Category Archives: SMB

Artificial intelligence, Big Data, data analytics, News & Analysis, Salesforce, SMB

Salesforce SMB’s business leader talks data analytics, AI and the age of entrepreneurship

Sanj Salesforce

Sanj Bhayro, SVP EMEA Commercial at Salesforce

While the business world has traditionally favoured the biggest and the richest, cloud as a technology is seen as the great equalizer. Through a transition through to the cloud, SMBs are being empowered to take on the nemesis of enterprise business, with the number of wins growing year-on-year.

This, according to Salesforce’s Sanj Bhayro, is one of the most exciting trends we’re now witnessing in business throughout the world. Bhayro currently leads the EMEA SMB business at Salesforce and for almost 11 years has been part of the team which has seen the power of intelligent CRM systems grow backroom businesses to industry giants. Just look at the growth and influence of companies such as Uber and AirBnB for justification of his claims.

“The SMB business in Salesforce is one of the most exciting, because we get to work with really innovative companies,” said Bhayro. “All the innovation in the industry is coming from these small to medium sized businesses. They are disrupting the traditional market which is in turn forcing the traditional players to transform their own business models.

“Something which is interesting from our perspective at Salesforce is that when we started 17 years ago the internet wasn’t that prevalent, the cloud wasn’t a word that was used that often, and it was the SMB companies who adopted our technology. The cloud offered them the operational efficiency, the scale and the reach to take on these traditional players. These smaller organizations are looking more and more towards technology as the enabler for innovation.”

The majority of the SMBs could be considered to be too small to drive innovation in-house. For the most part, the IT department is small, and responsible for ‘keeping the lights on’, working through the cloud has enabled innovation and created opportunities for these organizations. And for the most part, the ability to be innovative is much more prominent in the smaller organizations.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

The fail-fast business model is one which has captured the imagination of numerous enterprise organizations around the world. Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos recently claimed the fail-fast model was the catalyst for recent growth within the AWS business, though the majority are seemingly struggling to implement the right culture which encourages learning and innovating through failing. For the majority, failure is simply failure, not part of the journey to success.

But this in itself is one of the ways in which the smaller, more agile organizations are innovating and catching enterprise scale businesses. The implementation of cloud platforms speeds up the failures and lessens negative impacts on the business, to further drive the journey to innovation.

“For start-ups and early stage companies, failing is an accepted mentality. How many companies are actually the same as when they started? They failed, learned and then progressed. As businesses become bigger and bigger it becomes a lot more difficult. Certainly for larger companies there is a lot more friction around the fail-fast model. Smaller companies are culturally set up to allow them to pivot and try new things, whereas larger ones, purely because of their size, are constrained.”

Outside of the SMB team, Salesforce engineers have been prioritizing the use of artificial intelligence for future product launches and updates. This was reinforced during the company’s quarterly earnings call in recent weeks as CEO Marc Benioff backed AI as the next major growth driver. While there is potential for AI in the SMB market place, for the moment it is only for those who are ahead of the curve.

For the most part, data analytics is starting to drip down into smaller organizations, though there is still a substantial amount of data which is not being utilized. For Bhayro, as the concept of the cloud is now ubiquitous, the opportunities are almost limitless. But only once these organizations have got on top of managing their own data, breaking down the silos within the business.

Robotic hand, accessing on laptop, the virtual world of information. Concept of artificial intelligence and replacement of humans by machines.“AI translates well into the SMB business model and it will be the SMBs who drive where AI goes,” said Bhayro. “There are generally two camps when it comes to the SMB market, those who are cloud-native, those who capitalizing on the sharing-economy and those who are more traditional organizations. The shift that the traditional business has to make to break down the silos, and to move towards a cloud back-end is far more difficult than a company like Deliveroo who started in the cloud and can scale. Never the less that shift has to be made.”

