Virtualization Station

Virtualization Station with Alicia Gaba

Hello Blogosphere! It's me, Alicia Gaba, Senior Marketing Specialist at BlueLock, an experienced cloud computing provider specializing in cloud hosting.

A little about me: I've been at BlueLock since November of 2008, right when the cloud computing marketing began to take flight. It's been a wild ride, especially in the marketing realm. Before joining BlueLock, I was at another Collina Ventures company called Cantaloupe TV. Cantaloupe TV is an online video marketing company that also provides a software-as-a-service solution to help organization better manage and promote their online videos. That solution is called Backlight. While at Cantaloupe, I was involved with marketing (of course) and also handled 30-40 clients as their project manager. BlueLock happened to be one of those said clients.

After graduation, I became part of the Orr Fellowship. The Orr Fellowship provides a unique opportunity for undergraduate students searching for their first salaried, full-time position following graduation. Each year, a new group of talented graduates is selected from thousands of applicants and placed with a host company. Host companies are some of Indiana's fastest growing entrepreneurial companies. Fellows serve two-year commitment, where host companies engage them in innovative projects while allowing them the opportunity to work closely with company executives. My tenure with the Fellowship will end in June of 2010 where I will continue my position at BlueLock.

Education: I majored in Communication and Culture at Indiana University and was also part of a selective program called the Liberal Arts and Management Program (LAMP) which is a collaborative offering with the Liberal Arts school and the Kelley School of Business at IU. Myself and about 100 other IU students in my class took part in this awesome program and obtained a certificate in Business Management. I was also involved with the Public Relations Student Society of America, serving various roles throughout my years at IU and ending as President of the organization.

Personal: My husband Chris Gaba and I have an ADORABLE golden retriever named Wrigley (yes, we're big Cubs fans) and we love our little home in Fishers.

Introducing BlueLock CloudConnector, a vCloud Datacenter Service

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

This morning at VMworld in San Francisco, BlueLock officially released our newest cloud technology, the BlueLock CloudConnector, a hybrid cloud enabler. We are also announcing our selection as one of three North American vCloud Datacenter providers.

With BlueLock CloudConnector VMware customers can immediately realize the benefits of the next generation of cloud capabilities provided by VMware’s vCloud Director, the cloud delivery platform for vCloud Datacenter (also introduced this morning). vCloud Director adds new capabilities such as the ability to move workloads between VMware-compatible clouds (public and/or private) in a secure environment.

BlueLock CloudConnector for vCloud Director allows current VMware customers to view and manage their existing VMware environment (their private cloud) and BlueLock’s VMware-based public cloud resources in the vSphere Client control panel they already have, making the transition to a hybrid cloud even easier for existing VMware administrators.

vCloud Datacenter
As one of only three North American VMware vCloud Datacenter providers selected by VMware, BlueLock provides enterprise-class public cloud infrastructure with compatible management, security, application portability and business agility to businesses of all sizes. Use of the same VMware technology provides common management and security model enabling workloads to move between internal datacenters and the BlueLock Public Cloud.

vCloud Datacenter is an enterprise-class cloud built on VMware’s cloud infrastructure technology including VMware vSphere, vCloud Director, and vShield security. vCloud Datacenter delivers consistent and auditable security and performance through SAS-70-Type-II certifications as well as technical capabilities such as network isolation, role-based access control and directory services integration.

Read the full release.

CloudWorld (aka VMworld) - Just around the corner

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

As many of you virtualization and cloud experts know, VMworld is just around the corner - next week to be exact. BlueLock is thrilled to be so involved with the event this year, especially with its heightened emphasis on cloud computing with the VMware vCloud iniatives we've already been hearing so much about. We've been beta testing one of their most talked about technologies (no I'm not telling what...) and we have a little product launch surprise of our own too. You'll hear all about the newest cloud technologies bright and early on the morning of Tuesday, August 31.

If you're attending the event, come check us out on the showroom floor at booth #639 or check out our cloud demos in the Cloud Pavilion. Not attending? Register to see the keynote sessions for free here. Don't worry - we'll be tweeting and posting throughout the conference too! Just follow us on twitter at @bluelock to hear the latest cloud gossip from the show.

We're just as excited as all of you for this year's big VMworld event. Hope to see you there!

