As of January 12, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) introduced new .brand and .category gTLDs (generic top-level domains) and started to accept applications for them. This new program will be a big game changer for the Internet naming system as we know it today, and is a cause for some concern.
It will be interesting to see which companies will use this as a strategic opportunity to own and control registry or simply as a defensive play on their brand, but the really interesting thing about this change is the industry polarization surrounding it. Organizations like the Association of National Advertisers predict disastrous consequences if this program takes off. Others like Afilias Limited, the ICANN-designated registry operator for the .info top level domain and a global provider of domain registry services, is looking at this as a win to grow their portfolio. With their recent acquisition of Registry Services Corporation, Afilias now supports seven generic TLDs operating under ICANN contracts and has launched seven new TLDs since 2001.
Jeff Ernst, principal analyst at Forrester Research, wrote a great article illustrating the concerns organizations should have about this. Here are the major ones (You can read his whole article here):
Concern 1: Cost to play
Company officials need to decide if spending $185,000 per gTLD just to apply is worth it, plus all the infrastructure that is needed to run and support the gTLD. Granted, there are a good number of registrars you can off load that work to, but then you are paying them an ongoing fee to maintain and operate it for you. The cost of gear to do it yourself makes the $185k application fee look like pocket change.
This video from the Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership talks about the real cost vs. brand cost:
Concern 2: If I don’t someone will
Citations from Jeff’s Article below:
“This is true. ICANN has procedures to protect trademark holders from infringement, but the process doesn’t guarantee that another organization can’t get your string. If you don’t apply, the onus is on you to review the applications on the ICANN site after the window closes to see if anyone has applied for a string that is or contains your name. Assuming you have legal rights to the name, you can file a legal rights objection.
The court will consider certain factors that will be open for interpretation, but I believe that:
If you have trademark rights to your name and the organization applying for your name does not, you will prevail in an objection and prevent the other applicant from winning your string.
If the applicant has trademark rights for the same term in another sector, you’ll need to prove that the applicant’s intended use of the gTLD will cause harm to your brand, which will be difficult to do and you likely won’t prevail. Let’s say Delta Airlines and Delta Faucet hold similar marks on Delta within their industries. If only one applies for .delta, the other would have a hard time proving harm.”
Concern 3: Spend millions to defend my brand
“This one doesn’t add up. I don’t see a huge risk of cybersquatting on top-level domains, or on second-level domains within the new TLDs because:
Cybersquatters won’t vie for top-level domains. A cybersquatter with no trademark rights would be absolutely foolish to apply for your brand name, because the probability of being awarded the gTLD is next to zero. The perpetrator would have to go through the extensive process of completing the application, in which they describe in detail how they intend to use the registry, prevail against any objections, and pass all of ICANN’s technical and financial requirements. Also, there is no secondary market for gTLDs, so a cybersquatter would have no way to extort money out of you to buy it from them.
Rights holders have first crack at second-level domains. Each new gTLD is required to have a “sunrise period,” which provides trademark and brand holders the first rights to register their brands as a second-level domain within the gTLD before it opens to general registration. Brand owners need to evaluate the new gTLDs and determine which ones they want to be part of, which ones they want to prevent others from registering, and which don’t matter.”
To Jeff’s point here, I don’t worry about the gTLD as much as how much money I might have to spend to buy those second-level domains that currently I have under control. To me it seems like a gamble on whether or not it will pay off.
Concern 4: If I apply for my .brand will I get it?
“No. Several situations could arise, which must be factored into the decision to apply and manage properly.
A non-applicant could object to your application. Just like you can file a legal rights objection, another company can claim that your gTLD string infringes on its trademark.
Another company could apply for the same or similar string. The more generic your brand or company name, the more likely that you could also face competition for your .brand string or a similar term. When this happens, ICANN first gives the parties an opportunity to work out a resolution on their own, which we don’t expect to happen, and then it will go to auction.”
