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Cloud Services

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Submitted By berniebm
Words 1520
Pages 7
Amazon’s and Google’s Cloud Services Compared
Zakaria Abuzeid
Machemia McGregor
Bernard Murrell
Lisa Thomas
Casaundra Woolridge

Keller School Of Management
Managerial Applications of Information Technology
Instructor: Marlyn Kingsley
November 30, 2011

Overview

“When you care enough to send the very best” is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the Hallmark brand. Hallmark Cards, Inc. has remained the Goliath of the greeting card industry. Hallmark’s products also include paper party supplies, gifts and wrapping paper, ornaments and decorative items for the home, memory-keeping picture frames, albums and scrapbooks, electronic greeting cards and personalized photo cards, and flowers that can be purchased in one of its 40,000 retail outlets, 3,000 Hallmark Gold Crown® stores or through its website and amazing Hallmark even a cable television channel.
There is an untapped market of consumer and business convenience that Hallmark can find very successful. Currently Hallmarks products can be found in 100 countries around the world and in more than 40,000 stores in the United States alone. Our intent is to provide Hallmark’s current and future customers a service in which Hallmark will send them a reminder of an up-coming event such as a Birthday, Anniversary, Shower, etc. via mail, email, and mobile devices in different time frames. The idea is to provide the entire event experience. Customer completes form and one event they want to be reminded of is a 5 year Wedding Anniversary, Hallmark will send the first reminder 8 weeks before the date and will include a catalog of possible 5 year anniversary gifts which can include a list of businesses where the customer can contact them to make reservations for a restaurant, have flowers delivered, purchase a singing telegram, order limousine service, and more.
Accomplishing this new avenue would require Hallmark to need a immensely larger storage database that can be easily accessible to any of Hallmarks internal or external customers and to do this would require the company implementing the use of either Amazon’s or Google’s cloud services.
Detail of services to be provided

Hallmark wants to establish a database of its current and future customers that will store their personal information such as: birthday, anniversary, graduations, etc.
Reaching the untapped market

During the first year: Hallmark can establish the database by having customers fill out the information cards either in the store, via mail, or the internet. The customer will list dates that they would like to be reminded of. Hallmark will send the customer a reminder notice of the selected information 30 to 45 days prior the date of date selected; this could be done via email or text. Then 15 to 30 days prior to the date a list of gift suggestions via email, with all contact information to make the arrangements or order the desired package.
Year two: Hallmark can work with current suppliers to develop a website that will have all of these resources together bundled in packages or single items to suit the customers’ needs and wants. The customer will be able to sign up for this free service. There is also a need to cultivate new suppliers to add to the offered goods and services. The target market is the general public, businesses and corporations. The business division will focus on managers, supervisors, secretaries, and HR departments. Generally businesses provide a budget for employee’s yearly anniversaries and holiday parties.
Google Cloud Services

I am a Google fan - one who is amazed at Google’s grand vision for cloud computing! Interestingly, starting from the most fundamental layer of web, i.e., domain name system (DNS) look-up, to more sophisticated search and productivity apps, it has a significant presence everywhere. Ten years back, even savvy computer users would have found it difficult to believe that Google could offer such a wide array of efficient services to millions of consumers so cheaply, or, in some cases, even for free.
Below is a list and brief description of the Google Cloud Services that can be consumed by an individual, small office home office, or a micro business to achieve the desired efficiency in day to day activities. I am a consumer of most of the services mentioned here.
What exactly is Google's cloud?

The following paragraph from BusinessWeek magazine
“It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.”

What are Google Cloud Services?

Apart from the extremely popular Google Search, Gmail, Chrome browser and Android OS there are various Cloud services from Google. Most of these services can be categorized under SaaS (Software as a Service) and are free. A few, like Google Maps, are free only for non-commercial use. For details on the services described below, please read Google’s Terms of Services associated with each service.
Google Places Its tag line is Get your business found on Google. Google Places is Google’s directory of businesses.
How many times have you used the good old Yellow Pages in the last year? Most of you may answer - never. The upcoming Facebook and Twitter generation may not even have heard of the Yellow Pages. Google Places is the new Yellow Pages, but unlike the Yellow Pages it’s free to businesses and online. To give a Google booster to your business, simply add your business and claim it.
Google Offers After a recent failed attempt at acquiring the daily-deal site Groupon, Google responded with Google Offers. Google is already building a network of local merchants through Google Places, so it looks like Google Offers was the missing link. Offers started with a beta version in Portland, Oregon (US), on April 20, 2011. As of the writing of this article, apart from Portland, the deals are available for five locations only: New York City Downtown, New York City Midtown, New York City Uptown, Oakland-East Bay and San Francisco (the last two are in California).
Amazon Cloud Services Amazon cloud computing is the latest technology that provided computation, software, data access, and storage services that does not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that deliver needed services.
What are Amazon cloud services One of the first milestones for cloud computing was the arrival of Salesforce.com in 1999, which pioneered the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple website. The services firm paved the way for both specialist and mainstream software firms to deliver applications over the internet. In 2002, Amazon Web Services, “which provided a suite of cloud-based services including storage, computation and human intelligence through the Amazon Mechanical Turk” (Computer-weekly.com, 2009). The next development by Amazon happened in 2006, which was the launch of its commercial web service, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The technological breakthrough gave the ability of small companies and individuals to rent computers on which to run their own applications. The Amazon EC2/S3 is the first widely accessible cloud computing infrastructure service that provides SaaS online video platforms to television stations and newspapers. The simplicity of Amazon EC2 services allows the owner to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It allowed the users with the ability of complete control to any computing resources by running on Amazon’s proven computing environment. The Amazon EC2 gives the user flexibility, where the choice of multiple instance types, such as operating systems and software packages. With the Amazon EC2, “ the user may select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage and the boot partition size that is optimal for their choice of operating systems and applications. An example would be the choice of oprating systems including numerous Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows servers. Amazon cloud services are designed for use with other Amazon web services. Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications. Another focus of Amazon was its reliability of its web services. Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. “The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region” (Danielson, 2008).

References
Cloud Computing Defined 17 July 2010. Retrieved 26 July 2010.
Danielson, Krissi (March 26, 2008). "Distinguishing Cloud Computing from Utility Computing".. Retrieved 2010-08-22. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae_DKNwK_ms http://www.techno-pulse.com/2011/04/google-cloud-computing-services.html

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