Perhaps some people see cloud computing in terms that are too simplistic, e.g., you adopt or don’t, it’s one kind or nothing. Not ING Americas, the U.S. division of the Dutch banking firm.

I recently read in a banking magazine that ING was first attracted to the concept of cloud computing when it began estimating the current and future cost and time required to run certain applications, according to Alan Boehme, SVP, IT strategy and enterprise architecture, at ING Americas, who was quoted in the story. “We looked at: Can we run the jobs faster and give our analysts and others more time to make business decisions, and can we do that at a cost that’s equal to or less than it is today?” he said.

Guess that they found out: A projection that the bank could cut processing time and costs by as much as 50% by using cloud services.

But that savings discovery is just part of the story. After testing cloud computing last year, it applied one of its core applications across several key providers, including Rackspace, Amazon and Salesforce.com. In doing so, the bank moved beyond the simple notion that you have to put all your eggs (data or apps) in one basket (a provider).

And the bank understands that “different parts of ING will be able to take advantage of cloud computing at different rates,” said Boehme, in the article, who estimated that some of the financial institution’s business units will be able to move 50% to 60% of their processing to the cloud depending on the platform, while others may only migrate about 10% of apps and data.

All this is very interesting to read and indicates to me that enterprises — often due to economic necessity — are becoming more and more sophisticated in their understanding of and approach to the cloud. And that is why we at Monitis are seeing heightened interest in third-party monitoring solutions that measure things like cloud platform up time and provide warnings when apps are down.

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.

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.

Press Release

San Jose, CA – April 22, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of all-in-one Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced a major new product launch: Java Application Monitoring.

Using their leading-edge hosted software as a service (SaaS) approach, Monitis’ Cloud-based Java Application Monitoring Tool enables IT managers to monitor any Java-based service with JMX hooks, but to do so from the Cloud. This means that in addition to enabling users to see inside a production Java (also JRuby) application deployed in a cloud or in a datacenter, users are free to monitor these processes from anywhere at any time.

Said Monitis Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan, “This is a big deal. This is a major step forward in the industry and we are excited to be at the forefront of this innovation. With this new addition Monitis becomes a true Swiss army knife for the IT administrators. Our host of useful tools in one simple, easy-to-use package can be configured in 5 minutes and require zero maintenance efforts.”

Monitis’ Cloud-based Application Monitoring Tool provides monitoring, troubleshooting, root cause diagnosis, plus pro-active planning tools such as load generators, scalability analysis, resource usage analysis and more. Specifically, the Java Application Monitoring tool:

• Monitors every metric, log, and configuration for all JMX resources in your inventory
• Identifies problem resources
• Controls all JMX resources on-demand
• Sends alerts on any measurement, log, or security event in your JMX environment
• Integrates fully into Monitis’ award-winning internal and external monitoring suite.

Specific metrics for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) Monitoring Tool include:

• General JVM Server Metrics
  • Availability and Uptime
  • Object metrics
  • Heap Memory Used, Committed and Max
  • Loaded and Unloaded Classes
  • Thread Count
• JVM Garbage Collector Metrics
• JVM Memory Pool Metrics

Monitis’ Cloud-based Java Application Monitoring Tool can monitor all leading commercial and open source J2EE application servers. The servers which provide JMX capabilities for monitoring include all leading products like: WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Apache Geronimo, JRun, Tomcat, Glassfish, and Resin. Monitis monitoring of Sun Java System could also be done through the SNMP mechanism used by the administrative console of the web server.

As with all Monitis tools, the new Cloud-based Java Application Monitoring tool is designed to save IT managers massive amounts of time. Sign-up and set-up take less than 5 minutes, and with Monitis’ heralded, hyper-intuitive interface, there is no learning curve – an incredible claim given that Monitis is perhaps the most powerful application performance management tool available today. Its pay as you go model makes the procurement easy even for Universities, which may also benefit from academic pricing.

Last but not least, Monitis is making the remote JMX probe agent open source, creating unlimited space open for IT managers and system administrators to gain confidence by extending the tool and creating customized checks.

Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a Java technology that provides the tools for building distributed, Web-based, modular and dynamic solutions for managing and monitoring devices, applications, and service-driven networks.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is the only service that provides Cloud 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, central 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. Recently, because it’s Cloud-based monitoring helps companies reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures, Monitis was named the Most Innovative Start-up for 2009 by The 451 Group at their annual Client Conference.  

Monitis was founded in 2005 by a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and fed-up and worn-out developers who were tired of complaining about the limits of software-based tools, while inspired by the promise of the Cloud.  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 revenue growth of over 10%.

