Another month brings another new study highlighting security concerns as the leading barrier to cloud uptake in the enterprise. Rather than decreasing, it seems like the concerns are going in the other direction. Security breaches (such as those at iCloud and DropBox) continue to make headline news and add fuel to the fire. The winner in this situation? On-premise solutions. Who pays? The enterprise. Actually, it pays through the nose, since expenditures for on-premise solutions can be anywhere from 3-7 times more expensive than their cloud equivalents (at least in the estimates that I have seen).
Monthly Archives: September 2012
Taking Your Application Delivery Strategy to the Cloud
Enterprises and business are leveraging the public cloud and Internet now more than ever. The explosion of Software as a Service and cloud computing have presented today’s enterprises with a new challenge, controlling and optimizing the Internet. In his General Session, Michael Cucchi, Director of Products at Akamai, discusses their globally distributed and massively scalable Intelligent Platform and how Akamai’s Terra Enterprise Solutions enables businesses to leverage the cloud and control the public Internet as an extension of their infrastructure.
Michael Cucchi is the Director of Product Marketing for Akamai’s Enterprise Cloud division. In his role, he sets the go-to-market strategy for positioning Akamai’s solutions towards strategic IT initiatives within the enterprise such as cloud computing, web application performance, and cloud security. He has over 18 years of engineering, management and marketing experience in the high-tech industry.
Because We Care About You…
Our business is about empowering you as a customer. Our business is about supplying you with all the needed tools to dominate your field of choice. We empower you with the most advanced Cloud Hosting solutions available anywhere on the market today. From Windows VPS to Linux VPS, from Hosted Exchange to Hosted Voice and from colocation and full IT integration solutions, our business is about making your business run smoothly. Due to this, because our passion is letting you get to work without having to worry about your IT needs, we have decided to improve our customer experience.
Heroku Chief Forsakes Tech for Olive Gardening
Former Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian, who became Salesforce.com’s EVP of platforms when the SaaS pioneer acquired the Platform-as-a-Service for $212 million in December of 2010, left Salesforce last month.
According to his LinkedIn page, he’s off farming olives somewhere in the San Francisco area. How utterly sensible.
GigaOm, which discovered his departure and is looking to intrude on his pastoral reverie, says he was “key to Heroku’s fast growth.” It says the now-polyglot Heroku hit a “1.5 million apps-hosted plateau” in May.
Sebastian came out of SourceLabs and BEA.
Effectively Leveraging the Cloud for Better User Experience
The cloud has many benefits, but when it comes to application development, how does the cloud help enterprises and development teams create custom software and applications that end users actually care about? In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, EffectiveUI President Anthony Franco highlights the advantages cloud computing provides for quickly developing custom software and applications with compelling user experiences using real world examples from Adobe, Herff Jones and Navy Federal Credit Union.
He also explores:
Using the flexible nature of cloud computing to rapidly design and deploy integrated enterprise applications
Leveraging the cloud for a highly visible and transparent development process
Using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create a hybrid cloud
Enterprise Talent Wars and IBM’s Acquisition of Kenexa
Different factors are driving changes for businesses who need to continuously adapt to them. Not having the right talent available is a challenge in being able to adapt to those changes. Efficiently managing the talent pool is an important to businesses that is leading to numerous acquisitions in this space.
That observation leads me to IBM’s recently announced acquisition of Kenexa. With this purchase, IBM is getting into the HCM application space in direct competition with Oracle who acquired Taleo, Salesforce who acquired Rypple and SAP who acquired SuccessFactors for similar reasons. Demand for solutions in this space is also increasing due to the entry of millennial candidates into the workplace who are likely to look for job satisfaction in addition to typical benefits, likely to re-locate if they find the right position and also are very social. All these characteristics bring different expectations of HCM solutions by enterprises to cater to a different expectation of the workplace. In other words, in Kenexa, IBM picked solution focused on an area with a significant projected worldwide demand growth, as candidates are growing pickier in choosing an employer.
Study: 44.4% of IT Pros Say They Will Move to the Cloud In the Next Year
Qumu today announced the results of their 2012 IT in the Cloud Assessment Project. A survey of over 700 IT professionals conducted online by Toluna found that 44.4% of them will be moving applications to the cloud within the next 12 months, with up to 33.4% saying that this will include up to half of their applications.
54.5% of respondents touted the benefits of making the move to cloud-based applications. When asked what benefits they thought were most important, surprisingly, more than 30% of IT professionals said better security. This result indicates that companies are becoming more comfortable with the quality of security in cloud based apps. After security, other benefits identified are:
- Cost savings once deployed – 26.9%
- Better mobility support – 25.9%
- Time saved not having to update infrastructure – 22%
- Quick deployment – 18.5%
- Better for the environment – 12.6%
- Elasticity to scale up or down as needed – 11%
- Outsourced system support and maintenance – 10.9%
Even as IT professionals report they are planning to move applications to the cloud, many organizations already have. The survey found that fully 44.9% of IT professionals are already running some applications in the cloud. The top applications include email (25.9%), storage (24%) and document management (13.9%). Other applications include project management (11%), CRM (10.3%), marketing automation (6.8%), video communication (10.3%) and employee portals (11.3%).
