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.

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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.

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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 …

For many companies, getting their mobility strategies off the ground and successful is the highest priority project they have in 2013.  The urgency to get their sales and consulting teams equipped with smart phone and tablet-based applications is accelerating.

Pilot projects have shown mobility applications can shorten sales cycles and serve as a better sales training and management platform.

Serving the sales force with these technologies is paying off across a wide spectrum of industries.  It’s also changing corporate cultures, making them more responsive as well.

With these rapid advances going on and the prediction in December, 2012 by Mary Meeker that the installed base of smartphones and tablets will exceed the total PC installed base by the 2nd quarter of this year, market researchers are releasing forecasts more frequently than ever.  I’ve summarized the key forecasts below:

• Google’s Android operating system is dominating mobile operating systems …

In the latest microupdate (#4) for Parallels Plesk Automation 11.0, new much sought-after capabilities have been added to Parallels’ unrivaled multi-server hosting offering.

•  SmarterMail – enables often-requested support for popular and cost-effective Exchange-level email server software
•  Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – in addition to registering existing servers, you can now also automate your SQL Server 2008 installations
• Diagnostic tools – aids administrators in troubleshooting issues with connecting service nodes to the management node.

For details on the update, read the Release Notes.

Jitterbit’s integration solution is designed to be the glue between on-premise, cloud, mobile and social data and applications.
Jitterbit focuses on simple yet powerful integration technologies that can be quickly and easily deployed to create integrated processes and data views. We’ve seen a lot of interest in light-weight, low-coding integration capabilities as more SaaS and cloud services need to be coordinated. This is now becoming even more pertinent to bringing data together from a variety of sources.
Jitterbit 5 aims to raise the level of simplicity even higher with new features that streamline process integration, said the Oakland, CA company. The wizards-based approach allows non-technical users to design integration projects through a graphical, point-and-click interface. I think making more people able to tailor and specify integrations can significantly boost innovation and productivity.

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Are you already behind the curve? Cloud is already in the enterprise – and the federal government. What was important for yesterday’s cloud is table stakes for the future, so what’s next? Learn from one of the world’s leading cloud providers as they share their vision of the market and the future of cloud.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Jim Anthony, Vice President of Sales Engineering at Terremark, takes you inside the state of the enterprise cloud today and show why the future of the cloud is so bright.

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We have a saying here at ‘wichcraft: Make people happy while being proud of what you do.

We’re in the retail food business. Our job is to feed our customers, and our customers are at the core of everything we do. As Director of Technology for a sandwich company spanning 15 locations and three states, it can be easy to forget this simple fact. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the daily grind of maintaining servers and networks just so we can keep our business humming along.

When we made the jump to Office 365 earlier this year, we were able to take our existing on-premise servers and move them to the cloud. As a result, we eliminated layers of complexity, and I no longer needed to spend valuable time and resources administering legacy systems. This has allowed me to shift my focus toward new and exciting ways to better serve our guests, like launching a new loyalty platform and implementing tools to help us engage customers through social media.

In addition to being easy to manage, Office 365 is much more reliable than a traditional on-premise server environment. This was really put to the test when Hurricane Sandy struck New York City in late October.

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This is a follow-up companion post to the larger industry trends and perspectives series from eariler today (Part I, Part II and Part III) pertaining to today’s VMAX 10K enhancement and other announcements by EMC, and the industry myth of if large storage arrays or systems are dead.
The enhanced VMAX 10K scales from a couple of dozen up to 1,560 HDDs (or mix of HDD and SSDs). There can be a mix of 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch devices in different drive enclosures (DAE). There can be 25 SAS based 2.5 inch drives (HDD or SSD) in the 2U enclosure (see figure with cover panels removed), or 15 3.5 inch drives (HDD or SSD) in a 3U enclosure. As mentioned, there can be all 2.5 inch (including for vault drives) for up to 1,200 devices, all 3.5 inch drives for up to 960 devices, or a mix of 2.5 inch (2U DAE) and 3.5 inch (3U DAE) for a total of 1,560 drives.

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