If you are like most businesses you struggle with the age-old problem of trying to define the perfect price for your service. You also struggle with what can and is offered as a service. While this is true for all industries, in cloud it is a particularly acute problem. It is important to remember that the cloud market has plenty of opportunity for providers to differentiate offerings or for completely new providers to enter the market and compete. However, unseating the market leaders will not come from selling commodity services. While providers like the old recurring, predictable contracted revenue model, customers are becoming more educated, have more visibility and are demanding that their bill be better aligned with their actual consumption. In addition, service differentiation does not mean simply bundling multiple features to justify a single flat price regardless of a customer’s interest. Customers are reacting to the “tyranny of packages” as they realize they are being forced into a commodity model. There is no question that the value-add bar needs to move higher and service providers need to build tailored, high-margin, sticky relationships with customers. Using financial commitments, you can achieve predictable revenue while providing customers with elasticity to utilize reserved instances, on-demand instances, bandwidth, etc.
Monthly Archives: July 2013
Rationalize Your IT Budget with Recovery-Based Pricing
By Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President, Asigra
If you make software purchasing decisions or influence your company’s data and recovery solutions, there are some recent studies you should know about.
The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently surveyed economic buyers, technical buyers, and financial buyers about their data-growth expectations, cost pressures, pricing preferences, and recovery rates. They discovered:
- – 3 out of 4 respondents expect data to grow at a rate of around 20% a year.
- – 2 out of 3 respondents felt “some” or “strong” pressure” to reduce IT spend.
- – Financial buyers were the most likely group to expect a “substantial increase” in backup & recovery costs over the next 5 yrs.
With these data points in mind, let’s now look at another report by Forrester Research: Demand Pricing That Matches Business Value—The Radical Sourcing Trend for 2013. In this report, Duncan Jones explains why the traditional pricing models currently dominating the software market are “obsolete” and “no longer match products’ cost to the business value they deliver.”
Jones notes that technology market shifts such as cloud and big data affect the way that IT managers and other purchasers buy software. He goes on to recommend that software buyers demand new pricing models that better match business value.
Performance-based pricing models continue to surface in the IT industry, such as recovery-based pricing for backup and recovery users: Recovery-based pricing can be categorized as a performance- or behaviorally driven pricing model that puts greater cost controls in the hands of the user. That’s because this approach has been decoupled from the number of machines protected or the capacity of data to protect. Instead, pricing is connected with the volume of data actually recovered.
Recovery-based pricing allows users to pay for what they are purchasing the solution to do – recover their data. It also helps software purchasers rationalize their IT budget for data and recovery because they will be billed for data that is recovered. This model aligns with a recovery metric, no longer solely based on the backup of data. If a company’s recovery needs are less, then users will pay less for these services. What’s more, it offers a fixed cost of backup with a variable cost for recovery based on the amount of data recovered on an annual basis.
Eran Farajun is the executive vice president for Asigra. The company can be reached at partners@asigra.com or 416-736-8111.
How Cloud, Mobile & APIs Change the Way We Broker Identity
The adoption of cloud by organizations looking for more efficient ways to deploy their own IT assets or as a means to offset the burden of data management drives the need for identity federation in the enterprise. Compounding this is the mobile effect from which there is no turning back. Data must be available any time, from anywhere and the identities accessing it must be asserted on mobile devices, in cloud zones, always under the stewardship of the enterprise.
APIs serve federation by enabling lightweight delegated authentication schemes based on OAuth handshakes using the same patterns as used by social login. The standard specifying such patterns is OpenID Connect where a relying party subjects a user to an OAuth handshake and then calls an API on the identity provider to discover information about the user thus avoiding having to setup a shared secret with that user – no identity silo. This new type of federation using APIs is easi
OVH.com “2013 Reloaded” Dedicated Servers Are Now Hybrid Cloud Ready
OVH.com has unveiled its next generation of custom-made dedicated servers dubbed “2013 Reloaded” and designed specifically for hybrid Cloud infrastructures.
