Companies are shifting resources to the cloud for a variety of reasons: efficiency, cost, analytics, customer service, etc. While these are worthy goals, there’s a more fundamental objective that companies leveraging the cloud should strive for: unlocking the collective brainpower of your workforce and customer base.
While the term «social» means different things to different people, at the heart of the concept lies an understanding that people are the organisation’s most valuable asset.
In a truly «social» business, technology implementations – be they cloud, mobile or social media – all support the ability of your workforce to collaborate, innovate and remain agile.
To offer a techy twist on James Carville’s famous election season adage, when it comes to maximising cloud investment, it’s the people, stupid, that ultimately determine the value of your implementation.
How smart, or stupid, then, are today’s cloud-dwelling companies?
Parallels is pleased to announce the latest milestone in our alliance with CloudFlare, a global leader in Web performance and security. CloudFlare for service providers selling Parallels Plesk Panel (versions 11 and 10.4) is now available through the APS catalog. It takes less than 5 minutes to install and comes in two plans: CloudFlare Free and CloudFlare Performance Plus. Parallels is now making it extremely easy for service providers to upsellCloudFlair’s enterprise-grade website performance accelerator with built-in security, perfect forsmall and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who are concerned about cloud security, yet also seek competitive advantages like Web acceleration for their sites.
In addition, CloudFlair delivers many operational benefits to Parallels Plesk Panel service providers by reducing server load and bandwidth usage, while protecting their servers from DDoS attacks. On average, a website on CloudFlare loads twice as fast for its visitors, experiences 65% fewer requests and can save upwards of 60% of bandwidth. There’s even an automatic IPv4/6 gateway, which enables site availability for visitors on IPv6 networks, while keeping IPv4 infrastructure intact until you’re ready to migrate.
Improved website performance and lower operational costs are only part of the CloudFlair story. SMBs continue to cite security concerns as a major barrier for adopting cloud-based applications and services. By securing their websites from potential threats, service providers can rest assured their hosting customers are better protected, while their end user site owners concentrate on managing their content and running their businesses. «The new CloudFlareplugin for Parallels Plesk Panel allows for quick and easy deployment,» said Gerado Altman, National Partner & Reseller Manager at Velocity Host. «We would love to keep CloudFlare as our own secret weapon, but really the more users who are on the network the greater the power CloudFlare has to wield against malicious attacks and help all those who use their services.»
CloudFlare aims to bring premium performance and security services to every website. Today, over 500,000 websites use CloudFlare, ranging from blogs and SMB e-commerce storefronts to governmental agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Interested Parallels Plesk Panelservice providers can download CloudFlare today via the APS catalog. Not a Parallels Partner yet? Sign up here (even at the no obligation Member level), then head down the path to greater profitability with Parallels Plesk Panel and CloudFlare.
Scott Houston, chief executive officer for GreenButton, and Stephen Spector, cloud evangelist for Dell, Inc., will be co-presenting «Game Changer – High Perfomance Computing in the Cloud For Everyone,» at the 11th International Cloud Computing Expo. Scott and Stephen will discuss how companies of all size and budgets can best leverage cloud based high performance computing, without breaking the bank. They will also demonstrate the simplicity and cost efficient methodology for running a rendering workload in the cloud in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
One of the more obscure services Amazon AWS offers is the Simple Workflow Service. Using Deciders and Workers, SWS allows the building of complex tasks, including those that run in parallel, all while retaining fault-tolerance and scalability. This video gives a nice overview.
Many have focused on the cost reduction possibilities of the cloud, some have focused on business agility. However, the cloud can play a strategic role, as well.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Joe Weinman, Sr. VP of Cloud Services & Strategy at Telx, will discuss how the cloud can enhance operational excellence, i.e., improve business processes. It can enhance customer relationships and the customer experience. It can help differentiate products and services. And, it can accelerate innovation. Moreover, it can play a key role in sustainability, thanks to its ability to act as a substitute for other energy-intensive approaches and its ability to optimize physical processes.
To entice the Fortune 1000 to use more clouds, IBM and AT&T have cut a deal to combine resources and deliver a highly secure, supposedly first-of-its-kind “network-enabled” cloud service that uses private networks rather than the public Internet.
The widgetry combines AT&T’s virtual private networking and IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise+ cloud capabilities with what is called “breakthrough” technology from AT&T Labs that creates a fast, new, shared cloud service that’s secure enough to overcome corporate inhibitions about the cloud.
It’ll take them until early next year to get it out.
The pair says that when customers connect to IBM’s IaaS resources over AT&T’s virtual private network, the newfangled technology tightly integrates the security protections of both so customers can quickly and reliably shift information or applications between their own data centers (private clouds) and this new cloud service.
SYS-CON Events announced today that TBlox has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
TBlox is the new standard in cloud business software with embedded social media, mobile commerce, business intelligence and open system-to-system integrations. Users stay connected and share business data in their communities. Individuals and businesses team-up for the best deals by using TBlox’ or third party apps.
Workday, the cloud-based human capital and payroll management house expected to IPO this week, has boosted the price of its shares from $21-$24 to $24-$26 apiece, suggesting that there’s investor appetite for the stock although the company isn’t making money yet.
It means to float 22.75 million Class A shares so it could gross as much as $591.5 million. It may use some of the money or the stock itself for acquisitions.
None of its outside investors will be parting with any of their positions in the IPO.
Compuware Corporation on Tuesday announced Compuware APM for Mainframe, a solution for deep transaction management from the edge through the mainframe. By combining Compuware dynaTrace’s patented PurePath Technology® with Compuware Strobe’s unrivaled mainframe application management expertise, distributed system and mainframe teams can resolve performance problems faster, reduce MIPS costs, postpone hardware upgrades and accelerate time-to-market for new applications.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Stealth Software has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Stealth Software is uniquely positioned to enable Cloud Service Providers and Enterprises manage the explosive growth of data in a secure, transparent and cost effective manner. Information is growing at a rate of 9 fold every 5 years. Last year 1.8 Trillion GB’s of information was generated. Cloud Service Providers will manage a large part of this data. They are looking for a secure and transparent way to scale, efficiently manage and provide business continuity for the information they hold in their environments. The Stealth Software solution addresses the requirements Cloud Service Providers and Enterprise Customers have around security, data protection, data privacy and business continuity.