Shared resources always seem to bring some benefits when it comes to going green or helping the environment. Car pooling saves on gas and produces less pollution, mass transit systems claim to do the same. So it only makes sense that sharing computing resources and computer pooling would do the same and in fact it does.  The move towards Cloud Computing  will end up not only helping companies save money on their balance sheets but will also allow It Departments to help save the environment.

Right now servers everywhere are whirling away processing orders for online Christmas and Holiday shopping.  Ecommerce companies have been preparing for this all year, making sure their servers can handle peak loads and give shoppers the online experience they expect. So what happens after the holidays have passed and the server loads slow down? Most companies will still be running and maintaining all this equipment until next Holiday season.  It’s not uncommon for most companies to be running their servers at 20% capacity most of the year and while there is a lot of capital and resources (energy included) being used they are providing no economic or environmental benefit at all.

Cloud Computing  solves a huge problem in capital inefficiency and helps companies save energy and the environment, by allowing companies to easily scale up IT resources when demand is high and scale down when activity slows.

Tax season will be apon us soon and in Data Centers all around the world severs that were once confirming shipping address and sending holiday shopping orders will be helping tax preparers get the information they need to help their customers. All the while there are small Green Tech companies that are using shared Cloud resources, allowing them to innovate and do research that would have cost ten times what it does now.

Rich Alessandro

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business. Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. You also benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your relational database instance via a single API call. As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no up-front investments required, and you pay only for the resources you use.

The new Adobe® Flash® Builder™ for Force.com is a jointly developed integrated development environment (IDE) that gives developers a single, powerful tool for building cloud-based rich Internet applications (RIAs), which can easily be deployed to end users through the browser via the Adobe® Flash® Player, or directly to the desktop using the Adobe® AIR® runtime. These applications run seamlessly online or offline while taking full advantage of the security, scalability, and reliability of Force.com. Force.com enables developers to create and deliver any kind of business applications, entirely in the cloud and without software. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce.com implementations or build entirely new applications to provide customized user experiences for any business need.

Read More Here http://developer.force.com/flashbuilder

SAN MATEO, Calif. — October 14, 2009 —NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of cloud computing business management software suites, today announced a new version of NetSuite OneWorld that lets Oracle E-Business Suite enterprise customers enjoy the cost savings and efficiency benefits of cloud-based business suites at the divisional level while retaining current investments in Oracle applications at the corporate level. With NetSuite OneWorld for Oracle, Oracle E-Business Suite customers can use NetSuite’s leading Software as a Service (SaaS) application to manage multinational, multi-subsidiary business operations in real-time and then roll up division-level transaction and summary data to gain a key enterprise-wide view of business operations.

This new offering from NetSuite targets a market opportunity that is gaining significant attention in the current economy as large enterprises struggle to control costs and gain greater efficiencies across key business processes. While some companies spend vast sums on corporate implementations of integrated suites like Oracle, these business software systems often have difficulty delivering the functionality and flexibility needed to manage and drive the multiple divisions that make up today’s typical large multinational corporations.

Read More here http://www.netsuite.com.au/portal/au/press/releases/nlpr10-14-09.shtml

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc said more than 2 million businesses now use its online office software, and the Web search leader is going global on Monday with an advertising campaign to lure customers away from Microsoft Corp and IBM products. The campaign, which starts Monday in countries including France, Japan and Britain, represents a rare foray by Google into mass-market advertising and underscores increasing competition to provide businesses with email and other office software. While Microsoft and International Business Machines Corp dominate the market for enterprise email, Google is trying to convince businesses to switch to its so-called cloud-based services, in which software is accessed over the Internet and maintained at Google’s data centers instead of on a company’s computers. Cloud-based services can provide cost and maintenance savings over traditional software, though recent high-profile outages — including an outage of Google’s Gmail last month — have raised questions about the reliability of online software for business users. Gartner analyst Tom Austin said most businesses will eventually switch to cloud-based email, but the process may take years. He noted IBM and Microsoft have introduced cloud products recently, and that Cisco Systems Inc appears to be preparing to offer its own cloud-based software. On Thursday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told investors during the company’s quarterly earnings conference call he intended to boost investments in new business initiatives. Google’s Apps business — which the company has said is profitable and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year — is a tiny portion of Google’s overall business, which yielded almost $22 billion revenue last year. According to spokesman Andrew Kovacs, its Apps team has doubled over the past year to more than 1,000 employees. Google said Apps is used by 2 million businesses, up from 1.75 million in June. Those include both larger businesses that pay $50 a year per user for Apps, as well as firms with fewer than 50 employees that get the software for free. The company also said there are now 20 million active users of Google Apps, up from 15 million in June, although that number included students who use the free version Google provides to universities. Google’s marketing campaign, which it first rolled out in the United States in August, will feature ads in publications such as The New York Times, Forbes and The Economist, as well as on billboards at airports and train stations in various cities. Google Enterprise Product Marketing Director Tom Oliveri would not say how much Google is spending on the campaign, which runs through 2009. He said the creative part of the campaign was designed in-house by the Google Creative Lab team led by former Ogilvy & Mather executive Andy Berndt. (Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang)