All concerns aside, I can really see the value for companies like Nike that have a worldwide brand and plethora of product lines. They become the .Nike gTLD and everyone worldwide would know all things Nike would live there. No more confusion about if a site I find on the Internet is sponsored by Nike or not. It really can give Internet control back to the brand owners. (At least the ones that can afford it.)
On the flip side, I don’t see any real value in making this investment for companies that have one product line or are a niche service, etc. Last but not least, I wonder how the landscape of the Internet will change with companies that buy gTLDs such as .social, .banks, .camping, .auctions, etc. (those generic domains that aren’t brand specific). They will have to battle to convince everyone that their gTLD is the authority on a specific subject matter. It is going to be really interesting to see how this program will change the game of the Internet.
I’m sure we’ll change no one’s opinion on it; but I just wanted to say that I mentioned in the last post that I would seriously fear for my job – indeed, my entire career – if SOPA/PIPA passes.
I think yesterday proved that was more than just hyperbole. The sites that voluntarily blacked out were those which had the most to fear from the legislation – sites with user-generated content.
While I am paid the “big bucks” for my ability to write, the truth is that many of the tools I use for writing were exactly those that were blacked out yesterday. If I need to write on a technical topic which I am unfamiliar with, or simply need to look up a quick pop-culture reference so I don’t make an idiot of myself confusing He-Man with Thundarr the Barbarian, Wikipedia is my go-to source.
An RIAA spokesman ridiculed the Wikipedia blackout, claiming that college students were writing more accurate papers from primary sources yesterday. But that’s short-sighted thinking. Wikipedia’s value isn’t in being the be-all and end-all for knowledge; but for beginning a search for knowledge, it cannot be beat. Each article in Wikipedia has a valuable list of citations which direct students to the primary resources which they might not be able to find otherwise. This is ignoring the fact that the ‘self-policing’ fact-checking process of Wikipedia has resulted in comparable accuracy with traditional encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica as early as 2005. If Wikipedia was around when I was in college, it would have been a life-saver.
Being without Wikipedia was jarring in ways I didn’t even conceive of. I use Wikipedia as a “brain extension,” allowing me to remember facts that I would always be without. Yesterday, when I didn’t know something, I couldn’t just “look it up.” I’m used to a world where I idly just expect to think about: “I wonder who the first Prime Minister of Australia was,” and have the answer in less than 10 seconds.
Reddit also was down yesterday. Not only do I use Reddit extensively for my personal life (I play Minecraft on Reddit’s servers, and co-founded a local club through Reddit), but I often find obscure technology stories that need more attention, or inspiration for a blog post I write here on Reddit. Plus, Reddit is very good for promoting those articles once they are written (although I always play fair with the community and don’t spam the site).
The other major site I rely upon stayed up yesterday: YouTube. However, undoubtedly YouTube would also be affected if SOPA passed. My other job responsibility is corporate filmmaking – which is then distributed on YouTube. Without YouTube, there is no cost-effective way to distribute the videos and reach a wide audience – hence no demand for my skills.
Quite frankly, yesterday was a nightmare for me, and it goes to show how easy it is to take complicated web services for granted – even when they are crucial to our very lives and livelihoods.
Yesterday we sponsored a webinar about how to make money in the cloud with MSPAlliance CEO and co-founder Charles Weaver, featuring our CTO Antonio Piraino and two of our esteemed service provider customers: Ken Ziegler, president and COO at Logicworks, and Kevin Detsch, vice president of business development at ePlus. MSPNews.com, which has published an article about the webcast here, summarized it nicely: “One of the most important elements for today’s service providers seeking to take their offerings to the next level, is to do away with traditional constraints and find new ways to introduce and manage their services, as well as monetize them.”
With that framework in mind, here are a few of the key points/takeaways:
The audience was polled at the beginning about whether or not they plan to offer cloud services in 2012: 51% said they already offer cloud services, 22% are planning to in 2012, 15% were not sure, and 11% said no.
