If you want to position your Web hosting services for maximum growth and revenue, you can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, you need to identify the specific market segments you’re addressing, determine what their needs are, and frame each offer accordingly, using the style, language, and bundles that will appeal to that particular segment.

In our latest Best Practices paper (available for download on the Marketing Best Practices page within the new Parallels PartnerNet), we identify the best practices our service provider partners listed for effectively merchandising Web services to two groups of customers—those who are less technically oriented and those who are more technically oriented—plus general merchandising recommendations that apply to all customers. By following these best practices, you’ll be able to both maximize your conversion rates – from browsers to buyers – and drive increased revenues.

To download the complete whitepaper, or just a self-diagnostic checklist tool, go to Marketing Best Practices page. Not registered? Sign up today!

– Josh Beil
Director of Service Provider Marketing
@joshbeil

Microsoft has decided it wants to be popular.

It’s remade Windows Azure as both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with Linux support – so the rumors were right – since public clouds are largely Linux instances.

The Linux distributions supported include OpenSUSE 12.1, CentOS 6.2, Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2. (Red Hat itself was, evidently, too much to ask for given it’s a cloud rival and had its own cloud announcement this week but CentOS is a Red Hat clone.)

That should theoretically let Azure chase after Amazon, Rackspace, OpenStack and, as of Wednesday, Oracle, not to mention HP, Dell and everybody else.

Microsoft has also bought into the hybrid cloud, a concept Amazon only supports with Eucalyptus in tow. Azure will also have all-SSD block storage, something Amazon is only grudging with.

Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate VMs will obviously be supported. It says it still has to get all the third-party Windows apps over to Azure.

Bill Laing, corporate VP for server and cloud at Microsoft, summarized the changes in a blog posting:

Windows Azure Virtual Machines — Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. Migrate existing workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SharePoint to the cloud, bring your own customized Windows Server or Linux images, or select from a gallery. As a common virtualization file format, VHD has been adopted by hundreds of vendors and is a freely available specification covered under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

Windows Azure Virtual Network — Virtual Network lets you provision and manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Windows Azure as well as securely extend on-premises networks into the cloud. It provides control over network topology, including configuration of IP addresses, routing tables and security policies and uses the industry-standard IPSEC protocol to provide a secure connection between your corporate VPN gateway and Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Web Sites — Build web sites and applications with this highly elastic solution supporting .NET, Node.js, and PHP while using common deployment techniques like Git and FTP. Windows Azure Web Sites will also allow easy deployment of open source applications like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, Umbraco and Drupal to the cloud with a few clicks. (Expect MySQL and SQL Servers as backends.)

New tools, language support, and SDK — Windows Azure SDK June 2012 includes new developer capabilities for writing code against the latest service improvements with updated support for Java, PHP and .NET, and the addition of Python as a supported language on Windows Azure. Additionally, the SDK now provides 100% command line support for both Windows and Mac. (There will also be a new management portal.)

Availability in New Countries— Availability of Windows Azure is being expanded to customers in 48 new countries, including Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa and Ukraine. Roll-out will be complete later this month, making Windows Azure one of the most widely available cloud platforms in the industry with offerings in 89 countries and in 19 local currencies.

Microsoft is running a 90-day free trial of Azure. During the preview period that started Thursday Linux VMs will be discounted. Depending on size they’ll cost 13 cents an hour to 64 cents an hour.

read more

“Microsoft.” A name that many people say in the same manner as Jerry Seinfield would say “Newman.” I was doing this just the other day…

Yet Microsoft is a company that just won’t acknowledge its critics and doomsayers, a company that continues to grind out $2 million+ in profits per minute and maintain a status as a Fortune 40 company.

Which leads me to believe we should take its Azure expansion and imminent Windows 8 launch seriously.

The tiles will make desktop and laptop users crazy – and yes, there will still be many millions of desktop and laptop users for a long time to come. It’s good to get out of the Valley once in awhile and learn these things. The tiles look-and-feel may crash and burn on traditional PCs, in fact. If this happens, we will see a quick backpeddle to a “Windows Classic” for these systems.

But Windows 8 will not be this decade’s New Coke. Expect it to be a hit on tablet PCs, if recent demo models shown in Taipei by Taiwanese companies Acer and Asus are priced smartly and work well. Expect it to be a hit on future smartphones as well – Windows 7/Nokia phones are already gaining some momentum, and IDC believes Windows will be the #2 smartphone platform by 2016.

I often put as much stock in five-year projections as I do in the stuff my disturbed cousin over there in the rocking chair says, but I’ll make an exception here. The smartphone business is driven by carriers as much as by consumers. As carriers start to throw a range of Windows smartphones in the faces of store visitors, and incentivize specific phones, Microsoft’s market share will grow.

In this environment, the iPhone will remain a single-vendor, high-end option, Android may some day fracture totally, and it’s still unclear whether Blackberry will go the way of Francisco Franco or not. Microsoft should benefit.

