Friday 03 September 2010
Ebix, Inc, a leading international supplier of On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance industry, unveiled today its strategy for Cloud-computing and announced the new Ebix Cloud family of products and services for the Insurance market.
Within the Cloud-computing model, all Ebix solutions and software will be delivered as a utility or on a pay-per-use model basis. Built on top of the current Ebix product portfolio, these offerings would provide a range of services from collaboration infrastructure to data integration solutions. Ebix’s Cloud-computing platforms will allow an insurance entity to outsource data center and application hosting across multiple platforms to a single managed service provider. This will work to drive costs down and improve overall performance and reliability.
Ebix would also utilize the Cloud Web Application framework for developing multi-tenant SaaS applications based on the Cloud infrastructure. The new Cloud service would offer the convenience of traditional SaaS, but with far greater freedom, control, and cost savings for Ebix’s customers. Ebix Cloud Infrastructure solutions will help clients create and manage their applications over the Public and Private Clouds.
Security is a critical need in the insurance industry and it gains even more significance in the era of Cloud-computing, which presents challenges such as data safeguards, audit, governance and availability. Ebix is mitigating this security risk by auditing the deployment of its infrastructure based services on the stringent ISO 27001 standards.
Ebix Cloud offerings would help customers by continuing to offer On-Demand solutions to optimize resource utilization and by reducing the infrastructure management and monitoring costs. These Cloud offerings will encompass the areas of — Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service. The Cloud offerings will include providing consulting, migration, custom application development and deployment services to Ebix clients, while deploying turnkey pricing strategies rather than having users pay for computing power or storage.
Ebix president and CEO, Robin Raina said, “As an On-Demand solutions provider to the insurance marketplace, it is a natural progression for Ebix to grow into the Cloud-computing arena as it aligns well with our current application development strategies. Our Cloud-computing services are being designed to meet customers’ critical need to experience results quickly as they deploy their technical applications in traditional data centers, modular data centers or the Cloud.”
Robin added, “There is an opportunity in the insurance industry to offer infrastructure based services on a utilities model, delivered over a Cloud. This will allow insurance companies, brokers, investment advisors, broker dealers, and other entities involved in the insurance industry to run multiple applications interfaced with each other outside the confines of their own data centers. This means clients will have the benefit of dealing with one infrastructure services provider. We believe Ebix is uniquely positioned to play a major role using Cloud-computing within the insurance industry. We are one of the only players who can deliver a multitude of services while processing an end-to-end insurance transaction, utilizing our suite of SaaS based products like EbixExchange, EbixAdvantage, SmartOffice and SmartIntegrator.”
About Ebix, Inc.
A leading international supplier of On-Demand software and E-commerce services to the insurance industry, Ebix, Inc., provides end-to-end solutions ranging from Infrastructure Exchanges, Carrier Systems, Agency Systems and BPO services to custom software development for all entities involved in the insurance industry.
With 30+ offices across Brazil, Singapore, Australia, the US, New Zealand, India and Canada, Ebix powers multiple exchanges across the world in the field of life, annuity, health and property & casualty insurance while conducting in excess of $100 billion in insurance premiums on its platforms. Through its various SaaS-based software platforms, Ebix employs hundreds of insurance and technology professionals to provide products, support and consultancy to thousands of customers on six continents. Ebix’s focus on quality has enabled it to be awarded Level 5 status of the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Ebix has also earned ISO 9001:2000 certification for both its development and BPO units in India. For more information, visit the Company’s website at www.ebix.com
SOURCE: Ebix, Inc.
iomart Hosting, the UK data centre and managed hosting provider, has today launched two of the UK’s first genuine true cloud hosting platforms.
iomart Hosting, one of the few UK data hosting companies to own its entire data centre infrastructure, has developed two platforms which will allow customers to make use of the ‘cloud’ – an on–demand, remote IT infrastructure that enables companies to access and manage scaleable computing resources without the need for capital investment. This allows cloud users increased efficiency, as well as lower costs.
iomart Hosting’s five UK data centres enable it to offer two new Cloud service offerings:
- CloudXtra: allows access to iomart Hosting’s cloud infrastructure on demand, where customers pay only for what they use, when they use it. This option is ideal for test, development and short-term or seasonal high-capacity requirements.
- CloudSure: utilising iomart Hosting’s UK data centre network, CloudSure offers a bespoke and full-customisable cloud service. It enables integration of networking, server, storage, and application infrastructure into a single, virtual cloud-based architecture
Angus MacSween, chief executive of iomart Hosting, said: “The benefits of cloud computing are hugely exciting but as yet are relatively untapped.
”We took a strategic decision to ensure we owned our data centre infrastructure and that strategy continues to prove its worth now with the advent of virtually-hosted cloud based data networks. With our two cloud hosting offerings, we are meeting the needs of two distinct markets. We are catering for both the company that needs to expand its current IT infrastructure on a short-term basis and also, for example, the company that requires high availability for disaster recovery purposes. Many cloud providers offer resilience within one single data centre, with our network we can offer the ‘cloud holy grail’ of multi site redundancy.
“We believe we’re the first in the UK to offer genuine cloud services. The beauty of our infrastructure set up is that we can adapt and develop that service across our data centres to ensure that, regardless of where our customers are, they can benefit from our cloud network.”
He added: “Our cloud hosting solutions are all backed by a genuine 100% business uptime guarantee, are fully supported by our technical teams 24/7, and we have invested heavily in engineering our network to avoid any single point of failure. That’s what we offer with our cloud hosting solutions – peace of mind.”
NOTES TO EDITORS
About iomart Hosting
iomart Hosting is one of the UK’s leading providers of managed hosting services. From a single server through to private cloud networks, iomart specialises in the delivery and management of mission-critical hosting services, enabling customers to reduce the costs, complexity and risks associated with maintaining their own web and online applications.
By physically owning and managing its own network infrastructure, including five state-of-the-art data centres in the UK, it offers world-beating levels of service to its customers. The company offers a unique 100% uptime guarantee. 100% uptime is iomart Hosting’s mantra, the company lives and breathes it, with all hosting services being engineered to ensure no single point of failure.
Services offered include: Managed Hosting, Colocation, Complex Hosting solutions, Content Delivery Networks, IP Transit, Data Centre Services and Cloud Computing (Infrastructure as a Service).
iomart Hosting is an ISO9001 & ISO27001 certified company.
About iomart Hosting cloud services specifications
CloudXtra:
On Demand Computing
Pay As You Go
High Performance
Guaranteed 100% Service Level Agreements
ISO 27001
24 x 7 Support
CloudSure:
,
Virtual Private Cloud
Xen Platform
Fully Flexible & Configurable
Dynamic infrastructure on demand
Insurance/Total Peace of Mind
ISO 27001
Guaranteed 100% Service Level Agreements
RealPage, Inc. (www.realpage.com), today announced an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering for owners and operators of multifamily properties. The service will be offered under the trade name RealPage Cloud Computing (or simply the “Cloud”), a new division of RealPage that will provide computing services to RealPage clients operating in two fully redundant data centers connected by dual 10 Gigabit dedicated fiber circuits.
“The RealPage Cloud is the single largest data center in the U.S. dedicated solely to the multifamily real estate industry,” said Jason Lindwall, president of RealPage Cloud Computing. “In addition to hosting all RealPage applications on hundreds of servers with more than 300 terabytes of storage and the fastest possible redundant connections to the Internet, we are also offering hosting services for popular third party accounting platforms.”
A cloud computing platform allows an owner or fee manager to outsource data center and applications hosting to a managed service provider with the economies of scale and expertise that drive costs down and improve overall performance and reliability.
“Corporate IT departments are under increased pressure to provide more services for less cost and it becomes challenging when technology costs are rising and IT professionals are becoming harder to find, train and retain,” added Lindwall. “We are addressing our clients’ need to cut costs and dramatically improve the reliability and capabilities of tightly integrated solutions. Our clients still retain control over their enterprise applications, but by hosting these applications in the Cloud, they enjoy the benefits of much higher performance and tighter integration to other applications.”
RealPage Cloud Computing enables owners to:
• Reduce hosting costs for third party applications
• Rely on a real-time disaster recovery center
• Improve application performance, due to extremely high-speed networks offered by RealPage. RealPage offers managed network services to thousands of locations around the country
• Realize improved and more reliable integration between third party accounting applications, all RealPage applications, as well as selected third party Cloud partner applications
• Utilize a quality assurance platform to test changes to any Cloud partner application before it is introduced into the production environment
For more information about RealPage Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or to schedule an interview with a RealPage executive, please contact Karen Dodge at karen.dodge@r
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Located in Carrollton, TX, RealPage provides Software-as-a-Service products and services to more than 30,000 apartment communities across the United States. Its six on-demand product lines include OneSite® property management systems that automate the leasing, renting, management, and accounting of conventional, affordable, tax credit, student housing, and military properties; CrossFire® contact centers that help boost occupancy and build retention; YieldStar® asset optimization systems that maximize asset valuation and investment return; VelocityTM utility management and payment services; LeasingDesk® risk mitigation systems that reduce a community’s exposure to risk and liability; and OpsTechnologyTM spend management systems that help owners manage and reduce operating expenses. In addition, RealPage now offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service to multifamily owners and operators to help reduce IT costs and dramatically improve integration performance and reliability
Database in the Cloud
Joyent, the leading vendor in Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing, announced today that it is taking the proven performance and reliability of Sun Microsystems’ MySQL database to a whole new level by offering optimizations to the Joyent Cloud for MySQL. Joyent and Sun’s database group have teamed up to create Virtual Appliance templates for MySQL.
Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL is configured to maximize the open source database’s performance on Joyent’s powerful, secure and stable virtualization technology. Performance benchmarks (http://www.joyent.com/mysql) demonstrate that Joyent’s Virtual Appliance for MySQL can deliver 3 times the number of Transactions per Second than comparable deployments of XEN-based clouds, such as Amazon’s EC2.
“Running Read-Only tests, our internal benchmarks show that a 1GB Virtual Appliance for MySQL in the Joyent cloud can perform 1,245 transactions per second with 8 threads,” said Jason Hoffman, Joyent CTO and Founder. “A more expensive 7.5 GB large instance on Amazon EC2 only manages 425 transactions per second with the same 8 threads.”
Joyent has made it easy to launch a Virtual Appliance for MySQL as a single instance or as part of a Web-scale architecture.
“MySQL is pre-installed and optimized on the Joyent Cloud,” said Hoffman. “From the minute you get your login credentials, you are ready to go: deployment could not be easier. Dual-Master or Master-Slave configurations will also soon be available as pre-defined architectures.”
The Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL is available based on a typical cloud model. Users can scale up and down when they need to — and pay for only the infrastructure they use. There are no contracts to lock-in users. Additionally, the Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL Enterprise is fully supported by the MySQL database experts at Sun.
“MySQL is the most-used database in today’s Cloud environments,” said Rich Nigro, MySQL Managed Hosting Business Manager, Sun Microsystems. “We are delighted to see that Joyent is making this dedicated MySQL offering available to users of the popular Joyent Cloud.”
The Joyent Cloud has many customers benefiting from MySQL, and there are several case studies of how the optimized implementation has driven application performance, operational stability and value.
“Context Optional provides scalable solutions for brand marketing across social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter,” said Rafi Jacoby, Director of Engineering at Context Optional. “We’ve built and deployed viral applications for Kraft, Toyota, McDonald’s, MTV/Viacom, and many other Fortune 500 brands using MySQL running on the Joyent Cloud. We’ve been impressed with performance and uptime, with several databases having run more than a billion queries with no downtime.”
MySQL is the most popular open source database software in the world. Many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, critical business systems, communications networks, and commercial software. At http://www.mysql.com, Sun provides corporate users with premium subscriptions and services, and actively supports the large MySQL open source developer community.
About Joyent, Inc.
Joyent is a vendor of ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS), a.k.a Cloud Computing. Joyent provides a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to buying and running your own IT infrastructure, while still providing all the security, cost stability, and enterprise-grade performance of a dedicated private data center. The Joyent Cloud is built using the company’s unique networking and virtualization technology, the Joyent Accelerator. Joyent’s shared hosting, virtual appliances, free developer programs and Cloud Computing products leverage the Joyent Accelerator to provide our customers with unparalleled Cloud Computing performance and value.
Joyent was founded in 2004 with a seed investment from co-founder and CEO David Young and Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel. Since then, Joyent has grown organically and has been completely funded by revenue. Joyent’s customers include LinkedIn, Major League Baseball, Gilt.com, Facebook, and 20,000 other companies ranging from small development shops to large Fortune 500 enterprise users. Joyent powers 25% of the daily application traffic on Facebook. www.joyent.com
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.
Does this mean Google wants to be in the software development game or the web hosting business? What’s the company’s vision for App Engine, and where does it fit in the cloud computing landscape? SearchCloudComputing.com caught up with Mike Repass, product manager for Google App Engine, during a recent trip to California. here are lots of people carving out bits of the public web and fencing it off. We’d like to keep it open and App Engine is a way to encourage that. We’re saying, let’s build a business that supports web advocacy, even though it may be low margin, let’s make it easy for people to build on the web. We’re never going to get to the level of Microsoft, in terms of the number of people we have in support and training and all of that, but maybe we can think up some novel solutions for that.
Hosting is a commodity business. Adwords, is the highest margin business of all time, and we’ll never get that margin off App Engine. It’s the same for Saleforce.com on their core business, selling CRM as a service, versus Force.com. They are really pushing Force.com, but perhaps for promotional purposes or lead generation, it’s a loss leader and perhaps we are in the same boat. The question gets at, what are Google’s core competencies? We know how to deal with hundreds of thousands of machines. All our hardware is custom built and not something we could easily serve up at a raw level in a way that makes sense to people. Infrastructure as a service would be a play against Google’s core competencies.
