Email Archiving, Email Hosting - SaaS

Cisco Acquires Cloud-Based Web Security Provider ScanSafe for $183 Million

We have a lot of respect for peers of ours in other cloud computing categories.  In particular, ScanSafe has been an innovator in the cloud-based web security space for a long time.

Today, Cisco's security business unit announced they are acquiring ScanSafe for $183 million.

"With the acquisition of ScanSafe, Cisco is executing on our vision to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services for advanced security enforcement," said Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Technology Business Unit (STBU). "Cisco will provide customers the flexibility to choose the deployment model that best suits their organization and deliver anytime, anywhere protection against Web-based threats."

I've met with Tom Gillis at Cisco before and he's an impressive leader.  Between the amazing success IronPort has had and the new acquisition of ScanSafe, it seems like Cisco is doing well in the cloud security space.

Congrats to Cisco and the ScanSafe team.  Seems like a good fit for both and more validation of cloud computing in general.

Cloud Computing – Let the Magic Carpet Ride Begin

The days of Doogie Howser's blue IBM PS/2 screen with the ever-so-subtle blinking cursor are long gone. Today, we've got desktop computers with multi-core processors, several gigabytes of RAM, hard drives in excess of a terabyte and fiber optic connections in our homes that can symmetrically transfer data at more than 15 megabits per second. And, how we're using these technologies and huge Internet pipelines would blow even Mr. Howser's genius mind.

Then, Doogie was rockin' an 8 MHz processor; today we're conceptualizing entire operating systems in the cloud. With Google's Chrome OS announcement, the "cloud computing" phrase is going to buzz even more. I get it - Google's omnipresent, but short of a locally-installed application here and there, that presence has almost always been strictly in the cloud. We all expected that Google's next big project would be a cloud-based operating system - it was simply the next logical step.

Creating even more cloud buzz, Microsoft recently announced that they will release a free, cloud-based version of their Office software. Up until now, Microsoft has been best known for their on-premise solutions. However, this announcement makes it clear that Microsoft has officially recognized the cloud as a viable vehicle for application delivery. But most importantly, this is the confirmation evangelists like us have known would one day come - the cloud is going mainstream.

The question is no longer whether or not cloud computing is here to stay; it's only a question as to which giant is going to win the race. So, who is it going to be? Google or Microsoft?

If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em … VARs Consider Benefits of SaaS

Whether you're drinking the Kool-Aid or shrugging off software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the latest fad, it doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon. In fact, according to an estimate from the leading industry analyst firm Gartner, SaaS (also known as cloud computing) will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013.

As more and more companies begin to adopt SaaS, value-added resellers (VARs) must also consider the switch. But the decision is a little more challenging for VARs. First, SaaS requires VARs to completely change their business models, which is no easy feat. Some VARs also feel that SaaS threatens control of their customer relationships. And finally, the SaaS model takes longer to realize profitability, taking VARs from low-volume, high-margin products and services to high-volume, lower-margin sales.

On the upside, however, the quality of earnings with the SaaS model is higher with more predictable, recurring revenues. In addition, although the types of professional services VARs offer may also require some changes with SaaS, there is still a great deal of opportunity to provide value. Data conversions, project management, change management, training, system integration and software customization are still high-demand needs that offer tremendous business value. It's also important to recognize that VARs have a big opportunity to add value to up-and-coming hybrid approaches, for example, LiveOffice's partnership with Mimosa and Microsoft's software-plus-services model.

In the end, VARs need to be flexible and provide solutions their customers want and need. SaaS is a big player, especially in a down economy, and it's getting easier to sell as more and more customers begin to understand it and adopt it. So take notice, VARs, and decide where you see the future of your business. But as Francis Bacon said of innovation, "He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator."

Who Says You Can’t Live on a Cloud?

It's amazing to me how far technology has come in the past 15 years. At the risk of embarrassing myself, I admit I was a late bloomer when it came to technology. I made it through college using a Brother word processor, which consisted of a typewriter and a pseudo-computer screen with lovely green type, and I thought it was pretty cool. I didn't touch a computer (a very old Mac with a tiny, nine-inch screen) until my first job, and that was more than daunting. Then there was this thing called email, another foreign anomaly in my young professional life. It wasn't long after my introduction to the computer and email that I got my first cell phone, one of the largest known to man. I don't even think I used the Internet until the late 90s. But that was then ...

