Cobweb Solutions Web Hosting Provider, Selected by QuantaSol

Website hosting and Internet access provider, Cobweb Solutions, has been selected by privately-held developer of third generation solar cells, QuantaSol, to manage its messaging and email systems.

Sue Sparkes, Commercial Manager, QuantaSol, noted, ''As a small start up company we do not have our own IT personnel who could take care of our email system for us. Also, we used to be in managed offices, where physically locating a server would have been difficult. Even though we have since moved, and have physical space, it makes more sense to outsource to Cobweb. Their support is great, very responsive and patient.''

Cobweb's fully outsourced IT service, QuantaSol's staff can access email when they are on the road, synchronising these messages with office desktops, laptops and other mobile devices at their Kingston-upon-Thames headquarters and co-ordinate calendars and tasks.

Before implementing the Cobweb solution, QuantaSol relied on a rudimentary email-only service with POP3/IMAP access, supplied by its website host. Staff could only access Microsoft Outlook locally, making it impossible to read email while on the go. And since QuantaSol is a small start-up with no systems administrator, implementing Microsoft Exchange Server in-house was not a feasible option.

QuantaSol's Cobweb solution incorporates Microsoft Hosted Exchange, Email Archival and Fetch PC Backup. And because the solution is delivered through software-as-a-service, very little IT resource is required, with updates and fixes included automatically. Cobweb's Hosted Microsoft Exchange also features highly effective anti-virus and anti-spam filters, which protect employees from malicious and irritating spam emails.

Mark Adams, Managing Director, Cobweb Solutions remarked, ''Outsourcing email and IT makes complete sense for a small business; it's reliable, completely scalable and guarantees a quality service that will never let them down. With Cobweb's Hosted Microsoft Exchange service, QuantaSol can concentrate on running their business in the knowledge that their IT infrastructure won't let them down.''

Cobweb is one of Europe's leading providers of hosted Microsoft Exchange services since 1996. Cobweb is ISO27001,ISO9001 and ISO14001 accredited, and is a Microsoft Gold Partner with five core competencies. The company offers managed services including Hosted Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint with mobile and archival solutions, web and SaaS hosting, and white-label hosting for reseller and referral partners.

Cobweb Solutions Limited was formed in 1996 to provide hosted and internet based services to small and medium sized businesses. With data centres in London and Fareham, more than 40,000 customers benefit from managed email services, website hosting and internet access, with quality assured support and guaranteed service levels. Cobweb is Europe's leading provider of Hosted Microsoft Exchange solutions with over 2,000 business customers. Around 50% of Cobweb's business comes via indirect channels. The company is the approved supplier of Internet Services to members of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). In addition, BT, Telewest Business, Eircom and Regus are amongst the partners who resell its Hosted Microsoft Exchange solutions. Cobweb Solutions is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, the Microsoft EMEA Hosting Service Provider of the Year 2004 and is both ISO9001 and ISO27001 Certified.

 

For more information, please visit: www.cobweb.com

Sun eyes cloudware position

Sun Microsystems is gunning for the cloud space and eyeing, in particular, the position of being a platform provider.

Speaking at a media session Tuesday, Matt Thompson, senior director, developer cloud tools at Sun, said the company intends to be a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, that is, to provide the underlying facilities supporting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

This is distinguished from providing the infrastructure for the cloud such as data centers, which is a further basic layer in the cloud structure.

Thompson, four months into his role in Sun's cloud division, explained that the company had recently reshuffled to focus on the cloud space.

"The key to [succeeding in] the cloud computing business is to be a platform," he said.

He brought up Windows Azure as an example of a competitor eyeing the PaaS position. Azure is Microsoft's cloud-friendly version of its Windows OS, designed to run over the Internet from Microsoft's data centers.

Azure is positioned as an alternative platform for developers, allowing them to write programs outside of their business' servers.

Sun's OpenSolaris OS is also targeted toward the developer community, as a test bed for programs. "It will take more magic than [Azure] for Microsoft to be a platform provider though," Thompson said, adding that OpenSolaris was a better candidate because of added administrative tools, such as its ZFS filesystem.

Sun hopes OpenSolaris will be its entry point into the PaaS scene, by courting developers. Its Sun Tech Days conference is aimed at warming developers to the platform, by educating them on Sun's technology such as Java and Solaris.

