While some are still scratching their heads about Windows 8 and its tablet-centric Metro UI push, with news Tuesday that Microsoft will Azure-ize its Windows Server software and make it white-label, one could argue that the operating system giant’s eye is on a different prize: a cloud OS with the reach of Windows on the desktop.

In a one-two punch — one to VMware and the other to Amazon — Microsoft announced at its Worldwide Partner Conference tools aimed at hosts using Windows Server that will let them brand their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds as their own. Read the rest of this entry →

“No pain, no gain,” some say. Microsoft for quite some time has been inflicting pain on its partners, who are still hoping and waiting for the gain.

This week with the announcements by CEO Steve Ballmer to allow reselling of Office 365 and increases to the margins, Microsoft Partners finally had some hope that Microsoft was batting on their side and the gains were forthcoming.

Then in a typical give and take manner, Microsoft first does a major punch in the face to OEM partners by not allowing the resell of Surface Tablets. The following day, Tuesday, Microsoft did a major punch in the face to the likes of VMware, Citrix and Amazon, which could have far reaching effects into the solution provider community as well.

Microsoft’s Service Management Portal announcement, which essentially is an “Azure-like infrastructure-as-a-service,” allows Microsoft partners to offer a hybrid-like cloud experience to their clients without using Microsoft’s cloud. It uses extensible APIs that lets companies connect their hosted applications to other hosts’ specialized cloud services and on-premise resources. Read the rest of this entry →

Mid-market organizations are always seeking ways to enhance their existing ERP applications and make them more accessible to their employees. The two most effective approaches to turbo-charge existing ERP applications are to add mobile cloud technologies and Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities to the mix.

These powerful additions will allow mid-market customers to easily connect and manage large-scale data, enabling them to make more informed business decisions in real-time. By extending that data to the mobile cloud, remote workers gain immediate access to the most critical information right at their fingertips.

When properly integrated with ERP technology, the mobile cloud will drive impressive breakthroughs for mid-market companies. Dramatic cost and operational efficiencies, expanded real-time collaboration with customers, vendors and partners as well as faster and more personalized customer service are among the key benefits for end-users.

Below we’ve outlined some best practices for integrating mobile cloud technology and BI tools into existing enterprises. Read the rest of this entry →

What do they say about the weakest link? Forget the focus on the cloud and five-nines. Let’s focus for a second on the power delivery system in the U.S.

Following a recent major Amazon outage as a result of a power failure, ZDNet reported on Tuesday that “Salesforce.com customers continue to suffer as instances of the social enterprise service crumbled in the face of a power outage.”

Luckily — for U.S. customers at least — the outage happened starting at 12:49 a.m. PDT. That did not help Europeans much, and they are said to have taken to Twitter to vent. Indians too:

@salesforce HELLO?CRM down for 2 hours is killing us here.Anyone out there at salesforce.com?

— Boris Palanov (@bpalanov) July 10, 2012

Read the rest of this entry →

By Katie Keating

UPDATED: Two panelists added for Thursday’s chat. Check out additional bios and Twitter handles below.

It’s a well known fact that cloud computing drives efficient IT operations and business innovation. But the benefits don’t stop there, as efficient operations lead to more sustainable practices throughout the organization. This month’s #cloudchat, taking place Thursday, July 12, from 4-5 p.m. ET, will explore the varied sustainability implications of cloud, ranging from characteristics like shared resources delivered on-demand to capabilities like smarter power grids and water management.

Our experts will give insights on what organizations are already doing, and tips on how you can use cloud to promote sustainability in your business.

Read the rest of this entry →

Global spending on IT may grow faster than forecast — at a 3 percent pace to $3.6 trillion this year — the research firm Gartner said on Monday, with spending on public cloud services expected to increase from $91 billion last year to $109 billion this year.

Gartner said, and Bloomberg reports in “Gartner Raises IT Spending Growth Projection On Cloud Services”, that telecom services, especially in emerging economies, will continue to be the largest IT market, growing 1.4 percent to $1.7 trillion. But the cloud is also seemingly racking up some related business: “IT services spending may increase 2.3 percent to $864 billion this year, buoyed by demand for consulting services because of the ‘complexity of environments’ for businesses and rising demand for analytics,” Gartner said.

The contrast for “silver lining”-sake: Worldwide IT spending growth will slow from 7.9 percent last year as the eurozone crisis, a weaker U.S. recovery and a slowdown in China curb economic growth, [Gartner said]. “There has been little change in either business confidence or consumer sentiment in the past quarter, so the short-term outlook is for continued caution in IT spending,” Richard Gordon, vice president for research at Gartner, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, CIO reports on research from Host Analytics and Dimensional Research, which it says “indicates that IT is spending significantly for cloud services.” CIO reports too that chief information officers “are practicing what they preach, too, as IT departments outpace all other business units in cloud adoption.”