“So much data is being created and there’s so much that you can do with it. The problem is that so many companies are not doing enough with their data. Recent reports stated that most companies can only analyse 1% of their data. Even before we start moving towards AI technologies, the way we service intelligence is through insight. We need to provide the right tools to make data available and malleable, to everybody in your business. These data analytics tools are the first steps and then we can look forward to AI technologies.”

The UK government has made numerous schemes available to SMBs to encourage the growth of this subsector in recent years, and Bhayro believes these efforts have been playing off in the international markets.

“I delighted to say that the UK takes a leadership position (in relation to SMB growth and innovation in comparison to the rest of Europe),” said Bhayro. “Something in the region of 95-96% of the companies in the UK are SMBs, and the government is currently doing the right things to encourage and propel entrepreneurs. I think we’re in the time of entrepreneurship, and this is the time for people to have the vision and grow. These companies are having wonderful ideas, and they are moving into the growth period, but it’s the customer experience which really differentiates them from the competition. Not many of these companies are set up to achieve customer experience objectives, but this is where we (Salesforce) come in.”

Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid, News & Analysis, SMB

HPE targets SMB hybrid cloud market

cloud-hubHPE has launched ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid, a new offering designed for small and mid-sized businesses, educational institutions and branch offices.

As part of the offering, customers will receive an on premise server, as well as public cloud computing capabilities through HPE. The proposition is the first from the company’s Easy Connect portfolio, which will eventually be a collection of product offerings with the aim of making cloud adoption easier for smaller organizations.

“Small businesses want to focus on growing their core businesses, not spending their limited resources on deploying and managing IT,” said McLeod Glass, GM for SMB solutions at HPE. “This new solution is part of a broad HPE initiative, inspired by the unique needs of small and mid-sized businesses, to deliver innovative solutions that are easy for our channel partners to sell and easy for our customers to use.”

While the cloud market has to date focused on implementation in enterprise size organizations, there have been a number of plays for the SMB market in recent weeks, including from Go Daddy and Microsoft. Although the SMB market does not offer the same level of contracts as those in enterprise scale organizations, it could turn into a potentially lucrative segment. Research from BCSG highlighted that adoption levels are rising healthily.

SMB statsThe finding stated 64% of SMB’s are currently using at least one cloud solution to help them run their business, though the average number of cloud services was in fact three. 78% of the market is considering increasing the number of services they currently consume and by 2017, BCSG estimate that 88% will be using at least one service, and the average number of services consumed per company will be seven.

The ProLiant Easy Connect Managed Hybrid is marketed on the idea of simplicity of use for the customers, through it is not clear how large or significant the Easy Connect portfolio will be on the whole.

“Organizations of all sizes are transforming their IT to a hybrid mix of private and cloud technology,” said Nick East, co-founder and CEO of Zynstra, who’s virtualisation and cloud management software will be used in the offering.

“Together with HPE, we’ve done the heavy lifting for SMBs and their IT partners. This small form factor solution delivers the right business value without compromise or complexity, and is integrated with and managed centrally from the cloud. It’s how IT should be.”

BCSG, News & Analysis, SMB, telco, Telco Cloud, UK

Study urges telcos to do better on cloud

Mobile bankingTelecoms operators are missing an open goal on cloud services, according to a report by cloud service market provider BCSG, writes Telecoms.com. While operators are perfectly placed to sell small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) the services they want, their indifference is actually driving customer away and they could miss a multi billion pound opportunity.

Its report ‘SMB cloud services: the multi-billion dollar opportunity for telcos’ interprets the data from an independent survey of 500 US and UK SMBs. The report argues that there is a strong demand for cloud computing services among medium sized businesses. However, the SMBs say their buying decisions are being delayed by confusion over which services will best suit their needs. While 43 per cent of the study group said they want to buy cloud services, only 31 per cent even had a cloud migration strategy in place.

Demand for cloud services is high and many want support in making the transition from their present on-premise computing model, says the report. However, telcos are ignoring this clear opportunity for consultancy, it argues.

