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.

For a while now Google has been trying to diversify its revenue by going into the enterprise space with Google Apps, the productivity suite that includes Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and more.  They’ve gained some traction so far, having signed some multi-million dollar contracts with large corporations, government entities and universities.  But to turn Google Apps into a multi-billion dollar revenue source, Google needs to address the fears organizations have about cloud security.  That’s why they released a Security white paper last week.  The main argument is that data is stored and replicated across several disparate data-centers with multiple security levels.  Google also has a security page for schools.  On it they say:

It’s your content, not ours. Your Apps content belongs to your school, or individual users at your school. Not Google.

We don’t look at your content. Google employees will only access content that you store on Apps when an administrator from your domain grants Google employees explicit permission to do so for troubleshooting.

We don’t share your content. Google does not share personal information with advertisers or other 3rd parties without your consent.

We sometimes scan content. And for very good reasons, like spam filtering, anti-virus protection, or malware detection. Our systems scan content to make Apps work better for users, enabling unique functionality like powerful search in Gmail and Google Docs. This is completely automated and involves no humans.

As a fellow cloud company we often face the same concerns over cloud security, so it’s nice to see how Google addresses them.  Monitis is actually at an advantage because we performance data, not sensitive personal data.  We share a similarly secure infrastructure, storing data on several disparate data-centers.  Given Google’s vast network of data-centers, there’s no reason why Google Apps should be any less secure than storing data in-house, and white-papers like this one will accelerate cloud migration.  You can see Monitis white papers here.

Last week I read an interesting article by Jabulani Leffall about the top IT security issues causing sleep-deprivation at University IT departments.    Among the top 10 were 1. Securing remote access, 3. Patching systems, 6. Network use monitoring, 8. Password management and administrative access, and 10. Monitoring system logs.

In all these case, using cloud-based monitoring has advantages over open source.  With Nagios or other open source products, you need to make frequent exceptions to your firewall to configure server monitors and also to make the Nagios dashboard accessible from outside your firewall.  With a SaaS like Monitis, you don’t need to touch your firewall because all data is pushed to the cloud via HTTPS and the dashboard is hosted on our servers, not yours.

Regarding patches, we echo the sentiment that they are a major downside of Nagios and software in general.  They reduce productivity and are a pain.  With Monitis, there are no patches or upgrades to worry about.  All product improvements are released seamlessly without your involvement, even for internal agents.

Password Management and administrative access are doable with open source, but not nearly as simple as in a SaaS, which lets you control user privileges from anywhere.

Monitoring of network use and system logs is possible with both solutions, but here’s where reliability makes a huge difference between cloud-based and open source.  Nagios usually runs on just one server within your firewall, making your entire system vulnerable to the problems of that one server.  If that server goes down you won’t receive critical notifications about your network use or system events. With Monitis, you have not just one server, but an entire monitoring network, so you can rest assured that we will notify you even when your entire network goes down.

There are often concerns about storing proprietary data on cloud servers.  These are legitimate concerns, especially for applications with confidential data like customers, students’ test scores, email, and health records.   Monitoring data shows the performance of servers, websites and applications like Moodle or Blackboard, which is far less confidential.  I think that explains why universities are showing increasing interest in cloud-based products, particularly in monitoring.

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 at Monitis. 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

More good news for cloud computing! Google last week released its once mysterious Chrome Operating System to open source.

Chrome OS, available in 2010 – is a web-based operating system that promises to boot up super-fast on a netbook – way faster than the time it takes to start your basic PC. And Chrome has web applications (competing with Microsoft Windows Azure) that will run on application tabs. Users can access with one click and manage in a series of windows.

I read a short piece in which Matt Papakipos, engineering director for Chrome OS, addressed security issues (always reassuring to businesses considering making the leap to the cloud). In the story, he is quoted as saying that every component of Chrome OS, from firmware, to the kernel, to the file, has a cryptographic signature attached to them. “It’s as if each one were a document that’s signed at the bottom with a John Hancock saying ‘Yes, this is the right set of bits,” he said.

It’s clear (to me, anyway, and I hope to a growing number of you all) that we’re rapidly moving away from complicated, resource-hungry office desktops to lighter, app-free machines – leaving the heavy-lifting such as app access and data storage to the cloud.

One more step in the right direction!

PS: If you want to catch the scoop on Google’s vision for the future of cloud computing, check out this YouTube video.

Press Release

Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based application performance, server and network monitoring solutions, today announced that it has been invited to participate in The 451 Group’s 2009 Innovators’ Showcase at its Fourth Annual Client Conference on November 3-4 at Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel. In addition to announcing its new vision and roadmap at the conference, Monitis plans a series of major new network and cloud monitoring announcements during the week that will continue to cement its lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies.

San Jose, CA October 28, 2009 – Monitis, the leading provider of 100% Cloud-based application and IT infrastructure monitoring solutions, is one of only 6 companies selected by The 451 Group, a respected technology industry analyst firm, to present its vision: “Monitoring in the Cloud: Monitor Anything from Anywhere”, to more than 300 top executives from leading US enterprises.

The 451 Group, with its focus on analyzing the business of enterprise IT innovation, covers hundreds of stealth and early-stage companies. The 451 Group’s Innovators’ Showcase, a regular part of the company’s Client Conference since the inception of the event in 2006, showcases some of the best and brightest of these young companies.

Participants, who are nominated by 451 Group analysts, present their business plans and demos of their technologies to The 451 Group Client Conference attendees, who include venture capitalists, investment bankers, enterprise IT end users, software and hardware vendors and system integrators. Attendees are given 451 Group scrip to “invest” in the Innovators Showcase companies. The company that receives the most scrip is honored at the end of the conference.

“The cloud is the next frontier of IT operations management,” said Dennis Callaghan, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. “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.”

In addition to announcing its new vision and roadmap at the conference, Monitis plans a series of major new announcements during the week that will continue to cement its lead over conventional, software-based monitoring technologies.

According to Hovhannes Avoyan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO “Our success to-date comes from the insight that launched the company in the first place. Back then, when a few of us experienced just too many late nights stuck in the office due to inefficient monitoring and management tools, we began to look around and see that many of our counterparts were exasperated by the same issues. The Cloud was offering a better way, and we jumped at the chance to change the game.”

One of Monitis’ early customers, Schoolwires will also be joining Monitis during its presentation to discuss the impact Monitis’ Cloud-based solutions has had on his business. Schoolwires has been using Monitis’ all-in-one suite of monitoring tools for more than 2 years. “Utilizing the Cloud, has led to major advances at Schoolwires!” stated Rick Stivers, Director of Network & IT Services at Schoolwires, Inc. “We’ve been able to gain efficiencies, while reducing costs and the net result is an increase in SLA. Monitis is a critical tool we utilize to quickly respond to downtime for the 1,200 plus web sites we manage.”

What:    The 451 Group’s Fourth Annual Client Conference Innovators’ Showcase
When:    Nov 3-4, 2009
Where:    Boston’s Marriott Longwharf Hotel

For more information on The 451 Group’s 4th Annual Client Event, please visit: Innovators Showcase Webpage.

About Monitis All-in-One Monitoring Platform
Monitis is a 100% Cloud-based, complete, and flexible IT monitoring solution which consolidates back-end, application, and cloud monitoring in an all-in-one, central monitoring service. The platform is easily customizable and may be used for managing 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 10%.

About The 451 Group
The 451 Group is an independent technology-industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. The company’s analysts provide critical and timely insight into the market and competitive dynamics of innovation in emerging technology segments. Clients of the company – at vendor, investor, service-provider and end-user organizations – rely on The 451 Group’s insight to support both strategic and tactical decision-making for competitive advantage.

The 451 Group also operates Tier1 Research – an independent division of The 451 Group – which analyzes the financial and industry implications of developments impacting public and private companies within the hosting, communications and Internet infrastructure sectors. The 451 Group is headquartered in New York, with offices in key locations, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., London and Boston.

About Schoolwires, Inc.
Schoolwires Inc. is headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA.

Schoolwires provides strategic online communication, community-management and productivity solutions to the K-12 education market. The company’s core product is SchoolwiresCentricityTM, which brings together robust and flexible website management, community management and web 2.0/social network capabilities in a single, user-centric solution. Schoolwires also delivers SchoolwiresSynergyTM, a digital file sharing solution, Schoolwires AssistTM, a service request solution, and SchoolwiresShare(TM), an exclusive online client community and support center.

