1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: FreshDesk, Chennai, India

A finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge, Freshdesk is a SaaS company that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand customer support software that offers multi-channel social support. Freshdesk introduces itself as a kind of Salesforce.com for customer support so to speak. Small- and medium-business owners can set up online customer support platforms that combine the backend help desk system used by agents (ticketing, knowledge management) with an online customer portal (self service, forums, idea management, voting, etc.) on the front end. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: Bizosys, Bangalore, India

Bizosys Technologies, a Bangalore, India based software engineering company was founded in 2009. The founders, Sunil Guttula and Abinasha Karana are experienced IT professional with 15 years’ experience between them solving various enterprise IT problems. Guttula, Bizosys’ CEO, and Karana founded the company with the goal to “simplify software development.”

Toward that end, they have created two products. The first is HSearch, a NoSQL technology based search engine for big data that aims to break the barrier of scale of growing information and accessing it across information silos. The second product is 10Screens, a tool to visualize business requirements critical to software development, which tend to be hampered by poor communication among various stakeholders. 10Screens is currently a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark India Startup Challenge. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: You have not seen any products out there that meet to your specs?

Diane Bryant: Consumerization is such a buzzword. With consumerization, I do believe the consumer solutions because social media is a consumer solution. I believe that the providers of the social media solutions will eventually adopt enterprise hardened attributes. What we all I need is consumer user experiences, but with the enterprise capability. I do see continuous investment by the consumer companies, whether you are talking about handheld or smartphones or tablets or operating systems or social media solutions. I see them continuing to invest in hardening their solutions in their enterprise security elements, because there is that just amazing blur of the world between consumer and corporate. We will continually increase the amount of support we do for consumer devices and divide up the enterprise. It is what employees want, and it is our job to make our employees more productive. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Now, switching gears a bit. In all this work you have been doing – and you are deep into the process – what are some of the holes you see? I run this program called One Million by One Million, and the goal is to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in annual revenue and beyond. Part of the blog’s effort is to highlight blue-sky opportunities and open problems within the cloud world. From your vantage point, what do you see as open problems that you would like to point entrepreneurs to? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: And security? What is your strategy vis-à-vis security?

Diane Bryant: Again, that is step one on the security factor. What are the applications that are of high risk? We don’t put those into the cloud. Then we go through, and we have to look at compliance as well. We are in the early days of cloud and anything more mature. These aren’t black and white statements, but today compliance, more precisely compliances and auditing, is around physical service. You are looking at the application and the server that it’s running on and who has control over that server. What are the controls of that server? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Even so, does it really make sense for all enterprises to design and architect the entire solution on their own? You are probably much more technology oriented than many other IT shops. I have to believe that there are many other IT shops outside the technology vertical that don’t want to do a lot of development and don’t want to do as much designing as we think. It should be at least somewhat ready, right?

Diane Bryant: I completely agree with you. What you are hitting on, though, is why it isn’t happening. I do believe that we will evolve to a state where there are standards that define how these cloud environments are secured and managed. When you have those standards, that is when you get all kinds of innovation and solutions, full-time solutions, that aren’t proprietary. That is why I say we are a relatively new era. We all want to go to a cloud because it provides great TCO on utilization and agility inside of IT. It provides great business value because when the business group says I want an app, I want a new solution, it takes us now minutes instead of months, which is a huge value to the business. We all want to go there, but you are right, if you are a private cloud and you are a large enterprise and you want to go there, you say, I will just do it myself. It is a big investment. It is a big industry. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: To summarize, you would say that if you were using Google apps, they would offer you a native implementation of that with the same functionality.

Diane Bryant: Google started a consumer solution, and we are hardcore enterprise. I think maybe that is where we are having a disconnect.  We need an enterprise solution. It has to be secure; it has to be robust; it has to have offline capability; it has to have e-discovery solutions. Just think about everything that an enterprise has to have that a consumer wouldn’t care about. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Diane Bryant, CIO Of Intel (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: And what kind of environments are these cloud applications working on from a user interface point of view? On the server side, I understand all these virtualization and scalability issues. What about on the client side? Is it all operating on a thin client browser based environment or are you deploying clients?

Diane Bryant: We are not doing server hosted desktop virtualization on the server side, no. We are not doing that. It’s strictly the application running in the data center in a shared infrastructure cloud environment being accessed by a thick client. All our Intel employees have notebooks, full capacity notebooks, about the drives. We refresh them every two to three years. We have many of our apps run local to your machine. Our office applications are local to a machine, so we still have a thick client as the primary device. The applications are just being hosted in the data center in the cloud environment. >>>