Meanwhile, back on the application farm, Microsoft has opened up Azure to other PaaS platforms, and is following the big-vendor approach of HP and IBM of delivering its dev stuff as Infrastructure, with the PaaS frameworks found within. This allows it to be more like Amazon Web Services, and is thought to be a smart move by others of us in the peanut gallery. I’m hopin to get full Azure (and anti-Azure) immersions soon, and will report back.

read more

I got a BSOD the other day, while harmlessly searching for an original Churchill citation, via Google Chrome on a semi-ancient Acer laptop loaded with Windows Vista Home Basic.

Hello darlin’. Nice to see you. It’s been a long time. You’re just as lovely as you used to be. (Apologies to Conway Twitty and George Jones.)

I’m reasonably sure Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (who are my age) and all the rest at Microsoft have taken a few years off of my life during my decades of becoming an unwilling DOS/Windows demi-guru, forced to learn far, far more than I’ve ever wanted to learn about how the world’s most powerful kludge works.

To be sure, I’ve purchased and used several Apple products as well, but have found neither nirvana nor religion there. So I quit smoking and started eating oranges long ago to counterbalance the toll these Redmond Sons of Babbage are taking on me.

But the blue screen caused no real harm or foul (so far), leaving me free to muse and write an article about the new Azure and the upcoming Windows 8, while contemplating our steady march to the Heat Death of the Universe along the way.

read more

With increasing data storage demands resulting from new content types – rich digital media, social media and machine-generated data – small and mid-size businesses have been challenged to incorporate sophisticated methods to back up critical company data.
For many types of small businesses, it just doesn’t make sense to go out and buy all the storage hardware, software and services that were required before the advent of cloud backup, which now has a track record of about seven years.

read more

OpenNebula comes with several characteristics that makes it a unique software for the management of private clouds. This is actually not a mere coincidence, but rather a consequence of the design principles followed by the OpenNebula team at the time of creating the architecture and whenever a new feature is planned. So, without a shred of a doubt, we can claim that OpenNebula has the ability of managing Private Clouds embedded in its DNA.
Let’s see the three stronger points of OpenNebula when managing a local set of physical and virtual resources, for in-house consumption:

read more

Another year and another Cloud Expo in New York. This year I will be giving two different presentations.
The first is on Application Performance Monitoring in the Clouds. In this talk I will cover the five top lessons we have learned about performance and cloud applications.
The second is about Performance Management in ‘Big Data’ Applications. Most articles that I found on performance and Big Data are about the performance options on the Big Data product itself, but tend to be pretty light on the application itself. In this talk I will cover the two sides of BigData (Hadoop MapReduce and NoSQL) and analyze how these new technologies affect the application performance discipline.

read more

Next week I’ll be speaking at Cloud Expo in New York City, one of the premier cloud industry events in the U.S. Of the 150+ sessions that will take place over the four-day conference, a handful appears to address an essential element of the cloud: the network.
The importance of an enterprise-grade network at the center of cloud services cannot be overstated. Without it, private clouds are closed systems, and public clouds are subject to unpredictable performance and potential security breaches. The optimum cloud is one that is network-based, where cloud services are actually embedded in the network. A network-based, or “virtual private cloud,” allows cloud workloads and applications to be managed and delivered as part of a total solution to any device, just like voice and data.

read more

Impetus Technologies (www.impetus.com), an innovation-based software R&D services company, today announced that it will present and exhibit at Cloud Expo, NYC from June 11-14, 2012. Impetus offers accelerated consulting and services for architecture audit, design and implementation to build Big Data and Analytics solutions for enterprises. Enterprises today face challenges while integrating the Big Data technologies with their existing IT setup.
Vineet Tyagi, Head of Impetus Innovation Labs, will be presenting a session on June 12th and share with companies, the strategies that would help in minimizing the risks of such integration.
Vineet has also been invited to participate in a CTO panel that will discuss the emerging trends in Big Data and Cloud Computing. Impetus is hosting a workshop at the Boot camp on ‘Big Data Analytics using AWS cloud offerings like AWS, EMR and DynamoDB’.

read more

For many years, companies collected data from various sources that often found its way into relational databases like Oracle and MySQL. However, the rise of the Internet, Web 2.0, and recently social media began an enormous increase in the amount of data created as well as in the type of data. No longer was data relegated to types that easily fit into standard data fields. Instead, it now came in the form of photos, geographic information, chats, Twitter feeds, and emails. The age of Big Data is upon us.
A study by IDC titled “The Digital Universe Decade” projects a 45-fold increase in annual data by 2020. In 2010, the amount of digital information was 1.2 zettabytes (1 zettabyte equals 1 trillion gigabytes). To put that in perspective, the equivalent of 1.2 zettabytes is a full-length episode of “24” running continuously for 125 million years, according to IDC. That’s a lot of data. More important, this data has to go somewhere, and IDC’s report projects that by 2020, more than one-third of all digital information created annually will either live in or pass through the cloud. With all this data being created, the challenge will be how to collect, store, and analyze what it means.

read more