Come a little closer in the cloud
When thinking about the cloud, one may not realize the importance of proximity. This is understandable, given that one of the most commonly cited benefits of the technology is its potential to increase mobility and provide users the option of working from nearly any location.
However, the cloud is only an effective tool if your business can connect to it. This is where proximity comes into play. The closer a business is to a cloud center, the faster its services will perform, and issues with such services are drastically reduced.
Seeing green in the cloud
A few years ago, going green was all the rage. Businesses and consumers alike were doing almost all they could to tap into their inner tree hugger.
In recent years, though, some of the noise surrounding environmental business practices has died down. While the need is still there, it doesn’t seem to be capturing the same amount of attention as it did in the last decade. This coincided largely with the economy tanking. Businesses suddenly found themselves without the extra bread to spend on green initiatives, like solar panels and eco-friendly lighting.
Streamlining applications with Cloud Accelerator
The cloud represents a monumental shift in the way companies approach IT. These days, instead of buying software packages or mountains of storage tapes, we’re just as likely to send software, storage, and other needs to the cloud, which can often afford better solutions at lower costs. However, one challenge that still remains is optimizing response time as more applications are hosted in the public cloud. Because applications hosted on the public cloud are “farther away” from the end-user, customers may find response time leaves something to be desired.
Recognizing this, we rolled out our Cloud Accelerator service in January’2011. The service—an industry’s first acceleration service for public clouds—leverages our Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) architecture to optimize the performance of applications run on the public cloud, including SaaS, storage, or common office apps.
LATAM felt the presence of Virtela
Is it worth a one way journey of 24 hours with 2 flight changes to get to a conference for 2 days? The short answer, yes. Especially when it’s the Capacity LATAM 2011 show in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Most of the LATAM carriers were present at the conference and just like us, they had come with goals in mind. While some attendees focused on the panel discussions, others were already in meetings scheduled weeks in advance. The event itself triggered new networking initiatives and we had some good meetings with LATAM carriers and also discovered new partners and vendors.
Virtela takes on the “Windy City” at IT Roadmap
This year’s IT Roadmap Chicago definitely had more emphasis on the cloud than in the past—that’s good news for Virtela.
Our VP of Marketing, Liza Adams, presented at the event and spoke on Using the Cloud for Faster Apps, Robust Security, & Proactive Management. It was reassuring to hear positive feedback from the attendees. One audience member applauded that Liza’s presentation demonstrated how to approach and solve IT issues for multinational companies, instead of sounding like a sales pitch.
Opportunities for Cloud Services
I joined Virtela two weeks ago, and this is my first blog post! I’m very excited to join Virtela as cloud computing is picking up momentum across different sectors and around the world.
Today, Virtela held a webinar presenting results and findings of our recent survey on top IT infrastructure priorities for 2011. Two of the top priorities among the multinational companies surveyed were pursuing cloud solutions and application acceleration. Although multinational companies are increasingly taking advantage of cloud services, opportunities for leveraging cloud computing exist in other sectors as well.
The votes are in! Top 10 IT Priorities for 2011
More than 400 IT professionals at multinational companies responded to Virtela’s recent survey on top IT infrastructure priorities for 2011 and improvement areas for managed service providers (MSPs), and the results provide an exciting glimpse into the year ahead.
Topping the list of priorities are infrastructure management, security, data center consolidation, application acceleration and cloud solutions. Not surprising, really. Having just come back from PTC ’11 where cloud services seemed to be a recurring topic of conversation amongst our global partners, to the customers we speak to on a daily basis, cloud solutions are in high demand given their ability to deliver better, cheaper and faster ways to meet security, application acceleration and other needs. And with today’s IT leaders being tasked with security and compliance initiatives on top of the ongoing management and monitoring of networks, data centers, application speeds and overall business efficiency – it’s no wonder they ranked these as their top priorities for 2011.
Virtela “Cloud” Hits Waikiki Beach
Virtela’s Global Network Operations support for our customers “follows the sun”. So does its Global Strategy Access Strategy team. We follow the sun even to picture perfect Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. In Aloha shirts and clutching a wad of business cards, we had a mission at the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council’s 2011 conference (PTC 2011).
Led by Andy Funk, our Vice President of Global Access Strategy, the team underpins Virtela’s partnership with global carriers as a platform for supporting cloud services and superior customer experience. We take time to meet with global partners, share industry perspective, discuss on-going and future business, strengthen industry ties and discover new partners. The Hawaii venue of this annual event lends itself to strong participation from Pacific Rim and North American carriers.
Webinar: Developing a profitable cloud services strategy
I’m excited to participate in this Thursday’s FierceTelecom webinar, Developing a profitable cloud services strategy. It’s rare nowadays to sit (virtually) alongside service providers with different business models to engage in a healthy debate and discuss how each can craft profitable cloud strategies.
Level 3 will be represented by my former colleague, Carolyn Reuss, as a data center/co-location company. Qwest will share the views of a traditional telco. And I’ll cover how Virtela, a managed services company, has developed its global cloud strategy from years of serving multinational Fortune 500 and midmarket customers. I love this panel because, although we may compete with each other at some level, we are successful partners in many cases when it comes to cloud.
Cloud-based IT Services – 2 New Approaches
It’s exciting – and engaging – to finally see cloud computing and storage gaining strong and lasting market adoption. And not to be always looking for the next IT trend, but I’ve felt for the last 12+ months that it’s been time for additional IT services to start making their way to the cloud…or at least delivered via a cloud-based format.
Well it looks like my wait is coming to an end, given announcements by my [new] company, Virtela, as well as other vendors making announcements over recent weeks, and even the recent Riverbed announcement. There appear to be two primary architectural approaches to offering cloud IT services – either integrated as single service offerings (e.g. WAN optimization tied to existing cloud compute or storage resource pools like Amazon EC2 (see #2 on diagram below), or as independent cloud-based service offerings – either single service or more holistic multi-service IT cloud platforms (see #3 on diagram below).