VMworld 2010 - it's right around the corner!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

The BlueLock team is hard at work preparing for an exciting VMworld 2010 in San Francisco at the end of this month. This year's focus for the conference is largely dedicated to cloud computing, lucky for BlueLock.

As VMware' Service Provider of the Year (Americas), we are involved in a number of exciting projects and presentations at the big event. As you might remember, last year we were a part of the big vCloud Express announcement. This year we'll continue to make a big splash and we're thrilled to share even bigger news with everyone!

If you're interested in registering or learning more about the big event, visit the VMworld 2010 site.

If you attend, make sure to stop by the BlueLock booth (#639) and check out our demos in the Cloud Pavilion for your chance to snab a Flying Cloud Monkey!

BlueLock Cloud Monkeys & Indy VMUG

Friday, July 30, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Tuesday (July 27) was the annual Indy VMUG Demo Days event, and BlueLock had a ball! Not only did we have some great cloud computing conversations at our booth, but everyone loved our flying cloud monkeys - they went like hotcakes. These two quickly found a safe place though:

Below Brandon Jeffress is taking the time to show some BlueLock fans the proper way to fly our monkeys. Our new Orr Fellows, Brant Howell & Jon Corwin (pictured below as well) learned how to fly monkeys too, but they also learned even more valuable skills at the VMUG breakout sessions where they viewed VMware demos and learned about the virtualization technology that powers the BlueLock Cloud.

Want to snag your own flying cloud monkey? Meet us at VMWORLD 2010! We'll be on the showroom floor in the Cloud Pavilion and around at Booth #639.

Check out the real BlueLock Cloud Monkeys here.

DECA Slashes 91% of First-year Infrastructure Costs with Cloud

Wednesday, July 21, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

DECA Financial recently chose BlueLock to provide its cloud hosting services, and in the end, slashed 91% of its first-year infrastructure costs.

Founded in 2009, DECA Financial Services is an accounts receivable management (ARM) agency experienced in collecting debt of any type. After experiencing tremendous capital expenditures on technology infrastructure and personnel at a prior employer, the DECA founders searched for a cloud hosting provider that offered ease-of-use and scalability to host their technology platform. Being a very technology-driven agency, DECA needed a robust infrastructure platform to run all of its processes, while not having to deal with the IT resources, people and costs associated with owning the infrastructure hardware.

“Had we built our own infrastructure, we would have spent at least $600,000 on hardware and another $100,000 for one employee to manage the infrastructure – ultimately costing over $700,000 in the first year alone,” said James Hefty, Director of Operations Support, DECA Financial Services. “With BlueLock, our projected first year spend is around $60,000, compared to the original $700,000. Now we have a much higher quality IT environment than we would have if we hosted it ourselves - at a fraction of the price.”

To learn more about the BlueLock & DECA solution, read the case study.

Or, check out the recent news article on Computerworld about the BlueLock & DECA partnership entitled, "IT budgets pointing to the Cloud, expansion."

Rights and Responsibilities in Cloud Computing (via Gartner)

Monday, July 19, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Gartner recently released six "rights" and one "responsibility" for cloud service users/clients to help enable better business relationships between vendor and client. This list, although short, is actually quite exhaustive in terms of outlining some major topics a client should cover BEFORE entering a cloud hosting agreement.

Gartner's list of Cloud Computing Rights & Responsibilities:

The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data - Service consumers should retain ownership of, and the rights to use, their own data.

The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes - All computing services - including cloud services - suffer slowdowns and failures. However, cloud services providers seldom commit to recovery times, specify the forms of remediation or spell out the procedures they will follow.

The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes - Every service provider will need to take down its systems, interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and otherwise ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch.

The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front - Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment.

The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates - If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about.

The right to know what security processes the provider follows - With cloud computing, security breaches can happen at multiple levels of technology and use. Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network).

The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements - Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured.

This list brings light to what BlueLock is already doing right to better our relationships with our own clients. Based on the Gartner list provided, we are certainly in the right place.

1. Our clients do own and control their own data. We just provide and help manage the infrastructure platform.
2. BlueLock's Service Level Agreement (SLA) addresses liabilities, remediation and business outcomes the organization follows in the case of a service fall down.
3. BlueLock sends notifications and updates to our clients prior to, during and after any changes or updates to our environment that may or may not affect our client's environments. We even ask that our clients make us aware of any changes or updates on their end so that we can plan together to better alleviate any chance of disruption.
4. Technical limitations and service requirements are always discussed in the sales process.
5. We provide legal documentation upfront.
6. Our security procedures are very important to our clients, and therefore, our clients want and need to know what security processes we follow and adhere to.
7. Software license requirements are important - BlueLock must stay true to its software providers, and therefore, our clients must stay true to them as well.

