GMO Cloud

Boost Your Computing Power with Cloud Computing

Every company, irrespective of its size or location, has hoards of computing activities to undertake: data entry, data processing, storage and retrieval, data transmission, communication, customer/client services management, centralization of IT systems and network administration. The good news is that cloud computing can help significantly!

A typical example is Zillow, where a US real estate company helps clients in finding homes, apartments, properties to rent or buy, mortgage matters, and periodical communication of the latest developments in US real estate. Interestingly enough, Zillow has been able to accomplish these tasks more efficiently than before due to cloud technology, specifically in the fields of:

1. Handling of Big Data:–Cloud computing facilitates better handle big data in Zillow’s day-to-day activities. As a real estate company, Zillow is daily confronted with the challenges of managing huge data and information related to its increasing number of potential and existing clients. The process of managing such hefty data sets may be daunting and costly for in-house IT infrastructures. However, the adoption of cloud computing has increased Zillow’s computing power by streamlining processes by which important data are obtained, processed, stored, retrieved and transmitted.
2. Price Estimation:–Cloud computing assists Zillow in generating more accurate price estimates that add value to properties. This is achievable due to the quickness or speed of internet connection guaranteed in the cloud, where system interruption is nigh-unthinkable.

Apart from the above, companies can be rest assured that the quality of their operations will be optimized and maintained over a long period of time via cloud. Businesses are adopting cloud technology in droves because of the promise of cost efficiency and high performance. This smooth running of one’s business without any observable hitch is transferable to the quality of services or goods delivered to end-users.

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About the Guest Author:

Jerry Olasakinju, a Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) degree holder, is a passionate researcher and writer whose interest in everything computing is unparalleled. He blogs about his literary works at http://jerryolasakinju.blogspot.jp/

Android and iOS Success: A Two-Way Traffic for Japanese Mobile Apps

For developers who want to enter the Japanese market, Android and iOS apps provide an easier entry point. Similarly, Japanese app developers are also seeking to enter the worldwide market through the same channels. This is one example of a true world market with a central repository.

Apps which easily come to mind are those for established browser based apps like Dropbox, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Seismic and Facebook. Another app which has crossed borders with great success is Angry Birds.

Entering the Japanese mobile app market is not that easy for foreign app developers. Besides the fragmented nature of the market with lots of feature phone brands, there is also the matter of a portal or platform. The fragmented market is daunting because developers have to alter apps for each feature phone.

Sales reports for 2012 indicate that iOS and Android now account for the majority of sales in smartphones. That leaves the app developers with only the slight problem of localization and culturization for the Japanese market, which is a totally different concern.

Additionally, app developers who want to get into the Japanese market may skip the need for a Japanese mobile app portal like GREE and DeNA. They can instead rely on traditional strategies for marketing: social media and word of mouth. In Japan, companies like GREE and DeNA do the same work for apps as Google Play and App Store, promoting and running these in the same manner as Facebook and Twitter. They will dominate for the foreseeable future.

The success of these companies can be seen in the way they monetize mobile apps. Japan is the second largest market for app monetization, and third in app download volume.

Japanese game and app developers can also use Google Play and App Store to sell their products. Coming from a very competitive marketing culture famous for being persistent and patient, Japanese app developers are prepared to wait until the rest of the world starts to appreciate their style.

Entering Japan is not a simple matter of placing an app on App Store and Google Play. There is still the matter of support, and a cloud hosting service is required to deal with variable customer throughput. Getting into the Japanese market just got easier, but app developers need all the help they can get from culturization and localization specialists.

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About the Guest Author:

Rodolfo Lentejas, Jr. is a fulltime freelance writer based in Toronto. He is the founder of the PostSckrippt, a growing online writing business dedicated to producing top quality, original and fresh content. To know more about him, please visit www.postsckrippt.ca. Like him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

Transitioning On-Premise Software to the Cloud

There is a visible decline of on-premise hosting and a continuous increase in hosting software on the cloud. If current trends are maintained, the crossover will occur sometime in 2014. Thereafter, the cloud will outpace on-premise hosting at an ever increasing rate. If you are a cloud service provider, you have to help your customers make the transition.

It’s got to be hybrid for a while…

While the on-premise market may be shrinking, very substantial investments in hardware and software continue, meaning even though the SaaS model blossoms, a mix of on-premise and cloud-based systems will continue to stay for the near future. Cloud service providers must find ways to help companies make the transition.

The key questions service providers have to answer are:

• How will the operational changes be accomplished?

 

• Are there any new offerings that could not have been made with the traditional model?

 

• Can the cloud vendor innovate and bring new capabilities to the market?

 

• Will the service provider help the customer make effective use of the cloud technology?

 

The top few reasons to move to the cloud (of which vendors should be acutely aware) are:

• Reduction in IT infrastructure costs
• Reduction in capital expenditure
• Reduction in management and support costs
• Converting fixed costs to variable ones
• Improve business agility
• Improve IT system flexibility
• Improve service quality
• Simplify management
• Speed up implementation

Service providers themselves have to change their business model. In the good old days of up-front software sales, vendors got their profits at the beginning of a sale. However, with a cloud model, the revenue comes over the years and hence managing a relationship with the client becomes critical. The low revenue per customer per month implies that a larger number of customers have to be registered for the business to make financial sense.

