Business Processes, iPad, iPhone, Mobile, QuickBooks, Small business

QuickBooks Online Adds Mobility With New iPad App

With today’s introduction of QuickBooks Online for iPad, small businesses that are mobile by nature will no longer have to save the books for last. Rather, they can get more out of their workdays with an app that helps them work more productively, wherever they are.

“As a wedding planner, I spend 70 percent of my time away from my desk meeting with clients and vendors. At the end of the day, I used to sort through my meeting notes, map out next steps, track payments and expenses, and follow up with invoices,” said Sadie Waddington of Locally Grown Weddings in San Francisco, Calif. “Now, I save time by catching up on accounting during the four hours I commute on public transit each week using QuickBooks Online for iPad. The app also helps keep me more organized and look more professional in front of my clients and vendors.”

Now available in the App Store, QuickBooks Online for iPad brings the world’s No. 1 small business cloud accounting solution to one of the world’s fastest-growing computing devices. It packages the most useful on-the-go business tasks in an easy-to-use, friendly app with a native iPad experience, including integration with the Camera, Contacts, Push Notifications and Location Services.

“Managing a small business is a different game today than it was a few years ago, due in large part to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets,” said Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Financial Management Solutions division. “We found that more than 20 percent of QuickBooks Mobile for iPhone users access the app through iPads. And, customers like Sadie told us they need more than mobile point solutions – they need an all-in-one app that lets them work in a whole new way, and that’s what we created.”

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Medicine in the cloud: Embracing cloud computing for multiple uses

Cloud computing seems to have taken the IT world by storm within a number of industries and the medical field and all it entails is no exception.

The medical industry in all its forms has embraced the cloud in a number of manners as varied as the industry itself, from simply keeping patient information and histories in the cloud to using it for new drug discoveries, innovative medical treatments, and efficient storing, distribution, and analyzing of medical imaging and real-time data. 

Throw in the everyday operations management of medical facilities and employees within and the use of cloud computing in the medical industry grows even further.

Basic record keeping

Hospitals and medical practices in general are well-known for the sheer amounts of data created on each individual patient, from histories to procedures to medications to x-rays and charts to billing.

Up until the advent and facilitation of cloud computing this …

Call Center, Evolve IP, NACR, Partnerships, Telecommunications Industry

Evolve IP, NACR Partner for Unified Communications, Hosted Contact Centers

Today Evolve IP announced it has partnered with NACR, an independent integrator of communications solutions. With this agreement, NACR will leverage Evolve IP’s  unified platform to offer its customers cloud services including unified communications/hosted IP phone services, virtual servers, and call center solutions.

NACR serves over 5,500 clients from small businesses to Fortune® 100 and global enterprise clients. Through this relationship, NACR’s customers gain access to Evolve IP’s cloud services including:

  • Unified communications/IP phone systems that provide advanced features such as fixed mobile convergence (FMC), find me/follow me, unified messaging, HD voice, and more, all delivered as a cloud service but with the quality and control of on-site equipment.
  • Virtual servers that utilize Evolve IP’s private cloud infrastructure to reduce CAPEX while improving IT productivity. Evolve IP’s virtual servers leverage the scalability and failover of public cloud services while maintaining the privacy and security of dedicated environments.
  • Hosted contact centers that improve operations and customer service with intelligent routing and queues, call recording, call whisper, and every major feature needed to run a best-practice call center.

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We Should Sell “Cloud” Better

Everyone in the IT industry knows how amazing cloud computing is – it can cut overheads, introduce flexibility and make previously unobtainable services affordable for even the smallest of businesses. But with 60 per cent of the American public claiming to have no clue at all about cloud services, it seems that the sector’s enthusiasm is yet to turn into mainstream awareness.
It’s tempting to dismiss such findings out of hand – after all does it really matter if people don’t know how iTunes, Gmail and other products work as long as they actually do what customers want? The answer is a resounding yes, it does matter. Too many small business owners don’t understand the benefits of cloud computing and they’re missing out.

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There Is More to PaaS Than You Think

As described in the last week’s post NIST defines three different cloud computing service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS and SaaS are really easy to grasp but I see people struggling to understand the PaaS model. As a long-time application developer though I find the PaaS model the most compelling one for new applications. Here is why.
I will look at two examples: one enterprise and one from the consumer world.
Let’s start with the enterprise scenario. If you examine any enterprise application portfolio you will find out that almost every development team has implemented it’s own code for handling common functionality like authentication, authorization, database access etc. There are also numerous cases when the same team developed the same functionality over and over in each new project. Even the componentization model doesn’t help in this situation because either developers are often not aware of the existence of the components or there are too many options they can choose from and they cannot find the right fit for their scenario. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the holly grail for this problem but many enterprises are still far from achieving this goal.

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Five Ways Cloud Can Improve Your Business’s Top Line Growth

While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.
Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.

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Technology, Innovation and Futile Feats

During a recent conversation with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and his top executives, it became apparent that amid all the new technology advancements like cloud computing and Big Data, organizations are struggling to seek the concrete advantages in applying these technologies to their own real-world scenarios. Even more worrisome is the situation that occurs when an organization cannot leverage any of the already-proven solution approaches or services to address a specific problem or a concern and the situation remains unresolved over time.
These issues could very well be rooted in the way an organization goes about solving problems. Or they can reflect the inability of their service provider and technology vendor to identify the need for change and the implementation of the right solution.

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Cloud Compliance in IaaS Is Mainly Your Responsibility

Cloud compliance is always a hot topic, but recent updates to the HIPAA and PCI regulations, have further enhanced the need to clarify some important points around cloud compliance and regulatory compliance. In this blog post, I would like to address some issues as highlighted in the valuable PCI DSS Cloud Computing Guidelines (available here), around compliance and Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing. (While the trigger is the PCI guideline, the discussion applies to HIPAA as well).
First and foremost, the level of control and your ability as a cloud customer to implement security in your cloud environment is dictated by your cloud type. For example a customer using Software as a Service (SaaS) will have the least amount of control and the SaaS provider will have the greatest level of responsibility for data security, while in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the customer has much more control on data security implemented in his cloud account while the IaaS provider will emphasize “shared responsibility”. And to translate it to compliance: A customer in a SaaS environment must rely heavily on the provider’s compliance (which is either there or not), while in a IaaS environment the customer must take active responsibility for compliance together with tools provided by the IaaS cloud provider.

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Technology, Innovation and Futile Feats

During a recent conversation with a CIO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise and his top executives, it became apparent that amid all the new technology advancements like cloud computing and Big Data, organizations are struggling to seek the concrete advantages in applying these technologies to their own real-world scenarios. Even more worrisome is the situation that occurs when an organization cannot leverage any of the already-proven solution approaches or services to address a specific problem or a concern and the situation remains unresolved over time.
These issues could very well be rooted in the way an organization goes about solving problems. Or they can reflect the inability of their service provider and technology vendor to identify the need for change and the implementation of the right solution.

read more