Antonio said that many service providers have embarked on “Phase 1” of cloud computing with virtualization and some automation, and perhaps an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering and one or two applications such as e-mail thrown in. The challenge is migrating to “Phase 2.” Many MSPs are stuck with legacy investments and cannot justify new ones due to the day-to-day challenges of maintaining their current offerings and service levels. Budget is always an issue, and another one is that MSPs just don’t know where to start.
There are new service opportunities that exist in the cloud, including disaster recovery, application-level services, monitoring, and analytics.
Antonio mentioned that too many service providers are holding on to basic up/down (fault monitoring) as their service/SLA offering instead of moving on to more granular performance monitoring and other managed services.
Once an MSP decides to create managed services, the sticking points are: How to manage differentiated service levels; Creating new pricing schemas (Hourly, monthly, committed, a la carte management?) and monetizing and managing new services.
According to Antonio, moving to the cloud means having the right processes and technologies to deliver on service level expectations: “Virtualization alone does not a cloud make.”
MSPs must make decisions about server, hypervisor, cloud stack, storage, app, and GUI, and then tackle security, reliability, cost, complexity, and culture. Another key issue is ensuring availability, performance, and control.
Good systems management is crucial: It adds visibility and predictability to your IT decision making; drives greater ROI for services; helps with cost allocation, simplification, culture change; and helps control decentralized assets.
Another important consideration is having access to “Operational Business Intelligence” to answer questions such as “What visibility will I have into my provider’s competency?” “I have a limited budget – where is it best spent?” “How do I calculate my capacity needs for next year?” “How do I decide where workloads should reside?” According to Ken Ziegler of Logicworks, MSPs must provide the real performance data and business intelligence customers need to defend their investment to their own internal business constituents.
The attendees were also polled about which pricing model is preferred by their customers. The results: Fixed: 25%; Resource consumption based: 50%; Don’t know: 25%; Other: 3%
Ken said that pricing preferences depend on many factors, but that the majority of Logicworks customers prefer fixed pricing. However, the AWS model of hourly or pay as you go is becoming more popular. Indeed, he recited a quote he’d heard recently that customers stick with AWS precisely because they have the freedom to leave at any time.
All agreed that security is one issue customers are concerned about and voice regularly. Kevin Detsch of ePlus mentioned that security always comes up, especially as service providers evolve from managing infrastructure to hosting applications. Ken said that having a third-party security audit done goes a long way in ensuring customers they can trust you.
Antonio stated that when it comes to security and disaster recovery plans, you get what you pay for. “We in the industry need to educate buyers that there are different types of service providers.” All customers must take responsibility for their security/DR plans.
In the same vein, customers need to understand how their workloads reside within their service providers’ architectures and plan accordingly (hearkening back to last year’s AWS outage). According to Ken, MSPs need to help customers understand the best path to redundancy. It’s a matter of understanding your customers’ needs and helping them plan accordingly.
The final polling question asked what cloud management visibility do clients want? Application: 77%; Network: 63%; Storage: 51%; OS, hypervisor, or bare metal: 4%. Kevin said that their customers are increasingly asking for visibility into the application layer.
Thanks to Kevin and Ken for doing this webinar with us! The replay version will be available shortly at http://bit.ly/yw7vdE. Look for ScienceLogic at MSPWorld Feb. 1-3 in Miami (booth #1119). Antonio will be there to talk more about how not to get stuck in the cloud!
We invite all hosters/MSPs interested in offering differentiated cloud computing services to join us this Wednesday, January 18 at 2:00pm Eastern for a free webinar called “Don’t Get Stuck in the Cloud: Developing new high-margin offerings, pricing and service levels to get ahead.” Hosts Antonio Piraino, CTO of ScienceLogic, and Charles Weaver, CEO and co-founder of the MSPAlliance, will be joined by two of our customers – Ken Ziegler, president and COO at Logicworks, and Kevin Detsch, vice president of business development at ePlus - to provide a real-world perspective on expanding cloud services to drive business growth.
