Flexibility Drives Open Source Adoption

One of the myths about open source software is that IT organizations adopt it because it’s free. But it turns out that while cost is definitely a factor - especially in these tough economic times - the bigger issue is flexibility.

There’s a lot of administrative overhead associated with testing and deploying proprietary software in the enterprise. In contrast, open source software can generally be downloaded and tested by virtually any member of the IT staff without a whole lot of interaction with vendor salespeople and internal purchasing departments.

In fact, a new survey of over 500 IT professionals conducted by Zenoss, a provider of open source systems management software, found that 66.1 percent of the respondents said they use open source whenever possible. But what’s interesting about these results is that over 70 percent cited flexibility as a primary reason for using open source, which narrowly edged out lower costs.

At the same time, however, over 70 percent said that the current state of the economy played no role in influencing their interest in open source technologies.

According to Mark Hinkle, vice president of community for Zenoss, IT organizations are increasingly valuing the fact that they can adopt open source technologies on their own terms. Interestingly enough, the Zenoss survey also found that the IT people surveyed still value the support they get from vendors, the maturity of proprietary software and the features they get in those products.

Ultimately, while the Zenoss survey shows that mainstream adoption of open source software is already here, it doesn’t appear that the adoption of open source technologies necessarily means that proprietary technologies are going away altogether. But It does mean that proprietary software needs to be not only that much better, but a lot simpler to initially test and acquire as well.

RIM's PlayBook faces tough battle for loyalty

"The PlayBook’s big advantage over the iPad for enterprise customers is that many businesses already have BlackBerry smartphones deployed, and are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server product to manage their connectivity. Enterprise IT managers understand the security and device management advantages that BlackBerry has over Apple, and RIM will maintain these advantages with the PlayBook, which is fully compatible with existing BlackBerry services. 

The BlackBerry PlayBook certainly looks like a strong contender against Apple’s iPad, at least amongst RIM’s core enterprise customers. Further, RIM’s dominance of the enterprise smartphone market has begun to come under pressure from Apple and a range of Android competitors, and since the iPad’s launch there has been a lot of discussion about the role of tablet devices in enterprise and the adoption of consumer devices by business users.

The PlayBook is aimed squarely at enterprise users, but RIM has very deliberately included high-end multimedia and gaming capabilities to attract consumers – and of course business users are also consumers.

The PlayBook’s big advantage over the iPad for enterprise customers is that many businesses already have BlackBerry smartphones deployed, and are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server product to manage their connectivity. Enterprise IT managers understand the security and device management advantages that BlackBerry has over Apple, and RIM will maintain these advantages with the PlayBook, which is fully compatible with existing BlackBerry services.

The danger for RIM is that Apple already has a big head start in the tablet market, and the buzz around its apps and ‘cool factor’ is significant. Many business users will want to bring their own iPads into the work environment, so this is going to be a long and hard fought battle for RIM, but an important one as mobile devices become an increasingly important part of doing business.

Half of B2B firms boost search campaigns through social media

While many B2B firms leverage social media to connect with potential clients, more than 40 percent have found the platform is useful for boosting search campaigns as well.

Forty-four percent of respondents reported seeing noticeable boosts in search engine campaigns. Forty percent saw a lift in search engine referrals, 25 percent observed higher click-through rates on their paid search initiatives and 25 percent increased their conversion rates.

The majority of these companies leveraged social media to improve search engine optimization. Two-thirds (66 percent) are using the platform to create in-bound links, 64 percent are using extended profiles to reap more hits from search engines and 62 percent are tuning in to social media conversations to plan keyword strategies.

The benefits of social media campaigns inspired many B2B firms to hire more social media experts. More than half (56 percent) of companies are devoting more budget to the platform, while 15 percent are hiring staff.

With hundreds of millions of consumers using social media and online shoppers conducting more than 16 million searches per month, the combined power of social and search channels enable brands to reach a large audience.

Google Instant, SEO and your business - what does it all mean?

What is Google Instant?

Google Instant is the new, potentially game-changing addition to the world’s favourite search engine.

 

Google instant will change the way we search, experts predict.

Google Instant displays search results as a user types. Rather than typing your entire search query and hitting enter, you can simply start typing – and Google will predict what you are looking for. Results will appear, and change, below the search box as you type. Google says that the average web user reads much faster than they type, so displaying results in this way will save time.

That might well be the case. But the SEO community has been having kittens since Instant launched, with many proclaiming it to be the death of optimisation. While this is unnecessarily melodramatic, Google Instant does have significant implications for every business that relies on its online presence.

How does it change search patterns?

Users want to get to what they are searching for as quickly as possible, and Google Instant might help them do this.

Given that Google Instant’s predictions seem generally to be pretty accurate, it is a fairly safe bet that users will spend less time looking through search engine results pages. They will probably click through to one of the top results more quickly.

Many people have been suggesting that businesses and SEOs will now have to optimise not just for keywords, but for letter combinations. If you believe some of the blog entries posted this week, London hotels will have to optimise their site for every letter combination from ‘lon’ onwards if they want to keep any of their traffic.

But this isn’t the case. The search results users see are not based on letters – they are based on the keywords Google thinks they are searching for. In other words, if you start typing ‘London hotels’, Google doesn’t think you’re searching for things related to ‘lon’ – it is trying to guess what keyword you are going to type, and then it is displaying results relevant to that keyword.

