Friday 12 March 2010
RingCentral, a cloud computing based business phone system provider, announced today that it has been selected as a 2010 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Candidates for this prestigious award are nominated by the world’s leading technology experts and are judged by a distinguished panel appointed by the World Economic Forum. Vlad Shmunis, Founder and CEO of RingCentral, has been invited to receive the award at the upcoming World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in January 2010 in Davos, Switzerland.
“As President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs and as a former entrepreneur and venture investor, I recognize the social and economic benefits that can arise from information and communication technology innovations
. I was extremely pleased to represent Alcatel-Lucent and contribute my insights to the team of Technology Pioneer Partners serving on the Selection Advisory Committee,” said Kim Jeong, President, Bell Labs, Executive Vice-President, Alcatel-Lucent, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Laboratories, USA and Technology Pioneer Partner.
Previous Technology Pioneers include AdMob, ClearWire, Google, LoudCloud, Mint.com, Monster.com, Sycamore Networks, TellMe Networks, and UTStarcom. To be selected as a Technology Pioneer, a company must be involved in the development of a life-changing technology innovation and have the potential for long-term impact on business and society. In addition, it must demonstrate visionary leadership and show all the signs of a long-standing and sustainable market leader — and its technology must be proven. Twenty-six companies were selected from a pool of 300 prospects this year for their accomplishments as the most innovative start-ups and for their critical impact on the future of business and society.
“It is an incredible honor to be named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum,” said Vlad Shmunis, CEO of RingCentral. “Receiving this recognition is a true testament to our capabilities and underscores the importance of our work in delivering innovative cloud based business phone systems to businesses. Mobile phones have had a dramatic impact on the global economy and RingCentral is delivering world-class solutions that can be instantly deployed on a global basis for the mobile business world. With this tremendous recognition, we continue to build strong momentum heading into 2010.”
As the traditional office transforms into a mobile and distributed work environment, business communication solutions need to evolve. With staff working from various remote locations, many businesses are unable to integrate distributed and mobile employees into a single business phone system. Legacy on-premise business phone systems are not only extremely expensive, but were designed for centralized office environments and before the era of Internet and mobile phones. RingCentral delivers cloud based business phone systems that are designed for the modern mobile and distributed business world, at a fraction of the cost of traditional phone systems.
About RingCentral
RingCentral provides cloud computing based business phone systems. With top industry honors, including PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Award and Small Business Computing’s Excellence in Technology, RingCentral delivers on-demand phone systems that are designed for the modern mobile and distributed business world, at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, RingCentral is privately held with backing from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and DAG Ventures. For more information, please visit: www.ringcentral.com
ParaScale Forecasts Cloud Storage Opportunities
Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in all things cloud. Google and Amazon popularized the concept, now businesses of all sizes and types are interested in its potential. With the availability of cloud storage-enabling solutions, many service providers and hosting companies are investigating new cloud storage service offerings.
“Tier1 quantifies the cloud service market to be $300M in 2009 and growing at a compound annual growth rate of 100% over the next three years,” said Analyst Antonio Piraino. “I estimate the cloud storage services opportunity to be 40-60% of this market, and consider it the low-hanging fruit amongst cloud services and the quickest for MSPs to deploy.”
Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, a start-up company developing cloud storage software, believes the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed in the future. For service providers, this presents tremendous opportunity, as well as challenges.
Krishnan asserts that the public cloud storage service provider market is beginning to segment. Segment one includes the mass-market cloud service providers like Amazon S3, Google, Rackspace, and a few others. Segment two consists of the sophisticated enterprise cloud service providers who are rapidly creating new services that are combining virtualization, multi-tenant storage cloud and compute cloud service and private hosted clouds. Segment three is comprised of the giant telcos such as AT&T, Verizon Business, and Deutsche Telecom.