Specifically, the webcast will explore how to introduce and monetize high-margin cloud, or other value-added service offerings, without creating cloud management headaches. The group will discuss new services opportunities for service providers in the cloud era, providing and managing to SLAs, and monetizing the management of new services.
We’ve recently looked back to see our top articles for 2011, according to unique page views, time spent on the site, etc. And we thought this would be a good time to look at them and try to understand why these articles connected with our readers.
Our CEO, Dave Link, writes about a panel discussion in which he listened to the Director of Cloud Architecture at Netflix, Adrian Cockcroft, talk about building, testing, monitoring, and scaling the massive on-demand applications Netflix requires. During the topic, he brought up the idea of “stolen time” – the amount of time your VM is ready to run, but could not, because of other VMs competing for the CPU. Because you don’t control the hypervisor as a cloud service provider, it is difficult to tell whether or not the hypervisor is oversubscribed. Netflix was able to improve performance bydetecting when this was the case, and just killed the VM to launch it on a less congested CPU.
I think this resonated with our readers, because it explained a problem that isn’t obvious, but which affects many cloud service providers, and provided one company’s solution to that problem. It didn’t hurt that Netflix had a major outage around the time that this post went up – and people were searching heavily for “Netflix” and “performance” in search engines.
In this early ’11 post, we talk about the fact that ScienceLogic keeps all your IT infrastructure management data – including network, system, event, asset, ticketing, virtualization and cloud – in one application with multiple functions. The core of our product and our business has always been about putting all the information and all the tools service providers and enterprises need to monitor, manage, and maintain their physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure in one location, as one entity, to improve performance and add new/differentiated technologies and service offerings with ease.
This basic message resonated – and continues to resonate – with anyone who has ever had to deal with an IT environment where this wasn’t the case.
This article by Dave Link covering the Midsize Enterprise Summit explains the views of Jackie Fenn, a Gartner fellow, and the creation of the “Gartner Hype Cycle.” The idea is that new innovations often come to us in a cycle of invention, followed by inflated expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, and a plateau of productivity; in other words, that it’s only after we reject a new technology as being able to “change everything” that we start to see the real potential of that thing to change some things.
It’s easy to see why this would resonate with our readers. Most people in IT are technology enthusiasts always looking for the next big thing; and all people in IT are interested in improving their performance and infrastructure. The Hype Cycle helps put both unreasonable and realistic expectations in perspective.
In this article, Lindi Horton, sales engineer, talks about what she learned at a panel at SXSW in Austin. Specifically, she talks about how infrastructure buying strategies should take a cue from the world of medicine and for any of their various problems, buy a “minimum effective dose;” the smallest amount of something that would produce the desired outcome.
The trick, of course, is finding the people who will fundamentally understand the business, manage the metrics that matter, and be able to understand what the requirements for your business truly are. As most of our readers are those people, this was another one of our more popular articles for the year.
With commoditization and acquisitions happening in the cloud space, how do companies remain successful in this highly contested space? That was the question that cloud computing and virtualization product manager Jeremy Sherwood asked the panel at HostingCon (including the heads of GearHost, Dreamhost, and Hostway).
The answer was that you need to focus your efforts on a specific niche and work on your specialty. And this message perhaps resonates with hosting providers as many of them offer managed services with their hosting (even if they don’t consider themselves a “managed services provider”).
This live-blog of the VMworld Keynote, talks about, what else, virtualization and cloud computing becoming not just a large part of IT, but the dominant part of IT. Of course, what else would you expect from a VMware keynote? It also helped that because of our same-day coverage, we were able to, along with other technology blogs, break the news on the new version of vSphere, VMware Essentials, and VMware Go.
Here, Dave Link talks about the massive scale-up of the federal government towards cloud computing resources, and what the government mandates that every agency must do. These hard dates and actionable results-oriented mandates were informative for setting the expectations of federal cloud computing initiatives.
