Archive for April, 2010
Author: April 14,2010 by Chris Thorman
If it’s been a while since you last rented an apartment or a house, you may be surprised to find that the property management industry is much more tech savvy than you remember.
The rise in number of vendors offering web-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) systems for property management is driving the adoption of new technology by property managers. In addition to major web-based players such as Buildium, AppFolio, PropertyWare, and DIY Real Estate Solutions, an increasing number of other SaaS property management software vendors have recently started to emerge. Property managers are finding that the advantages of the SaaS model help them accomplish their most important goals – retaining tenants and attracting new ones.
Besides a relatively low entry cost, there are five major reasons why web-based software for managing rental properties is gaining traction in the industry. The advantages of the model offered by SaaS property management vendors include:
• Moving tenant services online;
• Offering web site creation and integration;
• Eliminating the need for extensive software training and maintenance;
• Enhancing communication between owners and managers; and,
• Improving record keeping and security.
Let’s examine these reasons in more depth to see why property managers are spending more time than ever online.
Online Tenant Services
A business maxim that is becoming more true every day is that if a company can offer a service online, they should do so. SaaS based property management software fits this maxim well by taking many traditional functions of a property management company and making them available online.
DIY Real Estate Solutions offers an online tenant portal. Think about common interactions between tenants and property managers. Chances are a SaaS based software vendor has come up with a web-based solution:
Paying rent? Head to the company’s web site with your checking account information.
Need to review your lease? Access it online behind a registration page.
Want to view available units? Peruse a online gallery of photos or videos.
Need to communicate en masse to tenants? Send out an e-mail blast.
It’s true that these tenant services can be created without specific property management software. But what a SaaS model does is deliver these services in an integrated suite. A piece-meal approach would involve managing those with different services and it’s possible the information wouldn’t integrate with other programs without some doubling up of data entry.
Few would disagree that the more services a company can offer online, the better. SaaS based property management software gives management companies more online options.
Website Creation and Integration
In the spirit of moving services online, many SaaS property management vendors give companies the option to create online portals where tenants and owners can manage accounts.
Appfolio Property Manager can create Craigslist ads directly. Smaller management companies often lack the resources to build a web site that is also a business tool. By using a SaaS software vendor that offers a tenant/owner portal option, these companies are able to bypass the cost of hiring a web developer. This levels the playing field by lowering the barrier of entry to the online market.
These integrated solutions can also help market vacant properties and units more easily than traditional on-premise software.
Some SaaS software vendors offer integration with listing sites such as Craigslist, where a property manager is only a few clicks away from posting professional looking ads online.
These integrated web site and software suites increase the professionalism and efficiency of a management company, in addition to attracting new tenants and helping smaller companies easily get online.
Fewer Technology Headaches
In the software industry as a whole, one of the most attractive features of SaaS systems is that they’re browser-based, multi-tenant architecture systems. All software updates are pushed out automatically by the software vendor, requiring little to no action by the customer.
This auto-updating, web-based approach is ideal for property managers. Many property management firms have at best a contracted IT worker to solve technical issues and at worst nobody. SaaS vendors are able to remotely fix issues, when they do occur.
Finally, one of the primary characteristics of SaaS property management vendors is that they’ve designed their systems specifically to be easy-to-use and to appeal to those who aren’t especially tech savvy. This results in a faster learning curve for property managers who are not technically proficient.
Enhanced Communication
At the end of the day, a property management company not only has to satisfy their tenants to stay in business but also the property owner. SaaS can help improve communication between owner and manager.
Buildium offers dozens of online reports. Because SaaS property management software is web-based, owners and property managers are given access or e-mailed reports detailing rent rolls, financial standing and virtually any other data they’d like to be able to see. Owners can log in from their home or office and property managers can log in from any property with a web browser.
By quickly addressing problems between ownership and management, an owner is less likely to hear, “You didn’t know we were only half-occupied?” at the end of the month.
Finally, web-based property management software is also accessible through a smartphone’s web browser, adding another layer of mobility to SaaS.
Property managers and owners a like enjoy having this level of access and owners reward management companies who offer it.
Better Record Keeping
Any property owner or manager will tell you that you only need to experience one lawsuit to know that your record keeping must be impeccable. By moving to a SaaS model, companies are able to easily digitize and store complaints, warnings, payment records, maintenance logs and lease agreements through their property management software. This information is important when dealing with evictions or lawsuits.
