Friday 03 September 2010
NaviSite, Inc, a leading provider of cloud-enabled enterprise hosting and application services, today announced its next-generation cloud-computing platform. NaviSite Managed Cloud Services (NaviCloud), based on VMware vSphere(TM) 4 and VMware vCloud(TM) and the Cisco Unified Computing System, is an innovative, enterprise-class infrastructure platform that provides high-performance, scalable, on-demand, usage-billed IT infrastructure. Targeted at enterprise IT-hosting and application-service needs, NaviCloud is a flexible and customizable platform that adapts to changing customer requirements, enabling businesses to use resources more efficiently, while reducing capital and operating costs.
NaviSite’s virtualized infrastructure is deployed as multiple highly-secure infrastructure clouds, hosted in NaviSite’s SAS 70 Type II-certified data centers in the U.S. and the U.K. These cloud complexes allow customers to buy compute, memory and storage from the underlying resource pool and configure them for use in either self-managed or fully-managed modes. In self-managed mode, customers can create virtual machines (VMs) and configure them with a choice of operating systems and other software. In managed mode, customers can select a range of monitors to be applied to VMs, groups of VMs and environments that then feed into NaviSite’s system-wide monitoring and management systems. Functional management of the resources and VMs is provided by the NaviCloud customer portal, which has been designed by NaviSite to facilitate the different use modes, and to provide full transparency for resources, trending and service levels.
“VMware vSphere(TM) 4 and the VMware vCloud(TM) initiative transform IT infrastructure, enabling service providers to offer IT as dynamic services to customers who can increase or decrease compute capacity on demand to save time and money,” said William Shelton, Senior Director of Product Management, VMware. “NaviSite’s new Managed Cloud Services offering delivers on this promise and will enable customers to focus less on infrastructure maintenance and more on initiatives that help grow their businesses.”
NaviCloud has several key differentiators:
– Enterprise-Class Performance - NaviCloud is based on VMware
vSphere(TM) 4 and deployed on the Cisco Unified Computing System. With
Intel® Nehalem processor-based blades and integrated Fabric Interconnects
with 10 GbE fabric, the NaviCloud architecture spans multiple data centers,
providing customers with built-in disaster recovery and high availability -
regardless of geography.
– Fully Managed - NaviSite delivers cloud-enabled managed hosting and
application solutions as a fully managed service to ensure 7×24 enterprise
class service levels. NaviSite also continues to support all our customers
with our 7×24 operations center and account management teams.
– Full Suite of Solutions - NaviCloud brings cloud characteristics to
the entire suite of enterprise-hosting and application-management services,
enabling a broad set of solutions to be provisioned as a utility.
Enterprises can customize and optimize infrastructure for their application
stacks and scale automatically to accommodate increased demand. Resources
are provisioned in real-time to match changing needs, billing is based on
resource consumption and SLAs are based on application performance and
availability.
– Spectrum of Services - NaviCloud supports self-managed, monitored and
fully managed modes, providing flexibility and system assurance on an as-
needed basis. NaviCloud can be combined with dedicated infrastructure
services to create hybrid IT environments — allowing enterprises to
augment existing internal resources with cloud services.
– Custom Solutions - NaviCloud can be custom engineered to ensure that
customers’ unique requirements are addressed.
“NaviCloud is truly a next-generation enterprise-class architecture that addresses the cost, performance and security requirements of larger enterprises,” said Denis Martin, Chief Technology Officer, NaviSite. “We spent a lot of time with our customers, learning about their cloud hosting requirements and, based on their input, injected a healthy dose of unique, customized development into NaviCloud. The result is a high-performance, scalable platform for delivering cost-efficient, on-demand, usage-based infrastructure and application services.”
“We are thrilled to expand our partnership with NaviSite and be one of the early adopters of NaviSite Managed Cloud Services,” said Rick Blaisdell, CTO, ConnectEDU. “For years, ConnectEDU has relied on NaviSite’s managed-hosting services as the platform for our student, educator and employer solutions. NaviCloud delivers an enterprise-class utility platform in the fully-managed services package — with the flexibility to be configured to meet the specific needs of our applications — that has always set NaviSite apart from its competition.”
