Tag: NaviSite


OpSource Acquisition Aimed at Accelerating Dimension Data's Global Cloud Strategy

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30th June

Dimension Data’s acquisition of OpSource marks the end of an era and illustrates how the Cloud Computing competitive landscape is expanding to encompass every type of tech vendor and service provider.

Although it is only a fraction of the size and has only a fraction of the brand equity of Salesforce.com, OpSource has had a disproportionate impact on the growth of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market and broader Cloud movement.

The company’s CEO, Treb Ryan, has been a tireless evangelist for the business value of SaaS and now the Cloud. He and his staff have invested heavily in educating and facilitating the industry’s growth through an endless stream of webcasts and whitepapers, and founding the industry’s most important annual gathering, the SaaS Summit, now known as “All About the Cloud” and managed by the SIIA.

Rather than simply offer a set of hosting services, OpSource put together … Read More »


Cloud Parade Ambushed by Amazon Outage

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25th April

Plenty of has been written about last week’s disruption of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) which took hundreds of organizations offline, including many rapidly growing start-ups and evolving aspects of enterprise operations.

(The best I’ve read summarizing the questions raised and lessons to be learned as a result of the AWS outage was by my friend Phil Wainewright.)

After suggesting at the beginning of last week that recent issues surrounding Google could derail the rapid growth of Cloud Computing services, it is obvious that Amazon’s problems must be added to the list of sobering events which will certainly cause many entrepreneurs and enterprise decision-makers alike to re-think their Cloud strategies and deployment tactics.

Google’s support issues, combined with Amazon’s service availability problems, clearly make real two of the three greatest fears which IT and business decision-makers face when considering the widening array of Cloud alternatives. The third primal fear … Read More »


Time Warner Cable Buys NaviSite, Illustrates Convergence of B2C and B2B Worlds in the Clouds

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2nd February

Time Warner Cable’s planned acquisition of NaviSite not only intensifies the M&A activity in the managed hosting arena that was ignited last week by Verizon’s purchase of Terremark, it also shows how the corporate and consumer web services markets are converging.

As Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable’s Chairman and CEO, stated in the company announcement, “Our commercial services business is a key growth driver for the company and one in which we continue to see great opportunity.”

Thirty years ago, I was wrapping up a full-time MBA program at Boston College and was fascinated by an article in Data Communications Magazine about the impending diversiture of AT&T and the prospect of new players entering the enterprise data services market. In particular, the article suggested that the rapidly evolving cable companies of that time could capitalize on this opportunity. I pitched a Boston-based … Read More »


Will Service Outages Sink SaaS

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5th January

Salesforce.com gave its customers a belated New Year’s gift of unscheduled downtime yesterday, which extended into today in some regions, according to its Trust.Salesforce.com site.

While many of its corporate users might welcome a respite later in the year, most probably came back to work this week with the idea of pounding on their customer databases to generate new revenue opportunities to kickoff the new year. Being unable to access their online customer relationship management (CRM) system probably didn’t make them too happy.

So, will this service disruption derail Salesforce.com, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and broader cloud computing movement? Only if these isolated incidents evolve into an ongoing pattern of declining performance.

Occasional problems happen. Back in 2007, I predicted that the on-demand services market would continue to soar despite more severe service delivery problems at NaviSite that year, because customers were already becoming convinced they could get a better return on investment … Read More »





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