While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.
Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.

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During a recent conversation with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and his top executives, it became apparent that amid all the new technology advancements like cloud computing and Big Data, organizations are struggling to seek the concrete advantages in applying these technologies to their own real-world scenarios. Even more worrisome is the situation that occurs when an organization cannot leverage any of the already-proven solution approaches or services to address a specific problem or a concern and the situation remains unresolved over time.
These issues could very well be rooted in the way an organization goes about solving problems. Or they can reflect the inability of their service provider and technology vendor to identify the need for change and the implementation of the right solution.

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This year, Eucalyptus Professional Services is going open. All the way open,” blogged Jason Eden, Senior Director of Professional Services at Eucalyptus Systems, this week as the open source cloud company ushered in changes in the realm of Education, Consulting, and Certification.

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Cloud compliance is always a hot topic, but recent updates to the HIPAA and PCI regulations, have further enhanced the need to clarify some important points around cloud compliance and regulatory compliance. In this blog post, I would like to address some issues as highlighted in the valuable PCI DSS Cloud Computing Guidelines (available here), around compliance and Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. (While the trigger is the PCI guideline, the discussion applies to HIPAA as well).
First and foremost, the level of control and your ability as a cloud customer to implement security in your cloud environment is dictated by your cloud type. For example a customer using Software as a Service (SaaS) will have the least amount of control and the SaaS provider will have the greatest level of responsibility for data security, while in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the customer has much more control on data security implemented in his cloud account while the IaaS provider will emphasize “shared responsibility”. And to translate it to compliance: A customer in a SaaS environment must rely heavily on the provider’s compliance (which is either there or not), while in a IaaS environment the customer must take active responsibility for compliance together with tools provided by the IaaS cloud provider.

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During a recent conversation with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and his top executives, it became apparent that amid all the new technology advancements like cloud computing and Big Data, organizations are struggling to seek the concrete advantages in applying these technologies to their own real-world scenarios. Even more worrisome is the situation that occurs when an organization cannot leverage any of the already-proven solution approaches or services to address a specific problem or a concern and the situation remains unresolved over time.
These issues could very well be rooted in the way an organization goes about solving problems. Or they can reflect the inability of their service provider and technology vendor to identify the need for change and the implementation of the right solution.

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The biggest eye-opener in Gartner’s recently-published study on the current agenda regarding the digital landscape for Chief Information Officers is that CIO’s recognize that cloud computing will not only be a significant part of the future, but that their own roles and behavior need to be updated to survive in the modern enterprise.

“CIOs will have to develop new IT strategies and plans that go beyond the usual day-to-day maintenance of an enterprise IT infrastructure…. technologies provide a platform to achieve results, but only if CIOs adopt new roles and behaviors to find digital value.”

Most CIOs recognize that the future of enterprise IT lay not with sitting and writing code and patching servers, but rather one of strategic development and as an integrator of business goals: riding the sea change from a person plugging in cables to an analyst; from a compiler of stacks to a broker …

Michael Dell may be facing a stockholders’ revolt.
T. Rowe Price, the mutual fund biggie that held 4.4% of Dell at the end of the third quarter, isn’t prepared to support the company’s leveraged buy-out at the price the Dell board agreed to last week.
T. Rowe Price chairman and chief investment officer Brian Rogers released a statement saying, “We believe the proposed buyout does not reflect the value of Dell and we do not intend to support the offer as put forward.”
His position mirrors that of Southeastern Asset Management, which is understood to hold 8.4% of Dell and faces a loss of nearly $400 million if the deal goes down at the $13.65 or $24.4 billion agreed to. It claims Dell is worth $24 a share, a price it hasn’t fetched in a long time.

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Today it is exactly two years since the weirdest Valentine’s Day I have ever experienced, or indeed hope ever to experience again.

February 14, 2011, in short, is etched into my diary and my brain as the day when I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

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Guest Post: Ilyas Iyoob, Director, Advanced Analytics and Sr. Research Scientist, PhD at Gravitant

We first went from reserving cloud capacity to securing capacity on-demand, and then we even started to bid for unused capacity in the spot market – all in an effort to decrease cost in the cloud.  Can we take this one step further?  Instead of us bidding for capacity, wouldn’t it be interesting if we can get providers to bid for our demand?

Retail supply chain market analogy

In fact, this is a common phenomena in the retail supply chain industry.  For example, Walmart has a large amount of freight that needs to be shipped between different cities over the course of the year.  So, every year an auction is conducted in which Walmart lists all their shipments, and carriers such as JB Hunt, Schneider, Yellow etc. bid for the opportunity to carry these shipments using …

by Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

Lifestyle hosting is where many of the great hosting companies began. The first few customers, managed from the kitchen table, hosting begins as a hobby to express creativity and business acumen. For many this is also where hosting stays and has the most appeal. A lifestyle choice.

But for some this is just the beginning to life-long growth and the first step into building a business that can feed a family, pay for college, and maybe build a family legacy. 

For both the lifestyle hosters  and those who want to keep growing, single-server-panel technology is the definitive starting point. It is easy to setup, available on both Linux and Windows, has a simple user interface and management console and in most cases stays up-to-date with latest technology like support for IPV6 and services beyond shared hosting.

For lifestyle hosters this is all that is needed – the ultimate solution. For professional hosters it works well with the first few hundred customers. It then becomes the biggest obstacle to growth and the hoster’s worst enemy.

Key to growing at the ~ 1k user level is personal time. At this stage in the development of the hosting business money is still short and demands on the personal time of an owner become extremely high. Growth requires focus on customer acquisition but this time is simply not available, eaten away by the administrative tasks of managing multiple servers.  When you are running a hosting business with 5+ servers,  your day is spend on logging and re-logging; managing mail software n-times over; patching OS and apps; restoring data, and managing AV software.

The result is frustration, and slow or no-growth and in some cases the demise of hosting business when owners overreach and overstretch. This should not and need not happen. And the single-server-panel is to blame.

A solution to that problem is a hosting infrastructure that can grow with the needs of a hosting business, scale without creating administrative overhead with each server added, and be open to new services module.

Parallels Plesk Automation is a brand new solution that tackles this problem. It leverages learnings from the early multi-server solutions like Parallels Business Automation Standard, Parallels expand and Parallels H-Sphere products and combines it with the enterprise class architecture of Parallels Automation and the usability of Parallels Plesk Panel technology. The result is a multi-server hosting solution that easily scales from one server to one hundred, reduces administration overhead by providing administration of the complete hosting infrastructure from the single pane of glass, improves security of the system by creating a new level of isolation between the nodes, and drives performance of the system up with node optimization.

For professional hosters this means breaking “the glass ceiling” of single-server hosting. With low administration, the owner of a growing hosting business can devote more time to customer acquisition and will finally break through the 1000 customer barrier. For larger hosters, it means deep optimization of infrastructure and new wave of growth. A consistent code base from the single server Plesk Panel through Plesk Automation all the way to a telco-ready Parallels Automation ensures not only unblocked growth potential but also an opportunity for a smooth exit strategy if the owner chooses to sell and a business needs to be integrated into a larger provider infrastructure.

Rapidly growing consumption of cloud services by small businesses creates plenty of space for a professional hosting business to succeed and grow. With Parallels Plesk Automation, they now have a platform to base that growth on.