Posts for "Cloud Computing"

With the rise of the consumerization of IT, enterprises and small businesses alike are finding it more and more difficult to control and secure access to sensitive company information. When your employees can sign into their company accounts from anywhere at anytime, not just at the office, how do you ensure that your data is safe? Symplified was founded to solve just that problem. We sat down with Eric Olden, founder and CEO of Symplified, to discuss where the cloud is headed, how BYOD is changing the IT landscape, and what Symplified plans to do in order to help companies keep ... READ MORE

Business Software Week in Review gathers the most interesting news items from the past week in one convenient post. Go into the weekend knowing you didn’t miss anything important this week. This Week on Business-Software.com We kicked off the week interviewing the CEO of CloudPassage, a company whose answer to the debate around cloud security is offering elastic security for SaaS providers. We also interviewed Infobright's CEO, who is making big data analysis quick and easy. In looking at the best free ERP systems, we found that while it's certainly a plus not having to pay license fees, free ERP solutions put ... READ MORE

Platform-as-a-Service is a young market, undergoing vast changes. Many of its key players have only been active in the field for a couple of years, with giants like Oracle and HP just recently getting into the game. As a result, you have to either be an established company (Google, Microsoft), or do something unique (Engine Yard focuses solely on Ruby, for instance). We previously covered the basics of PaaS benefits and key software vendors. Today, we're taking a closer look at the top 5 PaaS providers. This post is part of our editorial series on how the cloud is transforming the ... READ MORE

Last Monday VMware, the Palo Alto-based developer of virtual machine technology, announced that it was purchasing Nicira, an early player in the emergent segment of software-defined networking. The decision was not a small one for VMware, who made the acquisition at the price of $1.26 billion in a combination of cash and stocks, and only three weeks after its purchase of DynamicOps, a competitor in the hardware virtualization space. While it's not yet clear what this will mean exactly for the technologies or the developers at both VMware and Nicira, it is as good a sign as any that the idea ... READ MORE

Cloud computing is changing the way we do business today. It takes away the cost and headache of building, hosting and/or maintaining software solutions on site. However, there is a range of different service offerings when it comes to cloud computing, the three main categories being Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS - closely examined in a previous post) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). PaaS sits between IaaS and SaaS in terms of what it offers. It is a cloud computing environment equipped with a solution stack to create your own applications. Whereas IaaS concerns infrastructure (servers, databases, etc.) and SaaS are fully developed ... READ MORE

While reading through Hacker News back in 2010, Girish Mathrubootham came across a post on ZenDesk's price hikes and how its customers were outraged by the 60-300% increase in their help desk costs. One commenter stated, "Here's a potential customer to whomever can get this right and at the right price. It seems like there's still a huge opening in this market for someone to come in and take all of ZenDesk and eSupport's customers," and thus Girish got the idea to start Freshdesk. The Freshdesk approach to help desk software and services is to provide its customers with a product ... READ MORE

Piston Cloud is fast on its way to becoming a household name in cloud computing, delivering not only a powerful cloud operating system that can fit on a USB drive, but also participating in thought leadership and community events. CEO and co-founder Josh McKenty joined us for an in-depth discussion on their unique role as a liaison between the open source community responsible for OpenStack and the companies looking to deploy it. To learn more about Piston Cloud, please visit their website or profile page. The cloud market is very crowded, so what inspired you to start Piston Cloud? For about two years, ... READ MORE

Pretty much every selling point of the cloud boils down to cost. The cloud provides pre-packaged resources, so you don't have to buy, install, and maintain them yourself. The cloud doesn't require labor-intensive implementation projects that use up too much time and money. The cloud is scalable to meet your business needs as they continue to evolve. And best of all, it is mostly priced on a pay-per-use basis. Yet, as cloud adoption surges, more and more companies are experiencing the unforeseen pains of runaway costs. A 2012 Cloud ROI survey conducted by InformationWeek found that of all the companies using ... READ MORE

Last week, we highlighted the five leaders in IaaS solutions. The list was heavy on big, established names. However, the IaaS market is changing so rapidly, that there are plenty of other companies that could be game-changers in this crowded field. Here are the top five companies you should keep an eye on. Main Contenders GoGrid GoGrid is the largest pure-play IaaS provider, offering virtual and physical servers, storage, networking, load balancing, and security scaled in real-time and in multiple data centers using a web interface or API. But besides their extensive offering and very competitive pricing (pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $.06/hour, but ... READ MORE

We've discussed cloud computing pretty often over the past month or so, writing about cloud 101 and demystifying the cloud, and there are many companies, both new and old, who are offering their own solutions to the business world's growing need for scalable cloud computing. The problem is, though, that most solutions are pretty much the same, thus making it difficult for one company or one solution to stand out in any noticeable manner from the rest. Piston Cloud Computing, however, is doing its best to make itself stand out. Built on OpenStack, the core product from Piston Cloud Computing, Piston Enterprise OS, is a scalable ... READ MORE