Tag: managed services


The Emergence of Managed IoT Services – A Guest Commentary in E-Commerce Times

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13th May

With every market forecast predicting rapid growth of the overall Internet of Things (IoT), industry and investor focus shifts to specific market segments that will experience the quickest adoption. While most of the attention is on particular applications and technologies, I think managed IoT services will be one of the biggest market opportunities.

One of the greatest challenges standing in the way of widespread IoT adoption is the lack of skills and experience to evaluate, acquire and integrate all the piece parts necessary to assemble an IoT deployment. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in E-Commerce Times regarding how these forces will fuel the emergence of a new generation of IoT managed services.



Overcoming Cloud Complexity with a New Breed of Managed Services – A Guest Blogpost

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23rd November

One of the ultimate ironies about today’s Cloud Computing environment is that the proliferation of Cloud services is making it more complicated to take advantage of the new generation of ‘on-demand’ capabilities that were once expected to make IT simpler and more economical. As a result, many organizations are turning to proven managed cloud service providers to bring order to all the confusion.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives regarding this market trend in our guest blogpost hosted by Cloudnexa.



EMC Acquires Virtustream to Offer Enterprise-Class Managed Cloud Services – A Guest Commentary in Sandhill.com

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28th May

The proliferation of cloud services is making it increasingly difficult for organizations to capitalize on the cloud promise of more flexible and less-costly computing resources than those found in traditional on-premises corporate data centers.

EMC’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Virtustream aims to rectify this issue by offering a new set of sophisticated managed cloud services to its enterprise customers.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ analysis of the industry implications of the Virtustream acquisition in Sandhill.com.



How to Select the Right Provider to Optimize Application Performance – A Whitepaper Published on Behalf of PTC

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12th December

Businesses of all sizes across nearly every industry are racing to adopt new strategies and solutions to achieve corporate objectives in the face of unprecedented market and competitive pressures.

In this context, moving business applications and processes to the cloud has become an increasingly common approach to lower costs and address changing business requirements.

Although there are numerous cloud services providers available, many organizations struggle to select the right partner and to procure, deploy, and administer the right cloud services to meet their application management needs.

To improve their chances of success, THINKstrategies has seen many business and IT decision-makers gravitate toward cloud services organizations that can provide not only the infrastructure functionality they need, but also a full lifecycle of application management services.

This more integrated approach to cloud services can enable organizations to achieve greater application reliability, security, and performance to satisfy … Read More »


ISV Migration to the Cloud via Managed Services – A Guest Commentary in Sandhill.com

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28th May

In one of my recent commentaries in Sandhill.com, I discussed the growing opportunities incumbent software vendors (ISVs), especially publicly traded ISVs, have to move their applications to the cloud and offer a new generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions to their customers. Click here to read about one path I think provides particular promise to those ISVs that are concerned about cannibalizing their installed base of perpetual license customers and disrupting their existing business models in Sandhill.com.



Traversing the Clouds

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2nd November

Last week’s travels took me from Boston to Washington, DC, for NetworkWorld’s latest stop of the IT Roadmap and then on to San Jose, CA , for the SIIA’s OnDemand conference.

In DC, I had the privilege of presenting in the Convention Center’s main ballroom THINKstrategies’ perspectives regarding cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and managed services.

A year ago, less than 50 people attended my breakout session on this topic as these new services were just beginning to hit the radar-screens of government agencies as they anticipated the arrival of the newly elected Obama administration.

Last week, the number of attendees in my session was over twice the previous year’s total, the latest milestone in a steady rise which I’ve seen throughout 2009 of both public sector and commercial interest in on-demand alternatives to on-premise systems and software.

In the case of these government-oriented attendees, … Read More »


Can HP Assure the Cloud?

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2nd April

HP unveiled a new Cloud Assure program this week, in conjunction with SaaScon, which responds to the growing concerns among enterprise decision-makers about the availability, security and performance of today’s rapidly evolving cloud computing services.

I think HP’s announcement is timely because enterprise IT/business decision-makers are interested in taking advantage of the burgeoning cloud computing opportunities, but apprehensive re: the reliability, accessibility and security (RAS) of these services. As a result, they’re looking for cloud computing services which give them a greater level of manageability, visibility and control.

HP is betting that it can capitalize on its the web monitoring services and skills it acquired in its Mercury Interactive deal, and its corporate brand equity as a network/system management (NSM) vendor to establish a strong position in the cloud computing management market.

HP’s biggest obstacle to success is that it isn’t considered a leading cloud computing … Read More »


U.S. Schools and Government Promoting SaaS and Cloud Computing

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6th March

Among my predictions for 2009, was that the new Obama administration would push legislation and take other initiatives to promote Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing as part of its overhaul of the government and economic stimulus efforts.

Sure enough, Obama’s new CIO–Vivek Kundra–made it clear yesterday that he is a big proponent of SaaS and cloud computing. Here’s what he said to the Wall Street Journal,

“I’m a big believer in disruptive technology. If I went to the coffee shop, I would have more computing power than the police department. Consumers had better technology than the government did. I’m all about the cloud computing notion. I look at my lifestyle, and I want access to information wherever I am. I am killing projects that don’t investigate software as a service first.”

Support for SaaS and cloud computing isn’t only coming from the top … Read More »


Savvis First Managed Services Winner of BoSS Award

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5th March

Savvis, Inc. has been named the first managed services winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations, including increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Savvis is an outsourcing provider of managed computing and network infrastructure for IT applications. A case example of the business benefits of Savvis’ services is Wall Street Systems, a provider of treasury, trading and settlement software, which decided in 2006 to make a strategic shift in direction and move from a standard licensing model to the new SaaS delivery model.

Click here to learn more … Read More »


More SaaS-Enabled Managed Services

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1st March

I recently published a column in E-Commerce Times discussing the growing interest and adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools among IT professionals seeking to better manage their increasingly complex IT environments.

Two announcements during the past week illustrate the growing convergence of the SaaS and managed services industries as well, a trend which I’ve been talking about for the past two years.

The first of these announcements came from ManageEngine which unveiled a free beta of its new SaaS-based network, systems and security management software capabilities.

ManageEngine is a quiet giant in the IT management industry with over 37,000 companies utilizing its traditional software solutions. It is also a subsidiary of India-based, AdventNet, Inc., which also owns Zoho, the increasingly popular SaaS office productivity solution provider.

While ManageEngine’s new OpManager On-Demand offerings do not currently include the Zoho tools, they capitalize on the same service delivery infrastructure and SaaS … Read More »





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