SaaS product management professionals should always remember that there are four P’s in marketing, one being product. Unfortunately, software companies have a bad habit of thinking about product in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix. This is a particularly costly mistake in SaaS and is the root cause of many a SaaS Don’t. Unlike other businesses, SaaS creates a real-time, always-on connection between the customer and the company through the SaaS product. Smart SaaS product managers look to establish this connection as early as possible and to leverage it throughout the entire SaaS customer lifecycle.
Archivo mensual: octubre 2013
Cloud Expo: Lighten Your Data Center TCO with Helium Storage Solutions
Massive in scale, hyperscale cloud infrastructures are defining new storage efficiencies as there are intense economical and operational pressures to do more with less, while building and maintaining expansive and complex multi-tiered storage data centers in order to scale, reduce TCO and ultimately manage prolific data growth. At the heart of these data centers is storage.
In his General Session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Brendan Collins, VP of Product Marketing at HGST, will talk about the future of HDDs based on a new Helium platform that will enable new market opportunities and improve TCO like never before.
Cloud Expo: APIs for Mobile App Development: A Soup to Nuts Analysis
APIs are the foundational element of a mobile app strategy, and are necessary to truly get an enterprise’s massive amounts of data into a usable framework on a mobile device. However, what makes a great API that developers will be successful building against? What’s the best architecture? How do you build clients that use APIs?
In his General Session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, will discuss the best practices and latest thinking about building mobile apps against APIs, and how to design APIs that are intuitive and optimized for building engaging mobile apps.
WebRTC Summit | Building a Self-Hosted WebRTC Project
Learn how to build WebRTC applications from scratch, all the while discussing many of the issues surrounding WebRTC development in a business environment.
In his session at WebRTC Summit, Rod Apeldoorn, Programmer and WebRTC Wrangler at Priologic Software, will be using EasyRTC Open Source. The added control granted by a self-hosted solution is a key requirement for many WebRTC pilot projects prior to releasing to the cloud. Working our way up from a simple video chat, we’ll look at data channels, multi-party streaming, and enforcing server side control.
Compuware APMaaS Simplifies Mobile, Web and Third-Party Problem Resolution
Compuware on Wednesday announced the availability of the new Compuware APMaaS Platform. The platform now offers a simplified, zero-configuration user interface for quick time-to-value. Customers are now able to manage mobile, web, and third-party performance, powered by its global third-party service monitoring platform, Outage Analyzer, in a single view.
«Generally, third-party performance is outside the control of IT operations, but they still need visibility into their performance because it impacts the overall user experience, said Steve Tack, Vice President of Product Management for Compuware’s APM business unit. “By providing a simple and easy way to automatically identify third-parties and monitor them proactively, companies are able to ensure third-parties are positively supporting the business.»
Compuware APMaaS Simplifies Mobile, Web and Third-Party Problem Resolution
Compuware on Wednesday announced the availability of the new Compuware APMaaS Platform. The platform now offers a simplified, zero-configuration user interface for quick time-to-value. Customers are now able to manage mobile, web, and third-party performance, powered by its global third-party service monitoring platform, Outage Analyzer, in a single view.
«Generally, third-party performance is outside the control of IT operations, but they still need visibility into their performance because it impacts the overall user experience, said Steve Tack, Vice President of Product Management for Compuware’s APM business unit. “By providing a simple and easy way to automatically identify third-parties and monitor them proactively, companies are able to ensure third-parties are positively supporting the business.»
Think Office 365 is a Maintenance-Free Environment? Not So Fast …
Guest Post by Chris Pyle, Champion Solutions Group
So you’ve made the move to Office 365. Great!
You think you’ve gone from worrying about procuring exchange hardware and storage capacity, being concerned about email recovery plans, and having to keep up with the constant maintenance of your exchange server farm and the backing up your data, to relying on Office 365 to provide virtually anywhere-access to Microsoft tools.
Sounds pretty good, and we won’t blame you if you’re thinking that your move to the cloud has just afforded you a maintenance-free environment, but not so fast.
While the cost-savings and convenience it may seem like a no-brainer, what many administrators often forget is that the cloud itself doesn’t make email management any easier – there are still a ton of tasks that need to be done to ensure usability and security.
Indeed while moving mailboxes to the cloud may be efficient and provide cost savings, it doesn’t mean administration ends there. Not by any means.
Not to worry, for starters Office 365 admins looking for a faster and easier way to handle mail administration tasks have a number of tools at their disposal, such as our 365 Command by MessageOps. 365Command replaces the command line interface of Windows® PowerShell with a rich, HTML5 graphical user interface that is easy to navigate and makes quick work of changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage and reporting (and did we say you don’t need to know PowerShell?).
From our users who manage about 1 million mail boxes we see the most effective 365 administrators break down maintenance and tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly buckets. Breaking down tasks this way simplifies work-flow, and the best part is that this can be easily implemented into your routine and should heighten the value and success utilizing Office 365.
