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Web Seminar Recap: Value Definition and Sales Enablement for Cloud Applications and Solutions

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

Everyone wants a piece of the cloud. So now you want your piece. It is one thing to build it. It is an entirely other thing to position and sell a solution within it. Other challenges include how to staff the right supporting organization and creation of team compensation plans that drive desired behaviors.

On Tuesday, April 16, 2013, Mike Shook and Will Shook of Accelerence, LLC went over the business rational for cloud. They also discussed how to sell cloud solutions and your product or a solution within it. Will and Mike discussed ways to counteract the confusion and uncertainty the cloud can bring and offered specific value propositions and selling techniques to hit the ground running.  They touched on getting started with a cloud services strategy, cloud sales processes and barriers to entry.

Overall, the presentation went over why the cloud is hot, selling cloud followed by selling your solution, defining value in the face of confusion and tips on how to do effective competitive research.

You can listen to a complete recording of this presentation at aspeevents.webex.com. Select “View Event Recordings” in the top right corner and then search by title.  You can also download the slides from this presentation by visiting our Web Seminar Archives.

Looking for an extensive training course on Cloud Computing? Check out Understanding Cloud Computing to learn more!

Web Seminar Recap – Cloud: Understanding the Service Level Agreement

Monday, February 11th, 2013

As more and more people look to the Cloud as a solution, the more we, as consumers, will look to outside companies to manage our internal cloud.  When we reach this level, another company is then involved in providing IT services to your company and a new technical relationship is started Do you know what the cloud provider is responsible for in the relationship and what your company is responsible for? In this one hour web seminar that took place February 8, Mark Wilkins discussed what you should expect from a cloud provider, what a Service Level Agreement is and why you need one. Click to continue »

SharePoint & Enterprise Collaboration News, Updated Weekly: February 8, 2013

Friday, February 8th, 2013


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White Paper Wednesday: VMware vSphere 5.0 – Tools & Info

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Over the last twelve weeks, we’ve brought you almost fifty white papers on a lot of the topics on which we teach classes every day. A fair portion of those white papers have dealt with virtualization and cloud technologies. We’ve said it before, but the growth in virtualization is impacting IT efficiency and business transformation in ways that merit a lot of attention.

Today our free resources again revolve around virtualization, but the four white papers we’re publishing deal specifically with VMware and their vSphere virtualization products. The most recent version of vSphere (5.0) is VMware’s most advanced virtualization enabler yet, and we have some great information for anyone who is using or just considering utilizing it for their business. These white papers cover:

  • New features of vSphere 5.0
  • Configuration and management tips
  • Troubleshooting tips
  • Ho to use VMware snapshots

Today’s four white papers are brought to you in conjunction with Global Knowledge.

Download all four white papers now

Click to continue »

White Paper Wednesday: Introducing Virtualization

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

By Chris Knotts, PMP – ASPE Creative Director

Last week, we offered four free white papers exploring several virtualization topics which are highly relevant to the ongoing “virtualization explosion.” This rapid growth in virtualization technology is having a huge impact on IT efficiency, cloud computing, and business transformation.

But what is virtualization? When you operate in the technology sector, as we do, it’s easy to forget that virtualization is still in the process of entering the mainstream. So for folks who just want a high-level view of what virtualization is, we offer our first white paper for this week: “Virtualization 101.”

Our second white paper is “VMware View 5: What’s New?” As enterprise virtualization has begun to be widely adopted, VMware has established itself as a primary player in the virtualization product space for enterprise cloud computing. We take a look at the most recent version of VMware’s View product for  end users in the enterpriseand what it can offer in terms of new features.

Today’s two white papers are brought to you in conjunction with Global Knowledge.

Download both white papers now

White Paper #1 – Virtualization 101

What exactly is virtualization and how can it help your company? The term ‘virtualization’ can be applied to many aspects of an IT infrastructure: applications, networks, storage, hardware, and end-users. In this white paper, we’ll define virtualization and focus on how certain trends, such as server virtualization, are changing the datacenter. We’ll look at what makes virtualization so compelling to companies in terms of efficiencies, improved resource utilization, cost reductions, and automation, to name a few. We’ll also address the ways in which virtualization optimizes the performance of servers, desktops, applications, and users.  This white paper covers:

  • What is Virtualization?
  • Advantages of Virtualization
  • Types of Virtualization
  • Major Virtualization Players

Download this white paper now

White Paper #2 – VMware View 5: What’s New?

