Big enhancements in Google apps! Check out the details.
GE Capital, Microsoft Join Forces On New Financing For SLED - Government - IT Channel News by CRN
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--> --> --> --> GE Capital earlier this week confirmed a new arrangement with Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) to finance software and equipment sales to state and local governments. The program, which is offered through Microsoft Financing, presents another option for VARs pushing IT sales under tightly-squeezed state and local budgets."For government -- especially state and local government -- funds are tight. There are a lot of projects they want to go after, and they need financing to fuel the purchasing of Microsoft products," said Jim Kelly, general manager for vendor finance at GE Capital. "We've been in the state-and-local financing business for over 20 years, and we have expertise when it comes to resellers and financing in the VAR channel model."
While the economy is starting to pick up, state and local governments remain tightly constrained. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and other Obama Administration programs have promised money to provide IT at the state and local government levels for various projects, but state government administrators continue to wrestle with procurement issues and budget shortfalls.
According to state government watchers like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the National Conference of State Legislatures, as many as 41 U.S. states will end FY 2010 -- which began on July 1, 2009 in most cases -- with new budget gaps and even bigger shortfalls than previously thought.
But that also creates an opportunity for SLED-savvy VARs, Kelly said, to offer demand products and agreeable financing terms to those state and local governments.
"With procurement dollars tight, financing allows a state and local government entity to get something that is digestible and affordable on a monthly payment basis," he said. "With these crazy times, this offers a lot of lubrication to be able to not only buy more product but get the products they want."
Microsoft's name recognition and cache in SLED made it a good decision for GE Capital, Kelly suggested. The financing program launched last month, and according to Kelly, a number of deals for Microsoft services and software had already been confirmed for financing.
The average transaction size, according to GE Capital, is about $900,000. The program has already seen both large transactions in the $500,000 to $1 million range, and small software package deals for branch offices in local governments.
"The pipeline is pretty robust," Kelly said, noting that demand for Microsoft services and software packages was "across the board" for Microsoft offerings, with no one piece of the Microsoft portfolio standing out so far.
"The availability of credit continues to be more robust than it was a year ago," he said. "Capital availability is not only a major concern for state and local governments but for everybody. Things are better than they have been, and we're lending lots of money to small and medium-sized businesses today, but it's not where it was 18 months ago. People are still anxious to have a financing source provide financing to help them sell product."
At the moment, Kelly said, GE Capital has no plans to extend terms to federal government agencies buying Microsoft products, and declined to elaborate further.
via crn.com
Google Apps Offers Migration for Microsoft Exchange - ReadWriteEnterprise
Microsoft has very limited capability to offer a cloud-based email environment. Most of the offerings it provides are locally installed, single-hosting services. Concerns will wane about cloud security. The ability to offer a cloud-based email environment for easy access will be the norm, not the exception. But even though Google has a jump, Microsoft will have its own offering. In the meantime, Google has an opportunity to make another leap into the enterprise.
This does represent a tipping point for many companies shedding IT assets. The question about email often comes up when companies consider moving to the cloud. It's an important part of the migration. In recent weeks, we have seen how email is becoming a foundation for the evolution of a web oriented, social enterprise. Google Apps Marketplace offers the capability to offer third party applications that integrate with Google Apps. Email is a critical part of the equation in this Google ecosystem. It provides a backbone for companies to connect its employees with Google Apps and the associated third-parties.
The process to migrate looks relatively simple. Through Google Apps, a customer enters their Microsoft Exchange user name and what it calls "two-legged OAuth," consisting of a consumer user key and a consumer "secret". They then upload a .CSV file consisting of the email adresses, calendar and contact information. It is optional what to migrate. For example, an IT administrator may upload email addresses and contact data but not the calendar. Email service does not get interrupted during the migration.
This is a compelling offering for companies moving to the cloud. But it's only part of the equation. Google still needs to prove it is robust enough for the enterprise to migrate to Google Apps. In the meantime, Microsoft needs to act fast and provide a cloud offering that at least gives its own community the option to move Microsoft Exchange to the cloud.
via readwriteweb.com
Wyse, Microsoft: Cheap Zero Clients for Schools
Wyse Technology, one of the leaders in thin and zero client computing, has joined forces with Microsoft. The result? A sub-$100 zero client that works with Microsoft MultiPoint Server 2010. Aimed at the education market and keeping costs low, education resellers and VARs may want to listen up.
Christened the “Wyse E01 Zero Client,” it’ll be working exclusively with Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. The server can be as basic as a regular PC in the classroom. It’ll allow up to 10 users to simultaneously access that single computer. (The E01 is not depicted above, but thought to be similar to other Wyse’s zero clients pictured.)
Since it’s low-cost, very easily-managed and contains all the correct licensing for the ’Windows 7 experience,’ computer classrooms can blossom — assuming the solution lives up to Microsoft and Wyse claims.
