If you’ve been following our blog series for any length of time, you already know that “the cloud”, in the form of Windows Azure, is becoming an option for IT organizations in which to extend their datacenters. And believe it or not, this includes the ability to create an Active Directory domain controller in the cloud and have it be in just another site in your directory services.
On second thought: Believe it. Today in part 20 of our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series, Keith Mayer (teammate and friend with an awesome blog) gives us the rundown on how to configure this very thing.
Capture More Valuable Insights from Your Big Data
What if you could make informed decisions on critical business issues by leveraging insights from the volume, velocity and variety of structured and unstructured data?
Register for January’s TechTalk, and you’ll discover how to combine the big data processing capabilities of IBM InfoSphere® BigInsights™ with the self-service business intelligence reporting of IBM Cognos® to create one powerful analytics solution.
Join us on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 11:00 am EST and find out how this combination of business tools gives organizations a powerful solution to translate large amounts of data into valuable, actionable insights and offers benefits.
Step-by-Step: Connect System Center 2012 App Controller to Windows Azure
The article I’m writing for part 13 our “31 Days of Servers in the Cloud” series involves using App Controller to create a virtual machine. But to do this, you first need to connect and associate App Controller (a component of System Center 2012) with your Windows Azure subscription.
So in today’s Part 12, as a preliminary document for part 13, in this article I’m going to show you how to connect App Controller to your Windows Azure account.
To make this happen, you first have to have a management certificate in place. This makes up the bulk of the complexity involved. It must be a management certificate that has a key length of at least 2048 bits and resides in the Personal certificate store.
EMC to Offer Syncplicity with Atmos and Isilon
EMC said Tuesday that it means to offer its cloud-based online file-sharing service Syncplicity, acquired last May, with its Isilon and Atmos widgetry so customers can store files as in the cloud as well as on-premise.
The stuff’s in beta.
It’s supposed to increase productivity, flexibility and ease of management, and reduce compliance risks.
Cloud Brings out New Equations to the Ecosystem
During the last decade, the enterprise war was among the handful of players. Microsoft wanted to be the de facto choice of the IT by pushing .NET application platform, integrated tools through Visual Studio, a set of servers in the form of SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk and System Center. Same was the case with IBM who was trying to compete through the Rational, WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli and MQ Series platforms. Sun and Oracle complemented each other and ran an integrated GTM to win the enterprise customers. The goal of every player was the same – Displace competition and own almost every aspect of enterprise IT including the directory services, messaging, databases, business intelligence, systems management, collaboration and enterprise integration.
Web Host Industry Review “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo NY & Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property.
IntelliBuzz Helps Companies Monitor Social Media
Intelliverse has launched IntelliBuzz, a social media monitoring service. IntelliBuzz helps organizations listen, engage, measure and optimize interactions across multiple social platforms to develop a better understanding of customers and markets, integrate a social CRM channel and align social strategies with overall business objectives.
“Today’s businesses cannot choose whether or not to engage in social media,” said Frank E. Paterno, VP of Marketing at Intelliverse. “Customers are expressing both joy and frustration socially. Companies that aren’t listening and choose not to participate in these conversations will quickly become obsolete.”
The IntelliBuzz service can help companies in the following areas:
- Provides marketers with a single dashboard to publish, engage, manage, analyze and report across multiple social campaigns and platforms. It also helps marketers schedule future posts and trend the social activity about their brand, which can range from protecting the brand during everyday operations to uncovering opportunities for social outreach and meaningful conversations.
- Empowers customer service and sales organizations to listen to and respond to customer and prospect conversations originating on the social web. Benefits include quickly responding to questions from prospects to delighting customers with surprise resolutions to socially made complaints. Customer service organizations can easily integrate IntelliBuzz into an overall CRM strategy and have the tools in place to find questions, comments or complaints on the internet, deliver them to the responsible team and track each interaction to ensure a timely response.
- Allows a human resource organization to gauge employee happiness, gain insight into potential negative organizational issues and evolve corporate values by monitoring the social media activity of the organization’s employees.
- Intellectual Property – Lets an organization know if the organization’s intellectual property (e.g., trademarks and service marks) and confidential information is being used inappropriately so it can respond accordingly.
Challenges & Opportunities for a Cloud-Based Application Delivery Strategy
With business application traffic over the Web expected to double in less than five years, the need for a solution that can meet and exceed this demand grows increasingly urgent.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Gary Ballabio, Product Line Director for Akamai’s Enterprise Cloud Solutions, shows how to meet this challenge head on and extend application delivery out of the origin and across the public Internet without sacrificing security, performance or control.
Gary Ballabio is a Product Line Director for Akamai’s Application Performance Solutions portfolio. In his role, he runs Akamai’s Terra Alta, Web Application Accelerator, Session Accelerator and IP Application Acceleration services. A 12 year veteran at Akamai, Ballabio has also held management positions in Engineering, Sales Engineering, Account Management and Professional Services covering teams in both Europe and Asia.
SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
This article is a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business. It is a completely updated rewrite of an older post. For this version, I have co-opted two real experts in the field: Ron Gill, (CFO, NetSuite), and Brad Coffey (VP of Strategy, HubSpot), to add expertise, color and commentary from the viewpoint of a public and private SaaS company. My sincere thanks to both of them for their time and input.
SaaS/subscription businesses are more complex than traditional businesses. Traditional business metrics totally fail to capture the key factors that drive SaaS performance. In the SaaS world, there are a few key variables that make a big difference to future results. This post is aimed at helping SaaS executives understand which variables really matter, and how to measure them and act on the results.
Cloud and business technology trends to watch in 2013
In 2013, IT buyers will be looking for increased stability and better ways to prepare for the next five years in their business cycle, according the the latest market study by Ovum.
“The fact that we live in very uncertain times makes investment decision-making even more difficult. With continuing instability across the global markets and even in locations with historically robust growth – such as China and India – the outlook for IT services in 2013 is unpredictable,” said Jens Butler, principal analyst, IT Services at Ovum.
Ovum believes that business leaders will be looking for greater reliability in their IT usage and – as a consequence – seeking stability, capability and accessibility among their external service providers.
Growing trend towards cloud applications
Moreover, Ovum has published three “Trends to Watch” reports on cloud computing – which reveals that 2013 will see managed cloud services continue to grow rapidly.
Their Private and Public Clouds report …