Is the cloud creating a silver lining for enterprise IT spending — and small businesses alike?

The era of web apps and the rise of the solo entrepreneur economy having grown together is no coincidence. Access to affordable, enterprise-grade software tools have enabled a new type of entrepreneur to emerge, leading some to call this the biggest change in the employment landscape since the industrial revolution.

As of 2005, one-third of the U.S. workforce participated in the freelance economy and that number continues to grow as more professionals leave the traditional workplace behind to build thriving careers as consultants, freelancers, and small business owners.

The economy plays a part in this shift, as the traditional 9-to-5 job no longer provides the comfort and security it once did. However, we can’t underestimate the role of technology: web-based technology is undeniably fueling the transition from large firm to small and solo business. Read the rest of this entry →

It made for a funny headline from some sites to report that online dating site, Whatsyourprice.com, “dumped” Amazon after its outage late last month/last week. But other sites dependent on Amazon’s EC2 service planned better. So, question is: Is it reasonable to expect no outages?

InformationWeek reports:

“Build it and they will come. Build it right, and they will stay.” That’s the slogan of Okta, an identity management service built on top of Amazon Web Services’ EC2 cloud. Part of EC2 went down during a power outage that affected its Ashburn, Va., data center June 29. But Okta built its Amazon-based service across more than one availability zone, and it didn’t experience any downtime.

In the aftermath of the outage, Whatsyourprice.com, an online dating service, also pondered those words. It had tried to build its application right, using two availability zones as Amazon advised, and it still faced an onslaught of customer complaints in the midst of the outage. “We received nearly a thousand complaints,” a level of disruption that Whatsyourprice.com had never seen before, said CEO Brandon Wade in an interview.

Instagram, Quora, Heroku, Pinterest, Hootsuite, and Netflix were also affected — and users complained — but they sites did not walk away from Amazon.

Will others — namely, you — follow Whatsyourprice.com and walk? Or is pilot error (when natural disaster strikes) par for the course and something you are willing to work around? Will Google’s — or any others’ — cloud be any better? How about on-premises. Would it not be more expensive to own your own redundant locations than buy time from Amazon?

What does a software developer need to provision a cloud server? In most cases nothing more than an Internet connection, an email address for authentication purposes and, depending on the cloud service provider (CSP), a credit card. You might be thinking “surely Andrew, if the developer is provisioning a cloud server for business use there are additional checks and balances to prevent it?”

Unfortunately, this is not the case. The CSP rarely, if ever, takes steps to differentiate between prospective (and paying) customers using its cloud for authorized business use and hobbyists looking to provision their own cloud server for a personal project. Many times the line blurs beyond recognition.

Such is one of the current technology problems that organizations find themselves faced with. Historically, organizations could limit the technological resources, such as servers and applications, utilized by its development and test teams — as they had control of the servers, workstations and the orchestration over its connective tissue (i.e. the network). Read the rest of this entry →

Collecting and analyzing broad categories of customer and product data is becoming equally — if not more — valuable than the product itself, writes Ken Oestreich of The Fountainhead Blog.

In his post over at GigaOm, Oestreich writes Thursday:

And, if the data is becoming so valuable, then analyzing and mining it ought to provide incremental revenue streams beyond the traditional product-based business model. But consider going one step further: If treated right, access to enough quality data would be valuable to others outside of your enterprise too — assuming the correct federation and business models were constructed.

This accretion of value around large data sets — particularly alongside an external ecosystem — is analogous to what we’re familiar with in the product world: The Platform. Indeed, we may find that entirely new business models based on data platforms may arise from legacy product companies.

The net-net is that amassing and exposing vast amounts of unique data to third-party ecosystem partners can effectively create Data-as-a-Platform.

Cloudline recently raised the question of whether one possible “trickle-down” effect of the cloud raised by an author — delivering Big Data for all — was really something that small businesses could look forward to.

Oestreich writes that “the coming age of big data isn’t just about storing and analyzing lots of bits. It’s about extending the core business models to leverage IP stored-up in your data, and creating new partner ecosystems — and data supply chains — to create even more value for your enterprise. That’s just where the fun starts.”

Have your say: With Data-as-a-Platform, could the Big Data-ready cloud spawn whole new business opportunities for small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs)?