MultiPoint Server 2010 is a new Microsoft product and it looks like Microsoft is happy to show it off with Wyse. Wyse and Microsoft have aimed to make this pretty straight forward: Wyse zero client simply plugs into the main computer, automatically configures, and enables a student to work immediately.
That’s pretty cool. Plus, it’ll cut down on maintenance and downtime, since technically there’s only one computer to manage per classroom — or at least, per every 10 computers. And then of course, there’s the inevitable ’green’ spin, but in truth, it’s more energy efficient for sure.
Wyse’s E01 Zero Clients have been custom tailored to work with the MultiPoint Server and they’re coming March 2010 specifically for education customers. The price point? A comfortable $99 (and international pricing available shortly.) Some more interesting tid-bits: the E01 is capable of using USB peripherals like your standard keyboard and mouse, but also webcams, USB flash drives, too.
Any takers?
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VDI is hot! Check out a few of the leaders providing elements of the overall solution.
Forecast for 2010: The Rise of Hybrid Clouds – GigaOM
For companies protective of their IT operations and data, wholesale public cloud computing adoption can be a difficult pill to swallow. But cloud momentum is too strong a trend to ignore. Enter the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts, enabling companies to maintain a mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources, both public and private, managed through a common framework to simplify operations. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in 2010.
First, let’s take a look at the reasons leading corporations to consider hybrid clouds, then the means for them to get there. Data security and control are most frequently mentioned as the drivers for corporations to own and manage a portion of their infrastructure. Most corporations have longstanding cultural biases toward keeping core IT assets in-house that are unlikely to change anytime soon.
That said, companies also want to take advantage of public cloud resources. One reason hybrid clouds are proliferating is to enable “cloudbursting,” or the ability to seamlessly and automatically grow workloads into public cloud resources for a period of time, and then decommission them once the heavy loads subside. For industries such as finance and health care, compliance regulations limit the number of public cloud offerings they can use, forcing some of their infrastructure to remain in-house.
Simple negotiating leverage will lead companies not to put all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, and maintaining private infrastructure provides one way to control, although not necessarily minimize, infrastructure costs. Also, the demands of a typical enterprise do not have the wide load swings of web applications, and in the cases where resource demand can be forecasted, owning infrastructure as a financed capital expense can be more advantageous than high monthly operating expenses.
The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate battle between lock-in and unlock. On the large vendor side, VMware has been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualization tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. The company’s vCloud Express initiative allows service providers to offer infrastructure as a service offerings for enterprises while maintaining compatibility with internal VMware deployments.
HP recently announced three offerings aimed at companies using both physical on-premise and cloud servers, including HP Operations Orchestration for provisioning, HP Cloud Assure for cost control, and HP Communications as a Service for service providers to offer small businesses on-demand solutions.
Microsoft has focused its Azure cloud platform on enterprises that can use the same Windows and .NET development frameworks on services internally and on the cloud. See our posts “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line” and “Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?” Even Amazon has started to reach towards hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.”
Approaching the market from another direction is a set of companies and open-source software projects that provide on-premise and public cloud integration. Eucalyptus is perhaps the best known in this category and provides open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.
Open Nebula, an open-source project out of the Distributed Systems Architecture Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, creates a new virtualization layer that “supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources.” And Nimbus, focused primarily on the scientific community, also provides a virtualization framework to help manage cloud deployments for infrastructure as a service.
The good news for enterprises considering hybrid cloud computing deployments is the range of options on the table. From the fully integrated end-to-end solutions like VMware or Azure, to the open-source solutions that provide more choice, the time is right to jump in and benefit from the cost savings, flexibility, and technology advances delivered by hybrid clouds.
via gigaom.com
Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010? – GigaOM
As the ramp-up towards the January launch of Microsoft’s Azure platform reaches a crescendo, it’s worth asking whether the software giant, of all companies, could be the most significant revenue driver for the cloud in 2010. While cloud adoption is practically a foregone conclusion in IT circles, cloud computing revenues still pale in comparison to total corporate IT spending. To drive significant revenue growth in 2010, cloud computing software and service providers need the simplest, fastest ways to move more spending from enterprise deployments to the cloud. And Microsoft, Azure, and the Windows ecosystem could emerge as the catalysts.
In December, Microsoft reorganized by forming a Server and Cloud division, following a slow and steady rollout of Microsoft Azure throughout 2009. The updates included all the usual tactics of getting developers, service providers, and early customers on the bandwagon. In November, Microsoft officials held court at the company’s Professional Developers Conference, seeking to engage the development community. It became clear there that while Azure does not equal Windows, common development frameworks like .NET deliver a more seamless bridge between on-premise and cloud deployments than existed previously.
Microsoft’s cloud emergence is visible elsewhere, too. Amazon recently announced support for Microsoft Server 2008 on EC2, and the company has been offering at least some Windows support since late 2008. In November, Amazon announced support for a software development kit for .NET developers that “provides a set of developer-friendly APIs that hide much of the low-level plumbing associated with programming for the AWS cloud, including authentication, retries, and error handing.” Rackspace has also announced Windows support is coming, with a beta release slated for early 2010.