Many SMBs complained that the indifference of their current supplier will make them look elsewhere. According to the report 42 per cent of SMBs receive ‘no help from their telecoms operators whatsoever’. This could possibly lead to mass defections, as 58 per cent of the sample of SMBs said they’d take their business to any service provider that shows them how to get access to a broader range of technology. As a result of the lack of interest shown by the telcos in their existing customers, 52 per cent of the SMBs said they will contemplate switching operators in the next two years.

With the potential UK/US SMB cloud computing services market quantified at $22 billion by PAC/Compass Intelligence studies, it’s vital that operators seize the initiative and address this clear and captive audience, said Tom Platt, commercial director at BCSG. “Operators have a unique opportunity to provide support and guidance to SMBs,” said Platt. If they don’t there could be consequences, Platt warned. “Long tenure from SMB customers does not imply loyalty.”

Cloud computing, Featured, SMB

What To Move To the Cloud: A More Mature Model for SMBs

what to move to the cloudMany SMBs struggle with deciding if and what to move to the cloud. Whether it’s security concerns, cost, or lack of expertise, it’s oftentimes difficult to map the best possible solution. Here are 8 applications and services to consider when your organization is looking to move to the Cloud and reduce their server footprint.

 

What to move to the cloud

1. Email

Obviously in this day and age email is a requirement in virtually every business. A lot of businesses continue to run Exchange locally. If you are thinking about moving portions of your business out to the cloud, email is a good place to start. Why should you move to the cloud? Simple, it’s pretty easy to do and at this point it’s been well documented that mail runs very well up in the cloud. It takes a special skill set to run Exchange beyond just adding and managing users. If something goes wrong and you have an issue, it can often times be very complicated to fix. It can also be pretty complicated to install. A lot of companies do not have access to high quality Exchange skills. Moving to the cloud solves those issues.  Having Exchange in the Cloud also gets your company off of the 3-5 year refresh cycle for the hardware to run Exchange as well as the upfront cost of the software.

Quick Tip – Most Cloud e-mail providers offer Anti-Spam/Anti-virus functionality as part of their offering. You can also take advantage of Cloud based AS/AV providers like MacAfee’s MXLogic.

2. File Shares

Small to medium sized businesses have to deal with sharing files securely and easily among its users. Typically, that’s a file server running locally in your office or at multiple offices. This can present a challenge of making sure everyone has the correct access and that there is enough storage available. Why should you move to the cloud? There are easy alternatives in the cloud to avoid dealing with those challenges. Such alternatives include Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or using a file server in Microsoft Azure. In most cases you can use Active Directory to be the central repository of rights to manage passwords and permissions in one place.

Quick Tip – OneDrive is included with most Office 365 subscriptions. You can use Active Directory authentication to provide access through that.

3. Instant Messaging/Online Meetings

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Instant messaging can oftentimes be a quicker and more efficient form of communication than email. There are many platforms out there that can be used including Microsoft Lync, Skype and Cisco Jabber. A lot of these can be used for online meetings as well including screen sharing. Your users are looking for these tools and there are corporate options. With a corporate tool like Lync or Jabber, you can be in control. You can make sure conversations get logged, are secure and can be tracked. Microsoft Lync is included in Office 365.

Quick Tip – If you have the option, you might as well take advantage of it!

4. Active Directory

It is still a best practice to keep an Active Directory domain controller locally at each physical location to speed the login and authentication process even when some or most of the applications are services are based in the Cloud. This still leaves most companies with an issue if their site or sites are down for any reason.  Microsoft now has provided the ability to run a domain controller in their Cloud with Azure Active Directory to provide that redundancy that many SMBs do not currently have.

Quick Tip – Azure Active Directory is pre-integrated with Salesforce, Office 365 and many other applications. Additionally, you can setup and use multi-factor authentication if needed.

5. Web servers

Web servers are another very easy workload to move to the cloud whether it’s Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, VMware etc. The information is not highly confidential so there is a much lower risk than putting extremely sensitive data up there. By moving your servers to the cloud, you can avoid all the traffic from your website going to the local connection; it can all go to the cloud instead.

