Is Google Building Touch into Chrome OS?

It’s not definitive “yes,” but an awkward “no comment” from a Google product manager that may indicate that touch capability is being built into Chrome OS.

At an event in London at Google’s headquarters attended by TechRadar, Senior Product Manager of Search Anders Sandholm “laughed nervously” in response to the question of whether Chrome OS would include multi touch capability, the technology made ubiquitous largely by Apple’s iPhone.

Sandholm went on to respond, “I can’t… I mean… right now we are targeting netbooks, that’s what we’re focused on, but I expect it to work well… we expect it to target everything up to desktop computers. Chrome OS will be built for a specific hardware setup.”

Adding touch capability to Chrome OS would position it as another operating system suitable for a tablet.

Now that so many of us are used to touch-based controls thanks to our smartphones, it makes sense that multitouch may find its way into more netbook, laptop and desktop offerings as well. Building touch into Chrome OS would position Google well to take advantage of that coming trend.

How will Apple iPad get into corporatations…. Consumers!

Well now that the dust is starting to finally settle, I thought it would be interesting to see where the iPad will go in terms of corporate use.

The iPad will appear in 60 days with WiFi, It will be quickly adopted as an employee-provisioned third device, particularly for Mobile Professionals. IT will support it in many organisations. After all, it's just a big iPhone to them and already 20% of firms support them.

The iPad is a fantastic device, and there will be many laptops left at home no doubt, the market it has targeted this time round is important; information workers self-provisioning what they need rather than what their employers provide, a concept that Citrix technologies have discussed for many months – Bring Your own Computer.

You can imagine that the corporate users that will  benefit from this initially (apart from IT) will be mobile workers, and Apple have addressed this market well, when you consider what this market segment care about:

• Messaging and collaboration on the go. (Need email, calendar, contacts, Web conferencing.)
• Full Web experience
• Business application media
• Full-size document tools
• Secure wireless connectivity
• And let's not forget, looking cool.

We saw it with the iPhone and we will see it with the iPad, if there is one thing that Apple seem to do well it is to make desirable consumer goods that suddenly become adopted into the work place in a viral fashion

Google Search is More Social

Last year Google released the Social Search experiment to make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts, and social search is available to all in Beta at google.com today.

Social search at Google has proliferated since it was launched, for example, there is social elements in Google Images. Now when you're doing a search on Images, you may start seeing pictures from people in your social circle. These are pictures that your friends and other contacts have published publicly to the web on photo-sharing sites like Picasa Web Albums and Flickr. Just like the other social results, social image results appear under a special heading called "Results from your social circle." Here's what it looks like:
You can check out your social circle directly by visiting this link. (Note that it may take some time for the connections and content to update.)

Google believes there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and are just beginning to scratch the surface.

If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services.

The new features are rolling out now on google.com in English for all signed-in users, and you should start seeing them in the next few days.

Citrix has around 3,000 XenDesktop customers and already has a Receiver for the Apple iPad

During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers they reported (which were pretty impressive for the climate last year), the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton provided a couple of interesting details about the company’s past performance and future plans.

Citrix grew 9% during 2009, for a total of $451 million in revenue.
Revenue from new license sales was $168 million, up 4% from 2008, and up 30% from Q3, while license update revenue increased 6% from 2008.

Technical services increased 20%, led by support, maintenance agreements, and online SaaS revenue was $82 million, up 18%.

Citrix closed 5 deals with over 10,000 seats for XenDesktop in Q4 2009, reaching around 3,000 total XenDesktop customers.

The company also counted over 20,000 XenServer downloads in that quarter.

Talking about the future, Citrix already has a Receiver for the just announced Apple iPad.

The prompt availability, well before Apple can start to ship the tablet worldwide, doesn’t surprise at all: for the last two years Citrix has openly discussed the idea of a Nirvana device that, coupled with their XenApp infrastructure, could finally offer mobility without compromised productivity.

Now that the iPad features a much bigger screen (9.7” with a 1024x768 resolution) and remarkable processing capabilities (apparently an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore @ 1GHz), Citrix may have finally found the endpoint device it was waiting for.

