Cisco blogged Monday that it intents to acquire the privately held Viennese cloud company SolveDirect for its cloud integration software. It said nothing about price.
In 2009 Cisco promised to underwrite the operation, then a subsidiary of Brain Force Holding AG, to the tune of €6 million over the years and fund its expansion into the US with the objective of tripling its revenues.
As part of the deal Brain Force spun it off but was still an investor, now probably holding less than 50%. It depends on how much Cisco’s investment in the firm diluted its position.
In 2008, SolveDirect generated revenues of €5.7 million and an EBITDA of over €1 million, employing 41 people. Cisco is reportedly a SolveDirect customer. The Austrian company is also a partner of BMC, which is currently in the throes of getting auctioned off and taken private.

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The responsibility for proper consumption of Cloud resources doesn’t fall to a single role in our organization. Rather, developers, operations personnel, as well as the managers responsible for the Cloud provider business relationship must work together to ensure the code is correct, the configurations are efficient, and the costs are transparent and carefully monitored.
There’s nothing worse than opening your water bill and finding that it’s a hundred dollars more than you expected. You scour your house and find the culprit: a leaky toilet or perhaps a dripping faucet. Hard to believe a simple drip drip drip can run up your water bill so dramatically, but those drips add up, quickly.

Replace the water with IT capability, and you have Cloud Computing. The pay-as-you-go utility model for Cloud promises dramatic cost savings, especially when unpredictable demand in a traditional, on-premise environment would require poorly utilized servers, sitting mostly idle on the off chance some spike in demand comes along. But just as with your water bill, there are many ways for your Cloud bill to go through the roof unexpectedly. Recognizing the Cloud equivalents to your problem plumbing fixtures can make the difference between saving money in the Cloud and flushing your savings down the drain.

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By, Elliot Curtis, Senior Director, Channel Development, Parallels

The world of the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) has changed radically over the last few years and continues to evolve as the Cloud becomes more and more pervasive for businesses of all sizes. Here, I take a look at just a few trends that ISVs face and the implications for their business.

Everyone is becoming an ISV: With advances in development tools and IaaS/PaaS, the barriers to building and delivering a business oriented SaaS application are very low. Consequently, IT services companies of all types (VARs, SIs, Hosters, Web Designers, etc.) find it easy to move into adjacent ISV categories. It is a relatively reliable way of generating new reoccurring revenue from an existing customer base and increases customer stickiness. As a result, traditional SaaS ISVs are facing an increasingly crowded market with many competitors who have a built-in customer base. Having a clear understanding of routes-to-market and channel strategy has become increasingly critical for application success, and ISVs should be prepared to develop strategic relationships that help reduce the burden of getting in front of potential customers.

Enterprise problems are becoming SMB problems and even Consumer problems: Starting in the middle of the last decade a lot of money was spent by Enterprise IT on trying to solve hard problems around the applications they supported for their business clients. How can data get shared across multiple applications? How do users avoid multiple application authentications and credentials? How do users quickly find the application they need? SMBs typically avoided tackling these issues because they either had pretty simple application requirements or they could afford to ignore the problem. But, because of the Cloud, what used to be limited to the realm of Enterprise IT has started to become everyone’s problem. SMBs (and I’ll throw consumers in too) increasingly have access to a huge variety of applications that would have been unthinkable even five years ago, and while their tolerance for multiple log-ins, siloed solutions, and difficult application discovery is pretty high, it is shrinking fast. For applications to become more SMB friendly, ISVs need to think about: single sign-on support for the customer, applications being aware of other applications so that data is shared, and application discoverability based on user requirements. These are not problems ISVs can solve in isolation and are also issues shared by Cloud Marketplace providers, who are increasingly the face to the customer. The ecosystem needs to have standardized models and approaches that offer open participation and a scalable approach.

