At a time when the demand for cloud business applications is rising by 20 percent a year, it seems remarkable that many web hosts and service providers still do not fulfill e-commerce.

Advancements in e-commerce platforms mean that it is now possible for any web host or telco to offer a powerful, yet easy to use e-commerce solution with ease. As a result, we are seeing more hosting providers of all shapes and sizes, seeking to adopt or update e-commerce offerings in light of this potential.

Addressing the e-commerce customer has some excellent benefits for the reseller. The e-commerce user offers a high level of ARPU and customer lifetime. Value-added resellers have much potential to combine with other value added services. In fact, the market for associated design, implementation and support services comprises an additional 6 billion dollars today, rising to 10 billion by end of 2019.

This attractive market has not gone unnoticed. E-commerce pure players such as Shopify, have seen remarkable growth. The valuation of these providers serves to underline the high value of e-commerce customers. For example, Shopify achieves a market value of two and a half billion dollars from a relatively modest installed base of 275,000 SMB merchants worldwide. This is opposed to a market value of only five billion for GoDaddy with more than 14 million hosting clients. So how does a reseller explore e-commerce for the first time and what should they look for in a platform partner? It is true that e-commerce means rapidly evolving technology.

The strongest platforms today will fully enable cloud agility and ensure the widest set of merchant needs can be fulfilled.

While there are options with both open source and SaaS platforms, the right choice will depend on a reseller’s customer needs for design, maintenance, security, etc. There are now very effective plug-ins for site builders and CMS platforms like WordPress, as well as feature-rich stand alone shop packages. A fully managed white label SaaS platform will deliver the end user a high quality, robust, all-inclusive service whilst freeing up the reseller to focus on sales.

The best platforms make powerful e-commerce solutions plug and play. It is essential that your e-commerce partner works hard to evolve in line with all the best and fully localized integrations, payment and shipping methods and apps that shoppers demand.

Philbert Shih of Structure Research, a leading analyst to the cloud industries agrees. “To keep up with the requirements of online retailers and their customers, the best e-commerce platforms will have to be current with features and functionality related to payment and shipping features. Today’s demanding consumers desire and trust only the latest tools,” he said. “This is crucial to the user experience, which in turn goes a long way to determining success for merchants”.

Of course, successful merchants will mean successful resellers. Customers that thrive will seek further e-business products and services. Partner with a global-scale provider whose experience and technology partnerships benefit you. For example, SaaS platforms with their own Apps Store and development programs can deliver your customers timely access to the latest tools for competitive advantage online.

For the reseller, the right e-commerce partner will offer a multi-discipline, integrated approach to implementing or modernizing your shop offerings. Consult the e-commerce platforms that specialize in serving the hosting and telco space. They naturally prioritize your needs as a reseller. You should expect tailored consulting, solution design, technical implementation, and application management and marketing. The best e-commerce partners will be also able to offer you quality white-labelled options for hosting, design services and customer support.

With so much potential to share in the retail success of your hosting customers, now is certainly a wise time to scope out your options.

Join me at HostingCon Tuesday, July 26 to learn more about how e-commerce can grow your hosting or service provider business. I will discuss e-commerce market growth more in depth and share how to take advantage of it to grow your business in the session, “How Service Providers Can Take Advantage of the Booming E-Commerce Market.”

Source: TheWHIR

Gelsinger also said in an interview with The WHIR that the current mobile-cloud era is the most transformative period in his career for IT.

The companies said that with VMware Horizon Air’s scalability and flexible monthly subscription pricing it will prove less costly and complex for enterprises than legacy on-premise virtual desktop infrastructure. IDC has predicted the global DaaS market will grow from $376 million in 2014 to over $1.4 billion in 2019, according to a VMware blog post.

Horizon Air is based on Desktone, which VMware acquired in 2013 to serve the demand for mobile enterprise hybrid computing.

“Hybrid is the new reality for migration to cloud. It’s the fastest-growing segment in the enterprise cloud space. Clients want control and flexibility in making decisions about taking their existing IT infrastructure into the cloud,” said IBM Cloud CTO Jim Comfort in a blog post.