Enterprises are adopting collaborative cloud-based solutions to enable their people to be more connected and productive. For many companies, video communications have become an integrated part of the corporate culture. 55% of respondents site benefits of using a secure YouTube-like service for enterprise video sharing. According to the survey, the biggest benefits that IT professionals see from using such services include:
- Increased access to training videos – 26.1%
- Gives employees a “voice” to share ideas – 24.3%
- Increased access to subject matter experts knowledge – 23.6%
- Better employee collaboration – 22.5%
- Improved organization and search of company video assets – 20.6%
Additionally, the survey found surprising differences between large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses. In all cases, large enterprises were more favorable to cloud-based solutions than SMBs:
- Running current applications in the cloud (51% vs. 42.4%)
- Seeing benefits in migrating applications to the cloud (59.5% vs.
52.5%) - Seeing benefits of using a secure enterprise video-sharing service
(63.3% vs. 47.3%)
“The results showing that large enterprises are more inclined to Cloud applications is somewhat surprising. Some may expect large companies to be concerned with Cloud security,” said Ray Hood, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qumu. “We believe that larger companies have more history with IT outsourcing and see the Cloud as the logical next step.”
The survey results come alongside the release of Qumu’s latest whitepaper, Managing Business Video in the cloud and Hybrid Clouds, as well as Qumu’s attendance at IBC 2012, the premier annual conference and exhibition for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of electronic media.
SYSPRO ERP Software Able to Facilitate Medical Device Unit Recalls
SYSPRO today announced that SYSPRO ERP software offers manufacturers extensive traceability capabilities to facilitate the ability of manufacturers to trace products from origin, through the manufacturing process, to their ultimate destination, fully maintaining assurance certification and tracking expiration dates. The reaffirmation of the extensive traceability functionalities inherent in SYSPRO ERP software was in reaction to the announcement that “over 123 million medical device units were recalled in the second quarter of 2012, reaching an eight-quarter high,” according to the quarterly ExpertRECALL Index released August 22, 2012.
SYSPRO lot traceability and serial tracking functionality afford extensive visibility up or down the supply chain, as well as providing specific component to parent tracking, thereby providing the means to expedite recalls, should the need arise. SYSPRO optionally allows specific traceable components to be reserved for specific work-orders, as well as providing the flexibility of specifying the parent traceable numbers at the beginning, during or the end of the manufacturing process.
The Associated Press article reporting the record number of recalls contains the following statement by Mike Rozembajgier, vice president of recalls at Stericycle ExpertRECALL, “The growing importance of this product category means that companies need to have a comprehensive recall plan in place that can be deployed within the blink of an eye and can effectively protect their customers…”
According to SYSPRO USA President Joey Benadretti, “The implementation of cost- effective SYSPRO software helps medical device manufacturers streamline their supply chains and also to employ extensive ‘backwards and forwards’ component and product traceability for speedy recalls.
Technology is changing faster than the methods of procuring it
Kevin Noonan, Research Director, Public Sector, Ovum
Many procedures for government procurement can be traced back through earlier stages of technology development. Over time, procurement has delivered substantial value and, like technology, it has developed and matured. However, the technology sector is changing at an increasing pace and procurement is struggling to keep up.
Business needs have also changed. Today’s corporate priorities are more about agency-wide productivity and consistency delivering better government outcomes. We recently discussed this phenomenon in the Ovum report Bridging the Gap Between IT Cost-Cutting and Agency Productivity. Some agencies are still chasing simple, across-the-board IT cost-cutting, while others are driving more sophisticated savings measures by focusing on agency-wide productivity. Of course, this approach also requires more sophisticated vendor relationships and a much lower tolerance of failure.
The changing technology landscape requires a rethink of requirements-gathering
Today there is a much richer set of engagement options …
Rackspace UK Achieves ISO 14001 Environmental Management Certification
Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has achieved certification to the ISO 14001:2004 Environmental Management standard. The certification is based upon an external validation of the company’s environmental performance with regard to the design, implementation and support of hosting solutions in its UK data centre and office operations.
ISO 14001 certification among cloud data centre providers is still comparatively rare and Rackspace continues to be environmentally proactive in improving its operations. Adherence to the voluntary 14000 or 14001 standards is evidence of Rackspace’s efforts to both improve and formally systematise the company’s environmental management efforts.