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.

The Gadfly and Goliath: Vembu Challenges Microsoft

By Ned Smith

The Economist called Sridhar Vembu a “dangerous man.” If he achieves his goal of removing the “value-pad” from business software, the publication reported in 2008, “a lot of people will lose a lot of money; software developers, consultants, shareholders and others.”

Vembu didn’t originally set out to be the gadfly of the software world; a graduate of one of India’s top engineering schools, he had his eyes on pursuing an academic career after he completed his Ph.D at Princeton in 1994, but was disillusioned by the “paper-shoving and the tenure-chasing.” Instead, he answered the call of the sirens of Silicon Valley. Academia’s loss turned out to be open-source software’s gain.

Vembu is the founder and CEO of Zoho, a privately held company that offers a comprehensive suite of some 20 low-cost, web-based applications for business that range from word processing, spreadsheets and email to web conferencing, databases and CRM. Zoho is the Swiss Army knife of office productivity software; if you have a business need, it has an app for that.

Founded in 1995 in Pleasanton, Calif., a hour east of Silicon Valley, Zoho is profitable with annual revenue of more than $50 million and has continually spurned venture capital and bank loans. Its major competitor in web-based office productivity applications is Google, but Zoho’s  menu of comprehensive applications and budget-pleasing business case makes it a potent competitor to the business productivity applications Goliath, Microsoft.

Zoho is clearly on Redmond’s radar. When Microsoft recently announced price cuts on its Business Productivity Online Suite, the company took advantage of the occasion to take a swipe at the competition. “We’re not seeing any inclination that Zoho or Google or Zimbra or any other of those offering fake Office capabilities can replace [Microsoft Office],” said Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online.

Did Zoho tremble? Not hardly. Vembu reacted in his customary feisty fashion. “Wow, wow, wow - Fake Office!” he wrote in a widely circulated email.  ”That is indeed a badge of honor for us. We just have a polite suggestion to Microsoft: to be perfectly consistent, Microsoft should also label their Bing ‘Fake Search’ - fair is fair, right?”

And Zoho retaliated against the latest rant from Redmond by launching fakeoffice.org, complete with its very own YouTube video, “Fake Office - The Movie.”

What is Zoho’s role in the cloud computing ecosystem?
We view ourselves as the “business operating system” - something a customer tweeted about first! Our goal is to be the extended IT department of small to midsized companies, giving them a rich, integrated suite of online applications, priced very affordably.

Zoho already offers 20 different services. What new service offerings are you working on?
We do not pre-announce products. Basically our product strategy is to offer an end-to-end business oriented applications suite, targeting the needs for SMBs, affordably priced. We bring depth of functionality and integration as our key differentiators.

What trends are driving the adoption of cloud computing?
These are the broad trends: 1. Increasing productivity in both delivering and deploying cloud applications. We get to develop and deploy applications faster, with fewer people; our customers get to consume these applications without the huge headaches of traditional systems management. 2. Such productivity gains translate into cost savings - because of our own cost savings, we can price cloud applications cheaper.  3. Integration costs are substantially lower.  4. Increasing mobile adoption - the future cloud client may well be a smart phone connected via USB to a keyboard/display device - the “network computer” is really a smart phone!

Is application integration the next frontier in cloud computing?
Absolutely. In fact, we believe cloud computing represents a breakthrough in application integration, because of easy web service interfaces and lighter integration approaches like REST (Representational State Transfer). A key part of Zoho’s differentiation is in the comprehensive integration we are doing across our document-centric (mail, office suite, wiki, discussions) and our structured data centric (CRM, Project Management, …) applications. In particular, the way we have integrated CRM & Mail is a signal of things to come.

What are the greatest technical challenges facing cloud computing? How is Zoho addressing them?
Earning customer trust in the security of the cloud is the single biggest challenge for all cloud vendors. We take security very seriously, and have an active security research team. If there is one thing we are paranoid about in Zoho, it is security of our customer data.

Does Microsoft’s entry into the world of cloud applications with the next-generation Office 2010 send a signal that cloud computing is now mainstream?
It does. Microsoft has been lukewarm in its approach to cloud computing, promising to come out with its full stack in one breath, while defending its existing cash-cows in another. It makes sense from their perspective: they have a lot to lose in the cloud evolution, because unlike the desktop world, the cloud computing application space is going to be far more competitive. I have argued that they have to get used to more earthly margins, always a hard thing to do for any company.

You’re not intimidated by the Goliaths of the software world and have taken potshots at organizations such as Safesforce and Microsoft. Who’s next on your “dis” list?
I like to think that what I am doing is to point out who is on the right side of history here, so to speak. We compete with Google as much as we compete with Salesforce, but we also love Google here at Zoho, and cooperate with them wherever we find common ground. My issue with Salesforce is their bloated business model, something we are very happy to compete with.

What’s been the reaction to fakeoffice.org? Does Redmond have a sense of humor?
The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. I am not sure if that is what they intended, but I think even Redmond would have had a chuckle!

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.

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