The kind of solution that lends itself well to this type of activity, among others, is often referred to as an Application Delivery Controller, this is a mature and trusted solution. With the wave of Virtualization and Cloud Computing taking grip businesses need a software or virtual Application Delivery Controller (aka softADC) to help achieve the management and deployment of applications across the three different environments.

News hit the web last week that Google has launched a version of its YouTube site for handsets running HTML5. The company is confident that it will produce an improved web experience for those of us using smartphones or tablets. The application traffic management strategy used by the YouTube team is on the whole to be admired. Unlike other popular social network sites like Twitter, YouTube has recently shown that it can ensure excellent web performance even when handling application traffic heavy projects.

Everywhere you look Cloud Computing subject matter is appearing all over the place. But who should you take notice of? Who do you listen to? Whose opinion really matters? James Urquhart is one individual who seems to be talking a great deal about Cloud Computing and making a lot of sense. Having read a post of his earlier this month (Hedge your bets in Cloud Computing) I believed it tackled a number of issues very well and want to add a few of my thoughts to the discussion.

Zeus will be attending and presenting at the forthcoming events in Sept, it would great to see you there or online if you can spare the time. Zeus staff will be on hand throughout the events should you have any questions about Zeus or our solution offerings. VMworld 2010, San Francisco | 3rd Cloud Circle Forum, London | BrightTalk Webinar - Managing Cloud Environments Beyond The Datacenter, Online

What we do here at Zeus and where we add value to the type of scenario that MTV might experience is by giving broadcasters an added level of intelligence to how and when they might put content out on the CDN and how the requests for the rich media are being handled. We work with one particular well known broadcaster who uses our solution (Zeus Traffic Manager) in conjunction with their CDN of choice. We provide the broadcaster with the intelligence to make decisions on when they need to start sending content onto the CDN for delivery to those requesting it.

HomeMade Digital’s work provides some great examples of how Zeus software is used to effectively manage the traffic to the voluntary organizations web presences. Further functionality used includes content compression, content caching and in the case of the UNHCR, GeoIP detection to serve different sites and different content to people from different geographic locations. Zeus is also being used in the Cloud Computing environment to detect when resource/servers need to be scaled up or scaled down dependant on demand for a particular service. This all helps to ensure the infrastructure being used is the most cost effective and these savings are passed on to the likes of NEF and UNHCR. Cloud Computing allows them to only pay for the resources their efforts are using and are not having to pay for under-utilized or idle resource.

Last Friday, a colleague was trying to buy Secret Cinema tickets, a meet-up for all that love ‘challenging and groundbreaking cinema’. Yet as she went to buy her ticket from wegottickets.co.uk, she found that the website performed badly. It was slow and in turn, did not result in a positive customer experience – in the end she chose not to buy the tickets, pointing to the frustration such online issues can cause.

Jim Metzler from Ashton Metzler and Associates agreed to take a look at Zeus 7.0 and give us his view of the technology. He also gave us his thoughts on some of the industry issues surrounding Virtualization and Cloud Computing and how these movements are impacting the demands organizations are placing on their current and future deployments of Application Delivery Controllers.

Really interesting to read the Ovum report written by Christine Bardwell discussing the growth of retail websites in Computer Weekly’s IT Management section. The content points to the fact that a buoyant online retail market has driven many businesses to set up websites, but increased demand is overwhelming retailers' platforms.

Adoption of cloud based services is clearly on the up. Further to this, recent news from V3.co.uk reports on new figures from Gartner that found that worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenues in the enterprise application software market will surpass $8.5bn (£5.6bn)...

It’s been great to see such good traction with the media around our appointment by STA Travel. We have started working with the company to provide their users with a much faster and highly accessible website. Given that STA Travel...

For those of you that were unable to attend a webinar (Virtualization and Application Performance) we co-hosted earlier this month you will be pleased to hear that we recorded the event and are now offering it as an on-demand webcast. The webinar was co-hosted with Jim Metzler from Ashton Metzler and Associates and discussed the impact of Virtualization in the datacenter on application performance.

He may not be world famous, but King Canute is quite a well known historical figure in the UK. Fed up with being lauded by his courtiers as all-powerful, he had his throne moved down to the local beach and...

As you trawl the Interwebs reading about all this Cloud stuff, it swiftly becomes apparent that there is more than one school of thought on the benefits (or not) to an organization. What all these contrary opinions have managed to do is split the potential users of “The Cloud” into a number of groups cited below.

This week sees us participate in our second online event this month. The event is a live online all day summit hosted by BrightTalk. Zeus along with the likes of HP and redhat are sponsoring the event and presenting on a number of webinars, you can find more details below.