Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

The Wall Street Journal reports that, during its first week on store shelves, Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 7 operating system sold like hotcakes. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was vague about the details, but was quoted as saying that sales have been “fantastic” since it launched October 22^nd.

However, research firm NPD Group, which tracks retail sales, uncovered that unit sales of boxed Windows 7 in U.S. stores were 234% higher during the software’s availability in its first few days than they were for Windows Vista, which debuted in 2007. While NPD’s figures don’t account for business sales, the article quoted a tech reseller that caters to business, education and government customers, saying the firm has seen a “strong uptick” in demand for PCs and Windows 7 since the product debuted.

Other experts in the piece sited a mixed picture of hardware sales tied to Windows 7, and October is traditionally a weak period for PC sales – too late for back-to-school and too early for the holidays.

Microsoft remains hopeful: It’s waiting for the sales data from partners in the hardware and retail businesses, but a spokesman noted that the NPD figures are “in line with the anecdotal stories we’ve heard about excitement people have for Windows 7.”

Of course, my interest in Windows 7 sales has nothing to do with any stock positions or holdings that I may (or may not) have in Microsoft. LOL. Rather, it’s in 7′s features designed to work within the cloud computing framework. And, given the amount of PC users out there – in both homes and offices – I’m watching with great interest the adoption rate and subsequent exposure to the cloud.

And, of course, the more cloud users there are, the more companies will come to understand the critical need to keep their businesses running smoothly via website, network, app transaction, server, cloud storage – and even cloud – monitoring.

Lastly, I’m happy that people and businesses are buying again. Sick of this recession; time to let go of some of that money everybody’s hoarding.

IDC has come out with its cloud industry forecast for 2009-2013. The basic message, over five major enterprise IT segments (Application Software, Application Development and Deployment Software, Systems Infrastructure Software, and Server and Disk Storage capacity) the five-year revenue growth outlook remains strong, at 26% – over six times the rate of traditional IT.

When I read this, I thought, ‘This outlook turns the recession on its head’ because, as IDC says: ” In spite of the challenging economy – or more accurately, because of it – this growth rate advantage expanded from last year’s forecast, in which cloud services were forecast to grow at over five times traditional offerings.”

So how do the individual IT segments stack up in IDC’s forecast:

App delivery and development, servers and storage are seen to benefit the most from growth. In 2009, App delivery holds 10% of the market, while in 2013 it’ll grow to 13%. Meanwhile, storage will grow from the current 9% to 14%, while servers will grow from 12% to 15%. Applications, meanwhile, will drop from 49% this year to 38% in 2013. While Infrastructure software will remain the same – at 20% of the pie.

Yet, despite the spectacular growth rate predicted, cloud will only be a fraction of overall (cloud and on-premise) IT spend, says IDC. Cloud spend is only 5% of the total this year, destined to double to only 10% of overall IT spend.

Clearly, despite the hype, cloud versus on-premise spend is still miniscule. But, spending is forecast to grow at double-digit number, and in this rough economy, that’s damn good news. Yes? My prediction, if I may be so humble to put forth one, is that the more spend that’s invested in cloud development, the more attraction it’ll generate – like bees to honey.

Amazon Web Services in late October introduced the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), making it easier for customers to “set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud,” according to the announcement on its blog. “We are always looking for ways to make it faster, simpler, and more fun to develop applications of all types,” said the blog. “Every hour that you don’t spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application.”

Amazon RDS gives its customers direct database access – without having to set up infrastructure, maintain software or manage a common database.

Using the RDS APIs or the command-line tools, Amazon said customers can access the full capabilities of a complete, self-contained MySQL 5.1 database instance in just minutes. “You can scale the processing power and storage space as needed with a single API call and you can initiate fully consistent database snapshots at any time.”

The blog took great pains to show how easy it is to use RDS, featuring step-by-step instructions to create a database instance, for example. It noted how complementary RDS would be to its Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon said that a number of its early adopters planned to use both of the services in their AWS applications.

Amazon also said it had a number of features planned for the coming months. Here’s another example of the wide-open field in developing apps for the cloud. I know that I, for one, will be looking out for future enhancements…as well as for any buzz and feedback from users.

Check out the full article on Amazon’s new cloud database service.

Wufoo is an online HTML form builder that helps people create contact forms, online surveys and event registrations – including people who don’t know how to write a single line of code.

