Newmind Named Among Top 100 Cloud Service Providers

Newmind Group now ranks among the world’s top 100 cloud service providers (CSPs), according to Nine Lives Media’s second-annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 report. The companies featured in the top 100 CSPs generated more than $2.3 billion in combined cloud services revenues in 2011. This number is up nearly 46 percent from 2010 according to the Talkin’ Cloud report.

The Talkin’ Cloud 100 report recognizes top cloud service providers based on such metrics as annual cloud services revenue growth (both in actual dollars and in percentage growth rates).

Companies reflected in the Talkin’ Cloud 100 report include:

• Cloud service providers -- companies that offer IaaS, PaaS and/or SaaS
• Cloud aggregators -- companies that offer online marketplaces for sourcing cloud applications, platforms and/or infrastructure
• Cloud brokers -- companies that recommend a range of cloud applications for customers
• Cloud integrators -- companies that link multiple cloud services into a customer solution
• VARs (value-added resellers) with cloud services expertise
• MSPs (managed service providers) with cloud services expertise

“Newmind Group is passionate about cloud computing, and using cloud services to make life easier for our customers,” said Sara Brylowski, Marketing Manager for Newmind Group. “What really gets us going is looking at all of the great successes our customers have had with Google Apps and seeing how the tools that we’ve been able help them find and use have improved their businesses. To get recognized for doing this by Talkin’ Cloud is icing on the cake.”

The Talkin’ Cloud 100 report is based on data from Talkin’ Cloud’s online survey, conducted January through April 2012.

The Power of Collaboration

For better or worse, you likely can't count all of the times in an average work day that you collaborate with your coworkers.

If you work in an open office setting you are unwittingly in cahoots on everything from work tasks to what music to listen to, and the longer the distance between you and your coworkers the more essential it is to find tools that make the collaboration painless.

When you don't get the casual face time that a lot of people take for granted, it shines a spotlight on how many decisions get made in those dismissible few seconds throughout the day. As e-commuting and super-computing become more of a norm though, how are you collaborating? Chat and email are handy, but when you need to group edit a document, are you each saving your own copy then tasking one person with merging them at the end (then doing it all over again on the next revision)?

I sat in on a conference call with an area business the other day to review a proof of a proposal from a "team" of businesses. The heads of each business huddled around their respective speaker phones and stared at their respective screens to page through the preliminary pdf proposal. They discussed the changes that needed to be made and divvied up the list of who would complete each task. How could this have been simpler?

These are the key workflow issues that Google Apps embraces. Collaboration is powerful. I'll say that again: Collaboration is POWERFUL. The sum of the team's experience, knowledge, and savvy is the force a company has to leverage over its competition. If the ability to collaborate and contribute to that sum has become so cumbersome and anti-intuitive that the product suffers, so will your success.

Linux is a brilliant example of what will happen when talent joins forces and works together toward a common goal, while still letting each person work in his or her specialty.