This is a short one:

I read about a new survey that suggests a huge difference of opinion among IT managers about the cloud and IT staff.  One of the findings is very interesting — that IT staff are far less enthusiastic about the cloud than their bosses.

In the poll, 40% of upper-level managers say their organizations are currently using cloud services or will within the next two years. That compares to less than one-third of middle managers and only 20% of staffers. Yet, when  asked to respond to the statement, ” my organization has no plans to evaluate cloud services,” only 12% of upper managers agreed. On the other hand, 22% of middle managers did, and 39% of IT staffers.

Somebody’s not talking to someone here.

Stop Stressing; Let Monitis Worry for You

IT staffers can stop worrying about cloud computing being the death knell for their jobs. Because the survey results don’t support that theory.  Two-thirds of respondents say they’ve seen no change in IT staffing levels as a result of adoption of cloud services.

I say that this survey speaks to the need for IT management to reveal their cloud computing plans with IT staff in order to calm their fears. After all, team spirit and collaboration can all be affected by suspicion and a lack of communication.

True, there are some services, such as cloud-based monitoring, that take a lot of the manual work and repetition out of IT management, but they typically free up IT staff to do more strategic things, such as planning for future capacity, budgeting and other tasks. Cloud services are a blessing rather than a threat, and IT workers need to hear that more often.

SearchCIO.com recently came out with a great article with some savvy guidance on building a private cloud — 5 steps, actually, for making a private cloud successful and within your reach.

Even if you still want to manage IT infrastructure and apps in-house, building a private cloud is still good practice, says the article. “With virtualization and the private cloud, CIOs are much closer to that goal of efficient and dynamic IT service delivery capability,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at researchers IDC, in the article.

But everybody needs help and guidance — especially if you’re embarking on something new. So, here are some of the five best practices that you can levy:

I. Assess

• Evaluate your current and planned hardware, hypervisors, network architecture and storage;
• Understand corporate security standards and existing vendor relationships, and be aware of what’s in the development pipeline at vendors (you don’t want to plunk down money for dead-end tech);
• Start with a defined project, and plan for growth and change. Use client case studies and success stories when preparing and documenting your deployment plans;

II. Deploy

• Be prepared for cloud computing growth and an eventual uptick by establishing a deployment schedule;
• Make essential content available in a centralized library so that all can access it;
• At kickoff, communicate! For example, introduce critical IT team members and confirm the deployment schedule. Create and deploy on-site training;

• Automate self-service provisioning of applications, but keep in mind that things will change; so, be flexible; .

III. Analyze

• It’s very important to review trends in usage, resource consumption, server use and administration overhead;
• Understand ROI and TCO metrics; gain executive buy-in with formal ROI evaluations on a frequent basis, preferably monthly and quarterly.

IV. Continue to be Creative

• Plan your service catalog wisely by creating reusable building blocks of virtual machines and services;
• Because your content is critical, study users’ needs and plan for their experience;
• Build a centralized IT infrastructure by avoiding discrete stacks and multiple OSs.

Even though private clouds remain behind your company’s firewall, you should still plan to monitor your critical applications, database and service providers on a 24/7 basis. It’s important to stay on top of potential problems with bandwidth and access — and receive warning of those pending crises. Countless companies are finding peace of mind in monitoring, and IT staff all over the world are getting a better night’s sleep because of it.

We’ve seen it before. Typically, the economy sputters and so do tech sales. But I read a story recently that proclaims the opposite for the Great Recession — that the economic slowdown caused cloud sales to rise because it prompted more CIOs to create lean and mean IT machines with more cloud tech and lighter staff.

One cloud services company highlighted in the piece saw flat revenue from 2008 to 2009, a good thing…compared to companies whose revenues dipped (some by 15-30%) when they didn’t take to the cloud. Now, with the economy showing signs of stabilization and maybe recovery, the company predicts a 30-40% revenue increase, as more companies realize they can do more on the cloud without hiring more IT staff.

OK, so this is the experience of one cloud services company. But does that make a trend? Throw in some Gartner statistics in there, and yes, you have a trend.