What perhaps interests our readers is the idea that cloud service providers can not only help with large projects such as moving an entire system infrastructure to the cloud, moving collaboration to the cloud, and replacing financial/ERP systems to services for the federal government; but that state and local governments will also likely have similar initiatives.
Furthermore, since the advent of virtualization, we’ve seen a move from computational scarcity to computational abundance. The federal government, however, has (as of the post’s writing) lagged behind the manufacturing sector – the average asset utilization in manufacturing was 79%, the average utilization in the federal government was 26%.
What can we learn from this?
One of the trends that we can learn from this, to make this blog better, is that six of our top seven stories for the year were on reporting on panels with new and refreshing ideas, providing the commentary of experts in specific fields and explaining how the innovation or insight affects the service provider market. We’ll be sure to continue to bring you these insights throughout 2012.
My husband bought me a tiny book for Christmas called “The Best of Brain Droppings” by George Carlin (you know, those 3”x3” ones you always see at checkout at Barnes & Noble and other book stores). I’ve been a George Carlin fan for as long as I can remember. His brand of irreverent humor, especially his analysis of language, always makes me laugh. One particular passage in the book really amused me – and if you are an IT pro, you’ll see why:
“I’m Tired Of…reading about clouds in a book. Doesn’t this piss you off? You’re reading a nice story, and suddenly the writer has to stop and describe the clouds. Who cares? I’ll bet you anything I can write a decent novel, with a good, entertaining story, and never once mention the clouds. Really! Every book you read, if there’s an outdoor scene, an open window, or even a door slightly ajar, the writer has to say, ‘As Bo and Velma walked along the shore, the clouds hung ponderously on the horizon like steel-gray, loosely formed gorilla turds.’ I’m not interested…The only story I know of where clouds were important was Noah’s Ark.”
I immediately thought of the amount of copy/marketing/sky writing written about cloud computing these days. It’s out of control!
Perhaps cloud computing is the most important development in IT in our generation – but it is getting to the point where vendors, tech press, and even laypeople say that anything and everything in IT is related to “cloud” in some way, even when it’s only tangentially related, or not related at all. Overuse of the term “cloud” where it is not appropriate dilutes the concept. The misuse of the term confuses and disorients many IT decision makers, diminishing the tangible benefits that organizations can realize. As the various technologies and platforms that are referred to as “cloud” become more mature, I’m sure we’ll reach a level of specificity that will make the term “cloud computing” somewhat obsolete. Hopefully, this will root out the pretenders, who will then go on to the next IT flavor of the month.
Back to Carlin’s passage, clouds in literature are often used as metaphor, to convey mood, or as Carlin himself points out, can advance the plot. What Carlin can’t stand is the overuse of the trope and the romanticization of trivial detail, to the point that it loses all context. This is what is happening to the term “cloud computing.” Carlin was no stranger to criticizing the overuse of certain terminology in advertising. I think he would have laughed at how IT folks can see a double meaning in his cloud rant. RIP
In Network World, Sandra Gitten writes about the Intercontinental Hotels’ Group’s move towards the cloud. On the upside, the move has resulted in cost savings and improved customer service – so much so that IHG is continuing to expand the cloud into their room reservation system, which processes 345M transactions daily.
The downside is that cloud applications have matured to the point where considerations regarding bandwidth are entering into the picture. And if the Network World article sounds like something you read five years ago, only with “cloud” substituted for “WAN,” you’re probably right.
Client/Server apps were often processed at LAN speeds, with movement to consolidated data centers and virtualization, many apps were repurposed to work on a WAN, causing a degradation in performance until reliable WAN acceleration techniques came into the picture and apps were recoded to be less “chatty” and work better on higher latency networks.
Now, however, companies are concerned about bandwidth and performance to their cloud apps. Many of these applications have to communicate with other applications in “mashups” where different components may be held on different data centers miles apart. Performance and latency issues are important in any application, no matter the platform.
