Tag Archives: savings

Improve Performance While Lowering Costs

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Expertly meshed information technology and voice technology services are the perfect combination of near term problem solving and long term competitive opportunities for organizations today.  Delivered across a redundant and highly performing mesh infrastructure, mesh services have proven to lower or completely eliminate technology ownership problems, while improving the customer experience and productivity gains.  Industry leading technologies and technology talent are available in any fraction or combination to fit your exact operational and budgetary expectations.



Intellectual Property On Demand – meshIP

Make good decisions or bad decisions.  There are more advancing and powerful technologies available in the market than most organizations or executives stay keep abreast of – let alone effectively leverage or turn into a strategy.  The meshIP service offers technology seasoned experts to validate or map your technology strategy, address and achieve operational excellence, execute a winning financial strategy, or sales and marketing counseling to leverage the most advanced strategies and technologies.  Compare this service to a CEO, CFO, CIO, or CMO on demand.

Consumable Desktop, Servers, and Cloud Applications – meshDESK

Spend too much to own, or only pay as you go.  Every day a host of advanced technologies and services improve in environments owned and operated by technology companies.  If you are not a technology company, chances are you are wasting money.  The meshDESK service takes responsibility for cost, compliance, and spending risk so you do not have to.  Leverage simple to access hardware, storage, applications, and security controls that can grow or shrink month-to-month.  Compare this service to your utility company relationship.  You only pay when you turn on the lights.

Highly Agile Voice Communications On Demand – meshPBX

If you are not communicating how your customers want your competitors will.  Aging systems and limited agility are proving to drive unnecessary reinvestment and long term capital risk.  Today, customers demand predictable voice and messaging access. Advanced voice technologies make this simple and possible.  The meshPBX service combines enterprise system functions with low cost network utilization, while incorporating voice to email and other messaging opportunities.  Compare this to 911.  When they need you, you are there.

Our mesh services are uniquely architected for sole proprietors and global enterprise utilization alike.  Desktop applications, storage, business continuation and security are offered at $99 per month per user.  meshPBX features and voice network utilization including long distance start at $29 per month per user.  Simply add or remove users as needed.   Please contact us today for a tailored evaluation and quotation.  The savings can start immediately and your competitive technology position is guaranteed to be future proofed.

www.meshIP.com

800.759.3195

meshIP Launches Two New Services!

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meshIP, LLC is please to announce the launch of two new services! meshIP was formed five years ago and has specialized in company formation, business plan development, funding and growth strategies. We are adding to our capabilities to assist small and mid-sized firms in their growth by offering hosted computing and telecommunications services. These offerings allow our clients to get out of the IT business and focus on their business.

Our meshDESK service offering  allows businesses to end the cycle of information technology overspending and support frustration by moving your users to on demand access of our global application and infrastructure cloud.

Cloud computing is enabling customers to access IT services without any infrastructure investment or any services deployed in-house. meshDESK is an integrated service that takes complex services and makes them simply consumable to businesses and agencies.

Our meshPBX service offering is an advanced telephone system platform that is owned and operated within the best data centers in the world – so you can safely transfer your operational needs and risk to us, while enjoying exceptional pricing.

Most importantly, meshPBX is highly configurable to demanding and unusual collaboration environments, while providing a long list of standard elements to meet your expectations of high mobility, messaging integration, security, and audit.

We are excited to be offering these two new services. Please check out www.meshIP.com to learn more about our capabilities

The Environmental Benefits of Cloud Computing

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A new report released by the Carbon Disclosure Project in London has found that blue-chip companies can reduce their carbon emissions by 50% if they move their data storage operations to the cloud. The study focused on major IT companies in France and the United Kingdom. These are the same companies which are also developing such “cloud” technologies and services. The release of the report follows an announcement that the use of cloud services may well triple within the next two years.

Cloud computing differs from the standard computing which we all know because all the software and information are not located in the computer CPU. Instead, these resources are provided to computers and other devices over the internet, similar to a home’s use of electricity through the electrical grid. The desired programs and files are manipulated over the web.

The benefit of cloud computing is that individual computers require less hardware because they won’t have to hold the gigabytes and terabytes of information. Companies can use servers located elsewhere to manage and process data. Less hardware equates to less energy consumed, and thus, lower carbon emissions.

The study found that in the UK, large companies that use cloud computing could achieve annual energy savings of £1.2 billion (€1.39 billion or $1.90). Carbon emissions saved is equivalent to the annual emissions of over 4 million passenger vehicles. For a country like France which is heavily reliant on nuclear power, the savings in emissions is much lower.

Cloud computing also lowers emissions by speeding up transactions. On the cloud, every piece of information and program is made available at any computer with an internet connection.

However, cloud computing does have its opponents. Many are concerned with privacy and the security of data. Instead of data being stored on your machine, it potentially be accessed by anyone with the ability to hack. Some are also concerned that cloud computing will lock users into proprietary systems and further big monopolies. One man, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has gone as far as calling the cloud a “trap”.

Nonetheless, the widespread adoption of cloud computing would have a positive impact on reducing carbon emissions. However, it would have to be adopted around the world and not just in Europe.

Author: David A Gabel
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US Intelligence Community Is Moving To The Cloud

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After a decade of enormous budget increases the American intelligence community’s budget will probably decline by billions of dollars, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said here.

Clapper told more than 3,000 people at the annual Geoint conference that the intelligence community’s budget had been handed in to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. “We are all going to have to give at the office,” Clapper said. The bulk of the cuts will come from accounts labeled information technology, he said.

The commitment to cut across the intelligence budget poses an important challenge for Clapper, as he made clear to the audience. The president told him, “this was a litmus test for the Office of National Intelligence.” After a decade of intelligence increases, which allowed all boats to rise, this is the first real test of the DNI’s ability and clout to control the fractious intelligence community which has historically resisted central control.

“We are all going to have to share in the pain,” Clapper said in a clear message to the Defense Department and the alphabet soup of agencies that comprise the intelligence community: CIA, NGA, NSA, NRO, DIA, FBI, Coast Guard and the intelligence agencies of the military services.

The biggest portion of those cuts, spread across 10 years, will come from anything labeled information technology, the director said. IT provides “huge potential for savings,” he said. How will it yield savings? Clapper said cloud computing — while not a “panacea” — makes possible much of those savings.

In a remarkable commitment, Gen. Keith Alexander, head of both the National Security Agency and of Cyber Command, told Geoint that NSA operations will move to the cloud by the end of this year.

Moving to the cloud, will provide huge savings of 30 percent to 40 percent savings in the NSA’s IT budget. He predicted the same can be achieved “across the intelligence community and the same across the Defense Department.” Moving to the cloud enables better security in some respects, Alexander said. All systems receive all security patches at the same time, for example. It also removes updating systems from the hands of a large number of humans, making it more certain they will happen.

Alexander also said moving to the cloud allows them to operate at faster speeds, which is critical to NSA and to other intelligence agencies.

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VoIP Migration Leads to Savings

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Small businesses looking to ditch old PBX landline phones can save big and increase staff productivity by migrating to Internet-based phone systems.

The telephone switchboard and landline desk phone may not be dead, but they are becoming relics of the past along with office ashtrays and typewriters.

Businesses are increasingly turning away from PBX (private branch exchange) phone systems and toward VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephony, which enables conversations to travel as data across the Internet. By 2013 more than 80 percent of businesses will use VoIP, according to research by In-Stat.

Is VoIP Right for You?

VoIP can be ideal if your company handles many calls among multiple people, has mobile employees, or juggles satellite offices. Implementing the technology can help to shrink or eliminate the cost of long-distance and conference calls.

In addition, VoIP provides the flexibility to manage calls as you would other data. For example, a caller’s contact information may pop up on a Web-based dashboard or on a smartphone with a VoIP app when they ring your number. Depending on the service, voice calls can be translated to text that you read via e-mail or on a smartphone. Many VoIP services extend beyond voice to encompass instant messaging, virtual meetings, and videoconferencing. VoIP is key to unified communications efforts to integrate all of your correspondence into a single, digital hub.

If you already have a local or wide-area network, then you’ve already laid much of the groundwork. Make sure that your organization has enough bandwidth–a T1 line or better–before trying to cram your calls through a sluggish data pipeline.

VoIP Options

What kind of VoIP system you need depends on the size of your business and the number of locations. One person working at home probably doesn’t need much more than a consumer service such as Skype, ViaTalk, or Vonage. Just sign up, download the app, don a headset, and you’re good to go. Skype even offers encryption to keep calls private. Mobile VoIP apps can help you rein in cell phone bills.

But that’s not enough if you need individual phone lines for your employees. In this case, the many VoIP options essentially break down to either a hosted or on-site VoIP service. Hybrid services can blend the two, letting you combine old and new equipment.

Research firm Frost & Sullivan projects that hosted VoIP will grow by 30 percent and on-premise by 12 percent over the next five years.

Hosted VoIP leaves the heavy technology lifting to another company. It can help a small business appear bigger by offering PBX-style features, such as individual phone numbers for employees and call transfers, even to workers away from their desks. It can include toll-free numbers and integration with e-mail and faxing software. You basically download software and buy or lease IP phones for each user. There’s little need to invest in expensive equipment or to pay an IT pro for ongoing support.

By contrast, on-premise VoIP will offer all the features of a hosted service, with the option for fine-tuning. Avaya and Cisco are among the vendors to consider. For this VoIP PBX option, however, you’ll have to handle all the hardware and the calls, so it’s time to call an IT pro. If you’re upgrading from a pure PBX system, a VoIP gateway device on your network can make the transition. Once you have VoIP going on your network, you should optimize your router and your network to prioritize traffic to ensure high call quality.

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Obama Banks on Cloud, Consolidation, to Hold Down IT Costs

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With Congress in the mood to cut spending, the federal budget proposed by President Barack Obama relies heavily on cloud computing and data center consolidation to keep IT costs under control.

The Obama administration’s 2012 federal budget proposal sets aside $79.5 billion for IT spending for fiscal 2012, which begins Oct. 1.

This proposal would increase IT spending by 1.9% compared to fiscal 2010. The current fiscal year’s IT spending remains a work in progress as the federal government operates under Continuing Resolutions. The latest resolution gives it enough money to operate through March 4.

The administration says it’s able to keep IT spending essentially flat at least partly because of projected savings of $3 billion-plus from IT consolidation and a planned shift to cloud computing technologies.

The White House has been setting the new IT direction over the past year, and in recent months started putting hard numbers to the plan.

In December, the administration announced plans to close more than 800 of the government’s 2,100 data centers by 2015.

Earlier this month, federal CIO Vivek Kundra released a report outlining a “cloud first” strategy for federal agencies.

Kundra estimates that the federal government could shift some $20 billion of IT spending to cloud computing platforms.

Kundra’s report said the government “will be able to reduce our data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30%” through cloud computing.

Ray Bjorklund, a vice president at consulting firm Federal Sources in McLean, Va., questioned Kundra’s savings estimate, noting that it is based on commercial sector studies that he is skeptical “will really apply to the government.”

Commercial businesses can act quickly on IT changes, said Bjorklund, but government agencies have statutory requirements and are so complex that “trying to wave your wand and say we are going to achieve 30% savings is not that simple.”

Bjorklund added that data center consolidation is a potentially long process, and he wondered whether the government “IT workforce is ready, willing, capable and able execute on that, to meet that timeline.”

The federal budget discusses investment in “light technologies,” which Deniece Peterson, an analyst at government market research firm Input in Reston, Va., said can be essentially defined as cloud services, but may include virtualization and Services-Oriented Architectures that are also part of an underlying cloud foundation.

Peterson also analyzed the budget in a blog post.

Instead of offering a significant amount of new funding for new technologies, this is a budget “that requires reprioritization and reprogramming of dollars,” said Peterson.

Kundra has set the priorities and by establishing cloud as a top direction. “Other less-critical programs will either see cuts, smaller growth than anticipated or be simply put on the shelf to be addressed when those savings are eventually reinvested in projects with clearer, more defined ROI,” said Peterson.

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Sunday Cloud Stats

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Quick cloud computing stats for a Sunday:

- CRN predicts that small business spending on Cloud Computing will hit $100 billion by 2014

- IDC estimates the market for public cloud products and services at $16B in 2010, growing to $56B by 2014

- Gartner estimates the Cloud market at $150B by 2013 while Merrill Lynch has it at 160B by 2011

- A recent survey of 500 IT decision-makers by SandHill found that ~50% of respondents cited business agility as their primary reason for adopting cloud applications

- Mobile and social computing are growing faster than anything before in the history of technology, and enterprise applications will need to adapt

- Gartner estimates that virtualization is growing rapidly and that by 2013, 60% of server workloads will be virtualized

- Public cloud infrastructure, applications and platforms are growing at 25%+ yet IDC projects that the market for enterprise servers will double by 2013

- A recent survey showed that every enterprise was using a SaaS application but less than a quarter of IT departments were aware that they were

Stats sourced from here

Ten Core Benefits of Cloud Computing

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Diversity Limited, a consultancy specializing in cloud computing/SaaS, collaboration, business strategy and user-centric design recently issued a paper discussing the ten core benefits of cloud computing.

This is one the best summaries that I have seen explaining why you should consider web-based software and cloud computing for your business. It nicely encapsulates the significant benefits small and mid-sized business can realize by adopting this approach to IT and telecom services.

1. Cost savings – cloud computing should save you money
2. Device and location independence - cloud solutions should allow you to work wherever and whenever you like
3. User-centric focus – cloud solutions should be designed with the user in mind
4. Reliability and scalability – cloud computing should be more reliable, and more readily scaled, than on-premise solutions
5. Minimizes software management – cloud solutions abstract maintenance away from the user
6. Organizational focus – cloud applications should allow you to focus on your core business and not be sidetracked by technology
7. Data portability – your data is your data, you should be able to move it as you see fit
8. Best of breed security – cloud security should be better, by an order of magnitude, than on-premise security
9. Powerful analytics – cloud solutions should give you an insight into your data and how people work with it

However, the challenge for small and mid-sized businesses is to understand the business and technical implications of the migration of their current, custom software environment and hardware infrastructure to a cloud-based model.

meshIP provides businesses with the intellectual property and insight necessary to develop a detailed project plan to insure a smooth and risk-free migration. By leveraging our technical and functional expertise and best-of-breed cloud services, we can insure these benefits are realized from day one.

The migration to cloud computing should not require betting your business on a botched implementation. The key to success is due diligence, planning and expertise.

meshDESK Hosted Desktop

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Hosted desktop technology is an innovative new method for delivering desktops to end users. Part of the ‘cloud computing’ concept, a hosted desktop looks and acts exactly like a traditional PC, but instead of residing locally, all software and data are housed in the meshDESK state-of-the-art data centers. You simply access your resources with a simple internet connection. Hosted desktops offer numerous advantages in terms of cost savings, security, resilience, flexibility and reduced management.

The future of computing is here now.

Hosted desktops are beginning to replace the traditional idea that all office staff must have a fully configured PC sitting beneath their desks. Of course, in today’s world businesses need their employees to have access to
computers to communicate and to support all business operations. However, the way in which this can be facilitated has evolved.

Buying, setting up, and maintaining PCs is an expensive exercise – especially when you factor in the associated management time and costs. meshDESK removes this headache by providing you with a hosted desktop environment, which you can connect to from anywhere via the internet – at home, abroad or in the office. All you need is a PC, laptop, thin client, or mobile device and an internet connection. meshDESK does the rest. Because we provide you with a full Windows environment with all the functionality you’d expect, you’d never know you weren’t using a PC. Additional applications can be installed on demand, while meshDESK performs backup, manages and supports the hosted desktops for you – ensuring they’re available 24 /7.

How does it work?
No visible difference between a regular desktop PC

A hosted desktop is a fully-functioning remote workstation. Instead of being held on local hardware, all software and data is housed in our state-of-the-art data centers. This data is then sent via the internet, to an end-user’s workstation (such as a PC or thin client), while industry-standard encryption (as used by Amazon and HSBC) ensures that no information can be accessed by external parties. Keystrokes and mouse movements are then relayed from the workstation to our data centers. This is an entirely seamless process and the end user’s Windows experience is identical to that offered by a traditional desktop PC, allowing
interaction with the exact same applications in the exact same way. You never notice the difference! As a hosted desktop is no longer tied to specific hardware, it can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from anywhere with an internet connection and end-device – at the office, at home, an internet cafe, on the move or even abroad. Moreover, since neither data nor processing reside locally, traditional PC hardware can be replaced by ‘thin clients’ or netbooks – a device that itself does almost no work. As a result, hardware is small, inexpensive, consumes a fraction of the power of a PC, needs little or no maintenance and hardware failures rarely occur. If you own, operate, and support PCs and applications, your per year user costs exceed thousands of dollars per year per user. Hosted desktops from meshDESK cut that by $600 or more immediately.

In addition, hosted desktops mesh perfectly with our other services, such as hosted VOIP and enterprise PBX, hosted Exchange and hosted BlackBerry, consumable computing infrastructure and more – to bring you a comprehensive anywhere, anytime’ business infrastructure at the lowest possible cost without sacrificing performance.

Want to find out more….?

To learn more about meshDESK hosted desktops, contact us now, or visit our website at www.meshDESK.com. You can speak to one of our representatives, arrange a personal web-meeting to discuss how hosted desktops can meet your requirements, or test drive a trial desktop to see the technology in action for yourself.