The follow up article to Welcome to the Age of the Consumer: No Opinion Matters More
Now we go into how to take advantage of those essential first few days or even minutes that you have your potential customer’s attention in order to follow through on heightened expectations of stellar customer service.
Information Technology (IT) service providers have historically struggled between the huge capital expenditure and long development cycles of building their own cloud versus the thin margins and limited flexibility of using public retailers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The emergence of wholesale cloud, and the technologies that make it possible, is revolutionizing how and by whom enterprise IT is delivered. Wholesale cloud is the game-changing third option between building your own (BYO) cloud and public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), providing the advantages of each minus any of the drawbacks. We are entering a new realm of cloud computing as the next wave of technical innovations from emerging startups brings the dawn of Cloud 2.0, and with it, a new era of IT transformation and agility. The global market for cloud services is expected to grow from $131 billion in 2013 to $244 billion by 2017 (source: PwC), and wholesale cloud presents tremendous opportunities for a growing segment of service providers (MSPs, SIs, and VARs) to gain a competitive advantage and effectively compete against larger players.
This BriefingsDirect innovator case study interview explores how a Texas healthcare provider has adopted cloud computing, and in doing so has both saved money and improved the quality of its many services.
Creative Solutions in HealthCare is the largest independent owner and operator of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), which are nursing homes, in the State of Texas. We also operate assisted-living facilities and we provide long-term care solutions, primarily in Texas.
In late November, Microsoft announced that first release customers would have access to Office 365 Video – a YouTube type video service in Microsoft 0365. Previously, video in O365 has pretty much been a load it to OneDrive and/or SharePoint online and “let ‘er rip” service. Customers could use the local video tool of their choice to watch their own videos but were not able to treat it as a viable social media entity like YouTube. For many users, the biggest detriment originally was that there was no organization or even ways to spawn that video online, let alone share or comment on it, so it really was not a great alternative to YouTube. But if I want a Microsoft-centric solution to promote my business within the ever expanding Microsoft Cloud model, then what do I use for a native solution without a ton of development time? Microsoft believes Office 365 Video is the answer.
Below, I answer some common questions around Office 365 Video:
Which Office 365 plans are required to get use this new offering?
Office 365 Video is included in the Office 365 E1, E2, E3 and E4 subscription plans (and the corresponding A2, A3 and A4 plans for Academic customers). To date, this is only for commercial customers and does not apply to SLED or FedGov (yet).
Do you have to incur additional costs for Azure Media Services consumption?
The integrated Azure Media Services usage does not incur additional cost to customer; videos stored in Office 365 will count against SharePoint Online team sites pooled storage. This is a doubled edge sword. Video format is key here, and without an education on what is a good frame rate to upload versus another you can easily run through your space allotted in those team sites.
What Office 365 workloads do I need for Office 365 Video to work?
Office 365 Video requires SharePoint Online. Once Office 365 Video has been rolled out to your users per the license model above, Office 365 Video will be enabled.
When will Office 365 Video be available in my cloud environment?
Customers who have opted into First Release should have seen, or will start to see very soon, Office 365 Video appear. Deployment beyond First Release, to standard deployment tenants, is targeted to complete worldwide by early 2015.
Can I turn off Office 365 Video for my subscription?
Yes. You can disable and enable it from within the SharePoint Online admin center.
Will Office 365 Video be available for the Office 365 Business SKUs (formerly the Small Business plans)?
No
Will Office 365 Video be available for the Office 365 Dedicated plans?
No
Hopefully this helps clarify some of the details around this announcement. If you have any other questions, reach out and I will be more than happy to answer them for you. socialmedia@greenpages.com
By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies
Amazon and Google have built software-defined data centers (SDDCs) that deliver massively scalable services with great efficiency. Yet, building SDDCs has proven to be a near impossibility for companies without hyper-scale resources.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, David Cauthron, CTO and Founder of NIMBOXX, highlighted how a mid-sized manufacturer of global industrial equipment bridged the gap from virtualization to software-defined services, streamlining operations and costs while connecting the infrastructure between its corporate data center and remote partner sites. He also discussed performance expectations and detail implementation scenarios.
Already, in the few short years that cloud has been in the mainstream IT conversation, we’ve seen the rise of “bare metal” cloud (thus ending the illusion of cloud’s infinite capacity to users), the substitution of virtualized machines by Docker containers, and most recently, the potential disruption of containers through the recent CoreOS Rocket announcement and Docker’s alleged movement toward full-fledged PaaS.
Meanwhile, PaaS was supposed to be subsumed into IaaS this year. Oh, and companies who were routinely accused of “cloudwashing” a few years ago are now considered to be mainstream cloud technology providers.
Which brings us to this week’s formal establishment of the Coud Foundry Foundation. Initial reaction seems to be that his organization will be detrimental to non-members Red Hat and Oracle, although it’s clear that Oracle will buy almost anything it seems it needs, and Red Hat is large enough (with $1.5 billion annual revenue) to shore up its weaknesses (say, in containers) as well.
Look at the “major cloud features” in this SingleHop infographic. Notice how some reference work life, some personal life (I was going to say “private life” but thought better of it) and most serve both halves of the lives we lead today.
Now that cloud services have become part of IT’s “new normal,” commonly referred to as “hybrid,” it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongst companies, of course. According to a Website Magazine article quoting a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional applications to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to your existing datacenter with RaaS.
PaaS has been such a great innovation for developers. They can develop and deploy applications from their desktop to the cloud, all in a consistent environment. They can deploy to production themselves, bypassing the IT middleman and speeding up the application delivery process. And they can develop in any language they want, without limitations. Developers have it made! But what about IT?
Does PaaS help them in any way or is it just another system for them to manage? Is this an unnecessary complication or does it help them? Why do they need PaaS?
“ElasticBox is an enterprise company that makes it very easy for developers and IT ops to collaborate to develop, build and deploy applications on any cloud – private, public or hybrid,” stated Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.