Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, you are probably aware that in May 2011 Google open-sourced the key audio/video components for web browsers, paving the way for the development of rich, high quality, RTC applications in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5. This in turn gave rise to the WebRTC project, a cross-industry project to bring Real-Time Communication to the Open Web platform. WebRTC – Web-based Real-Time Communication – is being heralded as one of most disruptive web/telecoms innovations for years, which is why SYS-CON Events, true to its 13-year tradition of producing events on the technologies of tomorrow, is holding its 1st WebRTC Summit in California’s Silicon Valley in November.
What Do We Have Against France?
One of my colleagues and advisors is from France, and currently working in the Sophia Antipolis tech enclave in the southeast of the country. He wonders why I never mention France in my stories about the global leaders in our rankings.
This is a valid question, and one that I know people also ask in many other highly developed nations, including the US. After all, aren’t the highly developed places the ones with the best quality of life, the best access to modern technology, the greatest places to live?
Perhaps they are. After three years in developing Southeast Asia, I can say that in many ways life is better for me back in the US. It is certainly physically less taxing.
What We Seek
But at the Tau Institute, we are not seeking to find the places with the most development or the most comfortable standards of living. Many other organizations already do that, and do that quite well.
Rather, we seek to identify those countries that are doing the most with what they have, ie, the relative leaders when it comes to their ICT environments, and by extension, the most potential for improving their economies and the lives of their people in the future.
And in fact, a number of highly developed nations have cracked into the Top 20 of the 102 nations we currently survey. New Zealand finishes #3 in the world (behind only South Korea and Estonia), and the Top 20 also includes the Netherlands, Finland, all of Scandinavia excepting Norway, the UK, Germany, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Belgium, and Australia.
But no France, no United States, and what happened to Norway, anyway?
We measure Internet and broadband access levels, average bandwidth speed, and other factors against the local cost of living – the idea is that technology is relatively more expensive in countries with an overall lower cost of living, so a lower-cost country will rank higher if it achieves the same development level as a higher-cost country. So a high cost of living in France and Norway work against these countries in our rankings.
To drill down into just one small example, Norway has the highest level of Internet access in the world, at 94%, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). France ranks 13th, at almost 80%. It slightly trails Germany and the UK.
But then there is Slovakia at 74%, achieved with a per capita income level less than half of that of Norway or France, and a cost of living that’s discounted 38% from the benchmark US dollar. We thus score Slovakia significantly higher in this category than we do France. Extend this approach across a variety of technology and socio-economic factors, and the countries doing the relative best, ie, doing the most with what they have, emerge.
US Lagging
The United States does not score well in our rankings, either. It can be contrasted to Canada, which does. But isn’t the US the world’s technology innovation crucible? Why does it not rank highly?
We do not seek to measure technology development, but rather, its deployment and use. In our key areas, the US barely makes the world’s top 20 in Internet access, its average speed is similar to Canada (which achieves this at an income level lower than the US), and its socio-economic factors (eg income disparity) trail Canada (and many Western European countries). Add it all up, and the US does not rank among the world’s top-tier leaders; Canada does.
It’s All Relative
All of this could lead to a question of whether we are thus penalizing wealthy countries for being successful. We are not.
Rather, we realize it is common knowledge that Norway and France are wealthy, provide a great quality of life generally, and provide great Internet access specifically. I’d happily live in either of these countries if the opportunity presented itself.
What we seek instead is to unearth uncommon knowledge about those countries that are doing the most with what they have.
If you want to identify the world’s wealthiest countries, simply look to Wikipedia. If you want to know who has the highest Internet and broadband access, simply look to ITU statistics. Look to other easily available resources for other simple statistics. But if you want to know who is doing the best with technology deployment and use on a relative basis, look to us.
How Important is Online Store Design and Usability to Your Sales? Extremely.
Lessons Learned: Online Store Design Makes a Huge Difference to Order Completion and Conversion Rate.