“Most manage hosters and service providers will need to determine their strategy for winning business in the second segment of contenders,” said Krishnan. “While the cloud services market is going to provide upside for many years, service providers must have a well thought-out entry strategy to succeed. Surprisingly, a number of mid-sized new entrants are considering a “build and they will come” approach and launching into segment one. This is a recipe for a “build and you will get run-over” scenario, as the goliaths of segment one already have first mover advantage and tremendous economies of scale.”
Business Questions To Ponder As Service Providers Consider Offering Cloud Storage Services
Krishnan identifies several considerations for service providers and managed hosting companies as they develop their cloud storage services offering. These include:
* Evaluate your customers and their data needs.
* What amount of data do you intend to store for your customers?
* What sustainable differentiator should you base your business on?
* What cloud services are already available and how will you compete?
* If you succeed, is the business and architecture going to scale?
Cloud Storage Technology Factors To Consider
Regardless of how the service provider answers the above business questions, the systematic approach to evaluate cloud storage technologies remains the same:
* A cloud storage solution has three key parts. Research the options to ensure a full storage cloud solution.
* Choose a cloud solution that can start small with a few TBs and scale up.
* Avoid proprietary interfaces and APIs.
* Determine if your preferred cloud storage solution can offer data access via familiar enterprise protocols.
* Do you have an opportunity to offer differentiated cloud storage integrated application services? Can your cloud storage platform help you deliver this high value service?
* Cloud is about scale. Ensure that your cloud data access protocol can scale as your business grows.
* Always perform a proof of concept within your own environment.
About ParaScale, Inc.
ParaScale is headquartered in Silicon Valley and is the leader in cloud storage software that enables service providers to quickly and easily create storage cloud service offerings. As a software-only solution that can be downloaded from the web and applied to any standard Linux platform, ParaScale Cloud Storage enables hundreds of commodity servers to be clustered together to act as a file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput. For more information visit www.parascale.com.
2009 Product Innovation Award
Salesforce.com , the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that Network Products Guide has named the Service Cloud a winner of the 2009 Product Innovation Award in the Software as a Service and Cloud Computing category. The award recognizes and honors vendors from all over the world with innovation and ground-breaking products that are “bringing essential and incremental changes and are setting the bar higher for others in all areas of information technology.”
The Service Cloud is the next-generation solution for customer service. Built on the Force.com platform, the Service Cloud transforms customer service through the power of cloud computing. The Service Cloud joins industry leading cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter with traditional service channels like phone, email, and chat to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the cloud. By capturing these conversations, the Service Cloud empowers companies to deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device - ensuring that the quality of customer service is consistent across every channel.
“The Service Cloud is completely revolutionizing the way companies think about customer service. By integrating social networks like Twitter and Facebook with traditional customer service channels, companies can deliver a new level of customer success,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “We’re pleased to be recognized by Network Products Guide for our most recent innovation in cloud computing.”
“Innovation is clearly an important factor for greater success and has the most impact on staying competitive,” commented Rake Narang, editor-in-chief of Network Products Guide. “Innovative products such as the Service Cloud from salesforce.com are bringing improvements in both the way companies do business and how they compete in the ever-changing marketplace.”
To view a short video on the benefits of cloud computing, visit: http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing”
About Network Products Guide Awards
Network Products Guide is a media sponsor of Interop and Technosium Executive Alliance Forums engaging Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs). As industry’s leading technology research and advisory publication, it plays a vital role in keeping decision makers and end-users informed of the choices they can make in all areas of information technology. You will discover a wealth of information and tools in this guide including the best products and services, roadmaps, industry directions, technology advancements and independent product evaluations that facilitate in making the most pertinent technology decisions impacting business and personal goals. The guide follows conscientious research methodologies developed and enhanced by industry experts. To learn more, visit www.networkproductsguide.com
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company’s portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available athttp://www.salesforce.com/crm/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company’s Force.com Platform http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) enables customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com’s http://salesforce.com) real-time, multi-tenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.