Yet, for many IT environments, there is still a misunderstanding of what is required to secure the performance of cloud applications. Testing for performance is often done in silos; and IT environments are becoming more integrated with cloud computing, not less. Many “networking” teams don’t know much about cloud management; many cloud application teams don’t know much traditional networking.
Applications need to be tested from an end-to-end performance perspective, and the location of any performance problems need to be isolated to their root cause. Sometimes it means upgrading bandwidth, sometimes upgrading hardware, and sometimes it can even mean recoding the application so that is requires less trips across the network. But the point is, unless you can identify the source of problems, you may have the wrong people fixing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.
Christmas is approaching (and Hannukah has already arrived – Shalom!) and many of you are about to depart on long weekends – or maybe you’re already on vacation. This is the time of year when the offices tend to be very short-staffed unless you work in a hospital, a postal or delivery service, or in an arctic toy workshop.
But computers, of course, don’t get the day off. While everyone goes home to their families – or at least to enjoy the day off – data centers will continue processing orders. Netflix’s servers have to be up if only because they offer “Emmett Otter’s Jugband Christmas.” Amazon.com will not cease to take orders on December the 25th. Nor will Visa or Mastercard stop processing transactions. Nor will your business.
Of course, if something should go wrong, it’s the service providers and system administrators that will need to be on-call. Let’s face it – you shouldn’t have to be woken up at 5:00am on Christmas day by an automated message that a critical piece of your infrastructure has gone down. No, the honor of waking you up at 5:00am should go to your kids.
And while we’re on the subject, why stop at Christmas? Most servers are really automation tools, performing complex tasks without human input. If it requires human input – to repair, to configure – then it is not living up to its potential. It’s one of the reasons that monitoring your IT infrastructure and doing systems management is important – it allows you to spend more time finding ways to more effectively automate tasks rather than having to fix the infrastructure to maintain the status quo. Ideally, every day should be “Christmas” in the data center.
Well, it’s the time of year again where we look forward and try to guess what the next year will have in store for IT, virtually guaranteeing we’ll have something to be embarrassed about when we look back at the beginning of 2013 at how naïve we all were.
But yes, here are our predictions for how the next 12 months will shake down, mostly from our chief prognosticators: CTO Antonio Piraino (whose predictions were just published in Forbes) and CEO Dave Link.
A legal note: Certain comments made in this post may be characterized as “forward-looking statements.” Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions. ScienceLogic undertakes no obligation to publically update or revise any forward looking statements (mostly because if we’re embarrassingly way-off track here, we’d rather hope you forget about it instead of bringing it up and making fun of us.)
There will be a cut-throat competition for consumer and enterprise cloud environments.
Quite frankly, as cloud computing becomes more mature, consumer cloud environments at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce can try to compete on price and economies of scale. However, they – along with managed hosting and data center providers of all sizes vying for consumer and enterprise business – will only be successful when they identify niche markets where they can deliver new services. The result will be a shifting, interchanged web of alliances and coalitions of convenience to come up with innovative cloud solutions, which will then come to a bitter, all-out war when activists from a Microsoftian separatist group assassinate the Archduke of Facebook.
One or more major cloud environments will be hit with a massive security attack.
This is almost a given since cloud environments are tempting targets. The upside is that after a major security attack, cloud service providers will be better armed with best practices for security and disaster recovery, and customers will recognize that they need to take responsibility for their own security and disaster recovery in the cloud. Sort of a “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Or horribly crippled. One or the other.
The price of cloud computing will go up – so will the demand.
This may seem a paradox of the law of supply and demand, but it makes sense in this context: IT budget cuts can be a major driver for cloud computing. With lower budgets, the flexibility and ability to break down costs into smaller increments make cloud computing a more attractive prospect. There’s even a bit of a “Giffen Good” effect where, as cloud service prices increase, it will take a larger portion of the already cut budget, which will mean there is less budget remaining, which further drives the cost-cutting measures of cloud computing adoption. This is not to be confused with the “Giffen Bad” effect, which occurs when Dave Lubarsky’s Golden Retriever, “Giffen,” chews on his shoes. Bad dog.