"There is a demand for new developers to learn how to deploy apps through the cloud. And there is a huge demand for elastic compute power, even in large enterprises," said Thompson.

Jeff Jackson, senior vice president, Solaris Engineering, Sun, said: "A lot of financial institutions' IT departments will pay for a test bed to run a pilot outside of the network, if it is reliable. Small development firms too want to see if their apps will scale."

Jackson estimates there are some 250,000 registered OpenSolaris users, with "hundreds of thousands" active users.

He is targeting the number of registered users to go up to a million by the end of this year, with that number further multiplied next year, he said.

The technology opportunity

As the downturn bites we're starting to see big differences between the behaviour of established larger enterprises and that of smaller businesses and startups.

Over the Christmas break I've been doing quite a bit of reading, not of all it happy. One report was Goldman Sachs' IT spending survey, which predicts a spending fall of 5% across the developed world.

This report confirms trends that are already noticeable here in Australia and we can expect this to accelerate during the year as the downturn bites.

One conclusion of Goldman's is this will favour the large incumbent IT industry players such as Microsoft and Symantec while working against the newer technologies such as software-as-a-service (SAAS), web 2.0 and open source software.

As the big end of town focus on their core activities they will see experimenting with new methods and technologies as a distraction. It's far safer to stick with what currently works even if it is just "good enough".

For smaller and newer businesses SAAS, web 2.0 and open source offer flexibility and cost savings that are not only essential to survival but also allow them to exploit the niches and market opportunities that will develop over the next few years.

This difference between small and big businesses' reactions to the downturn is going to be true right across the board. Apart from getting debt levels and unnecessary costs down, what works for big business will be very different to SMEs and start ups.

While the big incumbent players need to focus on their core markets, the smaller and newer operators have to be fast to spot opportunities, grab them and become the incumbent player in that niche before larger competitors even know that niche exists.

Some of today's small businesses will the giants of the next economic boom, and many of the success stories will be because they embraced the new tools and technology available to them which allowed them to see and exploit the opportunities in the years ahead.

How to Cut Expenses with Technology

Just in case you didn't get the memo, it's official: you have to cut costs now. Here are seven ways technology can help. They may not apply to every situation, but you should at least consider them for your company.

1. Choose software as a service (SAAS)

Don't spend time and money developing your own new application or purchasing an on-premise system unless you absolutely have to. Salesforce.com is the poster child for SAAS success, but today almost every application area has SAAS options available. The benefits of no capital outlay, immediate implementation and minimal internal support requirements are well known.

What is less appreciated is that SAAS systems are accessible from anywhere, allowing remote and/or home working to an extent not possible with on-premise systems that require a separate, expensive and sometimes unreliable VPN to be used remotely. This can cut down on unnecessary travel.

2. Go virtual

Do you still need to manage some in-house applications? Then look at virtualization. Audit your racks of equipment for utilization and combine under-utilized servers onto a single machine with virtualization. An alternative take on this is to simply launch new services on Virtualized Private Servers (VPS). If they are successful and demand soars, turn up the VPS or bring it in-house. Either way you win, since you control your costs from the get-go.

3. Use Web conferencing

Only five years ago, Web conferencing was a hit-and-miss affair. Loading up the software took forever. Once (and if) loaded, it often failed to cut through the corporate firewall, resulting in a user experience that was not unlike slogging through an unabbreviated version of "War and Peace." Today, that has all changed. Today's Web conferencing works well. With high bandwidth the norm rather than the exception, participating in a Web conference is as interactive as being physically present—and at an infinitesimally small fraction of the cost of air travel.

4. Or don't use Web conferencing

One of my employees used to conduct analyst updates by e-mailing the presentation in advance and then stepping through it over the phone ("Now go to the next slide, you should now be on slide 5", etc.). This works surprisingly well. Realistically, almost everybody in business has PowerPoint and if not, you can convert to PDF. This approach is for those who are truly strapped, because the cost is so low and the productivity benefit so tangible.

5. Use voice over IP (VOIP)

Use VOIP services rather than telephone. This doesn't work in all cases and does require high bandwidth. For most companies though, there is little reason not to use VOIP for internal calls at least. This is especially important for international calls. Another alternative is Skype. If you're not familiar with Skype, ask your kids for a demo. Quality varies from call to call but it's free.