Quick Tip – most cloud providers offer SQL server back-ends as part of their offerings. This makes it easy to tie in the web server to a backend database. Make sure you ask your provider about this.

6. Back Up 

A lot of companies are looking for alternate locations to store back up files. It’s easy to back up locally on disk or tape and then move offsite. It’s often cheaper to store in the cloud and it helps eliminate the headache of rotating tapes.

Quick Tip – account for bandwidth needs when you start moving backups to the cloud. This can be a major factor.

7. Disaster Recovery

Now that you have your backups offsite, it’s possible to have capacity to run virtual machines or servers up in the cloud in the event of a disaster. Instead of moving data to another location you can pay to run your important apps in the cloud in case of disaster. It’s usually going to cost you less to do this.

Quick Tip – Make sure you look at your bandwidth closely when backing up to the Cloud. Measure how much data you need to backup, and then calculate the bandwidth that you will need.  Most enterprise class backup applications allow you to throttle the backups so they do not impact business.

8. Applications

A lot of common applications that SMBs use are offered as a cloud service. For example, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. These companies make and host the product so that you don’t have to onsite. You can take advantage of the application for a fraction of the cost and headache.

In conclusion, don’t be afraid to move different portions of your environment to the cloud. For the most part, it’s less expensive and easier than you may think. If I was starting a business today, the only thing I would have running locally would be an AD controller or file server. The business can be faster and leaner without the IT infrastructure overhead that one needed to run a business ten years ago.

Looking for more tips? Download this whitepaper written by our CTO Chris Ward “8 Point Checklist for a Successful Data Center Move“

 

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

Baymard Institute, Industry & Market Insights, Shopping Experience, SMB, SMB Cloud Insights, Website

Are You Making Enough of Your Sales Online?

 

Do you want customers to buy online or offline? Parallels experience working with service providers shows a high percentage of small business hosting plan purchases are made on the phone talking to a living, breathing salesperson. Depending on the type of service provider, as few as 10% of direct channel sales by small businesses are via online purchase with up to 70% being made “offline” – via inbound phone calls – and the remainder being outbound campaign sales to existing customers. To be sure, these “offline” purchases are driven by online content. SMBs call after reviewing the service provider website. Research done through our SMB Cloud Insights report series reveals that for SaaS applications, for example, an SMB’s own online research is their number one source of information with more than 60% of SMBs citing it.

 

If that’s the case, why are so few hosting plan purchases by SMBs made online? Typically it is because of services discoverability issues on the website and the natural tendency for a generally non-technical buyer to need reassurance before pulling the trigger. 

But if your goal is to increase the number of purchases your SMB customers make online because you want to spend less on your call center staffing, what can you do? One area to investigate is your buying and checkout experience. The Baymard Institute does an unusual annual study related to customer checkout experience. They take users and watch them go through the checkout processes of 15 different popular e-commerce sites. What they discover from this is general principles around usability-related issues due to poor checkout design and how that increases customer abandon rates.  

 

Their findings are massive but touching on a few high level items might help get you pointed in the right direction.

 

+ The top reasons for checkout abandonment:

– Extra cost (shipping, tax, fees) 33%

– Forced account creation 23%

– Credit card trust 18%

– Complicated checkout process 18%

 

You may say that the top two don’t apply to service providers. But the study found it wasn’t so much the charging of extra fees, for example, as it was the confusing way it was presented or explained.

 

+ A disruptive problem with copywriting: Try to avoid technical jargon – think about who your audience is. That’s an obvious one, right? Here’s one that isn’t so obvious on the copywriting front and it is even more harmful: Not having descriptions for form field labels. In many cases what may seem obvious to you (“Address line 2”) will make no sense to some of your potential customers and in other cases what is obvious makes buyers balk (“Email address”) because they need an explanation of why you need that information (“To communicate with you – we never sell your email address”).  

+ A layout problem: Unclear error indications. This is the most harmful issue related to layout. If buyers can’t find the error on the form or don’t understand it there is a very high probability they will abandon the checkout process. This is especially true if they can’t find the error and submit the form again only to have it rejected yet again. In those situations they think the problem is a bug on your site. Ouch.

