Monthly Archives: February 2013

Cloud Understanding, EMEA, Research

Polls: Quarter of US, Third of UK Know What ‘Cloud’ Means

Webfusion, a UK hosting group, polled more than 1,000 respondents in the US to gauge their understanding of ‘cloud’ technology. Of the respondents, almost one third (31.8 per cent) stated that they had no understanding of the term at all, with only 25 per cent claiming to have a clear understanding of Cloud technology. The findings come on the heels of a similar survey conducted in the UK, which revealed that 34 per cent of the British public had a good understanding of ‘cloud’.

Key findings include:

  • 25-34 year olds have the best understanding of ‘cloud’, with one third (33.8 per cent) claiming to know what Cloud computing is
  • 63 per cent do not recognize Dropbox / iTunes/ Gmail / Hotmail as Cloud services
  • 91 per cent do not recognize scalable hosting as ‘Cloud’. This figure stands at 84 per cent in the UK

Commenting on the findings, Thomas Vollrath, CEO of Webfusion’s parent company Host Europe Group, said: “We were surprised at the general lack of cloud knowledge in the UK, but it turns out that we are much more Cloud savvy than our American counterparts, despite the US often being considered as technological innovators. With research indicating that three quarters of US businesses are consciously using some sort of cloud service, with UK adoption standing at 61 per cent, these results are yet more surprising.

“If consumers in the US don’t know what ‘Cloud’ means and have no idea that applications like iTunes are Cloud-based, then perhaps the use of the term should be restricted, at least in consumer circles. The reversal between US and UK consumer and enterprise Cloud knowledge goes to show that the use of the term ‘Cloud’ still remains a business message and should be used as such,” he concluded.

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Cloud Expo NY: Calculating the True Value of Industry-Specific Clouds

Industry-specific clouds are those PaaS, IaaS, and PaaS services that are tailored for a specific vertical, such as transportation, retail, finance, and health care. IDC sees a $65 billion market in these industry solutions for 2013, rising to $100 billion in 2016.
The value of industry-specific clouds is that businesses within a vertical can connect to applications, processes, and databases that are pre-defined for that vertical within a public or private cloud. They can extend processes and databases into the business domain, versus defining the data and processes within a generic cloud-based platform.
So, are industry specific clouds right for your business? What options are out there? How do you figure out the ROI?

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NewVoiceMedia Secures $20M Series B Funding

NewVoiceMedia,a provider of Cloud contact centre services, today announced that it has secured $20m funding from new investors Highland Capital Partners Europe and MMC Ventures, as well as existing shareholders Notion Capital and Eden Ventures.
NewVoiceMedia’s cloud service is instantly deployable and provides unique and patented routing capabilities designed to enhance the customer experience. The company is growing by more than 200% a year and now serves more than 8000 agents in 30 countries including Parcelforce, PhotoBox, QlikTech and SHL.
The additional investment will help accelerate the Company’s global ambitions including opening new offices in North America, where the solution is already widely used. Its platform, ContactWorld, integrates natively with salesforce.com Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, enabling customers to quickly and easily deploy world-class contact centres.

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Cloud Expo New York: Requirements of a Cloud Database

The traditional databases of the 20th century were never designed to scale to meet 21st century data demands. Google alone processes about 24 petabytes of data/day. With the added complexity of heavily virtualized hardware and storage plus apps being moved in and out of private, hybrid and public clouds, application developers, SaaS vendors, ISVs and enterprise IT all need a better answer.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Barry Morris, CEO & Co-Founder of NuoDB, Inc., will through customer examples and performance benchmarks explore the new rules for a 21st century Cloud Data Management System and discuss the critical new roles databases play in customers’ strategies and how to resolve today’s web-scale challenges.

