Posts tagged Cost
How Much Does SEO Cost? 3 Analogies To Help You Determine Its Value – Search Engine Land
Feb 2nd
 Search Engine Land |
How Much Does SEO Cost? 3 Analogies To Help You Determine Its Value
Search Engine Land “All I'm asking is how much you charge for SEO services!” I smiled. This was familiar terrain. As an SEO consultant, almost every client asks me a similar question. My answer is always the same. “It depends. On many things. Because SEO is not a … Benefits of SEO India for Online Business Marketing Crossing Borders: 3 Important Things to Know before Setting your Business on … |
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How Much Does SEO Cost? 3 Analogies To Help You Determine Its Value
Feb 2nd
“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?” Johanna’s voice showed a trace of irritation. “All I’m asking is how much you charge for SEO services!” I smiled. This was familiar terrain. As an SEO consultant, almost every client asks me a similar…
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How IT Addresses the Growing Cost of Poorly Planned Changes
Feb 1st
“I like to describe the roots of all evil being unplanned, or poorly planned, changes,” states Jimmy Augustine of HP Software. “Somewhere between 70% and 80% of all service disruptions are caused by faulty changes. Somebody goes in and makes a security change to a network device, and brings down the service. Downtime equates to costs and, in some cases, lost revenue.”
You would think Step #1, or something close to Step #1, for any kind of asset migration or disaster recovery plan would be to know what it is you have that you may want to recover when a disaster happens. There’s an art to this, it turns out, and it’s called dependency mapping. Last December, a VMware engineer we talked to listed it as #2 among his ten tips for disaster recovery planning, just after running a business impact analysis.
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What your business has and why
Dependency mapping is a complete inventory of the software that runs your business, and the components and resources upon which they rely. What dependency mapping software tools do is quite complex, especially now that more critical business assets reside in public and hybrid clouds. Many enterprises invest in dependency mapping without even knowing what it is or why it’s there. As a result, an HP software engineer tells RWW, they’re racking up enormous, unnecessary costs, especially as they transition from a traditional data center to a cloud-based environment.
When the CIO or the VP of Operations discovers these costs, there typically follows a lot of cleanup having to do with fans and something hitting them. Why didn’t we see this coming, they ask?
Augustine is HP’s group manager of product marketing for configuration management systems (leaving just enough room on the business card for a phone number). He talked with RWW about yesterday’s release of HP’s latest update, called Content Pack 10, for its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) tool. The new update addresses the ability to map assets deployed to Amazon’s primary public cloud services: Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Relational Database Service (RDS) and volumes and snapshots stored with Elastic Block Store (EBS).
“There’s a mentality that, when you go through a service provider, you’re going to want to have this visibility, whether it’s a public cloud or an outsourcing agreement or what have you. In most cases, the trust level is implicit,” explains Augustine. By that, he means the reliability level that many enterprises expect when they trust their assets to the Amazon cloud. They often assume the reliability question is out of their hands. And that’s actually not the case.
“So having this appropriate level of visibility allows IT managers and CIOs to make sure that service providers are doing what they spelled out in the service-level agreements, and it allows them to have peace of mind,” Augustine explains. It also enables a business to respond to performance issues that do crop up by adding capacity or compute power from within their own data centers.
Now you see it
“The dynamic nature of a cloud environment, whether it’s a private or public cloud, lends itself to the thinking of what we had over the last 10 or 15 years with automated discovery. You still need visibility to get to performance availability, and probably more so with the dynamic environment.”
HP’s management tool for configuration is called Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB). The dependency mapping tool discovers software components that are stored here. The visual form of UCMDB’s contents is what Augustine calls a topology – like a network configuration map, only with software. Some 18 months ago, he tells us, HP started implementing a dynamic service model for UCMDB, the upshot of which was that the management tool could see whenever a new virtual machine was spun, or a new application provisioned. Since HP’s monitors are already in place on customers’ systems anyway, he said, it only made sense to officially begin implementing them for measuring dynamic performance and reliability issues associated with virtualization and cloud deployments.
In an HP/TechValidate survey of 13 of HP’s existing UCMDB customers, 8 of those customers reported that DDMA with UCMDB reduced their time spent in the auditing process by as much as 30%.
Revealing the kind of engineering knowledge that makes him a perfect fit for HP, Augustine divides the use cases for UCMDB into the “change” group and the “steady state” group. For the latter, the transition to virtualization and/or cloud has already taken place.
“Let’s say the router goes down, or we have a problem with an application. The UCMDB, by virtue of automated discovery, will allow me to understand how important that application or router is, in terms of the service it delivers to the business,” he explains. “So it matters to me if I’m facilitating an e-commerce service or a back office service – the way that I respond to that performance or event is going to be different for those two examples.” In other words, it’s easier for you to craft separate strategies for responding to “negative impact” events – responding in different ways depending on how your customers will be affected by your response – when you have greater, more granular, visibility into what’s going on.