What does it mean for long tail?

Other SEOs are worried about the impact of Google Instant on long tail searches and content. Many optimisation strategies are built with long tail searches in mind, and there is concern that Google Instant could scupper these strategies.

First of all, it is likely that some users making long tail searches will see the content they are looking for more quickly. You might see a relevant page even before you have finished typing your query – and if this is the case, why would you wait to see more results?

But it is worth remembering that users making long tail searches are likely to be doing so because they are looking for very specific information. They are looking for subsets, if you like; they are not interested in ‘London hotels’ – they are interested in ‘London hotels with a swimming pool near Battersea’, or whatever it might be.

These users are presumably less likely to be tempted by early Instant predictions, because a quick scan of the title and description will show that those first few pages don’t contain the information they are looking for.

What about PPC?

Google Instant is also likely to have an impact on PPC. The most obvious concern is how the new tool will affect impressions. If results are changing every time a user types a new letter, how will Google count your ad impressions?

According to Google themselves, ad impressions under Instant are counted in one of the following three situations :

* The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result,  an ad, a spell correction, a related search).

* The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.

* The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

This would suggest that the ads you see for a fraction of a second as you are typing will not be counted as an impression – and will therefore not affect your click-through rate (CTR).

There are a couple of things to note, however. First of all, unlike in optimisation, many marketers are likely to start bidding on letter combinations in an effort to ensure that their ads are displayed first, and highest. By second-guessing the user you might be able to boost your CTR.

Secondly, Instant is likely to produce a mindset in users that makes them even less willing to wait for their results, or scroll through even the first page. As a result, adverts in high positions will probably become even more important.

Google Instant is a major change for the search engine. But the panic in the SEO community is premature. Keep monitoring your results as you always have been – and let’s wait for some hard data before proclaiming the death of optimisation.

How do UK and US mobile consumers compare?

On either side of the pond, mobile phone consumers have taken different approaches to market purchases.

Variations in tariffs, contract length and even geography, brought about contrasts in the way mobile phones are purchased, but smartphones like the iPhone have challenged the norm for users on the prowl for a new mobile.

Carolina Milanesi, research vice president of mobile devices at Gartner, said a greater range of subsidies from UK providers allows consumers to choose devices with desired features and then pick that device from the provider with the best deal, a contrast to in the US. In the US, it’s always been about the provider and the data and voice plan that best fitted your needs. Then, you would get whatever phone the provider would put on that package.

This is evident in the different ways mobile websites show their content. The UK site Know Your MobileKnow Your Cell, lists carriers and then shows products to consumers. displays handsets upfront whereas its sister US site,

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester, geographical scale was the one significant difference between the UK and US, impacting the level of coverage on which mobile phone users rely – a matter that is still a challenge to the US.

Contract lengths also vary between the two countries, with two thirds of UK consumers on prepay phones and the majority of US mobile consumers on long-term contracts.

Different technology

Market differences are also a result of varying technologies used by UK and US providers, according to Fogg.

UK mobile users have a much easier time switching SIM cards between phones than they would in the US because UK carriers use essentially the same technology on the same frequencies, he added.Any phone can work on any network, unless it has been locked to a network, but that lock can be undone very easily. That means if consumers want to switch networks, it’s relatively easy for them to do so.

However, US companies have a mix of technology, with AT&T and T-Mobile using SIM cards with CDMA technology – similar to UK carriers – and Sprint and Verizon use GSM.

iPhone in the market

This is why Apple’s iPhone is currently exclusive to AT&T in the US, because Apple would have to make a separate handset for companies like Verizon or Sprint, Fogg added.

As for the iPhone, Fogg said it is having a major impact on both UK and US carriers, causing them to look into how they price data, avoid congestion and manage their mobile networks.

“The iPhone is actually, if anything, more of a unifying force in terms of the experience of carriers on either side of the Atlantic,” he said.” The experience is more similar than it is different. “

Both the lead carriers for the iPhone the US, AT&T, and in the UK, O2, have both reported congestion in network quality problems.

Future of subsidising

As for the US, historically subsidy levels have been lower than in Europe, but with the shift to higher end devices, subsidy level has increased closer to the European model.

Milanesi said it would be interesting to see changes in subsidy levels in Europe, like what was seen with the iPad. In this case nonsubsidised hardware was sold at a fairly high cost but consumers still purchased it as there wasn’t a two year contract or high monthly plan tied to it.

She said when operators in other countries cut the level of subsidy, sales dropped in the short term, but then picked up again and sales went back to normal.

“That would allow carriers to lower their cost and may be a truer marker of who really the consumers are going after as far as brand, and who they like, rather than unnecessarily going with a brand that gets the highest subsidy from the carrier,” Milanesi added.

Mobile phone innovation

Rob Bamforth, principal communications analyst at Quocirca, said the market is headed not only toward devices, but also toward applications. After all, most people talk about having an Android device, not a Samsung Android device. That’s because that’s an app platform.

He said those involved in the market are trying to capture and understand the mobile application market and development stores.

This could ultimately weaken the carrier and device brand, he added.

“Despite the strength of the brands, I think people are typically looking to the devices,” Bamforth added. “The iPhone reinforces that and the counter-marketing that’s going on from the other manufacturers is also reinforcing that.”

