Open Cirrus Project Adds New Contributors, Increases Footprint
IBM Turns Back on Juniper to Buy Blade Networks
Radware Introduces Its Virtual Application Delivery Infrastructure Strategy
Corporate cloud adoption still faces obstacles
Organisations adopting cloud computing – whether internal, external or hybrid – still face a number of problems, according to Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy at BMC.
"Not all cloud providers are created equal," he said, referring to fundamental differences in their offerings, such as the way Rackspace will supply a bare virtual machine but Amazon will not. Furthermore, providers have their own APIs, and BMC’s management software can only abstract them to the extent the services are similar. This makes workload portability challenging.
Infrastructure, Data Integrations Huge for Hybrid Clouds
Right now, there’s a lot of focus on the public cloud versus private clouds, but there’s a good chance that long term, organizations will want to embrace both. And why not? There are some things you want to keep in-house, but certainly being able to acquire a bit of extra boost from a public cloud would be a nice cost-cutting feature.
Admittedly, this is a model few are capable of considering at this point. But it’s worth remembering, whether you’re trying public or private, that at some point, you may want to have both.
The Greening of CRM
I’ve been writing about sustainability as a natural outgrowth of CRM for a couple of years now. I know it takes time to refine a message—and, since the message of sustainability represents a major market turn, it has to be done right. But there’s been scant progress thus far, and certainly not enough.
By “sustainability” I mean using CRM to help organizations reduce the cost of business processes and increase revenues along three specific dimensions:
Mobility with the Cloud
Cloud computing has produced many benefits to the small and medium-sized business, one of the most powerful being the ease of mobility. Using cloud computing, businesses can now allow their employees to work anywhere from any device allowing them greater productivity, flexibility, and an overall competitive advantage.
Increased Productivity
VMware’s 5 Steps To Cloud Computing
VMware’s channel chief said solution providers looking to get in early on cloud computing can do so relatively painlessly in a five-step process, and that his company will introduce new competencies to help them on the way.
There is still plenty of time for solution providers to take advantage of the movement towards cloud computing and to make good money doing so, said Carl Eschenbach, executive vice president of worldwide field operations.
"We do not believe solution providers should be afraid of the cloud," Eschenbach said. "There’s a lot of money to be made."
5 Years Later, Oracle’s Fusion Apps Finally Near Release
They say good things come to those who wait — and wait is what attendees did on Sunday evening here at the start of this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference. Eventually, however, Larry Ellison, the company’s cofounder and chief executive officer, introduced Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a "cloud in a box," that brings together Oracle hardware and software at an extremely fast performance rate.
[Editors’ Note: CRM‘s compendium of relevant links and coverage from Oracle OpenWorld 2010 can be found here.]
Retired and Retried
Sometimes a team needs one of its members to get the ball rolling. For Prudential Financial, a Fortune 500 company with a presence in 30 countries, that member was its 401(k) retirement division. Dissatisfied with its CRM system and its process for tracking leads, the United States division of Prudential’s retirement business sought out Salesforce.com in spring 2009 to breathe new life into a lethargic customer-retention program and to integrate the sales team from a recent acquisition. That one business unit got the ball rolling, all right—a year later, all of Prudential’s U.S. business units had signed on with Salesforce.com.