Whereas in the case of the “change” group, Augustine repeats his warning about the root cause of all evil, which, contrary to Internet rumors, is neither money nor patents. “We’ve helped companies avoid disruptions altogether because they now have the visibility to understand how things relate to each other, so they’re not making this change at certain points in time during the day. They’re also able to respond to central issues much faster because they understand the context of mundane things like routers. When teams don’t have the underlying technology or foundation that we provide, they spend a lot of time trying to understand, ‘Okay, who owns that router? And how important is it?’”
He says the service maps that DDMA provides chart, from a high-level perspective of the business service, the underlying application, database, servers, storage elements, and network elements.
“IT is not getting more simple; it’s getting more complex,” HP’s Jimmy Augustine remarks. “You add virtualization, private cloud, public cloud, mobile applications. What this is doing is increasing the layers of complexity. We have some clients with hundreds of thousands of configuration items in their UCMDB, we have some clients with millions. You have to keep everything up to date; it doesn’t automatically happen. Having the discipline to go out and discover these items, either on a daily or weekly basis – an up-to-date view of how these things relate to each other – is fundamental. It’s a prerequisite to managing IT as a business.”
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The Cost of Doing Business: Foxconn, Apple and the Fate of the Modern Worker
Jan 27th
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” – Immanuel Kant
Ours is an imperfect society. The nature of our reality, our desires and our need to possess, while maintaining a façade of moral righteousness, puts us at odds with the reality that exists within the systems we have created.
In recent days, the character of our era of consumerism has been put in question. We want what is new, shiny, fashionable. We want it now. With this desire we turn our heads from the consequences it takes to produce our toys, our symbols of status. When The New York Times reports that our gadgets are made in Chinese factories where working conditions can be horrendous, we express outrage and tweet the article from our iPads. The culture we have created comes with the cost of doing business.
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The Conditions at Foxconn
The conditions at Chinese factories that make our gadgets can be deplorable. Workers often live in crowded dorms, work more than 60 hours a week, are punished with physical labor and withholding of wages, according to The New York Times report on conditions at Foxconn, which makes Apple’s iPhones, iPad and iPods. In a response to the article, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent an email to Apple employees and the company released a “Supplier Responsibility Report.” This is not a discussion solely about Apple though. Apple is the most valuable company in the world, so it naturally faces the most scrutiny. Other device makers, such as Dell, Nokia, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard, are clients of Foxconn as well.
Apple and Foxconn are just two examples in a larger system. Companies have to weigh the cost and benefits of the manufacturing process. This is not a new dilemma but is a matter of fact within the economy created by the Industrial Revolution. Nor is this quandary solely a matter of high tech devices. Companies like Nike have been cited in the past for the conditions at their manufacturing plants in Asia. How much do you really want to know about the synthetic polymer that is the backbone of much of the world’s textile industry? What about the bread you eat, the TV you watch, the socks you wear?
Framing the Utilitarian vs. Deontological Conversation
“The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed in the heart, and seeing it done.” – Mark Twain
Image: Samsung Galaxy Tab
The dilemma created by the source of our products can be explained in a utilitarian framework. Utilitarianism, “is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good.” Another word for this is consequentialism. In philosophy, consequentialism is the determination of the moral good of an act based on its consequences.
A utilitarian worldview can be beneficial. The most good for the most people is the highest degree of morality that can be strived for, many believe. The detriments to a utilitarian view are that it does not factor in the needs of the individual. “One must die so a thousand can live.” Is it fair to that one person that must be sacrificed to the greater good?
On the other side of utilitarianism is the concept of deontologicalism. It is the opposite of consequentialism: “no matter how morally good their consequences, some choices are morally forbidden.” Deontological ethics suppose that humans have a duty (the Greek word deon) to support the moral rights of the individual. The boundaries are thus drawn between the concepts of utility and duty.
How do we then rationalize these concepts into our modern era of consumerism? When we hear that four people died and 77 were injured at explosion and subsequent fire at Foxconn, where do we place our own morality on the spectrum between utility and duty? While many of these types of accidents are avoidable on a case-by-case basis, the nature of industrial manufacturing has always lead itself to these types of catastrophes. In a perfect world, everybody would be happy and well fed and the conditions at such factories would never cause harm to those employed. It is something to strive for but a reality that is not easily attained. We have to reconcile our idealism where all parties’ interests are satisfied against the reality of the systems we have created.
