Enterprising Notion: Unlocking the Promise of Cloud Computing

By Appistry

The enterprise landscape is rapidly changing. Data is ubiquitous. Information is flowing into an organization’s applications from more sources than ever before. Business expectations are also changing. Corporations today demand speed and flexibility from their applications. They want services that allow them to make better business decisions, create more satisfied customers, and react ever more quickly to evolving market conditions.

Current economic circumstances and increased competition are also driving the demand for a more effective model to deliver applications and services. This relentless push for a faster, better and more cost-effective technology delivery model has set the stage for new approaches to application development, deployment and management. Several technologies such as grid computing, virtualization, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have offered partial solutions for enterprises that require applications with greater scalability, agility and easier management capabilities.

However, these alone have not been enough. Enter cloud computing, an innovative model for delivering IT infrastructure, applications and data that shifts the emphasis from static, stand-alone application silos to dynamic, shared environments, dynamically allocated among various tasks and accessed via a network.

Today, many forward-thinking enterprises are using cloud environments to take advantage of the increased scalability, agility, automation, and efficiency that this technology can deliver. Yet, because cloud computing has evolved so quickly, there are still many questions surrounding it. To help business and IT professionals truly understand the promise of cloud computing, this paper will examine its development and benefits from an enterprise perspective.

Beginning with the origins of cloud computing, this paper will help define exactly what cloud computing is and how the enterprise can benefit from it. In doing so, the paper outlines a number of  “cloud characteristics,” which together illustrate the true potential of cloud computing and provide a framework for assessing current and future cloud offerings. Finally, the paper draws a distinction between infrastructure-oriented clouds and platform-oriented clouds and explains how cloud platforms allow end-user applications to unlock the true promise of cloud computing.

To download this white paper, click here.

Interactivity Over Clicks: Rich Media Benchmarks in Social Media

By Lotame Solutions

This report details aggregate trends in the social media space observed on the Lotame Co-op over the past year. The Lotame Co-op is a collection of over 250 publishers with a significant number of publishers in the mid- and long-tail of the social media space. This report is focused on social media publishers in the Lotame Co-op who, on average, tend to provide lower click-through rates for banner and display advertising, even those employing rich media.

The data in this report is based on over one hundred campaigns using rich media banner advertisements from over thirty advertisers and billions of ad impressions. These metrics can be used not only to gauge the success of a campaign in social media, but also to demonstrate where user behavior in the social media space is fundamentally different from behavior on non-social sites. Each section of this paper will focus on a particular metric of success.

Through each, we’ll focus on how the choice of creative format affected performance for that metric and compare the  benchmarks in social media to those published by DoubleClick in their “Creative Insights on Rich Media” research report, noting differences where significant. Finally, we’ll conclude the report with recommendations on how future campaigns can make the best use of this information.

It is our hope that this paper will demonstrate definitively that there is value beyond the click in the social media space. For best results, advertisers should set clear, achievable performance goals for their campaigns that are in-line with their overarching campaign goals prior to campaign launch, and focus on the metrics that speak to those goals, while aiming to beat industry benchmarks for those metrics.

To download this white paper, click here.

Online Ad Projections, Trends and Outlook

By Rubicon Project

Despite the less-than-optimistic predictions for growth in online advertising this year, the trends we’ve observed both in the news and in our own proprietary data reflect a healthy display ad market — one that’s still thriving in part due to the scale, targeting and automation that only ad networks and exchanges can provide.

Big media companies and VC firms invested $74 million on seven ad network-related deals during Q209 — the dollar amount up nearly 16 percent from the previous quarter1. Notable investments included Collective Media, which raised $20 million in a second round from Accel Partners and iNovia Capital2,  and Tumri, which added $15 million in funding from Time Warner3, to help finalize its transition from being a pure-play contextual ad provider, into a full service display advertising creative platform.

Meanwhile, the theory that a crowded market, falling CPMs and mass publisher revolt would force a stream of ad networks out of business hasn’t panned out. As Jeff Lanctot, chief strategy officer at interactive ad agency Razorfish, told Mediaweek: the growing divide between ad rates for top tier publishers and niche sites has created a middle class of content providers that “can’t afford” to sever their ad network ties4.

To download this white paper, click here.

Collaboration Networks: Integral to Entreprise

By BPM Forum and CMO Council

Throughout history, people have relied on networks to successfully conduct commerce. Networks are powerful conduits that allow the unimpeded flow of goods and services. The more efficient the flow of something throughout an ecosystem — be it goods, data packets or even language — the easier it is to gain competitive advantage. It is no surprise that the organization with the best network always wins.

Without question, the development exerting the greatest influence on traditional business networks today has been the advent of the Internet and, with it, the profound technological, social, political and economic changes it has produced around the globe. Today almost 1.5 billion people worldwide use the Internet.

And as the Internet wraps itself around the world, it is connecting countless physical devices to each other and to people, passing data and new services from person to person, business to business and country to country.

This virtually limitless ability to exchange information, services and data has rendered proximity irrelevant, physical barriers inconsequential, and even transformed traditional relationships, changing the ways in which almost all of us live, work, learn and play. As a result, enterprises of all kinds are reinventing the ways in which they define themselves and the relationships that comprise their value chains. Whether it is manufacturing, retail, finance, media or government, an entirely new way of doing business through greater collaboration is emerging.

To download this white paper, click here.

Companies Value Cloud Computing

Sponsored by Google, Inc.

In essence, cloud computing means running software and accessing data that reside somewhere else. ZDNet explains cloud computing in business-trend terms: “Software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the ‘cloud’ of the Internet.”

Google explores the cloud computing trend at length in another whitepaper, “Cloud Computing-Latest Buzzword, or a Glimpse of the Future?”

This paper picks up where the other paper ended: Examining whether cloud computing makes good business sense for your company. Let’s start with some predictions:

• In the next 12 months, someone in your company will push for at least one on-demand application.
• Your company’s first encounter with cloud computing will be driven by needs to save money, but within a few months of the first deployment, your horizons will expand. You’ll see opportunities where you once saw problems. You’ll see corporate silos tumble as people from different departments and locations collaborate on projects.
• Ultimately, you may find that moving your data to the cloud actually improves security, scalability, access and disaster recovery.

Overly optimistic? Perhaps. But as many companies are discovering, cloud computing offers rapid and significant results.

To download this white paper, click here.

The Role of Google Chrome OS in the Netbook Market

By Jeff Orr, ABI Research

Google’s investment in Internet software began with a search engine and email, and has now expanded to include the Google Apps suite and the Chrome Web browser. Now, Google has announced plans to introduce a Web-centric operating system-Chrome OS-during the second half of 2010.

Based on a Linux kernel, Chrome OS is intended to compete with the upcoming Windows 7 OS from Microsoft and is initially targeted at netbooks. Similar to Google’s strategy with the Android mobile operating system, Google Chrome OS will be moved into the open source community, estimated to be later this year.

Google’s likely entrance into the computing OS market has generated mixed reactions. Consensus from netbook processor and system vendors has been positive. “This levels the playing field,” they say, a reference to the early dominance of Intel Atom-based hardware paired with the Windows XP operating system. ARM-based systems do not have access to desktop versions of Windows. The Chrome OS announcement defines platform support as simultaneous access to functionality for ARM and x86 processors.

General opposition to Google’s announcement comes from what “might” happen in the market over the next 12 months before commercial availability of Chrome OS. Several netbook vendors have announced plans to introduce Android OS on systems this year. Does the Chrome OS carrot stall these introductions or end netbook development on Android altogether?

To download this white paper, click here.

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