Locaweb Blog

CIOInsight, citing a December 2010 report by MarketBridge, mentions in an article on Cloud adoption by SMBs data that suggests that Cloud Computing is fast moving past the innovators and early adopters phases of the product adoption curve. The research was done with 1,000 North American midmarket and small businesses and analyzed their adoption of cloud-based information technologies.

According to the study, mobility is one of the drivers behind this move by SMBs, which only months ago were questioning the security of the cloud. As mentioned in the IDC Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2007-2011 Forecast paper,”IDC predicts the number of worldwide mobile workers will reach 1 billion – including nearly 75% of the U.S. workforce – by the end of 2011.” This is aligned with MarketBridge’s findings, in which 38% os respondents mentioned increased mobility as the driver for the adoption of cloud services.

The study brings several other interesting pieces of data:

1. Cloud adoption is picking up the pace: 44% of the surveyed companies have at least one business application on the cloud, and 70% of the remaining companies plan to have one within the next 12 months
2. Marketing and Sales are the most accepted Cloud apps: 36% of companies are using marketing automation on the cloud, and 29% of CRM is cloud-deployed. Over 49% of the companies are planning to move one or more of these applications to the cloud within 12 months
3. Private clouds are preferred: 52% of respondents preferred to deploy on some sort of “private cloud” – Here is where these companies show signs of immaturity in using cloud technologies – they are still trying to do things “in house” or signing up for dedicated cloud setups and missing out on the economies of scale of public clouds, usually based on security concerns. The next number is even more surprising, since it seems to contradict this one.
4. Cloud security perception: 48% of respondents believed that data security would actually be better on the cloud, recognizing the investment and expertise needed to establish and maintain secure computing environments. This is really a head-scratcher when confronted with the previous piece of data, although considering that 48% believe that the cloud is secure and 52% prefer private clouds, there isn’t necessarily an overlap. These might be two complementary groups in the research.
5. Companies are outsourcing: 67% of respondents preferred to purchase software applications through a 3rd party value-added managed service provider; this appears to be due to a need for both higher service levels and functional expertise.

This is great news for the industry.

Cloud blogger Dustin Amrhein just posted a great article on one of the hidden but by no means lesser benefits of Cloud Computing, which is the forced standardization it brings. Basically his arguments are that by adopting a cloud server solution, companies force their teams to work with standard components, generating savings in maintenance and complexity over a traditional structure where each team believes it can do “better” than its peers. In those situations what generally ends up happening is the duplication of efforts in setting up environments and making them work together.

Below is an excerpt from the original article.

Advocating for the Value of Enterprise Standardization
— When I go out and chat with different users about cloud computing, we usually end up discussing characteristics and associated benefits of the approach. As one may expect, rapid provisioning and increased asset utilization typically dominate the discussion. Users can draw a more or less straight line from these characteristics of the cloud to clear value for their organization, either in cost savings, increased revenue opportunity, or both.
While these characteristics and their benefits may be clear, there is another value-producing characteristic of the cloud that, in my experience, users do not appreciate with quite the same fervor: standardization.

Forrester’s James Staten in a November 15th article making predictions for the Cloud Computing market (most notably from a IaaS point of view) states something that sound interesting to companies considering setting up their own private cloud structure.

He states that hosted private clouds will outnumber internal clouds 3:1 because they are the fastest and easiest way for companies to gain the benefits of a private cloud with the speed of a public cloud arrangement. The rationale is that companies that want to get the economies of scale of a cloud arrangement securely will not be ready to deploy their private clouds internally, while service providers will. In another prediction, he states: “You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. And this is a good thing. Because through this failure you will learn what it really takes to operate a cloud environment.”

This is very true – setting up a cloud infrastructure is time consuming and requires big investments. Worse yet, the biggest investments are CapEx, when companies are trying to free up resources for OpEx. But that is not the whole story. The reasons for choosing a private cloud over a public one may be mistaken to begin with.

Staten cites a Forrester research paper that compares cloud computing platforms that divides cloud implementations into 3 groups: Public clouds, private clouds, and hosted private clouds. The main advantage of using a public cloud, according to him would be to leverage the economies of scale of cloud computing in the fastest, cheapest way. Private clouds, on the other hand, would trade of most of those economies for increased control and security. The hosted private cloud solution would, as one would expect, be an intermediate solution.

However, public clouds already offer solutions that make those arguments thinner and less relevant. VLANs connecting groups of virtual machines and Firewalls isolating them from the rest of the cloud infrastructure make public cloud server solutions practically as safe as their private counterparts, without the added costs and complexity. IT personnel can easily rely on that kind of solution to tap into the power of cloud computing without having to put together their own cloud setup and without having to resort to any kind of private cloud, even hosted. Private clouds are necessarily more costly that public ones, and as Staten himself puts it, 2011 will be the year companies will be eager to start reaping the economic benefits of going to the cloud.

My own prediction is that 2011 will be the year that cloud SLA and security worries will stop being an impediment to the adoption of IaaS. The worries are valid, no doubt, but the solutions are already here and the providers are already implementing them. It is certainly the case in our own Cloud Server Pro products and will certainly continue to be the case as we move forward with our cloud computing offerings.

ReadWriteWeb‘s Audrey Watters reports, citing a StatCounter report, that Firefox is now the #1 browser in Europe.

The shift is largely due to the growth of Chrome, which has been stealing users from IE, rather than to Firefox user base growth. Firefox now dominates 38.11% of the European market, with IE trailing at 37.52% and Chrome a distant (but growing) third at 14.58%.

Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s CEO, says this is likely the impact of one of the action Microsoft took as part of their anti-trust settlement with the EU, which implements a browser choice screen in Windows 7. Called a “Browser Ballot”, this screen must give users their choice of browsers, which are displayed in random order to be as neutral as possible.

The fact is that, ballot or no ballot, Chrome grew 187% in market share in the period between December 2009 and December 2010. The browser war is far from over, and as usual, Google is in the spotlight as the protagonist of yet another rupture.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens as more and more users go mobile, especially with Android (there goes Google again!) growing as it has been growing this last year. This is especially true considering another report by Audrey Watters at the ReadWriteWeb, stating that by 2015, one third of US consumers will be tablet users.

Even though Internet Explorer still comfortably dominates the US market at 48.92% of users, the adoption of mobile internet access might change this balance, especially since Microsoft has yet to hit home with its mobile offerings.

Check out the image below to see exactly what this Android growth represents in Europe.

This morning the city of São Paulo began hosting the largest existing Linux-related business, technology and collaboration conference, LinuxCon Brazil 2010.

Locaweb sponsors the event, which gathers developers, administrators, users and some of the most important names in open-source software and policies in the world. LinuxCon was created following strong demand from the US Linux community for a technical and corporate event geared toward joint collaboration, education and networking opportunities.

This is the first Brazilian edition of the event, and will have the presence of none other than Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, in a debate about the present and future of the system.

Linus Torvalds – release photo

Locaweb will have an unconference area in the event, a Barcamp room, where several Locaweber talks will be held. Keep an eye on our Twitter (@locaweb) where we will be publishing the talk schedule and other important updates about the event (in Portuguese).

Event: Linuxcon Brazil 2010.
Venue: Sheraton São Paulo World Trade Center Hotel. Avenida das Nações Unidas, 12559, Brooklin Novo – São Paulo – SP – Brazil.
Dates: August 31st – September 1st 2010 – 8am to 7pm.
Official schedule: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-brazil/schedule

Agile techniques and methods have been in use at Locaweb for a while now, and recently two of our development leaders, Alexandre Freire da Silva and Leandro da Silva, attended the 11th International Conference on Agile Software Development XP 2010 in Trondheim, Norway. Upon returning, they wrote the posted the following (very interesting) article to our corporate blog in Brazil. I’ll try to be as faithful as possible to the original in my translation.

A very interesting theme we saw at XP 2010 was the importance of having security stories in the application development backlog. This theme is commonly neglected by developers and product owners.

What kind of story is this?

Security stories are stories written by ill-intended users trying to find security holes in the system that’s being developed. Of course, the ill-intended users are just make-believe; they’re actually developers and product owners with good intentions, trying to find security flaws so that they can be addressed.

These stories are extremely important, since we never want to put vulnerable systems into production, exposing our company and clients to harm. Therefore, they need to be validated in the QA process – preferably through automated testing -, just like regular user stories.

How should you write them?

Basically, the idea is to write one or more security stories based on a regular user story, when applicable.

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Since 04/29/2010 Locaweb is part of the official Ubuntu mirror sites in Brazil, both for ISOs (releases) and packages (archive) of all supported versions of Ubuntu.

Hosted on the same Cloud solution we offer our clients, the LTS version of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) had 1134 downloads the first day and an additional 2461 the following day, for a total of 2.9 TB transferred in just two days!

Until the time of this writing there were a total of 33802 downloads, mostly of the desktop version of Ubuntu.

For the Cloud clients that use Ubuntu, the Mirror download is actually a local transfer, and therefore the data transfer isn’t counted towards the plan limits, aside from being much faster.

To change your Ubuntu server to use the Locaweb Mirror as a package repository, follow the instructions in our Wiki.

If you wish to download the Ubuntu ISO from the Locaweb Mirror, go to: http://ubuntu-release.locaweb.com.br

We are proud to announce that Locaweb has been confirmed as the top web hosting company in Brazil and in Latin America, with 15.69% and 9.14% market share, respectively. The data are from the IDC LA IT Services Tracker 2009, in the Hosting Infrastructure Services category. This survey is conducted twice a year by IDC Brazil. The results are a confirmation of the leadership that has long been achieved in the company’s home country of Brazil, where Locaweb has a 23.29% share of the .br ccTLD, according HostMapper, a local Internet market research company.

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Just last week, Locaweb became a member of CACE, the Argentinian E-Commerce Chamber (Cámara Argentina de Comercio Electrónico). We join companies such as Google Argentina and Dell in the Argentinian web hosting and e-commerce ecosystem, taking an active role in the development of the country’s internet services market.

This is aligned with our strategy for Latin America, where we intend to be a key player in the adoption of the internet as a business tool. Our intention is to bring to clients in all of the region the newest technologies, such as cloud computing, so that they can leverage their sales through e-commerce and internet presence, at a low cost and with best in class performance and support.

We are currently working on the internationalization of our successful e-commerce platform and should soon have it available to clients in Argentina and other Latin American countries. In the meantime, our portfolio contains several products that can already be used by those that have their own e-commerce solutions to start selling online. Be sure to check out our hosting and cloud computing platforms at www.locaweb.com.

Last week Locaweb was present at the Amipci Internet Day event in Monterrey, Mexico. This year, the event was entitled “New Internet Business for SMB’s Workshop”. We had the chance to interact with entrepreneurs and web developers alike, showing them how Locaweb’s Cloud Computing and other solutions can help them leverage their businesses.

It was a great and very productive event, and the fact that it took place just days after our association to Amipci shows how committed Locaweb is to building a successful network of clients and players in the Mexican market.

The event took place initially at the “Museo del Palacio”, or “Palace Museum”, at the palace where the Nuevo León government is located.

The opening ceremony was presided by Mr. Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz, governor of the state of Nuevo León, where Monterrey is located.

We shared our stand with Verisign, our long-time partners for domain name registration.

On the second day of the event, at the “Museo de Historia Mexicana”, or “Mexican History Museum”, we gave a presentation on Internet Solutions for SMBs, focusing on SaaS (Software as a Service) and Cloud Computing, and showing the attendees how these solutions could help their companies be online in a cost-effective and reliable way.

We have a lot more coming for Mexico in the future. Keep on reading for more news about Locaweb’s events in this and other countries.