This is not a perfect world; we create systems that are fundamentally unfair. The more money is spent and made, the harder it is to change these systems. The two largest device makers in the world, Apple and Samsung, announced this week a sum total of nearly a hundred billion dollars in revenue ($46 billion for Apple, $42 billion for Samsung) in their most recent quarters. The two companies make devices that make people’s lives easier and happier and enable them to perform acts that are a benefit to the greater good. There is little question about the utility that is being produced from an individual perspective and in the dynamics of a worldwide information system. It can also be argued that the existence of companies like Apple and Samsung make the lives of the people that work in their factories better.
There is no doubt that the companies that are customers of factories like Foxconn (and Foxconn itself) can do a better job in maintaining safe, happy, healthy work environments. Yet, implementing changes that are beneficial to those workers may also lead to an imbalance in the system. Can the diverse nature of technological consumerism be monetarily supported if the efficiency that is demanded by companies like Apple and Samsung from factories like Foxconn is diluted?
For The Good Of Whom?
When we speak of the most good for the greatest number of people in this scenario, who are we talking about? The good of the consumer, the good of Apple’s shareholders, the good of the plant owners or the good of the workers? The different stakeholders will give you an array of answers.
Consumers want high tech devices can make their lives simpler, more efficient and arm them to do their jobs and make the world a better place. Shareholders want profits. Similarly, there is profit motivation for those who own the factories. The good of the plant owners theoretically could mean the good of the factory workers as the factory owners can open more factories, employ more people and create a higher standard of living for their employees.
The good of the factory worker… well, that is what is missing from the conversation. From a utilitarian perspective, what is morally right for the factory worker may not be of the greatest good to the other parties. From a deontological perspective, the other parties have a moral duty to uphold the rights of the factory worker. This is the dilemma that must be reconciled.
We are stuck at a crossroads. How to balance the utilitarian systems that provide the world with the devices that make peoples’ lives better versus the deontological morality of those systems. This is not a new dilemma but a scenario that has been played out thousands of times throughout the course of humanity, from the feudal systems of agrarian Europe to the factory towns of New England in the 19th century to the manufacturing plants in Chengdu that make our computers today.
While we all hope that humanity can rise to create a more perfect world where the balance of human moral values is no longer a question, it is not the world in which we live.
That is the cost of business.
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Infographic: How Much Does SEO Cost?
Jan 24th
How much does SEO cost? How much time do you have to discuss the various models and prices out there! However, a new survey sheds some light on the subject. Over 500 people and companies who offer search engine optimization services were asked about how their models. Turns out, it’s most…
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SEO: The Cost of Success – Business 2 Community
Jan 24th
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SEO: The Cost of Success
Business 2 Community With the cost of SEO varying across countries, consultants and agencies, it's important to know how much you should be paying to have your site optimized. Each company may charge differently, so we've highlighted this in order for you to make an … |
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SEO Strategist’s 3 Cost Effective SEO Techniques for Small Creative Businesses – PR.com (press release)
Jan 22nd
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SEO Strategist's 3 Cost Effective SEO Techniques for Small Creative Businesses
PR.com (press release) Here are some cost effective SEO ways from SEO strategist Steve Giovinco for small creative businesses: This is one of the most important and least used first steps. People—including professionals—skip it, mostly because it seems obvious. … |
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Google: Paid Clicks Up 34% While Cost Per Click Down 8% YoY
Jan 19th
Google just posted their Q4 2011 earnings resulting in a massive quarter but not meeting expectations of investors. In fact, Google’s stock is down over 9% in after hours trading. That being said, part of those earning results showed that paid clicks on Google’s network is up 34% year…
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Daily Wrap: Developing Hybrid HTML5 Apps May Cost Less and More
Jan 9th
Forrester asserts that hybrid HTML5 apps are less expensive to develop than native apps. This and more in today’s Daily Wrap.
Sometimes it’s difficult to catch every story that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.
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Hybrid HTML5 Apps Are Less Costly to Develop Than Native
Should you develop a native app or an HTML5 app that will run on multiple platforms? A Forrester report aims to answer the question. For the cost-conscious developer, hybrid HTML5 apps provide more value than attempting to create native apps across the four major mobile platforms.
From the comments:
Piotr Steininger — “Having developed several hybrids now, I have to disagree with the broad statement:
‘In the future we are likely to see a majority of apps built in this fashion.’I’m a veteran web developer and that includes Sproutcore and jQuery. I love web technologies. I was a huge fan of PhoneGap based apps. That is… until I went through the process of building and maintaining a several of them.
