The GoPC.net Blog

Bessemer Venture Partners, Byron Deeter and Philippe Botteri, co- authored an excellent white paper which was published this week on Sandhill.com (the IT investment capital website from the heart of Silicon Valley, Sandhill Road). A 1-page summary is viewable at PRNewsWire.com.

Having pioneered most of our own development and direction through trial and error over the last 15 years I can attest to having made many of the mistakes outlined in the article and learned those lessons the hard way. It’s a good reference paper for anyone managing, investing, or working in a cloud computing Startup.

As a counter point to this article, we don’t separate the cloud into layers of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. The GoPC.net cloud fully integrates these functions together as one system and in doing so we have been able to create one of the most open, collaborative, cloud platforms possible. Cloud is far more than just “web apps”.

During the lead up to the Dot.Com boom all the analysts viewed the ASP industry (**) as being series of Ven diagrams that showed no overlap between the different industry elements. You “had” to be a network provider, a software vendor, hosting vendor, but you could not be everything. Then after the crash the only companies which were left standing were those of us who were at the intersection of everything, proving to me that the strength all along was actually in our model – vertically integrating all levels rather than focusing on one narrow layer.

Today, GoPC.net visualizes the infrastructure layer to provide an environment similar to Rackspace.com or Amazon.com, it provides a platform layer where customers use a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) equivalent to say a Microsoft PC and the network servers (without Microsoft license costs) and then on top of this we deliver the applications and collaboration capabilities which SaaS enables existing desktop apps as well as web apps. So what I see is a trend where most software vendors now refer to themselves a “cloud solutions” but focus only a thin vertical niche (e.g. Salesforce.com focuses mostly on CRM), others like Zuora.com with their payment system focus on one thin horizontal niche. But I describe GoPC.net’s version of cloud computing as a horizontal platform which services multitude of vertical niches.

GoPC.net is an open collaborative cloud that can run almost anything (web app, desktop app, even Microsoft based apps if we have to), and we’ve added to this by packaging into specific products the target markets from individual consumers right through to the enterprise. We offer an open platform so depending the ticket an organization buys from us, they can run almost any application or technology as a cloud solution.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder GoPC.net

** Cloud computing is the new name for Application Service Provider or ASP, which it was called during the Dot.Com bubble from 1999-2001.

Last week, the OpenOffice.org Community celebrated 100,000,000 recorded downloads for OpenOffice.org 3.0, launched just over a year ago.

“The download total doesn’t include, for example, installations included with various Linux distributions or copies included on CDs given out by magazines, so the actual number is likely much higher.” — The H

This week, the OpenOffice.org Community’s annual conference (OooCon2009) opens in Orvieto, Italy. Developers, end users, and anyone interested in OpenOffice.org are invited to attend.

“We are delighted to have the global OpenOffice.org community coming to Italy at such a memorable time.” — Italo Vignoli, Spokesman, Conference Organising Team on PR Web

If you don’t want to download and install OpenOffice.org, or have never tried the OpenOffice.org office suite before, with GoPC you can use OpenOffice.org from your browser.

Within two minutes of setting up a GoPC account, you can create wordprocessing, spreadsheet, presentation, or PDF files without ever having to download and install OpenOffice.org yourself.

Using GoPC you will never again need to re-install software or upgrade your computer.

You can join the millions of OpenOffice.org end users without downloading and installing the office suite yourself. And, with GoPC you can use OpenOffice.org from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Independent leaders make Cloud offering for Accounting

San Francisco, 26 October 2009: GoPC.net the world’s leading independent provider of Cloud Computing and TurboCASH Accounting, the world’s leading Open Source Accounting package for small business have jumped in ahead of industry giants and announced the first entry level Accounting SaaS solution for Cloud computing.

Read the full article at TurboCASH.net, GoPC.net or CNN iReport.

TurboCash Invoice

Today, the first entry level accounting Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is being rolled out by GoPC and TurboCASH Accounting.

TurboCASH’s integration with GoPC delivers the full desktop product integrated with other desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, centralised file storage, backups and security, all delivered via the internet to almost any connected screen.

“The roll out with TurboCASH is a truly exciting development.” – Graeme Speak, CEO/Founder, GoPC

GoPC is a secure, ultra low cost and low maintenance IT solution suitable for most small to medium size businesses. Now with TurboCASH; accountants, businesses owners, and bookkeepers will have the ability to work and access their accounts from anywhere they have an internet connection.

For further information, see GoTurboCASH.

Today we are pleased to present our new GoPC website. We have responded to feedback and your ideas with a fresh new design to make using and discovering GoPC even easier for our GoPC members and visitors.

We have made the structure clearer, simplified our site navigation and enhanced your access to GoPC information and resources. As a GoPC member, your new GoPC Dashboard means accessing your GoPC has never been easier.

As one of our tens of thousands of GoPC users you have complete portability of your personal desktop and data from any Web-connected device, where you are. Based on your feedback and the work of our experienced web designers, we’ve added new features to bring the new user experiences for desktop and web applications in ‘the cloud’ with our GoOpenOffice.org and GoPower accounts.

GoPC was selected as one of 5 finalists this week to present on stage to the main body of the Silcom Ventures 2009 Summit at Stanford University.  http://www.silicomsummit2009.com/   The Summit included key notes from industry luminaries such as Meg Whitman (ex CEO eBAY), Vinod Khosla (one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and respected VC’s), amongst others.

This was an amazing opportunity for our company to present to an international conference of 350 technology investors and Venture Capitalists as we reach out for our next stage of investor funding to fuel growth of the business and to establish supercomputer nodes in other continents.

There is huge interest from Silicon Valley VC’s in the field of cloud computing and GoPC is certainly in the sweet spot with one of the leading technologies. We have now repositioned our company message slightly as the term “cloud computing” is becoming so misued that we are concerned it will shortly become a meaningless term.