This week, Gartner released new estimates of the good fortune of the cloud in a report that said global cloud computing services revenue will rise from $58.6 billion in 2009 to $68.3 billion this year. By 2014, Gartner expects the global cloud services revenue to reach nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that, due to economic pressures, over the course of the next five years enterprises will spend $112 billion in total on SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

In the report, Gartner research VP Ben Pring said: “In part, this can be explained by macroeconomic factors. The financial turbulence of the last 18 months has meant every organization has been scrutinizing every expenditure. An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility (remembering that time is money) is hard to ignore against this backdrop.”

Consider, too, the keynote address of Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, at the All About The Cloud conference in San Francisco in May. Hauger said business’s decision-making process has sped up as companies require faster time to value. “The economy is really pushing people in this direction,” Hauger said of the cloud.

Our experience here at Monitis mirrors this trend. Last year, our cloud-based monitoring business grew by huge margins, and we won two very distinguished IT industry awards. Our growth is coming from the recognition among companies that while the cloud brings new conveniences and efficiencies, it also brings a responsibility for more vigilance in order to keep servers and sites and customer applications running smoothly.

I have been writing a lot lately about  the beauty of the cloud for schools and universities, and how many schools are converting apps to the cloud – apps as diverse as course management tools and e-mail — not just to save money, use fewer computing resources (or use them more efficiently), but also to improve levels of service to students, staff and the public.

But I think that, having gone through University myself, and remembering the struggle to get there on the worst weather days of the year (so I could meet my course requirements and graduate), I find it almost a miracle that the cloud today provides opportunities to learn in comfort — that is, from home.

On Tuesday, June 22nd, at 2 pm EDT and 11 am PDT, make sure to catch a webinar on how Baylor University is benefiting from capturing its lectures using a fully automated cloud tool.

Baylor is enjoying these benefits:

- No need to install, manage or maintain servers or a classroom-based appliance
- Fully-automated for instructors and IT
- Lower total cost of ownership
- Virtually unlimited scalability
- Available to deliver classes in the event of a disaster

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), as more and more schools turn to cloud apps to conduct learning or just administer themselves more efficiently, they’ll need reliable third-party tools to help them ensure that their email programs and lectures are up and running and available when students and faculty need them.

That’s why Monitis offers the Academic Plan, a special monitoring program for schools — with special pricing — allowing any size educational institution to afford cloud-based monitoring of apps and site transactions.  Check out Monitis’s Academic Plan now!

Press release

San Jose, CA – June 23, 2010 - Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s first Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced another revolutionary advance in its technology. Monitis will be the first monitoring dashboard provider to switch from Flash to open-source HTML5 when displaying dynamic content in its web-based dashboard.  This switch makes Monitis’ interactive dashboard faster and more universally compatible.  

Given increasing concern surrounding the problems with Flash (battery drain, not open-source, and security vulnerabilities), Monitis was already sensitive to the issue. When results from a recent user survey showed that Monitis users want faster-loading, non-flash charts, Monitis realized that the time had come to make the switch.

As a SaaS provider of IT management, Monitis has always been committed to making its interface as fast and user-friendly as possible. The dashboard is instantly deployable, making getting up and running simple. Ajax pop-ups allow users to perform management tasks quickly without loading multiple web pages.  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 jQuery.

Said CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “Liberating IT manager’s time. That is our single-minded focus. Our move to open-source HTML5 is solely about this. While the move saves our users’ time by loading faster in the short-run, HTML5 will also save them time in the long-run by being open-source and more secure than Flash. That we are the first to move to HTML5, well, that’s just par for the course for us.”

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

So, you want to put your SaaS apps on the cloud. Most likely you’ll start out with a hosting service that offers you a private cloud (that is, a single tenant set-up). Well, you get a pat on the back for your bravery and taking the leap to the cloud, but you’ll probably quickly find that the single tenant model (if you’re lucky to experience growing usage) will run out of steam, and you’ll need more robust cloud services that support multi-tenants.

But switching is not an easy task.

In a recent Forbes article, Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, a company that specializes in enterprise cloud and managed hosting, put it like this: “Updating the code for a multi-tenant application means rolling out and testing a single instance of the application. In single-tenant, virtually deployed applications you have to roll out and test the code for every single customer. Once you get past 100 customers this gets extremely onerous. In the multi-tenant model, almost everything is shared at the appropriate layers of the application. This also has the advantage of having only one integration point for outside Web services, where in single-tenant applications Web services need to integrate with each individual customer.”

OK, we get it. That makes sense; but how does this affect open-source? Well, open-source was created mostly for the single-tenant architecture – with few exceptions. And until open-source starts supporting multi-tenancy, it’s not going to be the miracle help for applications that are speeding up to scale.

So is this the end of open-source for robust apps?

Says Ryan: “The ability to rapidly create multi-tenant architectures will be a very useful skill. I suspect that the open source community will address this in an organized manner for the most important components. Commercial firms will of course step in with offerings to make open source multi-tenant. But in the end, a lot of open source won’t be converted. Don’t get me wrong, that software won’t shrivel up and die, but it also won’t be involved in what is clearly going to be the main event for developers: multi-tenant applications.”

One man’s opinion, but makes a lot of sense in my view. It rings true for our commercial app, Monitis cloud-based monitoring. Our IT infrastructure – based in the cloud – supports our customers’ desire for growth because it was built for multi-tenants and their ever-expanding transactions.

We don’t create an instance per customer as some of our competitors do (and call it cloud- based application). We indeed are using a single instance for all our customers.  It makes us up to 75% faster in terms of new feature delivery due to single code base. Customers benefit by always using the most recent version of our software – as it is updated automatically.

Compare that to hosted monitoring solutions that get bogged down trying to support a single tenant and exploding transactions.

Check out how Monitis stands up against in-house monitoring software, including open source solutions!

OK; there’s some real innovative thinking going on in Arizona – and I’m not talking about immigration reform.

A week or so ago, I posted about Arizona University moving its internal e-mail program to Microsoft’s Business Online Productivity Online Suite. About 18,000 staff members will migrate and benefit from a larger inbox than they currently have, instant messaging and tools to set up online, collaborative meetings.

Now it seems that Northern Arizona University, located in Flagstaff, is making its move to the cloud by adopting standardizing its project portfolio management (PPM) on TeamDynamixHE, a Web-based service that will give the university’s IT team a centralized system to manage project requests, prioritize and score potential projects, and streamline the project startup and staffing process.

Manually, those are very time intensive tasks, although the school was already using automation internally – a combination of Microsoft Project with SharePoint. 

Read on; the way the school wants to use this sounds fascinating:

First, the school will use the system to track a paperless project and an e-planning initiative. The second part of the school’s planned usage allows students to select what programs they want to follow. That then produces a list of courses that are available. And based on the students’ selections, Northern Arizona can then determine how many courses, classrooms, and teachers will be needed to meet student demand.

It seems like the school got along okay with its legacy system, but it needed to convert to a centralized format in order to set itself up for growth for the future. Plus, it wanted to be able to track project costs and resource usage to predict the total, true costs of a project – including the management part.

I think this is a really innovative use of cloud technology to help a school get greater control over its costs. And I’m hoping that the decision-makers there are considering regular monitoring of the app to ensure that it’s running smoothly and that staff has access to it when they want it.

Good luck, Northern Arizona U!

How revealing – almost an inside story! I just read a Mozilla blog post that talked about how it has tweaked its top landing pages to improve customer service and market itself better.

Firefox, Mozilla’s browser, was downloaded by over 8 million people when it debuted version #3 in June 2008. Those were banner numbers for it then. But the company admits that its landing pages where its download button resides is brutally slow.  In the blog, Mozilla says its download button for version 4.0 doesn’t even appear for seven seconds. Slow load time is affecting about one-quarter of visitors.

That’s not good, because during those seven seconds, potential customers can turn elsewhere, for example, to competitor Internet Explorer. And Mozilla recognizes this. Slow page load times result in lost sales – and in Mozilla’s case, for its advertisers.  Research has shown that an 8 second load time (4 seconds above the optimal load time of 4 seconds) can result in a visitor loss of up to 75.75%.

Without getting too technical, the ISP has added speed – and has seen remarkable results. Before the fix, they predicted a one second reduction in page load speed would improve download conversions by 2.7%.  But what actually happened? It shaved 2.2 seconds off the average page load time and increased download conversions by 15.4%.

What does that 15% translate to? Mozilla has 275,000 daily visitors, and so a 15% improvement on that single English-language page enables 10.28 million additional downloads per year. And if it can replicate similar improvements across its other top landing pages, Mozilla expects to drive more than 60 million Firefox downloads each year, according to its blog.

“We’re excited by our initial results, but are only just getting started,” Mozilla says, adding that it has more optimizations planned – including testing a landing page that loads the download button before anything else.