Microsoft announced today up Visual Studio 2010 will have additional testing options for developers to ensure quality code. Microsoft has included built-in tools for Windows 7 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This is the first time that Microsoft has offered specific tools for building applications off of SharePoint. And with Visual Studio, developers can also build applications that cut across both Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure and on-premises databases. Microsoft is making it much easier for developers to build on the Azure cloud with these new tools. The specific Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio let developers build ASP.NET web applications and services that are hosted in Azure’s cloud services operating system. The tools also includes a SDK environment, and a simulated cloud environment that runs on the developer’s machine, so developers can test and debug their applications locally.

Hybrid Cloud Computing models are becoming more acceptable to IT departments. Moving less important applications to cloud services frees up computing resources for peak loads and poses less of a security risk than moving the entire infrastructure outside a company’s walls. A public private cloud mix of sorts is becoming the model of choice at least for some IT organizations. In retail and service sectors that have seasonally variable work loads it makes sense to move some applications to the cloud.

Rich Alessandro

IBM and Canonical are introducing a new, flexible personal computing software package for netbooks and other thin client devices to help businesses in Africa bridge the digital divide by leapfrogging traditional PCs and proprietary software. This is the first cloud- and premise-based Linux netbook software package offered by IBM and Canonical.

Part of IBM’s Smart Work Initiative, the new package targets the rising popularity of low-cost netbooks to make IBM’s industrial-strength software affordable to new, mass audiences in Africa. Businesses that could not afford traditional PCs for all employees can now use any type of device and low-cost software to enable all workers to work smarter anywhere using a variety of devices, regardless of the level of communications infrastructure.  

The IBM Client for Smart Work is now available across Africa and is being piloted for other emerging and growth markets worldwide. The solution includes open standards-based email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, social networking and other software for any laptop, netbook, or a variety of mobile devices. It runs on Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux operating system, and provides the option to deliver collaboration through the Web in a cloud service model. This software bundle can also be extended to virtualized workspaces using VERDE from Virtual Bridges, which is available locally through business partners and voice-based collaboration pilots through IBM Research. IBM estimates that it delivers up to 50 percent savings per seat versus a Microsoft-based desktop.

“Businesses in emerging markets are looking to gain the freedom and flexibility afforded by open standards,” said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software. “The IBM Client for Smart Work builds on the movement toward open standards and Web-based personal computing by giving people the power to work smarter, regardless of device.”

Link to IBM Press release http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/28457.wss

The economics of a cloud infrastructure will give small companies the ability to compete with larger firms on a global scale. Companies will save a lot of money by offloading what has historically been a major expense, to what will amount to a commoditized but very flexible business infrastructure. Because cloud computing applications use the subscription payment model, costs are spread over months or years; they become part of an operating budget instead of a capital budget, and avoid the depreciation costs of capitalized computer equipment. Embracing Cloud computing and SaaS will produce significant cost savings and help drive innovation around workload management.

The dynamic nature of Cloud Computing will give organizations a way to provide the right level of services for strategic initiatives and personal productivity that has never been available before. Commoditized computing capacity and Software Services will also allow IT-Departments to make better decisions of how they use their most valuable commodity , the IT staff themselves.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM are building massive data centers offering computing resources that are scalable and affordable to even the smallest companies. Almost every function of an organization has or will have a SaaS (Software as a Service) option to support it. Collaboration platforms such as WebEx and Salesforce.com will allow companies to increase the speed and efficiency of almost every business processes and allow companies efficient ways to interact with customers.

The appeal of Cloud Computing will inevitable lure all business to leverage some aspects as the pay as you go model , but the advantages offered to smaller companies using Cloud Services may help them lead the way for the near term.

Rich Alessandro

The Obama administration on Tuesday announced their long term cloud computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of government computing systems. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the administration’s first formal efforts to roll out a broad system designed to leverage existing infrastructure and in the process, slash federal spending on information technology, especially expensive data centers.As an example of what’s possible with cloud computing, Kundra pointed to a revamping of the General Services Administration’s USA.gov site. Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5 million a year. But by turning to a cloud computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.

You can see the New Government Cloud Apps Store Here https://apps.gov/cloud/advantage/main/start_page.do