Back in 2008 I was managing a hosting company in Russia. Our operations were fully automated by Parallels Business Automation Standard (PBAS), we were offering a full range of state-of-the-art hosting plans, and all of our hosting plans were competitively priced. Our sales were decent, but not spectacular, and they definitely weren’t growing as quickly as we wanted.
So we launched a research project to better understand our customer’s shopping experience and to pinpoint any problems. It shocked us to learn that for certain products up to 70% of our customers were not finishing their purchase. Clearly, something was happening during the purchasing process that created a barrier to completing transactions.
At the time we were using the standard store integration in PBAS, which was not necessarily designed to “sell,” but rather to show PHP code and PBAS API usage. User interface decisions made by programmers with knowledge of the internal code structure were perplexing to customers trying to use the store in a real-world environment.
To go deeper with our research we added a Kayako online chat button into every page of our online store.
Here are the main discoveries we made, and the changes we implemented to address these issues:
1. Customers don’t like to make difficult choices, and were simply “opting out” and leaving our store. We believed our typical customers were more or less “system administrators with degrees in Computer Science.” We wanted to impress them with flexibility and lots of interesting options, but when we started chatting with them we realized some of them, had no clue what “SLM memory limit” meant. So we reduced the number of options, renamed our resources and added simple descriptions. In short, we had to redesign our store so any person could understand and use it.
2. Multiple Call-To-Action elements were confusing and scaring regular customers away. Many customers were clicking on buttons and menu items in the shopping cart, which lead them away from the purchase process and even away from our web site. We wanted our customers to be 100% focused on the purchase, and determined that any additional information was simply defocusing clients from completing the purchase process.
3. Our customers’ emotional reaction to our web site was the fundamental driver in their purchasing decision. It became clear that long registration and configuration pages in our store were significantly reducing our sales.
4. A very slow shopping cart experience will make some people leave. Why? Because customers conclude that if the hoster’s own store is slow, their hosting will be even slower. So we had to increase our store performance.
It took us two months to make all these changes in the standard PBAS store, but the following results were well worth the effort. In the six months following the store changes:
• Abandoned shopping carts were reduced by 57%
• Online store sales increased by more than 150%
We shared all this information with Parallels PBAS developers who used the feedback, as well as feedback from other PBAS customers, to improve online store usability and functionality.
Today, PBAS Store is a ready-to-use and powerful tool. Released this month as part of Parallels Business Automation Standard 4.3.4, which includes:
• Simple, single-page order processing to reduce ordering time
• Redesigned, simplified, and streamlined interface
• Easy-to-add online chat services
• Ability to choose which resources are visible and add meaningful descriptions to them
• Support for stand-alone deployment on a high-performance dedicated server to increase store performance
• Many other enhancements
These enhancements demonstrate how Parallels learns from customer’s feedback to help its Partners grow their business. I am very proud to be part of this company.
I invite you to learn more about Parallels Business Automation Standard by visiting the PBAS web page, checking out the new store demo, viewing our recent webinar and upgrading to PBAS 4.3.4 today.
~ Alex Goncharov, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Parallels
Nirvanix Shutdown: Collateral Damage in Big Players’ Price War?
The sudden shutdown of Nirvanix, an early but recently faltering participant in the “pure-play” Online Storage space dominated by the likes of AWS S3, Microsoft Azure and Google, is in large part a result of downward pressure on prices as the big players continually lower theirs. Amazon, for instance, launched S3 in 2006 and charged $0.15 per gigabyte-month. After many step-wise price cuts S3 is down to $0.095 per gigabyte-month.
Pure online storage is fast becoming the sole province of vendors who either enjoy economies of scale, or who treat their offerings as a loss-leader to get other business (or a combination of both).
Smaller players may have to add value in other ways to survive. Nirvanix was not profitable, and when their latest round of funding came up short it was the last nail in their coffin.