Contact:
Monitis Inc.
Sales & Marketing Department
info@monitis.com
http://www.monitis.com
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2880 Zanker Road Suite 203
San Jose, CA-95134
USA

As we start the New Year, I want to take a quick look back to review some of the incredible milestones we’ve witnessed and orchestrated here atMonitis. We’ve watched the cloud industry expand and grow – with new cloud providers launching their platforms and a variety of new service providers bringing their brands and tools to the cloud.

Last year was an incredibly successful year for Monitis, as more and more companies making the move to the cloud relied upon our monitoring services (such as external monitoring, back-end monitoring, web traffic monitoring, transaction monitoring and EC2/S3 cloud monitoring.

We grew our customer base by 400% and our revenue by 500% last year. As you might guess, I’m ecstatic about those numbers, not just because it means we’re doing better, but because it represents growth for the whole industry, too. And I think it proves growing recognition by companies that accessing services, information and apps via the cloud – but safely – is the future of IT.

One of our biggest thrills this past year happened in November, at The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Conference in Boston. We competed with a group of other technology companies in the event’s “Innovators Showcase,” and we gave a presentation called “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere.” We won! and we were named “Most Innovative Start-Up of 2009.”

2009 was also a year of continuous enhancements and innovations to our services. I’ll list them below, and as you read through these developments and click on the links to learn more detail, you’ll be able to chart just how far we’ve come in delivering state-of-the-art, cloud-based network and systems monitoring .

I’m very proud, and I’m grateful beyond words to you, our customers. I sincerely hope you’ll help us usher in a new year of enhancements and services that, I am certain, will help you grow and expand your own businesses. We’ve got some exciting things planned!

Our 2009 Milestones:

- Launch of ‘Top 10′ service – providing network and systems engineers with a holistic view of processes and applications that are consuming the most resources, enabling them to quickly diagnose or prevent problems and properly match IT infrastructure capacity to business needs.

- Launch of asset management as a service, which automatically creates inventory of software, logs usage patterns and proactively suggests optimization to help companies reduce IT cost.

- Announcement of remote monitoring of system events.

- Launch of performance testing as a service, enabling companies to instantly run site performance tests, as well as keep historical records and manage performance scripts.

- Launch of public reporting and widgets, features that enabled our customers to make their websites’ uptime statistics publicly available – for the benefit of their own customers.

- Launch of our cloud monitoring service

- The addition of a monitoring location in China – expanding our global coverage

- The addition of a new external monitoring location within Amazon EC2 cloud network, allowing customers of the cloud provider to check their users’ web experience locally.

- Tweet alerts for network failures on Twitter

- Management Information Base (MIB) browsing for MonitorSNMP. A MIB is a type of database used to manage the devices in a communications network and comprises a collection of objects in a virtual database used to manage a network’s routers and switches.

- Introduction of remote monitoring to work on the Sun’s Solaris platform

- A free links checker service to detect broken and dead-end website links and alert users

- An interface for command-line tools to help make IT folks more productive and efficient

- A web ecosystem visualization service called WebMap, which helps IT engineers and managers understand their networks better in terms of status, health and manageability.

- Monitis S3 Monitoring, an on-demand cloud storage and usage service, enabling customers to independently monitor Amazon S3, notifying them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

- Database performance management and load testing from the cloud.

- User-friendly enhancements, such as the ability to manage all external monitors from a single, central location, enabling customers to edit network settings, monitor timeouts, change monitoring locations, schedule maintenance, and schedule and set up notification rules for all monitors from a single place.

- A new scheduling feature for our on-demand load testing

- Special holiday pricing for e-commerce monitoring – to help prevent site downtime

- MonitorSNMP, an enterprise-grade SNMP network monitoring service available via the cloud

- A time-saving universal cloud monitoring framework that enables external and internal monitoring from all cloud-hosting providers including Rackspace Cloud, Amazon Web Services and GoGrid.

- The ability for customers to create custom, end-to-end locations for server monitoring locations

- A free service to instantly check website response times from different locations

- Enterprise-class options for system failure and performance outage notification management

Cloud management platform provider RightScale plans to offer self-service utility computing in first-quarter 2010 that works across all of its supported clouds and will include additional accessibility, control, codified best practices and accountability.

The move reflects RightScale’s expansion into the enterprise. Indeed, some of its enterprise customers are already codifying corporate best practices as wikis that are being used to check compliance before additional projects are farmed out to the cloud.

Why is this so important? According to analysts at The 451 Group, the “ability to distribute workloads across multiple clouds is getting closer to becoming a reality,” and it’s clear that RightScale is moving in this direction.

RightScale has more than 100 paying customers, who mainly use the cloud platform for Web 2.0, databases), front ends to more-complex back-office systems, content delivery networks, self-service utility and internal IaaS deployments.

Amazon, too, is creating a growing number of tools for scaling, managing, monitoring and ‘dashboarding’ across the Amazon Web Services (AWS) landscape. But nontechnical users will find it hard going creating and managing instances and workloads.

Of course, there are a host of other third-party tools for managing AWS deployments, as well as incumbent vendors and integrators via product offerings.

Creating the ability for companies to easily and centrally use the cloud for multiple purposes – data access, application usage, and other purposes – will advance cloud computing overall.

I’m looking forward to seeing more details about the Ubuntu Linux open-source operating system. I read recently that a “Karmic Koala” version is due out October 29th, and I understand that both the desktop and server versions embrace cloud computing.

Something called Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is built into the server version of Ubuntu 9.10, and it is constructed atop Eucalyptus software – which implements many Amazon Web Services (AWS) functions, allowing businesses to build their own “private clouds.”

Meanwhile, in Ubuntu’s desktop version, there’s a cloud connection service called Ubuntu One. That enables Ubuntu users to synchronize files stored on different machines and back them up on the central service.

I’m always fascinated by new and emerging cloud technology, and I’m happy to hear about it – even as an alternative to Windows 7 (and the ubiquitous chatter about it). But let’s face it, as a recent cnetnews.com article points out, it faces challenges.

Yes, it’s popular among the Linux elite, but it’s competing with Red Hat on the server, and on desktops, what’s the chance of finding a Linux user among five office workers or consumers (They’re more likely to be customers of Windows or Mac, no?)?

But let’s skip back to the server environment for a minute – where Linux is a fixture. Perhaps businesses who want access to raw computing and their own apps and data storage capability will go for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. The software interface mirrors that of AWS’ EC2 and S3 – so it’ll be familiar enough to anyone with exposure to the cloud.

Again, it’s another choice, and choice is good. Just my thoughts!

Here’s some interesting news about how companies are innovating with network monitoring services, which is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart!

I read recently that Austin, TX-based SolarWinds Worldwide LLC is offering IP telephony monitoring that is designed to manage service level agreements over WANs on Cisco routers.

It’s called Orion IP SLA Manager, and it’s aimed at companies using voice over IP at more than one site. And even though Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS) already has a VoIP service monitor, SolarWinds Orion is supposed to help managers configure their network more quickly. And the product gives customers a “dashboard” view of usage and other statistics.

Without Orion, IT administrators would have to use a command line interface to configure every operation they wanted to monitor. Besides, they’d only get raw statistics, too. And that would require further labor to analyze. In essence, Orion would automate setup of IP SLA across whatever routers a company deemed necessary, plus provide a neat look at stats.

What was most encouraging to me, when I read about Orion, was a statement by Sanjay Castelino, SolarWinds’ senior director of product marketing. He indicated that Orion was driven by increasing customer demand for all types of monitoring services. “Customers are asking if I can do more to measure site to site performance beyond VoIP,” he said, in the article.

For instance, the company also has a monitoring product that reports IP faults and traffic analysis reports and gives administrators a view of complex, multi-vendor networks. Users can schedule scans and split those scans into subnets.

SolarWinds is one of the many IT companies today that are innovating and creating new monitoring services. And, as corporations demand ever-more efficient and productive computing from their IT folks, monitoring services will become increasingly important.

Today, IT managers want to set up their IT monitoring quickly and easily, and believe that’s what’s really behind the growth of monitoring services. To learn more about how network, website and other monitoring services can be a snap, visit us at Monitis.

Monitis, Inc. will be busy next week at The 451 Group’s Fourth Annual Client Conference on November 3-4 at Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel. We’ll be one of six companies featured in the conference’s 2009 Innovators’ Showcase – where we’ll be laying out our business vision: “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere,” to more than 300 top executives from leading US enterprises. 

It’s quite an honor to be included in this group – all cutting-edge tech firms.

But we won’t be too busy to unveil a series of major announcements before and during the same week. I’m confident that the news will help us to continue to cement our lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies. 

And, if you think, as CEO of Monitis, that I’m prejudiced and you shouldn’t take my word for where the future of cloud-based monitoring is going, then just listen to Dennis Callaghan, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. “The cloud is the next frontier of IT operations management,” he said, in a Monitis press release. “With its ability to do performance monitoring, testing and configuration management in the cloud, and of workloads running in the cloud, at an affordable price, we believe Monitis is a company to watch in the nascent Cloud management space.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

But while I graciously accept the compliment, I’m more excited about the rising need among companies for cloud-based performance and transaction monitoring. Today, for more than 50,000 customers of all sizes and in all industries (and across the world), we’re monitoring millions of transactions daily on web sites, servers, networks, desktops, apps, printers, SMS – you name it, and all from the cloud.

Stay tuned!