Archive for month: April, 2009

Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is gaining coverage in mainstream, non-tech media, such as USA Today. This is an indication of broader acceptance in the market.

As reported in IT World, Microsoft announced that its next generation MS Office suite (Office 14) will include Office Web Applications, a suite including lightweight versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

Signaling a potentially major shift in Microsoft’s view of SaaS, the service will run in Firefox and Safari, as well as Internet Explorer, giving Microsoft office a means to run on Linux servers.

From the article and the announcement, it is still unclear if:

• Windows users will be able to run Office Web Applications in Firefox, or only IE
• If the service will require locally installed software
• If the service will require use of Office Live Workspace

While reports have the new service available in Beta later this year, the service will not launch until the release of Office 14 (which has not been announced).

Microsoft is clearly responding to threats from Google Apps, Zoho, and OpenOffice. Will Microsoft be able to shed many of its current licensing, pricing, and channel policies to effectively compete in an aggressive marketplace?

As small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) evaluate cloud computing solutions, vendors often tout availability, or up-time, commitments. Understanding the metric, and how to compare vendor claims, is critical when selecting a solution.

Availability is generally expressed as a percentage — 99.9%, 99.99%, and so on. With 8760 hours in each year, 99.9% availability equates to 8.75 hours (0.1%) downtime each year, or an average of 45 minutes per month. Similarly, 99.99% availability equates to 45 minutes of downtime each year, or about 5 minutes per month.

Simple yes, but the devil is in the details. Most vendors caveat availability commitments by excluding schedule maintenance windows. For some vendors, this means regularly scheduled windows; for others this means any non-emergency maintenance activities with advanced notice.

When comparing availability claims, you need to account how availability is calculated.

For example, Google Apps has no scheduled maintenance windows. The Google cloud is designed to allow maintenance and updates without impacting user access to applications and data. Google’s 99.9% availability commitment means less than 8.75 total hours of downtime each year. In comparison, Company X running MS Exchange 2003 recently claimed availability of 99.99% as they had no unscheduled downtime in over a year. Looking more closely, they shutdown their email servers for about an hour each week to apply Microsoft security patches, install software updates, and run deep malware scans on the server.

Company X has total downtime of 52 hours per year. In a fair comparison, user availability is only 99.4%.

One of the advantages of Software-as-a-Service solutions, like Google Apps, is that SaaS solutions are design to provide better availability while reducing system administration and support costs. For Company X, moving to Google Apps would reduce the amount of time spent maintaining and supporting their email service — saving money and letting their IT staff focus on activities with greater benefit to the business.

Yesterday, I blogged about the cost of MS Exchange 2007, particularly since most SMBs do not buy Software Assurance and will need to purchase new licenses and new hardware.

In our example, a 20 person company looking to run a Standard Edition of Windows Server and MS Exchange would likely spend $20,000 to $25,000 over a three year period, or about $400 per user per year, to provide email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

With support, SMBs can get these services via Google Apps for about $5000 over the same three year period. Yes, you can save 75%

Again, this is a baseline comparison. For in-house solutions, costs rise if you add redundancy or collaboration tools. With Google Apps, redundancy is built-in and collaboration tools are included for free.

Granted, Google Apps is not appropriate for every business. But, do you not owe it to your bottom line to explore the possibility?

Google has expanded the capabilities of Google Video for Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users.

You can now:
– Add captions to your videos
– Upload videos up to 1 GB in size (increased from the 300 MB previous limit)

Click here to learn more about these features.

Also, Google has set the video storage size for Education edition users. Each school gets 10GB o Google Video storage.

Businesses using Google Apps Premier Edition still have 10GB plus an additional 500MB per user account. A business with 10 users will have a total of 15GB of Google Video storage.

Click here to learn more.