VMware to increase consolidation ratio to 16 VMs / core

The virtual machines per core (VMs / core) ratio is a measurement unit that virtualisation vendors use with extreme prudence to provide a rough idea of the server consolidation level that can be achieved on their hypervisors.

This ratio can be greatly influenced by several factors. The most important one is the kind of application workload that will run inside guest operating systems.

Depending on this element alone, some customers may end up having as low as 2:1 ratios while others may experience much higher values, so the best answer to any question around this topic is “it depends”.

Officially, the company says that its hypervisor can support an average consolidation ratio of 8 VMs / core, a number that several customers report as a realistic one mostly in VDI environments.

VMware may be about to double this value, reaching 16 VMs / core, with upcoming versions of its desktop virtualisation platform View based upon the Intel Nehalem processor.

Microsoft to Modify VECD Licensing

Anybody who as undergone a consultative exercise to establish if VDI is suitable for their business will have almost definitely come across two results:

1 – Yes there is a fit and a definite need for VDI in key areas of the business if not all

2 – There is an unknown element of licensing that needs to be considered – VECD from Microsoft.

In a recent event we ran with Microsoft it was stated that about 60-70% of VDI solutions are infringing Microsoft licensing agreements – luckily those are not our solutions!

Anyway the good news is that Microsoft looks like they are to modify their licensing model for VECD.

Rather than on products, Microsoft is focusing on VDI licensing.
In July 2009 it introduced two new VDI licenses, the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Standard Suite and the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Premium Suite, on top of its well-known Virtual Enterprise Centralised Desktop (VECD).

Now the company may perform additional adjustments to its offering.

A couple of days ago TechTarget reported that Microsoft plans to modify the VECD to reduce the cost per user.

Although Microsoft will update its per-use device model, the company continues to license per device because right now it's the only way to provide an accurate count of licenses per access point.  Microsoft passed the following comment on per user or per device licensing:

"Per user creates more complexity, and a wholesale shift to per-use licensing would be too costly," Microsoft said. "Most customer agreements are constructed around devices."

Therefore, it's likely some kind of hybrid model will come first.

"Some of the changes around the relaxation of use rights to support more flexible rights to allow roaming, and to other devices, will come in this calendar year," he said.

I certainly hope that this is the catalyst for VDI, it certainly cant do any harm.

Are you considering VDI?  If so contact us to see how we can help, call Charles Barratt on 0845 260 5757.

Storage End Users Seriously Considering Cloud

In a recent survey from CommVault it has been highlighted that half of the storage customers they polled (535 companies, 1000+ users with between 6TH and 75TB of data) were considering utilising the concept of cloud storage, despite security concerns of data.

The key facilitator for this shift is the growing volume of data followed by limits on current storage capacity, data centre capacity and data retention policies.

The respondents said that cloud storage could help with their DR policies, replace tape devices and introduce more efficient and predictable pricing models.

More than 75 percent of the survey sample said they have some concerns about moving data to a storage cloud, with 30 percent saying security is their biggest worry.

Dataplex exhibited at IPExpo in 2009 and will be there again in 2010, one of the reoccurring questions we were asked, was do we provide cloud storage services.   So if you are considering a move to the cloud you really should consider talking to Dataplex first.

Looking at Collaboration in the Cloud – Are you going multi tenant or dedicated?

A day very rarely goes past when cloud computing is not mentioned within the walls of our offices or those of our clients.

Compared to a year ago, it's amazing how important and pervasive cloud computing is becoming in our clients minds for business performance and agility.

One of the repeated conversations we have with clients is about business efficiency through collaboration (email, wiki, team sites, IM, Web Conferencing and Social Computing…) and can this (and should this) be run in the cloud.  Well most of the enterprise class cloud/SaaS providers offer a combination of dedicated or multi tenant architectures both with their pros and cons.  Many organisations are also interested in a hybrid cloud such as Microsoft BPOS where there is infrastructure still on premise and key components and users are hosted in the cloud.

The future of cloud-based collaboration is clearly multi-tenant for two economic reasons:

1. 1. Multi-tenant enables the fundamental economic benefits of a shared resource.
2. 2. Multi-tenant is a much faster way to deploy improvements.

Multi-tenant is also the path that every major cloud collaboration vendor is on. Microsoft, for example, is running Exchange Online in a multi-tenant solution that now scales past 25,000 seats. Salesforce.com and Google have always been multi-tenant.

