26 Jul 2010

A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) study shows that the Software as a Service (SaaS) market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009. IDC forecasts the market to reach $40.5 billion by 2014, representing a compound annual growth rate of 25.3%. By 2012, IDC expects that less than 15% of net-new software firms coming to market will ship a packaged product (on CD). By 2014, about 34% of all new business software purchases will be consumed via SaaS, and SaaS delivery will constitute about 14.5% of worldwide software spending across all primary markets.

“The SaaS model has become mainstream, and is quickly coming to dominate the planning – from R&D, to sales quotas, to partnering, channels and distribution — of all software and services vendors,” said Robert Mahowald, vice president, SaaS and Cloud Services research at IDC. “Enterprise IT plans are rapidly shifting to accommodate the growing choices for sourcing most or all IT software functions, from business applications to software development and testing, to service and desktop management, as SaaS services become available from established vendors and new models for accessing functionality in the cloud creates lower-cost options and more tailored models for consuming IT services.”

Additional key findings from IDC’s latest SaaS research include the following :

• By 2012, nearly 85% of net-new software firms coming to market will be built around SaaS service composition and delivery; by 2014, about 65% of new products from established ISVs will be delivered as SaaS services.
• SaaS-derived revenue will account for nearly 26% of net new growth in the software market in 2014.
• Traditional packaged software and perpetual license revenue are in decline and IDC predicts that a software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7 billion decline in worldwide license revenue in 2010. As a result, a permanent change in software licensing regime will occur.
• SaaS segment mix will shift toward infrastructure and application development and deployment/PaaS, and away from U.S. dominance. IDC expects that by 2014, applications will account for just over half of market revenue. This shift will happen in part as a result of increasing IT cloud spending by enterprise IT groups and commercial cloud services providers (cloud SPs) relative to end-user spending.This IDC study, Worldwide Software as a Service 2010–2014 Forecast: Software Will Never Be the Same (IDC #223628) presents IDC’s first look at worldwide SaaS software performance in 2009 and anticipated performance through 2014.

James Brown – Managing Director at Click Innovation comments “this is no suprise to us, SaaS is the way forward, our crm software, contact management software, business management software and small business software applications are all sold as a service.”

July 22, 2010

Worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue within the enterprise application software market is forecast to surpass $8.5 billion in 2010, up 14.1 percent from 2009 revenue of $7.5 billion, according to Gartner, Inc. The rapid adoption of SaaS has contributed to growth in varying degrees across the enterprise software markets. There will be a shift in total SaaS revenue from just over 10 percent of the combined markets in 2009, to more than 16 percent of these combined markets in 2014.

Gartner defines SaaS as software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers an application based on a single set of common code and data definitions, which is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contracted customers anytime on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based on use metrics.

“After a decade of use, adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets. As tighter capital budgets demand leaner alternatives, familiarity with the model increases, and interest in platform as a service and cloud computing grows,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. “Adoption varies between and within markets, and although use is expanding to a wider range of applications and solutions, the most widespread use is still characterized by horizontal applications with common processes, among distributed virtual workforce teams and within Web 2.0 initiatives.”

During 2009 and 2010, the significant industry buzz surrounding SaaS and other off-premises models has shifted to cloud computing – a broad concept, of which SaaS is only one variation, representing the application layer of the overall cloud architectural stack. Gartner estimates that 75 percent of the current SaaS delivery revenue could be considered as a cloud service, and that could exceed 90 percent by 2014 as the SaaS model matures and converges with cloud services models.

“The popularity of SaaS has increased significantly within the past five years and initial concerns about security, response time, and service availability have diminished for many organizations as SaaS business and computing models have matured and adoption has become more widespread,” Ms. Mertz said.

“Usage and vendors’ on-demand ‘ecosystems’ continue to evolve to provide additional business and technology services, more-vertical-specific functionality, and stronger communities of partners and buyers,” Ms. Mertz said. “Although some attrition occurred in 2009 due to business workforce reduction, nearly all SaaS vendors grew revenue, even during the economic downturn, as buyers continued to confirm their acceptance of on-demand. We certainly expect adoption of SaaS to far outpace market growth through 2014.”

