Cloud adoption: Concerns and challenges

In pure business terms, cloud is essentially a flexible, scalable, pay-per-use model for the way IT services are delivered and consumed, typically through short-term contracts. With its pay-as-you go model, cloud moves many IT costs from capital expenditure to operating expenditure; its “elastic model” means available IT capability can be flexed to mirror changing business demand; and it enables consumers of IT to have much greater transparency over their costs.

Key benefits of cloud adoption

Financial benefits - Cloud brings benefits across a broad range of financial areas:

• Reduced costs Costs are lower using cloud services compared to bespoke build and maintenance systems
• Reduced total cost of ownership Only the capacity required is paid for, with faster resource availability, providing optimum support to the business
• Reduced capital expenditure IT is purchased as operational rather than capital expenditure
• Costs aligned to business demand Cash flow is improved by spending only when services are required.

Responsiveness benefits

Cloud ensures the organisation is more responsive to business requirements through:

• Instant on Computing resources and systems are available immediately when needed by the business functions
• Universal access Cloud ensures applications and data are available any time, any place, anywhere
• Agile provisioning Cloud provides the ability to react to changing business requirements through the rapid delivery of appropriate IT operational resources.

Cloud adoption has advantages in terms of cost and convenience, it also do have its own concerns and challenges. The adoption of cloud is not just an IT issue; it is of concern to and impacts all parts of the business.

Primary concerns are -

• Security
• Privacy
• Sovereignty

Secondary Concerns are -

• Connectivity
• Reliability
• Contract Lock-in

Although moving to the cloud is not without its difficulties, with careful management these can be mitigated. It is also important to note that the achievable benefits vary for each application or business service that is being migrated to the cloud, depending on several factors, including: the size of the service; service efficiency; the location of the cloud; the cloud variant being migrated to; and the nature of the business itself.

Source/Ref: The White Book Of Cloud adoption By Fujitsu, Cloud Industry Forum.

New survey says 'Affordable Pricing Clears the Cloud of Uncertainty'

Survey reveals cost plays a key role when it comes to Cloud uptake!

Uncertainty around the current economic climate is forcing organizations to look at alternatives to on-site IT infrastructures and resources with one-in-three organizations citing managed services as a more affordable option, according to a survey conducted by hosted services provider Rise.

The research carried out at a recent event, surveyed over 100 IT industry representatives, regarding their willingness to embrace Cloud computing.

The results revealed that over one-third of the respondents stated that 'affordability' was a key driver when looking to move from on-premise to managed services. Cost was also referenced when it came to the demands of end users considering a migration to the Cloud. The potentially huge cost savings that can be realized by such a move was ranked second highest in a list of various demands.

The results also suggest that while firms are starting to gain a better understanding of Cloud computing, there still exists a level of uncertainty when it comes to the actual adoption. Over 50 per cent of respondents highlighted issues such as a lack of understanding, as well as security and complexity concerns as reasons for not migrating.

The results from the survey also include:

• Almost two-third’s of participants are looking to migrate to the Cloud within the next two years
• 63 per cent of participants identified cost and maintenance as the biggest challenge when it comes to managing existing IT systems
• Over 50 per cent of interviewees stated loss of control and security and storage as barriers to Cloud entry

According to Steve Holford, director at Rise, the results suggest that while uncertainty still exists around Cloud uptake, the cost benefits are forcing organizations to take a more serious look at managed services. "The uncertainty hovering over the financial markets has acted as a bit of a wake up call, forcing people to actively go out and see where savings can be made, and Cloud is most certainly one of those areas."

"The financial commitment that goes with maintaining an in-house IT infrastructure is huge, and Cloud computing represents an opportunity to do away with expensive upgrades and maintenance costs."

Steve continued: “The low cost adoption of Cloud can potentially lead to enormous cost savings for a business, and in the current climate these can’t be ignored. Instead of buying additional servers and storage devices that are used only a fraction of the time, employees can have access to Cloud applications and only pay for the amount of time actually used. Also, by outsourcing your IT needs you’ll be able to realign and focus on core business activities. We appreciate that a lot uncertainty still exists, and that us why a hybrid Cloud model offering the benefits of a hosted service while keeping sensitive data on site might also be an attractive option."