The launch extends a strategic partnership IBM and VMware announced in February at IBM Interconnect to encourage enterprises to move workloads from on-premise software-defined data centers to the cloud. The companies’ general partnership spans 14 years, and includes IBM’s support for VMware NSX, which launched in November to encourage enterprises to transition to hybrid environments including Softlayer.

VMware Horizon Air on IBM Cloud will be available to all customers of both companies globally, after an initial launch slated for Q3 2016.

Source: TheWHIR

Some elements of the US Telecom challenge seemed unlikely to succeed, including its key claim that the precedent set in the “Brand X” case is does not apply, and therefore that the definition of “telecommunications” is not ambiguous. Politico reports that the appeals court judges had seemed skeptical of the applicability of the FCC’s new net neutrality rules specifically to mobile broadband and internet exchange traffic, but Tuesday’s ruling represents an unqualified victory for the FCC. Net neutrality advocates are hardly enthusiastic about the FCC’s regulations.

Republican lawmakers have opposed the regulations and introduced the Internet Freedom Act into Congress last year, which was immediately sent to the Subcommittee on Communication and Technology.

Verizon successfully blocked FCC net neutrality regulation in appeals court in 2014.

Source: TheWHIR

Google said that the TPP requirement of the 12 participating countries that allows cross-border transfers of information and prohibits them from requiring local storage of data will make it more difficult for TPP countries to block internet sites.

Critics call the TPP “NAFTA on steroids” and say the agreement could force sites to remove content that allegedly infringes on copyright without a court order, punish internet users who share copyrighted material, and put restrictive limits on “Fair Use”.

“So, the ‘don’t be evil’ era at Google is officially over? I am extremely disappointed that Google would take this stance,” said an anonymous user in the top comment on Google’s blog post outlining its stance, referencing a slogan that Google used to include in its Code of Conduct.

Here are other organizations and tech companies that support the TPP:

• Internet Association
• Information Technology Industry Council
• Business Software Alliance
• Semiconductor Industry Association
• Silicon Valley Leadership Group
• TechNet
• Tech CEO Council
• Telecommunications Industry Association
• Software & Information Industry Association

And hundreds of technology companies that oppose it, including GlowHost, Golden Frog and Minerva Hosting.

It will be interesting to see if Google responds to critics and backtracks its decision. For now it seems to be holding steady.

Source: TheWHIR

Their discussions centered around making the web “open, secure and free of censorship by distributing data, processing, and hosting across millions of computers around the world, with no centralized control,” according to the conference site.

They’re not alone. The organization Redecentralize has been working toward similar goals since last year. The Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s work for digital privacy and openness goes back even further. And BlueYard, a VC firm, hosted a similar event about web openness in Berlin just a few days before the Decentralized Web Summit.

It seems clear that there is sustained and growing interest in online freedom and privacy.

How the Web Became Less Open

What are all these people worried about? What’s wrong with the web today as they see it?

Mostly, they don’t like the tendency of online data to be stored on and routed through centralized servers. These are certainly problems for anyone who believes information online should be free and private.

They’re also not happy about online censorship, which means governments or other authorities block certain websites within their jurisdictions. And they don’t like governments spying on web users in the way the Snowden revelations highlighted.

READ MORE: Government Blunder Exposes Snowden as Target in 2013 Lavabit Email Case

How to Make the Web Open Again

Arguably, however, these are not problems that can be solved by rearchitecting the web alone.

The main issue with online privacy and freedom isn’t that the design of the web — let alone the internet as a whole — is fundamentally flawed. Instead, it’s that most online consumers services have been designed in ways that centralize information and place privacy controls in the hands of vendors, not users.

There are lots of effective ways to protect your privacy online. You can browse using Tor or a VPN to hide your identity and view censored websites. You can use tools like HTTPS Everywhere to add another layer of data encryption. You can avoid placing data in clouds whose servers you don’t control. You could run your own email server if you really wanted. You can center your online activity around platforms like Usenet, which remains as free and decentralized now as it was decades ago, before the web appeared and made Usenet forums an afterthought for most internet users.

SEE ALSO: IANA Transition Proposal Gets NTIA Stamp of Approval

But most ordinary consumers don’t do these things. They have not heard of Tor. They might use a VPN for work, but probably don’t understand how that’s different from using a VPN for privacy reasons. They upload private data to proprietary clouds without hesitation. They use proprietary protocols, like Skype, for online communication even though they have no way of verifying that their data remains as secure and private as the service providers claim.