So while you may always have a high rate of “offline” purchases just because it’s the nature of the beast with this type of customer and product, you might want to take a look at your online checkout experience to see if it’s as buyer-friendly as you need it to be.

 

 

Scott Fallon, Senior Director, Partner Marketing

sfallon@parallels.com

 

 

Cloud Services, Control Panels, Guest Blog, Plesk Panel 11, SMB

Getting Smart About Webhosting Bundles (Guest Blog)

 

Parallels is happy to present a guest blog post from Infratel CEO, Bryan Goode. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

 

All Add-Ons Are Not Created the Same

 

It is now common to hear industry leaders urge hosting companies to bundle additional services with hosting packages.  Research has consistently shown that adding new services to hosting plans increases average revenue per user [ARPU] and has a positive effect on customer churn rates.

 

But wait, you say – where do I start?  How do I decide what services to bundle with my hosting packages?  Which add-ons best help me increase ARPU and reduce churn?  

 

At Infratel, we believe that you should consider two criteria when deciding which add-ons to include in a bundle:

 

  1. 1) Is this add-on related to the main, anchor product in my hosting plan?
  2. 2) Is this add-on relevant to customers who buy my hosting plans?

 

With these criteria in mind, we’re pleased to announce Infratel ClickConnect for Websites, the ideal add-on for webhosting bundles.  

 

Infratel ClickConnect for Websites is built specifically to be bundled with webhosting plans and allows your users to add ‘Click to Call’ functionality to a site in 30 seconds or less – helping your small business users convert more website visitors into customers!  

 

To make the opportunity even better, Infratel ClickConnect is the entryway into additional telephony services for your customers.   

 

Recent research shows that small businesses truly need a professional phone presence and fewer than 30% of your small business webhosting users have this type of a presence – representing a huge untapped market for the webhosting industry.

 

Get started today bundling Infratel ClickConnect for Websites with your webhosting plans.  To celebrate the Plesk 11 launch, for a limited time we’re offering you a FREE subscription for your own use when you bundle Infratel ClickConnect for Websites with your webhosting plans.  Click here to contact us today!

 

Bryan Goode

 

SMB, Virtualization

Virtualization for SMBs, Top to Bottom

Recently, Russ Stockdale wrote a blog post (part 2 of a 4-part series) on a VMware blog. He states that he is continuously looking for opportunities to increase revenue, control costs, and expand services to customers. These are the exact issues that I assist clients with all across the SMB range—from companies with one physical server running everything to customers with multiple sites and 100s of users. Since I get to talk to customers, many of which are SMBs (the same space Mozy serves) and architect solutions to their problems, whatever they may be, I figured I would write a blog along the same lines. The one key technology that we use and recommend is virtualization. Below are some suggestions for products/solutions GreenPages often provides SMBs.

Our smaller clients (less than 5 servers) have the same uptime and business continuity demands that larger companies do, but usually with a single person as their IT department. Virtualization makes their lives easier and provides much more flexibility than physical servers. The VMware VSA (vSphere Storage Appliance) allows the use of local storage to provide the benefit of a SAN including vMotion and High Availability at a much lower cost. Reducing a server to a giant file also allows for easier backup and recovery with snapshots, with both VMware and 3rd party backup software.

For medium sized companies, (less than 20 servers) virtualization fills some key technology gaps.  Specifically, the ability to spin up new servers quickly to meet users’ needs is key to a fast paced environment.  These size companies also get the same benefits as I mentioned above with business continuity, flexibility, and much less downtime with vMotion and High Availability. Backups are also easier in a virtual environment and many of our clients are getting rid of tape and putting these backups into the Cloud or another offsite location. That is much easier than rotating backups and taking tapes or a NAS drive offsite on a regular basis.