As of April 30, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 59,300 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM”. For more information please visithttp://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Google Apps customers can now employ a sort of safety net to protect corporate documents and files in Google Docs. Called CloudSave, users are able to conduct legal discovery and “un-delete” previously deleted documents as needed. CloudSave comes courtesy of Salvair, a company that works to increase organizational efficiency through cloud computing solutions. They recently announced the release of version 2 software for Google Docs Archival and eDiscovery. Traditionally, Salvair offers software, services and training for companies evaluating and subsequently implementing Google Apps. Encompassing migration, integration and usability for the enhancement of the Google Apps experience, Salvair focuses on software that supplements Google Apps within the enterprise.
By employing CloudSave, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFS can be readily backed up, making it a useful eDiscovery tool. Companies can benefit from the flexibility of archiving documents for an entire domain or for specific users, while enjoying the access and ease of Google Docs. Because eDiscovery isn’t just for companies, Salvair offers discounted pricing for educational and non-profit organizations. Considering that use of Google Docs is an affordable option for business document suites, not to mention collaboration and messaging, why not use the money you’re saving to ensure security and protection of your files? Price varies by options but starts at US$ 25 per user, or a minimum of US$ 15,000.
National Institute on Standards and Technology’s Peter Mell said Monday that the US needs “minimal” standards to define cloud computing. Mell, senior computer scientist for NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory, stressed that he was not speaking in an official capacity even as he discussed his draft definitions for cloud computing. He said he saw no issues with the U.S. putting “low-sensitivity data” on public cloud services; indeed, data.gov and USAspending.gov are currently hosted on cloud provider Terremark. There is a strong push from the top down; newly minted Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is pushing hard for cloud computing usage.
Kevin Jackson, VP of Dataline, met with Kundra and spoke of his overriding determination to cut computing costs by using virtualization and public cloud. Dataline provides IT services for the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies, according to Jackson. He said Kundra wanted to change the procurement system to favor new, cheaper technologies and push towards easier collaboration. Federal CIOs, he warned, would be held to task by Kundra if they did not look at cloud computing first. The U.S. government is on track to spend more than $77 billion dollars on IT in 2010, according to recent reports, mostly in services from EDS and SAP, making it one of the largest consumers of IT in the world. The conference discussions will yield a report on how to start standardizing cloud technology to be presented to the National Defense University Cloud Symposia on Wednesday. Fed CIO Kundra will present a keynote at the Symposia, as well as presentations by Google, HP, IBM and others.
Google’s Chrome operating system (OS) will operate on and allow immediate access to Web-based applications, which prominently includes the company’s cloud computing offerings. The OS will be designed to work originally with netbooks, providing what is being called an “Internet-based experience”, and will be expanded thereafter to laptops and desktops. CSC announced plans to resell Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) while providing all Level 1 and 2 support for the included products. They will also offer a mix of BPOS hosted by Microsoft, the version hosted in CSC’s “Trusted Cloud” and their already existing email management services as a multifaceted, cost-saving option.
After much speculation, it appears that the pricing of Microsoft Azure’s services could be up to 10% less than the cost of using Amazon Web Services. Industry sources have stated that Microsoft will “charge per 10 gigabyte database units, with other fees based on bandwidth and query activity.”
This guest post from Jonathan Sapir discusses the cloud computing revolution, including how the technology removes the boundaries previously enforced by IT and how the idea of users servicing themselves becomes more realistic with every day. t the HotCloud ‘09 conference in San Diego, CA, numerous groups made proposals in an effort to battle significant cloud computing issues. The IT Knowledge Exchange presents this free chapter excerpt from Power in the Cloud by Jonathan Sapir. The next step in IBM’s cloud computing strategy will be to offer business analytics tools as part of its services. Having these tools off-site will offer companies an opportunity to host and analyze large amounts of data elsewhere.
