You’ve read countless case studies of how small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have turned to cloud computing to raise productivity, improve customer service and stay ahead of the competition. But is your company ready to jump onto the bandwagon? Here’s what you need to know before moving to the cloud:

1. Define your needs
While cloud computing may seem like hype, it has leveled the playing field for SMBs that would not have been able to afford sophisticated business applications. 87 percent of SMBs surveyed said cloud applications have given them a competitive advantage, while 85 percent agreed that cloud applications have improved employee productivity. However, to realize the full benefits of the cloud, it is important to define what you want to achieve. Are you hoping to improve customer service by allowing your sales team to respond to customer requests quickly? Or, do you want improve collaboration among employees? Articulating those needs clearly will go a long way in choosing the right cloud service provider.

2. Choose the right service provider
Choosing a cloud service provider can be a daunting task. There are several criteria that you can use to evaluate a service provider, including performance, support and security. The Asia Cloud Computing Association has published a useful evaluation matrix that will help you prioritize your requirements. For example, if you have customers that demand strict data security, a potential cloud provider would have to score higher for that criterion over others. A company with limited IT resources may demand the highest level of support, while an engineering firm may place performance as its highest priority.

3. Back up and secure your data
Most cloud service providers will assure you that your data is safe. Bigger cloud players like Salesforce.com will enforce strict data protection policies to protect your data, but when an employee downloads or copies that data, security could go out the window. Consider employing cloud-based data loss protection (DLP) technology that takes digital fingerprints of data in the cloud. So, if someone tries to download, copy and paste, or e-mail confidential data, DLP technology will recognize the fingerprinted data as sensitive, and takes action to prevent misuse. Finally, backing up your data is a no-brainer. Most cloud services will allow you to export a copy of your data which you can restore if things go awry, or when you switch service providers.

4. Data integration services
Do you need to integrate existing data that you are housing on your in-house IT systems with your cloud service? This is especially important if you’re not ready to move all your data to the cloud. Your customer profile data, for example, may be tied closely to a legacy system which may be difficult to decouple. While integration is usually done through APIs, consider tapping on integration services provided by systems integrators to speed up the process.

5. Plan your deployment
Early cloud adopters agree that adequate planning and preparation would have made their implementation efforts easier and more successful. It is thus important for SMBs to develop a clear implementation plan, which should involve a deployment roadmap, as well as identifying key business and IT transformations with measurable benefits. Upfront planning would help you avoid issues like long deployment cycles, limited integration with other applications and lack of proper training.

Tags: Cloud computing, Information technology, Information privacy, Small and medium enterprises, Business, Service provider, Salesforce.com, E-Commerce

1) Data Is the New Supply Chain: Learn the Current Methods, Risk Management

DAMA International, the global association of professionals in data management, states that “Data Resource Management is the development and execution of architectures, policies, practices and procedures that properly manage the full data lifecycle needs of an enterprise.” In today’s information driven world, the data needs of an enterprise are very important. Some enterprises are built around providing information to external customers, and others have information of value that is used only with internal customers. In either case, the way data is managed is of great importance. While traditionally an internal IT department is responsible for this data management, now there are enterprises looking at external vendors to provide this management via cloud computing.

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2) Cloudyn Launches Free Tool For Making Sense of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Costs

Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them.

Amazon offers Reserved Instances at different rates depending on term of commitment — either one, two or three years. Cloudyn’s Reserved Instance Calculator will use predictions based on usage patterns to recommend optimal purchases. Given that Amazon actually opened its own marketplace for unused Reserved Instances last month, it seems like a tool for planning these purchases could come in pretty handy.

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3) Integration Cloud Services Brokerage: What it is. What it isn’t.

The intent of cloud computing is to extract technical complexity by offering computing as a service, thereby reducing IT costs and freeing IT staff to focus on achieving higher-level business objectives. For many firms, these objectives are increasingly centered on the extended enterprise and a valuable network of customers, suppliers, business partners and cloud providers.

