Apica, Apica WebPerformance, AppDynamics, Application programming interface, Google Analytics, Performance testing, SPDY, Tools

Apica WebPerformance Now Supports HTML5, Integrates with AppDynamics, Cloud Services, and Google Analytics

Enhancements to Apica WebPerformance portal, introduced today, include integration with AppDynamics and Google Analytics, HTML5 support, real browser monitoring from leading browsers, and provides an API solution for advanced monitoring capabilities.

Apica WebPerformance monitors the delivery of all web content and application functionalities from more than 100 locations worldwide, providing a controlled perspective on application performance. Using Apica WebPerformance’s powerful analytics, users can drill down to the code level to better understand the capacity, scalability, and responsiveness of their applications; troubleshoot bottlenecks; and take measures to proactively improve performance.

The latest enhancements to Apica WebPerformance include:

  • Integration with AppDynamics and Google Analytics. Real-time data
    from third-party accounts is fed directly into the Apica
    WebPerformance portal to provide deeper insight into the correlation
    of performance and traffic from a single location.
  • Websockets/HTML5 and SPDY standards support. To optimize the
    performance of live, rich media content such as real-time game
    updates, stock feeds, and status indicators, Apica WebPerformance
    includes Kaazing support, a commercial full-duplex communication
    server using Websockets and HTML5.
  • HTML5 GUI. The entire Apica WebPerformance portal now supports
    HTML5, which means that it can be accessed from laptops, smartphones,
    or tablets. The interface adjusts itself to the chosen platform so
    customers can keep track of their web performance wherever they are
    located.
  • Expanded real browser monitoring. Apica
    WebPerformance now supports browser checks from Google Chrome, in
    addition to Internet Explorer and Firefox. This provides a true
    end-user view of performance from the most popular browsers used today.
  • API access. Developers can embed monitoring results and
    performance check summaries into native programs using real-time data
    from Apica’s
    global network of monitoring agents.
  • Self-service functionality. Users can easily record scripts on
    their own and immediately begin reviewing and analyzing the
    performance of their website.

“Consumer demand for high-performing websites and applications is constantly increasing. Fast response times are no longer a luxury; they are expected,” says Sven Hammar, CEO of Apica. “Performance testing as part of the development process, not just after launch but prior to launch as well, is necessary to avoid problems that can cost businesses time, money, and poor brand reputation. We’ve enhanced our WebPerformance solution with more standards support and integration so users can correlate data from multiple instances and locations across the globe to get a transparent look at application performance and improve the end-user experience. We give businesses the power to optimize their web performance and identify issues before they impact customers.”


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Cloud Computing: Rackspace Cloud Institute Launched

Rackspace has unveiled a new global open cloud initiative, dubbed the Rackspace Cloud Institute, to train and certify an “army of thousands of technicians, engineers and developers” on the fundamentals of OpenStack, the open source cloud platform it put in play.
Rackspace, the first company to commercialize OpenStack, has been beta testing a training course for the last year and has educated 300-350 people from about 50 mostly end-user companies in Australia, China, South Africa and the US so far, with Israel and Hong Kong scheduled soon.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Storage Performance in the Cloud

It is no secret that one of the main challenges for applications in the cloud is storage performance. The storage performance problem in the cloud has multiple facets. It is not just low vs. high performance, but also the fact that performance varies over time and one customer can impact the performance of others. There is also the issue of storage performance monitoring. How does one know if an application is running slow because of storage performance or because of other factors like networking, IO concurrency, latencies, etc.?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Nelson Nahum, CEO & CTO of Zadara Storage, will discuss how a new cloud storage architecture is needed – one that is not based on “scale out,” but it is more similar to the compute cloud.

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Business Processes, Content Management, Customer Relationship Management, GlobalSCAPE, Mobile device, Salesforce, salesforce.com

TappIn Pro Edition Includes Salesforce.com Integration

TappIn, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of GlobalSCAPE, Inc. announced today the launch of the new TappIn Professional Edition. TappIn’s Professional Edition offers 10 GB of secure transactional cloud storage, enhanced secure mobile access features, integration with Salesforce, and group management capabilities designed for professional users, businesses, and an increasingly mobile workforce, by creating a go-to service for remote access to all content regardless of where it resides.