For further info: http://uk.rise.co/latest-news/

Google Analytics for Effective Market Research

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics about the visitors to a website. A premium version is also available for a fee which will majorly helps for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account. Google bought Urchin Software Corporation in April 2005 and used that company’s Urchin on Demand product as the basis for its current service.

Google Analytics is a powerful web page tracking tool that will give you enormous amounts of information regarding who is visiting your site.

Google analytics reports will tell you …

-> How many visits you had.

-> How many were new visitors.-> How many were returning visitors.

-> How many were absolute unique visitors.

-> Which pages were the most popular.

-> The average length of time on a page.

-> How many folks bounced off a page. (Visitor stayed only a few seconds.)

-> The average number of pages people visited.

-> Where your visitors came from. (country, state, city)

-> How people found your website. (direct / search engine / referring site)

-> What kind of browsers they used.

-> Their connection speed.

->Their service provider (Internet service provider).

-> Which keywords they used in search boxes.

-> Which pages they entered your site on. (It’s not always the home page.)

-> Which days of the week you received the most traffic.

-> If you’re getting significant traffic on days you ran other promotions?

-> And, a lot more cool data.

To get started simply type in Google Analytics in your search bar and get going. When signing up, you can add as many other users to your account as you like so long as they have a Google account. This means that other key people can access your data as well.

Google Analytics for Market Research

Google analytics Real-Time is all set to hit the globe with its newest promises.

Assess the effect of social medias- Estimating the immediate effect of social medias can be really easy with this new Analytics, according to some market research experts. Either you update a new blog entry or tweet your new launch, your real-time Analytics will show immediate results against these social media updates.

Evaluate campaign- This is another big advantage of this real-time Analytics. You can get a good idea about the site statistics without any extra need to do any market research. Now, no need to do a thorough keyword research every time you want to launch a new campaign. Just check out the Analytics and find all the details instantly.

Real Time Reports- This new version of Analytics lets you enjoy real time reports anytime you want to check it out, though this facility is available only for the Administrators account or if the account has been given proper access. To get these privileges, you need to upgrade your market research tool, Analytics, to the New Version (look out for the notification at the right top corner). And in the left hand Dashboard tab, you will find the Real time reports.

Google Analytics features:

Analysis Tools

• Real-Time reporting: Measure activity as it happens
• Custom Reports: Define the information you want to analyze
• Custom Variables: Create and analyze your own custom segments
• Advanced Segmentation: Easily analyze specific sections of your traffic
• Dashboards: Organize, monitor, and share KPIs
• Visualization: Learn the path visitors take through your site
• Sharing: Now everyone in your organization can collaborate
• API and Customizations - it's your data, format it the way you want
• Analytics Intelligence which allows to create alerts and custom alerts.
• Annotations which allows users leave shared or private notes right on the graphs.
• Advanced Segments - Segmentation of visits

Content Analytics

• Site Search: Get visitors to their destinations faster
• In-Page Analytics: See how visitors move within your site
• Site Speed Analysis: Uncover problems before your customers do
• Event Tracking: Understand what visitors do on your site
• Make your AdSense program more effective

Mobile Analytics

• Mobile Device Reporting: know which mobile platforms work best
• See where mobile traffic comes from
• Measure mobile app performance

Conversion Suite

• Understand how visitor behavior leads to sales and conversions
• Improve your online sales with Ecommerce Reporting
• See the complete picture of campaign performance with Multi-Channel Funnels
• Follow the different paths that visitors take on your site
• Make better marketing decisions with Attribution Modeling
• Multi-Channel Funnels to see how your marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions.

Social Reports

• Measure the impact of social media on metrics you care about
• Learn which social sources refer engaged visitors
• Discover what your visitors are sharing and where they're sharing it
• Social Conversions - The Conversions report enables social media marketing accountability - and clearly shows how social impacts your business.
• Social Sources - Social Sources reports help you refine where you spend time and move your social tactics from "gut feel" to data-driven.
• Social Sharing - Combining traffic with sharing bridges social and content, enabling informed decisions to build community and increase organic shares of content - on and off your site.