Today, I couldn't live without my computer, email, the Internet and cell phone technology. In the early 90s, I never would have imagined I'd be working in the tech industry, pitching the benefits of HP wares before finding myself in this burgeoning industry called "cloud computing." But I am a firm believer in the benefits of technology, and the sky is the limit - literally.

Cloud computing isn't just a fly-by-night operation. I believe it is the new wave of the future. And it makes perfect sense. If you look at the history of technology, innovators have always found ways to make things more efficient, reduce costs, expand features and simplify functionality for end users. Businesses are looking for ways to achieve the same things, especially in a down economy, and cloud computing is the right solution, delivered in a convenient and customizable package, where the possibilities are endless. More and more companies are building their mobile workforces and allowing staff the option of telecommuting, so providing employees with the flexibility to access information anytime, anywhere is a good thing for everyone.

But you don't just have to take my word for it. Leading industry analyst firm Gartner predicts that cloud computing will jump from $46.4 billion in 2008 to $150.1 billion in 2013, and many of the big guys are taking notice - Microsoft, HP, IBM and SAP, to name a few.

Remember when the Internet was destined to fail? There will always be naysayers, but I think cloud computing is here to stay. We've only begun to scratch the surface of the next big thing technology has put at our fingertips.

Leveraging the Cloud to Power through the Economic Crisis

 

In a recent study by Savvis, they describe how a new breed of IT leaders is leveraging cloud computing to realize short-term cost savings and improved efficiency. The study was conducted in January of this year with more than 300 IT leaders in mid-to-large enterprises in the United States, United Kingdom and Singapore.

The findings reiterated what most of us already know - most companies and their IT departments are struggling to find solid financial ground in the current economic crisis. In fact, IDC recently changed its earlier predictions about worldwide IT spending in 2009, revising its estimate of 2.6 percent growth to just 0.5 percent.

Amidst this backdrop, it was also clear from the study that this new breed of IT professionals has some fresh characteristics - they are nimble, forward-thinking and view technology as a strategic enabler. Now more than ever, IT leaders have to continue innovating, creating competitive advantages and must maintain a "lean and mean" corporate physique to remain aggressive in the marketplace.

So, how and where is this innovation coming from?

With 52 percent of all IT leaders globally seeing their cost savings derived from reducing infrastructure costs, a real opportunity exists for them to re-evaluate their existing IT infrastructure and consider a different approach that will have both short and long-term benefits.

The study then went on to divide the respondents into two camps: one camp (49 percent of all respondents) said that their organization is not doing well; the other camp (surprisingly 51 percent of those surveyed) who think that their companies are doing "well" or "very well" and are continuing to grow despite the global recession. Here are some of the characteristics of the better-performing organizations.

• Leverage cloud computing: 72 percent of all IT leaders believe cloud computing will play an important role in the future of IT and will help companies gain efficiencies and reduce costs.

• Spend more on IT: The IT leaders who are enabling their companies to do well spend 18 percent more of their revenue on IT than those who don't.

• Focus on infrastructure outsourcing: These successful companies spend a significant amount more - up to 32 percent more - of their IT budgets on infrastructure outsourcing.
  

These innovators are far more likely to consider consolidating and outsourcing the number of IT suppliers. As a result, they are able to re-direct staff into more business-critical areas, improve accountability and focus on the long-term while dealing with the day-to-day tactical issues.

As the paper concludes: "Investigating some of the options that successful IT leaders are pursuing: using IT as a strategic tool; asking "What does IT enable?" rather than "What does IT cost?" and focusing on delivering competitive advantage will put IT executives in a strong position. Exploring options to consolidate and re-organize your IT infrastructure and being open to innovative approaches, offers and strategies from reputable vendors may well be the key to achieving this."

We couldn't agree more.

Hey! You! Get off of my cloud...