“The increasingly mobile nature of today’s workforce, coupled with the rapid diversification of content sources and storage repositories, has forced a re-envisioning of how IT manages the access device landscape,” said Maureen Fleming, analyst with IDC. “Content is no longer stored on just a computer or server, it’s stored across collaboration platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft Exchange, on NAS drives, and in cloud repositories—public, private, and personal. As mobile devices put our lives at our fingertips, businesses and their employees will look for solutions that also streamline access to these content sources, increasing efficiency and eliminating the need for redundant copies and storage.”

“If we have learned anything from the BYOD revolution, it’s that people are looking for the simplest way to manage and access everything they need via a mobile device,” said Chris Hopen, President of TappIn, Inc. “TappIn Professional Edition is the next evolution of our approach to access and management, allowing users to go to a single place on their mobile device and securely access or share all of their important content—whether it resides on a home computer, business server, or SaaS application such as Salesforce. TappIn is the one place they can go for access to all of their content without having to move it all to one place.”

 

 


Content Management, Small business

Marketecture Business Center 3.0 Offers Integrated Online SMB Platform

Marketecture today announced the full platform launch of the Marketecture Business Center 3.0, its turnkey website solution for micro and small businesses, which allows small business owners to establish and grow their business online without having to build their own software or become Internet experts.

Marketecture Business Center 3.0 provides a suite of integrated online business management and marketing tools. The new platform leverages proprietary, scalable software and includes the following features:

  • Custom Website Design – Build a website in minutes using
    Marketecture’s intuitive drag-and-drop functionality
  • Content Management – Upload as many images, video, music and data
    files as desired with Marketecture’s unlimited storage and hosting
    space
  • Social Marketing Management – Monitor and manage the social
    environment surrounding a small business with deep social media
    integration for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and
    foursquare
  • Online Marketing Management – Work alongside Marketecture’s experts to
    deploy a variety of online business strategies, including SEO, PPC,
    viral, content and local marketing
  • Customer Relationship Manager – Track visitor analytics from one
    simple interface
  • Communications Manager – Unlimited email accounts, webmail access,
    newsletter and drip campaigns
  • E-Commerce – Set up a merchant account to collect money directly from
    the SMB’s website and use Facebook integration to enable customers to
    reserve services, purchase products and fill out forms and signups
    directly from the business’ Facebook page
  • Business Tools – Blogs, secure document editing and sharing,
    scheduling and reservations
  • Custom Logo Design – Use easy software tools to build great logos, or
    work side-by-side with Marketecture’s designers to create a logo to
    establish a brand

“After honing our platform for the past two years, we are thrilled to offer the full integration of the Marketecture Business Center,” said Oliver Bigler, chairman and CEO of Marketecture. “For years, thousands of micro and small businesses have benefited from aspects of our online platform and we pride ourselves in now being able to provide all the essential components needed to thrive on the web. For too long, small business owners have been unfairly offered select solutions by Internet software solution companies marketing their individual app. Marketecture’s all-in-one website solution and business system helps small business owners across the country build, market and grow their online business and adapt to an increasingly Internet-based economy.”

According to a 2011 report by research firm Borrell & Associates, most small and medium business (SMB) owners do not have the time or the expertise necessary to successfully conduct business online; in fact, 46 percent of SMBs in the U.S. have no online presence. Of the SMBs with an online presence, 80 percent are a simple “business card” site without embedded revenue generation. Marketecture addresses both deficiencies in its easy-to-use, all-in-one system, which helps clients build and maintain their website, find and retain customers and generate revenue.


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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: From Code to Cloud in 45 Minutes

In her hands-on workshop session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Diane Mueller, the Cloud Evangelist for ActiveState, will introduce conceptual cloud architectural principles and show how private Platform as a Service enables cloud app development, deployment, and management.
She will provide an overview of cloud architectures, present web frameworks and sample applications, then show how to package, create a manifest, and deploy apps to any cloud. By the end of the session, Cloud Expo delegates will be able to push an application from a source repository (e.g., Github) to the cloud and make it available for others to deploy, manage, or monitor.

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Disaster Recovery Ascends to the Cloud, Part I

While many new technologies claim to revolutionize the practice of disaster recovery (DR) for IT environments, few have significantly altered the economics and logistics of building and maintaining a secondary IT site. For most organizations, a secondary site housing server and storage infrastructure has remained the only recovery path for their business from a primary site disaster, failure or outage.
While it might seem preferable to avoid the expenditure of a secondary IT site altogether, what drives investment in DR infrastructures is a set of recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) that respectively determine the maximum allowable downtime and data loss an organization is willing to sustain. While certain organizations may require both of these objectives to be near zero (i.e. instant recovery, no data loss), other organizations may be able to withstand minutes or even hours of downtime. Understanding these objectives is one of the fundamental tenets for DR planning and investment.