Fogg said, specifically in the smartphone area and in the arrival of mobile internet, North American companies – RIM with the BlackBerry, Google with the Android and Apple with the iPhone – have been the most innovative.

“Those three firms have really driven the smartphone market for the past two or three years,” he said.

European handset makers like Nokia and the smartphone platform Symbian have been on the back end, fighting against the new wave of innovation coming from North America, he added.

As for the iPhone, Milanesi said the difference occurring in the UK, US and beyond is that it has generated an attention to user interfaces and intuitiveness.

“This is what Apple has done to the industry, moving away basically from focusing just on the hardware features and looking at the overall experience that a high end device should be able to deliver,” Milanesi concluded.

10 Information Technology Projects for 2010

These IT projects can help you achieve your goals of returning to stability or even cautious growth.

If you are one looking for a return to stability and maybe even some cautious growth, what are 10 IT projects that can help you achieve those goals? These are growth projects and not constant standbys of security, storage and hardware maintenance and upgrades. The old standbys have to be fed, but they won't fuel a growth rebound.

1. Mobility. It's time to think about application development with the mobile device as the primary client. Your top executives and your sales force are using their mobiles as their primary way of staying in touch with the company. Your customers are more likely to respond to offers made via mobile messages. Rather than thinking about how to mobilize older enterprise applications, think about mobility as the start of the project. And by the way, do you have the application developers with a mobile track record? I recently named mobile as one of the five enterprise applications you should be developing now.

2. Social networks. This is one you are going to hear a lot about. What you are not going to hear a lot about is how to build the reporting tools required for a successful social network program. Rather than send everyone off Twittering and running Facebook pages, start with what you are trying to accomplish first. Feel free to click over to my article on how to build successful business social network applications. Remember, if you can't measure it, you can't figure out if it is successful or not.

3. Enlarge your company's product development team. Remember the motto, "The customer is always right"? Technology firms had success at bringing their customer base into the product development process. Do you make it easy for customers to recommend new products and improvements to existing products and services? You should.

4. Get with the cloud and virtualization. One of the problems with the ways the technology firms have marketed cloud computing and virtualization is the pitch that it is mostly about cutting costs. However, cloud computing also offers a way for companies to quickly provision technology infrastructure for startups within their own company. A Fortune magazine article recently profiled browser pioneer Mark Andreessen explaining why startups will proliferate in the era of cloud computing. Does your company have a plan in place to rapidly support internal startups with technology or does the startup team sit gathering dust as they wait for databases, servers and commerce services to be deployed?

5. Think outside your technology box. Yes, it is easier to manage your technology resources when everyone uses the same laptop, the same operating system, the same database, etc. But if your company is going to take advantage of new business intelligence tools hosted in the cloud or new applications from companies such as Salesforce.com or new e-commerce tools from companies like Amazon, you have to start small. You have to find and fund the technology pioneers in your company or you are going to be stuck in the same tech rut as last year.

6. Be a leader. How are you developing the new tech talent in your company? While your travel budget may have been clobbered by the economic recession, you have many opportunities in virtual trade shows, e-seminars and smaller local events. Do you track the e-seminars your employees attend? Do you have a way to evaluate which e-sems and virtual trade shows offer the most value? Do you recognize employees who have gone out of their way to learn a new technology and bring it to your company's talent pool? You should. 

7. Think outside your company's business box. How much time do you spend looking at how the competitors to your company are using technology? What is their Web interface? How easy or difficult is it to order a product from the competitor? Sign up for their newsletters, mobile alerts and e-seminars where they may be a presenter. Now, take a few moments to step away from your industry and see how technology is being used by startups. Are they making use of geolocation services? What are their offerings like on mobile devices such as the iPhone App Store? This is not just Web surfing—this is called competitive analysis, and if you are structured about it, you can find some good ideas for your company.

8. Understand the new online contractor services. Web firms like ELance are changing the way contractors are hired. If there is an upside to a strained economy, it is there are lots of good contractors suddenly available. You really need to understand how these new Web-based contractor services work if you are going to figure out how to get the programming and application development resources for your new projects.

9. Rethink your company's IT infrastructure. I know this article is about 10 projects for new services, but if you are like most companies, the majority of your IT budget still goes into keeping the lights on and the servers running. Reducing those costs is where you free up new development dollars. The new part is you have a wider range of hosted services to look at than even a year earlier.

10. Be structured about looking at the new offerings from old vendors. Soon you will be asked about Windows 7 and new hosted application offerings from Oracle, new video services from Cisco and new business applications from Google. The big vendors have not been sleeping, but have been waiting for some economic sunlight before making their product marketing pushes. How many of these big platform switches can you make in a year? How rigid is the ROI that you can attach to these offerings? The execs from these companies are playing golf with your boss, and you need to have a reason why or why not you are ready to take on big projects that will consume most of your new project dollars and people resources.

How Google Works

Google focuses on three key areas : Search, Ads and Apps. Search is their core technology; ads are thier central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over their web-based software that one can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple.


The life span of a Google query is usually less than half a second, yet involves quite a few steps that must be completed before you see the most relevant results.


Google puts their search technology to work to show us only the most relevant ads on the page of results we'll see. If we can't find anything useful that relates to what we're looking for, we won't see any ads.