However, using cloud services for both back-office systems and B2B processes requires a high level of coordination and integration due to the inherent interdependencies. It’s one thing for these different services to exist as independent islands that never need to interconnect, or as loosely connected point-to-point interfaces. That’s easy to do. It’s another thing to outsource interdependent business processes to multiple cloud service providers. This becomes very complex, very quickly, and can mean adding staff and resources — whether it’s for writing code or just managing the integration process — either of which can negate many of the cloud computing benefits.

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4) Big Data Case Study: Predicting the Weather with 3TIER

Where would you build a wind-farm? Somewhere windy, obviously. But how would you know how windy that area was a year ago, two years ago, three? How would you know when the windiest time of year was? How would you predict the weather for today, the weather for tomorrow, the weather for next year and beyond? The answer: talk to 3TIER.

3TIER, an industry leading company dealing in renewables risk management, helps businesses decide where to place their wind-farms, solar-farms and hydro-dams by giving them all the information they need to assess the future energy potential of any location. How do they do this? Big data.

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5) Report: Wal-Mart’s Big Data Moves Will Boost Rackspace

Last week while the OpenStack conference was taking place in San Diego William Blair analyst Jim Breen reported that event organizer Rackspace (RAX) will likely win more business from retail giant Wal-Mart (WMT).

Breen noted that Wal-Mart was actively recruiting OpenStack engineers and the fact that Rackspace can gain traction with Wal-Mart for big data analytics reflects the progress of the OpenStack platform. Rackspace and Wal-Mart share a common enemy with Amazon.  Wal-mart has opened an office in San Bruno, California office to house @WalmartLabs, an innovation outpost that the brick-and-mortar company hopes will expand its Internet retail business and play ecommerce catchup with Amazon.  @WalmartLabs is in the process of consolidating its data analytics systems from EMC and IBM technology into a single global platform.

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Category: Big Data News

Tags: OpenStack, IBM, Wal-Mart, Big data, Cloud computing, Amazon, Rackspace, Walmart

Back in the summer in a private meeting I was asked for my thoughts on the outlook for cloud — what will the world think of it in two or even five years' time? This is what I said.

Cloud is delivered on mobile, includes social. Ask a techologist for a definition of cloud and you'll soon get dragged into discussions of virtualization, automated management and even data center design. Ask a business person and they'll talk about the freedom of interacting with applications, resources and contacts without being tied to a physical location. The business people have got it right: what's important about the connected technology of the cloud is the incredible speed, agility and transformation it enables in business. Some people say cloud is a buzzword that is nearing the end of its heyday, but I think it will endure, not as a technology buzzword but as a layman's term for connected automation.

Many businesses will thrive because of cloud. Cloud, in its widest sense of being connected to a global network of on-demand resources, is transforming entire industries. Look at all forms of media and publishing, look at retailing, look at advertising and marketing, look at information technology. The businesses that are using the Web to pioneer new ways of delivering goods and services are growing fast — as Marc Andreessen put it so memorably, software is eating the world.

Many businesses will falter because of cloud. There's a dark side to all the successful trajectories of those new businesses; they're putting many established players out of business. The disruption has a negative effect on society, with massive capital investments reduced or written off, while thousands of workers have to look for new jobs — many having to retrain before they can do so. The trouble is, these established giants have spent up years building up influence in society and their leaders have the ear of policy makers.

Government will impede the progress of cloud. Only last month, the European Commission announced a new cloud strategy that aims to add €160 billion to the EU's GDP by 2020. To help it achieve this goal, policy makers want to regulate the cloud — and that's when they see it as a force for good. When they discover the disruptive impact on those established industries that are past masters at political lobbying, it's all too easy to see how governments will be tempted to clip the wings of cloud. Many governments across the globe are already curtailing their citizens' access to cloud resources. As economic pressures intensify, this will get worse, not better.

Cloud is neither public nor private. Since all businesses must be connected to compete in today's economy, the distinction between private and public cloud is illusory. All instances of information technology have to operate in the cloud. Those who realise they are public cloud providers will do a good job of it. Those who ignore their connectedness will continue to expose their customers and partners to the risk of compromised or lost data. Most organisations will rely on a mix of public cloud resources along with their own privately operated IT, with increasing reliance on third-party cloud providers as the industry matures.