Data security is also an important consideration with record keeping and SaaS is able to deliver on that. Most web-based property management vendors offer security on par with online banking institutions.
Finally, a SaaS based vendor will likely back up records for a company. This is done automatically because the information isn’t stored locally – it’s in the cloud. Even in the event of a total loss of hardware, a company’s data will be available as if nothing happened.
The Trend Will Continue
The advantages offered by SaaS systems closely mirror the issues that property managers have to solve. Moving services online, integrating data, reducing technical issues, improving record keeping and enhancing communication are all advantages that will continue to motivate companies to adopt SaaS based property management software
Posted in 
Bernard Golden, CIO
April 23, 2010
The question of costs associated with cloud computing continue to be controversial. You may recognize in this blog’s title, an homage to the motto of Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential campaign: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.” The motto referred to the decision by the Clinton campaign to focus relentlessly on how the U.S. economy was doing in 1992, sidestepping other issues and always, always circling back to the economic outlook for the US. I was reminded of this by some recent discussions on Twitter that discussed the importance of economics in terms of cloud adoption.
This question of cloud economics arises especially in the context of the endless discussions about private vs. public clouds (private usually being thought of as referring to a cloud environment inside a company’s own data center). Some people assert that private clouds obviously must be less expensive, because one owns the equipment and is not paying what is, in effect, a rental fee. The obvious analogy is buying a car vs. renting a car. If one uses a car every day, it’s clearly less expensive to own rather than pay a daily rental fee to, say, Hertz. Sometimes this argument is made stronger by noting that public cloud providers also are profit-seeking enterprises, so an extra tranche of end-user cost is present, representing the profit margin of the public offering.
The proponents of public cloud computing cost advantages point to the economies of scale large providers realize. At a recent “AWS in the Enterprise” event, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, noted that Amazon buys “10s of racks of servers at a time” and gets big discounts because of this. Also, AWS buys custom-designed equipment that leave out unneeded, power-using features like USB ports. Moreover, the public cloud providers implement operations automation to an extreme degree and thereby drop the labor cost factor in their clouds.
[For timely cloud computing news and expert analysis, see CIO.com's Cloud Computing Drilldown section. ]
There is yet a third approach about cloud economics that calls for blend of private and public (sometimes referred to as hybrid) which marries the putative financial advantages of self-owned private clouds and the resource availability of highly elastic public clouds; this can be summarized as “own the base and rent the peak.”
What is interesting about Twitter discussion around this topic is that people point to surveys about private cloud interest indicating the real motive behind the move to cloud computing is agility, i.e., the ability to obtain computing resources very quickly and in an on-demand fashion. Cost savings of cloud computing were considered secondary to rapid resource availability.
I’m of two minds about this orientation toward agility rather than cost savings.
For sure, agility is magic, particularly when compared to the drawn-out procurement and provisioning cycles common to many organizations. Once you’ve seen that compute resources can be available in a matter of minutes, the old way seems antediluvian. We got a sense of this thirst for agility in the recent Ponemon Institute survey which notes that 73% of the respondents said that cloud computing allows business units to circumvent IT; moreover, business units control access to IT resources in 37% of he respondents’ companies (the title of the article, by the way, is “Cloud computing makes IT access governance messier,” which gives a feel for the findings of the survey!). Those decisions to circumvent IT are borne of need to respond stat to changed business conditions or opportunties: “If I can’t get it done the official way, I’ll do it myself.” I have heard a number of anecdotes in which business units have put an app up on Amazon and, when called to task, have overridden the demand that the apps be moved back inside by pointing to the financial results associated with the app. Profit bests policy.
And it’s clear that the agility of public cloud providers has provided an example of how it can be done, so internal IT groups recognize the need to meet the new benchmark for resource availability. It’s not tenable to maintain that everything should take months when someone else can do it in minutes. The question then becomes “why can’t you do it in minutes?” With the overhanging threat of business units choosing to go elsewhere for resources, implementing a private cloud that provides the benefits available from public providers becomes paramount. Of course, a private cloud also avoids the alleged shortcomings of public clouds in terms of security, SLAs, etc.
The question I have is whether agility trumps cost permanently. In other words, once the agility benchmark is met, will the cost of the internal cloud versus public providers be immaterial, or will it become the next benchmark. The question is somewhat reminiscent of performance benchmarking, where a common situation is that once one bottleneck is removed, another performance bottleneck manifests and becomes the problem.