So when would the cost of a dedicated architecture in the cloud suit your business model, there are typically three of these:

1. 1. If you are not satisfied with the security architecture proposed by multi tenant architectures.
2. 2. If your collaboration application must be highly customised and integrated tightly with other applications.
3. 3. If you workload won't run in a virtual machine.

So if cloud is for you and you need to understand your strategy, you really need to talk to Dataplex.

2010 CIO priorities are starting to shift

Priorities within IT are moving away from the large-scale enterprise deployments of the 1990s because technologies such as virtualisation, collaboration and analytics, can be deployed more cheaply, scaled quickly, and be more easily adapted, according to a Gartner report released yesterday. And CIO’s will become more focused on strategic activities, not just cost-cutting, both within IT and for the business as a whole, Gartner's survey of 1,568 CIOs in medium to large enterprises across the world found.

The top 10 technology priorities for 2010 are virtualisation, cloud computing, "Web 2.0" collaborative technologies, networking and VoIP, analytics and business intelligence, mobile, data and document storage and management, services and service-oriented architecture, security technologies, and IT management, according to the survey.

The top 10 business priorities are business process improvement, cost reduction, increased use of analytics, improved workforce effectiveness, attracting and retaining new customers, managing change initiatives, creating new products and services, better targeting of customers, business operations consolidation, and expanding current customer relationships.

Gartner expects IT budgets to remain essentially flat in 2010, and the bulk of spending to remain on traditional and existing efforts. The lightweight, modular technologies that have risen to the top of the technology priority list won't account for a huge amount of spending.

One reason is that they are cheaper to deploy than traditional enterprise apps, costing thousands of dollars not millions for the initial deployments. Another is that CIOs are still figuring out the implications of the technologies, their potential risks and benefits, and the appropriate structures and methodologies that need to be in place to effectively use them.

The survey also finds a shift in CIOs' attention from an IT focus to a shared focus on business and IT strategy, especially in large businesses, Gartnet says. In the last year, "CIOs have gotten better at helping executives see the difference" between IT strategy and the use of IT to further business strategy, he notes. Those CIOs who continue to focus on just IT strategy in isolation from the business will find that their mandate will become "all about cost-cutting."

EMC doubles density of Clariion, Celerra storage systems

EMC announced yesterday a new higher-density configuration of its Clariion CX4 midrange storage array and Celerra NAS gateway device, offering twice the capacity of previous systems in half the floor space.  The Celerra NAS gateway uses the Clariion frame as its back-end.

The mid-range storage systems, which now can house twice the number of hard disk drives in half the frame space, will also support lower-power 2TB SATA drives, compared to the 1TB drives supported by earlier systems.

The higher-density Clariion can be configured with the 2TB SATA drives as well as high-performance enterprise SSDs. The Clariion uses power efficiency technology such as disk spin down and EMC fully automated storage tiering (FAST) to allow for automated data migration between internal disks. Disk spin down puts drives into sleep mode when they're not in use.

A Clariion array can support up to 480 drives, or 960TB of raw capacity.

The higher density is achieved through a re-architecture of the frame, making it five inches deeper and so that two disk drive trays now fit front to back.

VMware Did Acquire Zimbra

As we blogged on here last week, there was mounting speculation that VMware could be about to acquire Zimbra.  Well yesterday (Tuesday 12th January) they did.

This is the 14th acquisition that VMware have made – that we are aware of; and as with Springsource in 2009 this seems to be an acquisition that is far away from the traditional space that VMware plays in.

In case you didn’t read our other post, Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite that competes with other PIM SaaS providers such as Google.

What is VMware going to do with Zimbra? A product that is completely unrelated to virtualisation with the exception of the  Zimbra virtual appliance.

VMware have said they will continue to support the users mailboxes and continue to develop the suite, but they have also mentioned in the press release that they will be looking to optimise and integrate the product into their vCloud solution.

What they have made clear is that offering business critical core applications is a key area of their strategy, so I would have thought that reading between the lines there will be a raft of more acquisitions to follow as clearly email is not the only core application a business needs.

I guess one of the biggest challenges in this new direction that VMware seem to be embarking upon changing the mind set of organisations away from just a virtualisation platform, very much like Citrix had to do with Presentation Server.

