Archive for July, 2010

Newer Entries »

Research Report: Microsoft Partners – Before Adopting Azure, Understand the 12 Benefits And Risks

Published on July 11, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

It’s All About The Cloud At WPC10

Attendees at this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2010 in Washington, D.C. already expect Windows Azure development to be a key theme throughout this annual pilgrimage.  Microsoft has made significant investments into the cloud.   Many executives from the Redmond, WA, software giant have publicly stated that 90% of its development will be focused on the Cloud by 2012.  Delivery of the Cloud begins with the Azure platform which includes three main offerings:

  1. Microsoft Windows Azure
  2. Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services)
  3. Microsoft Windows Azure Platform: AppFabric (formerly .NET Services).

Therefore, Microsoft partners must determine their strategy based on what part of the cloud they plan to compete in and which Azure services to leverage.  As with any cloud platform, the four layers include infrastructure, orchestration, creation, and consumption (see Figure 1):

  • Infrastructure. At a minimum, Windows Azure provides the infrastructure as a service.  Data center investments and the related capital expense (capex) is replace with oeprational expenses (opex).  Most partners will take advantage of Azure at the infrastructure level or consider alternatives such as Amazon EC2 or even self provision hosting on partner servers and hardware.
  • Orchestration. Microsoft Windows Azure Platform: AppFabric delivers the key “middleware” layers.  AppFabric includes an enterprise service bus to connect across network and organizational boundaries.  AppFabric also delivers access control security for federated authorization.  Most partners will leverage these PaaS tools.  However, non-Microsoft tools could include advanced SaaS integration, complex event processing, business process management, and richer BI tools.  The Windows AppFabric July release now supports Adobe Flash and Microsoft SilverLight.
  • Creation. Most partners will build solutions via VisualStudio and Microsoft SQL Azure (formerly SQL Services).  Other creation tools could include Windows Phone7 and even Java.  Most partners expect to use the majority of tools from Microsoft and augment with third party solutions as needed.
  • Consumption. Here’s where partners will create value added solutions for sale to customers.  Partners must build applications that create market driven differentiators.  For most partners, the value added solutions in the consumption layer will provide the highest margin and return on investment (ROI).

.NET:.NET (tongue and cheek here) – Microsoft partners and developers can transfer existing skill sets and move to the cloud with ease, once Microsoft irons out the business model for partners on Azure.

Figure 1. Partners Must Determine Which Layer To Place Strategic Bets

screen-shot-2010-03-22-at-105927-pm

More…

RSS feed for comments on this post. — TrackBack URL

Tuesday’s Tip: Applying The Five Stages Of Adoption Towards SCRM Projects

Published on July 5, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

Social CRM Faces Initial Adoption Hurdles From Management

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the “Five Stages of Grief” in her book, On Death and Dying. These five stages can be summed up as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  When applied to disruptive technology adoption by organizations, the “Five Stages” framework provides clear insight in anticipating how likely an organization is ready to embrace change.  Recent conversations with line of business operations managers about Social CRM identify both lack of awareness and high levels of internal resistance towards adoption.  In a recent phone and in-person survey of 31 front office operations owners (i.e. sales executives, support executives, and COO’s) about their attitudes on Social CRM, 67.7% (i.e. 21/31) expressed denial, 16.1% (i.e. 5/31) felt anger, and 9.6% (i.e. 3/31) experienced bargaining, 3.2% (i.e. 1/31)  encountered depression, and 3.2% (i.e. 1/31) achieved acceptance (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Most Front Office Executives Live In Denial About SCRM


More…

RSS feed for comments on this post. — TrackBack URL

Thursday’s Disruptive Tech Showcase: RainStor Tackles The Tough Challenges Of Information Preservation

Published on July 1, 2010 by R "Ray" Wang

Organizations Facing The Big Data Problem Must Solve The TCO Of Data Retention

The explosion in data volumes from terabytes to petabytes (i.e. 1 quadrillion bytes) drives many organizations to identify cost effective solutions for the retention and on demand retrieval of historical data.  More importantly, organizations must meet a plethora of changing business and compliance requirements.  RainStor’s solution focuses in on the retention of read-only or inactive structured data.  The solution delivers the “Three R’s” of fundamental data management capabilities for its customers by:

  • Reduction. Effective storage requires secure but accessible data reduction that can encapsulate data without loss in content or structure.  RainStor can take structured data sources such as log files, database, and event data and compress to a 40:1 ratio into containers of discrete files.  This means up to a 97% savings in storage costs.  On top of the compression, RainStor de-duplicates data values and detects patterns so values only need to be stored once.  This means information is stored in a tree structure while still maintaining a full representation of the original records.  The result – in repetitive transactions such as call data logs and stock transactions, storage costs drop by geometric proportions (see Figure 1).
  • Retention. Compliance rules create unnecessary complexity in managing retention and purge parameters.  Data in the RainStor solution follows existing policies and remains “as-is” or immutable.  The system preserves the original structure of the stored records.  Users gain control in managing compliance rules and can even store the data in an unstructured data solution such as EMC Centera.  The solution utilizes commodity storage systems and doesn’t require specialized DBA skills.  Organizations can keep their SAN, NAS, DAS, CAS, or even go with cloud storage options.
  • Retrieval. Existing systems remain challenged in preserving schema evolution and often lose context after upgrades from release to release.  In RainStor, the system stores schema and tables to be able to search back in a point in time.  By addressing schema evolution, any changes to new fields, tables, and columns are preserved and present the exact representation of the data regardless of query style.  As an extension repository, RainStor does not store in relational format and can instead point to a SQL statement.  Furthermore, organizations can retrieve data through SQL and BI tools such as ODBC/JDBC at RDBMS performance levels or better

Figure 1.  RainStor Applies Data De-duplication To Reduce Storage Costs

Source: RainStor

More…

RSS feed for comments on this post. — TrackBack URL

« Newer Posts