Advertising Analytics

• Make your search engine marketing more effective
• Understand how display advertising contributes to your programs
• Give mobile campaigns the attention they deserve
• See how your advertising campaigns work together with Multi-Channel Funnels
• Campaign measurement provides insights into what works, and what doesn’t

Google Analytics helps in measuring your market, understanding target interest, preference, and helps in determining changes for effective reach.   

Source: http://www.google.com/analytics; http://www.andesandassociates.com/Google_Analytics_Powerfu.html ; http://www.kaizen-digital.com.au/market-research-google-analytics-goes-real-time

Online Survey Tools – Market Research

Market research surveys are meant to gather any sort of market information. The aim is to gather information from a small sample of a market in order to be able to predict what the whole market wants. Surveys gives insights about market information and requirements. surveys generally examine the effects of people on particular business process (Product or Service).

Online surveys can be a huge help in understanding what constituents think and how successful the respective programs are, without breaking the budget. Online survey helps in this regards. Online survey tools can be a very cost-effective way for delivering surveys and collecting and analyzing results through one central system.

We have no of online tools for this purpose, Some are free and some are with basic subscription.

Online Survey Tolls

A number of free and low cost online tools provide easy interfaces for building surveys and viewing reports online. These packages can be a great fit for smaller surveys where advanced question types, survey logic and results analysis are not required.

• Kwik Surveys (kwiksurveys.com) - Kwik Surveys is a Free to use survey builder. Kwik Surveys to be easy to use for all experience levels so one will quickly be creating surveys.
• Smart-Survey (www.smart-survey.co.uk) - Smart-Survey is an Online Survey Software designed to help users to create a survey, publish it online and view results graphically in real time.
• FluidSurveys (fluidsurveys.com) - Create powerful surveys with logic, multimedia & tons of question types at a fraction of the cost.
• LimeSurvey (www.limesurvey.org) - LimeSurvey basically contains everything you need for doing nearly every survey with grace.

• SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) - SurveyMonkey offers a popular online hosted survey tool that works well for basic surveys. The free version might be useful for very small and informal surveys, but allows very little customization of the look of the survey, no downloads of reports or data, and can only collect 10 questions and 100 responses per survey.
• Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) - Zoomerang is similar to SurveyMonkey in many respects, but offers in general a somewhat more powerful package for somewhat more money.
• SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com) - SurveyGizmo offers an API for integrating survey functionality into websites, blogs and other applications, including integration with Salesforce.com.
• QuestionPro Online Survey Software (www.questionpro.com) - QuestionPro is web based software for creating and distributing surveys. It consists of an intuitive wizard interface for creating survey questions, tools for distributing survey via email or website, and tools for analyzing and viewing results.
• FreeOnlineSurveys (freeonlinesurveys.com) – Create your own Free online surveys. With FreeOnlineSurveys.com one can create online quiz , online survey, generate online polls, and generate forms by using the free form generator.

• KISSinsights (www.kissinsights.com) - KISSinsights gives your customers a way to Ask a question (or two) and customers will see it slide up from the bottom right-hand corner of respective site.
• SurveyWizz (surveywizz.com) – With SurveyWizz one can choose from a variety of different types of question, and arrange them in any order using simple drag-and-drop interface. Customise survey features, choose a colour scheme to suit website and see a live preview of survey at any time.
• SoGoSurvey (www.sogosurvey.com) - SoGoSurvey provides the most advanced step-by-step survey designing tool within a highly user-friendly environment. The key to obtaining good data through a survey is to design a survey with good survey questionnaires.

* Basic plan comes for free, Based on requirements the subscription plans applies. It differs among companies.

What Do Online Survey Tools Do?

Good online survey tool will allow you to easily define your survey questions and the possible responses using an online interface, and then send constituents a link to answer the survey online.