Cross application & platform support: Again, this used to be an Enterprise only challenge that was solved by a centralized support organization that understood the infrastructure and the applications running on that infrastructure within the confines of Enterprise IT. With the proliferation of SaaS applications, marketplaces and aggregator/brokers, all of whom have a part to play in delivering the service to the customer, how does the SMB customer get effective and rapid resolution to their problem? Consider the complexity: a customer may purchase a suite of SaaS apps from a Service Provider or Marketplace that is using a Service Delivery Platform from yet another software vendor and meanwhile each SaaS ISV is running their own application in a datacenter somewhere. Questions such as; “Who owns Tier 1 support & how do incidents get escalated?” are just scratching the surface of business rules. Operationally, there may be as many as five or six different support systems that all need to talk to each other with a taxonomy everyone involved understands. If effective technical and business solutions are not implemented up-front, support will quickly become a huge expense and a customer satisfaction nightmare.

As SaaS ISVs think through their go-to-market strategies and execution plans, these are three critical areas that have implications for future growth and sustainability. A key to success is to explore emerging standards such as APS 2.0 and Cloud companies that are working to help overcome these challenges.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Dell Inc. has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
For more than 28 years, Dell has empowered countries, communities, customers and people everywhere to use technology to realize their dreams. Customers trust Dell to deliver technology solutions that help them do and achieve more, whether they’re at home, work, school or anywhere in their world. Learn more about Dell’s story, purpose and people behind its customer-centric approach.

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The cloud movement is about much more than the service offerings. It’s a core ingredient of a larger commercial transformation movement — where savvy leaders are using business technology to advance their operations and accelerate their key processes.
According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on hosted private cloud (HPC) services will be more than $24 billion in 2016. IDC says that they define HPC as an operational model for deploying computing infrastructure services of many types via the cloud.
IDC forecasts that HPC spending will experience a compound annual growth rate of more than 50 percent during the 2012-2016 period, as companies look to managed cloud services in its various forms as a means to transform the ‘how’ of what they provide to their customers.

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The current technology refresh cycle presents many opportunities, and challenges to both organizations and governments. The potential of service-oriented architectures, interoperability, collaboration, and continuity of operations is an attractive outcome of technologies and business models available today. The challenges are more related to business processes and human factors, both of which require organizational transformations to take best advantage of the collaborative environments enabled through use of cloud computing and access to broadband communications.

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By Geoff Smith, Sr. Solutions Architect

It is inarguable that change is sweeping the IT industry.  Over the last five years a number of new technologies that provide huge technological advantages (and create management headaches) have been developed.  We have attempted to leverage these advances to the benefit of our organizations, while at the same time struggling with how to incorporate them into our established IT management methodologies. 

Do we need to throw out our mature management protocols in order to partake in the advantages provided by these new technologies, or can we modify our core management approaches and leverage similar advances in management methodologies to provide a more extensible platform that enables adoption of advanced computing architectures?

Cloud computing is one such advance.  One barrier to adopting cloud as a part of an IT strategy is how we will manage the resources it provides us.  Technically, cloud services are …

According to the latest report published by Strategy Analytics, Apple is moving ahead of competitors Dropbox, Google and Amazon in the battle for cloud storage supremacy.

Over a quarter (27%) of Americans polled said they had used iCloud, compared with 17% for Dropbox, with Amazon Cloud Drive (15%) and Google Drive (10%) trailing behind.

Interestingly, over half of respondents (55%) had never used a cloud storage service, but 33% had first used one within the past week.

The report noted the key battleground in the cloud storage wars was music, with nine in 10 users storing music, although movie content has the potential to become a huge player in the space.

“The growth of video streaming and the desire to access content via a growing range of devices will see services such as the Hollywood-backed digital movie initiative Ultraviolet – currently used by 4% of Americans – increase market share,” noted Strategy …

More and more of our lives are lived online. Our music collections, bookshelves, vacation memories and more are increasingly digitized and uploaded into the cloud, the vast network of server farms that provide the bulk of online storage today. Research firm Gartner projects that by 2016, 36 percent of consumer content will be stored on the cloud, up from a mere seven percent in 2011.
Service providers, watching these trends with a wary eye, will be required to accommodate ever-increasing demands for storage as consumer appetites for cloud content storage continues to grow. To adapt, many service providers are exploring new options in data center architecture that will permit greater flexibility and control over hardware costs.

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Both the Blackstone Group, the big private equity house, and the
indomitable activist investor Carl Icahn met Dell’s midnight deadline Friday
to express interest in the company, setting the stage for a bidding war against
Michael Dell and his partner, the Silver Lake Group.

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