Category: News

Grazed from KissMetrics.  Author: Editorial Staff.

xpansion-stage SaaS companies have an overarching goal to grow very fast and achieve sustainable profitability. Understanding the operating metrics behind other expansion-stage SaaS companies can help them form an optimal economic model.

With that in mind, OpenView Venture Partners recently surveyed more than 160 senior executives and consultants at SaaS companies to create a report that is specifically focused on some of the growth and profitability metrics that are most relevant to SaaS companies at the expansion stage. Below are some of the report’s key findings.

To read more and view infographic, visit:  http://blog.kissmetrics.com/saas-operating-metrics/

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Last year some 6,000 attendees trekked out to Las Vegas for the first customer conference of what many consider to be the leading public IaaS cloud provider: Amazon Web Services. AWS re:Invent 2012 saw the launch of a new data analytics and warehousing product, price drops on its services, and lots of tips and tricks for how to use Amazon’s cloud. Here are five things to watch for next week’s second installment:

How big?

Last year, roaming the halls of AWS re:Invent, some of those in attendance spoke about how it was “the cloud show” of the year. Salesforce.com, VMware and die-hard OpenStack folks may take issue with that. Either way, it’s an important show for the cloud computing industry, and it will be interesting to see one year later what the buzz is after a rousing inaugural in 2012…

Grazed from Hot News International.  Author: Editorial Staff.

It’s going to have a big impact on the cloud computing industry as people are afraid to put data in the US, but it’s also devastating for the kind of work I do, Jimmy Wales told reporters after an IT event in Norway, cites Reuters.  Cloud computing allows users to store and maintain data and applications digitally over the internet. Users can use software and access their files at any computer which has access to the World Wide Web. The technology has been gaining more and more popularity across the world as it makes computing more efficient and less pricey.  Yahoo email or Gmail services provided by American tech giants are simple examples of the usage of cloud computing.   

If you are BMW, a car maker in Germany, you probably are not that comfortable putting your data into the US anymore, Wales said on Thursday.  The revelations by the former National Security Agency contractor over its secret mass surveillance program caused outrage among Europeans. It appears that the agency tapped hundreds of millions of phone lines across Europe as well as fiber cables used for internet communications…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

One of the things still keeping some organizations from adopting the cloud computing model is the perception that cloud still has performance issues. It’s not entirely a falsehood, as there is lag on some cloud services. And when services go down, it tends to generate headlines. Instart Logic is hoping to begin to change things with the introduction of a SaaS offering aimed at SaaS providers that is intended to improve SaaS network performance.

According to Instart Logic, the new offering takes the web performance market beyond CDN (content delivery network) and ADN (application delivery network). The offering was rolled out in stealth mode to several customers, and the company noted it is already having success within the SaaS provider market. Instart Logic stated it is already serving hundreds of thousands of enterprise SaaS application users on its global network…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Rackspace is raising the ante on what constitutes a standard cloud server by boosting the capabilities of what will soon become its standard, enterprise server offering. All new customers initiating accounts at its Herndon, Va., data center will be assigned a new Performance server, and Rackspace expects established customers will eventually transfer to the new type due to their higher cost/benefit ratio.

It’s equipping its "Performance" servers with solid state disks, a component that heretofore has been considered too pricey an option by most cloud suppliers. The SSD has a big impact on one of the perpetual drags on cloud server performance, I/O speeds. Multiple tenants communicating frequently with storage or outside networks can choke I/O points. A Performance server can improve total disk I/O throughput by a factor of 132X, said Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer, in one of the boldest claims for the new type…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

IBM finally conceded to Amazon Web Services on the construction of the CIA cloud, reports Federal Computer Week. This became a fun fight to watch when word leaked in March that the CIA had awarded the $600 million contract to Amazon.com, accepting a bid that was $54 million higher than IBM’s.

As the report noted, "Big Blue had asked the court to halt contract work between the CIA and AWS while it considered an appeal. The government claimed in a subsequent court filing that an injunction and further delay on the contract would be harmful to national security." IBM is withdrawing, but it could be still in the running. However, it’s clear that AWS has the green light to build a secret cloud for the CIA, and work will likely begin before the end of the year…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Today. Author: Arnal Dayaratna, Ph.D.

Blue Box recently announced the release of its early adopter program for OpenStack Hosted Private Cloud. As a result, customers interested in developing applications on OpenStack can now turn to Blue Box for help with the likes of deployment and configuration, load balancing, scalability and customer support. Blue Box’s managed, OpenStack private cloud offering will be based on code released directly by the OpenStack Foundation. As such, the solution leverages OpenStack Nova for compute, Neutron-based software defined networking, a Horizon web interface for configuration and resource allocation and Keystone for authentication and policy management.

The early adopter program supports recent releases such as OpenStack Havana and Grizzly and plans to update OpenStack deployments to subsequent releases from the OpenStack Foundation as they become available. Key components of the Blue Box offering include management of OpenStack orchestration, “including monitoring and release management,” according to the company’s press release. Blue Box also delivers security functionality that accommodates HIPAA and PCI protocols…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Shuna Boyd.

Fujitsu introduces the next generation of ‘market-making’ cloud platform service, enabling CIOs to harness the broad potential of cloud with the complete business agility and innovation that cloud delivers. The Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform – for which pre-release testing is now available for early adopter clients – delivers everything required to integrate, aggregate and manage all cloud services and traditional ICT from a ‘single pane of glass’ to ensure all data is protected, identity is assured and services are governed.

Business leaders continue to enthusiastically adopt cloud services that deliver competitive advantage. The challenge for CIOs is how to manage and ensure appropriate governance and control across an increasingly diverse portfolio of cloud services without adding management overhead or being seen as blocking progress. Over the next three years, Fujitsu predicts organisations will introduce more than 30 cloud services from multiple providers into their existing ICT landscape. CIOs need tools to manage this growing complexity…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: John Mancini.

While there’s no question that cloud computing is here to stay, the numbers suggest that the need to manage content in the cloud has a variety of business drivers. The challenge facing organizations is that these various drivers are not necessarily consistent or aligned with each other.

Driving the Demand for Cloud Solutions

The needs and requirements of individual knowledge workers provide one driver, as reflected in "AIIM Trendscape: Content and the Cloud." Workers are struggling with assuring availability of their critical work content not only on their work-issued laptops, but also on a variety of personal devices and in countless locations. Many CIOs suddenly find themselves surrounded by hundreds of cloud-based sync and share downloads totally outside the purview or even awareness of the IT department….

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Jorg Bouman.

Nowadays, internet companies and their associated customers are increasingly relying on the Cloud for their services. This obviously has many advantages. However, there are also a few very serious downsides of providing and using software, infrastructures and services from the cloud. Most of the time a lot of business processes are completely depending on the continuous and uninterrupted delivery and performance of the services of these internet companies. If a service faces unexpected downtime, business processes could potentially come to a complete stop with all the possible and serious consequences.

Reputation depends heavily on uptime

What good is secured data and great business software from the cloud if the data or service isn’t available? In fact, downtime of these services could lead to serious losses in revenue, customers and reputation. Therefore, to these companies and its customers hosting and the associated uptime levels are crucial…