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Load Balancing 101: Active-Active in the Cloud

Why active-active is not best practice in the data center, and shouldn’t be in the cloud either.

Last time we dove into a “Load Balancing 101” discussion we looked at the difference between architected for scale and architected for fail. The question that usually pops up after such a discussion is “why can’t I just provision an extra server and use it. If one fails, the other picks up the load”?

We call such a model N+1 – where N is the number of servers necessary to handle load plus one extra, just in case. The assumption is that all N+1 servers are active, so no resources are just hanging out idle and wasting money. This is also sometimes referred to as “active-active” when such architectures include a redundant pair of X (firewalls, load balancers, servers, etc… ) because both the primary and backup are active at the same time.
So it sounds good, this utilization of all resources and when everything is running rosy it can benefit in terms of improving performance, because utilization remains lower across all N+1 devices.

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Interoute: Attainable SLAs and taking on AWS #AppsWorld

CloudTech caught up with Matthew Finnie, the CTO of IaaS cloud providers Interoute, who is exhibiting at Apps World.

According to Interoute CTO Matthew Finnie, a 100% service level agreement (SLA) is ‘nonsense’, although a lot depends on the sector your cloud company is trying to reach and the shape of your business model.

Interoute, who is currently exhibiting at Apps World in London, has a virtual data centre (VDC) which offers a 99.99% uptime rate and, while it doesn’t reach the magical ‘five nines’ in availability, Finnie inferred that it’s worth looking beyond the statistics.

“99.99% is an actual availability,” he said. “We’re coming at it from a world where we have enterprise customers and carriers who are building businesses on the back of us, and they don’t want a commercial SLA.

“If we gave them three, five hours’ service credits, it doesn …

APAC-Partners, Guest Blog, Parallels APAC Summit

LuxCloud Accelerates Resellers Business in the Cloud

 

This post is part of the Parallels Partner Series, featuring the insights of service providers who are growing by leveraging Parallels software, expertise and ecosystem to meet the cloud computing needs of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). View other posts here.

 

In 2010, LuxCloud saw the opportunity to create a platform to help IT resellers market cloud-based applications on a white-label basis. We knew two things would make this concept compelling to resellers: very low start-up costs – as a result of zero infrastructure investment – and the ability to sell services under one’s own brand. And this was how LuxCloud was born.

 

We were very clear from the beginning that we wanted to offer a platform which allowed resellers to focus on launching new services and thus growing their business.  Addressing issues of incorporating automated business functions (like billing) was important to us, as was the ability to quickly and easily automate the provisioning of services.  In addition, the platform needed to be able to scale as quickly as our reseller partners were able to grow their own businesses.

 

We found our solution in Parallels Automation, which provides a complete and customizable operational and business support system for delivering SaaS. Every aspect of the solution – from service delivery through management and billing – is automated. This enables us and our resellers to rapidly deploy new services while minimizing operational costs and maximizing revenues and profitability.

 

The scalability aspect of Parallels Automation is another draw. As resellers get comfortable with the business model, they can add new services quickly and easily. They can potentially scale up from a few hundred users to even a million from the same platform and without investing in any infrastructure.

 

After receiving training from Parallels, we set up an on-boarding process for our resellers, which enable us to get them up and running within a few days.  For the reseller, this faster time-to-market means better return-on-investment.

 

Within weeks of our launch, we won ten reseller partners across Western Europe, earning very positive feedback for our new delivery platform. What also makes LuxCloud popular among resellers is the ease of use and speed of integration and deployment. And because we take care of all service maintenance and management using Parallels Automation, resellers can focus on their core business – selling and delivering cloud services to their customers.

 

We are making plans to expand our business and services offerings using the Parallels Automation platform to include Microsoft Windows-based shared hosting and other Microsoft hosted applications.  We are also planning to expand the business globally, adding additional services and applications according to market needs and demands.

 

We are using our ‘first-mover advantage’ based on Parallels Automation to create a market niche. While other service providers may recognize the opportunity, our deep understanding of the motivations of resellers, our long-standing relationships with the stakeholders in our ecosystem, and the proven success of our white-label distribution platform, puts us in a leadership position in a burgeoning cloud services distribution market.

 

Marco Houwen

CEO and Founder

LuxCloud

www.luxcloud.com

 

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