Understanding the Fundamentals of Cloud Security for Healthcare
Continuing our discussion from my last blog in July, perhaps it’s helpful to drive deeper into security approaches and technology for use within clouds that serve the healthcare vertical. We’ll start by focusing on the fundamentals of cloud security for healthcare. However, some of this is transferable to other verticals as well.
First fundamental: Understand the data that will reside in the cloud.
Healthcare data has something in common. It’s dangerous to manage, unless you know exactly what you’re dealing with.
As we migrate health data to the cloud, it’s important to understand the data that will reside in the cloud-based systems, in terms of compliance and security requirements. This means understanding what is PII data, and what is not, as well as dealing with specific security requirements around encryption. This includes data in flight, and at rest.
After Nirvanix: How to assess the right cloud provider for you
By Nigel Beighton, VP of Technology, International, Rackspace
Choosing a cloud service provider is an important decision for any organisation. Cloud computing plays a central role in many businesses – from startups and SMBs to global companies – and usually involves entrusting service providers with mission-critical data and applications.
To assess potential providers and make the right choice, conducting due diligence across the following areas is essential.
Financials: As the recent closure of Nirvanix shows, it’s crucial to check a prospective provider’s financial position: past, present and future. If they are to be trusted with your data, they need to demonstrate that they have been, and should remain, financially sound.
So look for evidence of financial stability and growth over time; ask them about their financial prospects. Running a data centre requires major ongoing investment of capital, not to mention the substantial labour costs and operational budget. Are they in …
Webcast on Hybrid Cloud Strategy with VMware vCloud Hybrid Service
Because businesses need to respond more quickly to their internal and external customers as well as their competition, the agility and cost-effectiveness of moving applications to the cloud is an increasingly appealing option. Both IT and line-of-business leaders are looking for hybrid cloud solutions that not only connect and integrate their onsite and offsite environments, but also run existing and new applications in exactly the same way.
LSI Nytro WarpDrive Cards Maximize Performance for VMware Horizon View
LSI Corporation on Wednesday announced that it is working closely with VMware to deliver breakthrough virtual desktop density for VMware Horizon View™ deployments. Collaborative testing with VMware Horizon View using a single LSI® Nytro™ WarpDrive® application acceleration card achieved concurrent support for 200 active virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads on a two-node cluster with no storage latency.
“Our testing of the LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards confirms Nytro technology can support demanding VDI workload environments with simplified management and increasing security and control,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director of technical marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “LSI Nytro WarpDrive cards will help enable our customers to overcome the latency demands of VDI-intensive workloads to deliver high performance and return on investment.”
Understanding the fundamentals of cloud security for healthcare
By David Linthicum
Continuing our discussion from my last blog in July, perhaps it’s helpful to drive deeper into security approaches and technology for use within clouds that serve the healthcare vertical. We’ll start by focusing on the fundamentals of cloud security for healthcare. However, some of this is transferable to other verticals as well.
First fundamental: Understand the data that will reside in the cloud
Healthcare data has something in common. It’s dangerous to manage, unless you know exactly what you’re dealing with.
As we migrate health data to the cloud, it’s important to understand the data that will reside in the cloud-based systems, in terms of compliance and security requirements. This means understanding what is PII data, and what is not, as well as dealing with specific security requirements around encryption. This includes data in flight, and at rest.
Second fundamental: Identity-based security …
Forrester: Cloud Computing Fuels IT Spending
As IT departments get the green light to update systems and implement solutions, cloud computing is increasingly getting a slice of those IT budgets.
Cloud computing is on the list of top IT spending priorities for next year, according to Forrester Research.
Software spending worldwide will continue to grow with a big focus on the cloud, and these worldwide trends reflect the focus of midsize firms, according to an article on MidsizeInsider.com.
The Forrester research found that companies and governments spent more than $2 trillion on hardware, software and services. In the most popular segment, software firms allocated budgets for improving mobile apps, analytics, security and collaboration software. Software spending increased last year by more than $540 billion; it is expected to grow 3.3 percent this year and 6.2 percent in 2014, the largest projection for technology categories.