Over the past months, we've been working with Amazon AWS as an additional hosting vehicle of Xerceo Infuse and TrainingAtom.com (TrainingAtom is 100% on the cloud). A great deal has been written on cloud computing ( Here is an excellent short video on "What is Cloud Computing?" from Salesforce .com) but I wanted to go over some of the advantages we have seen over the past months and some of the practical experiences so far, both for ourselves and customers:

1) First and foremost: Speed!

This has been great for clients. By operating in various "availability zones" across North America and having access to multiple internet/ telco backbones has meant drastically reduced page load speeds and this seems to be consistent throughout North America.

2) Scalability/ Economies of scale

It's everything you've heard. If we want to suddenly "turn on" 20 servers in a specific region with Xerceo Infuse running. We can do it in moments, even automatically provisioning them based on demand. With the pricing structure of many cloud infrastructure companies like Amazon, pricing by usage. This means we can offer our products in the same way (See Xerceo pricing).

3) Updates, Multi-tenant hosting or single-tenant hosting is a snap:

Salesforce.com makes a persuasive argument for multi-tenant hosting and we found huge advantages over a single dedicated hosted deployment for clients. However the cloud lets us instantly "turn-on" a new single-tenant instance or server running a private community of Xerceo Infuse for those customers requiring a greater level of customization. We can schedule updates as well so all the individual instances are easily updated. Over these months deploying multiple test, stage and production environments is night and day using the cloud/ Amazon vs. a standard data center approach.

4) Great SLA

Amazon AWS has a service level agreement of 99.95% for both their servers and storage (S3). Though this is only three "9"s, considering they have two separate clouds in North America and Europe as well as various availability zones with each cloud it would take a lot to bring the entire system down. The other cloud infrastructure players like IBM, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo offer similar protection.

5) Security/ SAS 70 Type II / Infrastructure

Most of the infrastructure computing clouds we looked at had great security built in. Amazon AWS in our experience is no exception by hosting numerous HIPAA compliant applications using their systems. However in the case of Amazon they have still not achieved SAS 70 Type II certification although they are moving to get this. Going with a name like Amazon is helpful, since they plainly state they use the same infrastructure offered to their cloud clients, gaining the SAS 70 Type II certification would be an advantage. This would give further inspiration to those on the sidelines and take the plunge while also encouraging larger customers with many thousands of users. We actually have found little push back as a result of this from prospective customers. This is probably due to Amazon's history and excellent reputation and adoption of the latest open source and proprietary infrastructure applications by Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.

Now that enterprise cloud computing is so popular we are seeing a strange blurring between the ideas of open source learning systems and those hosted on the cloud. Both are focused on cost efficiency, requiring only small/ incremental payments for maintenance/usage as well as minimal up-front costs.  Here is an excellent article by Dion Hinchcliffe on Cloud Computing

Open Source software:

When we started Xerceo back in 2005, the big names in open source software: Red Hat Linux, Apache, MySQL and Liferay began by charging customers only for maintenance and support. This was also the case for the open source learning management systems such as Moodle or Joomla. They were almost exclusively locally installed by the client and priced based on the idea that clients were very technically savvy and could do much of the installation themselves. The only time you had to pay anything was if you wanted additional help or maintenance contracts to assist in deployment and updates. More recently, many open source vendors have offered two versions of their products: one that is "open and free" the other a "premium" version with additional features and performance for a fee.

SaaS (Software as a service/ hosting provider)

Next came the epiphany many enterprise software vendors and buyers had that all this could be hosted. Proprietary learning software vendors such as Learn.com and GeoLearning. realized that learning system customers were more concerned about their customers and learners getting access to training rather than caring that it was locally deployed. Many customers felt corporate training and learning though important was not mission critical if it went down intermittently and felt the added cost savings were worth not involving their own deployments. Even open source software is following suit. A few learning vendors such as Kineo are offering Moodle, which is open source, as a hosted solution for a minimal monthly user fee and setup charge (recently they seemed to waive even that).

Best of both worlds: Cloud computing?

This seems to be a game changer. Not only can applications be deployed to various servers based on desired location/ demand, in the case of Amazon AWS, customers can get world wide access on both a North American and European based cloud. The economies of scale are enormous with minimal cost to have access to multiple types of servers utilizing a range of operating systems and software both proprietary and open source. Such Linux, Apache, MS Windows, My SQL, Oracle, IBM applications and many others as well as load balancing and data clustering. Since servers are provisioned "virtually", servers can be turned-on almost instantly with the required operating system and applications immediately available. Data storage and backups can be spread out around the world. Like open source, with a cloud based learning system there are no initial software costs only ongoing minimal usage fees. The set-up is minimal with the added benefit that no technical expertise is required. For an example of this see Xerceo's pricing.

Vendor Lock-in: Open Source solutions vs. Cloud based applications

This issue is important for any application and no less so than for learning systems. When considering any cloud computing application, an important aspect is exit strategy: What if one day you want to remove your data/ cancel your service? Open source solutions are designed to allow easy export and import of data by their very nature. Even though Cloud based application providers (such as Xerceo) can blend open source and proprietary software to form their solution, they should be careful to ensure both easy deployment and exit. Do they allow you to easily export data/ user records and courses? Do they charge any fees for this? Is it easy to take the data format given and import that to a new application / deployment? These are all important factors to consider.

With the growing interest in cloud computing the flood of vendors offering their applications in this way will be staggering. Open source vendors may not be the exception.

Recently, our european partners L+M and Topscore in the Netherlands wanted to make the move from our locally deployed learning system Xerceo Infuse to our hosted, cloud based version. They were  excited because Xerceo Infuse is now multi-tenant so they could provide training to their many client companies very easily and add multiple communities for their customers at the push of a button. Also, they would access Xerceo Infuse through the Amazon ec2 european cloud as well as our deployments on the Amazon ec2 North American cloud for true worldwide access and redundancy.

No setup costs, decreased per user costs and easily configurable user interface. But there was a big problem...

Problem: They have spent much time and money on their existing user interface, intranet and web site.

Answer: Embed Xerceo Infuse in their web site!

3 Steps to embedding Xerceo Infuse functionality to your web site:

Step 1:  Go to www.xerceo.com, press the blue "Create a community" button, create a community and then log in.

Step 2: Go to the "Settings" menu item under "Manage" on the Administration Page

Step 3: Select "embedded in my own website" and press the "Help: How to embed TrainingAtom in my site" and copy the javascript code. Then paste it anywhere in your website you wish your users to see their Xerceo courses, dashboard or "My Learn" page.

Done!