Hybrid development may make sense on SOME tablet devices – namely iPad and iPad2. Even those have limitations. When it comes to Android, no animations/transforms are hardware accelerated and user experience is dismal at best (even on Honeycomb).’ (more of Piotr’s insightful comment)
More Must Read Stories:
A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter
Many of ReadWriteWeb’s readers are old hands at Twitter, but the service gets thousands of new users every day. That includes a lot of folks who suddenly need to use Twitter as part of their job. If you’re just being introduced to the joys of Twitter (or introducing it to another user), here’s a short and friendly primer on what you need to know about using the site. (more)
![You Are What You Like (And Not What Your Friends Like) On Facebook [STUDY]](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/Facebook%20Logo_150x150.jpg)
You Are What You Like (And Not What Your Friends Like) On Facebook [STUDY]
Students who share certain tastes in movies and music – but not in books – are more likely to friend each other on Facebook, according to a study released in November that has been getting attention in academic circles. (more)
Android App Identifies SOPA Supporters Behind Real-World Products
The Stop Online Piracy Act. The mere thought of the controversial Internet regulation bill passing even one house of Congress keeps you up at night. You’ve already transferred all of your domains from GoDaddy, even after they flip-flopped on their SOPA stance. You instinctively click on every anti-SOPA story on Reddit and Hacker News, voting up the best of them. On the Internet, you’ve eagerly joined the growing army of digital activists opposing the law, but what about the real world? What about when you go to the store? (more)
When Amazon’s EC2 Isn’t Potent Enough For Your Cloud Hosting
If you are looking to virtualize some of your data center and host it in the cloud, you probably have heard about Amazon’s EC2 by now. But one IT shop used EC2 as a strawman to consider what they really needed from their eventual service provider. It is interesting and instructive to see the steps that WoundVision took for this process. The company produces a risk assessment software solution supported by infrared thermal imaging for early wound detection. (more)
Tweet At ‘Em All You Want, But Gen Y’s Are Still More Influenced By Word-of-Mouth Marketing
A new report out from Sitel on social media and consumer trends implies that social media is key to reaching Gen Y (those born between 1980 and 2000), but the numbers don’t add up. While the Gen Y, or people born between 1980-2000, are in fact “digital natives,” that doesn’t mean they are actually most reachable via social media marketing. (more)
Forrester: As Growth Slows, Apple to Be More Influential than Cloud in 2012
A devastating assessment of the course of technology growth last Friday from technology analyst Forrester flies in the face of what competitive firms would consider “conventional wisdom,” to say that before cloud computing truly commands the attention of enterprise network architects, a few other dramas currently in progress must play themselves out first. (more)
![Where Do The Leading Republican Presidential Candidates Stand On SOPA? [UPDATED]](http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/romney_150x150.jpg)
Where Do The Leading Republican Presidential Candidates Stand On SOPA? [UPDATED]
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sounds like a guy who really, really wants to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act.
But Romney just can’t bring himself to mention SOPA by name. (more)
CES 2012: The Convergence of TV and Mobile Platforms
Anybody with a passing interest in the headlines pouring out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas cannot help but identify one major theme: 2012 is the year that the TV will converge with mobile platforms. For all of the talk that CES has lost its clout, it is still a good source for identifying trends that will drive the innovation of major technology companies in the new year. Last year tablets and dual-core processors were all the rage. This year, developers have something bigger on their minds. (more)
Flurry: Mobile App Usage Begins to Far Outpace the Web Thanks to Facebook
When technology pundits say mobile is exploding, many people just shrug and say “of course.” Many people might not fully comprehend just how big mobile is growing and the enormous ecosystem that it now encompasses. Mobile computing through smartphones and tablets is growing four times faster than the PC and Internet evolutions of the 1980′s and 90′s. People are now using mobile apps more than the Web and the gap continues to widen. (more)
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How to Find Low Cost Legal Help – If You Live in Tennessee
Jan 4th
If you need a lawyer and you can’t afford one and live in Tennessee, you might want to take a gander over at this website started by the state’s Supreme Court called JusticeForAllTN.org. “The court realizes that sometimes people cannot get help from a lawyer because they cannot afford one or they decide they want to represent themselves.” That and some plain-English initiatives started by the court can go a long way towards reducing legal costs for many common activities such as divorce, mediation and parental rights.
Wait a minute. Plain English legal language? Started by a court? For free? Yes, this is for real. And the site is nicely designed and easy to use too. It is about time, and shall we say sets a new high bar for similar kinds of public information sites from their government.
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The website, which was created by the court’s Access to Justice Commission, also has tips on self-representation, instructions on who qualifies for legal aid, and a way to locate the nearest such office. The court claims that more than a million residents of the state can’t afford a lawyer, about 20% of total cases brought before the various courts. “To our knowledge, this is the most extensive statewide site,” says Anne-Louise Wirthlin, the coordinator of the project for the court. The project prepared this short promo video:
According to this column by Gail Kerr in The Tennessean, in addition to the site, six of Nashville’s larger law firms have split up the various legal specialties and agreed to offer pro-bono legal services. Both are worthwhile efforts and I hope more states follow with similar acts in the future.
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