Control Panels

Turning Cloud Sense into Dollars

 

As small and medium businesses (SMBs) continue to increase their use of cloud services, web hosters have been asking, “How can I leverage this opportunity to better serve my customers’ needs and grow my business?” Here are some tips on how offering a competitive core bundle and upselling value added services can be a successful way to increase your average revenue per user (ARPU), reduce churn and differentiate your services.

 

•    Increase ARPU – To increase the revenue your customers generate, you need to continuously offer them new services. Upselling and cross-selling additional services and products—both during and after the point of sale—will play a major role in maximizing revenues from your existing customer base.

•    Reduce customer churn – Customer retention is the litmus test of your ability to differentiate yourself as a service provider and demonstrate to your customers you understand their needs. Studies show that when SMBs buy additional services through their Web service provider, they are less likely to leave. You can also differentiate yourself by engaging customers with great service; educating them on how to derive the greatest value from the solutions they purchase from you; and offering them outstanding support.

But how can you determine which solutions SMBs need? Our Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ research can help give you the answers:
 

30% of SMBs plan to add site building tools in the next three years – to capture your fair share, offer Parallels Web Presence Builder, a full-featured website design tool that any SMB can use. With Parallels Web Presence Builder, you can attract new customers and differentiate your services by offering try-and-buy evaluations or configuring a freemium website offer and upselling to paid or hosting packages.

50% of US SMBs have or plan to build mobile websites – with the highest growth in next three years. The time to start selling mobile optimized websites is now and UNITY Mobile will enable your customers to quickly create and publish a mobile site that run on any mobile phone and tablet. You can offer mobile services bundled or as standalone and UNITY Mobile products also offer you upsell options.

 

44% of SMBs are concerned about security – Web Hosters can help reduce security fears by upselling key services such as StopTheHacker, a great website security solution to help your customers prevent, detect and quickly recover from hacker or malware attacks. Another important application is CloudFlare, which extends your network globally with 23 points-of-presence on four continents, making your customer’s websites load twice as fast, while keeping them safe and optimized.

 

If you’re an Infrastructure Provider, you should offer server-wide services to protect your customers, secure your reputation and improve customer satisfaction – Parallels Premium Antivirus and Parallels Premium Outbound Antispam are two must-have applications. With Parallels Plesk Panel Power Pack you can extend Parallels Panel capabilities with high-value add-ons. As an example, Panel Power Pack includes five mailbox licenses for Kaspersky Antivirus server-side e-mail scanning software. These licenses are resalable, so you can use them to upsell your customers to additional mailbox protection, you can also upsell to an unlimited per server license.

 

Leslie McGuire
Channel Marketing Director

 

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Google To Sell Compute Engine By the Minute

Google’s Compute Engine, its interpretation of Amazon Web Services’ EC2, is here, 11 months after it was announced and a little late to the party with Amazon.

It’s now available for anybody who’s interested, not just the chosen few.

To differentiate itself from AWS, Google’s widgetry will be sold by the minute, not the hour, with 10 minutes being the minimum. Figure less than two cents an hour.

Google says it’s also got:

Shared-core instances to provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads;

Advanced routing features to help users create gateways and VPN servers that enable them to build applications spanning their local network and Google’s cloud; and

Large persistent disks that support up to 10TB per volume, which, it chortles, translates into 10x the industry standard. It used to just support 1.25TB.

Google has been working on adding a PHP runtime and the new App Engine 1.8.0 includes a limited preview of the popular web programming widgetry. Google says it offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage. App Engine already supports Java, Python and Google’s own Go language.

To make building modular application on App Engine easier, developers can now partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.

Google is also rolling out a Cloud Datastore, a fully managed and schema-less solution for storing non-relational data based on App Engine High Replication Datastore, which reportedly serves 4.5 trillion transactions a month. It says it’s a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability as well as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries and indexes. It’s a direct competitor to Amazon’s S3.