"Cloud computing" is the phrase for web-based software for business or personal use which requires no hardware or software. It's easy to collaborate and share our work no matter where we are or which computer we're using.

How Does Google Rank My Site?

As all online business owners know, having top rankings in the search engines is crucial for driving free traffic to your site.

So how is it that your competitor’s site gets top rankings in the search results while yours seems to be buried on page 10 or lower?  Here's the answer for you, but first, let’s look at the factors that Google takes into account to decide which sites will get those coveted top positions, and which will be relegated to obscurity.

First, we need to recognize that there are both on-page and off-page factors.

On-page refers to content that is actually on your page. In other words, content that both Google and your visitors can see and read. Off-page factors are everything else.

In order to understand how these work together, you need to start to think like Google. Google’s goal is to provide the most relevant, up-to-date information it can. They want to do that so that people use their search engine, and they want that so that people get to see those sponsored Adwords listings, which is where Google earns their money.

So, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that your web pages are good – that they contain quality information that the reader will want to read.

Second, make sure that your website has the correct information in its meta tags, titles and content.

This is where you use the information from your basic keyword research. Make sure that your most valuable keywords are the ones that you include in your site’s title and meta tags. And of course in your content.

Remember, Google likes content – it likes sites with lots of content; it likes sites with recently updated content and it like sites with themed content about the chosen topic – again, guided by your keyword research.

The Off-Page Factors

Visit Google and type in the key phrase ‘click here’. Here is what you will likely get:

Look at these results. See how the words ‘click here’ are in bold? That is because that was your search phrase and Google highlights your search phrase in the actual results.

Now look at the number one result – Adobe. Notice that they do not have the words ‘click here’ anywhere on their page. If they did, they would show up in bold on the search result listing, just as they do on the other results below.

So, for the search term ‘click here’, the Adobe site is totally lacking in on-page factors. Their page is certainly not about the subject of clicking here, or anywhere else for that matter.

So how did they get to number one? Once you know their secret, then you can apply that to your own site too.

The answer is in their back-links.  Back-links, as we will see below, are the ‘votes’ that the search engines count to determine where your site ranks.

Let’s look at this diagram for a minute:

This shows a hyperlink on a hypothetical site, example.com.

As you can see, the blue underlined text on the link says ‘dogs’. That blue text is what we call the link’s ‘anchor text’. If you clicked this link, it would take you to another site, which we will call Site A. So one can say that this link is pointing to Site A.

Here is another link. On this one the anchor text says ‘dog allergies’. It just so happens that this link also points to Site A.

Here are a couple more links, with different anchor texts. You can see that these point to Site B.

Now, looking at that diagram, what would you guess is the topic of Site A?

You guessed it: dogs.

And the topic of Site B? You got it – cars.

So you can see that you can get a good idea of what a site is about, based on the anchor text of all the sites that point to it.

So, if you were to search Google for ‘dogs’ which site, A or B, is Google more likely to serve up to you in the search results?

You got it – Site A.

That is because Site A has link reputation for ‘dogs’ whereas site B has link reputation for ‘cars’.  Link reputation simply means that the keywords in the back-links relate to your targeted niche – ie, dogs.

Ok, now let’s look at this diagram. Here we have a number of sites, all with anchor texts about dogs. Ten of them point to Site A and only 2 point to Site C.

Other things being equal, if you searched Google for the term ‘dog’, which site would rank above the other?

Site A would rank above Site C in the results, because it has more ‘link popularity’. In other words, it has more links pointing to it than Site C.

So, going back to Adobe – it just so happens that Adobe has thousands of links pointing to their site, all with the anchor text ‘click here’. And so they rank number one for that search term, even though they have zero on-page factors for it.

Putting these two factors together, you can see that if you want to establish a higher rank in the search engine results for your own search phrase, then you need two things – lots of links pointing to you (these are called back-links, as they point back to you) AND you need many of these links to have anchor text that matches your target keywords.

Ideally you would have thousands of links, all with different anchor texts matching not just your top ten most valuable key phrases, but your top hundred, or even thousand. By doing so, your site will rank in the search engines for the many long-tail keywords  that people type into the search engines. Some may not have much volume, but when you add them up it can result in huge amounts of free traffic.

Let me repeat that, as it is important.

To drive more traffic to your site from the search engines, you need to have thousands of back-links, all targeting different long-tail keywords in the anchor text.

So, let`s summarize:

1. You need to be at the very top of the search results if you want to receive significant traffic. Being hidden on the second or third page just won’t cut it.
2. You need to make sure that both your on-page and your off-page factors are optimized for your target search terms.
3. For on-page factors, that means lots of quality relevant content – for example lots of articles about your subject matter. If your site is about dogs – then you need lots of articles about dogs. And, of course, make sure that your meta tags and titles contain your targeted keywords.
4. For off-page factors you need lots of backlinks. How many? That depends on how competitive your target search term is. For something very broad and competitive like ‘music’ or ‘how to make money’, you will need tens or thousands. But for more specific terms, and especially for localized terms, like ‘chiropractor West Vancouver’ you might need only a few hundred. And of course all those back-links should use the correct anchor text.

Those are the fundamentals of SEO.