To learn more about BlueLock's cloud hosting services, contact us or visit our website.

Vote for your favorite Cloud Monkeys!

Friday, July 2, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

With only one more day to enter and a week left to vote - make sure to submit your use case for a chance to win an iPad in the BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys Use Case Contest. Also, if you aren't a user of BlueLock vCloud Express, your votes matter! Check out the recent entries and vote for your favorites.

We've got some really interesting cloud computing use cases already and these guys need your votes to win!

BlueLock Selects Wright Line for Data Center Heat Containment

Monday, June 28, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Cloud Computing Services Expert Chooses Advanced Heat Containment System from Airflow Management Authority

Worcester, MA June 28, 2010 -- Wright Line today announced that it has integrated its patented Heat Containment System (HCS) into BlueLock’s world-class, SAS 70 certified data center. BlueLock is an experienced provider of cloud hosting and managed IT services headquartered in Indianapolis.

“As a result of business growth and increased processing densities, excess heat was being produced in our data center,” said Mike Durham, BlueLock’s Director of Quality. “With Wright Line’s HCS, our ability to contain the hot air exhausted at the rack level, and then return it directly back into the CRAC, provides a predictable and efficient operating environment.”

Wright Line’s HCS was developed in direct response to customers growing concerns about the need to significantly reduce operating and capital costs while conserving energy and eliminating the waste most data centers currently experience.

The system captures, manages and directs the heat exhaust from IT equipment to the top rear of the rack enclosure were it is ducted to the data center’s precision air conditioning units through a ceiling plenum or hot air return.

The HCS can be seamlessly integrated into Wright Line’s own Paramount and Vantage Enclosure platforms, as well as most third-party server enclosures, including APC®, Rittal, Knurr and Chatsworth Products, Inc at the factory or in the field.

Cloud Computing: There's no turning back

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

A recent post entitled "Five Reasons for the Cloud Computing Boom," by John Soat on Plug Into the Cloud, an InformationWeek's Cloud Computing Destination, surfaces further evidence that the cloud and all its glory, is here to stay.

He writes the cloud is "a bonafide IT phenomenon that points to the future of organizational computing."

Gartner, a leading research firm, recently released a cloud computing report that estimates cloud services revenue worldwide will reach $68.3 billion this year, a 16.6% increase from last year’s revenue of $58.6 billion. And the industry will experience strong growth through 2014, when Gartner predicts worldwide cloud services revenue will climb to $148.8 billion.

Soat goes on to outline the five factors he believes have led to the success and buzz around this "IT phenomenon."

1. The recession which has brought on IT cutbacks and the need for innovation ways to cut costs.

2. CFO's ability to forego capex investments in technology.

3. CIO's have embraced the tactical benefits of the cloud.

4. The general acceptance of outsourcing as an IT strategy.

5. Nicholas Carr's writing which outlined the cloud computing arguments and provides one basic message: IT should be looked on as a low-cost commodity.

Comments on Soat's blog post also point out that the distributed nature of the workforce in the recent past has also promoted the cloud.

I believe we are currently seeing the beginning of an all out adoption towards cloud, which comes on the coattails of the widespread virtualization adoption. As businesses small and large begin to strategically think about their cloud options we will see more and more adopt private cloud, public cloud, or a hybrid cloud approach. At BlueLock, we are seeing a lot of traction with new (startup) companies jumping straight into the cloud and larger companies dipping their toes further and further in.

Announcing the BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkey Use Case Contest!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

The BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys Use Case contest begins today!

Former, current and new BlueLock vCloud Express Beta users will compete for these prizes:

The first ten submissions will receive a stuffed cloud monkey
The top five finalists will receive a FlipCam which they will use (and keep!) to create a recognition video for the application to compete for the Grand Prize - an Apple iPad!
The Grand Prize winner will receive the engraved Apple iPad!

Open for submissions by current, former and new Beta users, the contest runs from June 16 – September 6 and looks to surface the most innovative use cases of BlueLock’s vCloud Express.

