I would like to take this opportunity to share the big announcement from this holiday weekend. CSC has chosen Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud to power its cloud management.
The Spectrum of Hardware for the Cloud
When I joined Cisco in 1996, I was sitting in new-hire orientation and distinctly remember one of the VPs tell us that, “we are a software company”. I remember being surprised at this, because we had just finished touring an incredible lab filled with huge boxes of blinking lights. But after working with the products for a few months, it became obvious that the value to our customers was the stability and flexibility of the IOS software (no kids, not the stuff on your iPhone).
Mission Impossible, Solved
Enterprise IT managers are tasked with the mission to solve for the vast explosion of business data. As business data continues its relentless growth, building complex, tiered storage architectures is no longer practical. It has been nearly impossible to keep ahead of the explosion of data, until now.
Attend this webcast and join storage industry expert, David Vellante, as he leads a discussion with IBM and IBM Ecosystem partner, Nirvanix, on how to solve for the explosion of today’s unstructured data in the enterprise.
Global SMB Market: Web Presence
Part 3 of a 5-part series detailing Parallels SMB Cloud Insights research
In this Global SMB Market series we’ve been discussing our Parallels SMB Cloud Insights to help service providers target the rapidly-growing cloud services market for small and medium businesses. In our last post we talked about global growth opportunities in hosted infrastructure. This week we’ll discuss the opportunities for web presence with these companies.
As with hosted infrastructure, the opportunities in the web presence sector depend on the market segment to which a country belongs. However, compared to hosted infrastructure, there is already a strong penetration rate for all three market segments identified in our report (see Table 2, below), which can mean an easier job for service providers.
A Developed Web Presence
Developed countries with mature cloud services already have a well-developed web presence, with about 50% of companies having a service provider and 70% having a website. But even with these web-savvy companies, or Cloud Expanders, there is opportunity.
First, self-hosting a website is an expensive and technically complex solution for SMBs, yet the 15 to 20% of micro and small companies in this segment are currently doing just that. Service providers can educate these SMBs about the advantages of third-party web hosting and encourage them to switch to a hosted service. Second, service providers can offer tools such as website design, social media, and e-commerce capabilities, all elements that can be overwhelming and otherwise expensive for smaller businesses.
Maturing into Cloud Services
For companies in developed countries with maturing cloud services the opportunities are a little different. Our research found that only 50% of the SMBs in this group have a website, compared to 70% in the previous segment. But even with this dramatic drop in penetration, there is an opportunity to switch companies that are currently self-hosting – so-called Cloud Converters – to more affordable, easier to manage third-party web hosting as well as upsell services.
In addition, the 50% of SMBs in this segment that don’t currently have a website actually show a high willingness to adopt a hosted web presence, with over 30% of them considering adding third-party web hosting plans in the next three years, so now is the perfect time for service providers to get in on the ground floor.
Emerging into the Cloud
The web presence market among SMBs in developing countries with emerging cloud services has ample room for growth. Currently, less than 40% of SMBs in these countries have a company website, making these Cloud Leapers the primary opportunity in this market. Not only are they the largest group with no website, but they also show a strong willingness to adopt: about 35% of them plan to add a third-party web hosting plan in the upcoming three years.
Among all SMBs, whether they have a website or not, social media pages are the top forms of web presence. Although current penetration rates are still low, service providers should keep social media integration tools in mind, especially as Internet usage in all segments grows and leads to higher penetration rates.
In the next installment we’ll discuss options for Hosted Communication and Collaboration for SMBs.
Want to know more? Parallels has updated and enriched its wildly popular research on SMBs and their move to the cloud. We’ll present our findings in a webinar on May 30th. In this webinar, we will share the results of our latest US SMB research, including how SMBs are adopting cloud services, how much is being spent on each type of service, and how service providers should market to SMBs to benefit from the upcoming growth in this booming market.
UShareSoft Coupon Code ▸ usharesoftVIPgold Offer as Cloud Expo Sponsor
As an exhibitor at Cloud Expo New York, UShareSoft is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
UShareSoft offers a cloud server template factory and enterprise app store platform for self-service software onboarding to cloud. UShareSoft’s UForge enables customers to automate the creation and management of cloud images and server templates, with full software governance. Additionally, UForge allows hosting providers to build their own dynamic app store for enterprise IT applications, quickly scaling their cloud services business and ecosystem. UShareSoft tools are helping hosting providers, ISVs and enterprises in their transition phase to the cloud. Headquartered in Europe, UShareSoft has an R&D center in Argentina and offices in the United States and Japan.
Coraid Coupon Code ▸ coraidVIPgold Special Offer as Cloud Expo Sponsor
As a Silver Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, Coraid is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Coraid Inc. is a technology manufacturing company based in the United States. It designs and manufactures a full line of computer data storage products branded under the trade name EtherDrive storage. Coraid sells products through technology channel partners operating around the world. EtherDrive storage products provide enterprises of all sizes with a flexible tier of high performance Ethernet SAN storage. Coraid has been selling its products since 2004 delivering the fundamental building blocks for scaling out storage projects for virtualization, disaster recovery, high-performance computing, and cloud storage.
Access HP Cloud Storage from Mac OS X
If you have an HP Cloud account, you may be familiar with the following screen, which is the HP web based storage browser for HP Cloud Object Storage. You can upload, download and browse the files and folders in your HP Cloud Object Storage. Besides the HP Cloud Storage Web Browser access, you may also want to access the cloud storage from PC, from Mac, from mobile devices or from file servers. This is when Gladinet Cloud can help.
(ISC)² Coupon Code ▸ isc2VIPgold Special Offer as Cloud Expo Media Sponsor
As a Media Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, (ISC)² is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
The International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, Inc., (ISC)², is the global leader in educating and certifying information security professionals throughout their careers. Our reputation has earned our certifications numerous awards and global recognition. As one of our members, you’ll have access to current industry information, networking opportunities, discounts on industry conferences and valuable career tools.
Jaspersoft Coupon Code ▸ jaspersoftVIPgold Offer as Cloud Expo Sponsor
As an exhibitor at Cloud Expo New York, Jaspersoft is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Jaspersoft provides the most flexible, cost-effective and widely deployed Business Intelligence (BI) suite in the world, enabling better decision-making through highly interactive reports, dashboards and analytics. By leading in support for cloud, Big Data, and mobile deployments, Jaspersoft helps its customers deliver on the promise of self-service BI at scale. Leveraging a commercial open source business model and a community of over 275,000 registered members, Jaspersoft’s open source BI software has been downloaded over 16 million times. Jaspersoft production deployments, in excess of 175,000, power 130,000 data-driven applications spanning 15,000 commercial customers. Jaspersoft is privately held and has locations around the world.
PubNub Coupon Code ▸ pubnubVIPgold Special Offer as Cloud Expo Sponsor
As an exhibitor of Cloud Expo New York, PubNub is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
To obtain this special pass, here is a quick summary of all anyone needs to do – feel free to cut and paste these instructions into any email blast you might be sending out.
PubNub is a blazingly fast cloud-hosted data push service for building real-time web and mobile apps. Hundreds of apps and thousands of developers rely on PubNub for delivering “human-perceptive” real-time experiences that scale to millions of users worldwide. PubNub delivers the infrastructure needed to build amazing MMO games, social apps, business collaborative solutions, and more.