Constructing a high-availability application in the cloud can seem like a daunting process. The key is to assume that every component of a system will fail at some point and to prepare for that eventuality. Then you can build for failure and automate processes to handle it. Fault-tolerant systems designed for high availability - for example, 99.99% or 1 hour of downtime per year - are achievable in the cloud.

Here is a four-step guide to achieving high availability in the cloud.

Instances in the cloud - just as in a typical data center - are ephemeral. You need to be prepared for server failure. Building for server failure begins with designing stateless applications that are resilient through a server or service reboot or relaunch.

• Set up auto-scaling so that any given tier of your application - load balancer, app server, database, and caching servers - can maintain a minimum number of nodes or set of performance metrics.
• Set up database mirroring, master/slave configurations, and/or priming to ensure data integrity and minimum downtime.
• Use dynamic DNS and static IPs so that components of your application's infrastructure always have the right context.

2. Build for zone failure

Sometimes more than just single servers fail -- there are electricity failures, network outages, and lightning strikes. You need to make sure that your applications are prepared for zone failures. Zones (Amazon Web Services refers to them as "availability zones") are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other zones.

• Spread the servers in each of your application tiers across at least two zones.
• Replicate data across zones. Note that this is usually cheap, though not free.

3. Build for cloud failure

On rare occasions multiple zones in a region can fail due to system-wide issues -- the April 2011 Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage is a notable example. Each region is an independent system of resources with its own API endpoint -- which is how we define cloud here.

To achieve multiple 9s of availability, you will need to have a process in place for cloud failures. Building across clouds can be difficult: APIs, services, and configurations differ. You will need to design your architecture using generic concepts (durable storage) yet deploy using cloud specifics (EBS volumes).

Cloud management systems abstract away these differences and make it easier for you to implement a fault-tolerant strategy by providing reusable building blocks. These building blocks can be used to not only withstand moving across different regions of the same provider, but also across regions of different providers.

• Back up or replicate data across regions or providers. Make sure you secure and authenticate your communications across these regions because the traffic will traverse the open Internet.
• Maintain sufficient capacity to absorb zone or cloud failures, using reserved instances if necessary.
• Remember to crawl, then walk: Build high availability across zones and then expand to multiple clouds.

4. Automate and test everything

As you set up your infrastructure to handle server, zone, and cloud failure, you should be automating your processes in the event of failure. Cloud management systems allow you to execute pre-planned failover processes across servers, zones, and clouds. In an emergency, time is precious, so automate everything.

• Automate backups so that your data is ready whenever disaster strikes.
• Set up monitoring and alerts to identify and pinpoint problems as they occur because you may not receive timely information from your cloud providers.
• Your disaster recovery plan is only good if you test it to make sure it works. By randomly directing high loads to your production servers and disabling your various servers, services, and zones, you can test the ability of your infrastructure to withstand failure.

Cloud infrastructure has made disaster recovery and high availability remarkably affordable compared to other options. Despite recent highly publicized failures, many organizations successfully run critical services on the cloud when they architect correctly and use the right management tools.

Photo by joegus74

The Chevy Volt* is unique among electric cars because it runs on two sources of energy. You have an electric source - a battery - that allows you to drive gas-free for an EPA-estimated 35 miles. And there's also an onboard gas generator that produces electricity so you can go farther. So if you want to drive using only electricity, you can. If you want to drive using electricity and gas, you can do that, too. Hear what one proud Volt owner had to say about how the electric car fits his driving lifestyle.

Meet Ron Hipschman of California. "After seven months of driving my Volt, I have yet to get into a gas line," says Hipschman. He says the farthest he's driven on a single electric charge so far was about 50 miles, with most of that trip being on a freeway and taking place on a nice day when the temperature was about 70 degrees. "Perfect conditions for the battery," he notes.

Because the Volt lets drivers pick the driving mode to match their driving style (normal, sport, and mountain modes), you're truly in charge of the car's performance when you're behind the wheel. In addition, you'll also learn how to get the most efficiency out of the vehicle by keeping an eye on the dashboard.

"No jack-rabbit starts and stops, keeping tires properly inflated, and keeping the speed lower than most people on the freeway were always things I did. The Volt just makes it easier to see the effects," he explains.

Not having to shell out hundreds of dollars to fuel up and smarter driving skills are great perks, but the Volt's appeal goes beyond just the electric power, intuitive driving modes, and dashboard gadgets. There's also the cool factor - think movie and superhero spy cars! "My neighbor is constantly surprised that I can 'sneak up' on her with the Volt when she is in her driveway, which is next to mine. This is a real stealth car!" says Hipschman.

He encourages prospective car buyers to check out the Volt for themselves to see if it's a good fit. "Go take a test drive," he says. "You'll be sold."

*Volt is available to order at participating dealers. Quantities limited.

Your all-encompassing mobile device or sophisticated print-and-shoot camera allows you to take outstanding pictures - but it isn't always easy to create prints that are equally impressive. The Epson Artisan 837 all-in-one printer was built to perform, offering stunning, ultra-hi-def quality whether you're printing photos, everyday docs, or creative projects.

You know you always wish that photo printers would require less wait and less ink to do the job, so - lucky you: The Epson Artisan 837 is the world's fastest 4x6" photo printer - and it doesn't sacrifice quality for speed. You'll get vivid, rich, high-quality photos with high-definition, better-than-lab-quality printing that can be done conveniently at home. Plus, this gold standard printer is equipped with high-capacity ink cartridges that allow you to print up to 50 percent more photos. Winning!

Even better, you don't have to be right beside your printer or attached by a USB cord to print. With Epson Connect, you can be across the globe and wirelessly print photos, documents, web pages, or emails from your Epson Artisan 837. All you need is a mobile device and a few moments to install the app. From then on, you'll be free to roam while still being free to print as you please.

