Telepresence and videoconferencing services (both hosted and managed) will reach a whopping $1.2 billion(US) worldwide by 2016, according to ABI Research.
Cisco partner Tata Communications is riding that wave and shares insights in a recent FastChat video with MSPmentor Editorial Director Joe Panettieri.
In the video below, Joe interviews Greg Brophy, Director of Product Management at Tata. Greg shares ways that the company is using the cloud to help its customers connect globally using Cisco’s TelePresence technology. He also shares a recent customer win and what he sees are key trends among his customer base.
In this week’s episode, we offer a quick recap of Partner Summit 2011 with some event highlights, important links, plus our handy, downloadable summary document with all of the important links you need – from Cloud partner programs to Architecture specializations and those great deals that were announced, like a big WebEx discount for partners. And, if you missed Partner Summit keynotes, executive chats, or theater breakout sessions, head over to the Virtual Partner Summit site for replays.
I also caught up with Virtual Computing Environment CEO Michael Capellas who talked about the importance of VCE, its value to Cisco partners, and some info about VBlock. We’ll be sharing more of his insights and the full interview with him here on the Channels blog on Monday, so be sure to check back.
Watch our Partner Update newscast for the top partner headlines.
Once again, Joe Panettieri, MSP Mentor blogger and Editorial Director, featured another Cisco partner in his FastChat series, which centers on moving from managed to cloud services. This time around, Joe chatted with Vince Conroy, CTO of FusionStorm.
During their discussion, Vince talked about where FusionStorm is headed in the cloud services market, and he offered up some best practice advice for resellers who are formulating strategies for managed and cloud services.
Watch Vince’s interview below to hear all the details.
So, what’s FusionStorm’s focus? The company just recently launched a new, cloud-based hosting service in which customers can run applications in a hosted, private cloud. These private clouds are set up in one of six FusionStorm data centers.
If you are looking to break into the managed and cloud services market, Vince offers this bit of advice:
This year’s Cloud Connect was another great success, and thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on Cisco and the Cloud: Within and Beyond the Data Center. I was happy to see that we are beyond the discussion of “Is Cloud a true opportunity?” to “How can we get the most out of the Cloud?” There were many interesting industry topics discussed at Cloud Connect, I wanted to touch on one of them, the benefits of cloud, in more detail.
An interesting discussion came up in a panel on the differences between on-demand virtualization and Cloud. I share the panel’s general consensus that virtualization is a useful first step but not the end of the journey. Businesses of all sizes have achieved major benefits through virtualization (25%+ cost savings), increasing the utilization of servers to reduce hardware requirements and consolidate operations. When you move beyond this crucial first step, you open up the rest of your business Cloud’s benefits: flexibility, agility, scalability, and usability. When a truly dynamic cloud is implemented the benefits for service providers and enterprises are significant - saving 35-80% of the costs of traditional delivery. Let’s look at what drives these benefits:
Flexibility: Implementing a Unified Service Delivery foundation for your Cloud, enables an end-to-end virtualized infrastructure combining both the virtualized data center and the intelligent IP NGN to deliver services/applications from a common pool of compute, network, and storage resources, available on demand and also ensuring the services and applications can be delivered effectively.
I recently watched a session called, “Public Sector Cloud -- The Big Debate”, recorded earlier this year. The debate presents several points of view from experts in the field of Cloud Computing. I enjoyed the candid conversation and the opportunity to get a taste for the challenges governments face in their environments.
I encourage you to watch this too and let me know what you think. The session was moderated by Dr. Richard Sykes and includes experts such as John Suffolk (former UK Government CIO) and David Wilde (Westminster City Council CIO).
I recently watched a session called, 