LiveOffice has been offering hosted email archiving services since 2001.  As such, we have evolved and grown under the radar, while the media constantly found new names for what we and our brethren do, including:

• Hosting
• Application Service Providers (ASPs - remember those?)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Cloud Computing

While each term truly has its own unique nuances, our business model itself has remained pretty consistent:

• No software or hardware to buy, deploy or manage
• Predictable pricing per user per month
• Securely delivered over the Internet
• Automatically patched and updated

Since cloud computing is the latest label for our industry, we are now going through the predictable hype cycle that all of us have seen many times before:

• Initially: This could be big
  
• Shortly thereafter: This is going to change everything
• Around the same time: Everyone is going to use this
• Upon reflection: Well actually, no one is going to use this
• At the same time (from the other side): No wait, some people will use this and are using this
  
• Much later: Wow, almost everyone is actually using this
  

Think about it.  Remember the articles you read about the Internet in 1995?  The initial predictions were overblown.  Then people said it was dead and a fad during the dotcom crash.  And now look at how it has blown past most of our wildest imaginations.

In the same way, businesses leveraging externally-hosted IT solutions, versus running IT systems themselves (which is what hosting/ASPs/SaaS/cloud computing really is) is going through the same natural evolution.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. recently released a report on cloud computing throwing water on the flames of the hype.  One of the key findings, that generated tremendous controversy, was as follows:

Clouds already make sense for many small and medium-size businesses, but technical, operational and financial hurdles will need to be overcome before clouds will be used extensively by large public and private enterprises 

As someone benefiting from the growth in cloud computing, you know what my response is to that?  I agree.  100%. 

It's obvious, isn't it?  Cloud computing is a new area and, by definition, "hurdles" will need to be overcome.  If there were no hurdles, it would not be new.  I'm not sure why that is surprising to anyone.

In fact, I believe in this trend so much that I want the hype to be contained, because the hype obscures the real trends taking place under the covers - namely:

• Small and medium-sized businesses have largely had no good options when it comes to IT infrastructure, given their scale and expertise.  Cloud computing finally levels the playing field.  And although "small" business sounds like a tiny market, it's anything but that.
• At the same time, I am amazed by the number of large companies who, despite knowing all of the hurdles and barriers alluded to above, are still finding cloud-based solutions to be worth the trade off.

So let's get the cloud computing hype over with, because the reality is too promising for us to ignore.

Cloud storage services review includes email archiving

bMighty recently published a comprehensive review of cloud-based storage services.  In general, with all of the hype around cloud computing, many customers are finding that storage is a great place to start (whether primary storage, backup, archiving or other services), since it is typically an infinitely-growing area that is still very complex to manage.

bMighty highlighted LiveOffice's cloud-based email archiving service in the review:

E-mail can be one of the most daunting challenges that a small or midsize business will face. The broadest need is simply in the area of e-mail management. The cost of adding storage to an ever-expanding e-mail store or the resistance to restricted mailbox size leaves the typical business owner in a quandary. Not only is e-mail storage management expensive, but it exacts a toll on backups and e-mail server performance. A viable option may be to use a cloud storage provider like LiveOffice and shift the burden elsewhere.  

Microsoft Azure: Cloud computing for the rest of us

Microsoft announced a high-level schedule for delivery of its Azure cloud computing offering today:

More details on Azure, including pricing, should be available in the "coming weeks and months," Steven Martin, senior director of product management for Microsoft's developer platform, said in an interview. It's unclear when exactly pricing details are coming, but Microsoft plans to unveil new features of Azure later this month at its MIX Web developer conference.  

While the announcement was filled with ambiguous "plans to" and "coming weeks and months," and (my favorite) "expected to," the impact of what they're working on can't be underestimated.

One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that it simplifies the infrastructure management problem that has plagued everyone in IT for so many years.  Yet cloud computing, until now, has largely been optimized for the open source (e.g., Linux) application stack.  For example, Amazon's EC2 web service is great for Linux but is, in our opinion, still pretty raw for Windows.

Yet, speaking from experience, the infrastructure management problem that cloud computing purports to solve is perhaps the most severe in the Microsoft Windows environment.  Anyone that has had to reboot servers every few days knows what I'm talking about.

Hence, we're excited to see Azure when it's "expected to" be released.

The "cloud's" silver lining

It's pretty tough out there, no matter where "there" is.  We all hope that things will get better soon in our world economy.