Should be an interesting time ahead.

Watch out Mozy, ZumoDrive, DropBox…. – Google Docs is on the move

Over the next few weeks, Google will be rolling out the ability to upload all file types to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online. Because Google Docs now supports files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications, you’ll be able to backup large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more to the cloud. More importantly, instead of carrying a USB drive, you can now use Google Docs as a more convenient option for accessing your files on different computers.

This feature can also help you work with teams to organise and collaborate on information online.  You can even add these files to the same shared project folder your team has already been using to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets.

In addition to uploading any file into Google Docs, the Google Apps Premier Edition will be able to seamlessly upload many files at once and sync them with your desktop in real time using third party applications.

This feature will be enabled over the next couple of weeks.

CIOs should give the cloud a chance

In a recent survey a number of CIOs were questioned about Cloud Technology and whether it would be on their radar for inclusion in their IT architecture; more often than not it wasn’t.  Just over 50% of CIO’s questioned in BT’ Enterprise Intelligence survey could not see where cost savings could be made.

As we have blogged about time and again here, the biggest concern is security, the survey highlighted this "The majority of CIOs (57 percent) and senior executives (53 percent) surveyed said they were not happy to run applications and store data on servers outside their country for security reasons."

CIOs are a bit wary around another technology shift.  You would have to be new in IT not to realise there have been some IT silver bullets over the last 20 years that, well, never really delivered the goods.

So how do we position the cloud to a CIO and highlight the benefits?

1. Lets look at what Cloud Technology is; its an architecture to make existing IT systems more effective.  Cloud technology should not be a radical change for the business, moreover it should be a tactical deployment (initially) to solve well defined problems which are small by their nature.  We typically see cloud being leveraged as part of an overall solution and not the enabler to the solution.
2. Undertake a POC, identify areas of the business which could be improved through enhanced availability and improved management information.  There is not hardware or software to buy, implement a small none business critical POC and find your feet.
3. You need to understand that Cloud computing is a marathon and not a sprint, and will continue to evolve into a platform that is open, portable and above all (hopefully) have formal security processes regulating it.

Handled right, the Cloud can offer massive value to the business.

VMware Data Recovery 1.1

For those of you with VMware vSphere Essential Plus and higher you may be aware of the in built capability of Data Recovery, a feature of vSphere that VMware to be honest has not done a great job of marketing the value of.

Data Recovery is a disk & file backup/restore product that comes as a virtual appliance (powered by a 64bit CentOS 5.2 Linux distribution) and protects guest Operating Systems in ESX and ESXi.

Architecturally it looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In late November 2009 the company updated it to version 1.1 (build 207380) primarily to introduce support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 guest OSes.

VDR 1.1 also introduces a new File Level Restore (FLR) client for Windows guests which finally allows to restore single files:

If you haven’t already looked at this – take a look.

Microsoft launches MOF 4.0 Reliability Workbook for Hyper-V in Beta

The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) is a blueprint that companies can use to standardise the way they manage their IT, pretty similar to what the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) set of practices does.

Virtualisation is such a complex technology that involves Operating Systems, networks and storage administration, security hardening, performance monitoring and even applications troubleshooting in some cases and there is a real need for operational frameworks to handle virtual infrastructures.

A step in the right direction may be from Microsoft, which released the first beta of what they call Reliability Workbook for Hyper-V, as part of the existing MOF 4.0 framework.

The Reliability Workbooks are task lists (in Excel format) that Microsoft recommends to follow to monitor and maintain the health and reliability of their products.

Before using a Reliability Workbook a company has to fine tune it, performing a list of steps:

Once done, the customer can move on the spreadsheet, which includes 5 pages besides the Overview and Acknowledgements:

• Monitoring Activities
• Maintenance Activities
• Health Risks
• Standard Changes

Here’s the Health Risks table:

Its still quite basic as a product, but I assume it will be much richer for end users when it hits RTM.

VMware to acquire Zimbra?

If you don’t already know Zimbra is an online/offline collaboration suite owned by Yahoo, and goes toe-to-toe with SaaS PIM’s offered by Google for example.

The platform didn’t get much traction compared to the competitors above and Yahoo is rumoured to be trying to sell it since September 2008.