Our larger SMB customers (more than 20 servers) are usually heavy users of virtualization already.  We help them take the next steps in managing their environment and their risks by helping them implement three key VMware technologies. First, most of these clients already have more than one location. We help them get automated failover and disaster recovery by implementing Site Recovery Manager (SRM).  This is a fantastic way of getting multisite failover, migration, and recovery by leveraging their existing virtual environment and hardware. SRM also provides proof to auditors and management that they have a disaster plan in place that is tested on a regular basis.

The second way we help these customers is by using vCenter Operations Suite to help them manage the hardware and resources they have better. VMware vCenter Operations Enterprise (vCOPs) will point out trouble spots in their environment and assist them in identifying any issues and resolutions. Additionally the software will show them where they have over- or under-allocated resources to specific virtual machines or datastores so they can use those resources elsewhere and put off additional hardware purchases. vCOPs also has some forecasting capabilities so you can plan your next hardware purchases and not have to acquire new hardware unexpectedly.

An additional step that a few of our clients are taking is setting up self-provisioning capabilities with vCloud Director.  This allows them to spin up virtual machines for test or development or for other reasons without any interaction from the IT staff.  This makes it much quicker and easier to create virtual machines.  It also makes for a much cleaner environment since there are limits on who can create VMs and what virtual machines are created. vCloud Director will also clean up the old or expired VMs so you do not end up with VMware sprawl.

All companies no matter how large or small are better off leveraging virtualization to provide more flexibility, easier management, and better uptime and business continuity.  VMware has industry leading technology and features that every SMB can and should take advantage of. If you’re looking for more information on virtualization and SMB IT Solutions check out some other blogs I have written on JourneyToTheCloud.

HP, Miscellaneous IT, SMB

RECAP: HP Discover 2012 Event

If you are going to do something, make it matter.  That was the key phrase that was posted throughout the conference at HP Discover 2012 in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago.  With some of the new announcements, HP did just that.

One of the biggest announcements in my opinion is the HP Virtual Connect Direct-Attached Fibre Channel Storage for 3PAR. In a nutshell, it helps to reduce your SAN infrastructure by eliminating switches and HBAs. You connect your Blade System Servers directly to the 3PAR array.  This allows you to have a single layer FC storage network.  Since you won’t have a fabric to manage, you can increase your provisioning process by as much as 2.5X.  Also, by removing the fabric layer, you can eliminate up to 55% latency.

This will allow organizations to reduce costs by eliminating the SAN fabric.  It will save on operating costs by cutting down on capital expenditure.  It also scales with the “pay as you grow” methodology allowing you to purchase only what you need.

Complexity is greatly decreased with the wire-once strategy.  If new servers are added to the Blade Chassis, they simply access the storage through the already connected cabling.

Virtual Connect Manager allows for a single pane of glass approach.  It can be used through a web interface or CLI, for those UNIX lovers.

The new trend in IT is Big Data.  Some of the biggest customer challenges are the velocity and volume of data, the large variety and disparate sources of data, and the complex analytics that are required for maximizing the value of information.  HP introduced Vertica 6, which does all of
these.

Vertica 6 FlexStore has been expanded to allow access to any data, stored at any location, through any interface.  You can connect to Hadoop File Systems, existing databases, and data warehouses.  You can also access unstructured analysis platforms such as HP/Autonomy IDOL.

It also includes high performance data analytics for the R Statistical Tool natively and in parallel without the in-memory and single-threaded limitations of R. Vertica 6 has expanded their C++ SDK to add secure sandboxing of user-defined code.

Workload Management simplifies the user experience by enabling more diverse workloads.  Some users experienced up to a 40X speed increase on their queries.  Regardless of size, Workload Management balances all system resources to meet SLAs.

Vertica 6 software will run on the HP public cloud.  Web and mobile applications generate a ton of data.  This will allow business intelligence to quickly spot any trends that are developing and act accordingly.

Not to be overlooked are the enhancements made to the core components that are already part of the system.