• Flexible survey look and feel. A survey that has prominent branding for a survey tool rather than your organization can be off-putting to constituents and decrease your response rate. A package that allows you to update colors, font and header graphics can help you match a survey to your website or organizational branding.
• Skip logic. As you design more complex surveys, it’s often useful to let respondents skip a whole section of questions that don’t apply to them. Survey skip logic lets you define, for instance, that those who answer “no” to question 10 should skip to question 15.
• Piping. Piping allows you to pull answers from one part of a survey into another. For instance, if someone says in one question that they live in Hyderabad, you can then ask them in a follow-up, “What’s the best thing about living in Hyderabad,” filling in the name of the city from the previous question. More sophisticated packages allow you to combine skip logic and piping to customize surveys even further.
• Randomization. The order of a set of questions, or the set of answers to a given question, can often affect survey responses and thus the quality of your data. Features that automatically randomize the order of particular questions or answers will help avoid this issue.
• Website integration. While many packages create surveys in their own web page, some let you embed them into your existing website. This can be a particularly useful way to do quick, one-question surveys (called polls), or to gather opinions from web visitors in a longer survey.
• Data analysis. One of the primary differentiators between inexpensive packages and their more expensive counterparts is their ability to help you to analyze the data and understand the meaning behind the results. Most packages provide simple reports summarizing the answers to each question, and many will let you download them into Excel or another tool for further analysis. More advanced packages allow cross-tabulation to see the data relationships between different sets of questions, or complex statistical analysis.

Sources used: Idealware.

Pinterest is hot!!

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, 're-pin' images to their own collections and/or 'like' photos. Pinterest's mission is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting" via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing. Pinterest allows its users to share 'pins' on both Twitter and Facebook, which allows users to share and interact with a broad community.

Pinterest is hot. In fact, in March 2012 the site served up 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day.

Could Pinterest be the silver bullet for retailers on social media? Pinterest is clearly resonating with online consumers in a big way. To put it simply, customers who find a product via Pinterest are more likely to purchase it than those who find the product via other social networks.

Who are these people? Why do Pinterest users respond so strongly to products that are pinned? This infographic from Tamba breaks down the stats, explaining why Pinterest is so powerful with its consumption-friendly audience. 

Source: Wikipedia, Mashable

Software-as-a-Service market to grow 17.9 per cent to $US14.5 billion - Gartner

The spending rise is attributable to greater familiarity with how SaaS works, growth in related PaaS (platform as a service) offerings, and IT budgeting considerations, Gartner research director Sharon Mertz said in a statement. SaaS products are typically sold via subscription, allowing companies to avoid large up-front licensing fees and capital costs.

According to figures released by analyst firm Gartner, “Global spending on SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) will rise 17.9 per cent this year to $US14.5 billion. SaaS market growth will remain strong through 2015, when spending on the software is expected to hit $22.1 billion”.

North America is the most mature and largest SaaS market, expected to generate $US9.1 billion in revenue this year, compared to $US7.8 billion last year. And, Western Europe's SaaS spending will generate more than $US3.2 billion in 2012, up from $US2.7 billion in 2011. In the Asia-Pacific region, for which Gartner excludes Japan, SaaS revenue will jump from $US730.9 million in 2011 to $US934.1 million this year. Japanese companies will spent $US495.2 million on SaaS this year, compared to $427 million last year.

SaaS sales in Japan will be driven by CRM (customer relationship management) and collaboration software, "which already have actual demand”. The 2011 earthquake has also raised interest in SaaS there as a possible defense against such natural disasters.

SaaS spending in Latin America this year will be $US419.7 million, compared to $US331.1 million in 2011, Brazilian and Mexican companies will account for the majority of sales, with CRM, procurement and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications the most popular choices. Meanwhile, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa remain "small and emerging markets overall" with "ongoing infrastructure challenges”.

Overall, the market growth predicted by Gartner can be attributed to both pure SaaS vendors (Salesforce.com, Corent Technology, LongJump, etc,.) which is predicting it will reach close to $US3 billion in annual revenue during its fiscal 2013, as well as increased emphasis on SaaS by dominant on-premises application vendors like Oracle and SAP.

Those companies recently spent billions to respectively acquire Taleo and SuccessFactors, which compete in the HCM (human capital management) market. HCM is seen as an effective way for on-premises vendors to make inroads in the SaaS market. For one, many offerings focus on areas such as recruitment and learning and development. Those functions are adjacent to core human-resources functions like payroll, which are already handled at many companies by on-premises ERP systems.

