) Herald-Republican and USA Today and on assorted Web sites and has been distributed by The Associated Press.
Photos:
Dawn Simpson
Robert Karel
Robert Karel, Dawn Simpson, Max Trierweiler
Max Trierweiler, Dawn Simpson, Robert Kare
Photographs by Brian Kelly -All Rights Reserved