Appnomic Systems is a global provider of SaaS solutions that provide application performance management and data center operations automation. Appnomic’s solutions permit significant improvements to enterprise IT service delivery and increases in Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of enterprise and Cloud software applications. The company provides a predictive monitoring solution based on Application Behavior Learning (ABL) analytics that enable IT professionals to capture early warnings to prevent problems which could affect services to end-users.

Click here to read more about the measurable business benefits which Appnomic Systems’ customers are gaining from its solutions which earned the company THINKstrategies’ latest BoSS Award.

For more information about the rules for applying for a BoSS Award or to find a list of previous winners of the BoSS Awards, go to http://www.cloudshowplace.com/awardprograms/boss.html.
 
Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies has launched the Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program to recognize companies which are delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions producing measurable business benefits for their customers. For more information regarding the CCBV Awards, see http://www.cloudshowplace.com/awardprograms/ccbv.php.

The Cloud Management Summit will provide an intimate environment for corporate decision-makers to learn about leading Cloud solutions and share industry best practices for managing today’s rapidly evolving Cloud services to achieve their business objectives.

RightScale  has pioneered innovative ways to bring the power of Cloud Computing to organizations of all sizes. Its Cloud management solutions enable users to easily deploy and optimize the performance of business-critical applications across public, private, and hybrid clouds. It provides Cloud configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance capabilities. Millions of servers have been launched using RightScale’s solutions by a wide array of organizations, including the Associated Press, CBS Interactive, Intercontinental Hotels Group, PBS, and Zynga. 

As CEO of RightScale, Michael is responsible for setting the company’s vision and ensuring customer satisfaction. He has played a major role in helping promote openness and transparency in the Cloud marketplace. Prior to RightScale, he served as CEO at several Internet Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies and as executive vice president at eFax.com. He was also a panelist at the 2011 Cloud Channel Summit. 

Contact me if you’d like to learn how your company can participate in the Cloud Management Summit or our other Cloud Innovator Summits as a speaker or partner, and talk to Marc Sternberg if you’d like more information about sponsorship opportunities associated with these events.

Stay tuned for more details regarding our upcoming conferences via Twitter @CloudSummits.

In order to systematically respond to the steady stream of speaking requests we are receiving, we have established an online submission process to ensure that we can select the best speakers for our events.

Please go to the following links to submit speaking proposals for each of the Cloud Summits:

• Cloud Analytics Summit
• Cloud Management Summit
• Cloud Channel Summit 

We will consider each proposal on a first come, first serve basis. However, preferential treatment will be given to proposals focused on key business issues rather than specific technical topics.

We will also prioritize proposals that suggest CIO speakers for the Cloud Analytics and Management Summits, and channel company executives with first-hand experience working in Cloud environments. Summit sponsors and start-ups with a track-record of success will also receive greater consideration.

Contact me if you have questions regarding these speaking opportunities or have technical problems submitting your proposal. You can also contact Marc Stemberg of Rising Tide Media if you’d like to investigate sponsorship opportunities.
 
Stay tuned for more information about the Cloud Analytics, Management and Channel Summit  conferences via Twitter @CloudSummits.

I look forward to seeing you at these events.

I had spoken to this group a couple of years ago when the concept of Cloud computing was just emerging. At that time, they were primarily interested in better understanding what the concept meant and why they should consider it. Like many CIOs, the attendees of this session are now trying to determine where, when and how to deploy Cloud services to meet their day-to-day needs and achieve their long-term corporate objectives.

Although some debate continues to swirl around the merits of public versus private clouds, most industry observers agree that the vast majority of organizations will utilize a mix of on-premise and ‘on-demand’ applications and computing resources to support their business operations. Therefore, the key to success is properly managing this hybrid operating environment to get the maximum value from the new Cloud resources will extending the life of existing on-premise systems and software.

While most IT organizations have been managing mixed environments for a long time, the advent of Cloud-based services adds a new wrinkle to this age-old challenge. Rather than simply acquiring and installing a traditional on-premise system or software application into a traditional computing environment, capitalizing on a leading Cloud solution entails a new set of considerations.

Beyond evaluating a Cloud solution’s ability to meet the organization’s functional requirements, the IT team must thoroughly assess how well the Cloud vendor can deliver on its promises.

This means determining how it has architected its service delivery infrastructure to ensure maximum availability and optimal performance. It is also important to investigate the vendor’s customer support capabilities and policies to fully understand how the vendor will respond if there is a service delivery or other important support issue. This means determining what service level assurances the vendor provides and how it compensates the customer if it fails to meet these obligations.