Founded in 2000, IBrix, in Billerica, Mass., has 53 employees and more than 175 corporate customers spanning the communications, media, entertainment, Internet, oil and gas, healthcare, life sciences and financial services industries. HP uses the company’s technology in several products, including StorageWorks storage area networks, ProLiant servers, BladeSystems and ProCurve Ethernet switches and management software. IBrix provides HP with another piece of technology to grab a slice of the growing cloud-computing market. The computing architecture provides dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources as a service over the Internet. Examples include Salesforce.com’s software-as-a-service offering, and Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service business.
Cloud computing involves massive scale-out of servers, which present challenges in software development, deployment, management, security and more. IBrix’s key product Fusion includes a “highly scalable parallel file system with data protection, high availability features and a comprehensive management interface,” according to IBrix. The technology can handle data-intensive application environments involving 10s of petabytes of data. HP did not disclose financial details. The deal is expected to be completed within 30 days. HP plans to integrate IBrix into the StorageWorks division of HP’s Technology Solutions Group. HP announced the agreement about a week after storage rival EMC agreed to buy Data Domain, a maker of technology that reduces the amount of duplicated data stored. EMC agreed to pay $2.4 billion for the deduplication specialist.
It is amorphous and very loosely structured. A Cloud has no specific strength, organization or output. A hurricane on the other hand is “a storm system characterized by a low pressure center and numerous thunderstorms that produce strong winds and flooding rain”. A hurricane is organized, has form, purpose and an outcome. The center or eye of the hurricane is where the system is the most powerful and at the same time the calmest portion of the system. Cloud Computing is interestingly fraught with the same issues of its vapor filled synonym. It is amorphous and lacks specific direction from a business perspective. It promises a world of flexibility and responsiveness, but little is said about its’ from, organization, power and ability to generate an outcome, namely productivity and efficiency for revenue generation.
Citrix is addressing the entire spectrum of the Cloud. From Infrastructure as a Service (XenServer) to Desktop as a Service (XenDesktop) through application delivery providing Software as a Service (XenApp). This approach goes beyond theory to the basic elements of revenue generation. The very core technology of XenApp, for instance, is based on the concept that software should be ‘delivered’ as a service, not deployed. As the market continues to evolve, Citrix will emerge as a leader in this space because we had it in mind twenty years ago when we began to evolve server based computing.
The Pirate Bay customers could pay a monthly fee for music service, but could reduce that cost by contributing storage capacity to a commercially available Storage-as-a-Service offering. In other words, The Pirate Bay aims to be the first commercial peer-to-peer storage cloud that separates how capacity is acquired from how it is sold. This is extremely interesting, because it means it can sell one service to a consumer audience (music and video), and another entirely different service to business (storage services). One of the guiding principals of cloud computing for consumers and the small/medium business market is that the customer will never need to own large amounts of storage again. Thus, there may not be any storage for the average music customer to donate to the Pirate Bay cloud.
Regardless of whether or not The Pirate Bay succeeds in delivering the service Rosso outlined, the concept itself is intriguing and innovative. I certainly can see an auction marketplace for Infrastructure as a Service capabilities appearing from a peer-to-peer model in time. If it does, that will change the face of the cloud market in truly fundamental ways.
The emergence of cloud computing raises a host of questions about the best database technology to use with this new model for on-demand computing. The database manager you choose should be a function of the mission and the applications it supports, and not based on budgets and whether it will run in the enterprise as a private cloud or as a public cloud from a service provider. For instance, some companies turn to a cloud provider to back up mission-critical databases or as a disaster recovery option. Database-intensive apps such as business intelligence can be deployed in the cloud by having a SaaS provider host the data and the app, an infrastructure provider host a cloud-based app, or a combination of these approaches. And popular solutions for processing very large data sets, such as Hadoop MapReduce, can run in both the private and public cloud.
Security in cloud environments varies based on whether you use SaaS, a platform provider, or an infrastructure provider. SaaS providers bundle tools, APIs, and services, so you don’t have to worry about choosing the optimal data store and security model. Your database decision also will hinge on whether the environment supports a multitenant or multi-instance model. Salesforce .com hosts apps on Oracle databases using multitenancy. Amazon EC2 supports multi-instance security. If you fire up an Amazon Machine Image running Oracle, DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server, you have a unique instance that doesn’t serve other tenants. You have to authorize database users, define roles, and grant user privileges when using the infrastructure-as-a-service model. Consider the class of applications that will be served: data asset protection, business intelligence, e-commerce. Determine the suitability of these apps for public or private clouds and Factor in ease of development.