Senior VP of technical infrastructure Urs Holzle blogged that with all the feature enhancements that have been made lately, Google Cloud Platform is seeing increased use, with “over three million applications and over 300,000 unique developers,” using it in a given month.

Apparently Google is counting on expanding its partnerships with Oracle, SAP and Red Hat to attract the enterprise folk.

See https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine.

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Discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability with the Open Data Center Alliance

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) is holding its Forecast event in San Francisco in June, and I’ve been invited to moderate the panel discussing Virtual Machine Interoperability. As moderator, I’ll be far more interested in facilitating insights from panel and audience than in wittering on about what I think, so I wanted to use this blog post to begin getting some of the issues clear in my mind. What is VM interoperability, and why does it matter? From time to time, I write about Open Data. This has nothing to do with that. The Open Data Center Alliance is interested in data centres, not data. The Alliance was established back in 2010 with Intel driving things forward, and now claims over 300 member organisations, including the likes of BMW, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank and Marriott Hotels. According to the ODCA website, we came together to deliver a unified voice for emerging data center and cloud computing requirements. Our mission is to speed the migration to cloud computing by enabling the solution and service ecosystem to address IT requirements with the highest level of interoperability and standards. Much of the Alliance’s work involves identifying customer requirements and capturing these in a series of usage […]

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The Cloud and Quantum Mechanics

A computer exists that’s been able to solve complex problems set for it by Google and NASA 11,000 times faster than any traditional supercomputer. And those were the simple problems.

On harder problems, it was 33,000 times faster and on the really hard problems it was reportedly 50,000 times faster.

It’s a so-called quantum computer build on the principles of quantum mechanics and Google and NASA thought enough of the thing to buy one at a cost of maybe $10 million-$15 million and set up a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center.

There they’re going to try to advance machine learning, which, as Google says, is all about building better models of the world to make more accurate predictions. And that, from Google’s point-of-view, includes understanding spoken questions and what’s on the web so it can build a more useful and accurate search engine.

Other people want to use it to cure diseases and create effective environmental policies, both of which need better models, and they’ll get a chance because the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) will get time on the machine and make it available to researchers from around the world.

Together they’ll try move from theory to practice, building real solutions on quantum hardware.

Google says hopefully, “We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics.”

The machine they’ll be working on was built in Canada by D-Wave Systems, where Egenera founder and former Goldman Sachs CIO Vern Brownell is CEO.

It’s a second-generation machine. D-Wave only sold one of its first-generation 128-qubit D-Wave One commercial systems. That went to Lockheed Martin, which recently upgraded it to the new D-Wave Two machine Google and NASA are getting.

D-Wave sees the technology being heavily applied to the cloud. In fact it talks of a quantum cloud with a few high-end traditional servers at the back-end. Coincidently enough Google figures the best use of quantum computing is to combine quantum machines with the traditional machines in its clouds.

The D-Wave computer works by considering complex problems in terms of optimal outcomes. It can just consider more possible outcomes simultaneously and shake out the one that meets all the variables faster and with the least expenditure of energy than any other modern computer.

It considers the problem in terms of energy states and applies quantum physics to magically come up with the answer.

The technique is called quantum annealing.

And a quantum computer isn’t like a standard computer that represents data in bits that are either on or off, 1 or 0. Nope, a 10-quantum bit computer, or 10-qubit computer, can simultaneously represent data in 1,024 states,

Inside the D-Wave Two box are now 512 problem-solving qubits and its superconducting processor reportedly has to be cooled to near absolute zero.

NASA and Google reportedly mean to upgrade to 2.048 qubits sometime in the next year or two.

D-Wave has been working the kinks out of the esoteric widgetry since 1999 and in the process has gotten at least $61 million – well, maybe it’s closer to $100 million – in funding from such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos through his venture arm Bezos Expeditions, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture boys, and of course Goldman Sachs.