Kundra and his team are working on launching a “digital storefront for cloud computing solutions” that would offer for federal and other government buyers an experience that “is the same or similar to the experience that you and I have in our personal lives when we go to online stores like amazon or eBay or any of the other online vendors.”
This move to the cloud is going to be good news for Amazon, RackSpace and Microsoft, all of which we think are going to be competing with with traditional suppliers of information technology to the government. Others say that Terremark, HP, Google, Cisco and various systems integrators could be among the big winners. (GigaOM Pro, our $79-a-year subscription-only research service, has started following these developments closely.) For the U.S. government, cloud computing could be an easy way to deal with urgent and important issues, such as upgrading the federal and state technology infrastructure without costly upgrades. If Kundra is successful in his efforts, then the sheer buying power of the government is going help cloud computing reach a tipping point.
In a nutshell, Google shelled out nearly $1 million in the second quarter lobbying the federal government and others on behalf of all of its businesses, core or marginal. Google’s $950,000 total lobbying spending bests the $880,000 it spent in the first quarter and is about 30 percent greater than the $730,000 it spent in the second quarter of 2008. Google is currently under fire for its data collection practices related to the Google Book Search project, among several other issues, including CEO Eric Schmidt’s seat on Apple’s board. So what has Google lobbied about? How about issues ranging from the regulation of online ads and copyright issues related to the Google Book Search settlement to cyber-security as it relates to cloud computing and renewable energy resources. Sympathetic seeds may be sowing themselves within the government ranks, as Andrew McLaughlin, previously part of Google’s political action committee, recently joined the White House Office of Science and Technology as deputy technology officer for Internet Policy.
As you can see, Google’s spending is but a drop in the bucket compared with these more venerable vendors, but it’s still on pace to double its current spending. Let’s look at it another way: Google is comparing itself to companies that have all been around a lot longer and dwarf Google in size, revenues and lobbying spending. The closest in the lobbying department to Google is IBM, with a lobbying budget that at $5.3 million is nearly three times that of Google. But IBM also banked $98 billion in sales compared with Google’s $21 million.
While certain applications do rely on the storage of such data as customer records, emails and documents within the cloud, there is an entire class of applications that reap the benefits of cloud computing without any risk to confidential data. Take Internet security, for example, and web filtering specifically. Anyone using a recent Firefox browser has likely seen the red “attack page” warning before going to a web site. This safety mechanism comes to the browser through the power of cloud computing. Google does some basic security checks when it visits websites and publishes its findings for Firefox users and alongside search results.
In the real world, however, running every file that gets downloaded and then monitoring and mining data on everything it does is impractical–the memory and processing requirements are just too high. The same is true of websites; a thorough, automated evaluation of a website is a very slow process. Any vendor offering an appliance or desktop application performing this function would soon learn that end users won’t tolerate the required delays and would opt instead to turn off the feature.
When you move the in-depth scanning techniques into the cloud–with its theoretically limitless computing capabilities–and add in efficiencies gained by scanning a website or file only once, regardless of the number of users visiting it, that is the real power of the cloud. Traditional tradeoffs between security and performance can be re-evaluated as virtual supercomputers are applied to security problems and millions of users gain the benefit of a single in-depth scan.
According to public lobbying disclosures, the search engine giant spent more than $1.8 million since the beginning of the year in lobbying politicians, policymakers and the White House on issues such as cloud computing, the Wall Street Journal report finds. This lobbying effort has been ramped up over last year when the company spent $730,000 during the second quarter of 2008. The issues Google has been pushing seem to run the gamut of subjects the company would be interested in from regulations on online advertising, to the adoption of cloud computing services - which the paper reports Google spoke to the Department of Defense about.
There is a growing number of issues being debated in Washington affecting the internet and our users and we feel it is important to be involved in those debates,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich told the paper. It appears that there may be a growing interest in cloud computing from governmental organizations as news reports have indicated that the National Security Agency and the City of Los Angeles are both considering using cloud computing.