Better visibility and management in the cloud.
Cloud providers have been fixated on creating or emulating the ‘top’ cloud computing platforms from an infrastructure, self-service and pricing perspective, but the next big wave of opportunity for cloud providers and IT cloud system administrators is adding visibility and control of those increasingly expansive, decentralized and fluid virtual environments. Best of breed cloud monitoring, management and orchestration will be the name of the game in 2012. (The name of the game in 1980 was Pac-Man.)
Interoperability.
Next year, newer and more open architectures will win over the closed technologies. The cloud era is a rising tide that can float many boats together, rather than a series of siloed technologies that cannot possibly hope to compete adequately on all fronts of technologies that have simultaneously changed. Although there will continue to be multiple standards for APIs, there will be far fewer new API’s, and increasing simplicity to the ability to write into all those API’s.
Operational business intelligence will be used to manage costs and improve efficiencies.
One of the fastest growing uses of cloud computing is for business analytics. Big Data is being used to make decisions to drive leads and sales. However, IT infrastructure can yield data and analytics that can help manage costs as well boost productivity. Analytics helps determine the most efficient way to use human and capital resources, when to upgrade (or if to downgrade) IT infrastructure, and other big questions. Just be careful to double check the math – cloud computing can be our friend, but you never know if they’re secretly controlling your organization in preparation for a robot uprising.
Acquisitions will be about filling out portfolios, less on customer footprints.
Acquisition strategies will focus less on gaining customer footprint and more on what technologies are needed to fill out the portfolios of telcos, social media firms, large systems integrations and managed service providers to help them compete. In short, any company without a complete solution will find themselves at a severe disadvantage, even if they have a short term edge over the competition. Main targets for acquisition will be the cloud on ramp providers, orchestration technologies, security technologies, monitoring and management firms. Most of them will, as usual, be bought by Oracle, a company so acquisition happy it somehow acquired itself in a stock and cash deal in 2007.
Data centers will face increased regulatory scrutiny.
Here’s an interesting fact: 3-5% of all U.S. power usage is being drawn into data centers. Because it is such a major consumer of power, governments cannot afford to ignore the impact cloud computing and virtualization has had on their energy policy, perhaps even making requirements for “Green IT.” (Which, considering the operating expenses of energy costs, are probably a good idea anyway.) Of course, as more countries regulate, and – let’s face it – misregulate computing, there will be a demand for international hosters and service providers.
Now, we’re not the only ones making predictions, and if you’re looking for more Nostradamus-grade goodies, you can check out some of these articles:
Our video conferencing management experts Erik Rudin and Leo Nieuwesteeg are conducting a free webinar tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. EST for anyone wrestling with implementing, managing, and optimizing video conferencing for their end customers (the on demand version will be available here after the 14th). During the webcast, Erik and Leo will discuss the top 10 video management challenges, including deploying video managed services, gaining visibility into performance and availability across multi-vendor environments, bandwidth capacity needs, and troubleshooting.
Who should attend:
IT managers and technical staff in corporate or public sector organizations who are considering or have already implemented video collaboration technology
IT managers who plan to outsource the implementation and ongoing management of video conferencing to a service provider
Service providers who want to add new, differentiated video managed services to their portfolio or optimize the delivery of existing services
Topics to be addressed:
Drivers behind the growth in video conferencing and telepresence system deployments
Potential challenges with video collaboration service delivery and how to mitigate those risks
What IT managers should consider when selecting managed video service providers
Options available to service providers to create high-value managed video service offerings
After December 14, the Webinar will be available on demand at this link: http://bit.ly/v0JCHC
We’ll be making some exciting announcements about our video management capabilities next year, but in the meantime check out our Power Pack for managing video endpoints.
“This one doesn’t add up. I don’t see a huge risk of cybersquatting on top-level domains, or on second-level domains within the new TLDs because:
