Deb Woods

Early Bird at Cloud Expo Cloud computing is a big economic, green and scalable gift to organizations around the globe. The New Year offers a great opportunity to re-think your IT strategy and see how the cloud can benefit your organization. The day when IT leaders no longer have to worry about expensive internal data centers is fast becoming reality. The cloud allows you to rent your infrastructure, your platform, and/or your software. This simple pay-as-you-go cost model offers greater scalability and flexibility, and is very similar to the subscription based software model employed by open source companies. The Cloud is Economical In the past, large up-front investments were required to start IT projects. Organizations had to buy the hardware and infrastructure, along with hefty upfront licensing fees to proprietary software vendors. This upfront investment was c... (more)

Software Appliances: Delivering Open Source

Appliances. The very word is emblematic of stability and strength. Think of the appliances in your kitchen. Unless you’re particularly unlucky, 99.9% of the time your refrigerator, stove and dishwasher just work. You don’t have to give it a second thought. When we talk about software appliances, we’re talking about a similar stability. A software appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system to run well on a server or a virtual machine. Like your kitchen appliances, software appliances, require a minimal attention to things like ... (more)

Get Greater Business Insights and Relieve IT Cost Pressure?

With heightened pressure on today's businesses from the current global economic woes, figuring out what to do next on many business and technology decision-making levels, and making sure they are the right moves, can make or break your business. Take a moment to consider the following questions: Is now the right time to grow a particular aspect of the business? Could we cut the new IT application that is just about to go in-service? Do we really need to reduce the number of IT support staff to save money? How about closing a regional product? Maybe we should discontinue a product?... (more)