Although use and adoption continues to grow, deployment of SaaS still varies between the enterprise application markets and within specific market segments because of buyer demand and applicability of the solution.

The project and portfolio management (PPM) SaaS market is rapidly growing in percentage of sales. SaaS alternatives may help to grow the overall PPM market again rather than cannibalizing on-premises sales; however, some SaaS revenue growth will be at the expense of on-premises license, as several new entrants to the market are able to provide solutions at less than the cost of maintenance on more mature solutions.

The content, communications and collaboration (CCC) market continues to show the widest disparity of SaaS revenue generation, with SaaS representing 4 percent of enterprise content management (ECM) and approximately 82 percent of Web conferencing in 2009.

SaaS continues to penetrate the customer relationship management (CRM) market, accounting for nearly 24 percent of total CRM market revenue in 2009. SaaS in CRM exhibits more-general market adoption, ranging between 11 percent and nearly 40 percent of total software revenue, depending on the CRM subsegment. SaaS is forecast to account for 26 percent of CRM market total revenue in 2010.

“The market landscape for on-demand CRM continues to evolve and mature as the availability and use of SaaS solutions becomes more pervasive,” Ms. Mertz said. “Greater market competition and increased focus by the megavendors reinforces the legitimacy of on-demand, mitigating initial objections about security and availability for many, as acceptance of SaaS as a viable model for enterprise computing services grows.”

Virtual Internet (VI) are providing a managed service to Click Innovation with a platform that utilises a firewall and multiple virtual servers. Utilising VMware provides additional benefits such as real-time disaster recovery in the event that the units become unavailable due to hardware or OS service failure. Full resilience and redundancy is provided throughout the VMware hosting infrastructure. It also presents a scalable platform where processor, RAM and disc can be rapidly increased. In addition the platform uses a SAN failover storage array allowing quicker disc access than that provided by single servers. There providing superior performance to a standard dedicated server.

The VI VMware Cloud™ is a revolutionary managed hosting platform that provides a Dedicated Server with Zero downtime. Gone are the days of reboots and support calls asking why your server is unavailable. VI VMware Cloud™ maintains and manages your hosting environment ensuring that your server and content is online 24 hours a day. With the power to provision extra computing resources for your mission-critical applications in minutes, upgrades are simple. Best of all, Instead of buying potentially costly and over specified servers the VI Cloud™ platform can save you up to 25% of your annual hosting costs whilst improving performance

Improve your ROI with Virtualization

Virtualization essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. Virtual servers and virtual desktops let you host multiple operating systems and multiple applications locally and in remote locations, freeing you from physical and geographical limitations. In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of your hardware resources, you get high availability of resources, better desktop management, increased security, and improved disaster recovery processes when you build a virtual infrastructure.

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

1) Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization: Virtualization makes it possible to achieve significantly higher resource utilization by pooling common infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy ―one application to one server‖ model.

2) Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data centre. This leads to reductions in realestate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.

3) Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance.

4) Increased Application Availability & Improved Business Continuity: Eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unplanned outages with the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.

What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. A virtual machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains it own virtual (ie, software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC).

Virtual Machines Benefits In general, VMware virtual machines possess four key characteristics that benefit the user:  Compatibility: Virtual machines are compatible with all standard x86 computers  Isolation: Virtual machines are isolated from each other as if physically separated  Encapsulation: Virtual machines encapsulate a complete computing environment  Hardware independence: Virtual machines run independently of underlying hardware

Compatibility

Just like a physical computer, a virtual machine hosts its own guest operating system and applications, and has all the components found in a physical computer (motherboard, VGA card, network card controller, etc). As a result, virtual machines are completely compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications and device drivers, so you can use a virtual machine to run all the same software that you would run on a physical x86 computer.

Isolation

While virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer, they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate physical machines. If, for example, there are four virtual machines on a single physical server and one of the virtual machines crashes, the other three virtual machines remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the availability and security of applications running in a virtual environment is far superior to applications running in a traditional, non-virtualized system.

