Norwegian software firm Opera has acquired Silicon Valley based Skyfire Labs, a specialist in mobile video optimisation and cloud. The firm is known for its Rocket Optimizer software which allows mobile operators to use cloud computing to optimise video and multimedia on crowded cell towers, in 3G and 4G LTE networks.
The acquisition price includes $50m cash upfront and performance based earn-out payments over three years, including $26m in cash held that can bring the total deal size to $155m.
As a mid-tier ERP and CRM solution, NetSuite is an affordable software-as-a-service platform for small to mid-sized businesses. The cloud-based interface makes the platform available from anywhere with Internet access. Some of the many business tasks covered by NetSuite include sales and service tracking, order fulfillment management, project collaboration and lead tracking.
NetSuite Benefits
The benefits offered by NetSuite will differ between businesses. However, there are a number of service tiers and pre-configured options from which to choose that can help to provide maximum benefit with minimal start-up and implementation times. Benefits offered across most business types and sizes include:
How NetSuite Works
NetSuite is most often provided as a hosted service. This means that the platform is accessed and used through a web interface. Every person within the business uses the same interfaces and databases. This allows for real-time updates, instant access to information and improved interaction between departments and business segments. Setting access rights and roles by account or tier provides simple data management, user accountability and security.
Things to Consider before Choosing NetSuite
Though NetSuite offers many ways to customize and personalize the ERP experience, it is, at its core, a pre-configured product. This means that in-depth customization is often a highly involved process. Many NetSuite service providers will offer demonstrations or free trials to see if the product’s interface and features are a good fit for your business.
To help determine if NetSuite is a proper fit for your business, consider NetSuite consulting services. Professionals can help explain what to expect and provide an in-depth look in how your business can utilize the platform without the worry of service contracts, costly set up fees or time intensive research and training.
More Food for Thought…
As a cloud-based service, NetSuite offers a unified platform that is accessed using a high-speed Internet connection. However, with lack of local back up or local server solutions, any interruption in Internet service will result in an inability to access your NetSuite services.
NetSuite is a modular solution. This means that features can be added or removed on-demand to suit the needs of your business. Unfortunately, this also means that updating the platform can be tricky. Since modules are updated independently, you may find that you are forced to wait to implement an update due to conflicting module configurations and other issues.
The most common way of signing up for NetSuite service is through a value-added reseller. Comparing resellers and service providers is an essential part of finding the best NetSuite configuration. Phone and email support directly through NetSuite require recurring subscription costs as well. By finding a reseller that offers support, you can avoid unforeseen fees and service issues.
NetSuite is a proven platform for businesses of nearly any size. However, like any software suite, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the platform is essential to maximizing benefits.
nCircle today announced the award of its second PureCloud patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. nCircle’s intellectual property portfolio now includes 11 patents. nCircle’s patents cover a wide range of security innovations and represent the company’s significant, ongoing investment in security technology research and innovation.
nCircle PureCloud is a cloud-based security services platform that requires no hardware or software to be installed or managed. nCircle PureCloud dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of a wide range of security services — including vulnerability scanning, PCI scanning and web application scanning — making these practices easily accessible to small and medium businesses.
“Attackers are targeting smaller businesses that typically have fewer security resources than larger companies,” said Tim ‘TK’ Keanini, chief research officer for nCircle. “The breakthrough technology in nCircle PureCloud helps level the playing field by making enterprise class security tools accessible to all businesses, regardless of size.”
Mavenlink today announced the launch of new capabilities which provide users with end-to-end financial reporting and management control. With real-time visibility into their projects and financials, Mavenlink customers benefit from greater visibility and control over their business performance, and staying in alignment with business goals becomes more certain.
“Mavenlink, and our new smart class of products, is improving the way work is defined and managed across distributed teams,” said Ray Grainger, Mavenlink’s CEO. “With the addition of these new financial management and reporting capabilities, Mavenlink becomes even more compelling, enabling businesses to improve productivity, increase profitability and more effectively manage business outcomes.”
Mavenlink enables companies to efficiently manage more of their business online, including team & project management, messaging & conversations, file management, time & expense management, invoicing & online payments and financial reporting. Mavenlink’s new reports, available in real-time and multiple currencies, provide users a detailed view of the entire financial life cycle of projects.
Key new features include:
“Social Task Management (STM) platforms combine project management and social networking to enable teams to more effectively get their work done,” said Alan Lepofsky, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “By adding capabilities with financial related areas such as budgeting, invoicing payments and management reporting, Mavenlink has created a single place for team members to seamlessly organize all aspects of a project. I’ve yet to see this type of broad project management and financials together from any other STM SaaS provider.”