So, if you design a Wufoo form, it basically does all the heavy-lifting for you and builds the database, backend and all of the scripts needed to collect and understand data (also hosted by Wufoo). So, when you build a form, you can either embed the code on your website or blog or you can provide access to the form via a Wufoo link.

As another example of the explosion of cloud-based apps, Wufoo has now launched a feature that lets users collect money.

Now, Wufoo has entered the world of payments, and the new feature lets users create forms with payment collection options, including PayPal Payments Pro and USA ePay. Many web shoppers are familiar with being taken to a different page of a merchant site for payment — after depositing items in a shopping cart. But with Wufoo, there’s a seamless transition from data submission to payment collection. No journey to a new page necessary.

That’s a good thing for both consumers and website owners.

For website administrators, Wufoo provides payment summary pages, lists of shipping addresses, and can ensure that all users receive an invoice or receipt of the transaction for their records, among other services.

I’m surprised that, with a useful and innovative product like this, Wufoo so far seems to have flown under the radar. But I’m always intrigued to read and hear about more and varied apps being developed for the cloud – and ultimately making cloud computing easier for both consumers and businesses.

Read more about Wufoo’s integrated payment application for the cloud.

The City of Los Angeles is adopting web-based Google Apps productivity software for its 30,000 employees to use.

The 12-member L.A. City Council voted unanimously on October 27th to migrate to the cloud, hiring systems integrator Computer Services Corporation. The move could save the city up to $5 million over the life of the five-year contract.

This decision places L.A. among top public sector operations using the cloud for productivity software. Yet the decision by the council also reflects some ambivalence over security issues and the possibility of data loss: the group voted to include a penalty provision in the contract holding CSC liable if there is a breach of service or the city’s data is stolen.

Recently, Google has had some widely publicized security and availability issues around its email and applications.

Yet, increasingly, despite concerns about outages and data loss, major government agencies are signing up for Google Apps. For example, the City of Washington D.C., the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, and the Prince George County School District in Maryland are all customers. “Many more were watching L.A. closely, and we look forward to working with them,” said Google spokesperson Andrew Kovacs in a recent E-Commerce Times story.

L.A.’s experience with Google Apps is worth watching. I think a lot of municipalities and government agencies now considering the cloud will base their decision on whether to jump or not. And I’m sure that an uneventful record on security and data breaches for L.A. will help them decide.

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 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 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

OK, if you’re not convinced of cloud computing’s financial benefits yet, here’s a bit of information that should help convert you. In a recent article on the growing government cloud, I saw that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has achieved significant cost savings by moving USA.gov to cloud infrastructure and services provider Terremark Worldwide.

Just how much? Remember now, this is money you and I, taxpayers, that is, shell out. It doesn’t come from some private corporation’s operating revenue. In the story, the GSA revealed that the annual cost of maintaining USA.gov in the cloud is $800,000. While that may seem like a lot of money, it pales in comparison to the $2.5 million GSA used to spend before the transition. The earlier figure included hardware costs, which the cloud vendor now covers.

Said Martha Dorris, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services, which maintains USA.gov, in the story: “We were in a situation where our infrastructure required a lot of staff resources to maintain it every day. [Moving to the cloud] freed up resources, which we have used to upgrade our content management system to give us the ability to incorporate new functionalities and features on USA.gov to make the citizen’s experience the best it can be.”

Elasticity of infrastructure is crucial because USA.gov gets about 342,000 visits on any given day, and traffic fluctuates wildly depending on external events. So, recognizing that it’s important to plan for infrastructure overload and avoid downtime, Dorris added that the GSA recently bought additional space in the cloud to create a mirror image of the site in case the original goes down.

It’s easier, too, to upgrade USA.gov now that it’s operating in a cloud. It generally takes a day – versus up to six months the old way.

Still, despite the advantages of cloud computing, it apparently took the GSA IT staff some convincing to make the switch. “”It was a big change for the technical staff that worked in this environment,” Dorris noted in the article. “We took a lot of time and effort to make people feel comfortable.”

USA.gov was able to transition to the cloud in only 10 days, with one additional weekend of testing.

In this recession-plagued economy, when taxes are rising to cover the cost of more services and greater debt, it makes more sense than ever for the government to make smart changes – in order to be more efficient and save money. Glad to hear I know I’m saving some money, at least to keep USA.gov going.

See also How Taxpayers Are Saving via Cloud Computing

Look to the East, and that’s where you’ll see many of today’s business trends rising like the sun or being magnified like its rays. For example, in Asia, there’s a growing number of companies now using the cloud to access apps and store data.