I have to believe that cost effectiveness will become a new benchmark after the agility requirement is met. Once the ability to respond quickly to changing business conditions is possible, optimization along the “how much does it cost me to respond” will be an issue.
Put another way, if the agility issue arose because public cloud providers demonstrated that much better responsiveness is possible, why wouldn’t cost become an issue, i.e., if ABC public provider can deliver computing resource for X cents per hour, what can you deliver computing resource for, per hour? It’s hard to believe that the competitive pressure will end at “respond as quickly to compute resource requests as Amazon.” I know if I were running a business unit, measured on my overall margin, I’d be looking to see how to reduce my costs and definitely would use external comparisons to demand similar costs from my captive supplier.
We are in the midst of a transition in how computing services are delivered. We are moving from a custom, manually-intensive, expensive approach to a standardized, automated, inexpensive approach. It’s unrealistic to think that the expectation placed upon internal computing service providers will change along only one dimension, that of speed of response, while leaving all the other existing expectations unaffected. Change doesn’t work like that. Anyone who’s watched James Burke’s Connections knows that change begets changes, often in unexpected ways.
With regard to what’s going on with cloud computing, it’s instructive to read Clay Shirky’s blog entry about newspapers—especially regarding his discussion about the analogous rise of the printing press (search for the section that discusses Elizabeth Eisenstein). His point is that, retrospectively, the transition to the printing press looks inevitable and even fairly structured. No one can believe that people at the time felt that printing would become the basis of how knowledge is transmitted. At the time, however, it seemed chaotic and confused. And today, newspapers are in the midst of a whirlwind as the basis for their existence. The expensive printing press gives way to cheap electrons.
We’re in the middle of that kind of transition with regard to what the future of computing is going to look like. The one thing I can confidently predict is that, 10 or 20 years in the future, we’ll look back on the way things are typically done today the way we look at an old black and white movie in which someone wants to make a long distance telephone call and picks up the receiver and talks to an operator.
____________________
Virtual Global is a provider enterprise-class cloud computing solutions. Since 1995, our technologies have helped commercial and federal customers worldwide with their enterprise IT needs.
This was written by Michael Cheek on Friday, April 23, 2010, 7:53.
Dr. Ray Johnson
Lockheed Martin, along with the company’s Cyber Security Alliance partners, have released a new study entitled “Awareness, Trust and Security to Shape Government Cloud Adoption.” According to a survey conducted for the study, “the awareness, trust and security issues that have limited federal government adoption of cloud computing appear to be more perceptual than prohibitive.”
The majority of individuals involved in cloud computing trust the cloud based system and are not generally concerned about the security of the cloud model, the report found. The study predicts that the utilization of cloud technology by the federal government will increase as more people become aware of it.
The study also found that fully 34 percent of respondents in military, intelligence and federal civilian agencies were unfamiliar with the cloud model and only 14 percent of respondents said that their agencies had adopted cloud computing. Around 23 percent of respondents did not know what the agency’s policy on cloud computing was.
Also, three out of five respondents said that they do not expressly trust cloud computing. Perhaps most surprising is that 21 percent of respondents involved in cybersecurity within their organization were not familiar with cloud computing.
Nevertheless, the implimentation of the cloud model is growing across federal agencies.
“Increased awareness and understanding of cloud computing can pave the way for more adoption, as respondents who are familiar with cloud computing tend
to pursue its inherent benefits. The adoption rate among respondents familiar with cloud computing (44 percent) is more than triple the overall adoption rate (14 percent),” according to the report.
Also, respondents who are currently involved in cybersecurity at their agency listed cloud computing last on their list of security challenges.
“Seamless security is critical to protecting our customers’ information in the cloud. Collaboration with industry partners and government will accelerate innovation and adoption while enabling successful cloud implementations in the public sector,” says Ray Johnson, Chief Technology Officer and Sr. Vice President at Lockheed Martin.
You can read the full report here
____________________
Virtual Global is a provider enterprise-class cloud computing solutions. Since 1995, our technologies have helped commercial and federal customers worldwide with their enterprise IT needs.
By J. Nicholas Hoover
InformationWeek
April 20, 2010 02:06 PM
NASA has named Chris Kemp, formerly CIO of NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, Calif., to a new role as the space agency’s first CTO for IT, where he’ll drive innovative IT projects for NASA.