The tech division of the The Wall Street Journal, is reporting that VMware is acquiring Zimbra.

While this is seems extremely unlikely, WSJ is a very reliable news source.

So, assuming this rumour will be confirmed as true, the question is: why a virtualisation vendor like VMware would want a SaaS collaboration suite like Zimbra?

The new CEO Paul Maritz, which has been a top executive in Microsoft for many years, may envision a new VMware which offers IaaS, PaaS (see the SpringSource acquisition) and SaaS technologies all together.

Again, assuming this acquisition is confirmed (a big question mark), it is legit to ask: is the company moving this way because this is the right way to evolve for VMware, or just because this is the best way it could survive a future where Microsoft turned virtualisation into a real OS commodity and Google persuaded the world to embrace HTML5 and just release web applications?

Interesting times….

Business as usual for Dataplex Systems thanks to Citrix

Despite the torrid weather conditions across the UK, Dataplex continue to operate as a business with all staff working collaboratively from home.

Using a combination of Citrix technologies Dataplex staff have been able to access systems securely in real time from their home locations, this coupled with online meeting technology has provided Dataplex with the ability to be “virtually” there and continue to maintain operations.

Managing Director, Richard Sparrow who braved the elements for 2 ½ hours last night to cover 10 miles on the journey to his house provided the following statement:

“Dataplex have delivered real-time collaborative systems for many years and our clients have enjoyed the flexibility they deliver, yesterday morning we put into full swing the advice we provide.  Dataplex invoked their Business Continuity Plan yesterday morning for our Manchester and Oxford offices informing all staff to log on from home as normal, all systems were accessible as were all communications.  Dataplex respect the need to ensure their workforce is safe in such harsh conditions and as such have provided the infrastructure to ensure their wellbeing”.

Both Manchester and Oxfordshire has seen some of the worst snow conditions in decades, impacting business performance just as they get started in the New Year.

HP aims to deliver unified storage

Hewlett-Packard hopes to do the same thing with storage that it did with servers, leveraging years of system-building experience and economies of scale, by blurring the distinction between servers and storage.

The company envisions platforms based on industry-standard hardware with software that can change the characteristics of each component as an enterprise's needs change.

"What the Nirvana is, is that I give you something that is really 100 percent truly general-purpose," said Ian Selway, worldwide solution marketing manager.

Although several major IT vendors are moving to unite computing, storage, and networking, HP believes it has an advantage over rivals such as Cisco and IBM because it will let third-party products interoperate with its own and won't lock customers into specific devices or architectures.

HP's general-purpose approach will give organisations a cost-effective way to scale up their datacenters, taking advantage of the company's expertise in building computing platforms and its cost advantage as, for example, the largest buyer of memory in the world, according to Jeffrey Hausman, vice president of Unified Storage at HP.

With common hardware, managed by common management software, IT administrators will have fewer things to manage and an architecture that is easier to understand than a collection of distinct computing, storage, and networking boxes, Hausman said. While enterprises can benefit from this type of unified system from HP, existing storage systems from other vendors will also be able to plug in and work with it, he added.

With their extra time, IT managers can study new applications that business units want to deploy in the datacenter, to make sure they're deployed the best way possible, he said.

The company's acquisition of storage software vendor Ibrix earlier this year plays a key role in its strategy. Among other things, Ibrix can allocate different parts of an infrastructure to file storage, block storage, virtual tape, and other functions, and change that allocation as required.

Want to know more about HP Converged Infrastructure then please contact us: cb@dplex.co.uk

Microsoft adds Datacentre automation to System Center

I have meant to blog about this for a while now, but with Christmas and NY in the way I have finally got round to it!  Just before Christmas Microsoft acquired Opalis Software, and with it Microsoft will bring to their virtualisation platform and data centre management expertise a greater automation capability.

The company did not disclose any financial details of the transaction, but said that it would help augment its System Center line of management software. 

Datacenter orchestration is one of the most important areas where virtualisation will grow and expand in the coming years as the virtualisation platforms and technology matures.  The need for such a tool will become more evident as virtualisation implementations continue to scale out and increase in complexity.

