January 27th, 2010
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Posted in Uncategorized
January 19th, 2010
Check back soon for exciting information from VC3!
Posted in Software Development
January 4th, 2010
SCnow.com
January 4, 2010
Over the recent holidays the City of Marion’s online Facebook page reached a milestone.
The site, established in August, now surpassed the “1,000 fans” mark, and, as Dec. 31, had 1,004 fans, leading Mayor Rodney Berry to say he is pleased and surprised by the reception the site has had.
The social networking site links folks from around the world who have or do call Marion “home,“ the city’s publicist, Dianne Owens, said. Charged with oversight of the city’s online place for discussion, Owens posts pictures and updates to the site and said the city uses the Facebook page as a tool to help those who love Marion stay connected. Retirees, employees, those who live in the city and those who love the city converse through the site, she said.
There is a place on the site for discussions, she said, and, of course, the comments. The site has seven photo galleries of recent city events and more will be added.
The Facebook page currently is soliciting photographs from people. The request is that “favorite photographs of Marion” be sent to Owens, by e-mail to dowens@marionsc.gov . From those photographs sent, a new profile picture will be selected.
Additionally, after months of working with the Columbia-based VC3 group, the city has relaunched it’s Web site.
“The site is expandable and over time will accommodate many of the features that a trip to City Hall does,“ Bob Anderson, administrator, said. “The various departments will continue to add forms and more information will be placed online in the coming months.“
Posted in Uncategorized
December 30th, 2009
Ten years ago, many, if not most, of our customers did not have email, websites, internet connections, or servers. At the time, those companies that successfully embraced these technologies saw themselves at a strategic advantage, while today a company that does not use these technologies finds themselves at a substantial strategic disadvantage. The idea that a company cannot be found on the web, or cannot be contacted via email, seems fantastic to the average customer. The rapid adoption of technology has led to a point where it is assumed, and in certain cases legally mandated, that companies maintain a certain level of technology infrastructure. Companies must have email and websites. Their information must be secure and they must have backups.
Today many companies spend a substantial amount of time and money ensuring that this technology infrastructure exists and is appropriately maintained, while seeing no real strategic advantage as a result. At the same time, innovation is still occurring at a breakneck pace. Virtualization, Voice-over-IP, and other technologies are constantly evolving and force companies to continually re-evaluate their technology infrastructure to ensure that it remains relevant. Enter Cloud Computing….
What is it?
You’ve probably heard of the phrase, “cloud computing” already. Read any tech magazine and you’ve seen the term peppered throughout. Some have been referring to the Internet as the “cloud” for some time now, however when united with “computing”, the definition becomes, well, a little more clouded. Some analysts simply define cloud computing as virtual servers available over the Internet. While others define it as anything that is consumed outside of your firewall, including outsourcing.
Cloud computing is a model for allowing expedient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) from an internal or external, third-party source using either Internet-based or local-area infrastructure. These resources can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. In the simplest of terms, cloud computing means running software and accessing data that resides somewhere else. This type of technology delivery system represents a new way, and in some cases a less expensive and better way, of providing enterprise technology to your users.
How did it get here?
Many businesses have been using cloud computing method for many years. If you have a website, you are utilizing cloud computing. Most likely, your website is hosted at a data center hundreds of miles from your main office. Additionally, your website is most likely hosted on a server with hundreds of other websites. This is a prime example of cloud computing.
At the 2008 Cloud Summit Executive conference, Thomas E. Hogan, Senior Vice President at Hewlett-Packard presented the following statistic: “Some 87 billion e-mails are drafted per day around the globe, the digital universe doubles every 18 months, and the number of network-attached storage devices double every two years”, he said. “Yet, some 80 percent to 85 percent of IT budgets goes to operational maintenance. … Cloud computing promises to help IT organizations dial back maintenance costs so they can spend on creating business value.”
What defines a “cloud service”?
Self-service: The ability to go to a Website, set up your account(s) and start provisioning over the Web yourself. No need to spend hours on the phone with support working out your special configuration with self-service approach.
Commodity pricing: The self-service model enables cloud service providers to keep costs down. These providers have an array of pay-per-use (or subscription) options.
Transparent scalability: If your business requires more of a service, you go to your service provider’s Website and specify more and your bill will increase accordingly. Traditionally, you may have to acquire additional hardware or licensing which adds costs and time. The beauty of this model is that you don’t have to think about it, whether you need twice the number of virtual servers or triple the number of seats for a development platform.
Shared infrastructure: Software-as-a-service providers provide services to their customers in a multi-tenanted fashion, where a single instance of the software runs on the provider’s servers and all users log onto that same instance. Again, this sharing of resources allows service providers to keep costs down.
So who plays in the cloud?
The U.S. Census Bureau is one of those organizations using Salesforce.com. The project consisted of employing 2,500+ partnership agents to use Salesforce.com for the 2010 decennial census and was implemented in just under 12 weeks. This is a prime example of how cloud computing allows projects to scale from 200 to 2,000 users overnight to meet peak periods with no capital expenditure.
The New Jersey Transit is another example of an organization that leveraged a cloud offering, again Salesforce.com, to run their call center, incident management, complaint tracking and service portal. By using Salesforce.com, this agency was able to handle 600% more inquiries with ZERO new agents required while also improving their response time by 36%.
Finally, the U.S. Army was looking for a new tool to track potential recruits who visited its Army Experience Center. By utilizing this same application, Salesforce.com, the US Army is able to track all core recruitment functions while saving both time and resources.
The Value Prop for the Cloud
Fundamentally, the cloud computing value proposition focuses on solving a dilemma almost every CTO faces today: the lack of IT budget dollars to truly improve a business’s competitive position in the marketplace or at best, to stay up to date with current technology.
The traditional method of IT infrastructure planning requires organizations to make investments in anticipation of future needs. Cloud computing may allow these same organizations to dynamically scale key parts of their IT infrastructure as their business needs dictate. Cloud computing could result in the near elimination of up-front infrastructure costs as well as on-going fixed costs such as hardware maintenance or bandwidth allocation. The pay-as-you-use model allows you to pay incrementally more for cloud resources only when you require it.
We encourage you to look critically at cloud or utility computing offerings the next time you have a need for a new application or service offering. Although this is not a one size fits all, you should strongly look at both the economics and the advantages of a cloud offering as you look to migrate or expand the services and/or applications that you provide to your customers to determine if there is an offering out there that makes sense for your organization.
For more information on how your organization can benefit from the cloud computing offerings that are available, please contact us at info@vc3.com.
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