The new servers are perfect to boost the performance of already deployed solutions – like Big Data, databases, critical applications – integrating the last generation of RAID cards, with 6Gbps of bandwidth (unbreakable) and 3 options of access acceleration: the CacheVault technology (with ultra-fast Flash memory), FastPath (improving I/O performances using SSD drives) and CacheCade which combines SSD and SATA/SAS drives for frequent access (SSD) and primary storage (SATA/SAS). A hybrid configuration that enables to reach the best I/O performances in the market, without the heavy cost of a 100% SSD solution.
How Cloud, Mobile & APIs Change the Way We Broker Identity
The adoption of cloud by organizations looking for more efficient ways to deploy their own IT assets or as a means to offset the burden of data management drives the need for identity federation in the enterprise. Compounding this is the mobile effect from which there is no turning back. Data must be available any time, from anywhere and the identities accessing it must be asserted on mobile devices, in cloud zones, always under the stewardship of the enterprise.
APIs serve federation by enabling lightweight delegated authentication schemes based on OAuth handshakes using the same patterns as used by social login. The standard specifying such patterns is OpenID Connect where a relying party subjects a user to an OAuth handshake and then calls an API on the identity provider to discover information about the user thus avoiding having to setup a shared secret with that user – no identity silo. This new type of federation using APIs is easi
A High-Level IDaaS Metric: If and When Moving ID in the Cloud
Building metrics to decide how and whether moving to IDaaS means considering what variables and strategy have to be taken into account when organizations subscribe identity as a service contracts. Before moving any IdM to the Cloud, organization should balance costs and risks. Accordingly, metrics adopted should be enough flexible to be applied from both a company that is developing an IdM system and a company that already has a IAM in operation but is considering to move the ID to the Cloud. The metric introduced below is included into a coming IDaaS Best Practices helping companies to understand, evaluate and then decide if and how moving ID to the Cloud.
A High-Level IDaaS Metric: If and When Moving ID in the Cloud
Building metrics to decide how and whether moving to IDaaS means considering what variables and strategy have to be taken into account when organizations subscribe identity as a service contracts. Before moving any IdM to the Cloud, organization should balance costs and risks. Accordingly, metrics adopted should be enough flexible to be applied from both a company that is developing an IdM system and a company that already has a IAM in operation but is considering to move the ID to the Cloud. The metric introduced below is included into a coming IDaaS Best Practices helping companies to understand, evaluate and then decide if and how moving ID to the Cloud.
Zimory Raises $20 Million
Zimory, a Berlin cloud management start-up, has secured $20 million in funding led by its newest investor Deutsche Boerse. Existing investors Creathor Venture, High-Tech Gruenderfonds (HTGF), IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft (IBB), KFW and T-Venture also kicked in.
Zimory, which has previously seen $5.5 million in venture funding, means to use the new money to expand internationally and develop its vendor-neutral management platform for the cloud services marketplace further.
The recently announced cloud services marketplace, Deutsche Boerse Cloud Exchange, is the world’s first vendor-independent exchange for cloud computing capacities. It will enable IT resources to be traded like securities and energy, electronically, in seconds.
Best and worst performing cloud computing stocks in 2013
Cloud computing stocks continue to show wide variation in performance throughout the first half of this year.
Ten of the twenty companies in the Cloud Computing Stock Index delivered returns to shareholders with NetSuite leading with a 37.30% share gain, delivering $13,730 on $10,000 invested on January 2, 2013.
To more fully define the stock performance of these companies, I’ve added Earnings Per Share (EPS), Price/Earnings Ratio, Year-To-Date (YTD) Total Gains or Loss, Annualized Gain or Loss, and Total Dollar Value of $10,000 invested on January 2, 2013. You can download the latest version of the Cloud Computing Stock Index here. The filter applied to these companies is that 50% or more of their revenues are generated from cloud-based applications, infrastructure and services. Additional details of the index are provided at the end of this post.
Best Performing
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Name |
Symbol |
(1/2/13 – 7 … |
Paris-Based eNovance Snags $7M+ in Funding, Opens North American Office
“This new round of funding confirms the company’s business model and growth potential,” said Philippe Thériault, newly appointed Chief Commercial Officer for North America at Paris-based open source cloud computing company eNovance, as it was announced today that eNovance had finalized a funding deal worth more than $7 million.
eNovance’s unique expertise places us squarely among the few credible players on the market and in a highly advantageous position on the North American market,” explained Thériault.