During the 12-week contest, BlueLock vCloud Express developers enter by filling out a simple questionnaire on the BlueLock Web site between June 16 and July 7 2010 that includes a description of the BlueLock vCloud Express use case and why it deserves to win. Participants can promote their own use case through Twitter and other social media outlets. Submissions will be voted on by an open community of voters and judged by BlueLock and VMware on cloud applicability, creativity/innovation, time savings and cost savings to select the top five use cases. The first ten submissions will receive a BlueLock “Cloud Monkey” stuffed animal and the five finalists will receive FlipCams with the option to document their use cases in a two minute “Recognition Video.” Finalists who submit Recognition Videos will then be judged by BlueLock and VMware for the Grand Prize, with the winner receiving an engraved Apple iPad.

“The functionality of BlueLock vCloud Express has proven to be unique and of value to our clients, driving us to design some of the same features into our other solutions within BlueLock CloudSuite,” said Kim Graham Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, BlueLock. “We are excited to not only learn more about how developers have been using vCloud Express, but to also highlight the most unique and interesting use cases.”

“As a top VMware vCloud service provider partner, BlueLock has been able to help shape vCloud Express as it continues to demonstrate that they are ahead of the curve in understanding their clients’ needs in the evolving cloud computing space,” said Mathew Lodge, Senior Director-Cloud Product Marketing, VMware. “We are looking forward to learning about how beta users have taken advantage of the dynamic combination of the industry-leading VMware platform and BlueLock’s secure and reliable cloud hosting and infrastructure expertise.”

BlueLock vCloud Express is a reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure solution that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide. The technology allows users to create virtual machines as needed and add compute capacity via an online interface. Users pay only for the compute and storage space they use. Since being selected by VMware as one of only five companies worldwide to offer vCloud Express and launching in September 2009, BlueLock has reached 1,100 beta users of the product.

Participants can be past, current or new BlueLock vCloud Express beta users and can submit more than one application. For additional contest details, visit www.bluelock.com.

SaaS University DC: Where CEO's go for SaaS Higher Learning

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

BlueLock has attended and been highly involved in a number of SaaS University events in the past and the next event in Washington DC is sure to be another hit. SaaS University is an event Software executives who are contemplating or planning to move to a SaaS model can't afford to miss.

Softletter's SaaS University: Marketing, Selling, Infrastructure and Financing Conference in Washington, DC, July 20-22 features 30 content-filled sessions, six tracks, five keynotes, and four optional workshops related to Software-as-a-Service education over three full days. Featured are top executives and consultants from some of the software industry's leading SaaS companies and experts on the SaaS business model, such as BlueLock's very own, Brian Wolff who will present on the various infrastructure choices a software executive should consider.

SaaS University is all about hard data and practical execution strategies for SaaS and cloud applications companies. All presentations are screened for hard content and relevant case studies. Executives can be confident they'll leave the conference with their head ready to explode from the up-todate data and actionable advice provided at the conference.

What you should expect at the event:

    * 30+ separate sessions

    * Six tracks: main, government, sales and marketing, finances, transition to SaaS, and Cloud/infrastructure

    * Five Keynotes focusing on key strategic issues in SaaS and the Cloud

    * Four optional SaaS Workshops on channel development, pricing, marketing and developing and outsourcing your SaaS system

    * A special networking showcase highlighting the newest technology for building SaaS communities and analyzing product usage by your customer base

    * Access to invaluable benchmarks and hard data on SaaS available only from our comprehensive 2010 SaaS Report and our new 2010 EuroSaaS Report (available in July)

    * Additional valuable benchmarks from Softletter's SaaS Escrow and Failover Survey, Social Marketing for Software Companies Survey, and Lead Generation, Management and Conversion to Sales Survey. In addition to the presentations, all attendess in D.C. will also receive the complete summary results from all these surveys.

One attendee's remarks about the event he attended:

"I would like to thank you for putting on such a great show last week in Chicago. I still don't know how I ended up hearing about the conference but I have to say it was one of the most eye opening and helpful two days since I started my company. It is great to see other companies with the same issues, and people with answers to a lot of the problems and questions we are facing." Joseph Collins, CEO, VaporStream

For more information and to register for the event please visit the Softletter website.

Don't forget, early bird pricing ends June 15th and you can get an extra $100 off using BlueLock's special registration code BLUELOCK100! Register today.

