A heavy book!

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data?

When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what “pedagogy” means.)

Instead, cloud computing is much more appropriate for both students and faculty and staff.  The more schools that adopt the cloud, the more they can replace books — which by the way, have a tendency to get rather stale and outdated fast and cost a lot to replace — with cloud-based content delivery.

We at Monitis have been working with more more schools to help them ensure reliability of content-as-a-service.  But they are going beyond course content. The cloud is settling into ivy-covered walls with such resources as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, data visualization and analysis applications, teacher and administrator tools, and voice/video communications.  Often, much of that is provided online by the likes of Google and Amazon and Rackspace, and that’s why we are seeing big demand from schools for cloud platform monitoring, too.

When I think of all the schools I’ve worked with that are trimming IT budgets and making way for future scalability, boosting services to students, ensuring updated and current course content and making administration more efficient, I am impressed by their faith in the cloud movement. Faith is one thing, but I think that they are also good business moves, and the drivers within institutions–whether they be educators, IT folks or students themselves — are far-sighted and good decision makers.

Everybody wants to improve education and our educational system, but sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box to make forward strides.

San Jose, CA – August 31, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the deployment of another monitoring node, this time in Singapore. The new node will be managed by Singapore-based En Technologies (www.en.com.sg). Along with a new node in Spain, this brings to 12 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide. This is in addition to Monitis’ exclusive ability to offer IT managers nodes from custom locations of their choosing.

What makes Monitis’ nodes so unique is their True One-Minute Monitoring. This means that each of Monitis’ 12 nodes is monitoring a client’s site every minute. This is not the case with most other companies that claim to offer one-minute monitoring. Such companies only monitor once a minute from one individual location – not from all of their nodes. If a monitoring service is offering 100 nodes, each node is typically only activated once every 100 minutes – a far from optimal situation.

Hovhannes Ayovan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “As the hub of business in Southeast Asia, Singapore is a critical location for us to offer a monitoring node. Now, for IT managers in the region, the only thing they need to worry about is how hot the black pepper crab is on Joo Chiat Road, and not whether or not they are getting accurate information about their systems.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance.

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
  
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.
  

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

Not Raking in the Dough

I read where UBS, the Swiss banking giant, found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) earns $500 million yearly from its cloud computing business.

While that number may sound impressive to some at first blush, it’s really only around 2% of Amazon.com’s annual revenues. And in the blog I read about this news, that would be less than AWS makes on “garden rakes.”

UBS got its numbers by breaking out a lump sum of Amazon’s quarterly earnings reports that it calls “other” revenue, separate from its retail revenues. “Other” includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and other services like packing and shipping goods. On the bright side, UBS predicts that AWS cloud revenue might grow to $2.54 billion by 2014.

So what do these numbers mean to you? On the one hand, $500 million is a tiny fraction of worldwide IT spending — which comes to $365 billion a year right now — so it’s painfully obvious that public cloud computing is a lot smaller market than it’s been made out to be. However, on the other hand, we know that private clouds are preferred right now, as enterprises still have the heeby-geebies about security on public platforms.

So, my take on this is that just because AWS isn’t raking in (forgive the pun) billions of dollars yearly on the cloud right now, it doesn’t mean it won’t someday. After all, it’s built the infrastructure. And you know about that saying: “If you build it they will come.”

The Indian cloud market is now worth about $110 million annually, but a new survey says that could grow by almost 10 times as much to over $1 billion by 2013. Wow; that’s a lot of cloud cash!

The study, called Cloud Computing in India: Opportunities & Way Forward, by Zinnov Management Consulting, says that the Indian cloud computing market, SaaS has seen the most rapid growth until now, and is likely to reach $650 million in sales by 2015, while PaaS and IaaS markets together will reach $434 million each by then.

“This is indeed a perfect storm,” said Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting, in an article I read in The Times of India. “The only difference is that, this storm is destructive only to companies who are not willing to change, while it is a huge opportunity for others.”

Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP & Email workloads are the dominant apps in Indian cloud computing, according to the article.

I’ve always thought that the emerging economies of the world are the future goldmines of cloud computing, especially as opportunities for further growth in mature markets like the U.S. and Europe scale down a bit. And I believe that someday, homegrown companies in India will provide real competition to today’s mostly Western cloud services providers. Hear that Google?

I know that in my business, as Monitis grows globally and establishes new monitoring stations around the world, our international customer list expands accordingly. I guess my point here is that we in the IT industry often get caught up in our very Western-centric thinking about the cloud, that it’s mostly a trend in developed countries. But nothing could be further from the truth. The cloud, by its very nature, is borderless, and businesses and customers can be found everywhere — in Bombay, Beijing, Berlin and Boston.

San Jose, CA – August 23, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced the deployment of another monitoring node, this time in Spain. The new node will be managed by the Spanish service provider CSR-Online. Along with a new node in Singapore, this brings to 12 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide. This is in addition to Monitis’ exclusive ability to offer IT managers nodes from custom locations of their choosing.

What makes Monitis’ nodes so unique is their True One-Minute Monitoring. This means that each of Monitis’ 12 nodes is monitoring a client’s site every minute. This is not the case with most other companies that claim to offer one-minute monitoring. Such companies only monitor once a minute from one individual location – not from all of their nodes. If a monitoring service is offering 100 nodes, each node is typically only activated once every 100 minutes – a far from optimal situation.

Hovhannes Ayovan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “We didn’t choose Spain as our newest node location because they won the World Cup and have great wines (although both ideas eased the decision). We chose Spain because it is an integral part of our expansion strategy in Europe. Spanish IT managers deserve to be liberated from the outdated software-based monitoring solutions and Monitis is here to show them the way.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance. 

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud. 

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
  
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.
  

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

San Jose, CA – July 26, 2010 – Having already been the first monitoring dashboard provider to switch from Flash to open-source HTML5, Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s first Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced another revolutionary advance in its technology. Now Monitis Mobile will also switch from Flash to HTML5, enabling phones running on iPhone OS, Android, and Symbian to run open-source HTML5-based charts instead of the Google charts as images that Monitis Mobile had previously used.

Given increasing concern surrounding the problems with Flash (battery drain, not open-source, and security vulnerabilities), Monitis was the first monitoring provider to preemptively replace Flash with open-source HTML5 on its core product. Hence, the move to open-source HTML5 on Monitis Mobile was only a matter of time.

With the new open-source HTML5 charts will load much faster and contain more interactive features. These new charts will be based on open-source Flot, a pure Javascript plotting library for iQuery.

Said CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “We’ve done it again. With the advent of open-source HTML5-based Monitis Mobile, we’ve once more changed them game in the category. No other monitoring company is innovating as quickly as Monitis at the moment. We are indeed the ones to watch.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Systems Monitoring from the Cloud.  It is leading a new era of systems management tools – the Cloud generation.  Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution, offered on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Monitis consolidates back-end monitoring, application monitoring, website monitoring, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, hosted monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing of all kinds of IT assets such as websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices.  Monitis provides users with a comprehensive view of their system’s health and performance.

About Monitis

Monitis believes that the Cloud is the biggest thing to happen in IT management since IT management. Having seen this vision early, Monitis is now the global leader in developing this market.  It is the first affordable network and systems monitoring solution based 100% in the Cloud.

Besides Monitis’ enthusiastic and loyal user base of 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions, Monitis has won rave reviews from the technology analyst community. These accolades include:

• Being named as the “Most Innovative Start-Up for 2009″ by industry analyst The 451 Group at their annual client conference in December 2009.
  
• Being ranked among the 2010 OnDemand 100 in April 2010. The OnDemand 100 is a ranking by Morgan Stanley, KPMG, and AlwaysOn of the world’s top 100 private companies.
  

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Monitis is lead by a team of IT professionals with deep experience running enterprise-grade IT businesses, as well as starting and selling several IT start-ups.  Using a global workforce, particularly its R&D team based in Yerevan, Armenia, Monitis is poised to move from strength to strength.  At present, it has a loyal and enthusiastic user community of 50,000, and an average month-on-month growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
US & Canada Toll Free: +1-800-657-7949
UK + International: +44-845-527-3346
France + International: +33-48-607-9035
2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

I read a paper recently that listed a number of reasons why schools and universities are increasingly relying on their own websites to interact with students and deliver services, such as admissions, enrollment and registration, and other functions.

Those reasons (and I’ll get to them in a minute) make very good sense. But, overall, automation designed to answer students’ questions, helps schools keep staff lean, increases their productivity and boosts service levels to current and prospective students – even as enrollment grows and budgets shrink.

My thoughts: As smart as it seems to employ this kind of technology, it seems even smarter for universities and schools to follow-up with cloud-based monitoring tools to make sure those applications are running efficiently.

OK, now for the rationale for web self-services:

The # 1 reason is that “tech savvy” students can’t tolerate inefficiency. If they can’t find a resource or an answer to their questions on a school’s site, they’ll call or email someone on staff, which incurs extra costs and resources for the school.  Worse, a prospective student may give up and go to another school’s site.

#2 – A poorly designed site with little or no self-service capacity means school staff winds up dealing with the same issues, or answering the same questions constantly – taking up their valuable time. They could be doing some more high-value work.

#3 – The costs of labor-heavy administration means, well, high costs. At Temple University in Philadelphia, the 27th largest university in the U.S., (with 35,000 students), they figured out how much it costs to field all students’ questions each year: 4,000 staff hours per year…the equivalent of three full-time staff.

#4 – Technology such as instant answer agents saves schools money. For example, an interaction with a student via the phone costs $25, while an application doing the same costs $1 per instance.

#5 – Schools can measure the ROI of using technology, as it expands the bottom line. One school mentioned in the paper canceled plans to hire an additional staff of 25 after implementing such technology, saving a lot of money.

As both businesses and schools rely more and more on internet or cloud-based applications to expand efficiencies and savings, it’s also more critical that they keep a close eye on how those tools are working, for example, via website transaction monitoring. Monitoring those solutions is the answer and can provide valuable information on how they perform – allowing enterprises to avoid disaster scenarios, and, if necessary, fix small problems before they become bigger ones.

I couldn’t help but be struck by the announcement from social network Facebook, which operates on the cloud, that it is simplifying and at the same time strengthening its privacy options. What struck me about it was that consumers who use cloud apps (OK, maybe more consumers in Europe than the U.S. care about this.) are just as concerned about protection of data and security as companies are when using cloud- based services. And what struck me even more was that we need industry-wide protections – on both the consumer and corporate side – versus piecemeal patches and changes from service providers, be they big or small.

What happened with Facebook is that, in an effort to give users more privacy options, they came up with a pretty complicated solution. Users had to set privacy settings for each application that they used, for example, whether to share with friends, friends of friends or everyone. Plus, they had to set privacy settings for every new feature that Facebook introduced (hundreds since its founding in 2004).

Now, however, Facebook will give users a single privacy page listing all their applications and giving them a choice of three settings for each. They can also turn off their applications to make sure that no information is shared without consent. And Facebook will suggest defaults.

This sounds like a fine fix to me. Anyway, Facebook does not rely on its 400 million users sharing information in order to sell to advertisers, according to its head Mark Zuckerberg, pictured above (How old is this guy, anyway? He looks like he’s still in college.) 

But some in Europe, which, in general, is really more concerned about privacy and the sharing of information than the U.S., aren’t satisfied. According to a BBC article that I read, some questioned whether the default setting will be for sharing less information. And, the European Commission described the changes as “unacceptable”.

Maybe businesses can take a cue from the effort that Facebook has had to make to reassure users about privacy and security of data on the cloud.  In the absence of global industry-wide standards and protections, thousands of companies, government agencies and educational institutions migrating to the cloud are employing 24/7 monitoring of their apps, servers, networks, websites, cloud platforms and more.

It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Enomaly Inc. founder and CTO Reuven Cohen recently spent some time in China, and he discovered that cloud isn’t just hype there. It’s gone into active overdrive.

I was reading his company blog, and I was fascinated with the Chinese approach to making cloud computing available to the masses – something Cohen refers to as Communal Clouds. It reminded me of the drive in the U.S. to get phone service established in cities and towns and wild places alike.

Communal Clouds are cloud infrastructures within China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs) created by the government. SEZs are granted flexible tax privileges and other special policies, allowing businesses within the zones to prosper and do business more freely than in the rest of China. Many companies within these zones now feature their own on-site data centers. And the clouds – some of which are state-sponsored – give computing platforms to companies at little or no cost.

This is a great approach to stimulating economic growth. While the U.S. government has been active in setting up and perfecting its own cloud computing infrastructure, wouldn’t it be great if the government embarked on its own campaign of setting up sponsored cloud computing platforms for private businesses – especially growing firms?

This, in turn, would inspire more investment and business growth. And U.S. companies entrusting their data and applications on the cloud would be encouraged to invest in more cloud services, such as transaction or service level monitoring.

###

Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but earlier this month University of California Davis ended its pilot of Google Apps for 30,000 faculty and students before a full rollout was to commence because it was concerned about the privacy of data in emails. Apparently, UC Davis CIO Peter Siegel sent a note to employees explaining that faculty “…expressed concerns that our campus’ commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” according to excerpts printed in InformationWeek.

Despite UC Davis’s decision, Google is celebrating a milestone. As of today, it has 8 million students, faculty and staff at educational institutions globally using Google Apps. (In total, 25 million use Google Apps; so the educational piece of the pie is considerable!) Google is adding muscle to its efforts to sign up educational institutions to use Google Apps, even launching a new site for recruiting schools.

So far, thousands of schools and millions of students are using Google Apps Education, and some of the more famous include:

• Morehouse,
• University of Rhode Island,
• University of Nevada Las Vegas,
• Metropolitan State College of Denver
• North Carolina State University.

Yet, as the UC Davis incident shows, institutions still must be convinced that their data is private and safe – especially the content of emails. It’s not an easy task for cloud services providers, nor for Google, especially, which examines email content to sell advertising.

Yet, for many students, I’d venture to guess that they’re more interested in a constant flow of new bells and whistles added to their productivity suite (like Google’s recent addition of document collaboration) than worry about data privacy. If they’re emailing each other about girls or guys, do you think they’d mind a well-placed ad from a dating service?

Still, as I’ve said many times in this blog, prevention is the best medicine out there. And if you’re in love with cloud apps but still have doubts about performance, cloud monitoring services are the answer. You get an independent watchdog to alert you on a variety of metrics – and in a variety of ways, from phone to email to texting and Twitter.