At NASA Ames, Kemp led the development of NASA’s Nebula cloud computing platform and formed research and development partnerships with both Google and Microsoft that have already helped develop, provide data for, and expand efforts like Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope and Google Moon.
NASA makes a clear distinction between space technology and IT, said a NASA spokeswoman, so NASA chief technologies lead Robert Braun will remain CTO equivalent for space technology, while Kemp will oversee IT innovation.
Kemp’s new office, established in conjunction with NASA’s open government plan, is part of NASA’s CIO organization under Linda Cureton. The role will let Kemp develop and “explore” pilot projects like Nebula and the use of semantic search to query NASA’s historical data, according to NASA’s open government plan. Kemp will also be tasked with determining ways to make NASA’s IT environment more energy efficient.
Nebula, which includes a containerized data center and other distributed resources, was arguably Kemp’s flagship project at NASA Ames.
NASA’s open government plan provides an explicit timeline for Nebula’s future. By July, the agency will incorporate Nebula into its data center consolidation plan and release an infrastructure-as-a-service beta and a platform-as-a-service prototype. NASA plans to eventually make cloud services available agency-wide and even to other government agencies.
“Large-scale infrastructure is the name of the game at NASA, and the challenge is that we have missions that are wildly successful and missions that never launch,” Kemp said at in a speech at an event in March. “So, in NASA’s case, a shared infrastructure is a boon, because it’s an infrastructure that can be leveraged across missions.”
As CTO for IT, Kemp will also oversee a new Chief Technology for IT Officers Council composed of CTOs from each of NASA’s 10 centers. This new council will look to the long term to make predictions, think about innovations, and foster creative ideas for NASA’s IT environment.
Before joining NASA, Kemp was CEO and co-founder of vacation rental management software company Escapia and online grocery shopping start-up Netran, which launched Kroger’s first online shopping service. He was also part of the founding team of Classmates.com
James Williams, formerly NASA Ames’ deputy CIO, is now acting CIO of NASA Ames.
_____________________
Virtual Global would like to congratulate Chris Kemp on becoming NASA’s first CTO for IT. Virtual Global is a provider enterprise-class cloud computing solutions. Since 1995, our technologies have helped commercial and federal customers worldwide with their enterprise IT needs.
04/19/2010 - PC Healthstop Blog
There are hundreds and hundreds of Electronic Health Record software packages in the marketplace that claim to be capable of allowing you to establish meaningful use, but how do you know if those claims are true? So far there has not been an impartial, independent way to determine the truthfulness of a vendor’s claims.
Earlier this month, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) rolled out the first part of its testing infrastructure, created in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vendors, implementers, standards organizations and certification bodies. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) designated NIST as the agency responsible for determining if EHRs meet HHS standards for functionality, interoperability and technical benchmarks.
According to Bettijoyce Lide, NIST’s senior advisor, program coordinator for Health IT, speaking to Information Week Magazine, the goal is to establish a health IT infrastructure that provides a high level of security to American’s electronic medical records. “New test methods, along with testing infrastructure, certification, security and usability help ensure that the health information of Americans is exchanged safely, securely, reliably, and only to appropriate sources,” she said.
NIST created the test procedures and infrastructure based on the Interim Final Requirements (IFR) published by HHS on January 13th of this year. If those requirements change, NIST says it will change its test procedures accordingly. Plans call for tests to be rolled out in four waves.
Fifteen test drafts have been rolled out so far, each keyed to a specific requirement as spelled out in the IFR. As an example, test criteria 170.302(b) relates to maintaining an up-to-date problem list, a key meaningful use requirement. The test will determine if the program will “enable a user to electronically record, modify, and retrieve a patient’s problem list for longitudinal care in accordance with (1),the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(A), or, (2) at a minimum, the version of the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(B).”
Other tests will evaluate a product’s ability to maintain allergy and medication lists, calculate body mass index (BMI) and track among history. Additional tests will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
To keep stakeholders informed about the full extent of NIST’s activities in the health care certification arena, NIST has set up a special website with links to all of its major activities: infrastructure creation, test methods, conformance testing, and testing and support. The overall program can be used by vendors to determine if their products will meet standards before it submits them for certification, and will be used by approved certification bodies to test those product offerings.
This NIST program puts into place one of the final pieces of the certification puzzle. It will enable you to determine if a product which claims to be certified will actually perform the functions it says it can perform, because it has been tested and proven to meet the standards set forth by the HITECH Act and the definition of meaningful use.
Rich Silverman
PC Healthstop Blogging Team
_________________________
Virtual Global is a provider enterprise-class cloud computing solutions. Since 1995, our technologies have helped commercial and federal customers worldwide with their enterprise IT needs.
Tags:
Resistance to new technology concepts is inevitable, and cloud computing is no exception. But today, cloud computing has matured to the level where it is a viable technology, ready to embrace and bring benefit to your company.
The reasons why cloud computing’s time is now include:
· Economic necessity
· Support from major mainstream software vendors
· Demand from small business for high-end features
· Demand from enterprise users for more cost-effective solutions
· Need for collaborative tools
· Cloud technology has already passed the proving ground stage
Economically, the market today is not only ready for cloud computing, it demands cloud computing. On a macro level, the world is facing a huge recession from which it will be slow to recover, and businesses of all sizes need an edge just to stay competitive. Increasing revenues is always a key strategy of any business, but the reality of the situation is that many companies are not able to do so in a struggling economy. This leaves only cost cutting as a way to stay flat or increase the bottom line.
When a business needs to cut expenses, it’s not prudent to cut those areas that contribute to the company’s overall mission. Staff reductions may provide a short-term shot in the arm, but in the long run, this may be detrimental. The better strategy in cost-cutting is to re-evaluate the company’s technological underpinnings, and implement new technology that allows them to do more with less. Cloud computing is such a technology.
Furthermore, mainstream software vendors have all staked a claim in the cloud computing market. Enterprise software vendors, many with reputations for massively expensive implementations that take months or years to install successfully, have already rolled out cloud-based versions of their otherwise bulky systems. The results have been astounding. Enterprises have been using cloud-based versions of ERP software for example, to get up and running on individual modules immediately, instead of having to wait months for a custom rollout. Even if an on-premises solution is ultimately desired, the cloud-based system allows them to make an easier transition—and one of the hardest things about a major ERP installation is the transition. On the lower end, midsized businesses are taking advantage of these cloud-based enterprise systems to get functionality that they couldn’t afford before they became available on the cloud. On the low end of the market, small businesses and SOHO companies also have the cloud at their disposal as well, with offerings from mainstream vendors like Microsoft, Google, and even Apple delivering a wide range of cloud-based applications and services that promote not only productivity, but increased collaboration as well.
The consumer market is especially important for the acceptance of cloud computing, as this is where the technology initially filters into the business mainstream. Consumers that have become accustomed to using Google Apps, Microsoft Live, and Apple MobileMe will demand the same functionality in the workplace.
The collaborative potential is just as important as the functionality of the applications themselves. The fact that the cloud promotes collaboration fits in well with today’s ways of doing business. The decentralization of the workplace, the growth of outsourcing, and the desire for telecommuting and work-at-home solutions all demand collaborative technologies to work, and this is now possible only through cloud computing technology.
And finally, we have to look at the adopter stage of any technology. Early adopters jump in when a technology is new and unproven, and serve the purpose of providing a testing ground for the rest of us. Today, we see that cloud computing has a rich collection of providers, both well-established and startup; and that users come from all segments and all business size classifications. Furthermore, cloud computing providers have expanded to encompass the entire range of cloud computing technology (infrastructure, platform, and application), with prominent vendors already offering robust deliverables in all three categories. Cloud computing has passed that early adopter stage and is now entering the mainstream.
To technologists, the future of cloud computing is easy to understand, because we have the advantage of history. To truly understand the future of cloud computing technology, we merely need to examine the historical evolution of earlier computing platforms. The cloud is evolving in many of the same ways, with infrastructure, platforms and software.
More important is the effect of the cloud on the people who use it. We may even say that cloud computing is reaching “critical mass.” That is, it has come too far to put it back in the bottle. It’s here, the technology is ready, and it is already making dramatic changes to the way people do business, the way we work, and even the way we think. It is creating a new class of entrepreneurs and ushering a second dotcom boom.
What are the implications of this technology achieving critical mass? For one, IT buyers will not need to defend why they are buying cloud computing services—the argument instead will focus on “why are you using antiquated technologies?” and “Why are you spending ten times too much on this project when you could be using cloud computing instead?”
This blog is brought to you by Virtual Global; provider enterprise-class cloud computing solutions. Since 1995, our technologies have helped commercial and federal customers worldwide with their enterprise IT needs.