Schoolwires is recognized in the Inc. 500 List as one of the fastest growing private companies in the nation. The company’s on-demand solutions are deployed at nearly 4,000 schools serving an estimated four million students, parents, teachers and administrators throughout North America.

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

We at Monitis have another new product to talk about that will make it easier for companies to compute on the cloud.

In August we launched Monitis S3 Monitoring, based on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) monitoring technology. This new ability lets customers independently monitor their S3 usage and storage. And it notifies them when they reach prescribed thresholds.

With Monitis S3 Monitoring, we’re providing customers with greater access and control over the cloud infrastructure.

This all is based on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) approach, and is the latest product line-up in Monitis’s user-friendly, cost-effective systems (Monitis already provides EC2 monitoring). This gives Monitis the ability to show the users graphical displays illustrating the number of objects in each virtual folder or bucket, their total size, and the number of virtual folders, among other things. Users can set notification rules for each metric that we monitor. If you’re a customer, you can choose to be notified by Twitter, instant messaging, SMS, and/or email when any threshold is reached.

“On-demand cloud computing is at high-demand now, and the need for cloud monitoring is urgent,” said Hovhannes Avoyan, CEO of Monitis. “Our mission is to meet this need, and we provide tools that are fast, easy and affordable.”

Users who sign up for Monitis, receive access to Monitis Cloud, which is a web-centric on-demand software that does not require any downloads. This is a service beneficial to IT managers, as well as businesses ranging from small to enterprise-level.

A Little about S3

The S3 is an online storage service offered by Amazon’s Web Services division. Amazon S3 uses a simple web interface to provide unlimited data storage.

S3 was the first web service Amazon offered to the public, first in the U.S. in 2006 and then in Europe in 2007. There are an estimated 52 billion objects stored on Amazon S3 as of March 2009. S3 also includes image and web hosting and a back-up for its storage.

Read more about the new Monitis Cloud Monitoring Service!

Only a day after it launched its own e-mail cloud on October 5th, IBM announced a private data storage cloud. It’s called the Smart Business Storage Cloud, and with it, IBM will release an Information Archive. This is the latest cloud news to come from IBM, which seems eager to get into this space.

But this isn’t the only cloud product that will come down the pike from IBM. The company is promising a business-grade public storage cloud with flexible consumption models, complete with a self-service user interface. (Look over your shoulder Amazon S3; competition is heating up!)

IBM says its new product is a “true scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition,” according to a recent story on the company’s cloud<%2

There’s a new analysis by research outfits the 451 group and Tier1Research that I think encapsulates perfectly the advantages and challenges of the new world of cloud computing. In “Enabling the Distributed Datacenter,” the 451 Cloudscape communication, they make the following points – some of them obvious, some of them of the “I did not know that” kind:

- Cloud data storage is a growing market, dominated by Amazon S3 (see also Monitis Launches On-Demand Cloud Storage Monitoring Service), with its commodity public-cloud infrastructure. But lookout, other providers are catching up and offering more enterprise-friendly solutions;

- What’s the big appeal of cloud computing? Cost savings, as it enables companies to reduce capex and enables a “pay-as-you-go” approach to storage;

- Archiving and data protection are what most companies use cloud storage for these days, but that’s not the extent of capacity by any means. On the upswing in terms of usage: file-server replacement, content distribution and app storage;

- Growing usage is driving cloud storage architecture, some of which will soon be the “backbone” of storage clouds.

And the paper’s outlook on the development of cloud trends:

- A new market for storage vendors is emerging, with some providers building services with scale-out, object-based systems;

- If you’re a vendor with a novel way of storing huge sums of data, cloud storage service providers will beat a path to your doorstep (like the old mousetrap analogy);

- There still remains a lot of concern about data security and service reliability on the cloud, not to mention, bandwidth issues. And until users can see past these challenges (and, quite frankly, they get resolved by developers and providers), the cloud business will be held back from really rolling along;

- Integration issues, due to a lack of standards in cloud storage, are slowing down the adoption of the cloud’s IT-as-a-service functionality. And that’s also affecting enthusiasm among service providers.

I found this assessment of cloud computing to be on the mark, and I appreciated the concise and plain-language approach to the issues and challenges. I’m providing the link here if you want to check out the research and read up more on the state of cloud computing.

An amazing video presentation from Salesforce.com – “Force.com…The Platform is a Service”: