WOW! Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM) extends site-to-site protection to entire Private Clouds by leveraging the Hyper-V Replica asynchronous VM replication capabilities in Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 and our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012 enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisors. In this article, I’ll provide an introduction to Hyper-V Recovery Manager and a Guided Hands-On Lab at the end of this article that allows you to step through the process of protecting your Private Clouds with a Recovery Plan.
Archivo mensual: agosto 2013
Salesforce.com tops list of Talkin’ Cloud 2013 CSPs
Talkin’ Cloud has come up with its yearly Talkin’ Cloud 100, comprising a century of cloud’s best and brightest players. And, in a fiercely competitive field, it was Salesforce.com who came out on top of this year’s list.
Salesforce beat Amazon into the silver medal position, with Microsoft, Oracle and Google completing the top five.
Admittedly, it says something about the strength of the ecosystem where SAP (6th) didn’t make the top five and Workday (11th) the top 10. Terremark, Rackspace and NetSuite came 8th, 9th and 10th respectively, with SoftLayer finishing 7th.
For SoftLayer of course, now read IBM – a fact the researchers acknowledged which cropped up during the writing of the report.
“Amid all that activity, it’s clear that VARs (value added resellers) and MSPs (managed service providers) have warmed up to cloud computing, rather than fearing disintermediation,” the report notes, concluding: “Overall …
How cloud service advances reward the bold leaders
Are you one of those independent executives that uses strategic foresight to gain a decisive lead over competitors that tend to follow the crowd? Granted, it takes courage to make bold moves — and follow the path that’s less traveled. Big rewards tend to go to the confident, not the cautious.
What’s your business technology investment strategy for 2013, and beyond? Does your corporate foresight anticipate success, based upon your ability to deploy quantum-leap technological advances — like managed cloud services?
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), the economic slowdown in China has driven them to lower their expectations for worldwide IT spending growth this year. IDC now forecasts IT spending growth of 4.6 percent in constant currency for 2013. That’s down from the previous forecast of 4.9 percent growth and a sharp deceleration from last year’s growth of almost 6 percent.
Despite the lower forecast …
HDS To Spotlight Virtualization and Cloud Technologies at VMworld
HDS will demonstrate the power of its technologies for VMware environments next week through presentations, in-booth demonstrations and videos at VMworld® 2013, August 25-29, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
HDS To Spotlight Virtualization and Cloud Technologies at VMworld
HDS will demonstrate the power of its technologies for VMware environments next week through presentations, in-booth demonstrations and videos at VMworld® 2013, August 25-29, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
12th International Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York – Photo Album
12th International Cloud Expo, held on June 10–13, 2013 at the Javits Center in New York City, featured four content-packed days with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of cloud computing led by exceptional speakers from every sector of the cloud computing ecosystem.
The Cloud Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event in the past 10 years, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service.
Are You Making Enough of Your Sales Online?
Do you want customers to buy online or offline? Parallels experience working with service providers shows a high percentage of small business hosting plan purchases are made on the phone talking to a living, breathing salesperson. Depending on the type of service provider, as few as 10% of direct channel sales by small businesses are via online purchase with up to 70% being made “offline” – via inbound phone calls – and the remainder being outbound campaign sales to existing customers. To be sure, these “offline” purchases are driven by online content. SMBs call after reviewing the service provider website. Research done through our SMB Cloud Insights report series reveals that for SaaS applications, for example, an SMB’s own online research is their number one source of information with more than 60% of SMBs citing it.
If that’s the case, why are so few hosting plan purchases by SMBs made online? Typically it is because of services discoverability issues on the website and the natural tendency for a generally non-technical buyer to need reassurance before pulling the trigger.
But if your goal is to increase the number of purchases your SMB customers make online because you want to spend less on your call center staffing, what can you do? One area to investigate is your buying and checkout experience. The Baymard Institute does an unusual annual study related to customer checkout experience. They take users and watch them go through the checkout processes of 15 different popular e-commerce sites. What they discover from this is general principles around usability-related issues due to poor checkout design and how that increases customer abandon rates.
Their findings are massive but touching on a few high level items might help get you pointed in the right direction.
+ The top reasons for checkout abandonment:
– Extra cost (shipping, tax, fees) 33%
– Forced account creation 23%
– Credit card trust 18%
– Complicated checkout process 18%
You may say that the top two don’t apply to service providers. But the study found it wasn’t so much the charging of extra fees, for example, as it was the confusing way it was presented or explained.
+ A disruptive problem with copywriting: Try to avoid technical jargon – think about who your audience is. That’s an obvious one, right? Here’s one that isn’t so obvious on the copywriting front and it is even more harmful: Not having descriptions for form field labels. In many cases what may seem obvious to you (“Address line 2”) will make no sense to some of your potential customers and in other cases what is obvious makes buyers balk (“Email address”) because they need an explanation of why you need that information (“To communicate with you – we never sell your email address”).
+ A layout problem: Unclear error indications. This is the most harmful issue related to layout. If buyers can’t find the error on the form or don’t understand it there is a very high probability they will abandon the checkout process. This is especially true if they can’t find the error and submit the form again only to have it rejected yet again. In those situations they think the problem is a bug on your site. Ouch.
So while you may always have a high rate of “offline” purchases just because it’s the nature of the beast with this type of customer and product, you might want to take a look at your online checkout experience to see if it’s as buyer-friendly as you need it to be.
Scott Fallon, Senior Director, Partner Marketing
GreenButton to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that GreenButton, the leading provider of compute intensive, on-demand cloud solutions for private and public clouds, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
GreenButton delivers turnkey solutions for cloud-enablement, data synchronization and bursting to the cloud without the need for recoding. We enable enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs) and service providers to cost effectively leverage the cloud. GreenButton™ Cloud Fabric, GreenButton Mission Control and CloudSync solutions empower users across any industry such as biotech, digital media, energy, engineering, financial services and others to leverage our rapid enablement of vertical applications to virtualized on-demand infrastructure. GreenButton’s solutions are managed from a simple web based interface.
GreenButton to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that GreenButton, the leading provider of compute intensive, on-demand cloud solutions for private and public clouds, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
GreenButton delivers turnkey solutions for cloud-enablement, data synchronization and bursting to the cloud without the need for recoding. We enable enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs) and service providers to cost effectively leverage the cloud. GreenButton™ Cloud Fabric, GreenButton Mission Control and CloudSync solutions empower users across any industry such as biotech, digital media, energy, engineering, financial services and others to leverage our rapid enablement of vertical applications to virtualized on-demand infrastructure. GreenButton’s solutions are managed from a simple web based interface.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley Call for Papers Deadline August 31
Despite the economy, cloud computing is doing well. Gartner estimates the cloud market will double by 2016 to $206 billion. The time for dabbling in the cloud is over!
The 13th International Cloud Expo, to be held November 4-7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested topics below).