AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its third annual OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging on-demand and SaaS companies that are creating new business opportunities in high-growth markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:
Jeff Kaplan
on January 29, 2012 
I had an opportunity to speak to the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum at Towson University last week about new strategies and tactics for fully capitalizing on today’s Cloud alternatives. Because the group is composed of CIOs primarily from mid-size and large-scale enterprises with a lot of custom built applications and systems already in place, their biggest challenge is determining how to integrate the latest Cloud services into their legacy operations. Managing ‘hybrid’ Clouds is becoming a common challenge.
Jeff Kaplan is the Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the only strategic consulting firm focused entirely on the business implications of the transition of the technology industry from product-centric to services-driven on-demand solutions. 
Greg Ness
on January 23, 2012 
For a fresh perspective on data center obsolescence check out The Coming Colocation Crunch by Nemertes Principal Analyst Ted Ritter writing for Data Center Knowledge this week (Jan 18, 2012):
“Nemertes Research predicts a shortage of colocation space in the U.S. beginning this year, growing to a $1.9 billion facilities gap by 2015.”
Greg Ness is the vice president of marketing at Vantage Data Centers and has a blog called The Archimedius Report where he writes mainly about networking, security, and virtualization.
Jeff Kaplan
on January 19, 2012 
The concept of “shared services” has been bandied about the IT industry for over 50 years. Yet, past iterations of this concept have often failed to meet the needs of corporate executives and end-users from a functional and economic standpoint.
This is because previous generations of shared services were too often built upon cumbersome and costly systems and software which could not scale to give corporate customers greater cost advantages or added features than they could gain from optimized inhouse resources. As a result, only highly specialized shared services, such as payroll processing and basic hosting, prospered in the past.
Jeff Kaplan is the Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the only strategic consulting firm focused entirely on the business implications of the transition of the technology industry from product-centric to services-driven on-demand solutions.
Jeff Kaplan
on January 09, 2012 
Despite some skepticism from industry analysts about the ability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors to deliver viable business intelligence (BI) solutions a few years ago, today’s Cloud-based analytic tools are increasingly demonstrating that they can quickly generate tangible benefits to organizations of all sizes, especially mid-market companies.
The growing interest in Cloud-based analytics is easy to understand given the escalating pressures facing businesses contending with rising customer expectations and intensifying competitive. Businesses not only have to synthesize a widening array of internal and external data sources, they must also make timely and useful analysis available to an increasingly dispersed workforce so they can make better day-to-day business decisions.
Jeff Kaplan is the Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the only strategic consulting firm focused entirely on the business implications of the transition of the technology industry from product-centric to services-driven on-demand solutions.
Greg Ness
on January 03, 2012 
In the same way that the rise of the Internet led to the enterprise web (web-enabled enterprise applications) the public and private cloud is driving IT to new modes of operation, most of which demand more agility, more capacity and an even keener focus on operating and capital expenses. This profound tension -between a substantial evolution in demands on IT and an extended period of economic doldrums- has placed CIOs in the crossfire.
Greg Ness is the vice president of marketing at Vantage Data Centers and has a blog called The Archimedius Report where he writes mainly about networking, security, and virtualization.
Jeff Kaplan
on December 29, 2011 
A year ago, I published a series of 10 predictions regarding how the Cloud Computing marketplace would evolve in 2011 in E-Commerce Times. Here’s a recap and assessment of my predictions:
Jeff Kaplan is the Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the only strategic consulting firm focused entirely on the business implications of the transition of the technology industry from product-centric to services-driven on-demand solutions.
Greg Ness
on December 21, 2011 
Earlier this month I attended the Gartner Data Center Summit, and sat in on several presentations, including David Cappuccio’s intro keynote on data center trends and Neal MacDonald’s session on virtualization security. I apologize in advance for the breadth of my rambling and speculation, but I think the IT revolution playing itself out will mark the evolution of virtualization into the network and into private clouds built within a new type of elastic data center. While I cite two excellent Gartner presos the following thoughts are my own extrapolations.
Greg Ness is the vice president of marketing at Vantage Data Centers and has a blog called The Archimedius Report where he writes mainly about networking, security, and virtualization.
Jeff Kaplan
on December 19, 2011 
Despite numerous market research forecasts predicting that small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs) would be in the vanguard of adopting today’s rapidly expanding array of Cloud-based services, the truth is that most mid-sized businesses have been slow to join the migration to these ‘on-demand’ alternatives.
In too many cases, it has been hesitancy or even overt resistance among IT decision-makers within mid-sized businesses which has let to these organizations staying away from Cloud services.
Jeff Kaplan is the Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies, the only strategic consulting firm focused entirely on the business implications of the transition of the technology industry from product-centric to services-driven on-demand solutions. 
