Posts tagged software services

Cloud Computing a Threat, and Opportunity, for Taiwan’s PC Makers

Jun 14th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Amazon

8 comments

TAIPEI — When Richard Lee, an electronics magnate, peers into the murky future of cloud computing, he sees both opportunity and challenge.

The company he heads, Inventec, makes laptops, servers and other electronic hardware for Western brands like Hewlett-Packard, using the renowned low-cost Taiwanese manufacturing model. But if all the hype around cloud computing becomes reality, that business model may have to change.

“It might impact our legacy business,” Mr. Lee said in an interview. “But the good news is that it could also push us into new cloud computing opportunities.”

While the term is tossed around in reference to a variety of technologies, in essence cloud computing refers to delivering software, storage and other services via the Web from vast data centers. That is a shift away from the PC-based computing model, in which software is stored on individual machines.

If the supporters of cloud computing are right, the laptops that Inventec makes will become less important, as computing power migrates to server farms and as simpler, cheaper mobile devices like the Apple iPad proliferate. But the servers that Inventec makes could gain a more significant role if they are adapted to the needs of the data centers powering the cloud.

Inventec is just one of Taiwan’s world-beating technology companies that is bracing itself for this paradigm shift. Like other governments in the region, including that of South Korea, it has announced a plan to help its technology companies compete in a new cloud computing age. And a consortium formed in April is bringing Taiwanese telecommunications, manufacturing, Web security and other software companies together to figure out how to meet the government’s ambitious goals.

Cloud computing could offer one way for Taiwan to move beyond the business of contract manufacturing, with its low profit margins, and into more lucrative areas — provided that Taiwanese companies are able to shed mind-sets of the past and address their current weaknesses.

“We’re searching for a new model,” said C.Y. Ling, director general of the Department of Investment Services in Taiwan.

The cloud computing services market in Taiwan was forecast to hit 6.2 billion Taiwan dollars, or $192 million, this year, up from 3.7 billion dollars in 2006, with most of the business in storage and remote security, according to a report from the Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute in Taiwan.

At a recent forum on cloud computing in Taipei, Taiwanese participants gave somewhat angst-ridden views on the shortcomings of the island’s companies, while Western participants were conspicuously more upbeat. That may have something to do with the fact that Taiwan contract makers’ profit margins are a thin 3 percent to 5 percent, according to analysts’ estimates, while Western brands’ much higher margins give them more breathing room for risky innovations.

Mr. Lee of Inventec said that Taiwan companies needed to focus more on software. Combining the gadget-making that Taiwan is already strong in with software services will be the key to thriving in the age of cloud computing, he said. “We’re our own worst enemy — there has been too much emphasis on hardware.”

Unlike the United States, where the government largely leaves innovation to the free market, Taiwan has traditionally seen government-led campaigns to develop important technologies — semiconductors, PCs, then flat-screen video displays — and to help Taiwan companies figure out how to mass-produce and commercialize them.

So it is with cloud computing. In late April, Taiwan’s cabinet announced a 24 billion-dollar cloud computing plan. The plan includes investments in research centers and the establishment of a cloud computing industry alliance. The cabinet hopes that within five years cloud computing will be a $30 billion industry in Taiwan, creating 50,000 new jobs and luring investment.

The plan followed the South Korean government’s announcement last December that it would pump 610 billion won, or $487 million, into cloud computing.

Mr. Ling of the Department of Investment Services said his department planned a road show to Silicon Valley and Boston this year, in part to drum up cloud computing investment for Taiwan.

Continue Reading: NewYorkTimes

Related posts

CSC Announces CloudLab Virtual Development and Test Service Advanced SaaS Offering Powered by CSC Cloud-Enabled Data Centers

Jun 14th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Apps

5 comments

FALLS CHURCH, Va., Jun 14, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — CSC /quotes/comstock/13*!csc/quotes/nls/csc (CSC 49.73, +0.49, +0.10%) today announced availability of CloudLab, a new cloud-based development and test service delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. CloudLab provides rapid, on-demand access to a precisely configured, highly scalable and secure environment that speeds development, maximizes productivity, avoids capital expense, and lowers development cost. While primary users include IT operations and application developers, CloudLab can be used by sales for developing product demonstrations or training organizations for designing cost effective online training tools and curricula.