The next step, of course, is to devise a strategy that will help you create those off-page back-links to help you gradually and consistently move your own site up the search rankings. Our preferred method is via article marketing for a number of reasons.  First, articles can be used as great content for your site; second, they provide valuable, free information for your potential customers to read; and third, article marketing is a proven method of getting higher search rankings.  And by using article writing and submission services, you can do minimal work yourself and still build those coveted back-links hundreds of times faster than doing it all by hand.

CloudBuddy Personal Office

What is CSS CloudBuddy Personal Office?

CloudBuddy Personal Office is a add -in tightly coupled with CloudBuddy Personal product supporting the following in MS Office package:

• Microsoft Office Word

• Microsoft Office Excel

• Microsoft Office PowerPoint

• Microsoft office Outlook

The latest version of the CloudBuddy Personal Office add-in supports 2003, 2007 & 2010 versions of MS-Office.

How CloudBuddy Personal Office helps their user?

• Anytime, anywhere access to files and mails present in S3

• Allows storing of MS office files directly from MS Office interface

• Access to MS outlook backed up emails using email interface

• Serving attachments in mails via url’s associated with Amazon S3

How to install CloudBuddy Personal Office add-in?

Follow the steps provided below to install CloudBuddy MS Office add-in successfully

Step 1: Download and install the latest version of CloudBuddy Personal

Step 2: Download CloudBuddy Personal Office add-in, and install it

Step 3: Follow below steps to install add-in

How to use CloudBuddy Personal Office add-in?

On successful installation, the CloudBuddy Personal Toolbar will be visible in Add-Ins tab of MS Office package.

 

 

 

CloudBuddy Personal MS Office Add-in provides the following functionality:

S.No	Functionality	Description
1	Save	Helps in saving files directly into S3
2	Save As	Helps in saving files with different name in S3
3	Open	Helps in viewing the files directly from S3
4	Insert Hyperlink	Helps in attaching files as URL in another file
5	Share	Helps in sharing files via url’s (public / private)

(The above screenshots are specific to MS Word. It is applicable to MS Excel and MS PowerPoint)

CloudBuddy Personal add-in for “MS-Outlook”

On successful installation, the CloudBuddy Personal Toolbar will be visible in Add-Ins tab of MS Outlook.

CloudBuddy Personal MS Outlook Add-in provides the following functionality:

S.No	Functionality	Description
1	Save	Helps in saving mails directly into S3, which shall be viewed using mail view option provided by CloudBuddy Personal
2	Mail Explorer	Helps in selecting and saving mails in the local MS Outlook folder
3	Insert Hyperlink	Helps in attaching files as URL in a mail, thus entertaining users to attach mails exceeding the quota limits set by the mail administrator
4	Option of sending attachment as URL	Helps the user to attach files while composing a mail. While sending the mail, a pop-up will come up and helps the user to decide, whether attachment to be sent as a url (serving attachments from Amazon S3) or attachment itself. Please refer the screen shot below.

 

 

Increase Your Wi-Fi Signal Strength with a Foil

Are you looking for ways to increase the signal strength of that wireless router in your home without having to invest in a Wifi extender?

Then head over to the kitchen and grab some Aluminum foil that is normally used by mom for cooking or for wrapping sandwiches so that they stay fresh a little longer.



Tear off some foil in the shape of a rectangle, give it a curve and then place the foil behind the antenna of your router. This will reflect the wireless signals into your preferred directions.

If the router is mounted on a wall, you can make holes in the Aluminium foil and insert it inside the antennas as shown in the following video.

The Legal Issues Around Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing can help your business reduce costs as you don’t have to invest in hardware and other physical infrastructure, your data is stored on a secure location and you only pay for what you use – there are no licensing fees associated with cloud computing.

Legal Issues associated with Cloud Computing

That said, there are some important legal issues that must be taken care of before you sign-up with any of the cloud vendors for your business.

These issues, discussed below, are more relevant for business owners who are planning to shift to the cloud and may not really matter if you are a consumer who merely uses the cloud for storing emails or office documents. 

1. The Physical Location of your Data

1a. Where is your data stored physically?
Your data could be stored in any country and you may not even know where the data centre is situated. The ‘physical location’ raises the question of legal governance over the data. The customer must be clear so as to the provisions of the prevailing law in that particular nation.

1b. If a dispute arises, what will be the place of jurisdiction?
In case a conflict arises between the cloud vendor and the customer (you), which country’s court system will settle the dispute?

Say you are a business owner in China and your cloud service provider is based in the US. The vendor will definitely prefer settling the case in in an American court but as a customer, do you have the financial means and resources to get the dispute settled in the jurisdiction of another nation?

2. Responsibility of your Data

2a. What if the data centre is hit by a disaster?
It might happen that the vendor’s premises is severely affected due to a disaster. Even the 10-Q filings of Google Inc. with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission mentions such a risk:

Our systems are vulnerable to damage or interruption from earthquakes, terrorist attacks, floods, fires, power loss, telecommunications failures, computer viruses, computer denial of service attacks, or other attempts to harm our systems.

The question is whether you are indemnified by the insurance company for loss of your business or not?

2b. Is there any liability coverage for breach of privacy?
If a privacy breach occurs due to a fault of cloud vendor, is there any liability coverage policy taken up by the vendor? The scope of breach of privacy has widened considerably over the years in the field of cyber insurance. Some insurance carriers offer coverage even for breach of minor information and the customer is compensated on on behalf of the cloud vendor.

