Archivo de la etiqueta: cloud

4 Ways SMBs Can Take Advantage of the Cloud

julio 23, 2015 Chris Chesley

While cloud adoption among SMBs continues to rise, there are still plenty of SMB customers I speak with who are reluctant to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. Below are four examples of how cloud adoption can help SMBs excel.

Access to Enterprise Class Features

The cloud gives SMBs access to enterprise class features that many couldn’t normally take advantage of. Geo-location and load balancing are both great examples. If an SMB puts its website up on Microsoft Azure, a click of a button can put 3 copies locally and also put 3 copies in 3 different geographical locations automatically. This way if something happened at one of the locations, all of the is data already at another data center ready to spin up. Doing this without utilizing the cloud would be extremely costly and quite unrealistic for the budgets of most SMB organizations.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DRaaS is a cost effective insurance policy for SMBs. Instead of having to buy and maintain separate servers, SAN, storage, network, firewall, rack space, etc. I can take my backups and load them up to the cloud (Azure, vCloud Air, Cirrity, etc.). This gives me a way to have infrastructure fail over in the event of a disaster. SMBs that go this route can pay less per month to have this available than it would be buy on-prem equipment. Buying the equipment may mean that you aren’t using all of it as well.

Desktops in the Cloud

Another way SMBs can use the cloud is to host desktops. Doing this means you don’t have to buy or maintain desktops and allows for greater scalability. There are plenty of companies where users change a lot so internal IT is tasked with adding or removing users on a fairly regular basis. This means they have desktops that they need to build out manually. By hosting your desktops in the cloud, you can automatically spin up or down when needed. This not only provides cost savings, but will also save your IT department a significant amount of time.

Application Scalability

If you are running, say, Microsoft Azure, you can set Azure to utilization between 25-75% of CPU. When utilization gets above 75%, Azure is going to automatically turn up more servers and load balance them. If utilization dips below 25%, it will decommission servers. This allows for automatic scaling based on user activity. Doing this traditionally is much more expensive and in many cases not possible for SMB’s.

The bottom line is SMBs should take a closer look at cloud options that can increase efficiencies and drive down costs. If you would like to talk about this in more detail, please reach out. I’d love to have a conversation!

The corporate IT department is evolving. Has yours kept pace?

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

Box, Enterprise IT, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM and Box announce global enterprise cloud partnership

junio 24, 2015 Business Cloud News

US enterprise tech giant IBM has revealed a new global partnership with cloud storage outfit Box to integrate their products and sell into vertically targeted enterprise markets.

More specifically the strategic alliance will combine Box’s cloud collaboration platform with a number of IBM solutions, including analytics, cloud and security. Both companies will sell the combined products.

“Today’s digital enterprises demand world-class technologies that transform how their organizations operate both internally and externally,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “This extensive alliance between Box and IBM opens up an exciting opportunity for both companies to reach new markets and deliver unified solutions and services that can redefine industries, advance secure collaboration and revolutionize enterprise mobility.”

“This partnership will transform the way work is done in industries and professions that shape our experience every day,” said Bob Picciano, SVP of IBM Analytics. “The impact will be felt by experts and professionals in industries such as healthcare, financial services, law, and engineering who are overwhelmed by today’s digital data and seek better solutions to manage large volumes of information more intelligently and securely. The integration of IBM and Box technologies, combined with our global cloud capabilities and the ability to enrich content with analytics, will help unlock actionable insights for use across the enterprise.”

The alliance will focus on three main areas: content management and social collaboration; enterprise cloud, security and consulting; and custom app development for industries. The general thread of the announcement seems to be a desire to bring cloud applications to regions and industries that are not currently making the most of them and is just the latest in a sequence of collaborations by both Box and IBM.

acquisition, Colt, fibre, fidelity, Telco Cloud

Fidelity bid for Colt doesn’t convince directors

junio 19, 2015 Business Cloud News

Fidelity Investments, which is already the majority shareholder in Colt Group, has bid to acquire the remaining stock of the telecoms and cloud provider, but Colt directors are unconvinced.

