For any modern entrepreneur I`d suggest the sweet spot of cloud applications you should master is the holy trinity of these three killer apps – Linkedin, Salesforce.com and Google+ Apps.

In short these cater for the end-to-end requirements of a sales operation, so you can begin selling and closing deals.

Establishing successful sales teams is naturally a milestone you want to put in place as quickly as possible, and so having the tools as equally as quick as possible is one of the primary benefits of on demand IT.

Getting these three running gets you out knocking on doors, capturing prospect contact details and submitting initial proposals and even hooplah customer contracts.

As things evolve you can add everything else: E-contracting for speeding up return of those contracts, better e-marketing automation and social media publishing. These are also staples but the first three gets your beachhead established.

Google+ Apps …

The Big Data analytics marketplace is truly heating up in terms of interest, activity, technology and competition. According to a Wikibon report published recently, the total Big Data market reached $11.4 billion in 2012. But 2013 is the year that big data is going big time, so here we bring a round-up of what various IT industry executive have been saying about the fast-growing sector reckoned to be headed toward $53 billion by 2017, culled from Cloud Computing Journal and Big Data Journal.

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by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director Product Marketing, Parallels

My previous blog on differentiation generated interesting feedback. Thank you so much for your questions and opinions. I would like to respond to one particular question that was pointed my way: “How do I know that I am doing the-right-marketing?”

The purpose of marketing is to make money. It is not window dressing function and it is not a “making customers happy” function. For hosters, marketing is the business of hosting.

At the SMB scale in which the vast majority of shared hosters operate, marketing needs to be laser focused on three goals:

1. retaining existing customers
2. convincing and enabling them to buy more
3. bringing in new customers

This purpose-driven perspective on the marketing function has another advantage. It provides a clear measures of success. The most comprehensive measure for the first two goals is Customer Life Time Value. It connects two sub-measures routinely used in our business (Average Revenue Per User and Churn) in a way that allows for calculating marketing ROI on the third goal: attracting new customers.

Average revenue per user (ARPU) fails as a marketing measure because it ignores the fact that hosting is not a one-time purchase business. You can dramatically increase ARPU by overpromising and under-delivering on your service and go out of business when your frustrated customers leave.

Churn on the other hand focuses on customer retention but ignores customer profitability. You can drive customer churn down by offering great service and support at below cost and retain all your customers all the way to bankruptcy.

Customer Life Time Value (CLTV) connects these two measures and creates a new level of understanding for your business and your marketing. It is simple to calculate as a multiplication of ARPU and average time a customer stays with your service. For a customer on a services with ARPU of $10/month and expected life on a service of 18 months CLTV equals $180. CLTV also suggests two powerful levers for driving hosting business revenue: upsell to maximize ARPU and retention strategies to maximize lifetime.

With a CLTV in place you will also be equipped with a baseline for new customer acquisition costs. Looking at the example above, a $180 CLTV gives you an upper limit for a price to pay for bringing a new customer into your business. This combined with your marginal cost of maintaining and supporting a new customer, can now be used to calculate an ROI on the marketing spend for bringing new customers into the business.

Let me know if you find these blogs useful. You can always email me at adambo@parallels.com

The cloud world seems to have been received some interesting announcements and offerings over the last week. There were some new feature releases and price offerings from Amazon.

Microsoft has announced some important updates to Windows Azure Mobile Services. Plus, Cloud Foundry has also announced its ‘handshake’ with Pivotal Initiative.
Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week:
Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has offered a month long free trial of the AWS Trusted Advisor to all AWS customers. This service inspects the AWS environment and makes recommendations to help users save money, improve performance or close security gaps. Additionally, enhanced the Trusted Advisor’s user interface and added a new suppress feature that allow users to hide the results of certain checks. Next, they have also announced that AWS customers will get a $120 AWS Credit with any new SAP Hana One subscription.

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Securing your IT environment is not free, but there are new (cloud) options designed to mitigate costs while still providing a strong, manageable and proactive defense. While many companies still would rather spend capital on commodity assets, many CIOs recognize that information security is an important business driver…but the ultimate question is where is the balance between how much exposure can a company afford against the dollars needed protect it. The answer is different for every company, but there are best practices and alternate deployment technologies that can readjust the scales of risk versus reward.

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Recently Amazon announced the availability of Redshift Data warehouse as a Service as a beta offering. Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. It’s optimized for datasets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions.
Any data warehouse service meant to serve data of petabyte scale should have a robust architecture as its backbone.

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Riverbed Technology on Monday announced the availability of new product capabilities, developer tools and a supporting community that allow IT professionals to customize and adapt their IT infrastructure to meet the demands of their business and improve the experience of their users. As developers and IT managers use this programmable infrastructure they create a performance platform that is highly flexible and inline with the needs of modern virtualized and software-defined IT architectures.
“We encounter customers all the time whose needs are specific to their business and their infrastructure,” said Eric Wolford, president of Riverbed Products Group. “Today, we are giving customers the ability to uniquely accelerate their business in a way that has never before been possible.”

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QLogic on Monday announced that its 2600 Series 16Gb Fibre Channel adapters are now available through the EMCSelect program for a broad range of EMC storage platforms. EMC customers can now implement QLogic’s award-winning 16Gb Fibre Channel technology for high performance storage environments.
“For well over a decade QLogic has provided high-performance Fibre Channel solutions for EMC and its customers,” said Amit Vashi, vice president of marketing, Host Solutions Group, QLogic. “QLogic 2600 Series adapters allow customers to accelerate performance of bandwidth-hungry enterprise applications such as video streaming, databases, backup and online transaction processing. Fully compatible with 8Gb and 4Gb products, QLogic 16Gb Fibre Channel solutions protect organizations’ IT investments.”

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There are CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and a few other OpenStack competitors. With all the momentum of OpenStack, it might seem that these open source alternatives are little more than also-rans, doomed to drop further and further behind the burgeoning leader. But there’s more to this story. This is no techie my-open-source-is-better-than-your-open-source battle of principle, of interest only to the cognoscenti. On the contrary: big players are now involved, and they’re placing increasingly large bets.
Look around the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market. Notice that elephant in the corner? That’s Amazon Web Services (AWS). The IaaS market simply doesn’t make sense unless you realize that AWS essentially invented IaaS. And by invented, we mean actually got it to work. Which if you think about it, is rather atypical for most technology vendors. Your average software vendor will identify a new market opportunity, take some old stuff they’ve been struggling to sell, give it a nice new coat of PowerPoint, and shoehorn it into the new market. If customers bite, then the vendor will devote resources into making the product actually do what it’s supposed to do. Eventually. We hope.

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