San Jose, CA – February 25, 2010 – Monitis, the leading provider of affordable, easy-to-use, 100% Cloud-based, network and systems monitoring solutions, today announced that it has opened yet another front in its battle to save IT managers’ time – it has integrated its Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework with GoGrid’s cloud services, thereby enabling massive time savings for GoGrid’s customers.

Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates monitoring in highly dynamic cloud environments, where customers’ servers may be added and terminated according to the load by management software or manually.

Given this dynamism, setting up end-user experience monitoring can become a tedious, resource intensive, and error-prone process. Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework automates the configuration of external monitoring and server monitoring tools every time a new installation is called for – saving IT managers and system administrators around the world enormous time and hassle.

In addition to saving IT managers’ time, Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework gives users the confidence that comes from using a 3rd party tool to monitor Cloud infrastructure in an independent manner.  Even when Cloud computing providers provide some sort of monitoring, there is an inherent conflict of interest – as they are keen to show higher uptime. By providing a customized, independent audit of SLAs (service level agreements), Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework increases the credibility of Cloud computing providers claims, which ultimately benefits both users and the industry, as a whole.

Monitis already provides this service for Amazon and Rackspace clients, but with the addition of GoGrid, it now provides 3rd-party SLA verification for the industry’s top 3 cloud hosting providers. Said Monitis’ Founder and CEO, Hovhannes Avoyan, “In the pursuit of saving IT managers massive amounts of time, no one is even close to offering what we do. Our new partnership with GoGrid will continue to cement our lead as the new industry standard in Cloud monitoring.”

What I love about the growing cloud business is the business and educational opportunities that seem to multiply and feed off each other.

Take IBM’s recent move to donate a 54-server BladeCenter system to Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA. The system will allow computer users on Southern U’s network to share software and perform research using a single server cluster that eliminates the need for duplicate hardware and software in classes, labs and offices across campus, according to a press account of the donation.

Like the rest of the world – in the public and private sectors – the focus these days is on efficiency and reducing operational costs. And IT at Southern U. is no different. A year ago, Southern had 98 servers; now they’re down to 40.

A handful of students at the school are being trained for cloud computing, and applications will spread to 250 computer science students in the next phase of the initiative, said a professor at the school, in the story.

Eventually, the shift to cloud computing at Southern will spread to 16 schools and colleges and 10,000 students on the university’s campus. But Southern also plans to use the center to provide cloud services to other schools. Like I said, this is what I like about the varied business opportunities that open up with cloud computing.

Southern U will form partnerships with primary, middle and secondary schools and with businesses that want to ditch IT headaches and run software on Southern U’s cloud.

“We’re using the students here at Southern University to train students at other HBCU [Historically Black Colleges and Universities] campuses,” said Henderson, an IBM vice president based in Austin, Texas, said in the piece. “In creating this cloud, you’re saving energy, floor space, maintenance, licensing and personnel costs.”

This isn’t the only data center IBM has established with schools. According to the article, beginning in 2005, IBM developed a $360 million data center with the state of North Carolina and North Carolina State University to maximize computing resources there statewide. The IBM campus cloud-computing initiative is an application of the company’s umbrella IT strategy, Smarter Planet.

It’s pretty clear what Southern and other schools get out of the IBM investments, but what about IBM – where’s the angle? Basically, sounds like they’ve got a cloud-computing lab set up, and it stands to gain through a stream of students graduating with cloud-computing education under their belts. Any guesses where those students will wind up getting employed?

I’d say these are pretty smart strategies on both IBM’s and the school’s part.

San Jose, CA – February 19, 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 the Netherlands. This brings to 9 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide, and the third in Europe along with the UK and Germany. 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’ 9 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, but instead only monitor once 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.

Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “The Netherlands is of strategic importance for us, as so much of the European IT industry is based there. With this node and the others soon to be deployed across Europe, Monitis’ True One-Minute Monitoring is changing the game and setting a new standard.”

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform

Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates backend, application, 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.  More than 50,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies to government agencies and educational institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures. 

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 12%.

There’s a great, although somewhat scientifically-centric story on the future of cloud computing that’s worth reading.

Essentially, the story asks: “Is cloud computing a useful computational platform for the computational problems you and your institution need to address?”  In other words, why is computing on the cloud better than maintaining internal servers, hardware and all the resources needed to support them?

Right off the bat, the story points out a great reason: “Through the use of pre-configured virtual machines, scientists avoid any of the technical issues associated with getting an application to run — they just use it.”

But a good point to consider is that, since cloud computing is on the Web, the first and most obvious question to ask is whether the Internet connection used by your cloud computing service provides enough bandwidth to handle your app demands. And does it add too much latency? This author says that the cloud was designed as a “latency-tolerant network,” and may not be suitable for certain users – such as scientific and HPC computing. Interestingly, he points out that “many HPC algorithms and applications… bottleneck and die” even after just a few microseconds.

But for many other types of users, enterprises from large corporations to small and mid-sized web-based businesses, cloud providers offer plenty of bandwidth – even considering the presence of virtual machines. VMs can add to latency issues because of the time-sharing nature of their underlying hardware. This is so even though users may never have a clue of a VM failure running in a cloud environment. Some cloud computing providers take snapshots of the VMS as they run jobs, and if the hardware fails for one VM, then all can be restarted from that snapshot.

But while the author of this article may have mixed feelings about the cloud for the scientific community, he underscores, however, that “one strong appeal of cloud computing” is the simplicity of contracting with an Internet provider to access a lot of free-floating computational resources. It’s an “astounding bang for the buck” platform that needs very little capital expenditure, he notes.

Further he gives a boost to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as one example of a cloud computing service that is available to the scientific community, as users can specify VMS that can run on unused hardware resources within their datacenters as those resources become available. This way, scientists only pay for those resources they actually use.

That’s a key benefit of the cloud for all users – not just scientists, I might add.

In the end, after an analysis of the cloud for scientific computing, he adds: “The future looks bright, although there are some big clouds out there! Happy “cloud” computing.”

I, as the owner of a cloud-computing service provider who takes great care to provide proper bandwidth, security, cost-savings and other benefits to my customers, couldn’t agree more.

Imagine yourself as an IT superman, and on your best day, configuring 50 or so desktops at your company. That would be pretty impressive, I’d say.

Now, imagine process automation that can ramp up thousands of virtual machines in less than a month. In this age of virtualization, this is a reality now with products such as Surgient’s Cloud Express suite of tools that allows IT organizations to do just that.

I read about this new development by Austin, TX-based Surgient on CTOedge, and the goal is to provide companies with a turnkey set of systems management tools automating the provisioning of virtual servers across massive cloud computing deployments. That’s according to Brian Wilson, Surgient’s VP of services and support.

So, you may ask, why is this capacity so important in today’s computing environment? Well, like everybody else in the corporate world these days, IT has to cut costs, and that often means labor, unfortunately.  Meanwhile, the number of virtual servers that organizations need to deploy or implement keeps on climbing. And so companies need to employ the latest IT automation tools that do the job of the system manager.

I don’t like to see anybody – and their skill set – replaced, but this is the kind of technology that companies need today to increase efficiencies on a grand scale and stay competitive. And I suppose the more competitive that companies remain, the better able they’ll be to expand and grow and then, perhaps, take on more IT specialists to focus on other areas. It’s a vicious cycle.

Meanwhile, companies, especially small businesses, continue to seek out services, such as automation to monitor websites, that allows them to do more with little or no IT support staff. And the cloud is the perfect infrastructure model because IT tasks like monitoring can be done 24/7 and from anywhere in the world – not just one location.

IT executives already have a lot on their plate – everything from lack of time to concentrate on strategic initiatives to security worries and green computing.

But listen up, though. For 2010, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got a handful of tools on tap to make it easier to adopt advanced technologies in order to keep your IT service delivery in shape and maintain advanced data center operations.

#1 – Service Assurance

Because companies are rapidly adopting and expanding their use of virtualization and cloud computing, it’s essential that IT departments gain visibility into network traffic flows as well as application performance across multiple components supporting IT services. It used to be that this was something only service providers worried about, but IT departments are becoming service assurance experts on their won. So, you should check into services that give you clarity into the life cycle of an IT service. What you want is a true end-to-end picture of how traffic flows across the network, systems, applications and databases.

#2 – Virtual systems management

For some, cloud management capabilities is a more hyped or popular projection for 2010 than virtual systems management. But cloud management depends heavily on support for virtual systems and advanced features covering performance and capacity management. To put it another way, virtual servers comprise the computing environment, and automation enables the cloud to be monitored, managed, secured and made compliant. In 2010 you’ll we’ll see more enterprise IT organizations equip their toolboxes with multi-hypervisor virtual system support.

#3 – IT Service Catalogue

As IT departments streamline processes and better align their strategies to business demands, they’ll also improve the way they communicate those services to customers – via web-based catalogues. End users need to know what levels of service they are entitled to and in what frequency and –sometimes—how much it costs. And a catalogue allows IT folks to easily provide that information. A NetworkWorld article I read quotes Andi Mann, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, saying: “It is hard to imagine broad cloud computing adoption without an IT service catalog.”

#4 – IT Process Automation

This is a must for companies deploying virtual servers. But the trend will be even more robust in 2010 because virtualization and cloud computing rely on automation more than any other technology. The real benefit here is that things can be done at machine speed rather than human speed. And it’ll continue to be an invaluable tool for monitoring, as automation can keep up with the pace of virtual environments and stay on top of changes as they happen faster than humans can.

#5 – Resource Planning

If you’re already using virtualization and thinking about exploring cloud computing, you’ll also need to adopt IT resource planning processes and technologies in 2010. IT resource planning is a mix of capacity planning and financial management as well as usage and service measurement. With it, IT departments can be sure of how services are being consumed and respond quickly to business demand. So what elements should be part of resource planning? Aside from traditional IT capacity measurements, you need to consider such metrics as business requirements, human capital, financial metrics, facilities and power data, risk and compliance information and workload placement. Include, too, configuration management, asset management, change management, event management and performance management.

I highly recommend that you ensure each of these elements are in place for 2010 in your IT organization. The initiatives support effective monitoring of servers, networks, sites, transactions and even cloud platforms themselves.

Analysts Gartner released a report that says IT spending globally will grow this year a total of nearly 5% over 2009 and reach $3.4 trillion.

From a “Great Recession” point of view, that’s good news because IT spend actually fell by nearly that much from 2008 to 2009. Plus, it’s a change from Gartner’s previous estimate earlier this year that IT spend wouldn’t hit 2008 levels until next year. Gartner’s prediction follows forecasts by other research firms and technology companies of a huge IT spending surge.

“Although recovery will be slow, over the next 12 to 18 months, gross domestic product (GDP) is projected to increase, consumer confidence is expected to improve, and the availability of credit should increase,” said Gartner Research Vice President Richard Gordon in a statement, reported by cnet.com.  “At the same time, pent-up demand for new technologies will be released as enterprises focus on new growth opportunities and increase spending plans.”

Every major segment will feel the blessings of new investment, including hardware, software, IT services, and telecommunications.The rebound should be more gradual in mature markets like the U.S. (2.5% growth) and in Western Europe (more than 5% growth) and in Japan (1.8% growth). Meanwhile, look for spending to jump a more robust 9.3% in Latin America, 7.7% in the Middle East and Africa, and 7% in Asia Pacific countries.

I’d bet my last nickel that those new technologies Gartner is predicting that companies will invest in include cloud and virtualization services. I believe that, yes, IT departments and the CIOs that oversee them will pump up spend but still retain a mentality of thriftiness.

Smart spending is what I call it, and the Cloud, because it allows firms to expand computing resources without investing in expensive, maintenance-heavy servers and data centers, is the perfect example. 

Like a plasterer at the ready, Microsoft is set to patch the security hole in its Internet Explorer browser that is believed to have allowed the infamous breach of Google Gmail from Chinese hackers.

The BBC reported that MS was giving this top priority (usually it issues security patches at a set time each month) because of all the attention the breach is getting globally. “Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability,” said George Stathakopoulos, general manager of Microsoft’s computing security group, in the article.

It’s interesting to note how fast things can change in this Internet age of ours. For MS, the damage is coming on a few fronts.

The BBC article quotes security experts noting that they have seen malicious code on “copy cat sites” exploiting the weakness, although MS insists that the trouble has only affected those using IE6 or older versions (its latest version is IE8).

Plus, following recent warnings by the French and German governments that their computing citizens should switch to a different browser (other than IE), it now appears that Firefox, an MS rival, has profited from the incident.

The BBC article quoted web analysts StatCounter as saying that Firefox is now a close second to IE in Europe, with around 40% of the market compared to MS’s 45% share. Further, in Germany and Austria, Firefox has taken the lead.

I’m glad that MS acted quickly on this because I think it’ll give a shot of confidence to small and mid-sized businesses sketchy about using cloud apps.

Regardless of the browser they choose, companies that want to make the switch to the cloud need to feel that their data is secure. In the meantime, many are taking comfort in cloud-based monitoring services that act as an extra, very vigilant line of defense against evil-minded hackers who would destroy their businesses and the confidence of their customers.

One other consideration here: it’s in MS’s favor to take quick action to reassure cloud app users. After all, MS itself is betting pretty heavily on the future of the cloud – with its launch of Azure and new cloud computing business group (the Server and Cloud division).