Other believers who contributed include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Harris &Harris Group, the Business Development Bank of Canada, BC Investment Management Corporation and Growth Works Capital among others.

The NASA-Google machine is currently being installed at Moffet Field and should be in use by fall. It is expected to be considered by financial services, healthcare and national security.

D-Wave just set up a US company in Palo Alto earlier this month to overcome any national security objections to dealing with a Canadian concern. It hired Bo Ewald as president and head of global customer operations.

Bo has run SGI and was president, COO and CTO at Cray Research, CEO and chairman of Linux Networx, e-Stamp, and most recently Perceptive Pixel. He started his career at the Los Alamos National Lab.

The company has also hired Steve Cakebread, another SGI veteran, as CFO. He used to be president and CFO of Salesforce.com and after that CFO of Pandora.

See http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/05/launching-quantum-artificial…..

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SAP, HANA and the Cloud

SAP, the third-largest software company in the world after Microsoft and

Oracle, says it’s moving all data into main memory and all systems to the

cloud.

The company’s newly announced HANA Cloud Platform is going to be

the foundation of its whole cloud portfolio, creating a single point for its

cloud-based technology, including application development and integration

services, database and analytics services.

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"Disruption redefined" – why business is ready for the CDO

By Andrew Carr, CEO Bull UK & Ireland @acarr_bull

Businesses today increasingly look at technologies like big data and software-defined networking as being disruptive in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market.

Rather than having negative associations, disruptive in this context means having an impact through a different way of thinking about business issues and challenges, as opposed to the traditional dictionary definition of ‘throwing into confusion or disorder’.

This new interpretation of the word is focused on the development of new ways of working, ultimately leading to new revenue streams and enhanced competitive edge. Indeed, truly disruptive technologies will have a lasting impact on the IT and business landscape and will ultimately be absorbed into the mainstream.

This is what is happening today with one of the most celebrated disruptive technologies of all: cloud computing, which is now widely seen as …

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How the data centre evolves to the cloud [infographic]

As anyone with a vested interest in cloud computing will know, the perception of the data centre has evolved considerably, from isolated resource centres to more connected pools, helping maximise IT efficiency.

Not surprisingly, with the potential available, the numbers are growing. 60% of server workloads are set to be virtualised by 2014, compared to only 12% in 2008m, with total investment in data centre infrastructure growing 5% on average year on year.

There are, of course, pros and cons to virtualisation, with companies continuing to balance out efficiency and agility against security considerations.

Network solutions provider Ciena, in an infographic, has stated that “the cloud is only as good as the network that supports it,” calling its solution a “data centre without walls”.

Find out the journey from data centre to cloud in the infographic below (click to enlarge):

cloud brokerage, Hosting, John Zanni

Selling Value in the Cloud

 

Cloud brokerage makes a great deal of sense to the channel. Take vanilla services from a variety of vendors, package them with (or without) your own secret sauce, and sell them with your own SLA wrapped around them. It’s a classic channel solution sell. That said, this brings VARs and ISPs into conflict with IT departments – which, in the past, have been the owner of the service guarantee within each organization, and which may be feeling increasingly marginalized by the migration of application and resource management to the cloud. In this article by John Zanni, VP of service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels he discusses how Cloud brokerage turns resellers into VARs again.

 

Read the article on ChannelPro.

 

cloud brokerage, Hosting

Selling Value in the Cloud

 

Cloud brokerage makes a great deal of sense to the channel. Take vanilla services from a variety of vendors, package them with (or without) your own secret sauce, and sell them with your own SLA wrapped around them. It’s a classic channel solution sell. That said, this brings VARs and ISPs into conflict with IT departments – which, in the past, have been the owner of the service guarantee within each organization, and which may be feeling increasingly marginalized by the migration of application and resource management to the cloud. In this article by John Zanni, VP of service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels he discusses how Cloud brokerage turns resellers into VARs again.

 

Read the article on ChannelPro.