But one of the subtle points about this recession is that companies and government organizations are scrubbing their budgets to see how they can "do more with less."  Many cash- and resource-strapped organizations are turning toward software-as-a-service (or "cloud computing")-based approaches to help during this economic downturn.

Analyst David Ferris points this out in his blog entry today:

Struggling economies bring challenges, but also opportunities.

The IT world is ripe for a major shift, for three reasons:

* Economic concerns are driving IT departments to aggressively increase efficiency and reduce cost.
* Vendors have built vast SaaS infrastructures to enable outsourced messaging, collaboration, applications, and compliance solutions at a fixed cost (examples: Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon, Iron Mountain, LiveOffice).
* Server virtualization technologies - from Microsoft, Sun, VMWare, and in Linux distributions - have matured to the point where highly available, high-volume, and complex applications can be efficiently virtualized, at a savings of cost, space, administrative overhead, and energy consumption.

The state of the economy will have a catalytic effect on customer adoption of and migration to SaaS and virtual environments over the coming two years. Within the next three to five years, hosters will start using a combination of multitenancy and virtualization, to offer an always-on, always-available set of solutions to customers over the Internet.

Thus the state of the economy will greatly encourage customers to migrate to SaaS/cloud and virtual environments.

My colleague Amy Dugdale in our marketing team mentioned this out in a catchy way recently by saying Less Cash = More SaaS.

In addition, we previously discussed that email archiving demand will grow in the coming years as we all demand more transparency into what's happening in the business and government world.

Finally, we recently announced our Troubled Archive Relief Program(TARP) to help customers move from an on-premise archiving system today to LiveOffice's hosted email archive.

Often times of economic change catalyze shifts in technology and I think we're going through a major shift as we speak.

gmail is NOT the only "cloud" application

I am sitting here in Los Angeles Airport, waiting for my Friday night redeye flight, eating an ice cream cone and continuing to get disappointed by the depth of our technology media coverage.

Forbes recruited two heavy-hitters (Michael Saylor, CEO of Business Intelligence firm Microstrategy and Nicholas Carr, famous author and recent writer of the book on cloud computing, The Big Switch) to answer questions about cloud computing.  I was excited to read the article, because Forbes is a great publication and Michael Saylor and Nicholas Carr are very accomplished individuals.

Nicholas Carr is a big proponent of cloud computing and has grounded and cautiously-optimistic comments on the space:

What's your imagined time line of the adoption of cloud computing? Will it take years? Decades?

If you're talking about big companies, I would say it will be a slow, steady process lasting maybe 15 to 20 years.

For consumers, cloud computing is here. Applications offered by Google and other software-as-a-service companies are already taking over traditional software. When young people want to do something, they don't go out and buy software. They look to the Web.

For small businesses, it's something in between. Because they don't have as much investment in their current IT infrastructure, they're more willing to consider hosting their entire business on something like Amazon's Web Services.

Unfortunately, Michael Saylor employs the standard "false choice" argument which can be used to attack any new technology:

* [Big company X] will never use it
* And would you trust [low-end service Y]?

In this case, he seems to imply there is nothing between consumer gmail and American Express' financial systems.  Everyone attacking cloud computing loves to hold up Google as the only company running hosted applications.

What about on-demand small business accounting software? How about online customer relationship management technology? You're right - salesforce.com is a fad huh?  And I'm totally biased, but I think email archiving is a great candidate for software-as-a-service.

To me, there are a number of business applications that ARE the same across small to mid-sized businesses and that CAN be outsourced. This isn't mere conjecture - it's happening today.

Saylor goes on to say: 

If I were a small trucking company running a dispatch network and I need five-second response time on the phone, even then I wouldn't run my infrastructure on someone else's architecture. If it goes down, my customers go away. If it's really mission critical, you need to make people really comfortable--and that means 99.999% availability. 

In terms of downtime, I always love the argument that cloud computing is somehow inferior to internally-run applications.  IT departments in small to mid-sized organizations that I know often struggle to have enough capital, manpower and expertise to run systems at the levels of security, availability and performance that their users require.  And how many achieve "99.999% availability"?  Not many that I know.

I agree cloud computing is over-hyped and I agree big companies won't rush to it, but does that mean we should write it off altogether?

Maybe Michael Saylor should go hang out with the CEO of Lawson Software and write about how the Internet will never take off either.