2c. What can be done if the data center gets hacked?
Though all cloud vendors try their best to fend off hackers, no security setting is assumed to be foolproof. If the data center gets hacked, can you move against the vendor for claiming lost profits?

3. Intellectual Property Rights

3a. Is your data protected under intellectual property rights?
If it happens that the data is your own creation (like photographs, literature, etc), then is it protected under the intellectual property rights of that country? What means do you have if they get infringed?

3b. How secure are trade secrets?
Your data stored in the ‘cloud’ may have trade secrets or privileged information which must be protected under attorney-client relationship. How secure will such information be in hands of the cloud vendor?

Or consider a reverse situation. If you leak out a trade secret of another business entity, how far will your cloud storage provider go to protect your data when they have been summoned to the court with all your stored data, access logs, etc.

3c. Third party access?
The vendor may grant some privileged third parties access to your stored data. The identity of such parties, if any, must be disclosed to the customer. Here, the third party could be a legal authority or even an internal employee. The customer should always be informed before the vendor allows third parties to access the stored data.

To protect the interest of your business, it may therefore be extremely essential that your read the terms and conditions meticulously before signing up for a cloud based services.

If the vendor provides a standard form of contract (which is a general practice), then you must be must be fully aware of all the terms and conditions. It will save you from nasty surprises and you will be financially, mentally and legally prepared to save your business from unfavorable consequences of cloud computing.

40 p.c of European firms to up IT spend

53 percent of organizations in Europe will outsource more work in 2010, and 40 per cent of organizations are planning to increase their external IT services spending, according to a recent survey by Gartner, Inc.

The survey found that the percentage of organizations spending 50 percent to more than 75 percent of their IT spending on external service providers was on the rise, said a press release.

“However, the results also showed that the pressure on capital and IT operating expenditure is still strong, and European organizations expect providers to deliver further cost reductions,” said Claudio Da Rold, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

He added that although 40 percent of respondents said that they would increase the external share of their budget, 24 per cent said that they would increase the budget for providers, and almost a quarter of organizations still expected that their IT services budget wpould continue to decrease in 2010.

The online survey was conducted among 206 organizations in Europe during in the first quarter of 2010. The survey was directed at individuals who were involved in decision making on outsourcing and IT services in 2010.

The survey also showed that organizations of all sizes and with IT budgets of various magnitude are now showing an interest in outsourcing. It found that 14.7 percent of organizations with IT budgets of less than €1 million expressed interest in outsourcing, which compares to only 6.1 percent of organizations in this category in 2009.

“Organizations in Europe are expecting - or are in need of - growth, but they are also still highly cautious,” said Da Rold.

“Although we conducted this survey in the first quarter of 2010, before the start of the Greek financial crisis, we believe that the cautious expectation of growth will continue in Europe beyond 2010. Regardless of the future direction of the economy, European businesses and their service providers need to optimize their multisourced environments, while increasingly adopting industrialized IT services,” Da Rold added.

IT Infrastructure Projects 2010

Bank of India : Collaborative Communication To ensure cost effective, timely communication across organization, Bank of India has deployed comprehensive unified communication solution

Kotak Mahindra Bank : Data Center Consolidation Reduction of operational costs and optimization of resources was achieved by datacenter consolidation

State Bank of India : Datacenter Consolidation To cut OpEx, the bank thought to consolidate all its DCs and DRCs from across the world to a single location

United Bank of India : Gilat Card Integration in VPN Integrating satellite with terrestrial network using Cisco VSAT NM card

Bharat Petroleum Corporation : MPLS, VPN Connectivity All the staff are using MPLS links for business transaction, e-mails and Internet based business information

Max New York Life Insurance : Server Virtualization Virtualization solution on VMware platform was deployed to enable elimination of server sprawl

Max New York Life Insurance : Infrastructure Redesign A centralized setup that reduced servers from 500 to 25 and helped save Rs. 5.9 Crore.

Max New York Life Insurance : Data Center Upgradation Virtualization, consolidation with focus on Green IT was achieved with segmentation of firewalls on the same hardware box

Manappuram Finance : M-SIAN M-SIAN is reducing transaction time at the branch and maintaining end-point security at branch-level.

BORL : Unified Communication To set up a common network platform that would cater to basic data communication services, UC was deployed

S TEL : CRM Implementation A Telecom company deploys effective services using CRM to ensure high level of customer approval

Sasken Communication Technologies : Server-Storage Virtualization Seamless migration of service/data to new environment and Point-In-time Recovery for all virtualized servers

Enterprise IT buying 2010-2011

The economic downturn caused most organisations to cut all their budgets last year, including IT spends. Though the worst is now over, recovery is happening very slowly. These are therefore extremely challenging times for budget planners, who're currently busy planning for the next financial year. What kind of growth plans should they project and plan for next year? What should be their business priorities? Since IT is directly aligned with every organization's business needs, the IT spends can only be determined after the business priorities are decided. To make life easy for IT budget planners, who would be caught in a dilemma right now because of this, a survey of large and very large organizations was made to understand their IT spending plans for the next fiscal. The results are interesting indeed, giving a positive outlook for next year.

