Aria Systems: Recurring Revenue Market Disruptions to Continue in 2014

The trend of companies adopting recurring revenue surged in 2013, with brand names ranging from Adobe and Amazon to Target and Toyota using new billing and pricing models to grow sales and deepen customer loyalty. This surge will continue this year as more companies adopt recurring revenue models because of their flexibility and convenience for customers. Today, recurring revenue expert Aria Systems issued a projection on the industries poised for further disruption via recurring revenue in 2014 and beyond.
“Businesses large and small, across many sectors, are adopting the flexibility of recurring revenue,” said Tom Dibble, president and CEO, Aria Systems. “It’s not a fad anymore; it’s the new way to do business.”

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The true rate of cloud adoption in healthcare

Although healthcare was once considered an industry that would not adopt cloud computing due to systemic security, legal, and privacy issues, that no longer seems to be the case.  Those in healthcare IT are moving even farther into the world of cloud computing.

The use of cloud computing in the world of healthcare seems logical to me.  Healthcare providers, and payers, are cost sensitive.  They are also experiencing rapid change, thus they could use technology that’s more agile.  Finally, they pay close attention to regulations and compliance.  That’s all good for the cloud.

The problem is that most in healthcare don’t understand the value that cloud can bring.  Instead, many push back on cloud computing, both private and public, typically due to assumptions that are incorrect.  However, there are those who are beginning to push back on the FUD to take advantage of cloud computing.

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Service Provider Leverage in Emerging Collaboration Markets

The rapidly growing cloud market and the significant shifts in the voice and data services marketplace have created unprecedented challenges and opportunities for service providers. While the challenges presented to service providers are numerous and of strategic significance, in the interest of brevity, I will focus on opportunities specific to cloud collaboration.
Business OTT services like UC, UCC, and social collaboration are experiencing a surge in demand (Gartner predicts the collaboration market with grow to $21 B by 2018), and offer much greater margins than consumer OTT services, which are harder to monetize. As PWC observed in its recent report, service providers are especially well positioned to serve the business market given their preexisting relationship in business IT departments, and ownership of networks and infrastructure which allows them to offer best-in-market SLAs.

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Service Provider Leverage in Emerging Collaboration Markets

The rapidly growing cloud market and the significant shifts in the voice and data services marketplace have created unprecedented challenges and opportunities for service providers. While the challenges presented to service providers are numerous and of strategic significance, in the interest of brevity, I will focus on opportunities specific to cloud collaboration.
Business OTT services like UC, UCC, and social collaboration are experiencing a surge in demand (Gartner predicts the collaboration market with grow to $21 B by 2018), and offer much greater margins than consumer OTT services, which are harder to monetize. As PWC observed in its recent report, service providers are especially well positioned to serve the business market given their preexisting relationship in business IT departments, and ownership of networks and infrastructure which allows them to offer best-in-market SLAs.

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IDenticard® Access Control to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York

IDenticard® Access Control is a leading manufacturer of integrated access control solutions to protect employees, visitors, and facilities. Owned by Brady Corporation (NYSE:BRC), a $1.15 billion manufacturer of identification products, IDenticard Access Control draws on its 30 years of experience in security software development to provide innovative products based on its customers’ requirements and the needs of the marketplace. With an in-house engineering team, IDenticard Access Control has developed a patent-pending, revolutionary physical security solution that secures and monitors server rack access at the cabinet level. The system features easy-to-use dynamic mapping and customizable reporting capabilities to identify and track who accesses server racks and specifically where, when, and for how long.

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Interoperability: A Much Needed Cloud Computing Focus

Cloud computing transitions information technology (IT) from being “systems of physically integrated hardware and software” to “systems of virtually integrated services”. This transition makes interoperability the difference between the success and failure of IT deployments, especially in the Federal government. Recent government IT failures like the healthcare portal roll out highlight this critical difference.
Leading specialists serving on the federal health IT committee have voice their concern about the lack of comprehensive interoperability. “I’m concerned that this program isn’t focused on creating an inter-operable system that would allow unaffiliated systems to share medical information,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in an emailed statement to Fox News.

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Interoperability: A Much Needed Cloud Computing Focus

Cloud computing transitions information technology (IT) from being “systems of physically integrated hardware and software” to “systems of virtually integrated services”. This transition makes interoperability the difference between the success and failure of IT deployments, especially in the Federal government. Recent government IT failures like the healthcare portal roll out highlight this critical difference.
Leading specialists serving on the federal health IT committee have voice their concern about the lack of comprehensive interoperability. “I’m concerned that this program isn’t focused on creating an inter-operable system that would allow unaffiliated systems to share medical information,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said in an emailed statement to Fox News.

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The Missing Pieces of Agile Architecture

Instead of abstracting individual, static Service interfaces, Business Services must abstract sets of such interfaces via content-based routing and transformation operations on an intermediary like an ESB. Implement those abstraction operations as a matter of policy, and you shift control of the behavior of your SOA deployment to the metadata-driven policy layer. Get all this right and you have enormous control and flexibility over your legacy environment. The problem is, of course, that it’s extraordinarily difficult to get all these moving parts right.

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My Upcoming #cloudchat with IBM

I will be part of a tweetchat on Thursday, Feb. 13 at 4pm EST. The topic will be PaaS. The event is hosted by @IBMCloud, but there is no expectation to talk about IBM, its strategy, or its products. The company is taking the enlightened view that good conversation is good for everybody.

The nominal topic is whether the term PaaS is dying, whether it will soon (or some day) simply be integrated into IaaS.

I generally loathe this sort of metaphysical conversation except late at night in places with dramshop insurance.

That said, it should be fun. Among the panalists will be Judy Hurwitz, who’s been a definitive font of IT knowledge for more years than either she or I care to remember. She’s been on a tear recently, writing innumerable articles and several good books about Cloud Computing in all its forms and the world of XaaS. Judy is always practical.

As I hope to be as well. As I recently wrote, I’m involved with a new datacenter project, which itself is part of an overall strategy for a software start-up. I am looking at PaaS in all its forms – independent, bound to an ecosystem, open-source, and all grey areas to be found.

Our chat will be found on Twitter at #cloudchat.

Please feel free to chime in with comments as the thing unfolds.

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Where Is Oracle Headed in the Cloud?

Oracle has sounded extremely optimistic about their future; one that is going to be dominated by the cloud. The company has reported cloud revenue growth of anywhere between 35% and 50% over the past few quarterly financial reports. Safra Catz, the Chief Financial Officer at Oracle is noted to have said that her company is focused at increasing market share on the cloud at this point “unlike all those cloud companies” like SalesForce that are focusing on profits.
So is the company seeing a paradigm shift in their revenue pie? Not really. Despite the buzz about Oracle’s focus being on the cloud, this segment only contributes to 3% of the overall revenues at the moment. According to a report by Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher, the organic cloud growth at Oracle in the second quarter is not expected to have been more than 6%.

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