Cloud is established, so less discussed by name. Ask a group of CIOs if their organisation uses cloud, and few will put up their hands. Ask them if they use Salesforce.com, Concur, Successfactors, WebEx and the rest, and most will confess they do. As cloud becomes increasingly mainstream, it will be mentioned less and less, simply because it will become the default means of operating IT. There's no need to explicitly mention something that has become commonplace. It's just understood.

Related articles

• Cloud, consumerization of IT makes life tough for CIOs (gigaom.com)
• How Cloud Computing Can Help Your Small Business (grasshopper.com)
• IBM Sponsored Content: 5 Cloud Business Benefits (wired.com)

Tags: Information technology, Business, European Commission, Marc Andreessen, Chief information officer, WebEx, SuccessFactors, European Union

Sick and tired of hearing me bleat on about my favourite apps and services? Sit back and read this guest post originally published back in 2010 by James Adams who outlines his personal choices.

Cloud computing is the latest in the trend to minimize IT costs and increase productivity. Software from the cloud takes the burden of administration off of the local organization, relieving much of the demand for in-house expertise. Cloud based represents higher productivity for in-house and mobile workforces in the form of accessible and secure computing with more up time. Here are 12 cloud apps that will make your business more productive.

Basecamp

An online project management tool that runs through the cloud and provides team collaboration features. Everything you need to manage your projects is found in Basecamp, including file sharing, scheduling, task management and assignment, and feedback. Basecamp interacts with several iPhone apps, and third party computer-based tools to give you maximum accessibility and flexibility wherever you are. Packages available range from 15 projects to unlimited. A 30 day trial lets you see if Basecamp will fit the needs of your business before you buy.

Dropbox

A web-based file sharing service that also provides secure file storage, synchronization, and backup. Files can be accessed from anywhere and changes made to files by the team are automatically synced to user’s local computers. Supports Linux, Mac, and Windows. Dropbox offers 2 GB of storage free so you can see how it works prior to purchasing.

Zoho

A cloud based office software suite, offering powerful document creation management tools for spreadsheets, word processing, invoicing, CRM, and more. You pay for only the apps you use.

Dimdim

Web conferencing software that resides in the cloud and offers a great medium in which you can interface with your mobile workers, customers, and vendors. Rather than having people travel to meetings, why not let everyone stay home, save the earth and attend the meeting online?

Pixlr

Cloud-based image editing services. Three applications, Editor, Express, and Grabber combine to give users amazing power to create and edit images.

Github

Social coding application that runs through the cloud to provide version control and collaborative software development. Several packages are available from the free open source plan to the Giga plan that includes 300 private repositories, private collaborators, and 60 GB of storage. There is also an enterprise version of Github that companies can deploy on their own cloud platform.

FreshBooks

A financial management application that’s hosted in the cloud. This program offers “painless billing” that makes it easy to bill clients, track payments, and perform other bookkeeping. This app is specially designed for teams, freelance workers, and service providers.

Google Docs

A personal repository of documents that can be shared and updated as needed. Google Docs features revision tracking and allows users to save documents locally if necessary. This application is free.

Mojo Helpdesk

Provides online customer relationship management (CRM), including request tracking, ticket assignment, email integration, and on demand help. Eleven users are supported for the $24 monthly fee, with an unlimited option available for $49.

Cloudmark Desktop

Business with real time protection from email spam, phishing, and viruses without loading down the computers on your network.

Appointy

An online scheduling software that provides businesses with appointment and schedule management. The software can be configured to allow customers to make their own appointments and send out text and voice alerts for appointments. Appointy even has tools available to promote your business. Practically any business that schedules appointments over the telephone will appreciate the power Appointy offers to make businesses more efficient and productive.

Gliffy

Provides cloud-based charting and diagramming. This powerful app gives business access to the tools needed to create professional flow charts, floor plans, and technical drawings.

Cloud based applications are perfect for managing business functions from any web browser so employees and managers can be productive wherever they are. With software management and administration performed by the host, businesses can focus on their mission rather than on IT related tasks. Try these applications out and see how powerful web-based applications can transform your business.

This guest post was written by James Adams who is a blogger working for an online storeoffering toner next day for the UK. He is a contributor to their design blog where he posts about technology and design.

Tags: Basecamp, Cloud computing, Project management, Linux, Web conferencing, Office suite, iPhone, Windows

In the same vein as my previous post, I want to mention some of the basic but important things that someone starting out with cloud computing needs to know. Many times people see 'the cloud' as something magical, as the silver bullet that will solve all their scalability and performance problems. These people are in for a rude awakening if they don't pay attention to the following points.

Expect failure at any time

There are no guarantees in the cloud. Failures can and will happen, suddenly and mercilessly. Their frequency will increase as you increase the number of instances that you run in the cloud. It's a sickening feeling to realize that one of your database instances is gone, and there's not much you can do to bring it back. At that point, you need to rely on your disaster recovery plan (and you have a DR plan, don't you?) and either launch a new instance from scratch, or, in the case of a MySQL master server for example, promote a slave to a master. The silver lining in all this is that you need a disaster recovery plan anyway, even if you host your own servers in your own data center space. The cloud just makes failures happen more often, so it will test your DR plan more thoroughly. In a few months, you will be an expert at recovering from such failures, which is not a bad thing.

In fact, knowing that anything can fail in the cloud at any time forces you to architect your infrastructure such that you can recover from failures quickly. This is a worthy goal to have no matter where your infrastructure is hosted.

There's more to expecting failures at any time. You need a solid monitoring system to alert you that failures are happening. You need a solid configuration management system to spin up new instances of a given role quickly and with as little human intervention as possible. All these are great features to have in any infrastructure.

Automation is key

If you only have a handful of servers to manage, 'for' loops with ssh commands in a shell script can still seem like a good and progressive way of running tasks across the servers. This method breaks at scale. You need to use more industrial-grade configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef or CFEngine. The learning curve can be pretty steep for most of these tools, but it's worth investing your time in them.

Deploying automatically is not enough though. You also need ways to ensure that things have been deployed as expected, and that you haven't inadvertently introduced new bugs. Automated testing of your infrastructure is key. You can achieve this either by writing scripts that check to see if certain conditions have been met, or, even better, by adding those checks to your monitoring system. This way, your monitoring checks are your deployment unit tests.

If the cloud is a kingdom, its APIs are the crown jewels. You need to master those APIs in order to automate the launching and termination of cloud instances, as well as the creation and management of other resources (storage, load balancers, firewall rules). Libraries such as jclouds and libcloud help, but in many situations you need to fall back to the raw cloud provider API. Having a good handle on a scripting language (any decent scripting language will do) is very important.

Dashboards are essential

One of the reason, and maybe the main reason, that people use the cloud is that they want to scale their infrastructures horizontally. They want to be able to add new instances at every layer (web app, database, caching) in order to handle anything that their users throw at their web site. Simply monitoring those instances for failures is not enough. You also need to graph the resources that are consumed, and the metrics that are generated at all layers: hardware, operating system, application, business logic. Tools such as Graphite, Ganglia, Cacti, etc can be of great assistance. Even homegrown dashboards based on tools such as the Google Visualization API can be extremely useful (I wrote about this topic here).

One aspect of having these graphs and dashboards is that they are essential for capacity planning, by helping you in establishing correlations between traffic that hits your web site and resources that are consumed and that can become a bottleneck (such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, network bandwidth etc). If you run your database servers in the cloud for example, you will very quickly realize that disk I/O is your main bottleneck. You will be able to correlate high CPU wait numbers with slowness in your database, which reflects in slowness in your overall application. You will then know that if you reach a certain CPU wait threshold, it's time to either scale your database server farm horizontally (easier said than done especially if you do manual sharding), or vertically (which may not even be possible in the cloud, because you have pretty restrictive choices of server hardware).

As an aside: do not run your relational database servers in the cloud. Disk I/O is so bad, and relational databases are so hard to scale horizontally, that you will soon regret it. Distributed NoSQL databases such as Riak, Voldemort or HBase are a different matter, since they are designed from the ground up to scale horizontally. But for MySQL or PostgreSQL, go for bare metal servers hosted at a good data center.

One last thing about scaling horizontally is the myth of autoscaling. I've very rarely seen companies that are able to scale their infrastructure up and down based on traffic patterns. Many say they do it, but when you get down to it it's mostly a manual process. It's somewhat easier to scale it up, but scaling it down is a totally different matter. You need to worry at that point that resources that you are taking away from your infrastructure are properly accounted for. Let's say you terminate a web server instance behind a load balancer -- is the load balancer aware of the fact that it shouldn't send traffic to that instance any more?

Another aspect of having graphs and dashboards is to see how business metrics (such as sales per day, or people that abandoned their shopping carts, or payment transactions, etc.) are affected by bottlenecks in your infrastructure. This assumes that you do graph business metrics, which you should. Without dashboards, you are flying blind.

I could go on with more caveats about the cloud, but I think that these 3 topics are a good starting point. The interesting thing about all 3 topics though is that they apply to any infrastructure, not only to cloud-based ones. But the scale of the cloud puts these things into their proper perspective and forces you to think them through.

I spend a lot of time in LinkedIn groups and have learned a bit about maximizing their potential as conversation-starters. Here are 15 of my favorite tips. Please add your own as comments.

1. Ask Questions

The best way to provoke discussion on LinkedIn is to ask questions. Rather than sharing a link to an article, use it to kick off a discussion. For example, instead of posting a headline and a link to an article about cloud security, formulate it into a question:

“This article on Cloud Computing Path makes the case that the recent Dropbox security breach proves that the cloud is not yet secure enough for the enterprise. Do you agree?”

http://www.cloudcomputingpath.com/dropbox-security-breach-prove-that-cloud-is-not-secure/

2. Make it Personal

LinkedIn is the only major social network that doesn’t permit brands to interact as members. Only people can post content. With that in mind, make sure your posts have a personal tone. For example, instead of saying, “This webinar on the benefits of platform as a service has particular relevance to business partners,” try “This webinar on the benefits of platform as a service looks interesting. I hope you’ll join me there.”

3. Follow Up

This is very, very, very important. Don’t post a question and just walk away. When people do you the courtesy of responding, return the favor by responding to them or simply “Liking” their post. Remember that you started the conversation. That means you own it.

4. Fill Out Your Profile

When you contribute something interesting to the group, people will want to find out more about you. It’s disappointing when their click takes them to a skeletal profile page with no photo. It’s a lost opportunity for you, too, because you’re missing the chance to create a professional contact.

5. Use Active Voice

Why “facilitate the implementation of” when you can just “do?” Corporate speak doesn’t work in social channels because you communicate there as a person, not as an institution. Cleanse your prose of passive voice, buzzwords and superlatives. Write like you talk.

6. Keep Headlines Short and Avoid the Ellipses Of Death

LinkedIn gives you 120 characters for a headline, which is pretty generous. Headlines over 120 characters are truncated with an ellipsis (…). You want to avoid this because you’re forcing readers to click through to read the rest of the headline. The more clicks you require the more visitors you lose. The “Add more details” field gives you plenty of space to spread out.

7. There Are Three Parts Of Any LinkedIn Post. Use Them All

They are:

• Headline – Keep it brief and use it to communicate basic information or arouse interest.
• Add more details - Provide background and explanatory information. Tell people why you think this information is important.
• Attach a link – Use this area to post links. Never include links in the headline. If you need to have more than one link in your post, use a URL shortening service (see below) and include it in the “Add more details” section.

For example, instead of writing a headline like “Can anyone recommend a useful eBook on cloud computing? I’m looking for something oriented toward professional developers that has recommendations for the major PaaS and/or IaaS solutions.” post the question as a headline and the second sentence in the “Add more details” section.

