Tag: Infrastructure-as-a-Service


Overcoming the Pitfalls of Today’s IaaS Price Wars – A Guest Commentary in SearchAWS

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7th January

One of the major trends of the past year has been the escalating price competition among the leading infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft. While this race to the bottom has garnered a lot of attention and generated more interest in the cost benefits of commodity cloud services, it has also enticed a growing number of businesses to make unsuccessful moves to the cloud that could adversely affect the future direction of the cloud marketplace. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives regarding this important issue which can adversely affect the growth of the Cloud marketplace in SearchAWS.



HP to Sponsor and Speak at Third Annual Cloud Channel Summit on November 4

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17th October

Sanjay Sharma, Director of Business Development for HP Cloud has agreed to participate in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Industry Roundtable at the third annual Cloud Channel Summit on Monday, November 4, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

HP Cloud is also the latest sponsor to support the Summit which provides a peer-to-peer, networking forum for executives focused on building successful partnerships in the Cloud.

The IaaS Industry Roundtable will discuss – Creating New Customer Opportunities via Cloud Partnerships, and be moderated by Andy Schroepfer, Founder & CEO, Big Cloud Sales. The following industry executives are also participating in the Roundtable session:

Tom Halle, Sr. Director, Global Alliances, Savvis/CenturyLink
Nikesh Kalra, Global Cloud Services, Equinix
Brian Matsubara, Head of Global Technology Alliances, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Sean McCaffery, Vice President of Channel Sales and Operations, ViaWest

Click here to save $150 off current pre-conference registration rates!

The IaaS Industry Roundtable is one of a series of highly interactive panel sessions during the Cloud Channel Summit which will give participants a unique opportunity to … Read More »



Third Annual Cloud Channel Summit to Focus on New SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Big Data & SMB Partner Opportunities

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14th August

The agenda for this year’s Cloud Channel Summit on Monday, November 4 has been designed to focus on the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Big Data and Small-/Mid-Size Business (SMB) partner opportunities in the Cloud. Register now and save $100 on the conference registration fee!

The third annual Summit will once again take place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, and this year will include a special “Speed Networking” session to give attendees additional time to meet others interested in establishing new partnerships to expand their Cloud ecosystems.

Click here to see the full Summit agenda, and here to see the speakers who have already committed to participate in this year’s event.

CallidusCloud, Corent Technologies, CorSource Technology Group, Oracle, Salesforce.com and SoftServe are returning as sponsors supporting this year’s peer-to-peer, executive networking forum. Click here to learn more about the sponsors, and here to see the Summit partners.

Click here if you haven’t attended a … Read More »



IT’s Time for PaaS is Here

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18th June

It was about ten years ago when a new generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) alternatives started to gain acceptance and adoption among organizations of all sizes. And, it has only been about five years since Amazon Web Services captured the attention of the marketplace with its Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 offerings which opened the door to a vast array of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. Now, the third piece of the Cloud Computing puzzle is beginning to win over organizations seeking to build their own apps – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

While SaaS and IaaS solutions have experienced exponential growth and are forecast to continue to displace traditional, on-premise software and systems, PaaS has remained a relatively dormant segment of the Cloud marketplace. The lack of adoption of the various PaaS alternatives which have emerged over the past few years has been understandable. Organizations could … Read More »



Worry About Your SaaS, Not Your IaaS

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28th July

A combination of macro-market forces is driving companies of all sizes to adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to better support their employees, serve their customers and coordinate with their business partners. These forces are also attracting a proliferation of players and creating intense competition which makes it increasingly important for SaaS vendors to focus on their core competency – creating clearly differentiated software solutions – rather than deal with the complexities of managing their own service delivery infrastructures in a highly volatile marketplace.

Click here to read my recent blogpost, published on behalf of Rackspace, that outlines why SaaS companies should partner with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers to handle their service delivery requirements so they can focus on their core business of developing and marketing successful SaaS solutions.



Verizon vs. Amazon In the Clouds

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15th September

Verizon unveiled a new cloud computing offering yesterday, the latest in its series of “Computing as a Service” (CaaS) packages, aimed at small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).

The real target of the announcement is Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has pioneered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) frontier that has redefined the way computing power is packaged and delivered to the marketplace.

Although AWS hasn’t threatened to enter the telecom business, like Google, its success in the cloud computing market has raised the bar for telcos who have been laboring in the hosting business for many years.

AWS’s claim to fame in the cloud computing arena has been the hyper-elasticity and minuscule price-points of its IaaS solutions, which are bolstered by a myriad of third-party tools vendors. These services have primarily appealed to tech-savvy users, large and small, willing to cobble together these on-demand, online resources to meet their situational computing needs.

Verizon is … Read More »


Caspio Wins THINKstrategies' First Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Award

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13th April

THINKstrategies announced yesterday that Caspio, Inc. has been named the first winner of the new Cloud Computing Business Value (CCBV) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s cloud computing solutions.

The CCBV Awards program was announced in January 2010 to recognize Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers delivering tangible business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits include lower costs, faster deployment times, greater profitability, etc.

The Award program builds on the success of THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program which was initiated in 2009.

Caspio provides an on-demand, do-it-yourself, web application creation PaaS which replaces coding with intuitive point-and-click wizards, enabling users to rapidly produce web database components for capturing, publishing, and managing data online. Caspio’s customers range from one-person entrepreneurs to Fortune-500 corporations, digital media giants, government agencies, and educational institutions.

Click … Read More »


Key Competitive Battlefields in the Clouds in 2010

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3rd January

As the new year and decade get underway, here are a few of the areas of the cloud computing market which I think will be important competitive battlefields for established and emerging players:

Collaboration Wars: Collaboration is the ‘killer app’ in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) segment of the cloud computing market. The rapid adoption of Google Apps has demonstrated the latent demand for these web-based solutions. Now, IBM is promoting the enterprise-class qualities of its LotusLive offering to win a share of the market. Cisco Systems is also intensifying its efforts to promote its collaboration solutions built around WebEx and Telepresence. I also think Microsoft will accept a greater level of cannibalization of its Office products to win a bigger share of the collaboration market with OfficeLive.
Business-Oriented Social Networks: These are closely linked to collaboration and have gained a tremendous amount of attention because of the explosive growth … Read More »





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