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The Cloud Levels the Field Between Big and Small Businesses

Not so long ago, only very large companies could set up ERP systems. Costs were high, risks were even higher and some  implementations resulted in failure and bankruptcy. That said, benefits were also correspondingly high, and any company with a successful ERP could operate at a different plane altogether. Small and medium businesses simply could not use these solutions.

The situation is very different now, though. ERP delivered as a service – essentially a subset of SaaS – has changed the game and leveled the field. SaaS by itself is seeing growth rates of 25.5% and will hit revenues of $40 billion by 2014. At the same time, nearly 34% of all software will be utilized over the cloud and this growth is expected to continue in the near future. Research shows that although ERP in the cloud was just 2% of the cloud computing market in 2010-11, this field has begun to evolve and its market share will increase to 21% by 2015.

Battling an uncertain economy

In an uncertain economy, companies have much to gain by embracing the efficiency and process visibility that ERP can bring. With ERP, companies can lower ownership costs and move to on-premise hosted systems with the cloud SaaS vendor providing migration assistance.

On-premise ERP systems used to be seen as more capable with higher functionality. This is no longer true. Most cloud ERPs can tailor offerings to handle any specific requirements. Security has ceased to be a stumbling block and availability of systems is often even higher than that of in-premise systems.

Going Hybrid helps

Many businesses have experimented with hybrid ERPs. This means that some part of the ERP system works in the public cloud and others – perhaps dealing with key company capabilities – are maintained in-house or in a private cloud. Such an approach is more readily accepted by conservative Boards who would rather try less critical modules first and move more critical modules as they get more confident.

Research quoted above also showed that nearly 79% of respondents were looking to reduce their TCO of ERP. 54% of the small and medium businesses polled also wanted to avoid procuring new servers, hardware and software in setting up ERP. Other advantages are –

• - Benefits of economies of scale – since the SaaS vendor is sharing his costs over a large number of users

• - Virtualization – Virtual infrastructure like servers, storage and bring greater economy of scale to the SaaS vendor. This allows existing systems to be utilized better.

While all other ‘traditional’ advantages of cloud remain, there are some areas to watch out for.

Control over data – Be careful about how your data is stored in the ERP database. It is worth checking how easy it would be to switch from Vendor A to B in future. You do not want your data to be stored in a proprietary format that can only be read through the vendor’s own application.

Managing your Service Level Agreement – Your SLA must clearly spell out the vendor’s responsibilities. The standard parameters of availability must be there, alongside clauses like modifications to meet specific need and assisted migration to in-house infrastructure, or to another vendor.

Managing the process – Although another agency is manning the data center, a certain amount of core competence in ERP management is still essential. There is constant training to be done to make new entrants aware of the ERP and how it is to be used. Upgrades and improvements have to be an ongoing process to make your ERP grow and become more effective.

In the final analysis – An ERP solution in the cloud gives small and medium industries the resources they need to compete with multinationals in niche areas. With the benefits of ERP and the agility that comes with being small, these businesses can grow and prosper.

One factor to look out for on top of this is how your cloud hosting provider helps you secure your business. For instance, GMO Cloud ensures that its security is well in place. Visit the Security page and see how security is set-up in various levels of the business.

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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.

ClouD-ynamics – From Technical to Layman

Cloud computing offers multiple advantages including efficiency, accessibility and ease of use. Here, one of our engineers gives concrete illustrations of processes that make up the dynamics (and advantages) of cloud computing.

Cloud Computing in a Nutshell

The great idea behind cloud computing is the separation of software and hardware.  Before cloud, in order to put up a website, one would buy a server, have it setup, have OS installed by a technician, and send it to the data-center for power, network, and cooling.  Now software designers can concentrate on the OS and their software while the provider takes care of the physical hardware.

How? They make sure that the physical hardware underlying the virtual machines keeps running.  If that is working well, accessibility and cloud flexibility services to virtual machines can be provided in ways more efficient than one’s own hardware and software.

User monitoring of the cloud

The virtual machines the customer uses act just like a physical machine.  This customer can install the server OS they need and everything performs as it should, meaning the customer manages everything inside that virtual machine.  But wrong configurations, user mistakes, malicious code, bad updates, traffic spikes and run-away processes still happen inside the virtual machine.  Therefore the user knows best what to monitor and how to fix it.

Monitoring alerts and the like give the user more control and warning of problems without having to constantly watch the server themselves.  For most situations, the user can decide what should be done and is given the tools available to a cloud service.

Addressing issues arising from the provider’s services

When the situation arises where the problem lies within the provider’s physical hardware or cloud services and not the user’s virtual machine, possible solutions include:

• Physical hypervisor failure:  This is automatically detected on the provider side and the virtual machines are moved to another hypervisor.

• Damage to the virtual machine directory:  Some major change to the virtual machine disk directory, kernel, or such.  This is where automated backups help.

• Performance de-gradation: Hot/Cold migration allows the user to test out on another hypervisor.

