Salesforce.com and Cisco offering joint "Customer Interaction Cloud" for SMB customers

Salesforce.com and Cisco today announced that the companies will offer small and midsized companies a hosted, Web-based customer service offering. The service, called Customer Interaction Cloud, is based on Cisco's Unified Contact Center technologies. Salesforce will offer it as part of its Service Cloud 2 suite of hosted customer service solutions.

The offering, which will be available in early 2010, will combine Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco's VoIP-based Unified Contact Center, and is targeted to businesses with between 30 and 300 sales representatives or call-center agents.

The companies released a statement: "Through this offering, Salesforce.com and Cisco are addressing a growing demand for cloud computing-based customer service solutions in the SMB market."

Read more about this joint offering, and other Salesforce news (new 5-minute upgrade for Service Cloud) on Techworld.com.

Guest Blogger Mike Klein: Cloud Storage - Faster, More Secure, and More Reliable than Traditional Tape Backup

With so much talk about “cloud computing” it’s hard to separate the hype from reality at times. However, as one of the leading managed data center operators in the Midwest, we’re seeing a definitive trend with our clients moving towards “storage in the cloud” or online backup and data storage. Whether you’re backing up to an unknown location “in the cloud” or to a trusted data center such as Online Tech, the advantages of online data storage over traditional tape backup are worth considering.

For many, online data storage is less expensive, faster, more secure, and more reliable than the tape backup systems used over the past several decades. Here are a few of the advantages to consider:

Backup Costs – Rapidly declining storage and Internet costs has driven down the costs of online storage over the last 12 months. When you consider the real cost of a tape backup process including the hardware, maintenance, personnel costs, tape pickup and drop off, and offsite storage, online data storage can offer a far more cost effective alternative.

Security – Tape backup puts critical data on to a physical medium, which then has multiple points of human contact. Each of these points of contact introduces risk. It’s not unusual to see tapes in an unsecured holding area waiting for daily pickup, or a tape transported in a trusted employee’s car, all of which have physical security implications. Online backup transports the data over a secure, encrypted VPN tunnel from its source into a secure data center with no human contact, eliminating the physical security risks associated with tapes.

Recovery Time - In most disaster recovery plans, recovery time is the critical metric around which backup systems are designed to. Tape recovery often presents a significant bottleneck with the amount of time it takes to get backup tapes transported to the recovery site, mounted and the data transferred back to hard drives. Online data storage can dramatically reduce the recovery time with near instant data recovery. The data is already loaded and readily available for access at an alternative site over the Internet.

Reliability – Experts estimate that anywhere from 10% to 40% of tape backups fail, depending on who you talk to. Yet everyone agrees that the risk of lost data from tapes is real. For most IT managers, losing even 10% of their data in a disaster recovery scenario would be catastrophic. On the other hand, online backup stores the data to RAID replicated hard disks at the remote data centers, eliminating the physical and media problems associated with tapes.

Certainly, tapes have an advantage in certain situations. If multi-Terabyte data sets need to be written on a regular basis and stored for extended periods of time to meet regulatory requirements, tape backup may be more cost effective than online storage today. At the same time, daily backups and continuous data archiving where the data needs to be readily accessed, both lend themselves readily to online data storage.

So look for more and more companies moving their backups and data storage “to the cloud” as online data storage continues to become an easier and more cost effective alternative for backing up servers or archiving data into secure, high availability data centers.

- Mike Klein
President, Online Tech
http://www.onlinetech.com/
Read more about “The Seven Tips for Moving to Online Data Storage”

Study: 2 in 3 IT Managers budgeting for cloud computing

A newly released study by Applied Research, West finds that 66 percent of IT managers have already dedicated budgets for cloud computing, and 71 percent expect their cloud computing budgets to increase over the next two years. 250 IT managers of enterprise-level companies were surveyed by phone in the study on enterprise adoption of cloud computing, sponsored by F5 Networks.

Eighty-two percent of respondents said that they are involved in a trial, implementation or use of public clouds, while 83 percent reported being in one of these phases with private clouds.

For more information on the findings of the study, see this Information Week article on the topic.