I am an Infrastructure-as-a -Service (IaaS) evangelist and having had the pleasure to work with Virtual Data Centre (VDC) during my time at Claranet, I can comprehensively say it is the future of hosting.

I often work with customers to build an ROI model, taking into account all the business benefits gained and all the costs saved.

Often they still turn to me and say:

‘For the same internal resource considered over a 3 year contract your VDC comes out twice as expensive as my on premise servers. I am not convinced all the other benefits are worth that much’

read more

With hosted email steadily becoming the defacto way in which email is delivered to organisations, the market has become saturated with varying providers that offer sliding scales of technology, service and pricing.

Traditionally the hosted email market was the preserve of service providers who partnered with vendors to deliver their service. Increasingly, the growth in the market has seen vendors choose to enter the market directly. The likes of Google, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and VMware all have direct market offerings.

Such strong vendor presence means that it has become a buyer’s market. Google and Microsoft are increasingly turning what was a cold war into a hot war competing aggressively for small and enterprise business. This has also meant that the traditional service provider market is trying to adapt its commercial model to ensure they are competitive with the market’s big beasts.

However, there are number of things that mean that vendors don’t necessarily understand the requirements of the mass of businesses that sit in-between the very small and the very large. Put simply the mid-market is poorly served by vendors. Their inability to focus on migration and service means mid-market customers are left to figure out how they can shoehorn this vendor platform into their business.

read more

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Laozi, 600 BC.

IT is not core business for many companies operating in the UK mid-market, yet IT is instrumental to their success in a highly competitive market place. Very often IT teams are under resourced and under invested.

As a board becomes more aware of the benefits of IT, their demands and expectations can lead to knee-jerk reactions and unreal expectations. It quickly becomes clear that a transformation programme is required to bring IT to be an enabler for growth, delivering improved efficiency, access to new markets and employee flexibility – the list is endless and still growing. But the IT team is already over stretched and locked in a daily battle just to ‘keep the lights on.’ Sometimes it is easy to lay the blame at the door of the IT department. Whilst the perception that IT is not delivering may be unfair, it is likely a reality.

read more

I heard a statistic from a leading vendor last week that said 80% of all unified communications projects fail. As someone who tries to help organisations truly embrace the transformational opportunity that exists with UC I was shocked by this statistic.

The biggest problem I see for those 80% of UC projects is that it is seen as a technology initiative. It isn’t. Technology is of course key, but a successful unified communications project must consider so much more than infrastructure, servers and software.

To ensure your project is truly transformational you must look outside the technology and at how this project will and should affect people, process and communication. I believe many projects fail before they start, but asking some very basic questions can avert this:

read more

A sorry state of affairs

Number porting may not be the most exciting subject in world but it is clearly important to many businesses, and as a blog topic it is sexier than a piece about the intricacies of rating call usage. Let’s face it, the current state of affairs is a mess. Back in 1996 when the industry (and I mainly mean BT) was told that number portability was to be a right for all customers the UK telecoms industry blazed a trail. It took almost a decade for most of our EU neighbors to catch up. However, since these halcyon days a climate of inefficiency and disappointment has prevailed.

The average time to port in the UK takes 2 days, but what that figure doesn’t take into account is the arduous processes put in place by the major telcos. The process from beginning to end can and does take weeks. Conversely, the average time to port in the USA, Canada, Israel and Australia is under 3 hours. We are most definitely getting something wrong as an industry.

Number portability was put in place to provide choice to both businesses and consumers, allowing them to take advantage of new market entrants and technologies in an exciting deregulated world. Instead it has become a minefield of processes, industry acronyms and (in my own personal opinion) stalling tactics from major telcos often to prevent churn.

My personal plea to OFCOM is this: make change happen and keep in mind the business consumers who are the lifeblood of our industry.

read more

Since 2008 industry experts have been predicting an explosion in desktop virtualisation. To cater for this predicted demand many companies built platforms.

The reality is that the numbers predicted by Gartner – 40% of all corporate desktops virtualised by 2013 – have failed to materialise. Hosted Desktop has not become ubiquitous. But there are thousands of companies using and enjoying the benefits of Hosted Desktop services, who would never go back to the traditional model. There is an ever growing market for these services and while industry predictions were over optimistic, in both scale and time frame, the reality is people are moving to the Hosted Desktop model.

read more

The advent of high speed broadband services has always been a hot topic amongst our partners, customers and the media at large. ADSL Max and ADSL2+ are great technologies which BT has rolled out to most of the UK. But, having recently moved to a fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection myself, it dawned on me that some of the features it offers are a real game changer for organisations wanting to enable or further improve connectivity to remote home office users. Interestingly this has nothing to do with the part of the service everyone seems so focused on: the download speed.

read more

The mid-market is a great opportunity for any new technology and no doubt we have all seen the J curves for future uptake of cloud services, just as we saw them for mobile, VOIP, smart phones etc.

The bottom end of the market has engaged – with little choice – based on low cost or free offerings; while enterprise organisations can pay for whatever fits a business case and can show an ROI within 36 months.

In contrast, the mid-market is notoriously resistant to change or spending money unless there is a problem to solve or a very quick ROI – usually in a period less than 12 months.

read more

Most websites contain both static content and dynamic content, a combination that can really slow down user experience.

Of course, you want to avoid this slow-down at all costs and improve your user experience which can be achieved by scaling the web layer.

You might think to throw more server instances at the issue, though ultimately this is both ineffective cost-wise, and eventually not scalable.

Fear not, however, there is a solution, and it’s called caching.

read more

If you lack control over the performance and reliability of the network that connects you to the cloud capability, then no amount of resilience and technical wizardry on the part of your cloud provider will be of any value at all.

Typically, cloud providers do not own or provide the network connection. Net neutrality on the public internet backbone means that neither you nor your cloud provider will have any control over how your data packets are handled. If someone or something suddenly uses more bandwidth than expected, you may see a significant degradation of your application performance. If the application in question is mission-critical this could have a serious impact on the business. The importance of the network to cloud services means that a strong Service Level Agreement (SLA) and appropriate monitoring are vital in order to maintain optimal business continuity.

Reliance upon the network for access and application performance makes it essential to find a cloud infrastructure provider that understands and has expertise in networking and IT security. An Integrated Cloud Provider can deliver both the cloud resources and a fully controlled network. This means that you can set priorities on your traffic, as the link is direct from your in-house network fabric straight to the cloud provider, with no reliance on the public internet or an intermediate ISP. So as part of your cloud agreement, you can reserve a certain minimum network capacity for each of your mission critical applications.

read more