The new service, available via CSC Gateway, an e-commerce portal for hosting and cloud services, is a virtual equivalent of a physical environment with inherent usage controls and user access management. These features support a secure and efficient application development lifecycle. CloudLab eliminates the wait for physical machines or the budgeting processes associated with procuring new equipment. This service saves time normally spent setting up and tearing down test environments allowing for reduced cycle times and managed costs.

“CloudLab enables technology providers to say “yes” more often to business partners and internal customers who need an agile response to competitive and economic pressures,” said Siki Giunta, vice president, cloud computing and software services, CSC. “When using CloudLab, development, QA and IT operations access a pool of virtualized infrastructure to scale resources up and down as needed. Users can rapidly provision lab resources and deploy standard environments at the click of a button, avoiding bottlenecks found in many organizations. With CloudLab organizations can plan and execute safe application changes in days rather than months.”

As a leader in Cybersecurity and Healthcare IT, these offerings put CSC in a very unique market position to run cloud services for Healthcare, Financial Services and other highly-regulated industries where security concerns are paramount. The “Business First Approach” and proven credentials in SaaS enablement are unique differentiators for CSC in the Managed/Cloud Services Market.

Features of CloudLab:

– Self service — Easily provision and manage users, configurations, templates and assets through an easy-to-use self-service portal

– Runtime applications remain unchanged — Easily import and export existing production images with no modifications

– Snapshot and suspend — Rapidly create exact copies of complex configurations

– Controlled access — Restrict access and passage rights on any project, person or environment

– Reporting and visibility — Easily capture users, usage and actions with detailed audit trails

To view a video perspective from Siki Giunta, vice president of CSC’s cloud computing and software services, around the importance of this announcement, please visit www.csc.com/cloudroadmap.

For more information about CSC’s cloud services, please visit www.csc.com/cloud.

For insights, resources and community interaction on cloud topics, visit www.trustedcloudservices.com.

About CSC

CSC is a global leader in providing technology enabled solutions and services through three primary lines of business. These include Business Solutions and Services, the Managed Services Sector and the North American Public Sector. CSC’s advanced capabilities include system design and integration, information technology and business process outsourcing, applications software development, Web and application hosting, mission support and management consulting. The company has been recognized as a leader in the industry, including being named by FORTUNE Magazine as one of the World’s Most Admired Companies for Information Technology Services (2010). Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 94,000 employees and reported revenue of $16.1 billion for the 12 months ended April 2, 2010. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.csc.com.

Related posts

Cloud Computing Boosts Virtual Companies – Cloud Technology

Apr 9th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Amazon

7 comments

Cloud computing is no longer a fluffy abstraction. Consider California-based Rimon Law Group, which calls itself a Web 2.0 legal firm. Rimon employs 28 senior lawyers in seven U.S. states but has no offices, thanks to cloud computing services that are helping to change the face of businesses across the globe.

Rimon and many other professional services companies such as Innovations International, a 25-year-old U.S. consulting firm, are using cloud computing to slash costs, put on a professional face for clients, and transform themselves into virtual organizations.

What exactly is cloud computing? By one definition, it means shifting computing tasks and storage from local desktop PCs and company servers to remote systems across the Internet. And in the case of communications services, it means replacing local electronic switches known as private branch exchanges—which can range in price from several thousand up to hundreds of thousands of dollars—with software that can be easily controlled by any company employee over the Internet, without any training.

Both Rimon Law Group and Innovations International are among thousands of companies now using technology from RingCentral, a seven-year-old company based in San Mateo, Calif. RingCentral was named a 2010 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum and has raised $25 million in funding from the likes of venerable Silicon Valley venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. The company’s software is lowering the cost structure for business phone systems to as little as $10 a month and delivering those services in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.

RingCentral’s pitch is resonating with clients who are eager to save money and ensure they don’t lose business when executives are on the move. The company’s cloud-based technology “is a great equalizer that allows very small companies to come across as a fully professional entity to their customers,” says chief executive Vlad Shmunis, a native of Ukraine who now lives in the U.S. “Similarly, companies of any size can just be more accessible to their customers anywhere in the world.”

The market for these types of cloud-based unified communications services is projected to be worth $1.6 billion by 2016 in Europe alone, says Dorota Oviedo, a research analyst in the Warsaw office of Frost & Sullivan. It’s no surprise, then, that a number of newcomers are targeting the same space, including Poland’s Edge Solutions. Edge has a cloud-based offering called IntraOut which provides mobile phone synchronization, email, business grade instant messaging, high definition VoIP, groupware, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing.