• Minimizing effects of hypervisor crash: Separating the virtual machines by migrating to separate hypervisors makes this possible.

What can a user gain from monitoring performance?

Monitoring setup by the user should catch common problems which users can fix by themselves.

If the problem lies elsewhere the user can check any maintenance or trouble reports posted on the control panel by the provider.  If those don’t seem to be solving the problem, then the user should contact the provider where they can example the virtual machine and see where the problem is.

What is the difference between a hot migration and a cold migration?

The migration function is yet another advantage of cloud. There are two types of migration function: hot and cold.

Hot migration is the transfer of the OS and applications from virtual machines to physical machines without stopping OS operations or applications. In a highly demanding environment such as a public cloud, with even the best servers, the risk of failure starts to rise after around 3 years. The hot migration function easily avoids downtime caused by failure and maintenance issues with physical machines. Hot migration fulfills several needs:

• Freeing up a given physical server for maintenance without downtime for users;

• Dynamically balancing workloads among physical servers so that they all run at optimal levels;

• Preventing a facility’s under-performing servers (or those on the brink of failure) from interrupting operations.

Hot migration is not offered by the traditional non-cloud setup.  Also, it means flexibility and choice when the user understands they can protect themselves from the physical hardware beneath.

Cold migration, meanwhile, suspends OS and applications on virtual machines before transferring them to physical machines. Types of migration available depend on the hypervisor selected. With cold migration, you have the option of moving the associated disks from one datastore to another. The virtual machines are not required to be on shared storage, and the virtual machine you want to migrate must be powered off prior to beginning the cold migration process.

GMO Cloud offers these types of services as part of the cloud hosting package. Visit the Features page to read more about services offered.

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:

Bryan Kinney is a technical engineer at GMO Cloud. He has been working in the I.T. field for the last 18 years but has been into computers personally for 29 years. He loves good logical puzzles and non-logical human ones too.  Originally from the Northwest USA, Brian gets into hiking and survival camping.

Cloud Computing – Changing the Face of New Drug Discovery

Over the last 20 – 30 years, pharmaceutical companies have heralded new breakthroughs in the discovery of drugs, all based on modern advances in computing.

The first of these techniques was computer aided drug discovery (CADD). This relied on complex modeling techniques and high-end graphical workstations that opened up a new field called ‘rational drug design’. While this did result in some important drugs, even including early treatment for AIDS, it did not revolutionize drug research.

A few years later came a new technique called ‘high throughput screening’ (HTS). Once again medical science thought it was on the verge of a disruption in discovery techniques of new medicines but the same story repeated. There were some discoveries, but not enough to justify the huge amounts of outlay required.

Part of the problem lay in the amount of approximations researchers were forced to make. Drug discovery relied on modeling 3D molecules of candidate drugs, creating 3D models of receptor sites in the human body, and then finding possible matches. This technique was so computationally heavy that it was not possible to model tens of thousands of prospective drug molecules in a practical timeframe. As a result, researchers worked on a large degree of approximation to get reasonable performance from computer systems of that period.

These compromises and approximations greatly affected the process of discovery. What worked in a computer model often did not work in real life situations and the entire process had to be repeated. In the final analysis, this pushed up the cost of producing new drugs.

The Cloud Changes Drug Discovery

Luckily, the entire scenario has changed with the advent of cloud computing. Rather than wait for 10 CPUs to work 100 hours to throw up a possible solution, it suddenly became possible to harness 1000 CPUs and get results within an hour. With this kind of performance improvement, the need for compromise and approximation vanished. Programs could be made as realistic and accurate as possible, and yet the enormous computing power on-call ensured that answers were forthcoming in a few hours at the most.

In one well-publicized case, a large cluster was set up on a cloud computing platform, the work was done and the cluster shut down all in 20 minutes flat. The cost? Essentially loose change at $6.40! In the traditional drug discovery world, it would have taken months to procure and set up the cluster itself and the costs would have been astronomical – all to be recovered from the end user.

Taking advantage of this capability, specialist software for drug design and discovery has become available. These have a molecule database of more than 100 million compounds, each with individual physical properties, shapes, stereochemistry and chemical properties. There is no way this kind of data could have been used, had it not been for cloud computing services.

Yet another advantage of the liaison between drug discovery programs and cloud computing is that the latter has made experimentation and innovation possible. Previously, when a single simulation would run for an entire month, every step had to be a deliberate, well-thought-out affair. No inspired or ‘what if’ scenarios were possible. Today, however, with a simulation costing a few dollars and taking a few minutes, there is much greater experimentation. The results will be visible soon in the form of new drugs and more radical treatment.

Finally, cloud computing has given the researcher the magic wand he or she always wanted. Maybe it will banish deadly diseases and save impoverished people by giving them access to cheap yet powerful drugs. This is the true life-enhancing power of cloud computing. Out of the many identified benefits that cloud technology can give to the industry, it is still the high availability feature that stands out. GMO Cloud emphasizes on this as it gives an illustration of the system and how it is used.

