In Part 1 I talked about how there’s nothing new about subscription services since they’ve been around for generations.
Now I’ll relent a little and admit that there is something new about many of the subscription services out there. What’s new is what is no longer there. Traditionally, the whole point of subscription services was to create a two-way commitment in which both the service provider and the customer benefits.
The commitment benefits the customer by providing discounts, rewards, exclusive products, price stability and service guaranteed in return for a promise to pay money regularly for a period of time.
The commitment benefits the service provider by establishing a more predictable and reliable forecast of revenues for some time into the future, which facilitates both resource planning and financial planning.
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Cloud Expo New York: Six Not-So-Blind Men and the Cloud Elephant
As with everything else, the best way to get a view of a new technology area is by asking for independent opinions. The old adage of the 6 blind men and the elephant comes to mind. Coincidentally, there were six «blind men» on the panel, including our very engaging host, Mr. Geelan. And there were views that converged in a common theme – Cloud Connects.
The discussion was very entertaining, as all panels mediated by Jeremy are. Interestingly, the analogy went into elephants and other sorts of fauna. To me the Cloud elephant is the right animal to summarize this discussion around – my mind went to the old Indian fable of six blind men and the elephant (I did drop the word «blind» because the panel is obviously not blind and was made of very experienced leaders in this industry J). But it was six men with different views, yet converging on the same theme of how cloud computing fits into this world and the future.
MSPs Must Practice What They Preach – Especially with Security
Precautions to safeguard client data & infrastructure is an MSPs responsibility-this extends beyond client’s sphere of access to MSP employees & consultants. MSPs must employ some degree of security to cover their own access, not just that of their clients.
A man walks into the doctor’s office. He hasn’t been feeling well. A virus has been floating around the office and the man feels he’s caught it.
Doctor walks in, smiles and picks up the chart. He starts examining the man and as he writes a prescription advises he keeps sanitary and wash his hands several times a day.
Do you trust this doctor.especially after he prescribes vigorous hand-washing, but forgot to wash his own before poking and prodding during the exam.
Obviously this doctor loses credibility. This moral is a lesson that MSPs (managed service providers) must heed. MSPs frequently tell their clients to treat data in a secure fashion lest it compromised-by hack, by carelessness or by lax standards. It is only natural to expect your MSP to abide by certain security practices to prevent client data from becoming exposed.
Metacloud Outs Custom OpenStack for Fortune Firms
Metacloud plays hardball.
It has no patience with pilots or proofs-of-concept. It’ll only do production Infrastructure-as-a-Service installations, which is kind of uppity for a start-up that only hit the radar last October – even if it did come out of the closet with an unidentified Fortune 100 reportedly under contract.
It didn’t even have a name for its OpenStack distribution until now. It’s calling the private cloud it’s built on the latest Grizzly version of OpenStack Carbon|OS.
See, Metacloud’s founders are pretty sure of themselves because they figure they’ve done this kind of thing before. When CEO Steve Curry was at Yahoo for over a decade he managed its global storage operations that handled hundreds of petabytes of content and user data. And when CTO Sean Lynch was at Ticketmaster, the third-largest e-commerce system in the world, he ran its technical operations.
The company claims its operational experience is “a unique asset, found nowhere else in the private cloud services sector today.”
Replication & Erasure Coding Is the Future for Cloud Storage & Big Data
In the course of IT history, many schemes have been devised and deployed to protect data against storage system failure, especially disk drive hardware. These protection mechanisms have nearly always been variants on two themes: duplication of files or objects (backup, archiving, synchronization, remote replication come to mind); or parity-based schemes at disk level (RAID) or at object level (erasure coding, often also referred to as Reed-Solomon coding). Regardless of implementation details, the latter always consists of the computation and storage of “parity” information over a number of data entities (whether disks, blocks or objects). Many different parity schemes exist, offering a wide range of protection trade-offs between capacity overhead and protection level – hence their interest.
Moving to the Hybrid Cloud
Despite the great interest in SaaS and cloud, many large enterprises are still grappling with the right mixture of on-premises, hosted and various cloud deployment models for their applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year’s IT model obsolete. Ongoing.applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year’s IT model obsolete. Ongoing.
Red Hat Plays Its Trump Card
Red Hat made its power play Wednesday. One it’s been itching to make for a couple of years. One that it hopes will ultimately jam a stick through the spokes of VMware’s front wheel. And to make sure that happens it’ll be telling everybody who’ll listen that its widgetry is a third the price of VMware’s vCloud.
This is where Red Hat gets to play a card that only Microsoft can match – its operating system, commonly known as RHEL – and create a tightly integrated cloud platform by fusing RHEL with OpenStack, the open source cloud computing software.
The move came as a one-two punch consisting of a kit called the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and another called Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure that deliver the company’s essential vision of an Open Hybrid Cloud.
Pharmaceutical Bigs Opt for Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the game changer for the life sciences industry, according to an article on PharmaBiz.com.
Globally, pharma majors are deploying cloud technology because it provides data security, compliance and transparency, according to Vikram Anand, associate vice president, cloud-based technology & product delivery services, ArisGlobal.
“Cloud is changing the way we deploy technology. Eli Lily uses cloud services for research and development efforts. GSK has chosen to replace its existing Lotus Notes, Domino, and Postini services for its 96,500 employees worldwide, with everything being hosted on the cloud. Roche uses pre-clinical SaaS solution to consolidate several key application areas and harmonize all its sites worldwide,” he said.
The benefits of moving to the cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet with «pay-as-you-go» pricing. It allows enhanced collaboration, lower upfront investment, provides increased return on investment and greater flexibility and faster scale up of operations.
Cloud computing drastically lowers the total cost of ownership, improves collaboration, operational efficiency and speeds up the R&D processes. Security of data on the cloud is better than in-house systems. Data on the cloud is secure and compliant, Anand added.
CIO Outlook: Dealing with Legacy Applications
Legacy apps are surely the albatross of the modern cloud-enabled IT department – you put them there, and now you have to live with them.
Short of scrapping millions of dollars of worth of investments, something needs to be done with these apps, especially when cloud adoption is altering the efficiency and cost landscape for IT.
The first thing is to consider is why the move needs to take place. The reality for most companies is that there is a finite amount of space they can utilize in the data center. Companies have certain apps that they want to run locally, which is often the most mission critical aspects of their business. If its healthcare that’s EMR, if tis retail that’s the point of sale platform. These applications need as low latency as possible since there will always be someone in the organization that’s doing something very important and needs that data as quickly as possible.
What Does Doorstep Milk Delivery Have in Common with Subscriptions?
Some of our customers and billing industry contacts are somewhat intrigued (or even bemused) by the upsurge in attention being given to the concept of “subscriptions”. Some are concerned that they’re missing something because, after all, subscriptions have been business-as-usual for most of us for years. So why all the fuss? Does the growth of subscription-type services delivered over the Internet indicate there’s some exciting new business model out there? Are we seeing fundamental changes in the way companies are doing business?
Part of the mythology surrounding subscription services is that there is something fresh and new about this, something that needs a new generation of billing systems optimized for subscriptions. This is puzzling. Subscription services have been around on the Internet since its earliest days. Actually, subscription services in various forms existed decades before the Internet appeared to change our lives. True, the Internet has opened up huge additional opportunities for subscription services, just as it has opened up all sorts of other opportunities – for content distribution, selling products, communicating, and more. In one way or another, we managed to do most of these things in the dark pre-Internet days, but the Internet had truly transformed the scale, reach and cost factors underpinning all of these business activities.