So here’s the new pre-positioning statement:

At a high level:

At a user level:

Some customers have reported login/password issues on the new version.  We cannot tell you what your password was but you can recover old or forgotten passwords yourself off the main landing page of the website.

First, try and login to your account from the website   www.gopc.net.

If you are not logged into your personal control panel within a few seconds and returned to the website again then please use the “Recover Password” button underneath the field for Username and Password.  This will send an email to the email address you used when first signing on which will allow you to create a new password.

The GoPC Support Team

The cut over on 30th April 2009 went exactly to plan and was flawless. This was a huge project and crystalises about 18 months R&D from the whole team.

My thanks to the GoPC Team, and particularly to our CTO Chris Hoy Poy for the enormous effort in orchestrating this project and pulling it off so successfully.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder

Finally, after months and months of testing and data migration, we are ready to cut over all users to the new GoPC supercomputer infrastructure.

The change over will occur progressively over the next 24 hours.  There will be a couple of brief periods where all users will need to be logged off. This will be the first complete outage of the system affecting all users since we migrated the data centre in June 2006. It’s a record we’ve become very proud of but we’ve got to move forward. There are so many improvements on the new system, not the least of which is the time to create a new user account which drops from the current 4 minutes down to about 10-30 seconds.  Login times should also halve.  The next stages which will follow from this upgrade will be the rollout of new supercomputing nodes into North America and Europe and this will see a huge improvement in screen responsiveness for users closer to those regions (particularly Europe and Africa).

We have done our utmost to minimise the impact of this outage.  There are some areas which we have not been able to test until the live cut over is complete and there is the potential that we will encounter teething problems in some areas.  We will rectify any issues as soon as they arrise.  If you do experience any teething issues after the next 24 hours please contact us through the contact from on the website or email (support [at] gopc.net).

Once the new infrastructure is running we will start announcing a lot of rolling improvements to the system.  There will be a lot more choice available to customers, and a lot more freedom within some of the account types which we will have available.  Many thanks to those customers who have been answering our surveys and offering constructive feedback.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder

The problem with being a perfectionist is that one doesn’t want to mention anything until the pie is completely cooked, taste tested, and absolutely ready for presentation. The problem with Internet technology is that it’s never finished . . . But after years of refusing to announce anything until its actually running, I’ve agreed to put out this bulletin of what we’ve got coming down the line, just before it actually goes live.

I created GoPC in 1995 and we are now many generations of GoPC technology further down the path. The complexity in each new release grows exponentially. What becomes simpler and more useful for the customer requires a massive effort, discipline and very deep structured thinking on the part of the developers. I want to say that the GoPC team is the most intelligent, committed and brilliant team of people that I’ve ever worked with. It’s these guys and gals who have created the most incredible advances in GoPC for this upcoming release.

A special acknowledgement is also due to the remarkable people who create and contribute to Open Source, the thousands of developers who are responsible for the applications we’re able to provide via GoPC’s supercomputing framework at no cost to our customers. It’s our goal to add value to the work of these peoples by making their products much more available to a much broader audience.

The upgrade we’re about to undertake is a Major rework of the whole supercomputer. It’s new hardware and systems (approximately 100 separate servers not counting the expandable front-end nodes which carry the bulk of our processing load), new network infrastructure, the latest application versions on the desktop and a host of new very cool technologies. We have always made extensive use of virtualisation, and there is far more fail-over capability than ever before.

One of the most exciting advances from the new system is our ability now to fragment the supercomputer into separate pieces and distribute these geographically. This upcoming version of GoPC will become a distributed supercomputer with a footprint on each continent, all managed centrally. Changes and upgrades are automatically reflected across the entire infrastructure – thus effectively creating one global footprint. For customers who currently experience high levels of latency to the GoPC supercomputer in Australia (particularly users in Europe, Africa and Middle East where Internet routes go via the USA and can often exceed 400ms) this will have a dramatic improvement on screen responsiveness. We are currently negotiating with interested parties for financing and partnership involvement to achieve this quickly. Technically it is now about 10x easier than it was last year.

The new GoPC will give more granular control allowing us to tailor solutions for specific customer groups. Our premium enterprise customers and perhaps others will have the power to tailor their own solutions. For example they may choose from a simple pick list which applications their organisation will have; select another layer of data encryption technology on disk, add and remove users daily, select more server side storage, or recover a selected file from a last months backup straight from a window on the desktop. Godrive (GoPC’s online Drive) will seamlessly integrate with local PC desktop and you’ll be amazed at how fast this operates.

We have had countless requests since first going live in Dec 2004 with our open source version of GoPC, for a command prompt, for shell access and for the ability for people to install their own applications. This will soon become available and we will also allow customers to operate a complete virtual Linux desktop instance in their own virtual data centre.

This major upgrade crystallizes about 16 months of Research and Development by our team. Because of the scale of it, it has taken several months to migrate customers data and prepare everything for the big bang cutover. GoPC has run at 99.999% uptime since going live in Dec 2004, the only complete outages we’ve had was when we physically moved the data centre. At each upgrade we’ve only ever taken down part of the system at a time. We’re anxious about the change over because there are likely to be teething issues in areas which we could not have foreseen. But we have to move forward and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that any issues that surface are resolved as speedily as possible. Once we’ve switched over to the new system we plan to wait a few weeks to ensure things have stabilise and then start rolling out these new solutions which we’ve been wanting to bring to the customers.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, that everything will be running a lot faster. New customer sign-ups which currently are taking up 4-5 minutes, should reduce to around 30-40 seconds. The new GoPC works like lightning. We hope you’ll like it.

The ETA is any day now.

Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder