A heavy book!

What would you rather carry on your back — textbooks or lighter than air apps and data?

When I went to school (six miles each way in the snow and rain, LOL), every year the books got heavier. Now, students can look forward to easy trips home with courses online — brought to them by the cloud. I recently read a commentary that said textbooks met the needs of 19th and 2oth century students, but that they fall short of the needs of today’s interactive students. “They are old-school delivery that supports old-school pedagogy,” the author stated. ” (OK, I must admit, I had to go to Wikipedia to find out what “pedagogy” means.)

Instead, cloud computing is much more appropriate for both students and faculty and staff.  The more schools that adopt the cloud, the more they can replace books — which by the way, have a tendency to get rather stale and outdated fast and cost a lot to replace — with cloud-based content delivery.

We at Monitis have been working with more more schools to help them ensure reliability of content-as-a-service.  But they are going beyond course content. The cloud is settling into ivy-covered walls with such resources as word processors, spreadsheets, databases, data visualization and analysis applications, teacher and administrator tools, and voice/video communications.  Often, much of that is provided online by the likes of Google and Amazon and Rackspace, and that’s why we are seeing big demand from schools for cloud platform monitoring, too.

When I think of all the schools I’ve worked with that are trimming IT budgets and making way for future scalability, boosting services to students, ensuring updated and current course content and making administration more efficient, I am impressed by their faith in the cloud movement. Faith is one thing, but I think that they are also good business moves, and the drivers within institutions–whether they be educators, IT folks or students themselves — are far-sighted and good decision makers.

Everybody wants to improve education and our educational system, but sometimes it takes a little thinking out of the box to make forward strides.

San Jose, CA – August 31, 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 Singapore. The new node will be managed by Singapore-based En Technologies (www.en.com.sg). Along with a new node in Spain, this brings to 12 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide. 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’ 12 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. Such companies only monitor once a 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 – a far from optimal situation.

Hovhannes Ayovan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “As the hub of business in Southeast Asia, Singapore is a critical location for us to offer a monitoring node. Now, for IT managers in the region, the only thing they need to worry about is how hot the black pepper crab is on Joo Chiat Road, and not whether or not they are getting accurate information about their systems.”

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

Not Raking in the Dough

I read where UBS, the Swiss banking giant, found that Amazon Web Services (AWS) earns $500 million yearly from its cloud computing business.

While that number may sound impressive to some at first blush, it’s really only around 2% of Amazon.com’s annual revenues. And in the blog I read about this news, that would be less than AWS makes on “garden rakes.”

UBS got its numbers by breaking out a lump sum of Amazon’s quarterly earnings reports that it calls “other” revenue, separate from its retail revenues. “Other” includes Amazon EC2, Amazon S3 and other services like packing and shipping goods. On the bright side, UBS predicts that AWS cloud revenue might grow to $2.54 billion by 2014.

So what do these numbers mean to you? On the one hand, $500 million is a tiny fraction of worldwide IT spending — which comes to $365 billion a year right now — so it’s painfully obvious that public cloud computing is a lot smaller market than it’s been made out to be. However, on the other hand, we know that private clouds are preferred right now, as enterprises still have the heeby-geebies about security on public platforms.

So, my take on this is that just because AWS isn’t raking in (forgive the pun) billions of dollars yearly on the cloud right now, it doesn’t mean it won’t someday. After all, it’s built the infrastructure. And you know about that saying: “If you build it they will come.”

San Jose, CA – August 23, 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 Spain. The new node will be managed by the Spanish service provider CSR-Online. Along with a new node in Singapore, this brings to 12 the number of Monitis monitoring nodes available worldwide. 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’ 12 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. Such companies only monitor once a 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 – a far from optimal situation.

Hovhannes Ayovan, Monitis’ Founder and CEO, commented, “We didn’t choose Spain as our newest node location because they won the World Cup and have great wines (although both ideas eased the decision). We chose Spain because it is an integral part of our expansion strategy in Europe. Spanish IT managers deserve to be liberated from the outdated software-based monitoring solutions and Monitis is here to show them the way.”

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

Investors who went to Microsoft’s annual meeting came away with positive view of the company’s efforts to develop and grow the cloud, according to an article I recently read.

In the piece, some analysts said that investors had been pulling their money out of Microsoft over concerns that the company wasn’t doing enough to develop new sources of potential revenue. But in the same piece, the analysts noted that Microsoft has a history of adapting technologies invented by others and spreading them to the mass market — and that’s good news.

Microsoft’s COO Kevin Turner, at the company’s annual investor meeting in late July, predicted that it would “lead” with the cloud, and cited examples of winning cloud contracts against Google and IBM. That got investment analysts in a positive mood for Microsoft. For example, a Deutsche Bank analyst said that the bank believes the cloud is evolving from a threat to an opportunity for Microsoft.  And some said they believed investors’ hesitancy over Microsoft was probably due to their lack of knowledge about Azure — which encompasses cloud computing and data storage.

Glad to see Microsoft is getting more confidence from investors. I can only hope that more businesses get more confidence, too, that is, in the cloud. Having monitoring services that check servers and networks and cloud platforms certainly helps remove some of the insecurity.

VMWare's Big Event to Teach about the Cloud via Virtualization

I read recently that at VMworld 2010, the largest virtualization event in the industry, which spotlights VMWare and is set to take place in San Francisco in August and Copenhagen in October, VMWare will put its technology to good, practical use for all its VMworld labs, according to a press release.

At VMworld, attendees can deep-dive into technical sessions and get hands-on labs training, plus access to a wealth of technology and cloud partners who come to the show.  For example, attendees can share and gain practical knowledge around virtualization best practices, building a private cloud, leveraging the public cloud, managing desktops as a service, virtualizing enterprise applications and other strategies.

This year all VMworld labs will be powered by the VMware LabCloud portal, a self-service interface that was custom-built to enable attendees to access lab courses and content. The technology allows VMware to increase the number of labs it offers and provides attendees more ways to explore how virtualization can make their organization more efficient. VMworld plans to stage more than 22,000 lab seats through 480 simultaneous user workstations during the four-day event in San Francisco.

I’m hoping to attend the conference myself, since Monitis has an office in San Francisco, and I’m especially intrigued and pleased by the theme of VMworld 2010:  “Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.” It will hopefully make it a lot clearer to organizations how to migrate to cloud computing through virtualization and how to explore new pathways for discovering, learning and breaking new ground in transforming IT.

And of course, I’ll be evangelizing about the importance of monitoring servers and networks – virtualized and non-virtualized. So, if you see me, stop me and I’ll bend your ear a bit.

Louisiana State University (LSU) has a great story to tell about using the cloud to build a state of the art course management system (CMS), and it is an effort involving teachers, students and administration.

The school realized that it needed to consolidate two CMSs that they were using, one a Blackboard-based system and the other internally created and managed, in order to gain maximum efficiency and sustainability. In order to be sustainable, the CMS had to consider:

- The software development cycle
- The resources necessary to finance and maintain the CMS during this lifecycle
- The ability to evolve the CMS to meet ever-changing demands
- The ease of feature development during the lifecycle

After a lengthy review of systems in the marketplace, LSU picked the open-source tool Moodle, hosted by vendor Moodlerooms. The school picked Moodle for its sustainability, flexibility for customization, as well as its interoperability, allowing LSU’s IT staff to tie the application directly into legacy systems.

Only a year after its adoption and the conversion of 5,000 courses into Moodle, LSU saw dramatic increases in CMS usage (140% increase), training and support usage (including a 40% increase in instructor participation) — and all within its previous budget.  What’s more, LSU has been able to continually tweak its CMS, due to the open-source nature of Moodle.

One thing I’d advise LSU to do, however, is to keep a close eye on its hosted CMS. Whether we’re talking about Moodle or Blackboard or any other system, it’s crucial to make sure that the system is up and running smoothly for your students, faculty and staff to access. Monitoring services, such as Monitis, can provide load testing services and valuable, timely notifications to warn you when a system or app is down.