Business priorities
The business priorities for a majority of organizations across all industries surveyed over the current financial year (2009-2010) were to reduce operational cost, followed by improving productivity and customer service. This was understandable given the economic downturn. In the coming 12 months also, organizations plan to do the same, possibly, as the market condition improves, these priorities will change, and organizations will start looking at more growth oriented activities. Amongst the various industry segments that were surveyed, manufacturing organizations had productivity improvement as their top priority, followed by measures to reduce operational costs. Improving customer services was the top priority in the BFSI segment, which perfectly gels with the fact that most banks were busy deploying CRM solutions last year

BlackBerry-India standoff : Probability vs Possibility

Research in Motion faces an August 31 deadline to give India access to its secure email and instant messaging services or the Indian government has said it will ban those services, hurting much of corporate India.

India toughened its stance on RIM on Friday, saying any solution must pass through field trials. The government says it is concerned that militants could misuse the services to create instability.

If India does ban BlackBerry services, it would be the first country to do so, even though several governments have raised security concerns about the popular device.

Following are scenarios on what might happen to the services:

No Ban, RIM Agrees to more talks with Govt for Solution

Probability: Most likely
RIM could secure an extension of the deadline by persuading the Indian government to hold more talks with the company and jointly arrive at a solution to address security concerns.

RIM on Thursday offered to lead an industry forum to look at India's need to have "lawful access" to its encrypted mail and messenger in an effort to stave off the blocking of the popular service in the world's fastest growing telecoms market.

"Discussions are ongoing. We are not in the business of shutting down services," junior telecoms minister Sachin Pilot said on Friday. Earlier this month, RIM successfully managed to get a reprieve from a ban threatened by Saudi Arabia, with the country saying progress was being made on addressing its concerns.

Kuwait does not plan to ban BlackBerry services, but has been holding talks with the manufacturer about moral and security concerns. RIM had been asked to block pornographic sites and the company has requested four months to deal with the request.

NoBan, No Solution, India Govet Relents

Probability: Possible
RIM has hit back at India by pointing out that blocking BlackBerry services would be futile and has warned Indian firms' productivity and efficiency could be a hit by such action. The security that BlackBerry offers has made it popular with companies looking for a secure way to communicate, and the device has become an integral -- and possibly indispensable -- part of business executives' lives.

India, an emerging market and the world's second-fastest growing major economy, may not risk stoking the ire of businesses over a service that has become critical to the functioning of corporations in the country and around the world.

A shutdown would affect about 1 million users in India out of a total 41 million BlackBerry users worldwide, allowing them to use the devices only for calls and Internet browsing.

Unlike rivals Nokia and iPhone-maker Apple, RIM uses powerful codes to encrypt, email messages.

RIM has said BlackBerry security is based on a system where customers create their own key and the company neither has a master key nor any "back door" to allow it or any third party to gain access to user data.

India Bans BlackBerry Services

Probability: Unlikely
The security offered by RIM is both a blessing and a curse for the firm. While it sets RIM apart from rivals, it is a headache for governments intent on monitoring chatter between militants who may be plotting to cause instability.

India faces an internal security threat from a rising Maoist insurgency, as well as the risk of militant attacks similar to the one in 2008 when armed Pakistan-based militants went on a rampage across several Mumbai landmarks, killing 166 people. Analysts see no easy fix to the standoff as RIM says it has no way of intercepting the data that countries want access to. RIM has denied media reports that say it provided unique wireless services or access to any one country.

The company is likely betting that countries that ban the service risk being viewed as anti-business while also boosting RIM's reputation for providing unparalleled security that even governments cannot crack, experts say.

Government code crackers could possibly break the encryption on their own without RIM's help, but it is a slow process that requires tremendous skill and powerful computers.

Also, cracking the encryption without the knowledge of users and the service provider could have legal repercussions.

Automation to transform IT into revenue driver

IT has come out of its oblivion and is an integral part of any business today. Gone are the days when IT was considered to be a cost centre. Not long ago, every CIO was made to sit and ponder as to what revenue does IT bring to his/her business and is it worth spending so much dollars on it?

But today with automation this scenario is undergoing a gradual change.

“There are three stages of managing IT. They are break-fix model, remote infrastructure management (RIM) model and automation management or automatic management model. The next level of IT management services is automation, which in turn will turn IT into a revenue driver”.

How is automation going to change IT from a cost centre into a revenue driver?
Unlike before, today it is all the more important for a business to ensure that its IT assets run properly, at least 99.99 percent of the time. So from a reactive method of break-fix model, companies have to move into a proactive method to manage IT and that is automation.

Automation helps reduce human errors, improve productivity and also improves service levels. The developments in this area lead us closer to the dream of autonomic computing or self-healing technologies, where problems in devices are automatically fixed through intelligent tools without human intervention.

What are the newer trends that are coming up in IM space?

One of the trends is automation. Automation evolved in the early 90s in the West. Today, the West is moving towards a run book model or configure management data base (CMDB) model.

CMDB means every asset and footprint in a network is configured and all those configurations, both hardware and software, are then stored in a centralized location. With this, one can map which person is working on what application, at what level etc.
Moving forward, IT assets will be taken care of as a run book model, where all the policies and procedures are carried out in an automated way at different service levels. Once automation comes in, IT will start providing value-added service to other business units too.

Thus IT will stop being a cost centre and with automation every CIO will be able to answer the billion dollar question, “What value is IT bringing to my business?”. India is slowly moving on to this model.