Changing Consumers

In other words, what needs to change is web user behavior, not the technology itself.

Yes, there might be changes programmers could make to the way the web works that would make it inherently more private and harder to censor. But the tools for beating censorship and assuring privacy already exist. The challenge is just to make them easy enough that ordinary people will actually use them.

SEE ALSO: FBI Subpoenas Tor Developer to Testify in Criminal Hacking Investigation

And that presents a huge opportunity for service providers. As user interest in online openness and privacy increases, organizations that prioritize these features and make them easy for non-geeks to implement will thrive.

Original article appeared here: Do We Need a More Open, Private, “Decentralized” Internet?

Source: TheWHIR

Read more: How Long Will the Cloud Data Center Land Grab Last

LinkedIn is Digital Realty’s sixth-largest customer, judging by the amount of rent it pays to the San Francisco-based data center REIT annually. Its top tenant is IBM, and CenturyLink, Equinix, Facebook, and AT&T are second, third, fourth, and fifth, respectively.

If Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn closes successfully, Digital Realty will be able to claim it as one of its biggest customers, which should be good news for the data center provider, considering the rate with which the Redmond, Washington-based giant has been ramping up its data center spending. The company spent 65 percent more on data centers in the first quarter of this year than it did in the first three months of 2015.

See also: New LinkedIn Data Center Strategy Similar to Microsoft’s

In the first quarter, Microsoft leased close to 50MW of data center capacity in three locations from two different providers: CyrusOne and DuPont Fabros Technology, according to the commercial real estate firm North American Data Centers. Last year, Microsoft’s data center leasing activity included about 28MW total in three deals, with Digital Realty, DuPont Fabros, and Vantage Data Centers.

LinkedIn has five data center locations, using Digital Realty in four of them, according to Digital’s investor report for the first quarter. Digital doesn’t disclose specific locations its customers are in, but, as Data Center Knowledge has reported in the past, LinkedIn is in Digital’s data centers inNorthern Virginia and Dallas-Fort Worth markets. The social network has also said publicly that Digital is its data center provider in Singapore. It is unclear where the fourth LinkedIn location Digital has cited is.

Overall, LinkedIn occupies about 280,000 square feet of data center space in the four Digital locations.

In 2014, it also signed a 2MW lease with Equinix in Los Angeles, according to North American Data Centers, and last year took 10MW with Infomart Data Centers in the Portland market.

Original article appeared here: LinkedIn Deal Means More Microsoft in Digital Realty Data Centers

Source: TheWHIR

That verification is an advantage in fighting fraud online and may help Apple gain traction with e-commerce retailers. Target Corp., United Airlines, Lululemon Athletica Inc. and Etsy Inc. are among businesses that have signed up. The feature will help speed up and simplify the checkout process by making it unnecessary for customers to type in credit-card numbers. That may help reduce the number who abandon their shopping carts before paying, Ajay Kapur, chief executive officer of Moovweb, which adapts websites for mobile devices.

“Apple Pay for the web is probably the biggest thing in e-commerce technology that I can remember, since e-commerce itself,” Kapur said in an interview ahead of the announcement. “With a thumbprint, it will be as seamless as buying on Amazon.” His company is investing $10 million in building Apple Pay into its online software, he said.

Safari Only

The feature is only available through Apple’s Safari browser, and not on Google’s Chrome, the world’s most-popular browser, which has more than a billion mobile users.

“Apple Pay in browser limited to Safari is going to be a tough one to swallow for many,” said Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, wrote on Twitter.

Still, the move online is a blow to companies like PayPal, which offers shoppers one-click payment, said Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics LLC. PayPal also lets users of certain devices log into their accounts with a fingerprint reader.

“For PayPal, it’s pretty much a direct attack on their core business,” Entner said in an interview. “If Apple figures out a more convenient way of going through the authentication process, customers that have Apple Pay may pick that and not use PayPal.”

PayPal, a payment option on Apple.com, has much larger scale in the payments market, said PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar. The company has 14 million active merchant accounts, and 170 million active consumer accounts, he said. “PayPal is much more than a button on a website,” he said. “What we are building is truly an operating system for digital commerce.”

Source: TheWHIR