Over the past few years, there has been a big interest in disk to disk backup and deduplication.  HP’s latest solution in this space is the B6200 with StoreOnce Catalyst software.  It has over 50 patents that deliver world record performance of 100TB/hr backups and 40TB/hr restores.  This claims to be 3X and 5X faster, respectively, than the next leading competitor.

The hardware is scalable.  It starts at 48TB (32TB usable) and can grow to 768TB (512TB usable).  With a typical deduplication rate of 20X, the system can provide extended data protection for up to 10PBs.

This is a federated backup solution that allows you to move data from remote sites to multiple datacenters without having to reduplicate it.  It integrates with HP Data Protector, Symantec NetBackup, and Symantec BackupExec giving the administrator one console to manage all deduplication, backup, and disaster recovery operations.

The portfolio also includes smaller units for SMB customers. They take advantage of the same type of technologies allowing companies to meet those pesky backup windows.

As a leading HP Partner, GreenPages can assist you with these or any of the products in the HP portfolio.

By Mark Mychalczuk

Cloud computing, Cloud Services, News Round-Up, Saas, Small Businesses, SMB, Software as a service

News Round-Up 5/5/2012: What Makes the Cloud Cool, Feds in the Cloud, 10 Things Your Cloud Contract Needs

 

There have been some exciting announcements and fascinating news articles recently regarding cloud services and service providers. Every week we will round up the most interesting topics from around the globe and consolidate them into a weekly summary.

 

Cloud Computing Gains in Federal Government

The Federal Government is warming to the speed, agility and functionality of cloud computing.

 

State companies helping Army with cloud computing

The U.S. Army has turned to cloud computing, and to Wisconsin companies, to improve its intelligence gathering in Afghanistan.

 

Saas Offering Provides Detailed Analysis of Your Software Portfolio

Are you faced with the need to do a software portfolio analysis but find the prospect daunting given the scattered nature of your operation? A new SaaS-based offering might fit the bill.

 

SaaS Business Apps Drive SMB Cloud Computing Adoption

Lots of small and medium businesses have discovered the benefits of software-as-a-service. These SaaS applications are driving cloud adoption among SMBs. 

 

Here’s What Makes The Cloud So Cool

Mike Pearl from PriceWaterhouseCooper provides a useful plan of attack for business adoption of cloud computing.

 

10 Things You Just Gotta Have in Your Cloud Contract

CFO’s guide to the wild and wooly world of cloud services in which contracts are mutable, companies come and go, and politics a continent away could materially impact your business.

 

 

Also in the news:

 

 

 

Cloud Insights, News Round-Up, SMB

News Round-up 4/14/2012: OpenStack, Tech Stocks Surge, What Makes a Cloud a Cloud?

 

There have been some exciting announcements and fascinating news articles recently regarding cloud services and service providers. Every week we will round up the most interesting topics from around the globe and consolidate them into a weekly summary.


How Cloud Computing Can Improve Your Charity’s Efficiency

Great insights by David Sturges from The Guardian on how charities can leverage the efficiencies and flexibility afforded by cloud technology to deliver more for less.

 

Who Wrote OpenStack Essex? A Deep Dive Into Contributions

ReadWriteWeb looks into who contributed code to OpenStack’s Essex release to glean some insights on who’s driving the project and who has a stake in supporting it.

 

VMWare Seeks Linux-ization of Cloud with Any-Cloud App Platform

VMWare embraces open source and announce their plan to allow developers to build applications using the framework of their choice and the ability to deploy to just about any cloud.

 

Citrix Kicks Down Door, Breaks Up OpenStack Cloud Party

Citrix has abandoned OpenStack and launched its own CloudStack open-source cloud platform.

 

Tech Stocks Once Again Wall Street Darlings

Technology share from social media, mobility, cloud computing, data analytics and location-based e-commerce companies have surged up to 60% this year. Does this rise point to the beginning of a new technology bubble?

 

IBM, Red Hat to Join OpenStack Foundation

In the same week that saw Citrix leave OpenStack for its own open-source platform, Red Hat and IBM join the OpenStack cloud infrastructure.

 

Also in the news: