I can tell you this from talking day to day with companies looking to give their web businesses an edge: they are not happy with the technology that’s supporting their sites during all-important peak traffic periods, for instance during the holiday season or a special promotion.

How unhappy? I read about a recent survey that said nearly three-quarters of online shoppers experienced poor performance during peak periods compared to other times. And of those:

• 72% reported slower websites
• 58% reported errors on web pages
• and more than half said they couldn’t complete their transactions

Whether you’re selling widgets to other businesses or lipstick to consumers, these numbers aren’t good. You want your site to run smoothly especially during peak traffic periods. It’s a given that’ll run like clockwork during normal or slow traffic periods.

What’s worse, the survey said that more than three-quarters who had problems abandoned a site for a competitor, and then most (88%) wouldn’t return, after a bad experience. And what’s even more worrisome, given how powerful social media tools can make or break a product, service or company these days, look at these findings:

After a poor experience…

• Nearly half left feeling negative about the company
• 42% discussed it either with friends or online

My advice to website owners is to be prepared for peak times to avoid losing customers, and use available tools to test performance, such as load testing. Monitis’ WebLoadTester uses cloud computing power for instant web applications and network testing. At your request, WebLoadTester is able to simulate a large number of virtual visitors, each with their own unique user name/login and task.  On Demand WebLoadTester helps ensure that your site’s web pages will continue to work at peak performance when many visitors come. 

Heavy user traffic is never a bad thing, unless your web system is under too much stress.  WebLoadTester will help you determine how your system responds to that traffic.  You can use the service at any time, day or night, to ensure that your websites and applications are ready for an army of visitors – whenever they arrive.

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.”

I read in BusinessWeek that Microsoft business software president Stephen Elop expects the giant’s launch of Office 2010 in June, which will include a cloud-based version, to pump up revenue and profit.

I quote: “In that cloud environment, we are not only selling them [cutomers] software but we are also saying, ‘We’ll take care of your networking, your hardware, your operations, your customer support.’ “We’re doing much more work for the customer. What that does is increases revenue and allows us to participate in more profit.”

But Bob Evans of InformationWeek raises some important questions and injects a bit of doubt into Elop’s sunny scenario. Bob says: “Rational? Absolutely. Likely to happen? Maybe, and maybe not.

His theory is that, of course, it could happen if Microsoft can package enough value and flexibility into its cloud pricing model so that its huge base of Office users “decides that the transition costs for switching to Google Apps are prohibitive.”

So Microsoft’s big challenge is to set its prices not so much to grow revenue at a remarkable rate, but instead to allow customers to lower their cost of IT. But if Google continues to aggressively innovate with new products and price them competitively, that could put a serious crimp in the number of large clients that Microsoft is hoping to be the boosters of its cloud-based revenue.

Plus, who knows what kind of business collaborations that offer enhanced cloud services, such as transaction and platform monitoring services, will form in the future? That could add a bit of complexity to Microsoft’s business plan – and Google’s, too, for that matter.

Says Bob: “As we’ve seen repeatedly during other tectonic shifts in the technology business, the status quo rarely survives and it’s pretty much impossible to project a steady-state future. So while Elop’s expectation that more work for enterprise customers will logically mean more revenue and profit for Microsoft, I contend that his plan looks a whole lot better on paper here in February than it will when the cloud version of Office 2010 hits the market in four months.”

Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Microsoft’s new suite looks like, and how businesses and end-users take to it, too. Will it be more robust, more dependable and easier to use than Google’s apps? And will it be strong enough to withstand potential new competition from constantly evolving and innovating cloud players?

Last week San Antonio-TX-based Rackspace introduced a new cloud computing program for its 1,500 global partners.

The new cloud partner program will be different from other Rackspace partner programs – managed hosting and Email & Apps – as there will be a different compensation structure offered to partners.

Rackspace’s cloud partner program is for two types of partners: affiliates and resellers. Affiliates will earn 5% of customers’ monthly spend on cloud computing for three years and commissions start during the first month of active billing. Meanwhile, Rackspace reseller partners buy cloud hosting services and resell them to customers and generate profits from customer fees.

“Initially, we’re treating this as a separate partner program,” Fuller said, in a story. Rackspace e-mailed current partners information on the cloud partner program on February 18th, containing a link to sign up and to access additional details.

It looks like Rackspace was motivated to create the new partner cloud platform due to rising revenue from the technology. In the fourth quarter, Rackspace reported overall revenue of $169.5 million, an increase of more than 4% from the previous quarter and up more than 18% from fourth-quarter 2009.

In particular, cloud computing generated great business for Rackspace. In the fourth quarter, computing revenue rose to $17.1 million, up from $15.3 million in the third quarter. For the whole year, cloud revenue skyrocketed nearly 125% — to $56.4 million, according to the company.

Glad to see expanding choices for companies that want to offer customers cloud services, and even more pleased to read that Rackspace’s revenue is derived more and more from cloud computing. That’s a trend we’ve been experiencing here at Monitis, too, as more and more firms migrate to the cloud and look for independent services to monitor performance and reliability of hosting services.

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%.

Don’t forget to have a service level agreement (SLA) in place, as well as an exit strategy when dealing with cloud providers. That’s the message of a recent article that I read on how to protect your company’s investment in the cloud. Great, timely advice, as companies globally gear up to make 2010 the year of the cloud.

CEOs keep reading about the cloud and inquiring how their CIOs are making plans for the future. So there are a few things that CIOs can do to ensure their companies take advantage of cloud savings and efficiencies, while mitigating risk, too.

One sound piece of advice is to avoid being “dismissive” of cloud trends, advises the article, as business units will go elsewhere for guidance. Second, CIOs should advise business leaders on cloud risks and their strategies to mitigate issues such as security, stability and data privacy issues. Lastly, CIOs need to establish realistic and balanced service-level agreements after deciding to use a cloud service.

Going beyond establishing an SLA, CIOs should create a step-by-step plan that covers assessment to implementation in order to help business managers balance risk, fiscal impact, and flexibility. Good management demands that there be a plan on how to proceed once a decision is made to adopt a cloud approach for software as a service, platform as a service, or infrastructure as a service. Not only that, the plan should spell out what to do if and when things go wrong.

“SLAs are all about recourse and what you can do to protect yourself when bad things happen with your cloud service provider, but SLAs aren’t the only recourse,” says the article. Switching service providers or using internal resources are other possibilities.

Another good move is to keep a close watch on whether your provider is keeping up with their part of the contract. That’s where SLA monitoring comes in. You can hire an independent company that can monitor from the web, and that’s important because even when Cloud computing providers offer some sort of monitoring, there is an inherent conflict of interest – as they are keen to show higher uptime.

On the other hand, monitoring services by independent firms, such as Monitis’ Universal Cloud Monitoring Framework, increases the credibility of cloud computing providers’ claims, which benefits both users and the industry, as a whole.

IBM is opening a new, 100,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina to support new computing models, including cloud computing.

The new center is being built at IBM’s facility at Research Triangle Park campus and is expected to provide many services that will enable firms to deploy cloud-based apps quicker and easier. IBM operates 450 of these data centers worldwide, and this new facility is aimed at helping clients across both the public and private sector operate more efficiently and in a more environmentally sound way, according to CMSwire.com

IBM says there are several critical advantages to companies deciding to switch to cloud computing via its data centers – which feature servers and storage systems running business-critical technology including software applications, email and websites.

The advantages:

-         Cloud computing efficiencies: access to hardware and software needed to cut IT costs

-         Smarter data center management

-         Green computing, as IBM says its data center uses half the energy costs of similar-sized centers

-         Expandability: the ability to add greater capacity in the future at a fraction of the time it would take an internal data center to expand

We’ve heard a lot lately from IBM on its cloud development efforts. It’s clear that the company is taking this technology and its commitment to building it up seriously.  Just look at some of the far-flung places that the company is building cloud computing centers globally.

And, just last week, IBM said that the U.S. Air Force awarded it a contract to design and demonstrate a secure cloud computing infrastructure “capable of supporting defense and intelligence networks.” It’s a 10-month project, and will feature “advanced cyber security and analytics technologies” developed by IBM Research into the cloud architecture, according to IBM’s press department.

I’m particularly encouraged to see IBM working with the air force. Perhaps that will help establish more solidly the notion that cloud computing can be secure. And if that happens, IBM – indeed all cloud services providers – may be able to win a bigger vote of confidence from both public and private companies.  And that means more business for everyone.

What’s got into Oracle? Even though company president Larry Ellison has belittled cloud computing in the past (He’s publicly called cloud computing the “future” of computing, the “present” and “past” of computing, citing Salesforce.com’s existence for the past 10 years, and calling it “nonsense.”), the company has just announced a 50-date global road show on cloud computing for developers and system administrators.

Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, and during a recent webcast, the company outlined how it planned to use those assets – including helping customers build private clouds.  In 2008, Ellison said that Oracle would make cloud computing announcements in the future. But given his disdain for the concept, it was taken as sarcasm, according to a story I read about the new cloud road show.

The road show will detail Oracle’s take on cloud computing, “a label that has been slapped on everything from virtualized, scalable pools of computing infrastructure such as that sold by Amazon Web Services, to SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications,” said the piece.

Oracle cloud experts will clarify how companies can take advantage of “enterprise cloud computing, and topics will include tips on:

• developing private clouds
• how to move current IT to a cloud structure
• how to use public clouds, such as Amazon’s AWS.

So, given how Ellison and Oracle feel about cloud computing (whether it even exists as something new), why the elaborate road show – which I’m sure must be costing them mucho dollars? Analysts think it’s merely (or significantly, for that matter), that Oracle has to stake its claim in this rapidly developing technology. It’s the wave of the future, and Oracle needs to get on the boat to ride that wave.

I have a message for Larry. On your road trip, don’t forget the topics that many businesses – from small firms to enterprises – want to hear about: how to secure your data on the cloud and how to make sure your provider is performing reliably. That’s where 24/7 monitoring of cloud platforms comes in, and it would be a service worth talking about.

This is the trend we’ve been all waiting for – IT spending is bouncing back, as businesses invest more in new network equipment, desktops, software, cell phones and other technology. I read about this yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, as it reported on Cisco Systems Inc.’s 23% hike in fiscal second-quarter 2010 profits and an 8% jump in revenue.

In the Journal article, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers said that he planned to hire up to 3,000 workers this year, adding: “This is one of the most robust positive turnarounds I’ve seen in my career.”

Cisco’s news comes after the Commerce Department recently reported that business spending on equipment and software climbed 13.3% annually in the fourth quarter – the fastest growth since the first part of 2006.

A lot of the comeback in tech spending is from consumers, buying laptops and cell phones. But businesses are laying money down again, too. For example, Intel Corp. in January reported that revenue for its business that sells chips for corporate servers rose 42%, and Sybase Corp., which makes database software for financial services firms, had a 34% jump in profits for the December-ended period.

Cisco, whose fiscal second quarter ended in late January, said its profit was $1.85 billion, up from $1.5 billion a year earlier.

Could Cisco’s results be a grand harbinger of things to come and a spurt of much-needed hope since 2008? I hope so. Aside from the big tech outfits like Cisco, I’m personally seeing more and more demand from small and mid-size companies deciding to invest in new IT technology and services, such as cloud monitoring. What a year we had in 2009!

What do you think? Is the IT sector finally beginning to recover?

OK, OK. I know…it’s February already, and enough with the predictions and forecasts for the Cloud in 2010. But I can’t help myself; I’ve got one more to share with you. Actually, a few more.

These come from an online article I read about 10 cloud predictions, and I thought that some of them were particularly on the mark and relevant. And they’re all predictions from different IT industry experts. Here goes:

- 2010 will be the year that makes the Cloud. Large and small businesses alike will finally realize the cost, space and management benefits that they can reap by moving applications to the cloud.

- Cloud storage adoption will expand. Service providers will get better at inventing or delivering technologies that reduce latency and overhead, and that will drive greater adoption of cloud storage. Up until now, IO latency and security have been among the biggest hurdles for companies to adopt cloud storage. But cloud services providers have been working hard to refine techniques to reduce latency and protect data…and thus their offerings will become more attractive to users. This will pay off big in 2010.

- Hybrid cloud computing grows. Even though web access is ubiquitous, lots of users still don’t have it all the time and wherever they need it. Cloud providers recognize this, and so they’ll continue to develop “offline” working modes alongside their “always on” services, for example, the Gmail offline mode.

- Platform-as-a-Service strengthens. This is the year that the Cloud becomes more known on the application level – beyond infrastructure.
Companies will go beyond just using the cloud for setting up virtual machines and look more at ways of taking advantage of cloud platforms.

- The Cloud as the new Yellow Pages. As more business is done online, firms will further embrace social media for word-of-mouth advertising, and firms will have to get really good at managing their customer relations and reputations online. Cloud computing tools will help companies do this.

– Cloud inspires new thinking. In 2010, customers, vendors, resellers and integrators will begin to drop the old ways of thinking of how they’ve conducted business in the past and instead focus on how cloud computing can help them today and tomorrow. Will this mean that people will stop using the cloud to rebuild what they already do and instead use it to adopt new ways of processing data?

- Cloud platforms gain acceptance. This is the year that the boys get separated from the men. The best cloud platforms will be sought after as enablers of critical enterprise applications that must work well during periods of high demand and that can provide dependable SLAs and world-class disaster recovery.

- WAN Optimization-as-a-Service becomes a reality. As public and private clouds multiply, it’ll become more important for many enterprises to have an end-to-end software solution for virtualized WAN optimization from the data center, to the branch office and mobile users. Management, visibility and monitoring of the WAN and its traffic will be critical. Completely virtual WAN optimization enables the cloud infrastructure to be deployed and managed from any location. And it makes it possible for enterprises to deploy into their hosted cloud offering over the wire. And it allows managed service organizations to host WAN optimization-as-a-service on its own or as part of a service they sell as part of their cloud offerings.

- Independent monitoring of cloud platforms explodes. This is my prediction. Why shouldn’t I add it? This is MY blog, after all. Based on Monitis’s rapid growth during 2009, and some of the predictions of widespread cloud adoption above, I predict a more pronounced need for third-party cloud performance monitoring. Companies want to be assured that their investment in the cloud will pay off – and for that to happen, they need help tracking usage and performance.

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