Printing isn't the only job of the Epson Artisan 837. This all-in-one printer - versatile, remember? - includes a 30-page automatic document feeder which enables you to copy, scan, and fax large documents with ease. Epson. Built to perform.

Photo by svilen001

The cloud model provides convenient, affordable, and on-demand computing resources tailored for software development teams as well as augmenting in-house IT environments. Today's leading companies use the cloud to change IT to be more agile and power their agile software development teams. Below are five tips that enable them to deliver agile IT.

2. Empower Developers with self-service environments
Enable your developers by creating operational templates specific to each development project, setting consumption policies and providing an easy way for developers to consume IT services. Once you adopt an agile model, trust your developers and empower them with self-service environments. IT can reduce the amount of support they need to provide and development teams get the flexibility they need on-demand.

3. Expect rapid changes and fast iteration to be the new normal
Be ready to architect IT to be agile, configurable, scalable and flexible. An agile development model is inherently fast paced, so be willing to accommodate change and quickly adapt to what works and what does not. Expect rapid iteration and design your IT processes accordingly.

4. Collaboration is at the heart of agile development
Agile teams set the stage for customers, lines of business, QA, and support professionals from day one. All of these stakeholders are expected to operate on the application based on the specific roles they play within the team. If the IT environment cannot be easily replicated and shared with all stakeholders then the developers will not adopt it.

5. Maintain visibility and control over your IT operations
Agile IT does not eliminate security and governance needs. IT departments need to set security policies and enforce them through granular access control. They need to have complete visibility into quota usage, resource management, and compliance. Cloud providers like Skytap can easily enable security and governance needs for IT departments.

You can transform existing IT into an agile IT that development teams will embrace. The process isn't difficult - but you must rethink your IT architecture and implement a solution that is developer-friendly.

About the Author: Nate Odell is Director of Marketing at Skytap, a leading provider of cloud automation solutions. He is an industry veteran with a successful 11-year career in B2B marketing for technology startups. Follow Nate on Twitter @NateOdell25 or @Skytap.

Photo by artM

Think about it: Choosing the right printer is just like choosing a business partner. As smart entrepreneurs know, the right partner makes you (and your business) look good, pitching in where needed, never leaving you high and dry at 2 a.m. when you're finishing up an important presentation, and always performing at maximum potential.

The Epson WorkForce® Pro printer is a lot like a good partner.

It's the world's fastest two-sided inkjet printer and it's reliable. (Which you'll appreciate when you're printing those slide decks in the wee hours of the morning.) Thanks to a large ink and paper capacity, the Epson WorkForce® Pro requires less printer downtime to add paper and ink than competitive models. Even two-sided printing is practical and pain-free!

The Epson WorkForce® Pro is built to perform -- with technology that allows the ink to dry instantly, creating smudge, fade, and water-resistant prints that are half the price per page for color printing versus laser (not to mention the savings on paper). Better printer efficiency and value means more money in your pocket -- and a nicer pocket, too. That's why it's one of the easiest and smartest business decisions you'll ever make, allowing you to run your business at full speed.

Photo by brokenarts

The legacy IT model can no longer meet the requirements of today's agile development teams. Historically, the old IT model required at best two to four weeks to spec out a development and test environment, order the machines, network and storage gear, wait for delivery, rack it, and configure them. That procurement process is extremely time-consuming, inconvenient and costly. Today's development teams require a new approach to obtain much needed IT resources quickly for their development and test projects.

• Deliver a self-service solution portal. Developers can create, replicate, change or delete entire software dev/test stacks in seconds.
• Provide on-demand scalability and configurability. Developers can create new release stacks on-demand and in a consistent and dependable fashion as they go through release cycles.
• Provision multiple dev/test environments. Test engineers can run multiple copies of a release, build and test various OS/DB/Browser combinations and scale the environments up or down quickly, as needed.
• Enable constant time snapshots and rapid bug reproduction. Dev teams can recreate any complex bug scenarios (including production issues), rapidly snapshot those environments, make changes, run tests and compare the results to the original.
• Facilitate collaboration and parallel work streams. Engineers can collaborate and share access to those environments with other engineers and support professionals over the Web.

At the same time, IT professionals can get full visibility and control over cloud environments. In particular, they can:

• Set-up dev/test environment templates that are IT policy compliant.
• Create users, roles, access control lists and permissions.
• Establish hybrid cloud architecture to connect to in-house data centers.
• Assign group, project and individual level quota for machines, storage and networks.
• Track usage by month, by user, by project and implement charge backs if needed.
• Audit and ensure compliance policies are followed.

The result?

IT teams that adopt a cloud-enabled agile IT solution such as Skytap Cloud can expect to reduce their total cost of ownership by more than 70% while also reducing the release cycle time by more than 75% when compared to the legacy IT infrastructure. Agile IT empowers development teams to achieve the full potential of the agile model. In addition, IT will be able to retain full visibility and control over cloud environments and reduce operating costs.

Photo by OeilDeNuit

Editor's note: We offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write posts and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Running a small business is never easy. There are too many things to do but too little time, manpower and finance at your disposal. While cleverly juggling smart moves and a bit of luck can take care of the time and manpower, being cash strapped is one thing that needs more than just that. And most small businesses are cash strapped.

For two reasons:

• Spreadsheets and files are not nearly enough to manage the different aspects of your business efficiently. The world has moved on to the cloud. Tweets have replaced emails, and chats are the new phone calls. Why, then, would you lug around files after files containing sensitive and important data?
• You don't have to hire IT guys to build and manage your business applications.

A Mexican standoff? Not quite. Get around both of these with a stroke of brilliance. Build custom business applications - yourself. Yes you - with limited or absolutely no programming expertise - can build a complex looking application all by yourself, in minutes.

Zoho Creator is just what you need. Zoho Creator is a database software that lets users build customized business applications online. Building a customized business application is not rocket science. No really.

Here's a checklist that can help you decide if you can build your own app.

• You own the business? Yes.
• You know what you need to manage a particular department in your business? Yes.
• It will be your decision to hire an IT guy to develop the custom app for you? Yes.
• You will be briefing the IT guy on what your application needs to do? Yes.
• And when he comes up with an application, you'll be the one testing it out to see if it is really what you ​need? Yes.

If you answered yes to at least three of the above questions, then congratulations. You have what it takes to build a full-fledged customized application, all by yourself.

With a simple platform like Zoho Creator, you don't have to look any further. Zoho Creator's intuitive drag and drop interface lets anyone build customized applications easily and quickly. Include all the business rules and workflows you need, throw in some reports and spice it up schedulers and email notifications without breaking a sweat or burning a hole in your pocket.

When it's all done, stand back and take pride in yourself for being such an awesome craftsman.

Welcome to the world of creators!​

Photo by mjw

When it comes to social media, traditional marketers are strangers in a strange land. Despite companies' drive to be more social, a recently released study shows that 40% of a brand's Facebook page fans "unlike" them soon after a promotional campaign ends. And even within the most "liked" fan pages, user engagement is abysmal. Of Eminem's 41.5 million fans, only 575 actively engage with the page.

So how do successful brands keep that 40% happy and coming back? Let's look first at those who go wrong.

It's often not for lack of trying that social campaigns come up short, although we certainly can blame too much misdirected effort. As Joshua Ross of Fleishman Hillard points out, several top brands have abandoned literally dozens of failed social sites since social media came into vogue. On a recent project, he found that a client had close to 150 Facebook pages, over 65 YouTube channels, and 100 Twitter feeds. "Every executive is being asked to define their social media strategy (or just "do something") and the drumbeat is relentless," Ross said.

The go-to "something" for many brands is to offer special deals and freebies in exchange for a "Like" or follow. Although a great place to start, long term success and impressive ROI requires a broader strategy, otherwise fans will take your offerings and run (read: "unlike" or "unfollow"). Ross recommends developing a Social Media Architecture for your brand to bring "harmony, utility, and durability" to a company's online presence.

"One of the inspiring effects of the social web is that it exerts a selection pressure on organizations to return to the days of the neighborhood store, where business was founded on relationships and reputation as much as it was on advertising and brand, where the social contract was as important as the business contract," he said.

Compelling social brands begin with a sense of purpose and thrive because they have something to talk about and share with a natural community (and potential customers). Adidas has mastered this by focusing on several key communities of interest on Facebook: Running, Football, and Fashion.

Ruben Quinones of Path Interactive points to Starbucks as one of the social media marketing leaders we can learn from. At a time when sales started slipping for the first time in history back in 2008, Starbucks launched mystarbucksidea.com, a forum for customers to vent their frustrations, and submit their own ideas to improve the Starbucks experience. Whether it's on Twitter, Facebook, mobile,or their own social network, Starbucks provides the right mix of social that naturally leads to interaction and an improved experience," he said.

Quinones helps brands crack the Facebook feed by focusing on this right mix. "There is some great content out there, but not all of it is intended to be social, while others are not leveraged enough," he said. "And there are those that do a really good job of engaging, but are hurting their cause by broadcasting every single piece of content that comes out of their site along with their other updates. "

A brand's editorial team needs to determine a coherent content strategy to avoid spamming, and thus turning off, followers and fans. Frequency of content is key. "For example, if an organization created a video highlighting a branding initiative, it may not hurt to "broadcast" it via your social channels.

However, if there were 10 pieces of content about this same product launch that was hitting all your channels, then the audience might surrender to messaging fatigue. If that one piece of content was mixed in with several great pieces of content that provided some educational, entertainment, exclusive value to their audience, then that one "broadcast" piece of content would not only be more likely to be viewed, but accepted."

Another essential content consideration: Facebook's EdgeRank. The higher your page's EdgeRank, the more likely it is to show up in a fan's News Feed. Help yourself out by publishing content that encourages interaction: polls, links, photos (users tend to click to see larger versions), and videos. Make sure to update frequently, as posts can get easily lost in the stream of activity.

Quinones, Ross and dozens of other marketing thought leaders will dive deep into these issues and more at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo New York this October 10-13. Come see them by registering now with code RWW20 to save 20% off all conference passes.

Beginning a new social media program or demonstrating to senior management its value can be a challenge. While social media is becoming established in marketing, many still struggle to prove its value to the bottom line.

Perhaps one of the most important of all metrics, engagement with users is likely one of the main reasons your social media program was started. Measuring where, how and why it's happening and increasing its effectiveness and frequency across channels is vital to program success.

Measuring engagement is much more than simply measuring how many people have opted in to receiving your content. You might have 50,000 Twitter followers or 5,000 Facebook fans, but are they really interacting with and listening to you, and if so, what can you learn about that audience that can help you hone your messaging?

There are four steps to consider when answering this question.

Step One: Determine where it's happening

Most social marketing programs include multiple platforms, and activity can vary from one platform to the next. It's important to understand where your activity is happening and what type of activity that is.

Let's say you have comparable sized networks on Twitter and Facebook, but you're getting more of the key signs of engagement on Twitter (retweets, replies, mentions) than on Facebook (comments, likes, shares). There's something going on there that's worth looking into.

Looking at each platform you're using and comparing it to others will tell you where your fans or customers are the most engaged. If a clear front-runner emerges, that information will help to inform where your efforts should be concentrated, and where you may need to work on growing your audience.

Step Two: Determine how and why it's happening

The next step is to measure the "how" and "why" parts of the engagement question. To do this, we recommend taking a broader look at your data to identify trends. For instance:

• Choose a larger date range, for example the last six months, and compare that data to the first six months.
• Compare month to month, especially if your program is relatively new and you don't have many months of data.
• Look at specific pieces of content, and identify the ones that are creating the most engagement.
• On a daily or weekly basis, determine whether there are specific times when your audience is more engaged, whether it's a particular day of the week, or a time of day.

This allows you to see trends in active users - how many of your fans visit monthly, weekly, or daily and what they're doing when they visit.

It also allows you to see trends in interactions - how often and when are you creating buzz in your user community, how many comments and likes do you get on average, what content has generated the most feedback, etc.

You'll begin to see clear spikes in interactions where your content was really successful.

• Compare those spikes in interactions to the piece of content you posted that generated that feedback, and use that information to inform future posts.
• Think about your active base, how much real engagement you're getting as opposed to just getting in front of your audience. In the case of Facebook, a high number of page views compared to a low number of actual interactions means that you have a small active base and room for improvement.

You'll develop a sense of the interactions your audience is making with you, and you can begin to answer the question of how and why. This is a valuable addition to where and how much.

Step Three: Find your most engaging content and hone in

Using this information, you'll be able to clearly identify what engagement levels your content is eliciting. For instance, certain kinds of posts may get more feedback, while other kinds of posts garner little to no attention at all. Is it the title? Is it the type of post? Was the content posted at a certain time of the day or week?

By honing in on the content that people really respond to, and reducing or eliminating the efforts that aren't working, you can begin to refine and replicate the types of content that most engages people, that people find the most valuable.

Step Four: Put it in perspective

It's also important to remember that engagement can be a very broad term. You want to make sure you're looking at it not just by itself, but also in terms of your total audience. If your level of engagement is high in a very small part of your overall community, you need to consider whether that's moving towards your goals.

How many overall followers do you have in a given network, and of those, what percentage are actively responding to you, interacting with your page and sharing your content? The higher the percentage, the higher your engagement.

By putting these steps together, you'll be able to better understand how effective your content is at creating an engaged and interactive audience, and how well it's helping you achieve your business goals.

For more information on Measurement, check the Awareness whitepaper, The Top 9 Social Media Metrics Marketers Need to Know, or our latest e-book, The Social Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.

Photo by digital_a

Brands have evolved from asking "Should we be on social media?" to "How can we improve our social media activities?" At the same, they want to understand "what is the value of social media?"  That simple question of value transcends company size, industry and focus.

Three months ago, Awareness set out to answer the question of uncovering the value in social marketing by conducting research and meeting with social media practitioners and experts alike. During the interview process, we asked the group to tell us what advice they would provide Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) as they set out to design, manage and measure their social marketing strategy.  Here are their insights:

Have a plan! - Jason Falls, principal of Social Media Explorer:
"Go into social with a plan. Social channels are like other marketing channels - treat them with the same diligence. Don’t just test the waters - commit to social. It is the way of the future.  Test and iterate. Integrate social with your marketing and business initiatives - social marketing cannot exist in a vacuum."

Passion is contagious - David Berkowitz, senior director of Emerging Media and Innovation for 360i
"Don’t think of social only as a way to drive leads and sales.  Social is about passion - Oreo has over 22 million fans because the brand has given voice to the passion of its consumers."

Focus, test and learn - Paul Gillin, author of "Social Marketing to the Business Customer"
"Focus on a limited number of tools initially and build your portfolio where you see tangible traction.  Develop a center of social marketing expertise to avoid repeating the same mistakes other brands have made.  Consider hiring social marketing experts to help you develop that expertise."

Think like a publisher - David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author of "The New Rules of Marketing and PR"
"In the world of social, companies need to think like publishers. The first thing that companies need to do is understand where they rank in search engine results. Smart companies know what their prospective customers are searching on. They then create social content - blogposts, YouTube videos, webinars, etc. that leverages key words to improve search engine rankings."

Integrate social into your business - Nathaniel Perez, head of social experience at SapientNitro
"If your level of maturity with social marketing is low, rely on agencies and consultants to help you succeed. You will need carefully integrated content, processes, and governance in order to succeed. Social is not media-centric, it is customer-centric. Once you have gained experience, work towards integrating social deeper within your business. Plan your resources around the following key functional areas: research and insight, engagement and community building, media planning and integration, and data and analytics."

Budget and prioritize - Jeremiah Owyang, industry analyst with Altimeter Group
"Allocate your social marketing budget based on your level of social marketing maturity. In our February 2011: How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets, Altimeter reported that the average social media annual budget in 2010 was $833,000, but that figure fluctuated based on annual revenue and social marketing program maturity. Use industry benchmarks to allocate your budget."

Commit to social long term - Jonas Nielsen, co-founder and managing partner of Mindjumpers
"Go in for the long haul, and don’t put social in the hands of junior brand managers.  Social is one of the one important channels of the future - your own media that will position you to spend less resources over time - for marketing, customer service, and product development."

Start by focusing on existing customers - Erik Qualman, author of "Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business"
"The best companies understand social touches every aspect of their business. Start with answering why you want to run social programs and what success looks like.  Remember: only a portion of your social efforts can be tracked directly down to sales.  Most of social is relationship-based - it is a longer-term investment in your brand. Focus with your existing customers - they will spread the word for you. Welcome to the world of mouth."

What do you think?  Do you agree with the experts?  What would you add to their list?

The complete results of the study are available in the recently released eBook: "The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing" and attend the Social Marketing Funnel Webinar on August 18th @ 2PM ET

Mike Lewis is a sales and marketing executive who has been at the forefront of leveraging social media for demand generation and customer acquisition.  Mike is the vice president of marketing & sales at Awareness, Inc, where he works with some of the world’s largest brands and agencies to define their social media marketing strategy. Follow him on Twitter @bostonmike or visit his blog Social Episodes.

Lead photo by hksusp

Today's IT managers are facing a classic conundrum.

On the one hand, we all recognize that IT sandbox environments are an emerging necessity. Companies increasingly need a place for dynamic workloads, such as migration and software evaluations, security testing, pre-production test beds, training sessions and IT labs.

And yet these IT sandbox environments typically aren't compatible with the capital-intensive in-house data center resources we're accustomed to utilizing. Unlike well-planned data center workloads, sandbox workloads are characterized by fluctuating capacity needs and other rapid changes, and they often require intensive tactical IT support - none of which is well-suited to the traditional data center model.

At Skytap, we believe we have found an answer to the conundrum. The solution, as we see it, is in the cloud.

In fact, in many ways, IT sandbox environments are ideal candidates for transition to the cloud. Think about it. First, sandbox environments offer a low-risk adoption path to cloud computing. Plus, they also can provide high ROI, since resource utilization can be aligned with demand and users can be empowered with self-service -both of which can significantly reduce costs and IT support burden.

Need more proof? Let us walk you through three of our top ten reasons why it makes sense for you to rethink the way you're managing your IT sandbox environments. For example, if you transition your IT sandbox environments to the cloud, you can:

1. Eliminate infrastructure constraints on the business. A cloud service enables infrastructure capacity to be added quickly - often in less than a day! - to meet business demand. What's more, costs go down because cloud services are provided using a utility billing model, so you only pay for what you use.
2. Avoid expensive application rewrites. Ensure your cloud provider supports a wide variety of operating systems, databases, application servers and infrastructure tools so that your machines can keep the same networking settings and host names and connect to onsite infrastructure as required. The goal is for your IT and development teams to use a cloud service as an extension of their on-site IT environment and to run existing applications, virtual machines and systems unchanged in the cloud.
3. Reduce data center cost and complexity. Why use costly in-house data centers to support dynamic workloads? By contrast, cloud services are generally billed on a variable, pay-as-you-use model, so an organization can convert large upfront capital expenditures into needs-based operational expenses. Savings can be immediate. In addition, aligning computing capacity with demand helps minimize ongoing support costs, and you can apply quotas to individuals and organizations to cap usage and/or hard budgets. Skytap's solution even enables virtual data center environments to be automatically suspended when not in use to avoid unnecessary charges.

. . . and that's just the start of our list!

Want to learn even more? For additional information, please download this white paper: Top Ten Reasons to Transition Your IT Sandbox Environments to the Cloud.

We're convinced that it's time for you to rethink the way you manage your IT sandbox environments. By transitioning these dynamic workloads to the cloud, you can start reaping a wide range of significant IT benefits, including lower costs, enhanced agility and improved productivity.

Photo by trublueboy.

Mobile app developers are probably more than a little tired of empty promises about the grand future of mobile networks. But take a quick look at history and it becomes obvious that the technology has come a long way.

Do You 4G?

That was all just a prelude to LTE (the dominant 4G technology). Also known as 3GPP Long Term Evolution, LTE is being rolled out globally and is now the uncontested replacement for both GSM and CDMA networks. This new technology gives network providers the ability to deliver faster and more reliable access, richer experiences for mobile device users, and a more secure environment.

4G networks are being deployed across the globe. When developers know how networks function, better apps get built. More efficient and powerful apps make networks better, which accelerates customer adoption of apps. What follows are concrete steps developers can take to make apps perform their best on these new networks.

As an App Developer, Why Do I Care?

LTE was designed to offer more than two times the bandwidth of 3G and half the response time. The radio signals from cell towers have less interference in LTE and increased signal capacity means more users can access the network simultaneously without noticeably affecting performance. These improvements mean apps will be able to pull down more data from the network with less noticeable lag. When users pull up maps, they'll come up faster and scroll more smoothly. Graphics-heavy web pages will load faster and video playback will start sooner and play with fewer hiccups.

Almost every aspect of the mobile experience will be improved with LTE. Unlike earlier network technologies, LTE uses an all-IP backbone with highly efficient routing. Data moves through the backbone more rapidly and, because voice and various data types are all handled as IP packets, apps can shift between them more easily. There are nine content types defined in LTE and quality of service levels can be assigned to content on the basis of type. This means that voice data won't over-consume bandwidth that should be reserved for web video, for example.

LTE's security and reliability are also major improvements over 3G. As data is being sent to and from a user's mobile device, it is automatically encrypted. A sophisticated key mechanism provides further security and temporary user IDs make it more difficult for malicious hackers to gain entry to devices. To enhance reliability, session tracking keeps users connected to applications even when they switch from 3G or 2G to LTE and back again, even when there are delays.

Leveraging LTE in Your Apps

LTE will provide increased performance for all apps, but you can get even more out of the network to create a truly exceptional user experience. Take advantage of these tips now and your apps will perform better and make your customers happier, whether they are on LTE or older networks.

Plan for a Mix of 2G, 3G and LTE Use
Give your app the ability to make an intelligent decision about how to fetch data, depending on the network being accessed. Also remember that latency and bandwidth vary within a given span of network coverage, so data transfer rates will not remain constant within an LTE network. It can be a challenge to determine not only what sort of network performance you're getting, but also why. For example, the same response figures could indicate that you're on a fast 3G network or a slow LTE network. If your app relies on constant network connectivity, periodically have your IT department check both bandwidth and latency to make an educated guess about what kind of network it is on and adjust accordingly. Service providers are working with industry standards organizations to define consistent interfaces that will allow developers to receive information from the network about latency, bandwidth and saturation, but this is not yet a reality.

Speed Results with Pre-fetching
In many situations data retrieval needs can be anticipated with pre-fetching. By giving your application a way to access necessary data before it is requested by the user, you can provide an even more frictionless user experience. If you expect that users will be making many data-intensive requests that have to go through the network to a server, invest some effort in creating a pre-fetching system. By definition, pre-fetching is imperfect, but if your app can use a solid pre-fetching algorithm to pull down data and cache it on the device before it is needed, you can give users a demonstrably better experience. Because LTE provides lower latency and higher bandwidth, pre-fetching is a more practical approach than with older networks.

Cache More
Mobile devices are no longer computing lightweights. By caching extensively you can increase the responsiveness of your application and eliminate the spikes in network requests that cause user-discernable performance problems. Spikes in network activity typically occur at predictable times. Think about how and when your app needs data and if possible cache in advance of periods of high network activity. Of course, don't forget to periodically flush caches.

Next page: Create One Session with Multiple Gets

Create One Session with Multiple Gets
LTE was designed with longer sessions in mind, so take advantage of it. The fewer requests your app has to make, the lower the latency and higher the responsiveness. Over the years app developers have been trained to make small requests frequently, because of network limitations. If you can rope a bunch of requests to remote servers into one session, you'll be able to better take advantage of LTE's higher bandwidth and longer sessions.

Take Advantage of LTE's All-IP Capabilities
Because LTE can go from idle to active in 100ms, your application can provide an always-on experience without actually being active at all times. LTE's ability to deliver a variety of media concurrently means that you can start one stream while stopping another. For example, an app could display a scrolling map while simultaneously delivering voice over narration without start-up hesitation or playback stutter.

Avoid Polling on Demand Requests
The first batch of LTE-ready mobile devices may consume more battery power because the batteries are not yet optimized for power consumption, and because they may be monitoring both LTE and CDMA networks at the same time. By reducing polling, you can reduce battery depletion. It is also important to note that if the user is moving between 3G and LTE networks frequently, an application dependent on frequent updates or keepalives could timeout during the handover between networks.

Favor Downloading Over Streaming
While LTE provides higher quality of service and bandwidth, at least for the near term LTE will be coexisting with 3G networks. The handover from LTE to CDMA can cause a delay of between 3 and 8 seconds on average, depending on whether the two networks are on the same frequency. While packets are buffered in a streaming situation, depending on the density of LTE coverage provided by the carrier, a user could move in and out of 3G repeatedly while on the move. This could cause noticeable hesitations in streaming playback. Continuous streaming also appears to drain batteries at a higher rate than downloads. Also, in areas with slower networks, batteries get depleted faster because the device boosts its network reception in order to overcome network noise. For these reasons, keeping streaming to short bursts will help with real world battery power management.

Use A Bigger Buffer
When a user pulls down streaming media or initiates a download from your app while on an LTE network and for whatever reason is switched to a 3G network, the effect on the user can be minimized through the use of a large data buffer. Since LTE already pulls down data faster, it is a good idea to use a bigger buffer than you would on a 3G network. This will not create a noticeable performance hit on LTE networks, and will minimize the impact of user movement between LTE and 3G networks.

Avoid Aggressive Behavior
Apps that live in an RF (radio frequency) environment and have to operate on a crowded wireless network need to be good citizens. If packet loss occurs, a device needs to back off or wait for response. If your app is continuously attempting to regain lost packets, it can exacerbate the original failure conditions, degrading or denying service to other devices and congesting traffic. Overly aggressive behavior also unduly burdens device batteries. An app that keeps trying to pull down signal from a congested network rapidly sucks the life from batteries.

The Future

Mobile has moved from the periphery to the center of business and personal communications. Already in many countries the mobile phone has become the primary device for accessing information, managing communications, and performing tasks previously handled by personal computers. LTE is the core of the first network designed from the ground up to accommodate the expectations of carriers, developers, and consumers. Rollout across the globe is moving rapidly and if you can optimize your apps for LTE before your competitors do, you will be able to provide a demonstrably better user experience.

Laura Merling (@magicmerl) is Senior Vice President of Alcatel-Lucent's Application Enablement Platform and Strategy.

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Night and day. Science and art. 1s and 0s.

For years now, software development teams and operations/system administrators have maintained this kind of yin and yang duality, pushing each other in opposing, but complementary, directions.

We're all familiar with the dynamic of the IT department. Typically, the development team's modus operandi is to deliver new features to end users. Meanwhile, operations/system administrators focus on liability for the software, service, run time and reliability.

Enter the concept of DevOps, which fortunately, can eliminate polarization like this forever. To learn more on the topic of DevOps register for this webinar.

DevOps is a new IT discipline that brings order to an otherwise chaotic and complex world of application/service development, testing, deployment, scaling and monitoring. It also helps ensure software quality, security, availability, reliability and performance. Enterprise IT professionals that want to upgrade their skills can learn more by attending Upgrade your IT Skills with DevOps Principles.

Ultimately, by nullifying the turf wars between siloed, independent teams, DevOps creates a single, unified approach that is responsible for the success of the entire application lifecycle.

And, it gets even better. These days, DevOps can become even more powerful when combined with the cloud computing.

The cloud enables DevOps Teams to work faster, with more flexibility and at a higher rate of total efficiency. Together, DevOps and the cloud present a compelling, virtually unstoppable force (forgive the pun).

Is it time to instrument DevOps principles and the cloud in your organization? Most likely, it is, and to help you get started, here are three key reasons why DevOps and the cloud are perfect for business success:

Cloud Automation

The cloud is driven by the automation and virtualization of infrastructure. Cloud automation solutions like Skytap enable enterprises to deliver dynamic IT workloads by utilizing scalable, efficient cloud computing resources accessed and managed through a self-service web UI.

Today's dynamic workloads, such as development and test, application migration and IT Ops, are critical for business success. However, because traditional IT infrastructure lacks the agility and flexibility required to support these workloads, project delays have become the norm. The cloud enables infrastructure to be ready on-demand to support today's dynamic workloads and therefore providing DevOps teams more agility for application development and testing.

Self-Service Cloud

DevOps teams and more specifically Developers, engineers, and QA managers need self-service cloud solutions that increase agility and enhance collaboration across geographically dispersed teams. The cloud empowers DevOps teams with key requirements such as configurability, self-service access, collaboration, visibility and control.

Solutions, such as Skytap, let DevOps teams utilize these features with the business and technical applications they already know and use. (This capability is especially important for DevOps teams that do not want to rewrite applications currently in use!) In other words, the application rules the cloud and ultimately dictates how Operations is run and managed.

The cloud can empower developers and testers to work in parallel streams without constraints. For example, if the QA team in an Enterprise organization finds a bug/defect in an application, it's often difficult to replicate the problem. Typically, before moving on, the team has to stop their workflow and provide someone else access to the environment to troubleshoot.

In the worst-case scenario, the team may have to build out a copy to reproduce the bug -an exercise that's far from agile and potentially costly from a time and resource perspective. Solutions like Skytap remedy these problem areas by creating parallel streams and snapshots of environments quickly on-demand.

Visibility and Control

DevOps teams using cloud resources need to maintain important corporate policies and procedures. Cloud solutions with built-in management capabilities can help them achieve that goal. The latest cloud solutions can provide detailed usage reports and control mechanisms to manage deployment, monitoring, failure recovery, operating system maintenance, system configuration and overall performance.

No matter the size of the organization, these solutions offer teams greater visibility and control while managing computing resources, quotas and security policies. What's more, all of this can be achieved even as the technologies empower DevOps teams with more self-service autonomy, providing more agility for faster and better software application delivery.

DevOps teams are looking for solutions that will enable rapid deployment of public, private, or hybrid clouds to handle surges related to increased cycles for run builds, tests and deployments of software applications. Solutions like Skytap Cloud solve the right kind of problems, enabling DevOps teams with toolsets to optimize the application development lifecycle.

Acquiring skills in this new IT discipline will enable you to bring order to an otherwise chaotic and complex world of agile application development, testing and scaling. Join us and learn from industry experts on how companies are transitioning from "Old IT" methodologies to the "Cloud IT" DevOps model. Sign up now.

About the Author: Nate Odell is Director of Marketing at Skytap, a leading provider of cloud automation solutions. He is an industry veteran with a successful 11-year career in B2B marketing for Technology Startups. Follow Nate on Twitter @N8Odell or @Skytap.

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Conduit

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Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent, one of the largest innovation powerhouses in the communications industry, is turning the network into a powerful platform for developers.

With the launch of the Alcatel-Lucent Developer Platform, the company provides service providers and enterprises with tools that enable third-party developers to build, test, manage and distribute applications across networks, including television, broadband Internet and mobile. Alcatel-Lucent's introduction of a radical new business model combines network APIs with other third-party APIs, and opens revenue sharing opportunities to support developers in their pre-revenue wallets and provides an additional revenue channel for service providers.

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Meshin

Todays' worker craves context and focus from their blizzard of information. Meshin understands and sorts critical messages in your inbox to help you easily find task-critical information on demand. Check out our new MeshinFocus to see your most important messages, in real time and in one place.

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Skytap

Skytap provides cloud automation solutions for enterprises and software vendors to develop, test, migrate, evaluate, demo, and train on new and existing applications in the cloud. Skytap Cloud is ideal for distributed Dev/Test, Training and Sales Demo teams. Teams are empowered to:

• Create multiple cloud environments in seconds
• Run existing applications without any code changes
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Customers of all sizes can deploy Skytap in a day. Try Skytap for free.

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BTBuckets

BTBuckets is a free personalization and on-site behavioral targeting tool that allows websites to increase engagement and ultimately maximize conversion rate optimization (CRO) by clustering and targeting specific user groups. With a simple installation process (a single tag implemented on your site's webpages just like Google Analytics), BTBuckets can update and adapt your website in real-time to create the best experience for that specific user segment without the need to change any HTML code on your website.

BTBuckets segmentation capabilities include behavioral, demographic, customer life-cycle, technographic and firmograhic. Install the BTBuckets browser extension to create segments from within the Google Analytics interface and target these users immediately.

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Mashery

Mashery is a platform for Web services, allowing companies to manage their APIs using Mashery's expertise. At the "Business of APIs" conference, Mashery CEO Oren Michels explained to the audience that while APIs are a technology, their use is a business decision. He went on to say that Mashery has helped customers such as WhitePages.com, Thumbplay, Compete.com, and Calais. Check out the white paper "Five steps to scaling your business development using Web services" to discover how you can use APIs for your business.

You can find out more about APIs and their business use at www.mashery.com.

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SciVerse Applications

SciVerse Applications is a marketplace where researchers, librarians and information specialists can find applications that customize the search and discovery of scientific information. These applications access content on SciVerse (ScienceDirect, Scopus and Hub) containing over 10 million scientific articles and more than 42 million abstract and citation records from Elsevier, the world's largest publisher of scientific and medical information.

Through the Developer Network, developers can collaborate with researchers and librarians to create applications accessing the content via RESTful APIs based on OpenSocial specifications. These applications can be fee-based or free, focus solely on SciVerse content or integrate external content, and will be available to more than 10,000 research institutions and 15 million platform users worldwide.

Visit us at: http://developer.sciverse.com
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StrataScale offers innovative server and cloud hosting solutions to meet the IT infrastructure needs of today's growing and established businesses. Now IT professionals can obtain affordable hosting solutions that control costs, provide agility, and supply peace of mind. Whether your hosting needs are cloud, dedicated server, or a hybrid of the two, the StrataScale complete package of on-demand solutions is easy to buy, build, manage, and scale -- all within minutes via our web portal. Every hosting environment is backed by guaranteed uptime, financial-grade security, and 24x7 engineering support.

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Clickatell

Clickatell has over 22,000 customers utilizing our service from small mom & pop outfits to large Fortune 500 companies including Avaya, Oracle, Shell, Barclays, BP, CNN, BBC and more. Here's why you should trust us to mobilize your business: Our SMS gateway offers you wider coverage than any other SMS provider delivering messages to 600 network operators in 200 countries. Our gateway is not limited to SMS text messaging. You can also send a number of other message types including Ringtones, VCards, Binary, EMS, Unicode, Flash SMS, WAP Push, and more.

Clickatell offers you direct connectivity to its core SMS gateway platform via a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) including; HTTP (internet post), SMPP, FTP, XML, SMTP (email to SMS), SOAP and COM Object. Each API has full documentation with sample code where applicable. Learn more about Clickatell here.

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Toopia

Nicolas Koenig is the developer who made our beautiful iPhone app a reality. He runs an iPhone development shop from the Netherlands called Toopia. Toopia also created the Thermometer iPhone app, which enables your iPhone or iPod touch to get the current temperature based on your location. The RWW app lets you read us on the go, follow us on Twitter, share stories on Facebook and Twitter, and browse at your leasure using Read it Later and Instapaper. Download the ReadWriteWeb iPhone application here.

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In a blog post published last week entitled "Cross Platform Mobile," Martin Fowler argues the case against cross-platform mobile application development tools. While his analysis is spot-on, his conclusion fails to hit the mark. Done right, cross-platform mobile application toolkits offer developers the very best of Web and native apps in a single location.

His analysis can be summarized as follows:

When dealing with the differences in user experience between platforms, cross-platform technologies can adopt two different strategies - emulation or abstraction.

The abstraction approach involves hiding the native UI controls below a "meta-API" (e.g. Java's SWT) that stays the same across platforms. The drawback of this approach is that it has so far resulted in a watered-down experience providing only the lowest common denominator between environments.

On the other hand, emulation relies on reproducing/mimicking the native UI controls (e.g. buttons, lists with momentum scrolling, fonts etc.) in a virtualized layer (e.g. Swing classes inside the Java VM or SenchaTouch javascript libraries inside a Webkit HTML5 browser or Flex Actionscript components running in the Flash player/AIR). The drawback of this approach is what Martin refers to as the "uncanny valley," i.e. repulsive end-user perception of the inevitable slight differences from "the real thing."

No disagreement there.

However, Martin's conclusion that one should forego cross-platform approaches entirely, and either go full native - at the expense of development resources - or full Web - a deliberate, radical departure with the device's native user experience - ignores a third, more practical option. In fact, Martin alludes to this option in the final footnote of his post:

"I see one path that might prove me wrong. In this scenario you use a cross-platform toolkit - but you write a different app, with a different experience design, for each platform you build for."

This is the exact approach Alcatel-Lucent has taken with its OpenPlug Studio cross-platform toolkit (which the company acquired in the fall of 2010 to bolster its Application Enablement strategy and released free to developers last week). OpenPlug Studio allows mobile and tablet app developers to create native apps from the same high-level code base (in Javascript or Actionscript), then use conditional compilation directives and assets packages for platform-specific features and UI layer components. As a result, mobile and tablet application developers end up building multiple binary variants for each platform from the same source tree.

The benefit is obvious (in Martin's own words):

"The gain over doing this with native code is that you have a single platform for your developers to use and can get some reuse of common code (particularly non-UI code)."

Martin also offers a couple caveats with taking such an approach - each of which is capable of being overcome.

"This strategy doesn't address the problem of dealing with UI controls."

... it doesn't?

It's actually possible to map the underlying native UI controls into the higher-level programming space of the cross-platform toolkit. In the case of OpenPlug, native UI controls from iOS, Android, etc. are mapped into a namespace extension of Adobe's Flex MXML UI layout declarative language.

When's it time to compile, native code is generated that links to the underlying UI libraries of the device OS, e.g. Cocoa Touch on iOS or the Java UI classes on Android. The result is that when a List component is built, iOS receives the real scrolling list in all its glory (momentum scrolling, physics/rebound and all), while Android receives a list reflecting that platform's behavior.

And all of this...in a single line of code!

Sure, there are functional differences in the implementation of a given UI Control (say, List) between platforms. But these can be managed by providing an exhaustive set of control properties (the superset of each platform). With conditional-compile directives for each platform, a smart cross-platform mobile app compiler will then include or exclude specific attributes where applicable.

This represents the exact opposite of a "lowest-common-denominator" approach.

And OpenPlug isn't the only one doing this. Similar approaches have been adopted by Novell's MonoTouch (high-level binding is C# in their case) or Appcelerator's Titanium (ditto in Javascript).

"Even if it works, it's only worthwhile if the developer-understanding and code reuse benefits are significant."

This would be true if the high-level language of the cross-platform toolkit were proprietary or didn't have a large following. With modern and relatively "standard"/well-adopted high level languages like ActionScript (or C#, or Javascript), there is a significant mass of developers already trained in using the language and associated frameworks to tap into.

Moreover, a significant body of reusable components, in many cases open source, also are readily available for numerous under-the-hood core functionality, such as network API wrapper libraries for Twitter, oAuth...take your pick.

This combination of a smart cross-platform technology and a well-adopted, high-level language yields benefits an order of magnitude higher than going pure native app on each device or pure Web app on all devices.

Can you build something that combines the best of the Web and the best of native apps? Yes, you can. Simply:

• Avoid replicating your dev team for each new platform.
• Don't do plain dumb "Write-Once Run-Everywhere" with an emulation of native UI.
• Use a smart cross-platform native app development tool like those mentioned above.

By Guilhem Ensuque, Director of OpenPlug products at Alcatel-Lucent. @gensuque_op

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