Running a successful business, regardless of the type of business, requires a handful of tenets that should always be embraced: enjoy what you do, hire the right people and provide the correct tools.
These days, one of those tools businesses now rely on to succeed is cloud computing. Many businesses are turning toward cloud computing, according to an article on Cloudtweaks.com. Here are a few reasons why.
With an increase in business comes more data. That data has to be stored somewhere. Instead of regularly buying new hard drives and external hard drives, many businesses have turned to cloud services. Cloud services are constantly expanding, and some offer a large amount of space at a premium price.
You can set your computers to remotely back up data to the cloud at certain intervals. If the worst case scenario happens and your computers are down, you’ll retain all of your data, since it’ll be stored remotely. You don’t have to worry about getting the computer repaired, either – since the data is remotely stored, you’ll be able to access everything from any computer.
Nippon Software Knowledge to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that Nippon Software Knowledge Corp will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“SOFIT super REALISM” is the world’s fastest all-in-one data processing appliance based on “in memory” technology. You can operate it easily and benefit from its amazing speed, which has never been experienced before.
Cloud Expo® 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4-7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT
The call for help began as a rumble.
Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor, sending an army of seismic waves to the coast of Japan, a geologic event as unavoidable and uncontrollable as it was unpredictable. By the time the earth again stood still and the subsequent tsunami receded from Japanese shores, the enormity of the tragedy was left to see, even as so much of the landscape was wiped clean by the waves.
Get It Right The First Time: The Importance of Customer Onboarding
by Duncan Robinson, Cloud Market Strategist, Parallels
Increase revenue per user and reduce churn – two of the key business drivers for service providers moving into the cloud. Customers who already have a relationship with service providers are a key target for cross-selling cloud services for good reason. Research by Parallels SMB Cloud Insights ™ shows that SMB customers are highly likely to consider their existing supplier for cloud services and 68% of US small businesses have a strong preference to buy more services from a single supplier. All good news for traditional service providers entering the cloud services market. However, making the most of this opportunity relies on delivering a great end-to-end customer experience.
A crucial (and often overlooked) part of this is customer onboarding. Customer onboarding is the process of setting up the customer’s service once they have completed their purchase. This is often done by phone appointment but can be done onsite (usually for an additional fee). This is a critical step as customers often don’t know how to set up and get the most from cloud services. Service providers need to take the lead in ensuring that customers have their services properly set up and help them to get the most out of them by providing advice on getting maximum business benefit.
To avoid churn, customers need to feel like they are getting value for their services. Imagine a scenario where a loyal, existing customer with 10 employees buys a new cloud service. None of the employees activate the service as they are unsure how to do it and eventually switch it off. This means the customer has been paying for something they have never used and are likely to feel pretty aggrieved at their service provider. Something meant to decrease churn could end up driving an increase!
The key to avoiding this is to build a high quality onboarding process into your end-to-end customer experience. We have seen great examples where service providers have implemented proper onboarding processes with impressive results. One such provider measures (on a weekly basis) customers who have been properly activated have a 90% lower churn rate than those who are inactive.
You can choose to do this in-house or outsource to a specialist partner. Either way it does require investment but will payback through lower churn, a reduction in ongoing calls to customer service and importantly higher customer satisfaction.
The message is clear: get it right the first time – invest upfront for happy customers and lower churn.
Learn more about Parallels Cloud Acceleration Services.
NYSE’s “Tick as a Service” shows cloud use is growing in the capital markets
Rik Turner, Senior Analyst, Financial Services Technology
NYSE Technologies, the technology products and services arm of the New York Stock Exchange, is teaming with UK software developer First Derivatives to launch “Tick As A Service,” an offering that will enable firms carrying out backtesting on algorithms and compliance checking to access large volumes of historical tick data directly from its facilities.
Payment is currently by monthly subscription rather than on a pay-per-use basis, and the data is presently stored separately for each customer, but the plan is to move to a central store, which suggests on-demand payment will become possible.
Ovum sees the launch as a further sign of the advance of cloud in the financial markets and recommends that companies with large-scale backtesting or compliance workloads consider the new service.
Data-as-a-service helps reduce capex on hardware and management
The partnership with First Derivatives is designed to enable companies that …
WebRTC Summit Registration Is Now Open
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.