Encapsulation

A virtual machine is essentially a software container that bundles or ―encapsulates‖ a complete set of virtual hardware resources, as well as an operating system and all its applications, inside a software package. Encapsulation makes virtual machines incredibly portable and easy to manage. For example, you can move and copy a virtual machine from one location to another just like any other software file, or save a virtual machine on any standard data storage medium, from a pocket-sized USB flash memory card to an enterprise storage area networks (SANs).

Hardware Independence

Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying physical hardware. For example, you can configure a virtual machine with virtual components (eg, CPU, network card, SCSI controller) that are completely different from the physical components that are present on the underlying hardware. When coupled with the properties of encapsulation and compatibility, hardware independence gives you the freedom to move a virtual machine from one type of x86 computer to another without making any changes to the device drivers, operating system, or applications. Hardware independence also means that you can run a heterogeneous mixture of operating systems and applications on a single physical computer.

Virtual Machines: Building Blocks of the Virtual Infrastructure

Virtual machines are a fundamental building block of a much larger solution: the virtual infrastructure. While a virtual machine represents the hardware resources of an entire computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the interconnected hardware resources of an entire IT infrastructure—including computers, network devices and shared storage resources. Organizations of all sizes use VMware solutions to build virtual server and desktop infrastructures that improve the availability, security and manageability of mission-critical application PHYSICAL DEDICATED VIRTUAL DEDICATED Hardware failure resilience Full Server Access Rapid Hardware upgrades OS Disaster recovery

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT
 DNS Management
 100% Network Availability
 100% Hardware and OS Availability
 Real-Time Hardware Failover
 Telephone Technical Support Troubleshooting
 Monthly server patching and system updates on request
 Solution Monitoring (ping, FTP, HTTP,) 3 Defined Services 24/7 – Email and SMS
 APC and KVM switch for instant remote reboots and troubleshooting

Application Hosting

 Application hosting is fast becoming a cost effective option for businesses wishing to reduce the responsibility, overheads and man hours involved in running an IT environment in-house. By hosting your applications with VI within our secure Data Centres you can not only reduce your IT bills, but ensure total peace of mind in that your servers are secure, backed up daily and managed by qualified and experienced VI Technicians 24 hours a day.

VI Cloud Hosting

 Outsource and negate all risk for your Hosted IT infrastructure. Critical hosting services for high availability demanding platforms
 Always on hosting with exceptional levels of uptime
 Fully Managed by certified engineers
 Rapid deployment and scalable Cloud
 Comprehensive SLA‘s

Security

 A dedicated or managed firewall provides your server with additional protection from unauthorised access, keeping unwanted intruders away from your data and ensuring continuity. Whether you choose a dedicated or managed firewall, our security engineers will assist you in ensuring that your firewall rules and server are secure, allowing you to focus on your core business. At VI we offer a wide range of security services, including Intrusion prevention, audits and consultancy.

Disaster Recovery and Continuity

 The impact of loosing data can severely cripple companies leading to lost business and productivity. The backup and recovery of lost data ensures that an unwanted crisis can be diverted or rectified with ease and precision.

 VI’s suite of services enables clients to ensure continuity in the event of unforeseen circumstances affecting their data. VI currently helps many Government and financial clients with Geographical DR and Continuity hosting environments, all covered by comprehensive SLA‘s.
Service Level Agreements

 VI provides 3 core service level agreements allowing our clients to choose how we manage their hosting platform. Our custom SLA allows us to tailor our service to meet the specific requirements.

Monitoring and Reporting

 VI suite of reporting tools delivers reports on Server health and performance as well as traffic analysis. This tool enables effective capacity planning as well as a real time overview of how your servers are performing.

 We provide comprehensive monitoring systems which monitor specific services on your server platforms. VI Notification System will automatically send you an SMS and an email informing you of any degradation of service

Messaging and Collaboration

 Fully managed and outsourced email, Accomplish more with an on-the-go, at home and in-the-office email solution that cuts your work in half with full synchronization. Changes are automatically applied to your desktop, Web mail and mobile account with VI Managed Exchange Hosting.

SUPPORT

With a highly qualified and dedicated Customer Service Team, Server Engineers, on-call Technicians available 24 hours a day our focus is on delivering more than you expect.

Going that extra mile for our customers is what separates us from other hosting companies & is something we are very proud of.

SUPPORT SERVICES (SLA)

The following services are included within the Standard service level agreement. Additional requirements are available on request.
MANAGED HOSTING HIGHLIGHTS  Reactive Monitoring, fixing & reporting of 10 customer-defined services.  SMS & Email Alert notifications  DNS Management Control Panel  Hardware

Diagnosis & Rebuild  Server restore upon request  Installation of 3rd Party Software & Approved Applications  Restoring back ups  APC switch for instant remote reboots 

Reactive Monthly server OS patching

TELEPHONE & EMAIL SUPPORT

Managed server support gives you direct access via telephone or email to our Support engineers 24 hours a day who are on hand to offer expert help & assistance as well as perform work on your server(s) on request. You will be issued with a support ticket and emailed once your request has been picked up and then another when the support ticket has been completed. Support is offered in the following ways with associated timescales.

CLASS CLASSIFICATION SUPPORT HOURS RESPONSE TIME 1 Urgent – Your Server is not accessible remotely or via the web 24/7/365 – Phone support Within 5 minutes 2 Server & website is operational – but Server is experiencing degradation or impacting service – A Service needs to be restarted on server – Backup restore 24/7/365 – Phone & email support Within 30 minutes 3 Routine maintenance, server management or general phone support Working hours 9am -6pm Phone & email support Within 1 Hour

HARDWARE SUPPORT

VI Managed servers are covered by HP hardware warranties and benefit from guaranteed 2 hour hardware fixes. Many hosting companies offer 1 hour hardware replacement guarantees but do not include the time taken to diagnose the hardware fault before replacement is undertaken. VI guarantees to have a working replacement server within 2 hours of diagnosis of fault. CLASS REPLACEMENT CLASSIFICATION SUPPORT HOURS RESPONSE TIME 1 Component– Drive/Processor/Memory/PSU 24/7/365 – Phone & email support Within 15 minutes 2 Total

Hardware replacement – Full server 24/7/365 – Phone & email support Within 1 Hour

ADVANCED MONITORING

Virtual Internet have advanced monitoring systems to keep both our engineers and you alerted to warnings and system failures,
as well as overall and continual performance & health of your hosted environments.
These are provided in the following ways:

Advanced Server Notifications:

The monitoring of any services running on your servers, such as web, ftp, SQL are performed continually and in the event that
a particular service should stop, SMS and email notifications are sent out by the VI monitoring systems alerting you and VI
Engineers. This allows for quick resolution of incidents and effective service continuity.
Examples of services which can be monitored are:
 HTTP/HTTPs web addresses, including ASP(x) pages
 FTP
 ICMP (ping)
 POP3 and SMTP
 Databases MySQL/MS SQL
 Telnet/SSH/RDP devices
 TCP/IP ports

Server Performance & Health Monitoring:

VI Reporting is an online tool which delivers reports on Server health and performance as well as traffic analysis. This tool
enables effective capacity planning as well as a real time overview of how your servers are performing. VI continually monitor
the CPU, Memory and traffic loads on each server to allow an overview of how each server is performing on a daily basis. This
information is supplied to customers through the VI Reporting & Monitoring portal and displayed graphically.

DATACENTRE

With a high-capacity data centre network extending throughout Europe and the fastest connections to global internet infrastructure, Virtual Internet (VI) provides businesses with the best hosting services available.

The security and uptime of your server is as critical to us as it is to you. Our data centre is carefully monitored 24/7 for both technical performance and security. Only our qualified engineers, or yours, may enter the facility after passing through a stringent system of electronic and physical identification checks. Every server benefits from optimal temperature and atmospheric controls, UPS and generator back up.
 Dual redundant Network – 2 x 1000Mbps
 Redundant Power Feeds
 Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) systems
 24 x 7 Monitored Security systems
 Fire-suppression Systems
 Climate and Environment control Units
 24 x 7 On-site Network Engineers

Our London data centres have sophisticated traffic management and switching technology. If any part of the network should fail, traffic is intelligently re-routed in under a second, so that there is no downtime for your website.

Power Information:
 Uninterruptible redundant AC and DC power solutions that are flexible and upgradeable, meeting all types of customer needs.
 100% power supply availability record for the previous three years.
 All power requirements of installations planned and managed by senior VI support staff.
 VI proactively completes a monthly physical power audit to highlight potential power loading issues.

Building UPS:
 The battery banks are designed to supply the building for 15 minutes whilst the generators are run in.
 On current load the batteries would be expected to last almost 1 hour.

 UPS is not designed as a power supply, rather a filter and a bridge to allow the generators enough time to get up to a speed where they can carry the load in addition to smoothing and conditioning national grid power.

Building generators:
 The three generators each capable of producing 3.4M Watts.
 On current building load a single generator could supply the entire building (current building load 2.8M Watts)
 Generators take approximately two minutes from automatic start till they are capable of offering a full supply.

Diesel supplies:
 Two 55000 litre underground storage tanks (110 thousand litres total)
 The generators are designed to supply building for 24 hours at full load.
 Under current building loads they would expect to last almost 3 days.
 Level 3 have an 8 hour SLA with diesel suppliers for tank refills.

Air Conditioning & Cooling:
 All our Racks are serviced by four independent cooling units ensuring failures do not impact cooling capacity.
 HVAC redundant power and cooling design.
 Redundant, physically diverse water cooling systems.
 Air distribution is under raised flooring for maximum temperature control.
 Humidity is maintained at 50%.
 Temperature is maintained at 20 degrees Celsius.
 Air is filtered continuously to remove dust particles and/or contaminants.
 Perforated tiles deliver air to the co-location area and can be moved/added to redirect cool air into warm spots.

Security:
 Multi-layer security control procedures.
 Biometric palm scans, electronic photo id badges and PIN access are required to gain access to the facility.
 One-in-one-out entry policy.
 24 x 7 closed-circuit video (VI operate independent cameras)
 24 x 7 alarmed door monitoring.
 Secure cabinet access (key and combination locks).
 24 x 7 monitored & manned site with security staff.

Fire Suppression
 Smoke detection systems above and below floors.
 Double-interlock, pre-action and dry-pipe fire suppression systems.
 System provides the best security against accidental discharge.
 Close proximity to emergency services.

Other Information:
 VI is able to provide off-site networked storage facilities.
 VI peer with a number of UK based ISP‘s.
 VI operates a 24 x 7 support service with a variety of SLA‘s to suit each customers need.

VI NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

Virtual Internet (VI) has invested millions in a dedicated network infrastructure to guarantee that its hosting services are world class. Its strategic partnership with one of the worlds most advanced internet infrastructure companies, Level 3 Inc., means that your servers are connected to a state-of-the-art IP network.

Our Gigabit Ethernet connectivity brings a level of bandwidth capacity that few hosting companies can equal. At a billion bits per second, Gigabit Ethernet has the potential to blow through virtually any bandwidth bottleneck. These super fast connections, combined with our direct links to the London Internet Exchange, mean that your web sites download

without any hold-ups. At Virtual Internet (VI), we are extremely proud of our Data centres, not only in infrastructure and security, but in the management and way that they are maintained. We actively invite prospective clients to visit our data centre to review our network.

Virtual Internet (VI) Data Centres provide you with the safe, secure, redundant facilities for your hosting needs. Our Data centres are equipped with features such as 24 x 7 technical support, backups for power (UPS) and advanced fire detection and suppression. Virtual Internet (VI) employ the highest possible security features, including video surveillance, by both visible and hidden cameras, motion sensors, biometric identification systems, controlled photo ID key-card access and 24-hour security-guard patrols.

VI DATACENTRE TECHNICAL SPECIFICATION

Infrastructure Connectivity Core
2 Gigabit per second (i.e. 2000Mbps), Gigabit Ethernet connectivity to infrastructure. Burst Capacity
Up to 2000Mbps Infrastructure (LINX)
IP network with direct links into London Internet Exchange.
Connections run through a State of the art global IP network with single hop connections across the Atlantic. Internal Cabling
Fibre-optic and 100 Base T Ethernet Cat 5
Environment Air Conditioning
Constant 21°C, 50% humidity Redundancy
Climate controls HVAC of 150% facility capacity Fire Control
Localised, pre-action, dry charged fire suppression Power Systems
UPS to generator supported 230V AC.
Automatic Transfer Switches
30 minute UPS backup & 24 hour generator backup
Systems Physical
Top floor location, 18″ raised floors throughout Monitoring
Infrared motion detection systems Manned
24/7 manned security and patrols Closed circuit video

All areas of the data centre feature CCTV surveillance, including all external access points. Access
Security identification through Photo ID and PIN number Palm Scan identification through all major areas of the centre.

VI NETWORK DATA LINK FAILOVER Virtual Internet (VI) has invested millions in a dedicated network infrastructure to guarantee that its hosting services are world class. Its strategic partnership with one of the world‘s most advanced internet infrastructure companies, Level 3 Inc., means that your servers are connected to a state-of-the-art IP network. Our Gigabit Ethernet connectivity brings a level of bandwidth capacity that few hosting companies can equal. At a billion bits per second, Gigabit Ethernet has the potential to blow through virtually any bandwidth bottleneck. These super fast connections, combined with our direct links to the London Internet Exchange, mean that your web sites download without any hold-ups. At Virtual Internet (VI), we are extremely proud of our Data centre‘s, not only in infrastructure and security, but in the management and way that they are maintained. We actively invite prospective clients to visit our data centre to review our network. Virtual Internet (VI)Data Centre‘s provide you with the safe, secure, redundant facilities for your hosting needs. Our Data centre‘s are equipped with features such as 24 x 7 technical support, backups for power (UPS)and advanced fire detection and suppression. Virtual Internet (VI)employ the highest possible security features, including video surveillance, by both visible and hidden cameras, motion sensors, biometric identification systems, controlled photo ID key-card access and 24-hour security-guard patrols.

Small to medium companies may not have the internal resources to deal with the wide range of technical issues that may arise. Getting quality advice at the outset is essential for any IT Director/Manager looking to invest in a significant infrastructure. They may not have the capital to invest in expensive monitoring and alerting equipment or have the 24 x 7 technical staff to react to incidents day or night.

Today‘s organisations often require 24 x 7 performance and for most of these businesses, IT management is not a core competency, but hosting infrastructure is mission critical to their business.

For each Virtual Internet Managed Hosting enquiry we pull together commercial and technical staff to devise the most reliable and cost effective solution for the client; from simple firewall and server configurations to complex load-balanced database and application servers.

There are very few hosting providers that can match the skill, expertise and experience of Virtual Internet in designing and running complex hosting infrastructures. Clients that rely on Virtual Internet for these critical services include one of the world’s largest media and broadcasting companies, digital interactive TV platforms, online casinos, web service providers and many others.

Benefits of Virtual Internet’s Managed Hosting Services

Save Time

 Our Managed Hosting services will allow you to save time by depending on Virtual Internet to deal with time-consuming tasks.
 By outsourcing hosting and support to Virtual Internet you can focus on your core business
Focus on Core Competency

 By utilising Virtual Internets Managed Service‘s for your infrastructure you won‘t need fulltime employees with expertise required to run a variety of applications and systems. Your remaining staff can focus on important projects or specialised tasks.

Reduce Expenditure

 Outsourcing can save money by allowing you to purchase only the amount of expertise needed, at less than the cost of permanent staff.
 Budgeting is made easier because of the fixed monthly cost.
 The Virtual Internet Managed Services will decrease the downtime of your hosting infrastructures, saving you money.
 Volume discounts are offered.

Scalable

 As your business grows or changes, you can quickly scale up or down to meet demand, reducing your risk.

Control

 Virtual Internet‘s experienced 24 x 7 technical staff is only a phone call away.
 Provide access to certified best-practices, people, and tools
 With our performance monitoring tools you can quickly review your infrastructure deployments.
Flexible
 Virtual Internet Managed Hosting Services are built to make it easier to tailor the solution to best fit your needs.

Business-Class:

Virtual Internet is a leading pan-European internet service provider for high availability managed hosting products. Since Virtual Internet was founded 1996, its philosophy has been to work with world-class technology providers to deliver the best hosting services available. Virtual Internet (UK) Ltd provides reliable Managed Hosting services, focusing on High availability and Total Resilience in both network and hardware environments. Using only the very best in Hardware, systems and suppliers, we deliver one of the mostcompetent, competitively priced and complete hosting services available in the UK.

When deciding on server hosting it is not an occasion to ‗take a chance‘ on the cheapest provider since this could seriously hamper your business. Many hosting providers make extraordinary claims about their data-centres, facilities, technology and customers. In reality, very few hosting providers have actually made the infrastructure investments to back-up their claims.

By choosing to host with Virtual Internet (VI) you are sure to have all the facilities and support you may need at your disposal. We encourage all of our dedicated server customers or potential customers to visit the data-centre and see the facilities for themselves.

The advantage is that it allows a lot more functionality than a standard webshop and is fully supported and set up by one supplier.

Transactions can be tracked, contacts are automatically added to the contact management module and all orders follow a predefined and measured order delivery process. ClickHQ facilitates email marketing campaigns to those customers in order to cross and upsell.

For more information on this excellent service please call us on 0845 88 00 203.

I sold my last business in 2005 after building it from scratch over eight years, I took some time out after the sale and reflected on what I would do differantly next time around.

My conclusion – start with a good business management software system that could manage all the day to day activity and which would give you a good overview of your key business processes.

We had a sales prospecting program called ACT and later Goldmine which we also used as a CRM system, a Sage accounts package, a bespoke billing system and an HR system.
This set up caused lots of issues down the line which really resulted from us being too busy with all the things you do as a new business rather than taking the time to plan. We were being successful in terms of growth and were building a good business but with hindsight could have been a lot more efficient if we had planned more and had had the experience that the 8 years of running the business later gave us.
All the founding directors had good experience in different areas but none of us had started and run a business where we had to look after multiple customers, suppliers, and employees.
We shot from the hip on the move and didn’t use any consultants or have any Non Execs to advise us as we wanted to use all our funds to grow a sales team.

The big issues were:
1. Synchronising data from the sales and telesales teams – ACT was great when used as a single user version to track an individuals own prospects but when we had to synchronise different databases from our different teams it was a nightmare. As we grew we needed to buy numerous consultancy days from expensive systems integrators to add custom fields and to generally make the system fit our business. We also had issues of salesman working remotely accessing the system and spent lots of man hours enabling them to work efficiently.
2. The Customer Services Department used a further customised CRM version of ACT/Goldmine which could record information in custom fields but had no inbuilt logical processes to follow with a simple overview.We were trying to make a simple flat database product fit our business which was dynamic and changing. It worked but only just and we lost a lot of time and things slipped through the net which were very costly. We couldn’t record and measure the time taken between process steps to highlight bottle necks in our processes – we had blind spots and were growing too quickly to notice until it cost us money. The other problem for customer support staff was that they could not access the billing system. They couldn’t see what a customer had been charged for in previous periods or had paid because they didn’t have access to Sage either. Information had to be entered twice and mistakes were made and the people who may have noticed the mistakes couldn’t see the other side. Basically our staff looking after customers were not empowered to do their jobs properly which meant that customers were not getting the best service and we probably lost some customers as a result.
3. All the information put in the billing system was only viewable by 3 people out of 65 staff and there was no automatic link to update payments in. Things got messy when our customers increased or decreased the number of items that we billed them monthly for because there were 2 different systems to be updated manually. Even worse there were occasions that we didn’t bill customers for all the products that they had. We had to carry out regular, time consuming audits to make sure that we billed for the no. of products that our CRM system said we should.
4. Sage is great for Accountants but to the non financial managers it is difficult to interrogate and get meaningful information out of. In my experience this leaves managers and directors without up to date financial information while they wait for weekly or monthly management accounts/reports which are provided to them by their FD, Book Keeper or Accounts Department.
5. Our simple HR program was only accessible by our HR manager and she was part time! We had to wait for her to be in the office and not in interviews with potential new staff before we could get HR notes out of the system.

There were lots of other system problems relating to a lack of access to relevant employees, a lack of flexibility and expensive bespoke programming.
Another big problem was the resilience of the servers in our office, access to information when out of the office and the security of our data.

All the above issues prayed on my mind at the time but there really wasn’t a proper alternative for us to consider at the time.

When we were writing the specification for ClickHQ ( our business management software service) it was obvious that we should build a service which seamlessly integrated all the modules needed to efficiently run a business from day to day.

Whilst not perfect for everybody, in my perhaps biased view, ClickHQ business software will save you both time and money because it was written by people like you that have walked the walk and learnt from their mistakes.

As part of the ongoing development of ClickHQ we have written code that allows us to add full ecommerce capability into any Joomla website so that our business customers can have an online shop that seemlessly links into the same system that runs the rest of their business.

Call us on 0845 88 00 203 for a demo.

Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5

The above line tells the server “I prefer British English language over American English”. This doesn’t reflect my personal taste of course, but I doubt there are servers that differentiate between the two variations.

Languages are defined by using their international language codes. Multiple languages must be separated by comma and a single space. The “;q=0.5” sub-parameter is a weight, used to sort the languages in order of importance (highest weight first). By default, weight equals 1.0 .

In PHP, you can get the value of the “Accept-Language” parameter from the $_SERVER array.

For multi-language websites, the simplest way to decide which language to use is to compare two arrays, one with the list of supported languages and the other with the user’s preferred languages.

I intend to push the limits of web applications developments further by introducing the ability to achieve distributed object environments using JavaScript (JQuery) and PHP (or any server-side scripting language).

Distributed object environments (DOE) are environments where object are shared among components of a distributed system. In DOE, distributed components (requestor) can request (via special calls, accompanied by object reference) for objects that are not physically present on the same machine or address space. With the help of middleware technologies, programmers are relieved of the pain of having to deal with the complexities associated with distribution. This request is served by generating the object (whose reference was passed along with the message) and sending it back to the requestor. Different implementations exist for the processes that take place between the request and the response. One of which I’ll be discussing in this article.

Since Google’s use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to make search suggestions in 2005, AJAX have become widely used to develop web applications with real-time capabilities. Via AJAX, requests for resources or section of the web page can be made to a server, and on success, the server’s reply can be applied to the required section usually a div tag within the html document. The communication between the server and client (in this case the web application) is usually asynchronous, in other words, the web application can continue with other tasks as soon as the message is sent. In this context, “Messaging refers to the communication model of asynchronous, possibly multi-cast message exchange for event notification, or request processing” (Tai & Rouvellou, 2000).

AJAX is based on messaging, and therefore could easily be used to make requests for objects. These objects have to be JavaScript compatible, as JavaScript is used at the client end. The server, in receipt of this client request, sends JavaScript compatible objects using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). “JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition – December 1999.” (JSON)

PHP, a server-side scripting language, supports JSON by default. It provides functions for encoding and decoding JSON objects.

Finally, JQuery, a JavaScript library, makes requests via AJAX really easy, taking out the complexities associated with JavaScript. It provides full support for JSON, with special functions for making AJAX-JSON requests.

In summary, using standard HTTP protocols, JavaScript (jQuery), AJAX, JSON and PHP, a web service that simulates a distributed object environment can be developed.

Bibliography

JSON. (n.d.). Retrieved 01 19, 2010, from JSON: http://www.json.org/

JSON Functions. (n.d.). Retrieved 01 19, 2010, from PHP.NET: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.json.php

Tai, S., & Rouvellou, I. (2000). Strategies for Integrating Messaging and Distributed Object Transactions. IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed systems platforms (pp. 308 – 330). New York: Springer-Verlag New York, Inc.

“The websites I build don’t use any JavaScript.”

jQuery was bought to my attention a couple of years ago, if you’re a web developer / designer and don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m about to revolutionise the way you build websites, and web based interfaces.

jQuery is a JavaScript library, it extends the core JavaScript functionality, wrapping it up in easy to use methods. The result is astonishing. Produce drag and drop elements, AJAX calls, dialog boxes and much more all within just a few lines of code. jQuery is supported across all common browsers letting you focus on building the interface of your clients dreams.

The community that develops, extends and supports jQuery allows you to tap in to a wealth of knowledge and resources. Getting started only requires a bit of basic JavaScript knowledge and the ability to read the excellent documentation.

I should point out, other JavaScript libraries are available, I just like jQuery more than the others!