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AMD Micro Servers Certified on Rackspace, Validated on OpenStack

AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 x86-based micro server has been certified for the Rackspace Private Cloud, which simplifies the management of large pools of compute, storage and networking resources using OpenStack.
The so-called “Nova in a Box” and “Swift in a Rack” reference architectures are respectively supposed to be the most efficient compute and highest storage capacity solutions validated for OpenStack.
Product Certification means that enterprise deployments of Rackspace Private Cloud on SeaMicro SM15000 micro servers are a proven and rigorously tested solution.

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Managing IT in an Environment of Change

Social interactions driven by mobile devices are causing a huge growth in infrastructure needs by enterprises. This write-up is about an event held for enterprise users.
The growth of mobile devices generated by smartphones and tablets is driving universal access to information in the multi-channel era. Similarly, social networking is a disruptive change that influences many aspects of consumer behavior. The large amount of data created through these means requires analytics to help enterprises respond to market dynamics. Cloud technologies help enterprises analyze this data in a timely manner, enabling enterprises to deliver significant advantages over their competition.
On January 22, 2013, Oracle hosted an executive roundtable in Cincinnati for enterprise IT users to discuss these changes and associated challenges. Attendees represented a variety of industries, so their requirements varied, but the fundamental need to transform how enterprise IT adapts to these changes was the same.

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Build vs buy—5 reasons you shouldn’t build your own CRM

By Sangeetha Parthasarathy

As a business consulting company, we frequently hear the comment, “We are more than capable of building our own home-grown technology ecosystem.” That’s great. But before you jump in head-first, and start buying a bunch of servers and stalking developers on LinkedIn, you should consider everything required to build, implement, and maintain your system.

Here at Bluewolf, we’ve discovered several misguided rationales behind building your own CRM. To avoid falling into those traps, consider these 5 wrong reasons to build your own CRM:

  1. “I can build it, so I will.”

    This is the most common reason. We often come across tech companies, start-ups, online retailers, etc. who have a lot of in-house technology expertise. While it is logical to think that a company can achieve this technology transformation in-house, issues often lie around resourcing and prioritisation.

    Development resources are often tight and are necessarily channeled …

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Roundup of cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts 2013

When the CEO of a rust-belt manufacturer speaks of cloud computing as critical to his company’s business strategies for competing globally, it’s clear a fundamental shift is underway.

Nearly every manufacturing company I’ve spoken with in the last 90 days has a mobility roadmap and is also challenged to integrate existing ERP, pricing and fulfillment systems into next-generation selling platforms.

One of the most driven CEOs I’ve met in manufacturing implemented a cloud-based channel management, pricing, quoting and CRM system to manage direct sales and a large distributor network across several countries.  Manufacturers are bringing an entirely new level of pragmatism to cloud computing, quickly deflating its hype by pushing for results on the shop floor.

There’s also been an entirely new series of enterprise software and cloud computing forecasts and market estimates published. I’ve summarised the key take-aways below:

  • Enterprise sales of ERP …
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Cloud Tips: Virtualization vs cloud computing – What is the difference?

As the new technologies emerge, the number of technical terms also gets piled up. While those who are always updated are familiar of all the seemingly “vague” terms, the rest of the world remained confused. Such is the case tackling the collaboration, crowdsourcing, social media and a lot more. In this article, we will differentiate between cloud computing and virtualization.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Apparently, many businesses have been alarmed and informed on the advantages of using cloud computing against traditional storage for their files and data. Aside from the power of accessibility, mobility and security, cloud computing brings in more savings and more efficiency for maintaining the operations of the company. In line with this, the concept of virtualization is often mixed up with the former approach. Both are gaining dominance, however people are not sure just how different they are from each other.

There have been heated arguments …

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Cloud Conversations: Public, Private, Hybrid & Community Clouds? | Part 2

Common community cloud conversation questions include among others:
Who defines the standards for community clouds?
The members or participants, or whoever they hire or get to volunteer to do it.
Who pays for the community cloud?
The members or participants do, think about a co-op or other resource sharing consortium with multi-tenant (shared) capabilities to isolate and keep members along with what they are doing separate.

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