As a business consulting company, we frequently hear the comment, “We are more than capable of building our own home-grown technology ecosystem.” That’s great. But before you jump in head-first, and start buying a bunch of servers and stalking developers on LinkedIn, you should consider everything required to build, implement, and maintain your system.
Here at Bluewolf, we’ve discovered several misguided rationales behind building your own CRM. To avoid falling into those traps, consider these 5 wrong reasons to build your own CRM:
“I can build it, so I will.”
This is the most common reason. We often come across tech companies, start-ups, online retailers, etc. who have a lot of in-house technology expertise. While it is logical to think that a company can achieve this technology transformation in-house, issues often lie around resourcing and prioritisation.
Development resources are often tight and are necessarily channeled …
When the CEO of a rust-belt manufacturer speaks of cloud computing as critical to his company’s business strategies for competing globally, it’s clear a fundamental shift is underway.
Nearly every manufacturing company I’ve spoken with in the last 90 days has a mobility roadmap and is also challenged to integrate existing ERP, pricing and fulfillment systems into next-generation selling platforms.
One of the most driven CEOs I’ve met in manufacturing implemented a cloud-based channel management, pricing, quoting and CRM system to manage direct sales and a large distributor network across several countries. Manufacturers are bringing an entirely new level of pragmatism to cloud computing, quickly deflating its hype by pushing for results on the shop floor.
There’s also been an entirely new series of enterprise software and cloud computing forecasts and market estimates published. I’ve summarised the key take-aways below:
As the new technologies emerge, the number of technical terms also gets piled up. While those who are always updated are familiar of all the seemingly “vague” terms, the rest of the world remained confused. Such is the case tackling the collaboration, crowdsourcing, social media and a lot more. In this article, we will differentiate between cloud computing and virtualization.
Virtualization and Cloud Computing
Apparently, many businesses have been alarmed and informed on the advantages of using cloud computing against traditional storage for their files and data. Aside from the power of accessibility, mobility and security, cloud computing brings in more savings and more efficiency for maintaining the operations of the company. In line with this, the concept of virtualization is often mixed up with the former approach. Both are gaining dominance, however people are not sure just how different they are from each other.
Common community cloud conversation questions include among others:
Who defines the standards for community clouds?
The members or participants, or whoever they hire or get to volunteer to do it.
Who pays for the community cloud?
The members or participants do, think about a co-op or other resource sharing consortium with multi-tenant (shared) capabilities to isolate and keep members along with what they are doing separate.
The economics of business are radically changing due to the way in which software and services are being delivered thanks to cloud computing.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mike Kavis, Chief Technologist at Kavis Technology Consulting, will cover the following six reasons for the disruption:
Cloud Culture
Investing in Reality
Changing Labor Pool
New business models
Founder’s dilemma
PaaS is the game changer
Cisco released findings from two global studies that provide a vivid picture of the rising security challenges that businesses, IT departments and individuals face — particularly as employees become more mobile, blending work and personal lifestyles throughout their waking hours.
Despite popular assumptions that security risks increase as a person’s online activity becomes shadier, findings from the Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveal that the highest concentration of online security threats tend to target legitimate destinations visited by mass audiences — such as major search engines, retail sites and social media outlets.
Cisco found that online shopping sites are 21 times as likely, and search engines are 27 times as likely, to deliver malicious content than a counterfeit software site.
Security risks rise in businesses because many employees adopt “my way” work lifestyles in which their devices, work and online behavior mix with their personal lives virtually anywhere — in the …
The pressure for organizations, in the public or private sector, to reduce costs is constant. At the same time, organizations have to remain or improve user productivity in all their departments to stay competitive. This is even further magnified during a recovering economy as organizations face challenges of sustaining or growing revenue from customers or even government. Management and shareholders are always on the lookout to reduce their expenses. Innovative technology is one area where companies can look into to help to lower expenses with efficiency gains.
Specifically with respect to technology, many companies are taking advantage of the cloud to help with reducing expenditures while simultaneously improving productivity.
Server virtualization has already proven beneficial for many enterprises. Through data center consolidation, server virtualization is able to enhance efficiency and reduce operational expenses. As this technology continues to evolve, however, IT professionals are moving beyond the basic benefits of consolidation. With advanced virtualization technologies, IT organizations can provide a variety of cloud-based services for users. These innovative services are best supported through application-driven virtualization, an approach that dramatically simplifies management and deployment.
Virtualization management platforms vary. However, available platforms are able to optimize, configure and manage all components of the application stack. Using such platforms, IT professionals can manage all storage, networks, servers, virtual machines and applications in operation. Because these platforms improve IT’s ability to deploy and maintain its enterprise applications, the organization’s overall agility and efficiency improves as well.
Everyone is talking about Big Data but what does that really mean for companies trying to understand how to make data meaningful for decision making. To leverage Big Data, you have to be able to take the key results and use those patterns or anomalies in context with historical data to make decisions.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Judith S. Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, Inc., and Alan Nugent, Co-Founder of the Boston CTO Group, will provide a pragmatic guide to leveraging Big Data in the right way to impact business decision making.
The benefits associated with adoption of the cloud are well documented and understood. Organizations cite tremendous cost savings, fast deployment times and streamlined application support and maintenance when compared to traditional on-premise software deployments. So what is holding many companies back from adopting the cloud? A recent report from Gartner entitled “Five Cloud Data Residency Issues That Must Not Be Ignored” highlights one key reason for this hesitancy – enterprises’ questions and concerns about jurisdictional and regulatory control arising from a lack of clarity on where cloud data truly resides. The report from Gartner recommends that enterprises adopt measures that will simultaneously boost the security of sensitive data as well as assist them in satisfying regulatory compliance with data residency laws.