Equally important is determining the financial viability of the vendor. As a relatively new market segment, the Cloud is attracting a growing assortment of relative start-ups. This “Cloud Rush”, can’t sustain all the players and an industry shake-up is likely. Therefore, many vendors will either fail or be acquired by others. Considering how these scenarios could impact an organization’s dependency on a Cloud service is important.

IT and business decision-makers can also take advantage of a growing number of Cloud vendors that are providing unprecedented transparency regarding the reliability and performance of their services. Many are offering online ‘Trust’ sites that show the availability and latency levels of their services real-time.

A widening array of Cloud-based management tools are also coming to market which provide a ‘single-pane of glass’ dashboard that can help CIOs and their IT teams more easily deploy, monitor, measure and maximize the value of their hybrid Cloud resources.

Disclosure: This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

In addition to continuing to contribute commentaries to Datamation, E-Commerce Times, Internet Evolution and Sandhill.com, among others, I’ve been asked to also lend my perspective to two more online publications, APMdigest and TechWeb/UBM’s new IT Services site.

Here are my latest commentaries in these publications,

IT Services: Outsourcing Failures Drive More People to the Cloud, 01/20/12 

APMdigest: Three Tiers of Analytic Possibilities in the Cloud, 01/14/12 

E-Commerce Times: Building Synergistic Alliances in the Clouds, 01/13/12  

Internet Evolution: Google Goal for 2012: Changing You, 01/09/12 

You may have noticed that I’m also blogging on behalf of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Let me know if your company would like to leverage my writings, presentations and perspectives to capitalize on the rapidly evolving Cloud market.

This is because previous generations of shared services were too often built upon cumbersome and costly systems and software which could not scale to give corporate customers greater cost advantages or added features than they could gain from optimized inhouse resources. As a result, only highly specialized shared services, such as payroll processing and basic hosting, prospered in the past.

I was recently prompted to think about what sets today’s Cloud services apart from past versions of shared services when I was interviewed for a SearchCIO article.

Today’s rapidly evolving Cloud services are permitting a growing number of mid-size and large-scale enterprises to gain the full benefits of shared IT and software services. These Cloud services are even expanding the meaning of shared services.

What sets today’s generation of Cloud services apart from previous forms of shared services are the following factors:

• Changing Enabling Technologies: Virtualization, automated self-provisioning, greater security and more scalable service management technologies permit a broader cross-section of users to leverage more economical and flexible resource pooling from public and dedicated Cloud services. Layered on top of these resource pools are more user-friendly applications and data access systems which make it easier for organizations to take advantage of today’s shared services.
• Changing Economics: The rapidly evolving enabling technologies, along with rapidly maturing service delivery business models, permit leading Cloud providers to deliver their services at a fraction of the price of shared services in the past and more attractive bundles.
• Changing Customer Attitudes: Economic and competitive pressures, combined with workforce/workplace requirements are driving organizations to seek more cost-effective software and system alternatives. In the past, businesses either handled their technology and communications requirements internally or outsourced the entire their operation to a third-party. Today, they prefer to ‘out-task’, or selectively source, specific aspects of their IT and business process needs to specialized providers.

These forces are not only changing the nature of third-party shared services from various Cloud service providers, they are also enabling IT organizations to achieve the ideal of becoming internal service providers to their internal and external constituencies, including corporate executives, end-users, customers and business partners. Inhouse IT organizations can build data centers (i.e., private clouds) which emulate the best practices of the leading Cloud service providers. Or, they can serve as the ‘traffic cop’ for their constituents and manage the distribution of Cloud services to meet their needs.

Either approach can also take advantage of another dimension of today’s Cloud services – crowdsourcing. The best Cloud services capture valuable usage statistics to drive continuous enhancements to the functionality and quality of the services. In addition, these services encourage user feedback and peer sharing of best practices in the same way users share their experiences and code in the Open Source arena.

These technological advancements and behavioral changes are changing the way organizations view and utilize shared services.

Disclosure: This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program of THINKstrategies’ new Cloud Computing Showplace which recognizes SaaS companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.

independenceIT (iIT) enables organizations to rapidly transition from traditional, on-premise IT to realize the cost savings and operational advantages of the Cloud. iIT gives users secure, high-performance access to systems, applications and data from any Internet-connected device. iIT also provides supplementary IT processes such as automatic applications upgrades, maintenance, data security, backup and recovery with SSAE 16 security compliant process controls and infrastructure. iIT provides a centralized platform for managing multiple locations and supporting dispersed workforces.