San Jose, CA – July 26, 2010 – Having already been the first monitoring dashboard provider to switch from Flash to open-source HTML5, Monitis, the leading provider of the world’s first Cloud-based network and application monitoring suite, today announced another revolutionary advance in its technology. Now Monitis Mobile(available at m.monitis.com) will also switch from static images to HTML5, enabling phones running on iPhone OS, Android, and Symbian to run open-source HTML5-based charts instead of the Google charts as images that Monitis Mobile had previously used.

Given increasing concern surrounding the problems with Flash (battery drain, not open-source, and security vulnerabilities), Monitis was the first monitoring provider to preemptively replace Flash with open-source HTML5 on its core product. Hence, the move to open-source HTML5 on Monitis Mobile was only a matter of time.

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 iQuery.

Said CEO Hovhannes Avoyan, “We’ve done it again. With the advent of open-source HTML5-based Monitis Mobile, we’ve once more changed the game in the category. No other monitoring company is innovating as quickly as Monitis at the moment. We are indeed the ones to watch.”

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

Came across some interesting data from Google on the size, number of resources and other metrics of pages on the web. I thought they were worth noting here because some of the stats indicate that webmasters out there are only taking advantage of some of the power of the web, and in the process limiting themselves and the companies they represent — a lot of times their own.

This stuff comes from Googlebot — the company’s crawl and indexing pipeline. (Googlebot not only processes the main HTML of a page, but also all embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets.)

• The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire;
• Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed.
• In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host.
• The most popular sites could eliminate more than 8 HTTP requests per page if they combined all scripts on the same host into one and all stylesheets on the same host into one.

Also, this:

• The mean number of hosts per page is 7 for all sites Googlebot looks at, while the median is 5 and the max is an incredible 374
• Mean KB per page is just over 320 for all sites, while the median is about 177.5 and the max is just over 517,026
• The mean KB per host is 45.69; the median is more than 13 and the max is 441,631.71

Do you want your website to run faster? The first step is to make sure you’re monitoring your site. Consider trying Mon.itor.us is a free, powerful website, server and traffic monitoring service. We have established track records of robust execution, alerts delivery and we help many website owners to reach high uptime and availability at no cost. Mon.itor.us is a part of the Monitis family, which provides professional, premium all-in-one monitoring service, integrating application performance with back-end infrastructure and cloud monitoring.

Mon.itor.us provides a fresh, novel approach to web and systems monitoring.

Seems to me there’s a lot of movement toward a broader, stronger cloud infrastructure these days in all parts of the world, but I’m particularly struck by the activity in Asia. For example, last year we responded to rising customer demand for monitoring services in China by opening a monitoring station there.

Yamamoto Dreams About the Cloud

Now comes word that Fujitsu, that Japanese electronics giant, is “pinning its future” on cloud computing services, says the Wall Street Journal – that is, to lead its long-term earnings and overseas expansion.  Masami Yamamoto, the president of Fujitsu, said that he expects cloud computing-related businesses to generate revenue of about Y1.3 trillion to Y1.5 trillion in the fiscal year ending March 2016.  Now, cloud computing services only generate revenue of only about Y100 billion for the firm.

Fujitsu recently restructured to reduce its exposure to volatile and capital-intensive businesses such as semiconductor production and hard disk drives.  And now, it is trying to pitch itself to corporations as an all-in-one provider of hardware, software and services a la IBM.

Yamamoto said that the company should have 5,000 cloud computing specialists on its staff by the end of March 2012, and that Fujitsu’s clients will see the benefits when they adopt the SaaS business model — expected by many industry experts to replace the sale of software in packages for installation on individual computers.

“Go East, young man” could be the new mantra of cloud IT pros, just as “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!” uttered by an American newspaperman, was for the pioneers of America in the 1800s.

However things shape up, more and more firms — East and West (North and South, too) — will be coming to rely on monitoring services to keep their new cloud computing business gathering in the cash. So, it’s not just the end user who will need independent help keeping an eye on servers, networks, sites, bandwidth (you name it), but those very providers themselves.