CloudCamp: Lightning Talk

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Tomorrow is the big day for CloudCamp Cincinnati! BlueLock's Bob Roudebush will be presenting for BlueLock's Lightning Talk. See a Lightning Talk from CloudCamp Indianapolis #1. If you haven't signed up for CloudCamp Cinci there's still time! Register & get details today.

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

Healthcare Software Providers in the Cloud

Friday, May 28, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

BlueLock's healthcare-related client base seems to continue to grow - and they each have one specific need in common: security.

Recently, BlueLock produced a case study with Pathagility in regards to their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application which facilitates the generation, management and reporting of clinical data between healthcare providers and healthcare institutions. Early on in the company's life, they realized that it made more business sense to forge a relationship with a provider who could secure and manage their IT infrastructure environment rather than spending capital on purchasing, implementing and managing their own. At BlueLock, they were especially happy with the ability to scale and pay as they grew in a secure and SAS 70 compliant cloud hosting environment. Pathagility's success was dependent on their ability to focus on the development of their SaaS solution and get to market quickly rather than directing their talent towards the day-to-day IT operations.

A very similar story unfolds with a new client, AmeriVeri CR. AmeriVeri CR is an in-depth , fully automated method for verifying the coding accuracy of healthcare claims. The company saves their clients an average of 4% in healthcare claims simply by identifying coding errors. They also needed a highly secure and SAS 70 compliant cloud hosting solution. The company just got its official start in January of 2010, but after quickly receiving funding and attracting great interest from clients and prospects, the comany needed to be able to expand its offering quickly. Enter BlueLock.

These are just two of many healthcare-related clients BlueLock currently has running in its Enterprise Cloud platform, but each tells a similar story and proves that yes, the cloud is secure.

BlueLock Headed to CloudCamp Cincinnati

Friday, May 21, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

CloudCamp Cincinnati will be BlueLock's fourth CloudCamp event - two we hosted here in Indy and one we attended in Columbus, OH. I must say, they always deliver great discussions on Cloud Computing. The setup, the "un-conference" is perfect for the audience, which usually ranges from highly technical to business strategy individuals who may know a lot or not much at all about the Cloud. With the "un-conference" format, sessions and discussions are decided at the event by the attendees and speakers or session leaders are chosen based on whoever wants to and is qualified enough to lead the sessions.

Sound a little too haphazard for you? Don't be frightened, I would say after experiencing one CloudCamp "un-conference" you'll never want to go back to the traditional conference format again. I wrote a blog post about conversations that happened at one of our CloudCamp Indy events, if you're interested in breakout sessions that were created before. You can also read this post to find out what happened at the most recent CloudCamp Indy.

So, if you're going to be in the Cincinnati area on June 3rd, register to attend CloudCamp Cincinnati and join the cloud computing fun!

Cloud Computing for the Enterprise?

Wednesday, May 12, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

I don't believe anyone really thinks all enterprise data centers will begin rushing to the clouds anytime soon (although there are a few that already have). That's quite far-fetched. However, that doesn't mean they won't begin testing out the waters (or the clouds).

However, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci explained at EMC World, "IT infrastructure has gotten too complex, too inefficient, too inflexible, and too costly...You’re managing a lot more with the same or less resources.”

A recent article outlined the benefits of the enterprise data center alongside the benefits of cloud computing.

Today's data center benefits:

Trust
Control
Reliability
Security

Cloud Computing benefits:

Dynamic
Cost-efficient
On-demand
Flexible

“In a way, the attributes of one are the negative of the other,” Tucci said.

The question is - how does the enterprise access the best of both worlds?

The answer is simple, and it probably the same if you were to ask someone from EMC, VMware or BlueLock. The answer is private cloud computing.

What is private cloud computing? It refers to what some call internal cloud computing and describes an offering that emulates cloud computing on private networks which allows companies to access the advantages of cloud computing without the pitfalls, such as data security, corporate governance and reliability concerns. Companies must still buy, build and manage the cloud, which isn't the case in the public cloud realm, but there are still many benefits. One of those benefits that BlueLock clients have accessed, is the ability to connect their private cloud to the public cloud for bursting and/or disaster recovery.

Learn more about private cloud computing today.

Cloud Computing: A Real World Example

Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

I recently wrote a post about "What cloud computing means to you," in which I described some of the value our clients have gotten from the cloud.

What are our clients getting?

The ability to transition costs from Capex to Opex
The opportunity to lower overall IT Infrastructure costs
Better matching of revenue to expenses
Rapid provisioning and speed to market
Competitive advantage

That was a basic generalization of the broader values from the BlueLock Cloud. Now let's look at a real-world example of the advantages of cloud computing with BlueLock. The client I'm referring to has 30 servers in our cloud. They were able to:

Avoid capital costs totaling $150-300K
Improve margin by 35%
Add a new server for a client within 24 hours
Beat their own competitors on agility and costs

Are those numbers compelling to you?

Still not sure what cloud hosting might be able to do for your business? Contact the BlueLock sales team for a business assessment to look at what we can do for you.

What does Cloud Computing mean to you?

Monday, May 10, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Cloud Computing means many things to many people. It excites, motivates, and even scares some. But what does it mean to you?

The advantages of cloud computing have been touted again and again - from flexibility, speed, versatility, convenience, and cost effective to green, secure and scalable. But what makes cloud computing so interesting is that everyone has different thoughts and views around what it really does for them and means to them.

So first things first, what is cloud computing? At BlueLock we describe it in terms of 5 major things: on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service. It is provided in three different service models: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). (BlueLock does IaaS.)

But what's the real value of the cloud? These are the major values our clients have seen:

Transitioning IT infrastructure costs from Capex to Opex
Opportunity to lower overall costs
Better match expenses to revenue
Rapid provisioning (speed to market)
Competitive advantage

But again, I must ask, what does cloud computing mean to you?

BlueLock is Hiring a Staff Accountant!

Thursday, May 6, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

BlueLock is still on its hiring spree! Our latest opening is for a Staff Accountant.

Position Summary
BlueLock is looking for a Staff Accountant. The Staff Accountant would report directly to the Chief Financial Officer and would work closely with the Company Controller to ensure the integrity and timely presentation of the company’s financial statements. This position is responsible for a variety of accounting activities. Specific responsibilities will include journalizing the monthly transactions and daily accounting activities including payroll and accounts payable. This individual must have high energy, outstanding organization skills, strong work ethic and experience in a fast-paced environment. In addition to BlueLock responsibilities, the Staff Accountant will also perform light accounting duties for CVQ, Achievant, Collina Ventures, and Cantaloupe.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities (for BlueLock & four other Collina companies)
•    Journal entries
•    Sales Tax reporting (must comply with state deadlines to avoid interest/penalties)
•    Payroll form entries, payroll changes, and semi-monthly submission of data to
TruePay for payroll
•    Payroll journal entries
•    Submit H S A, United Way, Garnishments, & 401k withholdings as appropriate
after each pay period
•    Weekly bank reconciliations (clear checks & enter banking entries)
•    Accounts Payable – scan invoices to email, enter approved payables to
appropriate accounts/departments and attach electronic invoice copies, weekly check runs, & timely filing of paid files. Must be sensitive to vendor due dates to eliminate late fees/interest charges.
•    Respond to vendor inquiries timely and professionally
•    Monthly close for all companies
•    Other projects as requested by Controller & CFO

For more information and to view other BlueLock openings, go to our career page.

Cloud Computing: The chargeback model

Friday, April 30, 2010 by Alicia Gaba

Cloud Computing has been experiencing a lot of buzz, but the "Chargeback Model" within Cloud Computing has not quite seen the same excitement. Chargeback and metering refers to the ability for an IT organization to track and measure the IT expenses per business unit and charge them back accordingly.

This allows for better ability to accurately represent the ROI at a business and technology level. As long as IT infrastructure is physical, cost allocation is quite simple. Many enterprise IT shops maintain asset management systems and some have built out a centralized repositories of infrastructure-related cost information. With private clouds, virtualization can be handled in a very similar way as long as the virtual machines can be tied easily to physical systems. Those systems are then linked to a funding source from a business unit’s budget.

With public cloud hosting, there is no actual "physical machine" inside the organization from which to track. That doesn't make tracking impossible though. In some ways it may make it easier as cloud hosting providers continue to improve their monitoring and tracking of resources, accessible to you by a user interface where you can simply click and go, naming certain virtual machines and such based on the business unit using them.

How are you tracking your resources today? Is your organization using a chargeback model currently?