Improving application program performance will require parallelizing the program execution at ever finer granularity now that the processor clock rates are no longer increasing. However, even in a per-application dedicated computing environment, the parallelization overhead is known to place a limit on how much application on-time throughput performance increase can be achieved via higher levels of parallel processing. The throughput-limiting impact of parallelization overhead will be significantly amplified when executing multiple internally parallelized applications on dynamically shared cloud computing environment, since the allocation of processing resources to instances and tasks of any given application cannot be done in isolation, but instead it needs to be done collectively across all the applications dynamically sharing the given pool of computing resources. There thus is an urgent need to solve this complex challenge of developing internally parallelized programs for dynamic execution on shared cloud computing infrastructure, if we expect to be able scale the performance and capacity of cloud hosted applications going forward.
With today’s introduction of QuickBooks Online for iPad, small businesses that are mobile by nature will no longer have to save the books for last. Rather, they can get more out of their workdays with an app that helps them work more productively, wherever they are.
“As a wedding planner, I spend 70 percent of my time away from my desk meeting with clients and vendors. At the end of the day, I used to sort through my meeting notes, map out next steps, track payments and expenses, and follow up with invoices,” said Sadie Waddington of Locally Grown Weddings in San Francisco, Calif. “Now, I save time by catching up on accounting during the four hours I commute on public transit each week using QuickBooks Online for iPad. The app also helps keep me more organized and look more professional in front of my clients and vendors.”
Now available in the App Store, QuickBooks Online for iPad brings the world’s No. 1 small business cloud accounting solution to one of the world’s fastest-growing computing devices. It packages the most useful on-the-go business tasks in an easy-to-use, friendly app with a native iPad experience, including integration with the Camera, Contacts, Push Notifications and Location Services.
“Managing a small business is a different game today than it was a few years ago, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets,” said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division. “We found that more than 20 percent of QuickBooks Mobile for iPhone users access the app through iPads. And, customers like Sadie told us they need more than mobile point solutions – they need an all-in-one app that lets them work in a whole new way, and that’s what we created.”
Cloud computing seems to have taken the IT world by storm within a number of industries and the medical field and all it entails is no exception.
The medical industry in all its forms has embraced the cloud in a number of manners as varied as the industry itself, from simply keeping patient information and histories in the cloud to using it for new drug discoveries, innovative medical treatments, and efficient storing, distribution, and analyzing of medical imaging and real-time data.
Throw in the everyday operations management of medical facilities and employees within and the use of cloud computing in the medical industry grows even further.
Hospitals and medical practices in general are well-known for the sheer amounts of data created on each individual patient, from histories to procedures to medications to x-rays and charts to billing.
Up until the advent and facilitation of cloud computing this …
Today Evolve IP announced it has partnered with NACR, an independent integrator of communications solutions. With this agreement, NACR will leverage Evolve IP’s unified platform to offer its customers cloud services including unified communications/hosted IP phone services, virtual servers, and call center solutions.
NACR serves over 5,500 clients from small businesses to Fortune® 100 and global enterprise clients. Through this relationship, NACR’s customers gain access to Evolve IP’s cloud services including:
Everyone in the IT industry knows how amazing cloud computing is – it can cut overheads, introduce flexibility and make previously unobtainable services affordable for even the smallest of businesses. But with 60 per cent of the American public claiming to have no clue at all about cloud services, it seems that the sector’s enthusiasm is yet to turn into mainstream awareness.
It’s tempting to dismiss such findings out of hand – after all does it really matter if people don’t know how iTunes, Gmail and other products work as long as they actually do what customers want? The answer is a resounding yes, it does matter. Too many small business owners don’t understand the benefits of cloud computing and they’re missing out.
As described in the last week’s post NIST defines three different cloud computing service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS and SaaS are really easy to grasp but I see people struggling to understand the PaaS model. As a long-time application developer though I find the PaaS model the most compelling one for new applications. Here is why.
I will look at two examples: one enterprise and one from the consumer world.
Let’s start with the enterprise scenario. If you examine any enterprise application portfolio you will find out that almost every development team has implemented it’s own code for handling common functionality like authentication, authorization, database access etc. There are also numerous cases when the same team developed the same functionality over and over in each new project. Even the componentization model doesn’t help in this situation because either developers are often not aware of the existence of the components or there are too many options they can choose from and they cannot find the right fit for their scenario. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the holly grail for this problem but many enterprises are still far from achieving this goal.