Customer loyalty is a direct function of perceived value. The customer will only make the transition to cloud services if he or she is confident about the quality of service. This is especially true due to the tight competition among providers. That is why GMO Cloud takes the quality of service it renders very seriously, forever thinking ahead as to what customers will require. One example is the Setup Service where professional services ranging from preparations to troubleshooting are laid on.

Key areas of focus

Follow a hybrid approach Existing software investments will mean that on-premise software will stay for some time. In such a situation, going hybrid is the best answer. The cloud vendor adds value by moving some functions to the cloud. A case in point is disaster recovery. Even if the primary functions stay on-premise, the vendor can offer DR, back up and long-term storage of data in the cloud. Over time, this base will draw the software to the cloud as well.

Introduce additional functionality – Many small businesses cannot afford high-end software. This functionality can be offered to small businesses in the cloud to enable them to use most functions at a fraction of the cost. Additional business can be tapped this way.

Manage licensing changes gently Many users of on-premise software have perpetual licenses. If they migrate to the cloud, vendors should not rapidly change the licensing model. They should rather extend the licensing to the cloud so that the customer does not lose the incentive to migrate. The licensing model can be changed during the next upgrade cycle.

The key factor in helping your customers move from an on-premise model to a SaaS model is to make proposals that leverage the existing investment that the customer has already made.

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.

Why Moving to a Virtual Data Center is Good

In times of recession, concern spreads throughout IT enterprises, as limited budgets force companies to clamp down on IT operational costs. A majority of IT expenses go towards infrastructure requirements like large scale storage involving servers, data centers. These are the first to be targeted for cuts.

More data and information entails greater storage and data management space. Adding physical or blade servers would provide the necessary space but with mounting operational costs and power consumption requirements. Another approach was “application consolidation” but abandoned owing to issues such as resource crunch, conflicts and version incompatibility of databases.

The most promising implementation in IT infrastructure was the evolution of virtual data centers, as evidenced by Kronos – one of the pioneers in global workforce management solutions. The company was faced with increasing pressure from all sides owing to spiraling costs in IT. After going through detailed studies, they settled for virtualized data centers. The results were astounding: power consumption went down by 20 per cent and Kronos was able to shave off nearly $1.2 million in expenses.

A wise virtualization strategy involves a clear understanding of shared storage needs and necessary management skills to avoid unchecked sprawls. Some of the important benefits of moving to a virtual data center are:

• Offers enterprises (big and small) a dynamic platform for operations that facilitates smooth transit of live applications from one physical server to another, due to the virtualized environment present.

 

• Increased availability of key business applications for smooth functioning of important business models even in the event of a hardware failure.

 

• Existing infrastructure can be spruced up for better resource handling and load management across servers to provide optimum output with minimal consumption of resources.

 

• Backup and disaster recovery is made easier with readily available backup storage and software tools, which also prevents business operations from being disrupted owing to data center downtime

 

• Scalability of the data center infrastructure is possible at high levels without compromising efficiency or facing mounting costs.

 

These characteristics are attributed to the technology’s high availability features that improve the operations of a business. GMO Cloud offers this type of feature as it delivers faster access and lower latency from any location worldwide.

Thus the strategy of moving to a virtual data center paves the way for greater flexibility in administration as well as reduction of IT expenditure. It is a clear cut solution for IT organizations and business enterprises looking to streamline operations with minimal economic burdens.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.

Social Collaboration on the Cloud

Social networking and increased office collaboration tools make an exciting platform for more gritty tools to help organizations coordinate activities. The most recent trend is coupling this new age collaboration with the most promising technology in the IT workspace of today: cloud computing. So what exactly does such an option do for the business?

First of all, we need to see a business project as a social entity where few people collaborate based on comments from their peers and managers. There is always a pinch of constructive criticism as well as a dose of heavy criticism at times. The entire idea is to convert the traditional project management and control mechanism into one driven by social project management strategies. Cloud computing adds more utility and easiness to this transformation thanks to its ability to bring resources and people closer sans geographical and technological constraints.

With a cloud-based collaboration platform, project management becomes a daily routine akin to using Facebook. Communicating with peers becomes easier wherever you are while social collaboration in the cloud entitles you to work wherever you go, offering more flexible working hours, reduced stress and increased, uninterrupted concentration on tasks.

Social collaboration on the cloud streamlines the entire workflow. Planning a well-laid-out solution for design and deployment of your primary work environment as well as configuration for timelines and achievement milestones is made infinitely more possible.

The strategy helps guided content planning by making detailed sessions available to developers and editors, providing platforms for successful community management and mitigating risky conversations, also establishing behavioral compliance.

With such a core platform, it is easier for management to assess the success of key business projects and also monitor the status of objectives under different stages of execution. Providing detailed reports onto highly customized administrative panels and dashboards is facilitated by social collaboration on the cloud.

This architecture of social collaboration is something a traditional office environment has never coutenanced before. Just imagine the project manager conveying the respective tasks, responsibilities and instructions to each and every employee merely by updating his status on the enterprise social network like Facebook. He can tag the respective names of employees to each departmental responsibility in his status update.

This approach saves time and creates a more friendly approach to employee management as compared to the age-old dictatorial practice of sending custom email and messages to each employee.

When minds are needed to come together, this platform paves the way for brainstorming, transforming even project planning into a social activity. The level of success that a social project achieves depends upon the depth of cooperation and openness employees are willing to accept.

Social collaboration looks set to revamp traditional communication methodologies, creating new ways to connect, communicate and construct goals.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

About the Guest Author:

Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.