According to a recent story I came across while surfing the net, independent research firm IDC estimates that cloud computing in Asia is growing at more than 40 per cent yearly. Singapore companies, in particular, are moving from the “early-adopter stage to the early-mainstream stage of cloud computing.” Further, an IDC survey found that 40% of companies in the Asia-Pacific region, including those from Singapore, are already exploring or trial-testing cloud computing apps, such as word processing apps and and photo-editing software. About 10% are already using such SaaS apps.

A Yen for Savings

So, what’s behind Asian companies’ interest in cloud computing? Well, just like their western counterparts, it seems to be cost and labor savings. The story gave one example of a private Singapore firm that pared $1.1 million from its budget – “a massive 65 per cent savings” – by moving computing to the cloud in 2008.

And, just like governments around the world, Asia is switching public service data base storage and services to the cloud.

The article said that Singapore’s Ministry of Education became the latest convert several weeks ago, when it bought an entire suite of Google applications, including word processing and chat functions, for 30,000 teachers. It expects to save more than one-third of a million dollars per year.

The cloud’s unstoppable spread is covering the globe.

In a recent article on InformationWeek, I read about a conversation that Microsoft’s VP of Online, Ron Markezich, had with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer that led to the idea of Office Web Apps 2010 – due out in the first half of next year. This chat happened way back in 2004. Essentially, Gates and Ballmer outlined a major new strategy – selling software-as-a-service (SaaS) over the Internet, rather than selling licenses to their software.

It was a major shift in the way the company would do business.

But what I also found interesting was Microsoft’s recognition of the evolutionary nature of the switch to cloud computing. “We don’t want a one-slice-fits-all model,” Markezich said, in the article. “What we’re seeing is that very few customers with any legacy systems will move 100 percent to the cloud. There’s always going to be some data on the desktop or in their data centers.”

With this insight in mind, I found it particularly fascinating reading about the differences in how Office Web Apps and other cloud-based Microsoft services will be marketed – compared to its competitors, such as Google. Apparently, Microsoft will position itself to global companies – many of which enjoy perfect connectivity in some regions (the U.S. and Europe) and scattered or none in others, for example, parts of Africa. Such a company might say, “I’m not going to move my entire operation to the cloud because of sporadic access in some locations,” said Markezich. “They may choose to say that in Nigeria, I’ll have a server running Office Web apps, but [in another location] I’ll have corporate users on the [Microsoft] cloud because I’ve got great connectivity there and can save money.”

How does this compare to Google’s approach?

Quite different from Google’s “socialistic approach” to access to online apps, notes the article. Their approach translates to: “all customers are treated equal; no, we can’t tell you exactly what server your email is hosted on, but trust us, we’ve lived up to our 99.9% availability guarantee so far and prices that can’t be beat. We will treat you well because we’re a good company.”

Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing the debut of Office Web Apps and how the competition heats up in the world of cloud computing!

What’s your take? Do you think it will improve cloud computing with new services, standards and security?

The Wall Street Journal today (October 12^th) featured an article, or rather, more of a questionnaire, that provided some basic knowledge about cloud computing – and done in a very fun way. I thought it was significant because such a mainstream business publication was giving subjects such as cloud computing and virtualization so much attention. Clearly, the subject of “the cloud” has moved well beyond the realm of discussions at the water cooler in the IT department.

The Journal said that “cloud computing is attracting a lot of interest from chief information officers and high-tech entrepreneurs. They like the promise of lower cost, less complexity and reduced power consumption.” With a series of 10 questions, the story also tested readers on their general knowledge of the cloud.

Here are a few of the Journal’s Qs&As on cloud computing:

- What exactly is cloud computing? Is it “lightweight software that takes up little space on a hard drive” or “computing resources that can be accessed on demand, like electricity from a utility.” Answer: the latter.

- Which of these techniques is vital for creating cloud computing centers? (Virtualization, Cannibalization, Transubstantiation, or Insubordination?) Answer: Virtualization.

- An internal cloud is: An overhanging threat or a cloud that sits behind a corporate firewall? The first is the right answer if you’re in a lousy mood. But the second choice is the right answer.

- What August event was widely seen as an example of the risky nature of cloud computing? Was it the spread of the Conficker virus, or was it Gmail outage for more than an hour? Answer: the August 31 outage of Google’s Gmail.

I highly recommend reading the WSJ’s coverage of cloud computing and the paper’s very entertaining Q&A!