Sunday 14 March 2010
There are several kinds of Cloud Computing service offerings. Here are the most common ones. Common Services. Some products offer Internet-based services—such as storage, middleware, collaboration, and database capabilities—directly to users.
SaaS. Software-as-a-service products provide a complete, turnkey application—including complex programs such as those for CRM or enterprise-resource management—via the Internet.
PaaS. Platform-as-a-service products offer a full or partial development environment that users can access and utilize online, even in collaboration with others.
IaaS. Infrastructure-as-a-service products deliver a full computer infrastructure via the Internet.
DaaS. Desktop-as-a-service which utilize virtualization of desktop systems serving thin clients.
BT has announced plans to offer its business customers access to integrated cloud computing and collaboration platforms via Microsoft Online Services. Under a new agreement with the software giant, the broadband firm is to become the first telecommunications and IT provider to resell the Dedicated Business Productivity Online Suite to clients. It is hoped that the integration of Microsoft’s products into BT’s 21CN global customer network will give customers access to a “fully-hosted managed service”.
Neil Sutton, vice-president of global portfolio at BT Global Services, said the agreement would also cut the “overall networked IT and infrastructure costs”. He added: “The services will also allow customers to build on existing legacy systems, while integrating voice and data applications.” BT recently announced plans to speed up its rollout of super-fast fibre broadband across the UK.
CISCO, the world’s biggest maker of network equipment, released its latest network server at a workshop in Phnom Penh. Called Data Center 3.0, the server is designed to offer cloud computing to its clients, Cisco Indochina Director Palasilp Vichivanives said. Cloud computing is a service that stores, retrieves and manipulates data over the Internet on remote servers run by firms such as Google, Cisco, IBM and others, utilising excess or unused resources of several computers without requiring capital expenditure. Market research firm IDC estimates that companies will this year spend US$100 billion on fixed data centres. Suppliers of these already have to compete with companies offering data centres in the “cloud” , and that competition is only expected to grow. Palasilp Vichivanives said the design, which had been several years in the making, was a part of the company’s five-phase road map to cloud computing.
Market research firm IDC estimates that companies will this year spend US$100 billion on fixed data centres. Suppliers of these already have to compete with companies offering data centres in the “cloud” , and that competition is only expected to grow. Palasilp Vichivanives said the design, which had been several years in the making, was a part of the company’s five-phase road map to cloud computing. He said the new data centre would deliver a streamlined IT operation for the company’s clients at a lower cost. Adopting Data Center 3.0 would also give companies the IT system flexibility needed to maximise the business potential of the new generation of Internet products and social media technologies.
Whether he’s at home, at work, at the lake or at his in-laws, whenever Tommy Vallier needs to send an invoice to clients, he just goes to the nearest computer. It doesn’t matter which computer, because no one hard drive stores his files. It’s all in the cloud. On the Internet. Forget Microsoft Office, Vallier, a freelance Web developer in Kingston, writes and saves his documents on Google Docs. I now use the Web to manage my email, calendar, contacts, to- do lists, quick notes to myself, news, podcasts, photos, videos and documents,” he said. “It’s all about access.
Hence the great promise of cloud computing, the idea of putting all computing needs on the Internet rather than a local machine. All your data and applications are accessible from anywhere, at any time. No need to invest in expensive servers without knowing if you’ll use them to capacity. No need for multiple systems administrators in the IT back office. With cloud computing, you let someone else worry about the hardware and software and pay them only for what you use. This has been the mantra of major cloud computing vendors scrambling for customers, companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and myriad smaller providers.
On the consumer side, Microsoft and Telus will soon let Canadians store their medical records online to share with doctors. There’s no shortage of analogies for cloud computing. It has been described as taking a taxi rather than buying a car. Or using the postal service instead of having a private delivery truck. In his book The Big Switch, journalist Nicholas Carr compared it to the rise of the electricity grid, when factories stopped buying and running their own power generators and paid utilities. One can also prototype ideas and applications on the Web with a limited number of test users, creating a low-cost virtual test lab. Files on office computers and mobile gadgets are automatically synchronized.
Yellowfin, with it 100% browser based interface, has always been able to be deployed via the cloud; however, Yellowfin 4.1 offers enhanced scalability with improved clustering administration allowing for far larger and complex deployments. For example by using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud web service as the backbone. Glen rabie, CEO of Yellowfin says “Popular applications for cloud deployment include software-as-a-service applications such as CRM, expense management, human resources, and Web analytics. But now we’re seeing a sudden burst of activity around business intelligence. This makes sense, since BI software shares characteristics with the aforementioned apps that make it right for cloud computing.”
The benefits of deploying Yellowfin in the cloud have been proven by Base2, who use Yellowfin to track real time performance metrics for field management services. “In the past you had to buy and manage physical servers to deploy Yellowfin, but now you can have Yellowfin running within 15 minutes,” said Arthur Marinis of Base2 a Yellowfin partner. Ron Dovich, a Yellowfin partner based in Austin Texas noted that “We choose to run Yellowfin inside of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud platform because our client does not own any hardware or have any in-house expertise for building out and managing the required infrastructure.Yellowfin has no plans to offer a SAAS BI application directly to end users. “What we offer is the capability for our partners and OEM partners to develop their own products and services in the cloud using Yellowfin,” says Rabie. The value in Yellowfin is that clients and partners have the flexibility to choose either cloud or traditional in house deployments.
The Cannes organizers have added new categories in recent years, like design and PR, to keep up with these changes. But I believe we’ll soon need new categories to honor marketing programs that are technology driven. Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in IT circles, but it should be equally discussed among marketers. It’s another technology trend that’s already having a tremendous impact on consumers. And where consumers go, marketers need to follow. Cloud computing is fueling intense interest as a way to reduce technology costs within organizations.
But the same dynamics can fuel savings in marketing costs by enabling brands to shift to a new, ongoing dynamic with consumers, one that doesn’t rely on the costly media expenditures of our campaign-centric advertising world. Let’s start with some simple definitions. When we speak about “the cloud,” we’re referring to any kind of Internet-based service that allows its users to upload, store and share personal “stuff” online. If you upload a video to YouTube, that video is in the cloud. If you upload a photo album to Flickr, those photos are in the cloud. If you sign up for Facebook or MySpace,
The final barriers to technology adoption are cost and simplicity, and the cloud has an answer to both. On the cost side, netbooks are lowering the bar of affordability for people and entire societies that could not previously afford the power of technology. On the simplicity side, everything you do in the cloud is accessed through a Web browser or a mobile application. There is absolutely no reason why brands can’t get into this game. At its core, cloud-based marketing is powered by a simple idea: be useful to your customers and they in turn will be loyal to your brand. The cloud is a massive engine of technological utility, with myriad ways to be useful to customers.
Intel demoed this fledgling tech this morning at its seventh annual Research@Intel event in Mountain View,California. As Intel researcher Byung-Gon Chun told The Reg, the Clone Cloud is designed - as its name suggests - to create a clone of your smartphone’s data and apps and run them in a cloud environment where they can take advantage of far more computing power than could ever be squeezed into a pocketable device. Thanks to a stack living on your smartphone and another on a host device - which could either be dedicated hardware or a virtualized instance - your phone (or netbook, nettop, MID, or whatever) could live a schizoid life, existing both in your pocket and in the cloud.
Of course, offloading computationally expensive operations from clients to hosts is not new. The Clone Cloud is different, however, in that the client/host relationship dissolves into the cloud. The smartphone isn’t getting data from an application running in the cloud. The smartphone itself is running in the cloud in clone form. To demonstrate the power of the Clone Cloud, Chun ran an image-processing task that took a minute and a half on a smartphone. On the smartphone’s clone, the same task took a second and a half - including the transmission time - and the process was seamless. To the user, it simply looked like one hella-fast smartphone.
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Casey says cloud computing would allow government agencies to ramp up and down their services based on needs. “We’re busy at the end of the year when our clients do most of our buying, the IRS is busy each April and the Census every ten years,” Casey says. Oh, and we love Casey’s sense of humor: Her presentation included a clip from Back to the Future and this old, but great joke. “I grew up in Texas and we had both kinds of music: Country and Western.”
Rick’s company does high-end video and photography, recently producing a promotional video for the U.S. Government Printing Office. And we love Joe’s title, and he says: “There are a lot of Internet evangelists, but only one consigliere, and if anyone tries to take it I’ll make them disappear.” FMC does global digital training on software programs like Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Boris FX, Digidesign, NewTek and Softimage. Anna’s company “teaches executives all the things they don’t know how to do.”
Merlin International raised $50,000 at their annual Fishing Challenge for Team River Runner, a volunteer organization that introduces wounded military veterans and their family members to whitewater boating and paddling sports. Merlin is a Colorado-based IT consulting firm with federal sales offices in Vienna.
The LeadMaster round-robin lead management system also provides an alternate lead distribution option to business partners and allows dynamically changing the delivery priority with each incoming lead. The LeadMaster round-robin lead management solution allows LeadMaster customers to automatically assign new sales leads to a team of sales people. The leads are distributed one per sales team member in a prescribed order. The round-robin lead management solution allows sales leads to be evenly spread out among sales representatives.
Offered via online subscription, LeadMaster’s flagship cloud computing application closes the loop between marketing and sales by tracking leads in real-time throughout the sales cycle, from demand generation to lead closure. Combining contact management, sales force automation (SFA), lead tracking and virtual call center capabilities, this powerful web-based application helps companies pinpoint where leads are quickly converting into revenue in order to increase close ratios and maximize return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns. LeadMaster’s products and services are available directly from its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia and also through a global network of value-added resellers, consultants and systems integrators. For more information, please visit the LeadMaster website. That’s our goal.
