Archives

Running a Successful Cloud Trial

  • Posted on: December 26, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Once you’ve made the critical decision that it’s time to partner with a cloud service provider, you will want to test the product with a trial. And to get prepared for the trial itself, there are several best practices that teams can implement. Things like setting your success criteria up front, putting together a schedule

Sales Engineers: Own Your Time and Leverage the Cloud

  • Posted on: December 20, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
If you’re a sales engineer, you’re likely responsible for everything technical when selling your product or service. You work hand-in-hand with a sales counterpart, but let’s be honest—your load doesn’t feel any lighter. And since it’s the end of the year, you’re solely focused on closing that big deal. You barely have time to think—let

Does Cloud Computing Really Need Marketers?

  • Posted on: December 17, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Think about the engineering behind something like a cell phone. Most people see the value and use the technology every day, yet have little interest in the complex underpinnings that enable their devices. Beyond the science, even the execution of the technology is an elaborate undertaking. Consider this: Alexander Graham Bell received his patent on

Best Practices for Choosing a Cloud Service Provider

  • Posted on: December 12, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Today we’re revisiting our series on the topic of choosing a cloud service provider. Many cloud providers have a hands-off approach to partnering with customers—so Alex Burreson, our West Coast Sales Manager, has provided his list of key questions to ask and successful habits to employ when making this crucial decision for your organization. There

On the AJAX-driven Web, Plain Old Semantic HTML Can Help

  • Posted on: December 10, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
For those of us working in specialized industries, investing in the strict microformat standardization process for most of the data we trade in is a lofty goal, with little reward. Microformats are standardized to encourage the browser and other software to apply behavior to the marked-up data (say, extracting a vCard and adding it to

User Support Series: Getting Started

  • Posted on: December 7, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
In the Skytap Cloud User Support series, we are taking a close look at sections of Skytap Help documentation. In this entry, we’ll look at the Getting Starting area, which contains guides for new users. You can reach this section by navigating to https://cloud.skytap.com/docs/index.php/GettingStarted, or selecting Getting Started from the Help Wiki sidebar: This page

Balancing Public and Private with a Hybrid Cloud Strategy

  • Posted on: December 5, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
In a new article, Network World has named 2013 the year of the hybrid cloud. The article also includes 10 predictions by industry analysts, and two in particular caught my eye. Prediction #1: Hybrid clouds will take off. That is, in fact, exactly what we are seeing happen on the front lines here at Skytap.

Top 3 Conversations We Had at the Recent Gartner Summit

  • Posted on: December 3, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Our team recently returned from the Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit in Las Vegas. This year, the summit featured a new mobile track, deep coverage of cloud recommendations, and a complete track on innovation for developers and another on growth and innovation—all designed to help IT professionals stay competitive and deliver the new

Skytap Cloud Help Documentation: An Overview

  • Posted on: December 3, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Skytap Cloud has been designed from the ground up to be easy to use, with an intuitive interface that guides the user through the process of managing a virtual environment. That said, Skytap Cloud has an array of specialized features, as well as some unique concepts that should be learned to take full advantage of

New Windows 8 Enterprise Template

  • Posted on: November 29, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Microsoft Windows 8 announced yesterday that they have sold 40 million upgrade licenses since October 26. This puts it well on track to exceed Windows 7 sales, which sold 60 million in its first two months. To support the new Windows 8, we’ve replaced our Windows 8 Preview template with a shiny new Windows 8

Adding Cloud Infrastructure to Your Automated Dev/Test Environment

  • Posted on: November 28, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
When most people think about using a public infrastructure cloud, it’s usually for an Internet-facing application like a company web server. And if you’ve ever considered a public infrastructure cloud for a training or dev/test environment, you might picture end users having to use some kind of remote access client, connecting via a client-based VPN,

White Paper: Putting the Agile into the Infrastructure

  • Posted on: November 28, 2012
  • Author: Skytap
Today we released our latest white paper: Cloud-Enabled Software Development and Testing: Putting the Agile into the Infrastructure. In the paper, we examine ways in which organizations can implement cloud-enabled software development by adopting an Agile IT strategy. The following is an excerpt from the paper: Agile software development is winning the hearts and minds

Join our email list for news, product updates, and more.