Opalis technology can help these growing virtualised, dynamic datacenters with the following:

• Run book: Automate maintenance and administrative tasks that are repeated over and over again
• Provisioning: An orchestration tool can help automate the configuration, deployment, and provisioning of server, storage, or network resources across the physical, virtual, or cloud environment
• Virtual service management: Automate virtual lifecycle management to control sprawl
• Deep integration: Orchestrate tasks across server infrastructure and systems management products to help with the physical, virtual, and cloud.

Automation has been and will continue to be a key focus for virtualisation players and will be deeply entwined into the management platform for their hypervisors.  VMware have Orchestrator and Citrix has Workflow Studio.

IT Security Predictions for a new year

Ok, so the Christmas holidays are over and the UK is coming to a grinding halt due to snow and Manchester is no exception.  So on a cold wintery day I am working from home and connected to my office holding a number of online meetings both with and without video and my productivity is as good, if not better than that of in the office. 

Anyhow, I got thinking about what makes this possible, and that led to me to think about security, as without formal security procedures and processes we would not realise the productivity we at Dataplex are currently enjoying. 

So as I was thinking about security and it is a New Year (Decade), I decided to have a punt on what may happen in the world of online security in 2010.  Don’t place any bets on these, and if you do and win my email address is cb@dplex.co.uk and you can you can use PayPal :)

1. Cloud security standards emerge. By the end of 2010, we’ll see a framework emerge for establishing a well defined set of technology, practices, and processes, organised into different levels of trust. Ultimately, adherence to these specifications will need be certified by third parties.

2. Federation will start to take off by the end of 2010. Use of federation will be fuelled by SaaS and cloud computing and the need for single sign-on to bridge identities

3. Web content security in the cloud will take off. Though managed email security is one of the more popular areas of security SaaS, organisations have been slow to adopt the SaaS model for Web content security. This will change in 2010.

Sure there are way more than this, but just a few that come to mind.

Who will be the casualties of Cloud Computing?

When looking at the space that cloud computing occupies, it's difficult to imagine that cloud computing could actually cause a number of casualties. However, as with any new technology, there are winners and losers.

So what could take a hit?

Service Governance. There are two types of service governance technologies: runtime, or the ability to enforce service policies during execution, and design time, or technology supporting the design and implementation of service policies. Policies are placed around services to control who can access those services and what they can do with them. Obviously, when using services you don't own or host, such as the case with cloud computing, the need for service governance goes way, way up.

Today SOA is a huge reality as company’s ramp up to leverage cloud computing or have an SOA that uses cloud-based services. Thus, the focus on runtime service execution provides much more value. Many of the existing runtime SOA governance players support enough design and implementation capabilities that separate design-time tools are not required. Cloud computing is simply accelerating the focus on the requirement for runtime SOA governance, and sooner or later design time will fall by the wayside.

Old clouds. Given how recent the cloud hype is, it's difficult to picture cloud computing providers that have been around for five years or more. But in fact, a few of them are out there. Ironically, some of these early cloud providers have not seen the implications of the recent growing interest in the cloud. These providers are typically bit players in the cloud, providing pieces of solutions, but not holistic solutions themselves.

Most of these organisations use proprietary software stacks in their own datacentres, while the newer breed of small cloud players use open source stacks that run in somebody else's cloud. Thus, these older providers support operational cost models that are just not in line with their peers. Moreover, well-funded and rapidly growing larger providers find that replicating many of the features and functions of the smaller and older clouds is just a quick internal development project. Therefore, we'll see many of the venture capital walking away from these older companies; if they're lucky, a larger provider will scoop them up.

Tier 2 Enterprise Software. It's no surprise that cloud computing is changing the way enterprises purchase and consume software. While the larger Tier 1 providers such as SAP, Sun, and Oracle have felt the pinch, the Tier 2 enterprise software vendors are going to have their markets taken out from under them if they don't get act quick.

The reality is that cloud computing is initially focusing on the small-to-medium-size business marketplace, which Tier 1 providers have largely left alone. The rapidly expanding cloud computing market addresses SMBs out of the box, and many of these smaller enterprises are finding that it is much more cost-effective to move to SaaS and other cloud services than to stay with the Tier 2 on-premise software vendors that traditionally dominated the SMB market.

Could be an interesting market going into 2011.

This article originally appeared at Infoworld.com.