What the Toronto Malple Leafs and Microsoft have in common

Why is that Microsoft insists on holding its customers (both personal home computing and business users) hostage?

With the recent release of Windows 7.0 O/S plagued with problems why can't they make something that works, efficiently.  It doesn't need to incorporate all the bells and whistles but work on what it is capable of doing.  Personal users and business users have roughly the same type of needs however, there are different feature sets we require.   With all the posted comments for support and most still not resolved it makes you wonder whyt corporations and users are willing to jump so quickly into unproven technology. 

The security patches and updates are far too frequent and become a part-time job to manage even if automatic updates are turned on.  Endless bugs and sometimes simple tasks cannot be handled efficiently or is made too complicated.  As a business user the MAC strategy of desktops Powerbooks and a working secure O/S is looking very attractive. 

Although MAC is far more expensive more organizations are starting to investigate this strategy and are looking for security and stability.  A working O/S with fewer problems tighter security and and easier interface to use, what's  not to like ?

As more SaaS models come on the market for applications, platforms and the like will users move away from MS to LINUX, Ubuntu, Mac etc. in droves.  MS pushes beta quality yet consumers are still willing to accept a less than standard product.  Is just extremely good marketing?  As much as I am a die hard leafs fan, The Toronto Maple Leafs are terrible team.  They have always had BAD scouting, sometimes better than mediocre management but cannot put the pieces. together.  Smaller market teams are doing it better by winning and at least contending. 

If corporate sponsorship dries up and fans refuse to support a losing product will that spur change, can the same be said for Microsoft users ?   With another hockey team in town does other options where consumers can spend their frighten them, it should. 

In the computer world is this just a case of non-exposure by other competent operating system vendors are not getting their fair kick at the can by having a lack of marketing budget on products that work ?   Will lack of support from consumers actually make a difference to MS? 

Would love to hear the comments on this.

C-Level guide to cloud computing

Today we explore a high level overview of cloud computing and its components.   This is a C-level guide to cloud computing and basic concepts of cloud computing.  Enjoy and feel free to circulate this.

C –Level  Guide to Cloud Computing or Cloud Computing Simplified

The concept of cloud computing has proliferated within organizations due to the great success stories circulated in the media.   This guide will be a quick, high–level guide to cloud computing of what it entails, architecture, uses, benefits and how cloud computing can help your organization.

What is cloud computing ?

Cloud computing is defined as a style of computing that involves the use of products and/or services which are deliverable over the internet.  This can include anything from applications, databases, infrastructure, platform, administration, storage, network capacity and all types of functions that are delivered by data centers and internal IT teams.  It essentially extends resources while bringing the applicability of the web to the enterprise

Cloud Architecture

Cloud architecture can be compared to that of common internal stacks today.  Cloud architecture contains: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) , Platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (Saas).  These can be compared to the network, database and application levels of common software.

                IaaS – This is the lowest layer delivering basic storage and compute capabilities as standardized                         services over the network.  Here the resources are combined to leverage the products and services that the cloud can offer.

                PaaS – This is the next layer up that provides a framework for the programming environment along with services to encapsulate the flexibility and ability to build, distribute, share new content or programs throughout the organization. An example of this is the Amazon EC2 and S3 services offered or the Force.com platform that allows partners to leverage an existing platform to build out additional functionality.

                SaaS – This is the top layer that can be leveraged to include any combination of services, applications or databases that end users may interface with.

Cloud Models

Within the cloud there are several models that exist.  The main cloud types are: Public, Private and Hybrid.

              Public - Run by third parties that control all aspects of delivery to the organization, by products and    services from different customers running on multiple servers and/or platforms and end users are not aware of who else and what other services are being delivered to other customers.

Private - Private clouds are on-demand infrastructure owned by a single customer who controls which applications run, and where. They own the server, network, and disk and can decide which users are allowed to use the infrastructure.

Hybrid -  A hybrid cloud is a combination of the two models.  This may entail where the organization owns a part of the infrastructure or application and the cloud providers own and administer the remaining services

 

Cloud Benefits/Usage

There are many advantages a cloud computing model can offer an organization.  Included is a brief list of common benefits gained by cloud usage.   This is a partial list and there are many other opportunities that may be gained depending on the model and services your organization requires. 

·         Leverage existing horizontal scalable hardware and software

·         Lower administrative duties for the network and applications

·         Reduce capital costs by turning them into operating costs, no upfront investment  – a pay as you go model

·         Reduce data center costs by maximizing utilization rates, load balancing to distribute wok etc.

·         Virtualize different operating systems, images, platforms and applications while using the hardware

·         Combining an enterprise stack of products and services

·         Availability/Reliability, Density/ Scalability, Agility/Security

·         Handle extra capacity for spikes in demand 

·         Deployment, testing and functional offloading of applications or tasks that that require server  intensive processing

·         Testing, development can be executed within the cloud, the saving of provisioning the hardware and software for these tasks can rapidly decrease product development time and speed time to market

·         Lower energy costs by fully utilizing all hardware capacity

·         Reduce IT start up costs

·         Leverage existing usage of storage networks, easily restored in case of disruption (continuity planning)

Certain vendors within the cloud arena offer a combination of services and software for enterprises to utilize. Sun is one of the few vendors that offer software, systems, and services as a stack of products which may be utilized in combination or as a holistic solution. Other vendors that offer such products and services as IBM with the collaboration suites and social networking capabilities brought to the workplace through a cloud with its Lotus Live and other lotus products.  

The interoperability of platforms systems and applications is still a while away as many providers lock-in proprietary services that do not allow organizations to move clouds or systems easily.  This should also change in the future as technology evolves, open standards, common protocols, and API’s  prevail.  Organizations should demand that obstacles be removed in limiting the way they do business which includes the customer bill of rights when dealing vendors.

