How cloud integration is defining the future of CRM

The future of customer relationships depends more on context than transactions.   

And this trend is accelerating, driven by the integration of social media into customer relationship management (CRM), rapid gains in usability of CRM and integration applications, and the global growth of the API economy.

Gaining a clear, contextually-based view of customers isn’t easy.

Fine-tuning system integration to understand the nuances of customers, gain greater insights and infusing customer intelligence through a company requires more than APIs and cloud platform integration. 

It requires a precise strategy of integration to align customer data to ongoing strategies.

The bottom line is that customer-driven integration is reshaping CRM and will accelerate as cloud platforms, combined with APIs, reorder the customer relationship landscape.

To gain greater insights into what’s going on in the area of cloud-based CRM integration and the impact of the API economy, I recently spoke with Lou Guercia, President …

G-Cloud iii drums home the need to keep data local

The Cabinet Office’s third iteration of the G-Cloud framework not only added an extra 368 suppliers to its CloudStore, but it raised a few eyebrows over the exclusion of one notable bidder – Amazon!

The company made no secret of its desire for inclusion during the G-Cloud’s second iteration, touting that it was looking to get involved with the G-Cloud in the future.  And, the reasoning for its previous exclusion was widely attributed to its lack of a UK-based data centre, along with an absence of assurances over whether data would be backed up across the Atlantic.

So, while the cloud is set to change everything, some things will probably always remain the same.  Our protective nature over our own data and who can touch it might just be one of those things that will never change. 

Governments and public sector bodies fall into a rather unique category of …

Cloud-Friendly BPM: The Power of Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture

We must bring together the worlds of SOA, BPM, Cloud, REST, and HOA. The secret to getting all these architectural trends to work well together centers on how we deal with state information. We must first separate application state from resource state, and then subsequently take the conceptual leap to understanding that the best way to implement our business processes is by combining HOA processes with Composite RESTful Services. Once we make this leap, however, the pieces of this complicated puzzle finally fall into place.
What we need is a better way of dealing with state information that both allows our BPM engines to be Cloud friendly, and also frees us from the limitations of our ESBs. Or perhaps we must reinvent our ESBs to work in the Cloud. However you slice the problem, Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture (HOA) has the answer.

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Wowrack to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York

SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. From headquarters in Seattle, WA, Wowrack services seven data centers globally for nearly 3000 customers around the world.

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Big Data & Cloud Start-Ups Successfully IPO

Big Data and the cloud each contributed a start-up to the stock market last Friday.
Tableau Software, a profitable chart-making BI data visualization firm, IPO’d on the Big Board in New York sporting the highly desirable ticker symbol DATA and selling at the open for $31 a share. It rose to $50.75 by the end of the trading day, up nearly 64%.
It has subsequently inched up further and ran as high as $59.60 before falling back a few bucks. Its market cap was $1.9 billion at noon Tuesday.

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nfina Technologies to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York

SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in computer design, network equipment design, manufacturing, data center design and financial management.

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OpenStack to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York

SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS applications and eCommerce sites, the world’s largest public clouds, and Global 1000 enterprises alike, each of whom rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day. The open source cloud platform controls pools of compute, storage and networking resources at massive scale, making them available via a self-service dashboard.

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MaxCDN Now Accepting Bitcoin

NetDNA LLC, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, today announced that MaxCDN is the first CDN to accept payment via Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency, enables instant peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide payments with low or zero processing fees. The community-driven software operates with no central authority – managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.

“Developers are a core part of our customer base and have been requesting this payment model,” said Justin Dorfman of NetDNA. “We’re strong believers in open source and part of that commitment is being responsive to developer requests. Bitcoin as the emerging “coin of the realm” for this community and we’re excited at the opportunity to be accepting Bitcoins.”

SAP Pilots Service to Unlock Value of Mobile Data

SAP today announced the SAP Consumer Insight 365 mobile service, a pilot initiative of a new cloud-based offering aiming to unlock the value of big data. The service will be powered by the SAP HANA platform and will allow enterprises to gain insight from the analysis of massive amounts of aggregated and anonymized consumer data residing in operator networks in real time. This market intelligence will ultimately allow brands to strengthen relationships with consumers through more targeted and context-specific marketing efforts.

“The rise of the always connected mobile world is creating a new source of data that has the potential to provide deeper insight into consumer behavior,” according to Guy Rolfe , global mobile practice leader at Kantar Mobile. ”The challenge is that this data is on a scale not seen before, therefore any service that can address this will create a new empirical data source that will not only complement existing research methodologies, but will also enable brands to better connect to consumers.”

There are more mobile devices in the world than there are people. The proliferation of mobile devices has significantly changed the way people communicate, live and engage with each other at work and in their personal lives. As more consumers get connected around the world through mobile devices, smartphones and the Internet, all of these interactions create massive amounts of data. The sheer volume and scale of this data has made analysis difficult.

With SAP Consumer Insight 365, data from operator networks will be analyzed through advanced analytics providing population level insight as well as high-definition detail through an intuitive Web portal, without drilling down into user-specific information. All mobile network operator data will be stored discreetly and individually partitioned within a global network of SAP data centers.

 

 

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