Source: CIO, IDG News Service.

Top 12 B2B e-Commerce Predictions for 2012

GXS, a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce solutions, announced its Top 12 B2B e-commerce predictions for 2012.  Thought leaders from GXS created the predictions based upon research, news, trends, industry discourse and customer discussions.  The predictions span different industry verticals, geographic regions and technology sectors. 

#1 – Cloud-Based Integration Platforms Come of Age: The market is at the right inflection point to massively adopt cloud-based integration. Much like SalesForce.com has built a platform for cloud-based applications in the CRM area, cloud-based integration platforms will emerge to support information exchanges between corporate ERP systems.
 

#2 – ERP and SaaS Providers Seek Partners for Cloud Integration: Traditionally, developers of ERP and supply chain applications have left the connectivity and integration of business partners to the customer’s IT department. In 2012 we will see more ERP and supply chain vendors leveraging cloud-based integration platforms to accelerate implementation.
 

#3 – Purchase Orders become Cross-Channel in Retail: As mobile goes mainstream and online sales reach double-digit percentages in many categories, retailers are re-engineering their supply chains to support these fast growing channels. In 2012, retail industry associations will lead efforts to enhance the standard B2B e-commerce transactions to better accommodate the cross-channel model.
 

#4 – Next Best Offer Forces Marketing to Align with Supply Chain: Next Best Offer (NBO) is the analysis that determines, often within 200 milliseconds, which marketing offer is most likely to entice customers. To deliver on NBO, the entire retail supply chain will need to exchange price and promotions information in real time.
 

#5 – Consolidation Wave Hits e-Invoicing: More than 550 vendors provide e-invoicing services in Europe alone, many of which are small providers with less than $50 million in annual revenues. In 2012, we will see a continuation in the consolidation of the e-invoicing  sector that started in 2011 when SAP acquired Crossgate and Ariba acquired b-process.
 

#6 – Austerity Drives Public Sector e-Invoicing Adoption: Within Europe and the United States, austerity and growth are the government watchwords of today. By implementing e-invoicing, public sector authorities can decrease back-office expenses. Already, the governments of Norway, Denmark, Spain and Greece have announced e-invoicing programs. More will follow in 2012.
 

#7 – Bank Payment Obligation Booms in Emerging Markets: Suppliers in emerging markets are beginning to push back on open account terms due to the credit risk imposed on them. Paper-based letters of credit (L/C) are not an attractive alternative due to the costs. The Bank Payment Obligation (BPO) functionality of SWIFT’s Trade Services Utility (TSU) may be the answer. 
 

#8 – Supplier Risk Management: At least three Global 1000 brands will suffer a public relations disaster in 2012 for issues related to environmental impact, product quality and human rights in their supply chains. As a result, risk management in their supplier community will become a paramount concern in 2012.
 

#9 – Freemium Models Gain Traction in B2B: In a freemium model the majority of users are subsidized by a small group of customers who pay for access to enhanced features. Examples of freemium models already exist in the EDI network and e-invoicing sectors.  In 2012, we will see a freemium-style file sharing service enter  B2B .
 

#10 – OFTP 2.0 Adoption Levels to Triple: OFTP2 has seen widespread adoption by the major car manufacturers and tier 1 suppliers in Europe. Expect the use of OFTP2 to expand beyond Europe in 2012. The increasing requirement to exchange engineering and design files has led automakers to find a reliable, secure and fast way to exchange this big data.
 

#11 – The End of Managed File Transfer: Historically, technical and commercial limitations drove a distinction between moving small and large, structured and unstructured files between companies. As the availability of network bandwidth, processing power and storage capacity, increase this unnecessary division of technologies will dissolve. The category of MFT will become a feature of broader integration suites.
 

#12 – The Digital Economy Grows: As technologies such as RFID, sensors, video cameras and GPS devices, more and more information will be exchanged via machines creating fully digital business processes. Middleware and integration technologies will form a critical underpinning of this second (or digital) economy as they do in the physical world today.