Other factors are behind Microsoft’s cloud focus as well. One is the Microsoft Service Providers License Agreement (SPLA), which was updated in 2009 to make it easier for service providers to offer Windows options more cost-effectively. While there’s some debate in the service provider community about how the SPLA actually works and whom it benefits, Microsoft has provided more options than in the past, giving cloud service providers better flexibility.
It’s also worth considering the sheer volume of tools and resources that Microsoft is wrapping around Azure. As Stacey outlined in “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line,” there are plenty of tricks up Microsoft’s sleeve for supporting enterprises and service providers, including AppFabric, which “helps developers connect applications and services in the cloud or on-premise.” Microsoft is also going all out to provide interoperability with programming frameworks and software such as Ruby on Rails and MySQL.
Finally, there’s the issue of what enterprises really want from the cloud. While there’s been plenty of discussion about virtualization at both the enterprise and service provider level, Windows commands a far greater footprint than any hypervisor out there. It appears unlikely that many CIOs favor Windows administration as a long-term core competence. Perhaps those CIOs can offload some of their more basic Windows applications directly to the cloud first. That’s just one more way that Microsoft’s business model and dependence on success in the cloud could shift dramatically next year.
Image courtesy of TechFlash Todd on Flickr.
via gigaom.com
Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Google vs Microsoft on the browser, cloud, and mobile platforms
Google is an amazing company, even more so from the inside. To the outside world Google is just search. But Google has made three big bets on the future of computing; Chrome (browser), Google Apps (cloud), and Android (mobile) that will change everything. VentureBeat interviewed me yesterday about my first month at Google.
Vibe – Google is a high energy environment. Lots of smart people with big ideas. Everything is data driven. Decisions are made based on data that has been analyzed, and going forward everything is monitored and measured based on the data. Opinions and “gut feel” are considered too, but in the end, results are measured by data. Even things like travel expense caps for airfares and hotels are data driven. They keep track of every trip taken and the actual costs for airfares and hotels, then establish the caps based on the data.
The Google campus is beautiful, funky, and efficient. There are bicycles everywhere for people to use to get between buildings. In some ways it feels like a college campus, but the intensity level is much higher. Most people sit in open cubes with four or more people in a pod. Offices with doors typically have 2 or 3 people in them. People work in groups and there is a real sense of teamwork everywhere you look.
Perks – Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the gourmet cafes in each building. The food is awesome!! The 401K match is 50% of your contribution up to $8,250. Health plan is pretty good, but not as good as Microsoft’s plan. MSFT pays for everything, no co-pays, no deductibles. Google really caters to employees needs. Onsite dry cleaning service, car washes, Oil changes, ATM, Fitness Centers, Haircuts, Massage, and Concierge services.
Meetings - 30 minutes is the standard, start on time and end early if possible. Video Conferences are pretty standard since the company is geographically distributed. Nearly every conference room has video conference equipment. Everyone uses Google Docs to capture meeting notes, a true example of real time collaboration.
Gmail – The Gmail you all use as consumers is the same email all Google employees use internally. Threaded conversations are a HUGE time saver and help keep things organized. I didn’t really appreciate that feature until my departure from Microsoft when my email inbox was flooded with messages many with the same subject line. Gmail made it easy to manage. Links, not attachments, also ensure that you are always working with the latest version of a file. No more searching for the email with the attachment and then making sure it is the latest version with up to date changes. Offline Gmail makes all your email and attachments available offline. Great for airplanes or travel.
The future of computing – I think Google has made three big bets on the future of computing; Chrome (browser), Google Apps (cloud), and Android (mobile). The trends are pretty clear. All the exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code in the cloud, and the cell phone as the platform. Your cell phone will become your primary computer. I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. Chrome, Google Apps, and Android make this vision possible.
Think about the cell phone you had 10 years ago, in 1999, and compare it to the phone you have today. More power, more memory, better networks, more applications, etc. Now project 5 or 10 years ahead. The vision of your phone as your computer is not far off. You will be able to decide which applications and data you want resident on the phone and which you want in the cloud. You will be able to plug it in anywhere; in an airport, hotel, airplane, office lobby, etc, and have instant access to everything you need.
2010 the turning point - I think 2010 will be the year that enterprises of all sizes start their transition to Gmail and Google Apps, and take their first steps towards the vision of the future. The move towards Cloud Computing is obvious. Gmail and Google Apps are the easy first steps in that direction. The cost savings are enormous,over $500 per user per year. Compare that to buying software licenses and maintenance from the old style software giants, and add the costs of server hardware, and IT managers to run them.
The next 5 years are going to be exciting. There will be big changes in the software industry. I am thrilled to be at Google and look forward to being a small part of the movement to the future of computing.
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A very interesting view from someone who recently left Microsoft to work at Google.
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