How has remote infrastructure management evolved in India?

Remote infrastructure management technology has been with us for a long time. However, because of the lack of economic viability of the technology, only large markets could afford it.

Evolution of RIM in India is much more rapid than in any other market. Till about 2007 nothing of this concept have been heard of in India. In 2008 and early 2009 there were a lot of buzz about RIM in India; however, nobody had any clue. A few service providers started providing RIM and thus started learning the concept in early 2009.

However, today the evolution is very fast. We are in the early stages of a matured market. The speed with which we are growing, in another two-three years we will get a widespread model.

By 2013 nobody is going to manage IT as such in the break-fix model anymore in India. Most of the market will be then managed through RIM. However, it will take 2013-2015 for the market to get widespread automated managed service.

How will virtualisation and cloud shape up RIM space?

Cloud and virtualisation are one aspect of IT operation, whereas, automation and RIM are different.

Cloud is a common infrastructure where people can pool in and start using the common infrastructure and put their applications and data into further use. Whereas, in virtualisation, people use infrastructure that is available virtually. These were the initiatives that started in 2005-2006 in the market and will only mature by 2012.

Cloud is still in the early stages of developments and will be full-fledged only by 2014, since there are only a very few Indian cloud operators today. Whereas, virtualisation is picking up very quickly, as a concept, where applications scale up virtually.

Moreover, companies such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, have been able to effectively perform and optimise in a virtualised server. Today all these software solutions are capable to work on a multi-tier architecture or a client-server model.

However, these software producers have not invested and come out with any product that can work effectively in a virtualised environment. Even though in a virtual server any software can work directly, the code that runs in these software has not been designed to run in a virtualised environment.

So, unless the business applications are transformed in to virtualised model, this will not really create a big value for the business. And we are still three years away from it.

At the end of the day, virtualisation and cloud are IT assets, so RIM is required to manage them.

De-distancing remote IM services

Gartner defines global remote monitoring services as the remote monitoring and management of various IT services that are related to infrastructure support from global delivery sites.

What is remote infrastructure management (RIM)?

Remote Infrastructure Management Services (RIMS) is the management of an enterprise’s critical or core IT systems that include data center (comprising messaging and application servers) and network management, end-user desktop services and security (hardware, software, connectivity and people), remotely.

RIMS is driven by factors that include continuous effort by enterprises to enhance service and performance levels and reduce costs, advancements in technology, the spread of low-cost bandwidth and the wider availability of high-speed networks, improved infrastructure efficiency and management; and evolution in offshore capabilities.

Why should enterprises opt for offshoring their IT infrastructure management?

The basic value proposition for RIM is “better service levels at a lower cost”. Customers have begun to enjoy several benefits from RIM. The most significant is reduction in overall infrastructure management costs, almost by 25-45 per cent. They are getting better service and quality, thereby increasing scale and customer satisfaction.

How safe is it to offshore IM services?

Several success stories across industries and functions stand testimony to offshore infrastructure management. Original barriers to off-shoring infrastructure management have been eliminated or reduced largely.

These include:
Processes and tools required to manage infrastructure remotely.
High price, poor performance and instability of international data telecommunications.
Lack of available resources with infrastructure skills at suitable remote locations.
Organizations still accessing results from existing off-shoring initiatives.

Companies are continuously developing intellectual property via integrated tools.
Enhancing operational efficiency via standardized processes.
Driving differentiation through increased service levels.
Building skills and capabilities to scale in profitable service lines.
Exhibiting high transparency and governance.

What is driving the demand for RIM in the present scenario?

There are two-three important things that drive the demand
Advances in RIM capabilities: This is the single largest factor that has made RIM possible. Simplification in enterprise infrastructure architecture, simplification of IT management and governance tools and much improved telecom infrastructure have made the current RIM wave possible.

Changes in customer behaviour : Customers now see a value chain in every component of their infrastructure and are increasingly outsourcing it that way too. They have very specific needs when it comes to network management and a different set of needs when it comes to messaging management and they don’t necessarily think that the same vendor will provide them the best of both services. This is also reflected in decreasing deal sizes despite an increased share of deals being signed by >$10 billion companies.

Customer offshore maturity: Customers are increasingly comfortable with outsourcing their services to a remote location. Infrastructure management works in real-time, and the consequences of an error are more immediate. However, after successfully outsourcing application and BPO services to India and other RIM locations, many more customers would be willing to try RIM.

What are the challenges in this space?

Since talent supply, not demand, will constrain growth, the industry needs to create new talent sources. A concerted branding exercise, which highlights the exciting aspects of working in real-time technology environments, will be required.

There is also a need to address skill gaps through improving relevant curricula in educational institutions and obtaining hardware OEM certification.

While poor urban infrastructure including office space, roads and planned townships and reliability and cost of powers continue to pose challenges to the industry as a whole, RIM services are more vulnerable to these issues.

Given the 24x7 real-time nature of the work, availability and uptime needs of the customers, investments required in physical networking operating centres (NOCs), and disruption of services directly affect service levels.

Compensating for any lack is costlier. In many cases, such disruptions are unacceptable and concerns could prevent migration of sensitive services.

Large legacy outsourcers still work on T&M prices for a majority of their engagements.

From a regulatory standpoint, cyber laws, telecom policies and improved security need to be looked at more stringently.