NaviCloud offers a competitive advantage to enterprises looking for IT flexibility and cost-savings, providing seamless connectivity and performance that would prove difficult and costly for businesses to achieve in-house or through a public cloud. Leveraging NaviSite’s industry-recognized experience and expertise in hosting, virtualization, applications management and SaaS enablement, NaviCloud offers an innovative alternative for procuring, deploying and paying for IT infrastructure.
To learn more about NaviSite Managed Cloud Services, please stop by our booth (#2522 Moscone South) at Oracle OpenWorld, October 12-14, or visit www.navisite.com.
About NaviSite
NaviSite is a leading provider of cloud-enabled enterprise-hosting and application-management services. It provides customized and scalable solutions, leveraging its industry-leading hosting infrastructure, full suite of managed services and custom and packaged application life-cycle management expertise. More than 1,500 customers depend on NaviSite for customized solutions, delivered through a global footprint, comprising 16 state-of-the-art data centers supported by approximately 650 professionals. For more information, please visit www.navisite.com.
Hosted business solutions provider First Hosted is offering its customers the first cloud computing mobile ERP suite for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. NetSuite for iPhone delivers on-the-go access to NetSuite’s integrated business management suite, including real-time Dashboards which can be set up to present key operational data for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Ecommerce.
Thousands of companies use NetSuite to manage their mainstream business processes, leveraging its Software as a Service (SaaS) design to access invoicing, customer records, inventory, and financial reporting from any Internet-enabled computer. Now, for the first time, iPhone and iPod touch users can access NetSuite functionality using a rich interface designed to run natively on iPhone and iPod touch, adding to the anytime, anywhere features already offered by NetSuite’s cloud computing platform. Additionally, if a company has implemented custom fields, custom records, role-based security or custom dashboard elements in their NetSuite account, they will all be seamlessly reflected in the NetSuite app.
Any NetSuite user on the go can appreciate real-time access to their NetSuite calendar and task lists, including the ability to accept or decline events and mark tasks complete. Sales representatives can benefit from access to leads and opportunities, the ability to view customers and contacts, and to review credit status, quotes and orders. Field service users can inquire about customer history, browse associated cases, and see all issues filed by a customer. Executives can browse financial trends, watch dashboards in real-time, and drill into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as well as generate report snapshots and Scorecards.
“This is a great release by NetSuite,” said Andrew Peddie, Managing Director of First Hosted. “Access is very fast overall and trend graphs are much faster than through a browser. From a CEO view, users can see KPIs and access top 10 information quickly―by sales, customers, sales reps, and so on. Like in a browser, the application lets users find a customer quickly through searching. The iPhone application adds tremendous value to the NetSuite experience.”
Mobile business functionality enabled by NetSuite includes:
• NetSuite Dashboards including KPIs, report snapshots, trend graphs, scorecards, reminders, and recent records. The dashboards are interactive, allowing users to drill down and explore trends with the touch of a finger.
• NetSuite Calendar with support for accepting or declining events and marking tasks complete.
• Lead, Prospect & Customer records tailored to mobile sales, field service and executive leadership, including access to associated contacts, marketing campaigns, opportunities, quotes, orders, purchase history, financial history, cases, and issues.
• Productivity tools that leverage native capabilities of the device, such as click-to-call from any NetSuite record containing a phone number, click-to-email from any NetSuite record containing an e-mail address, and click-to-map (via Google Maps) from any NetSuite record containing a physical address.
Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), On Demand, Hosted and Web-based are all terms used to describe NetSuite, a suite of business management applications delivered via the Internet. Sometimes referred to as ‘SAP for the rest of us’, it is an affordable Oracle-based business system delivered via the Web for small and mid-sized companies. NetSuite provides full-featured financials, CRM, inventory and e-commerce software—all in a single system. The suite also provides real-time visibility across an entire business operation, real-time dashboards for all key employees, and anywhere, anytime access to the information a company needs. Its on-demand infrastructure dramatically lowers maintenance and license fees.
For more information, visit http://www.firsthosted.co.uk
About First Hosted
First Hosted Ltd is an experienced team of business consultants that includes a Chartered Accountant, European Lawyer, Technology MBA and Chartered Engineer. The company offers operational and software systems advice, consultancy, implementation, training and support, along with hosted VoIP and e-signature solutions. As a long established Certified NetSuite Solution provider, First Hosted helps organisations to improve performance and growth in a way not possible with conventional techniques.