VMware View 5 leverages many of the improvements present in vSphere 5 from a virtual machine perspective. The central focus on View 5 appears to be in improving the end user’s experience to near-native, allowing for greater flexibility in both how the virtual desktops are presented and in the actual capabilities within these desktops. These changes include enhancing the performance of the PC over IP protocol (PCoIP) to connect users to their virtual desktops, allowing much greater optimization on throttling and caching than there was in the previous version. VMware states that these changes alone can result in up to 75% bandwidth reduction over the previous version. There are also numerous improvements to how virtual desktops are managed and provisioned. This white paper covers the following major updates to VMware View:

  • PCoIP Improvements
  • Enhanced End User Experience
  • View Media Services
  • View Persona Management

Download this white paper now

White Paper Wednesday: Exploring Virtualization

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

By Chris Knotts, PMP – ASPE Creative Director

These days, virtualization is a topic that needs little introduction. Exponential growth in computing power and memory capability has drastically transformed (and disrupted) the way IT administrators have conventionally approached IT infrastructure and architecture. As these resources become more and more powerful, the ability to use virtual machines to make huge gains in IT efficiency is becoming the new norm.

We have focused on cloud computing and virtualization in previous White Paper Wednesdays, but today we’ve published four new white papers which explore virtualization even further. It’s a topic that any IT pro or technology professional should constantly be learning more about.

We have four new white papers for you today, brought to you in conjunction with Global Knowledge.

Download all four white papers now

Click to continue »

White Paper Wednesday: Virtualization Mistakes, Must-Have IT Skills, and Mobile Strategy

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012
By Chris Knotts, PMP – ASPE Creative Director

Today’s White Paper Wednesday is a bit of a technology mashup, but there’s nothing wrong with that. We’re taking a break from the past few weeks’ deep focus on SharePoint and Microsoft, and looking at some topics that touch on a few of the most-discussed technologies of the last few years: virtualization, mobile development, and IT job skills.

Today we are publishing three new white papers: these pieces include our perspective on the most essential job skills you should have if you’re a professional working in IT, how to avoid common virtualization mistakes, and concrete steps to take in implementing a mobile development strategy. We hope you find them useful, and we hope you’ll let us know what you think.

These three white papers are brought to you in conjunction with Global Knowledge.

Download all three white papers now

Click to continue »

White Paper Wednesday: Cloud Computing For the Rest of Us

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

by: Chris Knotts, PMP – ASPE Creative Director

Despite skyrocketing use of cloud-based services and systems, a lot of people in the business world still don’t quite understand what the “cloud” is. But there’s no excuse to go another day without educating yourself! Let us help with these three brief but informative (and free) white papers.

Cloud computing is a term that has become almost universally used over the past few years. But is there an “emperor’s new clothes” element at play here, in which nobody wants to admit that they just don’t quite know what cloud computing really is, exactly?

Now, I know that plenty of people in the tech space (especially IT pros and tech-savvy management) are perfectly familiar with the state of the cloud. But you don’t have to have many conversations among the larger business world to understand that in fact there’s a lot of ambiguity and misunderstanding among the general public about cloud computing. Is the so-called “cloud” really something big and new – a total paradigm shift – as all the hype would seem to indicate? Or is it really just hype; a new way to describe traditional IT services that are being packaged and marketed in a new way?

Click to continue »

White Paper Wednesday: Cloud Computing – A Quick Introduction and 10 Security Concerns

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

by: Chris Knotts, PMP – ASPE Creative Director

Everybody has heard about the cloud. If you don’t really understand its potential, there’s no excuse to wait. We offer a quick overview of what the cloud offers business, who the big players are, the potential benefits, and most importantly – 10 main security concerns you should be aware of.

Click to continue »

Thinking Internet & Cloud Security: This Week’s Anonymous/LulzSec Hacker Bust

Friday, March 9th, 2012

by: Chris Knotts, PMP – ASPE Creative Director

For me, the big story this week was in security. With so much else going on, it took a couple days for this story to punch through to the mainstream, but the internet hummed with it ever since Wednesday morning when the news broke. I’m talking about the federal (and worldwide) raids on prominent hackers associated with the loosely-defined Anonymous “hacktivist” movement. With Super Tuesday and the iPad 3 in the mix, all other technology stories were already starting at third place, so I thought it important to keep my eye on this one. After all, we’ve known the iPad was coming for awhile now – though cool, it’s more of a continuation of the iPad story, not a new one. Super Tuesday… I’ll leave that to the pundits.

Let’s look at this security-related story. We’re talking about these hackers that were arrested across the world in Ireland, Britain, New York, and Chicago. These guys were members of the group Lulz Security, (#lulzsec) an offshoot of global hacker collective Anonymous. (For more on Anonymous, including great background, check out this history from InfoSec.) These guys have hacked their way up and down the internet for the past couple years.  I think most of us have heard the official headline that 2011 was the worst year for internet security ever, and looking at the statistics I think few would argue (for more on hacking in 2011, check out this infographic). Click to continue »