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:

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.

Mobile Cloud Computing for Japanese Smartphone Users

Just recently, comScore Inc. has released new information on the state of smartphone usage in the Japanese market. Based on their survey, 1 in 4 Japan mobile users has a smartphone, the number jumping by 43% this year.

Since many locals enjoy flexibility when they are on the go, mobile phones have become the main medium to engage in different activities. With the production of smartphones, the Japanese will not allow themselves to get left behind as this innovative gadget obviously has better technology and capabilities. They can enjoy more games and applications through iPhones or Galaxy phones constantly being upgraded.

With millions of users, the Japanese market is utilizing smartphones to access the Internet for research, emails, social sites and work-related functions. Its connectivity to the Internet necessarily begs the question of mobile cloud computing.

With mobile cloud computing, smartphone users can access mobile applications through browsers instead of buying or downloading applications from the mobile company’s store. Japanese consumers can benefit from zero-cost easy-to-access applications. Instead of paying a mobile app developer, they can do their work anywhere and anytime they want by accessing their stored information through the cloud. Mobile cloud computing can thus complement the fast-paced lifestyle of the Japanese.

Companies desiring to promote their applications can connect to more smartphone users through a cloud-based application. Consumers won’t need to get newer versions of smartphones to use their favorite applications or update the application endlessly. Instead of draining their batteries when installing applications, they can just click on the website and save on power and electricity bills.

Mobile cloud computing will further expand in the Japanese smartphone market. Though it still has to resolve important issues on security and unreliable internet access, more and more people are starting to value what it has to offer especially for the young generation of professionals. As smartphone users continue to multiply, mobile cloud computing has attracted a great number of patrons, especially those integrating Internet access in their smartphone plans.

Mobile application development has become quite a trend in the software development industry simply because it iswhat consumers are inclined to use. Much of it is attributed to the usability features of mobile devices such as portability, network accessibility and the like. For developers to keep up with the saturated market, they need a reliable hosting provider that can deliver constant uptime and quick access. GMO Cloud gives this kind of security to customers as these are the key concerns in delivering their features. Visit the High Availability section of this site to find out more about the capabilities of GMO Cloud.

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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:

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.

Japanese Develop Rich Appetite for Smartphones

The Japanese embraced smartphones long before they were called smartphones. Almost all major smartphone manufacturers have established their presence in the Japanese market, as no multinational company can ignore the business prospects in the world’s third largest economy.

Over the years, smartphones have become a lifestyle gadget of the Japanese. However, with the exception of Sony, no domestic player is prominent in the international smartphone manufacturing sector – despite contributing significantly to the smartphone population of Japan.

A recent survey conducted by comScore revealed that Japan’s smartphone usage has increased phenomenally. comScore studied over 4000 mobile subscribers to analyse the recent trends in Smartphone usage in Japan. Survey results indicate a near 43% increase in the smartphone adoption. Falling smartphone prices and introduction of new generation operating systems were cited as two key factors contributing to this phenomenal growth.

Until a couple of years ago Apple had a lion’s share in the Japan smartphone market, but today over two-thirds of consumers are using Android-based smartphones. Google will be pleased to hear this as they have achieved their primary objective of beating Apple in one of the key smartphone markets, but Apple cannot be written off – especially after the launch of iPhone 5.

Despite being overshadowed by the remarkable feats of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, Microsoft continues to maintain a noteworthy presence. Although statistically Microsoft finds itself at the bottom of the table with only 3.2 per cent of smartphone users, they too are hoping for a strong comeback with Windows 8 OS.

Japanese people embrace any new form of innovation or technology with an open heart. Their tendency to always try out the latest in the market compels manufacturers to introduce newer models on a continuous basis. Though the global economic turmoil may affect smartphone sales elsewhere, the Japanese will not compromise their status as modern-day technology lovers and leaders.

The meteoric rise of Android is attributed to its availability as an open source platform, which results in smartphone makers churning out phones loaded with an Android operating system. Locally-manufactured Android phones are far cheaper than international brands, hence Android became the technology of the masses. Though not as popular as Apple’s iTunes, Google’s Play Store is rich in terms of applications, the top-rated of which are offered as free. More and more local manufacturers are adopting Android OS because it adds global appeal to their already economical smartphone models.

According to the comScore survey, Sharp is considered as the top smartphone brand in Japan, followed closely by Panasonic, Fujitsu, NEC and Sony. Smartphones have literally taken over PC’s as the dominant gadget of the new millennium. With a host of new smartphones slated to be launched later this year by top brands, the scene is only going to brighten.

From the development of applications to actually releasing the app for public consumption, developers need to know what factors to consider in choosing a server or hosting provider. GMO Cloud recommends several configurations that can well accommodate developer requirements to ensure that they will always have their system available both during and after deployment.

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.