The relationship between the two companies is intimate and has been from the very beginning. Fidelity provided the cash to form Colt back in 1992, to provide telecoms services in London. It soon expanded across Europe but in 2001, together with a lot of other telecoms and tech companies, encountered problems requiring a further injection of capital from Fidelity.

For some reason, despite holding its current majority position since then, Fidelity has decided it’s time for Colt to be wholly private once more. “As founders and majority shareholders of Colt, Fidelity is pleased to announce the continuation of its commitment to the business through returning the group to private ownership,” said Cyrus Jilla, President of Eight Roads, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity.

“We typically hold our proprietary investments outside the financial services industry, such as Colt, in the private domain. This transaction allows us to hold our investment in Colt consistent with this strategy while providing an attractive and certain value for the current Colt independent shareholders.”

The independent directors of Colt, who are there to protect the interests of its shareholders, have publicly acknowledged the offer of 190p per share from Fidelity, but reckon it’s too low.

“The independent directors believe that the offer undervalues the company and its prospects and accordingly they consider that the financial terms of the offer are not fair to the independent shareholders of Colt,” said their statement.

“The independent directors believe that the financial terms of the offer may be considered by some shareholders to be acceptable in the circumstances, and accordingly make no recommendation to shareholders whether or not to accept the offer.

“Over the course of 2015, the management of Colt has been working on a plan to refocus the company’s activities and significantly improve its financial performance. The Board has provisionally approved a new business plan and further details will be announced in due course.”

Colt’s shares were trading at around 156p before the bid and jumped straight up to 190p, implying the market thinks Fidelity’s bid is likely to be accepted.

451 Research, Apple Watch, Internet of Things, IoT, M2M, News & Analysis, wearable technology

Four-fold cellular IoT connections predicted by 2019

junio 17, 2015 Business Cloud News

IT analyst firm 451 Research has forecasted the growth of cellular network-based connections for IoT-devices as anticipation surrounding the tech continues to grow. It also reckons wearable tech as a major enterprise tool will become reality in the next 12 months.

According to the firm, the telecoms industry can expect a nigh on four-fold boom in cellular IoT connections between 2014 and 2019, growing from 252 million to 908 million globally. The firm reckons such growth comes down to several key factors, primarily the ease of access to and reduced costs of hardware and broadband for enterprise customers. Secondly, the maturation of cloud, data management and analytics platforms means machine-generated data can be hosted and utilised quicker than in previous years.

Finally, 451 also attributes increasing M&A activity as a positive influence on the developing IoT market, with the ongoing vendor land-grab driving advancements in technology.

“We continue to be bullish that ultimately the hype of IoT will be proven to be warranted back on business impact,” said Brian Partridge, 451’s research VP. “Over the forecast period we expect that M2M/IoT solution suppliers will find fertile ground in vertical markets such as retail and government that will adopt IoT/M2M to enable strategic digitization strategies such as smart cities and the use of digital signage, mobile point of sale, and connected kiosks to drive the transformation from brick and mortar to ‘click and mortar’.”

Simultaneously, Harbor Research has revealed some numbers forecasting the profitability of IoT applications, claiming 80% of IoT apps will be generating revenue for users within the next three years. At present, its survey suggest, 65% of apps are money making.

451 Research also looked into the use of wearable tech in the enterprise, and said that 39% of the IT decision-makers it quizzed will be deploying wearable tech solutions in the next six months, with another 24% following within a year. Of those deploying in the next six months, 81% identified smart watches as their wearable tech of choice.

“The release of Apple Watch has opened the flood gates governing wearables’ adoption,” said Ryan Martin, who’s an IoT and wearable tech analyst at 451. “Not now that the river is running, it’s less about where it will end and more about where – and when – to start. We expect wearable technology to deliver a key interface and input into the Industrial Internet of Things”.

To go alongside its research, 451 produced this handy market map for the IoT ecosystem.

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Financial Results, John Chambers, Kelly Kramer, News & Analysis, telstra

Cisco Q3: Enterprise shines while service provider biz struggles

mayo 14, 2015 Business Cloud News

Cisco said it enterprise business is looking strong but service provider segment still sees challenges

Cisco reported third quarter 2015 revenues of $12.1bn this week, just over 5 per cent what it raked in during the same quarter last year. In a call with analysts this week Cisco execs said the company sees continued growth in its enterprise segment, but its service provider business continue to struggle.

Revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 2015 was $36.3bn, up from $34.8bn for the first nine months of fiscal 2014.

Kelly Kramer, Cisco executive vice president and chief financial officer said the company saw a good balance across its portfolio, with its enterprise segment looking fairly strong, much like the previous quarter.

UCS revenues for the quarter were $3bn, which is sequentially flat but a 30 per cent year-on-year increase, and the company said its seeing growth in its converged infrastructure offerings (those co-developed with VCE and IBM). Its cloud revenues grew 11 per cent year-on-year, mostly on growth in its conferencing cloud software.

In a call with analysts this week Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the company is seeing better performance in its enterprise segment than its server provider business – hindered in part by an industry-wide slowdown in spending seen over the past few quarters now.

“In enterprise, the shift to selling outcomes, not products, is resulting in larger opportunities and dramatic increases in pipeline. In US enterprise, for example, the value of our pipeline of deals over $1 million increased approximately 60 per cent year-over-year, with the average deal size up over 30 per cent,” he said.

“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7 per cent, as global service provider capex remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organisational changes we have made in our global service provider organisation are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet.”

“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7%, as global service provider CapEx remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organizational changes we have made in our global service provider organization are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet”

Chambers also said Cisco’s intercloud strategy announced last year will kick into “phase 2” shortly, and while he declined to specifically outline what that entails he did shed some light on the programme’s challenges in its bid get other service providers on board with it.

“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time.”

“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those,” he added.

applications, Cloud computing, Featured, transformation services

If You Could Transform Your IT Strategy, Would You?

abril 16, 2015 GreenPages Blog

As you may know, GreenPages recently launched our Transformation Services Group, a new practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing.

This move was designed to allow us to help companies think beyond the near-term and to cast a vision for the business. As we look at the market, we see a need to help organizations take a more revolutionary and accelerated approach to embracing what we call “New World” IT architectures. While this is something we have been helping companies with for many years, we now believe that this is a logical evolution of our business that builds on our legacy of delivering high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

When we think about some of the great work we have done over the years, many examples come to mind. One of these is a complex project we completed for The Channel Company, that helped them truly transform their business. Coming off a management buyout from its parent company, UBM, The Channel Company was tasked with having to migrate off the parent company’s centralized IT infrastructure under a very tight timeline.

Faced with this situation, the company was presented with a very compelling question: “If you had the opportunity to start from scratch, to transform your IT department, resources and strategy what would you do?”

Essentially, as a result of their situation, The Channel Company had the opportunity to leapfrog traditional approaches. They had the opportunity to become more agile, and more responsive. And, more importantly, they took it!

As opposed to simply moving to a traditional baseline on-prem solution, The Channel Company saw this as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink its entire IT strategy and chose GreenPages to help lead them through the process.

Through a systematic approach and advanced methodology, we were able to help The Channel Company achieve its aggressive objectives. Specifically, in less than six months, we led a transformation project that entailed the installation of new applications, and a migration of the company’s entire infrastructure to the cloud. This included moving six independent office locations from a shared infrastructure to a brand-new cloud platform supporting their employees, as well as new cloud-based office and ERP applications.

In addition to achieving the independence and technical autonomy The Channel Company needed, the savings benefits and operational efficiencies achieved were truly transformational from a business standpoint.

It is these types of success stories that drove us to formalize our Transformation Services Group. We have seen first-hand the benefits that organizations can achieve by transforming inflexible siloed IT environments into agile organizations, and we’re proud to be able to offer the expertise and end-to-end capabilities required to help customers achieve true business transformation.

In our view, the need for business agility and innovation has never been greater. The question is no longer “is transformation necessary?” but rather “if you had the opportunity to start from scratch and achieve business transformation, would you take it?”

If you’re interested in hearing more about how GreenPages has helped companies like The Channel Company transform their IT operations, please reach out.

By Ron Dupler, CEO

advanced virtualization, Cloud computing, Featured, transformation services

Launching GreenPages’ Transformation Services Group

abril 14, 2015 GreenPages Blog

I am excited to announce that today, with the launch of GreenPages’ Transformation Services Group, GreenPages took a major step in the continuing evolution of our company. This evolution was done for one reason, and one reason only –to meet the needs of our customers as they strive to compete in today’s rapidly-changing business and technology environment.

GreenPages’ new Transformation Services Group is a practice dedicated to providing customers with the agility, flexibility and innovation they need to compete in the modern era of cloud computing. We see the establishment of this focused practice area as a way to help clients take a revolutionary, accelerated approach to standing up New World, Modern IT architectures and service delivery models that enable business agility and innovation.

Disrupt or be Disrupted

With each day’s latest business headlines we learn of new ‘up-start’ companies that are finding a new way to compete in what was once a mature market. You know the names – its Uber, it’s Airbnb. These companies have found a way to leverage advanced technologies as a strategic weapon and were able to completely turn existing industries on their heads without even owning cabs or hotels (respectively).

How’d they do it? They were agile enough from a business standpoint to understand the disruptive force that technology can play, and they were fortunate enough not to be encumbered by existing infrastructure, policies and procedures. While these companies clearly were smart and innovative, they were also fortunate — they had a blank slate and could start from scratch with an offensive game plan capable of delivering value to customers in new ways.

These market disrupters share the benefit of not being encumbered by legacy technologies, platforms and processes and as a result, are out-performing and executing their larger competitors. These companies were born to be agile organizations capable of “turning on a dime” when their competitors could not.

To compete effectively in today’s environment, every company needs to find a way to become more agile. Business leaders have the choice, play defense and respond to disruption, or play offense and become the disruptor. The need for business agility has never been greater. To support this needed agility and innovation, enterprises need nimble, agile IT platforms, as legacy platforms cannot meet this need.

If it were just about technology, modernizing IT would be a more straightforward situation, but it’s about more than that. This is more than a technology problem. This is a people and process problem. It’s about command, control and compliance… Needless to say, “high velocity change” is no walk in the park.

Fortunately, helping companies achieve transformational change is something we have been doing for many years and is an area where we have deep domain expertise. Throughout our history as a company, we have become adept at guiding companies through IT and business transformation. What we are doing today is formalizing this expertise—which has been forged working with our customers in the trenches and in the boardrooms—into a unique Transformation Services practice. Transformation Services represents the next logical evolution of GreenPages and builds on our prior legacy of high quality and competency deploying advanced virtualization and cloud solutions.

Our Approach

We have always believed that while many companies face similar challenges, no two scenarios are identical. Through our more than 20 years of experience we have established a methodology that we use in each engagement, regardless of the challenge, that allows us to identify the best solution for each customer, drive organizational and technical change, and create positive outcomes for the business.

We hope that you share our excitement about this unique moment in the IT industry and our continued evolution as a company. We all know that technology can produce tangible benefits, but sometimes the road to deployment can be daunting. Transformation Services was founded to ensure our customers are able to successfully navigate that road with agility and velocity.

If you’re interested in learning more about our new Transformation Services Group, please reach out!

By Ron Dupler, CEO

Disaster Recovery as a Service: Does it make sense for you?

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