"Suffice it to say, we’re in the middle of one of the most important computing shifts in history. And as has happened before with other major paradigm transitions, new businesses will emerge to define and dominate markets."

- Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net, 2011: The Enterprise Resets, TechCrunch, January 2, 2011.

 “The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either from a licensing standpoint or because their software is not extensible.”

We sat down with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager of Jahia Inc., in Washington, DC to discuss the open source CMS Cloud offering.

Hi Emmanuel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. In a recent release Jahiastated it has experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even among conservative industries like banking and finance, for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Why is not everyone using the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin: Some companies still have financial incentives to own their datacenter It really depends on the financial structure of the firm. Some prefer hardware that you can depreciate, in order to maximize tax deductions [CAPEX versus OPEX]. Most of our Cloud clients prefer to expense [OPEX] their web initiative spendings.

When discussing the cloud option with new or existing clients, what kind of concerns do you hear the most?

Emmanuel Garcin: Different types of customers have different reasons for looking at our cloud offerings. SMBs with low IT resources don’t want to spend on infrastructure. Large enterprises with datacenters still want the flexibility of the cloud, for example, to reach a new region. Thanks to Amazon, we have computing power all over the world. Companies also may want to get faster to market and bypass the  internal IT/datacenter processes which can be heavy and time consuming.

However, both types of customers hesitate to trust others to administer and secure their systems because they want to be able to monitor and back up the cloud themselves. Their concern is always the same:  What do we do when it’s down? Salesforce.com had the same hesitation in the early adoption phase. In our experience, Jahias’s automatic monitoring, security and backup option is often the selling argument.

London, 2 February 2010 - The 2nd PoweredbyCloud 2010 and the first international Cloud Law Summit taking place in London over three days, 8-9-10 February 2010 has attracted a wide international audience, particularly from the enterprise sector (www.poweredbycloud.com).

The PoweredbyCloud conference has established a reputation for providing strategic insight into the evolution of cloud services and business models that work.  With a speaker academy comprising of experts and front line players from Europe and North America, the event is positioned as the key content platform for providers and users.

In addition to the 2-day content driven conference, a special summit will focus on emerging Cloud Law will draw on experts from the US and Europe to discuss the implications of the Patriot Act in the United States, and EU Data Directive for enterprises.  Other topics covered included Privacy in the Cloud, Open Law, financial services, Cloud content and liability, negotiating contracts for Cloud Services, and how Cloud law might be framed in future.

"What emerges from this important conference in terms of creating a commercial and technological perspective of cloud services and infrastructure in Europe will be of key interest to enterprises," commented Philip Low, managing director at BroadGroup, the conference researchers and producers. "The added dimension of how potentially a wide range of cloud issues will be treated legally represents the first such initiative across the region, and is also being observed from Brussels to Tokyo." 

Six Degrees is launching a new group of events - the Cloud Computing Series (http://www.cloudcomputingseries.com). The first Cloud Computing Congress Europe (http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com) is taking place on 16th March 2010 at Olympia in London.

The series of events will look at how Cloud Computing is revolutionising information technology in the European, North American, and Asian market. Topics discussed include the latest state of Cloud Computing in the respective markets, its benefits and technical challenges, the impact on the IT function, and how the applications can be build, controlled and managed in a cloud-based environment. 

The Cloud Computing Congress Europe will run alongside Enterprise Social Media (www.enterprisesocialmedia.net) & the Social Media World Forum (www.socialmedia-forum.com), a leading social media event that brings together all industry facets.

Bitrix, Inc., one of the world’s leading content management system (CMS) developers, releases its new and free Bitrix Virtual Appliance v1.3. The product uses the technological idea of Cloud Computing and represents an absolutely new generation of software-plus-service solutions. The company changes its traditional way of how a software product could be delivered to a customer, pacing up with the new trends of Cloud Computing. The Bitrix Virtual Appliance offers easier installation and deployment and more importantly – enhanced productivity both for Bitrix software products and for other PHP applications.

The Bitrix Virtual Appliance is a complete and fully configured platform that has been developed both for Bitrix software products and for other PHP applications ultimate use and testing purposes. Not only does the implementation of a Virtual Appliance save time traditionally spent on system configuration, but it is also absolutely safe and reliable because of the virtual environment security configuration. Using the Bitrix Virtual Appliance greatly reduces the maintenance costs while its structure always remains intact and configured wherever it is deployed.

Being a responsive B2B company, Bitrix, Inc. has realized the concept of a more effective data transfer. The Bitrix Virtual Appliance allows you to relocate your web site project from one server to another leaving the whole structure intact and not requiring you to do any additional tune-ups for the new server environment. There is also no need to care much about hardware or software compatibility, it always remains set up and configured wherever you want it to migrate! That all means a huge reduction in maintenance costs.