Ends
Issued by:
Grant Bostock
MJO PR for First Hosted
(t) +44 (0)845 883 3435
(e) grant@mjopr.com
First Hosted sales enquiries:
Andrew Peddie
(t) +44 (0)845 680 6995
(e) andrew.peddie@firsthosted.co.uk
Cloud Computing Conference Call
Savvis, Inc. , a global leader in outsourced internet IT infrastructure services for enterprises, today announced that it will be participating in a call to discuss the cloud landscape and technologies and the company’s position in the cloud market.
“Cloud computing is one example of how virtualization is bringing a new level of service provider opportunity,” said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer of Savvis. “Cloud infrastructure services offer on-demand, scalable and pay-as-you-use resources that can be used to address two major challenges facing IT departments today: keeping costs down to stay competitive and investing in IT initiatives that will enhance new products and services.”
The event, hosted by Srinivas Anantha, Oppenheimer’s Internet Services Analyst, will be held at 10:00 a.m. ET on August 4 and will feature Doerr. To access the call, please get in touch with your OPCO salesperson or OPCO’s conference call planning desk at (212) 667-7990 for dial-in instructions.
About Savvis
Savvis, Inc. (NASDAQ: SVVS) is a global leader in outsourced internet infrastructure services for enterprises. More than 4,000 customers, including 40 percent of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500, use Savvis to reduce capital expense, improve service levels and harness the latest advances in cloud computing. For more information visit www.savvis.net
I would never go back to the [traditional] software model. Someone would have to make a very compelling argument for me to even consider it,” said Molly Fuller, president of Hands On Gourmet in San Francisco. Fuller said she struggled for a year with an on-premise software suite designed for catering companies before abandoning her investment in Caterease and switching to Salesforce.com’s hosted customer relationship management (CRM) products. Fuller said hosted services were attractive because they were available everywhere and because they were maintenance-free. She said she uses Salesforce.com to generate menus and logistics for the $1.5 million business, and the online interface allows Hands On Gourmet’s roving squads of chef-instructors, who host cooking classes for corporate events, to get instructions fairly easily. The on-demand pricing made it easy for Hands On Gourmet to switch to Salesforce.com, Fuller said. Although she wouldn’t go back, Fuller said, she didn’t regret her initial use of an in-house product. “I didn’t feel burned by it; I just chalked it up to a lesson.
Corefino’s entire business is in the cloud. CEO Karen Watts said her firm used IBM to host its servers. Corefino’s Web portal serves customers in China and employees in India and elsewhere. Watts said that vendors were as eager as her customers to slough off infrastructure costs to hosters and cloud providers. Market research firm IDC estimated that SaaS spending will jump more than $1.2 billion in 2009 and predicted that it would be close to $20 billion by 2012. Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, said that spending on cloud technologies, primarily SaaS, was rising five times faster than any other IT spending by companies.
One of the misconceptions of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader cloud computing market is that these new Web-based services will “disintermediate” the channel because of their simpler, more user-friendly solutions, and direct sales and delivery business models. While there is no question that the role of the traditional channel will be significantly impacted by the rapidly evolving on-demand services market, there is still plenty of room for innovative channel organizations to operate. There are also plenty of opportunities for new channel partners to succeed. Traditional value-added resellers (VARs) and systems integrators (SIs) that are primarily focused on capitalizing on the complexities of legacy applications are certainly at risk as a result of the fundamental feature of today’s SaaS solutions and cloud computing services its simplicity. By eliminating the complexities of deploying software and systems, reducing the need to extensively customize these solutions and systems, and lowering the costs of operating them, SaaS and cloud computing take a big bite out of all the marginal costs which historically represented the primary profits of traditional VARs and SIs.
However, there are still lots of modifications which VARs and SIs can make to today’s basic SaaS solutions, as well as reconfigurations they can make to the basic cloud computing services, to justify their role as these markets grow and mature. User organizations of all sizes still need help evaluating and selecting the rapidly expanding array of SaaS providers and cloud computing vendors. They need help catering these services to the specific business and technical needs of their organizations. They need help integrating third-party solutions to the basic SaaS application or cloud computing functionality. They need help optimizing their performance. They also need help changing their business processes and training their people to effectively utilize their on-demand services.
The reason it is difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system is because each application has unique needs which conflict or compete with the unique needs of other applications. Virtualization technology, such as that provided by VMware or Citrix with XenServer, breaks the bond of the application to a physical server by placing a layer of software, called a hypervisor, on the physical hardware beneath the operating system instances that support each application. The applications are “isolated” from one another inside virtual machines, and this isolation eliminates the conflicts.
Amazon embraces this virtualization model by using Xen to enable their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. I can tell you that there are lots of folks asking lots of questions about how to enable Windows applications in the “cloud.” I do not believe the answer is “Windows for EC2″ plus “Windows for GoGrid” plus “Windows for Rackspace” plus “Windows for [insert your data-center cloud name here].” If Microsoft does not find a way to turn the licensing ship and embrace JeOS, the market. irtualization enables the separation of the application from the infrastructure upon which it runs - making possible a level of business agility and dynamicism previously unthinkable. Imagine being able to run your applications on-demand in any data-center around the world that exposes the hypervisor (any hypervisor) as the runtime environment.
Cloud computing news we see some of the concerns in adopting this new paradigm, even as some of the largest business and government entities adopt (or seek to provide) cloud computing services. We can easily see vendors like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, HP, IBM, Unisys, and many others jockeying for position. Having worked for a vendor I can state confidently that nowadays they make their moves based on demand, not “build it and they will come” wishful thinking. That demand is coming from your competitors, and sooner or later, those cost savings will show up in the form of more competitive pricing of goods and services making it more difficult to compete for those that don’t adopt these efficiencies.
Using the GSA Storefront, federal agencies would choose infrastructure, Web applications, or other IT services to begin a streamlined procurement process. t’s at the top of the hype charts. It probably won’t save you money, especially in the short term. It needs more standards. And, it’s going to transform the economic model for computing. It, of course, is cloud computing — one of the most powerful business computing trends we’ve seen in years.
Earlier this year the company announced their partner status in the Microsoft Hosting BizSpark program in addition to the release of a cloud package for the enterprise. This month they were recognized by the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which listed them as a “Niche Player” for Web Hosting and Cloud Infrastructure Services (On-Demand). Each company in the Magic Quadrant was reportedly evaluated on its completeness of vision and ability to execute within: self-managed hosting, mainstream-managed hosting, highly complex managed hosting, global solutions portfolio, and enterprise applications hosting.
CloudLayer, SoftLayer’s set of cloud services and, in this case, recognition winner, includes a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Storage and Computing. All of these are available as standalone services or fully integrated with all other SoftLayer offerings. In my opinion, being evaluated in this report is proof that our unique approach is redefining hosting,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer. “Of course, our greatest pride and core goal is to provide solutions and scalability that make an impact on our customers’ business. But to me, being in the Magic Quadrant shows that we’re making a difference throughout the industry.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Sal Visca, CTO of Technology Development for SAP, will be presenting at the upcoming Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com) this coming November 2-4, 2009, in Santa Clara, California. His session will be entitled “Next-Generation On-Demand” Next-Generation On-Demand The SaaS pioneers have given us a taste of the potential of On-Demand, however, we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s to come and the future model for how the next generation of enterprise software will be delivered.
As I look at each of these areas of innovation, it is pretty clear that each have a relationship with cloud computing. For instance, automating the provisioning of IT resources and effectively managing that automation are two of the key concepts of cloud computing. No more waiting around for an ”administrator” to provision extra storage, compute power, software, etc., the cloud computing solution takes care of that within the context of some management and governance. By putting solutions in place that allow applications to grow and shrink based on demand, we deliver a more efficient, responsive experience. The ways in which vendors deliver those elastic applications and other software is radically changing. The fourth of the areas of innovation is perhaps a direct consequence of cloud computing. Cloud computing often entails a utility-based pricing model in which users only pay for what they use.
Finally, the last area of innovation Kareem mentioned was cloud-based services. The tie-in to cloud computing here is obvious, but it was interesting to note the emphasis on service. Cloud computing technology is cool stuff, but at the end of the day that technology must provide a useful service. It’s useful cloud-based services that will spur the adoption of cloud computing, not cool technology. In particular, I’ll be curious as to how innovation in these areas is influenced by cloud computing and vice versa.
