Cloudyn helps service providers with cloud offerings

Cloudyn's CEO, Sharon Wagner, reached out to discuss Cloudyn's cloud optimization tools could help managed service providers (MSPs) introduce a new set of cloud computing products. Cloudyn believes this represents a major shift for the industry.

Cloudyn has released a new platform called Cloudyn MSP that enables Managed Service Providers to create new revenue stream, increase profit margin and round-out their cloud offerings by adding Amazon Web Services broker to their portfolio of services.

Cloudyn points out that its tools make it possible for MSPs, system integrators and cloud resellers to analyze and visualize their customers' cost and usage profiles to discover ways to find savings and increase their profits. To accomplish that goal, Cloudyn’s offering  enables accurate cost allocation and calculation of profit margins for each and every customer.

The challenge MSPs face today is staying relevant in the face of an ever-growing list of cloud services. Cloudyn believes that its monitoring and optimization tools enable MSPs to be the cloud hero for their customers.

Wagner points out that its Cloudyn MSP supports any type of AWS deployment with the ability to manage standalone clients, as well as multiple sets of consolidated billing environments. Set-up can be done in minutes, with MSPs able to view the high-level, aggregated deployment as well as individual customer views. MSPs can easily match AWS accounts with relevant customers and define permission levels for users so access can be shared in a controlled manner.

Managed Service Providers have often been important partners as companies examine their IT operations to find cost savings. Their approach was to offer to take over the management and operations of the customer's own on-site systems, software, storage and networking.

If the customer wanted to pursue even greater savings and flexibility, the next obvious step is to relocate those workloads to a cloud service provider's data center to reduce the costs introduced by owning those systems, software licenses, storage systems and networking hardware. This often meant that the MSP lost a customer to a service provider, such as Amazon.

Cloudyn believes that by becoming a cloud service broker and helping customers move workloads off-premise is a better choice that if the MSP chose to built its own data center and rolled out a set of cloud service offerings. Cloudyn would point out that the MSP could take part in the movement towards cloud computing quickly and inexpensively.

While the concept seems sound, it is not at all clear that Amazon is the best choice for all of the MSP's customers' business critical workloads. If the MSP's customers' would prefer a different service provider to achieve higher levels of performance, scalability, reliability or security, Cloudyn's current product wouldn't help.

Cloudyn, however, is on to something here. MSP's have long provided customers a well-managed, safe and reliable on-premise It environment and could find a nice path forward by becoming cloud services offered by others and then providing the same level of management as it previously offered using the customer's own equipment. Later, if necessary, the MSP could chose to deploy its own cloud services.

The challenge MSPs have faced is staying relevant. Being a broker for a cloud service provider appears to be a nice path forward. Cloudyn, however, only offers AWS services to MSPs. Is that enough of an offering? MSPs will have to evaluate their own customers' needs to learn if another cloud service provider's offerings would be better

Fanplayr helps e-tailers get smarter about on-site promotions

How many times have you visited a Web site and been greeted with one of those automated agents looking to engage you in "conversation"? Or encountered a pop-up or display advertisement mysteriously linked to something you just bought or were researching?

Conversion tools of this nature aren't exactly new, but they are becoming a whole more targeted and sophisticated. One recent example I've come across is Fanplayr, which applies an additional layer of analytics to gather even more insight about visitor intent with the goal of being even smarter about how those people are approached.

"We allow the e-commerce merchant to target consumers as they are shopping, but only those that fall into certain defined activities," said Simon Yencken, Fanplayr's CEO. "We'll also be able to show you more about the 120 other people who didn't convert."

Here's how Fanplayr's service works: it analyzes where the visitor originates, his or her history and other behavior such as how long someone stays on a page, how deeply they dig into product details, and whether or not they seem to be doing some comparison shopping. It uses that information to create unique profiles that can be targeted with unique messages. Fanplayr is very much the opposite of "spray and pray" types of campaigns. "When you hit a reasonable number of those uniques, we can make a big difference in conversion rates," he said.

To be clear, if you're a really small e-tailer or e-commerce merchant that doesn't see all that much daily Web traffic, this solution probably isn't for you. Where the service is really targeted is at midsize companies that are trying to capture more of their particular niche. 

One example is Seattle Coffee Gear, which sells exactly what its name suggests. The company used Fanplayr's service to develop visitor profiles and associated campaign and promotional offers. For example, a "persuasive discount" was shown only to those visiting specific product pages. Other visitors were targeted with discounts tiered according to the amount of time they spent on the site. The company explicitly excluded low-margin products from any sorts of offers.

To test whether or not its offers were working, the e-tailer set up a control group - visitors that normally would received the sorts of offers described above, but that it deliberately left out. During a trial phase, Seattle Coffee Gear reported a 14 percent higher conversion rate among visitors targeted with the offers. The order values were also 30 percent bigger than for the control group.

"We recognized that optimizing our online purchase incentive programs could have a profound impact on both top-line and bottom-line numbers," said Kaylie Kipe, Web marketing manager for Seattle Coffee Gear, in a case study describing how it uses Fanplayr's technology. "We looked at several solutions that turned out to be overkill, complex personalization engines or products that were not flexible enough to meet our news. Fanplayr has found the perfect balance of features, ease of use and pricing."

Fanplayr pricing starts at $49 per month; the company is in the process of creating additional self-service plans appropriate for smaller retailers, Yencken said.

The technology can be integrated with a range of wildly used shopping cart technologies including Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce and PrestaShop.