Here are best practices for getting started:
Daily: Mailbox Administrators are constantly responding to any addition, change, and removal requests for their Office365 accounts. The most common are daily tasks that are quickly resolved, for example “forgot my password”, “need access to folder X”, “executive Y is on maternity leave, can you forward her files”, and so on:
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Modifying Passwords
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Modifying Folder Permissions
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Mailbox Forwarding
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Creating Single and Shared Mailboxes
Weekly: Weekly task groupings are geared toward helping Administrators keep a watchful eye on growth and scalability, security, speed and access. For example, checking for new devices that are being added to mailboxes, comparing them from previous weeks, and verifying that the user did indeed add a new device, and not incurring a potential risk of theft or fraud:
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Review Top Mailbox Growth by Size
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Review Office 365 Audit Logs
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Review Mobile Security
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Review Shared Mailbox Growth- (shared mailboxes only have 10GB limit!)
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Review the exact location of their servers and their mailboxes within the Microsoft data centers
Monthly: OK, now you’re cooking with gasoline — with those annoying daily tasks and cumbersome weekly tasks out of the way, top-level Administrators turn their full attention to security and access, which we can never have a lapse in attention:
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They run reports and lists of all users last login date. They are checking for people who may no longer be employed with the company, thus eliminating the need for that mailbox and its associated cost from Microsoft. Or if there is limited use, they could move the end user to a less expensive Office 365 SKU, again reducing their overall O365 costs.
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From a security standpoint, they are running reports to see who is forwarding their mailboxes to external mailboxes, such as sending their email to their home email account (Gmail/Yahoo/ Hotmail, etc.)
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Review password strength and the passwords that are set to expire on a monthly basis, ensuring their mailboxes are safe and secure.
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Review mailbox permissions, and review who has Send As privileges in their organization. They are confirming with the end user that they allowed these people to have the ability to send email as them.
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Review which employees have Full Mailbox access privileges. They confirm with the end user that they do want those additional users to have full access to their mail and calendar.
Quarterly: See how easy this is now? You’ve cleared out the clutter, and made sure every box on the system is secure. You’ve taken the steps to keep the system running fast and true, with consistent access and performance across the enterprise. Now kick back, light a fat stogie and do some light clean up and maintenance:
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Group Clean Up, review all email groups to ensure they have active members, as well as review which groups have people in them that are no longer employed, or contractors that are no longer involved, which groups aren’t being utilized, etc.
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Review the Edit Permissions list.
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Review Non Password changes in 90 days.
Conclusion
Just because you’ve moved to the cloud it doesn’t mean management and maintenance of your mail boxes stops there. Many of these best-practices would require the knowledge of PowerShell, but who wants to deal with that? Save yourself lots of trouble and find a tool that will manage these activities, streamline your work-flow and jump-start your productivity.
Christopher Pyle is President & CEO for Champion Solutions Group. He is also an active member of Vistage International, an executive leadership organization, and is a Distinguished Guest Lecturer at Florida Atlantic University’s Executive Forum Lecture Series.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014
Gartner, Inc. on Tuesday highlighted the top ten technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2014. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 10.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.
Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014
Gartner, Inc. on Tuesday highlighted the top ten technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2014. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 10.
Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.
The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department
By John Dixon, Consulting Architect, LogicsOne
Corporate IT departments have progressed from keepers of technology to providers of complex solutions that businesses truly rely on. Even a business with an especially strong core competency simply cannot compete without information systems to provide key pieces of technology such as communication and collaboration systems (e.g., email). Many corporate IT departments have become adept providers of technology solutions. We, at GreenPages, think that corporate IT departments should be recognized as providers of services. Also, we think that emerging technology and management techniques are creating an especially competitive market of IT service providers. Professional business managers will no doubt recognize that their internal IT department is perhaps another competitor in this market for IT services. Could the business choose to source their systems to a provider of services other than internal corporate IT?
IT departments large and small already have services deployed to the cloud. We think that organizations should prepare to deploy services to the cloud provider that meets their requirements most efficiently, and eventually, move services between providers to continually optimize the environment. As we’ll show, one of the first steps to enabling this Cloud Management is to use a tool that can manage resources in different environments as if they are running on the same platform. Corporate IT departments can prepare for cloud computing without taking the risk of moving infrastructure or changing any applications.
In this piece, I will describe the market for IT service providers, the progression of corporate IT departments from technology providers to brokers of IT services, and how organizations can take advantage of behavior emerging in the market for IT services. This is not a cookbook of how to build a private cloud for your company—this instead offers a perspective on how tools and management techniques, namely Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS), can be adopted to take advantage of cloud computing, whatever it turns out to become. In the following pages, we’ll answer these questions:
- Why choose a single cloud provider? Why not position your IT department to take advantage of any of them?
- Why not manage your internal IT department as if it is already a cloud environment?
- Can your corporate IT department compete with a firm whose core competency is providing infrastructure?
- When should your company seriously evaluate an application for deployment to an external cloud service provider? Which applications are suitable to deploy to the cloud?
To finish reading, download John’s free ebook