Unified communications are only one of a number of software services being delivered via the cloud. Other services include email, customer relationship management, human resources and executive search, application development, storage, and security. Innovations International, for example, says it is using RingCentral instead of a private branch exchange, plus Google apps for e-mail and calendar functions, and technology from Mountain View (Calif.)-based Egnyte for cloud-based data management. Combined, cloud based services are projected to grow globally from $14 billion in 2009 to $33 billion in 2013, according to research firm IDC.

A 2009 IDC survey of 75 British companies with 250 or more full-time employees found that 47% of companies are already using some cloud services in two or more areas and 16% are using them in seven or more areas. Expect that number to mushroom as more and more services move to the cloud, says David Bradshaw, IDC’s research manager for European cloud services.

Both small businesses and large enterprises are interested in unified communications being delivered as a cloud service, since it represents a cost savings and eliminates the headache of managing and integrating multiple applications and vendors, says Frost & Sullivan’s Oviedo.

For law firm Rimon, the choice to go virtual was easy. The average price per office per associate in downtown San Francisco is $10,000 annually, a waste of money since most of lawyers never see clients in their offices anyway, says Yaacov Silberman, the firm’s co-founder. What’s more, it’s easier to attract the best people if employers can promise better quality of life, such as by letting people work from home or easily move from place to place without fear of losing their jobs, if, for instance, their spouses are transferred, he says.

Since its creation in 2008, the virtual law firm has successfully lured high-profile talent such as Dov Grunschlag, a 30-year legal veteran specializing in labor and employment who worked as a professor of law at the University of California’s Davis campus and served as law clerk to then-Chief Justice Roger Traynor of the California Supreme Court before entering law practice. Other Rimon Law attorneys include seasoned Silicon Valley attorney Fred Tsien and Martin Goodman, a lawyer with 40 years experience specializing in creditor’s rights, who has worked for credit unions and banks such as Citibank.

RingCentral’s services include multi-extension business phone systems with an auto-receptionist that professionally answers, greets, and directs callers to the right department or person. Each employee can define how they want to automatically route calls to their home office or mobile phones, based on the time of day and availability. Users also can make calls from their iPhones while on vacation and make it look as if the call was placed from their office. And, Internet fax capabilities convert incoming faxes to PDFs, making them immediately available to distribute to team members to view, forward, and file electronically.

Phone companies see such services as a compliment, rather than competition. That’s why AT&T and ClearWire have both partnered with RingCentral to distribute the service in the U.S., says Shmunis. In Britain, RingCentral worked with BT Group in 2008 to offer services to BT’s small business customers with cloud based phone systems. RingCentral says the partnership was disbanded due to strategic and other changes at BT. In a written reply to a question from Informilo BT confirms it had a commercial partnership with RingCentral. “However, however, after a performance review, we decided to discontinue the relationship,” BT says. RingCentral is now directly servicing the U.K. small business market via its own local Web site.

Shmunis, a seasoned entrepreneur who sold a telecommunications company he co-founded called RingZero Systems to Motorola in the late 1990s, remains optimistic about RingCentral’s international expansion and says he also sees huge growth opportunities for the company in the U.S. Since one-half of the work force in the U.S. is employed at businesses with 100 people or less, Shmunis believes there are well over 10 million potential businesses that could be customers of such services in the U.S. alone.  Source: BusinessWeek

Related Blogs

Related posts

Saving Money Through Cloud Computing – Cloud Information

Apr 7th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Business

5 comments

The U.S. federal government spends nearly $76 billion each year on information technology, and $20 billion of that is devoted to hardware, software, and file servers (Alford and Morton, 2009). Traditionally, computing services have been delivered through desktops or laptops operated by proprietary software. But new advances in cloud computing have made it possible for public and private sector agencies alike to access software, services, and data storage through remote file servers. With the number of federal data centers having skyrocketed from 493 to 1,200 over the past decade (Federal Communications Commission, 2010), it is time to more seriously consider whether money can be saved through greater reliance on cloud computing.

Cloud computing refers to services, applications, and data storage delivered online through powerful file servers. As pointed out by Jeffrey Rayport and Andrew Heyward (2009), cloud computing has the potential to produce “an explosion in creativity, diversity, and democratization predicated on creating ubiquitous access to high-powered computing resources.” By freeing users from being tied to desktop computers and specific geographic locations, clouds revolutionize the manner in which people, businesses, and governments may undertake basic computational and communication tasks (Benioff, 2009). In addition, clouds enable organizations to scale up or down to the level of needed service so that people can optimize their needed capacity. Fifty-eight percent of private sector information technology executives anticipate that “cloud computing will cause a radical shift in IT and 47 percent say they’re already using it or actively researching it” (Forrest, 2009, p. 5).

To evaluate the possible cost savings a federal agency might expect from migrating to the cloud, in this study I review past studies, undertake case studies of government agencies that have made the move, and discuss the future of cloud computing. I found that the agencies generally saw between 25 and 50 percent savings in moving to the cloud. For the federal government as a whole, this translates into billions in cost savings, depending on the scope of the transition. Many factors go into such assessments, such as the nature of the migration, a reliance on public versus private clouds, the need for privacy and security, the number of file servers before and after migration, the extent of labor savings, and file server storage utilization rates. Based on this analysis, I recommend five steps be undertaken in order to improve efficiency and operations in the public sector:

  1. the government needs to redirect greater resources to cloud computing in order to reap efficiencies represented by that approach,
  2. the General Services Administration should compile data on cloud computing applications, information storage, and cost savings in order to determine possible economies of scale generated by cloud computing,
  3. officials should clarify procurement rules to facilitate purchasing through measured or subscription cloud services and cloud solutions appropriate for low, medium, and high-risk applications,
  4. countries need to harmonize their laws on cloud computing to avoid a “Tower of Babel” and reduce current inconsistencies in regard to privacy, data storage, security processes, and personnel training, and
  5. lawmakers need to examine rules relating to privacy and security to make sure agencies have safeguards appropriate to their mission.

Full Source

Related posts

‘Cloud Computing’: What Exactly Is It, Anyway?

Feb 8th

Posted by cloudtweaks in Amazon

2 comments

For a lot of small-business owners, “cloud computing” is the latest IT buzzword to leave them scratching their heads. To demystify things, here’s a primer for companies looking to wade into cloud services for the first time.

What are cloud services?

The Journal Report

See the complete Small Business report .

Broadly speaking, any service or program sent over an Internet connection can be considered a cloud service. An outside vendor runs the servers and software, so the buyer doesn’t have to worry about the technical issues in-house—and can focus on its own business.

The services come in a number of forms. Many businesses are already familiar with one aspect of cloud computing: software delivered over the Web. Along with email services like Google Inc.’s Gmail, there are programs that help salespeople keep track of customer information, such as Salesforce.com Inc.’s software, and backup data-storage services from providers such as Amazon.com Inc.

Some businesses don’t just use software services, they buy computing power from vendors such as Verizon Communications Inc.—much like buying power from a utility. Let’s say a retailer expects lots of additional business during the holidays, and its in-house servers can’t handle the load of customer orders. The company might pay a vendor for the use of its servers, to shoulder part of the computing work as the need arises.

Other companies, meanwhile, might buy computing power on a regular basis. They might drop one or more in-house servers entirely—or not buy the hardware in the first place—and let a vendor run their vital programs on its machines. Once again, the buyer would pay a fee based on how much computing power it used.

How much will they cost?

Unlike traditional applications, which require hardware such as servers and IT staff for maintenance, cloud services don’t carry many upfront costs.

A Cloudy Outlook

  • About 3.2% of U.S. small businesses, or about 230,000 businesses, use cloud services.
  • Another 3.6%, or 260,000, plan to add cloud services in the next 12 months.
  • Small-business spending on cloud services will increase by 36.2% in 2010 over a year ago, to $2.4 billion from $1.7 billion.

Source: IDC

Consider software. Salesforce.com’s offering for businesses costs between $5 and $25 per user each month. Google offers a host of programs including email, a word processor, video and a hosted Web site for an annual fee of $50 per user. For small businesses that have more-extensive computing needs, such as drug laboratories with extensive software, cloud services could cost more than $1,000 a month.

As for buying computing power, some providers charge for a certain amount of memory and computing configuration. Terremark Worldwide Inc., for example, charges six cents an hour for one gigabyte of RAM and the equivalent of one processor.

One caveat that might bump up costs a bit: If you’re going to rely on the Internet for your services, you will need a solid connection. While some believe a business-class DSL connection is sufficient, many industry observers and consultants recommend getting a faster line, such as a T1.

Continue Reading at WSJ

Related posts