While I was entertained reading this, and, quite frankly, a bit surprised at Mozilla’s frankness (although those aren’t bad download stats, proving just how popular the browser is), it also struck me that there must be countless businesses out there who, unlike Mozilla, don’t know that their online apps are too slow. And if they don’t have that information, they can’t fix it.

Latency of page load is a real problem these days, but the good news is that there are ways to find out what’s working and what isn’t. And then you can take action. For instance, Monitis offers a monitoring service that tests the speed of full page loads.

By tracking the page load times of each individual image, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes, the tool shows stats on the total number of objects, the size of each object, and load time for your web page. We offer an easy-to-view format (in multi-color bar graphs) and can be shown in load order or in a hierarchy.

We’ve helped many companies, educational organizations and other enterprises figure out why their apps are taking so long, and they’ve been able to take steps to speed things up. Adding speed – that’s something everybody loves, especially users.

Lawson Software CEO Harry Debes, in a recent story that I read, says that SaaS will collapse in two years. That’s right, collapse.

Debes says he’s lived through the “on demand” phenomenon three times in his career (first when they were called “service bureaus,” second when they were called “application service providers”, and now SaaS.

“But it’s pretty much the same thing. And my prediction is that it’ll go the same way as the other two have gone—nowhere,” added Debes in the interview. “SaaS is not God’s gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability.

“People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years.

An industry has to have more than just one poster child to overhaul the system. One day Salesforce.com will not deliver its growth projections, and its stock price will tumble in a big hurry. Then, the rest of the [SaaS] industry will collapse.”

Wow, this guys sounds pretty pessimistic, and I think he’s just dead wrong. Kind of reminds me of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s comments about the cloud. He even refers to Ellison in the article.

And I’m not the only one to feel this way. Check this out in the comments part of the article from a reader, Dklchang: “While it might be good for Lawson’s bottom line and investors, it has no benefit to the customer that’s dealing with an ever web-reliant workforce. Sure, Lawson’s ERP niche is geared toward dinosaurish industries, but that’s not what SaaS is addressing. It’s about immediate results and higher productivity, not year-long engagements with yet another entrenched vendor you’re stuck with.”

Anyway, I bring this all up because I believe just the opposite; that cloud computing and SaaS will continue to grow in popularity, and there is certainly plenty of evidence from studies showing companies and schools are investing more in SaaS on the cloud. Plus, even from our own success as a cloud-based monitoring service, there can be no arguing that this is the future of IT as well as consumer computing.

Microsoft said it will provide the Kentucky Department of Education with cloud computing services for the state’s more than 700,000 students, faculty and staff. The state stands to gain big savings (about $6 million) over the next four years by replacing its on-premise Exchange servers with cloud-based systems.

Students will use the Microsoft services, Live@edu for Office Web Apps, for new email services, as well file storage and sharing. The benefits? The school system believes cloud services will teach students computing skills they’ll need as adults. Plus, the learning experience will be enhanced by the ability to collaborate on assignments – whether the students are on school premises or not.

“Historically, it would have required months and potentially years to migrate hundreds of thousands of people to a new solution,” Chuck Austin, Kentucky’s school system’s project manager, said, in an article.

Recently, the Oregon school system adopted Google Apps for Education, and the state expects to save $1.5 million per year.

This move toward the cloud by schools started as a snowflake and is now a full-fledged giant, rolling snowball.  In honor of the trend, Monitis has created a special package of monitoring services for schools – the Academic Plan. It offers everything found in the traditional Monitis suite of tools, but also includes unlimited monitoring. So academic institutions, be they schools, colleges, or universities select one of 3 possible packages – Small, Medium or Large based on the number of servers they need monitored, and nothing else. It’s that simple.

Starting from just $248 per month, the Academic Plan, is a perfect offer for schools with even the tightest of budgets, as all added-value services are free – the number of parameters to monitor, the number of network devices, and even alerts including Live Voice and SMS alerts.

As an added benefit, educational institutions have the luxury of employing a single monitoring solution instead of the standard current mix of multiple open-source software solutions (e.g. Nagios, Zabbix, Zenos, Cacti), commercial software solutions (like Solarwinds, Whatsup Gold), and external end-user experience monitoring services (like Gomez, Keynote).