Excel is not a CRM!

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a major player in helping manage a company’s interactions with current and prospective customers.

Using technology to organise, automate, and synchronise sales, marketing, customer service and technical support can seem daunting, which leads to many professionals using excel as a CRM system. 

However daunting it may seem, the CRM software market is healthy and growing, which means your competitors are likely using a CRM system.

Analyst firm Forrester predicts the CRM software market will reach more than $15 billion by 2014, nearly double what it was in 2007. The CRM market totaled about $11 billion in 2012.

The reason for the growth? Companies are placing an emphasis on driving growth by attracting new customers and selling more to existing customers. Is your business keeping pace?

If your sales representatives are creating Excel spreadsheets that contain customer contacts and …

Explore the basics of SSD technology and its application to cloud computing. Learn about common system interfaces from Sata to PCIe, sequential and random performance, latency, Quality of Service, and RAS features for cloud data center application.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mark Jackson, Product Marketing Engineer at Intel, and Charles Anyimi, Applications Engineering Data Center Manager at Intel, will cover typical applications of data center SSD storage and review example solutions and ROI benefits.

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Threats to cloud infrastructure are widely discussed, but much of the talk is based on assumptions — the cloud must be less secure — and fears — this is something new, so I don’t quite understand all the implications yet.
OK, we will say it: Security is an issue in the cloud … and in traditional managed hosting, in-house data centers, and desktop endpoints.
What’s important is to understand the specific security issues of each environment.
Alert Logic (Logicworks‘ security partner) recently released the latest “State of Cloud Security” report, which provides and in-depth view on the major issues impacting security in the cloud.

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In recent years, IT departments have been confronted with the convergence of several highly disruptive trends that have fundamentally altered the enterprise IT landscape, particularly when it comes to how data and applications are managed. Mobility and the rise of BYOD (bring your own device), as well as the growth of social media and the electronic information it generates, have each proved transformative. But perhaps no shift has been more seismic than the adoption of cloud and SaaS-based applications led by CIOs who see the value proposition associated with outsourcing many complex IT operations.
However, integrating data across diverse SaaS applications with existing on-premise solutions has proved exceptionally challenging. To streamline this integration without slowing adoption, IT stakeholders are turning to cloud-based integration solutions that can curtail complexity and IT oversight while enabling organizations to better leverage their information capital to drive business objectives. Indeed, according to a recent report by analyst firm MarketsandMarkets, the global Cloud Brokerage Services (CSB) market is on track to grow from $1.57 billion in 2013 to $10.5 billion by 2018, a compound annual growth rate of more than 45% over the five year period.

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A data dichotomy has changed the face of information management, bringing with it huge new data challenges for businesses to solve.
The dichotomy means that organizations, both large and small, not only need to manage all of their internal data to provide intelligence about their businesses, they need to manage the growing reams of increasingly external big data that enables them to discover new customers and drive new revenue.
What are the biggest challenges that businesses need to solve now when it comes to data and information management?

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Cloud has arrived. Everyone in the business, from the CEO to the customer relations manager, wants in on a computing model that promises to lower costs while delivering better service and greater efficiency. The business finally sees the potential of IT to add value, yet such high expectations don’t come without risks for failure.
How can you increase the odds of success? By building a firm foundation based on clear communication with the business about their requirements. These conversations should be specific, detailed and, most important, collaborative. The following five steps outline a requirements-gathering process that brings the business and IT together.

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Having decided that mobile is the place to be, Rackspace is offering developers free purpose-built mobile cloud stacks based on OpenStack to help them “design, build, test, deploy and scale mobile apps” on its cloud.
The stacks are supposed to reduce complexity and save deployment time while Rackspace manages background operations.
The first stack is for PHP and includes LAMP plus the HTTP accelerator Varnishd, Memcache, PHP Memcache extensions and Alternative PHP Cache (APC), all open source code.
Rackspace is also working on stacks for Ruby on Rails and Node.js back-ends.

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Enterprises that are looking to deploy cloud architectures quickly run into challenges in dealing with complex requirements around resilience, availability, multi-tenant security and data gravity. A naïve «one-size-fits-all» approach to cloud building based on legacy infrastructure is inadequate for such environments, resulting in high costs, inefficiency and needless frustration.
In his general session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Paul Rogers, chief development officer for GE’s Global Software Headquarters, will look at how cloud architects can leverage state-of-the-art colocation facilities, scale-out software-defined storage solutions based on Ethernet storage architectures, and modern open source cloud platforms such as OpenStack to build private data clouds. Adopting this approach allows customers to combine enterprise requirements such as security in multi-tenant environments, high availability and business continuity with the benefits of a cloud architecture.

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The new and enhanced HIPAA omnibus standard brings an interesting question with regards to cloud security and the shared responsibility model in IaaS clouds. Since the release of the HIPAA omnibus, we’ve received many questions around “BAA” agreements, and how the responsibility split actually happens between (for example) the cloud provider and an ISV providing a healthcare application in an IaaS environment.
Without getting to the details of what a “Business Associate Agreement” means, I’ll simply say that the updated regulation makes business associates (Healthcare ISVs’, and potentially the cloud providers themselves) of covered entities (i.e. clinics or hospitals) directly liable for compliance with certain requirements of the HIPAA privacy and security rules (read more about it in this excellent HIPAA survival guide post). In other words, the entire “food chain” (The cloud provider, the ISV, and any other business associates in the logical flow to the covered entity), should ideally sign a business associate agreement. But what is the practical meaning of such requirement in an IaaS cloud environment? As one should expect – full compliance can be achieved only if all parties (business associates) will enforce compliance where they can actually do so. The IaaS cloud provider for example, will prove compliance on the physical and hypervisor level, while the Healthcare ISV will prove compliance on the guest OS, the healthcare application, and PHI data stored in the cloud.

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With the increasing prevalence and acceptance of the cloud as a viable alternative to on-premise IT, today’s IT organizations are faced with a wide range of options. In fact, had you just woken from a five-year slumber, you might find the available array of cloud service options quite daunting.
At just a moment’s notice, you can spin up pretty much anything, with Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings all readily available. Services can reside on public clouds in multi-tenant environments, private clouds within the four walls of an organization, community clouds shared between a limited set of tenants, or even a hybrid arrangement.
For the many IT organizations mired in maintaining server and storage infrastructure, IaaS appears a very attractive alternative to managing hardware in-house. While it’s still a rare organization who seeks to move all their IT infrastructure to the cloud, there is a long list of benefits to strategically and selectively partitioning infrastructure using a hybrid strategy. Take a look at just a few benefits: reduction of capital expenses, maintenance expenses and avoidance of the often dreaded refresh cycles required on a 3-5 year basis.

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