8. Think of the Benefit to Your Audience

Success in social channels is all about helping other people. Keep that in mind when composing a post. It’s not about you, it’s about them. For example:

• Instead of “A Primer on PaaS,” try “This Paas Primer could be a great conversation-starter for your prospects.”
• Instead of “Spot Market Pricing, New Services Fuel Amazon GovCloud Growth,” try “What You Need to Know about Amazon’s Government Strategy”

Use words like “you” and “I” a lot. This is a discussion, not a billboard.

9. Minimize Copy and Paste

Respect your readers’ time by minimizing pointless verbiage. Don’t just copy and paste the promotion from a webcast. Boil down the basic facts and tell the reader why you recommend it. The more you make your post a personal message from you, rather than a rehash of somebody else’s message, the more compelling it is.

10. Don’t Copy From Twitter

When I see hash tags in a headline, it tells me one thing: This person was too lazy to customize the message for me. The language we use on Twitter doesn’t fit well in the more generous confines of a LinkedIn or Facebook post. Rewrite the message for the network you’re using and the people you’re hoping to reach. Think of the context, too. Facebook is more playful than LinkedIn. The Sales Best Practices group on LinkedIn has a different membership than the Construction Professionals group.

11. Avoid Repetition

LinkedIn does you a favor by copying the first few words of any article that you post as a link. Don’t copy and paste those same words into your description field. You have 15 minutes to edit anything you post in a group, so check your work to make sure your description isn’t a carbon copy of the item to which you link.

12. Take Advantage of Polls

Polls are a basic tool you can use to solicit feedback. You can specify up to five answer choices and choose how long the poll runs. Try mixing it up; instead of posting a question, occasionally formulate the topic as a survey.

13. Use Trackable Links

It’s easy to measure the response to content you post. URL shortening services like Bit.ly and JotURL make it easy to shorten links and then track the number of clicks they generate. LinkedIn processes these short links just like regular URLs. You can also use Google URL Builder. It generates longer links, but they’re compatible with Google Analytics. You can also shorten those links with Bit.ly prior to posting them.

14. Be Provocative

I don’t recommend overusing this technique, but it’s fun to try from time to time. Instead of a descriptive headline, try one that piques curiosity. Here are a couple from the Sales Best Practices group:

Eat that Frog!

If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first. ~ Mark Twain

How do you start your day? Do you ‘eat that frog?’ Do you have a ritual that starts your morning?

Who’s ruining it for the rest of us?

The member goes on to ask why sales people continue to use spamming tactics that don’t work and give the whole profession a bad name.

15. Connect with Other Members

When you request a connection with another LinkedIn member, the service asks you to verify that you have an existing relationship. If you don’t, it denies the connection request. You can get around this by joining a group to which the other person already belongs and requesting the connection as a fellow member. Be aware that if your request is denied, LinkedIn won’t let you try this trick a second time.

Bangalore: With several cloud offerings in the market it becomes a little difficult for enterprise to choose the one that fits their budget. But enterprises do need to maximize their productivity and the best option for business is Google Cloud.

So for enterprises who already have adopted Google Cloud, how can you increase the value? How can you improve your storage system? The best answer is Google Drive.

Google Drive is a powerful collaboration platform that allows users to develop documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and business forms. With Google cloud, users can share data’s such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and business forms with colleagues, customers and partners. This maintains document iterations arranged, reducing the number of duplicated documents. Recently, Google Drive has been grabbing a lot of attention because of its low cost and high business value.

However the transition from the traditional methods is still slow. Enterprises are still depending on their businesses up on desktop-based tools like Microsoft Office. A successful adoption of Google Drive within an organization covers many factors such as ability of businesses and IT managements to provide better information, highlighting successful use-cases and by providing high-quality training.

With that here are 5 steps for enterprises for improving their Google Drive adoption.

#1 Communicate a clear plan:

Enterprises are still unaware of the latest trends and changes within the technology. So the first step for an excellent Google Drive adoption is to train and change the management plan within the enterprise. Factors such as technology co-existence, productivity suites and migration technique must be considered.

#2 Provide training:

The second step where enterprises must focus more is training. Training will increase users comfort level with Google Drive so that employees can primarily focus on business goals of their organization. Also, apt guidance can focus workers on organizational policies on naming documents, sharing, searching, and developing better organization ofdocuments within the Drive.

#3 Prepare a rich template gallery:

Organizations need to have a good library for all their important documents. This kind of course can assure users to store their documents with consistency and format.

Linking to templates from the corporate intranet site and allowing employees to access high-use documents like Meeting Agendas, Project Plans, Action Items Lists, Proposals and Statements of Work are the best examples.

#4 Lead by example:

Another method for easy adoption is to lead by example. Senior business and IT managers can lead the way by using Google Drive for day-to-day activities. Managers can create departmental surveys in Google Forms, share spreadsheets with their teams, create documents in Google Docs and share with teams.  This also helps in boosting the employee morale, which obviously increases the rate of approval of Google Drive.

#5 Create a document library:

Making important organization-wide documents and policies available in Google Drive and sharing them with the entire organization by creating links from the corporate intranet, is the best way to augment Google Drive adoption. Organizations also need to let users know about the availability of template library. These templates must be arranged into a slick experience with corporate branding and colors. Companies also must educate users as to where they can find the most up to date information, for example in corporate handbooks, department and organization policies.

Tags: Google, Microsoft Office, Google Drive, Cloud computing, Business, Organization, Companies law, documents

These companies below have held the largest market share in highly profitable businesses. Korean giant Toshiba has been extremely successful in consumer electronics, Microsoft dominates the operating system market and IBM is the market leader in enterprise computing. These companies have been able to rely on their constant revenue streams to support heavy investment in research and development. According to 24/7 Wall St. listed below are companies that invested the most in recent times.

10. Hitachi

2011 Patent Grants: 1,465
Profits: $-1.1 Billion
Sales: $96 Billion
Value: 473rd Largest

The 38th-largest company in Japan, Hitachi is a substantial and exceptionally diversified corporation, with major stakes in 11 separate industries, including electronics, construction, automotive systems and telecommunications. With such an array of businesses, the company is involved in a great many research and patent applications. It was awarded 1,465 U.S. patents in 2011. But the company’s shares are down 47.7 percent in the past five years, an under-performance of roughly 40 percentage points compared to the S&P 500 over the same period.

9. Hon Hai Precision Industry

2011 Patent Grants: 1,514
Profits: $2.4 billion
Sales: $61.2 billion
Value: 189th largest in world

Taiwan’s largest company, Hon Hai Precision Industry earned more than $60 billion in sales last year. Although this company’s name might not be very popular among all, most will recognize Foxconn, the company it purchased in 2010. Foxconn is the largest contract electronic manufacturer in the world. Shares of Hon Hai are down 63 percent in the past five years. Since 2009, the company’s annual patent rate has doubled.

8. Seiko Epson Corporation

2011 Patent Grants: 1,533
Profits: -$211.8
Sales: $10.5 Billion
Value: 1,596th Largest In World

The manufacturer of printers and other consumer electronics devices, including LCD televisions and personal computers Seiko is known as Epson by most Americans. Last year, the U.S. Patent Office granted thecompany more than 1,500 patents. One of Epson’s primary businesses was inkjet printers, which have been turned nearly obsolete by laser printers and a lower demand for printing in general due to cloud computing. Over the past five years, the company has ramped up its R&D department, generating approximately 100 more patents each consecutive year than the previous one. At the same time, the company shares have plummeted nearly 70 percent. In recent times the company lost $211 million.

7. Sony

2011 Patent Grants: 2,286
Profits: -$436.6 Million
Sales: $77.2 Billion
Value: 456th Largest In the World

Sony is one of the largest and most recognizable consumer electronics companies in the world. It is also one of the most struggling major companies in the world. Sony has steadily increased its patent portfolio, producing 805 more patents in 2011 than in 2007. Last year, the company lost $436 million. Over the past five years, company shares have lost more than three-quarters of their value. The company continues to struggle in its competition with rivals Apple and Samsung, both of which turned major profits last year.

6. Microsoft

2011 Patent Grants: 2,311
Profits: $20.6 Billion
Sales: $66.7 Billion
Value: 50th Largest In the World

Microsoft’s awarded patents dropped substantially in the past year. In 2010, the company was awarded 3,094 patents in the U.S. Last year, the number was just 2,311, resulting in the U.S. Company being passed by Japanese companies Canon, Panasonic and Toshiba. The software and computer company’s stock has remained stable, with share prices down 11 percent in the past year. This is roughly in line with the rest of the market. The company’s consistent revenue stream from its Windows operating system, server products and Xbox game console, among others, allows it to invest heavily in research and development. Last year, the company earned $20.6 billion, the sixth-biggest profit of any company in the world.

5. Toshiba

2011 Patent Grants: 2,483
Profits: -$211.2 Million
Sales: $68.3 Billion
Value: 509th Largest Company In World

The Japanese company, Toshiba produces a wide variety of consumer electronics, communications and network systems, as well as systems related to transportation, water and sewer infrastructure. The company had been among the top 10 of patent recipients since five years. Moreover, in the past couple of years, the company made a noteworthy jump awarded nearly 800 patents more in 2011 than in 2009. The company’s jump in technology development has not corresponded with financial success. Toshiba shares are down more than 60 percent in the past five years, and last year, the company lost $211 million.

4. Panasonic

2011 Patent Grants: 2,559
Profits: -$1.1 Billion
Sales: $79.4 Billion $79.4
Value: 482nd Largest In World

Well known for its televisions, video recording and viewing equipment, and batteries, Panasonic is a century old Japan based company. In order to remain competitive in the ever-evolving world of technology, the company must stay innovative. Since 2006, Panasonic has averaged approximately 2,100 U.S. patents per year, including 2,559 last year. However, things have not been going well for the company. Shares are down nearly 75 percent over the past five years, and the company lost $1.1 billion last year. Among the 2,000 largest companies in the world, this loss was the 26th worst.

3. Canon

2011 Patent Grants: 2,821
Profits: $3 Billion
Sales: $45.7 Billion
Value: 141st Largest In World

Canon is the 141th most valuable company in the world, and the fifth most valuable in Japan, according to the Forbes 2000. Thecompany manufactures a variety of consumer electronics and other products, but it is most well-known for its optical and imaging products, which include printers, cameras and video recording devices. Over the past five years, the company has been granted 2,300 patents on average per year. Canon’s shares are down more than 50 percent over a five-year period, but the company did make $3 billion last year.

2. Samsung Electronics
2011 Patent Grants: 4,894
Profits: $13.7 Billion
Sales: $133.8 Billion
Value: 33rd Largest In World

Though there are eight Asian companiesamong the top 10 patent recipients, the only one that is presently doing well is from South Korea not Japan. Samsung Electronics is the largest company in Korea by a wide margin and is the 33rd largest in the world. The company has a stake in nearly every technology-based industry on earth, including construction, chemicals, finance, semiconductors and consumer electronics. The company has had a great deal of success in the smartphone market. In the past five years, the company’s awarded patents roughly doubled. At the same time, share pricehas jumped 67 percent. Last year, the company earned $13.7 billion. It recently said it would increase 2012 capital expenditure to $41 billion.

1. International Business Machines
2011 Patent Grants: 6,180
Profits: $14.8 Billion
Sales: $99.9 Billion
Value: 31st Largest In World

The constant chief in patents has been, and remains, IBM. Last year, the company was awarded 6,180 separate patents, more than any other two companies combined excluding Samsung. This is the 19th consecutive year in a row that the company has been the top patent producer in the world. The massive IT Company has substantial market share in business technology consulting, as well as computer software and hardware development. The company made $14.8 billion in profits last year. Over the past five years, IBM shares are up more than 80 percent.

Tags: Foxconn, Hon Hai, Taiwan, IBM, Microsoft, Hitachi, Toshiba, IPhone