Click here to read about the measurable business benefits which have earned independenceIT the latest BoSS Award.

For more information about the rules for applying for a BoSS Award or to find a list of previous winners of the BoSS Awards, go to http://www.cloudshowplace.com/awardprograms/boss.html.
 
Based on the success of the BoSS Awards program which focuses on SaaS solutions, THINKstrategies has launched the Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program to recognize companies which are delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions producing measurable business benefits for their customers. For more information regarding the CCBV Awards, see http://www.cloudshowplace.com/awardprograms/ccbv.php.

• Attivo: The explosive growth of data, which is very often core to the value of today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud-based applications, is becoming an increasingly difficult issue for SaaS/Cloud vendors to economically manage to meet the escalating needs of their customers. This profile details how Attivio’s UIA platform has become increasingly attractive to SaaS/Cloud vendors seeking to keep pace with users’ escalating data access requirements.
• Dell-Boomi: As Cloud-based, SaaS business applications become more popular, the demand for more powerful, yet easy-to-use, integration solutions is also growing. Today’s integration solutions must not only tie together a rapidly expanding array of SaaS apps, but also pull them together with legacy applications, systems and data sources. This profile examines how Dell-Boomi’s latest features respond to rising corporate demands and customer expectations.
• Informatica Cloud: The proliferation of Cloud-based, SaaS business applications have created a growing challenge for organizations of all sizes trying to tie them together with their legacy applications, systems and data sources. Compounding the data integration challenge is the need to ensure the quality of the data traversing today’s Cloud/SaaS applications. This profile examines how Informatica’s latest Cloud-based data integration and quality capabilities are designed to address these increasingly important issues.

I hope you find these profiles useful and welcome your suggestions regarding other companies you think we should showcase.

The data access, integration and quality management issues which these companies are attacking will be the focus of THINKstrategies’ Cloud conferences in 2012.

Click here to sign up for our newsletter to learn more about these events, keep up with our latest profiles and read our perspectives on today’s rapidly evolving Cloud industry trends. You can also follow our updates via Twitter @thinkstrategies.

I provided a scorecard of my past year’s predictions which I published a year ago in E-Commerce Times in my previous blogpost.

I’ve been given the privilege of publishing this year’s predictions for 2012 in Datamation. I hope you like them and they serve as a guide for leveraging the unprecedented businesss opportunities created by today’s exciting new Cloud innovations.

Based on the success of THINKstrategies’ Cloud Channel Summit this past November, we are not only planning to have another one next November, but also plan to host two new events in 2012. We’ve announced that one of the new events will focus on Cloud Analytics. We will announce the focus of the other new event in early January. All of these events will be one-day forums for senior executives that will take place in the Bay Area of California.

Stay tuned for more information about these events, or contact me at info@thinkstrategies.com if you’d like to learn more about speaking and sponsorship opportunities.

Thanks for your support and interest in my perspectives over the past year. Let me know if you need any help capitalizing on the new business opportunities being generated by the Cloud.

If you have spare time to read more of my perspectives regarding important industry trends which are impacting businesses of all sizes across nearly every industry, here are my recent writings from other online outlets since my last listing of commentaries regarding channel issues related to our Cloud Channel Summit back in November:

• Internet Evolution: Human Capital Management Heads Cloudward, 12/21/11 
• Datamation: Cloud Computing: Show Me the Analytics, 12/12/11 
• E-Commerce Times: Standing Out in the Clouds, 12/09/11 
• Internet Evolution: Big IT Vendors Try Buying Their Way Into Cloud, 12/06/11 
• Internet Evolution: Why Google May Not Win in the Enterprise, 11/22/11 
• Sandhill.com: Market Implications of Salesforce.com’s Acquisition of Model Metrics, 11/16/11  
• Sandhill.com: Building Effective Channels in the Cloud, 11/13/11 
• E-Commerce Times: The Hard Part About Rolling Up Clouds, 11/11/11

In total, I published 43 commentaries outside of this blog. You can find a complete list of these commentaries here or here.

I hope you find my perspectives provocative and worthwhile. I look forwad to sharing more thoughts with you in 2012. In the meantime, have a good holiday week and best wishes for a safe, healthy and prosperous new year!