6. Choose the right freeware

It's tempting, and it seems counterintuitive not to take advantage of any free services that are available, but beware. The issues with free services are that you have no practical legal control or redress if something goes wrong, and "free-to-you" usually means "advertising-supported-to-them."

For example, GoogleApps analyze your content to target their advertisements. That means losing all privacy—and that could cost you the company.

7. Ignore obsolescence

Just because a computer is old doesn't mean it's useless. I remember once being struck that Fry's—a famous electronics store here in Silicon Valley—had running for its stock control system an old, character-based DOS application running on an equally-decrepit early 1990s vintage PC. It looked incongruous next to all the shiny new PCs and Macs.

But if all you want is to answer the customer question "Do you have a XXX-3452 in stock?", then this computer works just fine. The collective cold shoulder that business has given to Microsoft's Vista is a good example of this happening today, but you can take it further. Too many technology investments are made on emotional rather than financial grounds. Be especially wary of true but irrelevant statements such as "But it's now more than 15 years old."

Virtualization Expo: Citrix Sets Out To Change Desktop Economics

Citrix claims that CIOs want to stop supplying their companies' employees with computers and make it a "bring-your-own" affair so they can shed the cost of the hardware and the headaches of support.

And Citrix says that its newfangled "Project Independence" will see that BYOC vision realized and radically change desktop economics, a move Microsoft will reportedly support.

 

Project Independence is the end result of Citrix' move to develop what it calls the first enterprise-class Xen-based client-side virtualization, image management and delivery scheme optimized for Intel's vPro virtualization technology, the stuff in Intel's current and future Core 2 desktop and Centrino 2 laptop chips.

Product availability is set for the second half of this year from PC OEMs and Citrix directly, and involves the creation of a bare metal hypervisor that's supposed to overcome the limitations of current so-called "Type-2" hypervisors and server-based streaming solutions.

The coming Citrix widgetry, described as a "small embedded component," is supposed to "dramatically" lower the cost of desktop management by offering users centralized desktop virtualization that doesn't chintz on rich, personalized performance, security, mobility or scalability and supports multiple OS images.

Citrix and Intel are supposed to have a collaboration agreement but their arrangement doesn't require Intel to do much of anything except make accommodations in its chipsets' firmware if and when it should be required. At this point Citrix is just piling on what exists in the marketplace - including machines that already have an operating system installed.

Anyway, getting back to this Project Independence business, Citrix, whose research found 75% of business PCs are used for personal reasons, imagines organizations offering employees a stipend toward their purchase of, say, a laptop - whichever one they want.

It imagines employees not having to buy a home computer because their business machine will support both an open, loosely managed personal image and a locked-down, tightly managed corporate image complements of its "Type-1" hypervisor.

The data center will stream down a policy-based corporate desktop, and all related applications, into a secure, "100%" isolated client-based virtual machine. The data will be on both the data center servers and the widget's local drive so the user can work offline and tap into the device's native performance and graphics.

The data will automatically update once a connection is restored and software upgrades, those corporate bogeymen, will be managed centrally. Since the user's personal settings are isolated from the OS and the apps they won't interfere, as they often do, with upgrades.

The corporate desktop will also be accessible from any device. Citrix calls it "desktop as a service," promising that laptops will "feel brand new everyday" and be instantly on.

Citrix claims that this scheme will have companies spending "more on coffee and office supplies than they do on desktop management" and has the Enterprise Strategy Group observe that it will "disrupt a traditional desktop management industry that is costing enterprises billions of dollars a year."

Citrix VP of product marketing Sumit Dhawan figures the cost of desktop management can be cut by up to 50%.

Intel's vPro technology is providing the large-scale manageability as well as near-native virtualization performance.

Project Independence builds on the XenDesktop virtualization solution Citrix introduced last year.

Citrix is also capitalizing on the Xen Client Initiative established last year by the Xen open source community as well as the image management widgetry it acquired in its Ardence acquisition, the source of its Provisioning Server, according to Dhawan.

Importantly, he says that Microsoft will provide first-line technical support for Project Independence PCs based on XP and Vista.

Citrix' stuff is supposed to be different from VMware's in its dynamic desktop assembly as opposed to its rival's check-in/check-out approach

It should have a technology demo available now on its web site and is planning previews later in the first half ahead of second-half availability.