By offloading these IT and data functions your organization can focus on generating new business, intensely increase customer satisfaction and focus on the core processes that you have been successful at.

Organizations should evaluate their requirements, decide what options make sense to offload to the cloud and calculate the “costs” in doing so.  This will give the business an insight to the possible benefits of cloud computing. Enterprises are also including content management as part of the services issued from a cloud as these systems are usually not as easily accepted when implemented as an on-premise solution.  The cloud may also control a degree of change management which may influence the success of your project. 

As technology moves forward more and more services and software for nearly every type of organizational task will become available.  As recently as four years back not many if any supply chain softwares were offered as SaaS now several supply chain functions such as transportation, warehouse, demand and supplier relationship management applications are now readily available for consumption.  Organizations now have a wide variety of choices that they may deploy from ERM systems to specific applications such as CRM and the like.   For further information check our website. 

 

Shifting revenue models for vendors

The industry analysts say that we are on revolution back to thin client PC and applications. This revolution is due to the advent and quick uptake of all type of cloud applications. As applications and once non-traditional software makes its way to the cloud industries and applications that were once very closed are emerging as cloud solutions. These newly available software options are allowing a lower entry point for smaller businesses to compete and utilize world class tools. This perceived loss revenue by declining hardware sales is true only to a degree. While this will be true to an extent the forgotten part of this equation remains on the flipside of cloud computing. The vendors and companies offering cloud services and software applications must set up infrastructure and house the necessary hardware. Internet service providers, software developers, vendors, internet hardware vendors (vendors that make the internet work; servers, green energy saving companies, storage vendors, and security related companies for encryption, financing companies and like) are all investments that will have to be made for an entity to setup a cloud offering. As cloud computing becomes more popular security options become of primary importance. New companies with security software consulting of how to build private clouds, how they interlink with public clouds and the security options available and how these are considered as part of the enterprise IT strategy are emerging. Applications such as MS OFFICE have web competition. OFFICE will soon be available in the cloud while Google Docs and others are already there. Will this shift of delivery options lower the licensing of such applications ? It should as vendors are competing for market share as Google Docs for a year subscription is cheap. Cloud integration to traditional in-house applications will have to be considered as there will be be a large number of companies that still have fully functional software but need to enhance or add functionality using cloud technologies. This will in turn cause vendors to rethink its licensing structures and how to recoup this lost initial revenue. How will vendors adapt to this changing model and shift in business preference ? We will have to wait and see what unfolds.. these are exciting times.

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Game changers - Collaborative purchasing

In the world of supply chain and enterprise software new ways of business come along that couple technology to complement business practices. In this case the game changer is collaborative purchasing. Essentially it working together with like minded companies for a common goal - to reduce costs. This is the flip side to a buying consortium where they cater more to selling of common products and not cater directly to company specific requirements. In collaborative purchasing the group members share information for the good of the entire group to lower prices for whatever they are buying to either resell or consume. New membership is a group decision, only by unanimous count. Within the supply chain technologies for procurement are emerging that are changing the way procurement transpires. The usage of portals, consortiums , collaborative purchasing and social networking groups have shifted the thinking from internal-singular to external-global and the impacts on the organization. Combining systematic, repeatable and flexible purchasing methods to technology allows an organization to streamline its processes with little disruption or without significant cost. Corporations are starting to see the values of these approaches and are starting to pay more attention to these new and innovative ideas. If technology can be used to support your business while reducing inefficiencies and reducing costs, reduced risk and increase supplier quality then aren't these new applications and techniques worth considering ?

Finally, cloud computing standards and interoperability being established

With the advent of cloud computing exploding to most any type of application being available, it only makes sense for industry standards and interoperability to be established. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced today the formation of the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) in order to establish a lexicon of cloud-computing terminology, publish use cases, white papers and technical specifications, and to create reference implementation models for grid-storage architectures. The implications of this news, should it be embraced by vendors and more importantly end-users (organizations) should drive cloud computing to a whole other level. The creation of open standards for vendors to comply will also make it easier for customers to migrate from one system to another and allow the end-user multiple choices of vendors and applications as they should all work together as this is one the goals that this cloud initiative establishes. The creation and consumption of data should be easier by making the data easily portable to other applications within the enterprise space. This is especially great news for the SME market as there are many services that an SME can utilize such as cloud storage, outsourced procurement, server virtualization, human resources and all types enterprise software systems etc. That can be made to work together. This in-turn would make the IT strategies for organizations easier as now the data portion of the will be considered as this was not often the case. The explosion of information, different sources, the content management of internal and external data can now be managed a little easier. An advantage that this may offer organizations is that they can easily switch to other applications and not have to redo the implementation as the data is now reusable and portable. Lets hope the cloud computing initiative can provides direction, allows data transformation, portability and not lose sight of why this was created. Vendors that offer this thought leadership and early adoption of the cloud initiative might be looked upon as market leaders in a step towards creating a more trusting relationship with customers.

Eval-Source introduces "Ask the Expert" on new site

Eval-Source has introduced its new website with an "Ask the Expert" interaction for organizations looking to purchase enterprise software. Questions can be asked about software evaluation, benchmarking, investment evaluation, outsourced procurement and strategic consulting all the services www.Eval-Source.com provides. Our best practices approach combines IT, business and project management into a complete methodology so that commonly forgotten items are included and the necessary detail is produced to give you the best decision possible based on your organizational needs. Organizations often do not have method or a starting point on how to evaluate enterprise software other than basic generic checklists that are published. Our Tru-Eval method and Tru-Benchmark kits provide a procedure and systematic approach to software evaluation and selection. Our Tru-Eval and Tru-Benchmark kits make it easy for organizations to do it themselves with minimal training and within their own time frame.