Elasticsearch, the real-time Big Data search and analytics concern formed to commercialize the eponymous open source project that one of its founders started, has gotten a $10 million A round.
The financing was led by Benchmark Capital with Rod Johnson, the creator of Spring and co-founder of SpringSource, and Data Collective kicking in.
The company says it will use the money to build out the organization in all functional areas and expand into key geographic regions to support the adoption of Elasticsearch.
The Amsterdam-base start-up means to open an office in Silicon Valley with the money.
Actuate Offers ActuateOne for Customer Communications Management
Actuate Corporation today announced ActuateOne® for Customer Communications Management (CCM), an integrated solution for top-tier organizations to design, process, store and deliver high-volume customer communications, including account statements, policies, and bills. ActuateOne for CCM is the first in a series of solutions based on the BIRT iHub, a next generation solution deployment framework for delivering applications that keep end-users up to date on the insights they need – where and when they are needed.
“ActuateOne for CCM is designed to give organizations ultimate flexibility to integrate individual components within their existing infrastructures, or to deploy the complete solution to manage their enterprise customer communications,” said Steve Jones, Vice President and General Manager, Actuate Xenos Group. “With the solution, organizations are now able to aggregate customer data for campaign analysis, create targeted customer communications and deliver them to customers through their desired channels, via print and mail or digital channels on desktop or mobile devices.”
“In Customer Communications Management, as with other information management environments, awareness of the entire CCM process tends to be fragmented and limited to an individual’s specific area of focus,” said John Mancini, President at AIIM International. “When information managers don’t have a sense of how the entire Customer Communications process fits together, it limits their ability to make optimal decisions, plus they waste an inordinate amount of resources trying to integrate technologies and processes. What are needed are end-to-end technologies that enable CCM to be understood across data acquisition, content composition, processing, archiving and delivery.”
Within an integrated ActuateOne for CCM environment, organizations can:
- Build market-driven and customer targeted strategies: With
sophisticated data acquisition, data mining and analytics,
organizations can freely analyze customer data. Marketers can identify
market-specific insights and create targeted communications.
Communications can be defined to insert directed trans-promo, next
best offers and targeted marketing messages tailored to each targeted
customer segment. - Compose and create targeted customer communications: With
end-to-end document composition using BIRT, ActuateOne for CCM
simplifies the creation of customer communications. Taking raw data
from varying data sources, the solution creates targeted and
personalized customer communications for both modern-interactive and
traditional-print delivery. Through the use of definable templates
organizations can quickly create customer communications with
organizational branding, customer data and personalized marketing
messages. - Automate and manage customer communications: With leading
document processing and transformation capabilities, ActuateOne for
CCM easily stays on top of data deluge and the process complexity that
accompanies it. The solution simplifies the processes involved in
managing disparate systems and applications by managing the end-to-end
communications process, from data acquisition to analysis,
composition, archive and delivery to end consumers for print and
electronic consumption. With the ability to define and automate
business processes, ActuateOne for CCM enables administrators to
control, log and audit the entire communications process. - Securely Store Customer Communications: Using state-of-the-art
electronic archiving, ActuateOne for CCM addresses a key challenge
faced by today’s IT personnel – to efficiently store and retrieve
documents for numerous business purposes, ranging from business
analytics to online presentment to regulatory compliance. The solution
provides efficient search and retrieval and enables the retention and
disposition to satisfy industry-specific regulatory requirements. With
a built-in audit, logging and reports, ActuateOne for CCM provides a
360° system view, letting administrators identify potential concerns
before they become performance bottlenecks. - Delivering content where it’s needed, when it’s needed: With
its electronic, multi-channel delivery architecture, ActuateOne for
CCM facilitates secure internal and external access of customer
communications, enabling organizations to efficiently deliver content
to internal users and external customers. By using ActuateOne for
CCM’s ability to leverage a single composition design, only a single
format is required to enable delivery for print, web, mobile and touch
enabled devices. - Enrich customer-facing applications: With the ability to build
or integrate with application portals and dashboards, ActuateOne for
CCM enables organizations to share useful information such as
insurance policies, service specifications and billing details to
enrich the individual customer experience. The solution connects
customer-facing applications with relevant content to increase
application functionality by delivering communications in traditional
static formats like PDF for simple statement review, as well as
interactive formats that allow users to analyze, aggregate, manipulate
and graph data within the customer-facing application.
What is the long-term future of the data centre industry?
The world is changing faster than ever. The economic centres of power are shifting: from West to East, and from North to South. Economic liberalisation is one driver, as is the speed at which capital moves seamlessly around the world and the general demographic trends of people moving from insular communities in the countryside to faster paced environments in towns and cities. But the biggest driver is technology.
Manufacturing and IT technology is moving faster than it ever has. Small armies which can adapt and exploit new technologies quickly are taking on and defeating large armies which are wedded to long-lead capital expenditures.
Wealth is unlikely to be evenly distributed. A recent long term report from HSBC projects that by 2050 the richest countries measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will be China, the USA, India and Japan, in that order. But the richest countries by Income per Capita (i …
The Hottest Panels of this Fall!
As I am writing this, I am crossing the Atlantic for the seventh time in about two months. I’m on my way to CloudExpo West in Santa Clara, one of the few technology trade shows that are still growing. At the event I will be sitting on the last Object Storage for Big Data panel of the season. Robin Harris – aka StorageMojo – and I have been working hard this fall educating the industry on the benefits, challenges and opportunities of Object Storage. We’ve been trying to explain how the current generation of Object Storage platforms is so much different from the first attempt at it (EMC’s Centera), how it enables companies cope with the massive amounts of unstructured data that we are all generating and how companies can even monetize archived data by re-activating their archives.
Five Essential Components of Virtual Desktop ROI
Server virtualization was, for many in IT, a major win. IT departments and data centers were suddenly able to do a whole lot more with a whole lot fewer resources. Naturally, as time goes on, it’s become more and more attractive for IT to consider desktop virtualization.
Yet, the virtual desktop requires an infrastructure that’s simply not in place for many companies, and the ROI isn’t always clear from the start.
Big Data at Sears
Sears plus its acquired entity Kmart belong to Sears Holdings whose goal is to get closer to its customers. That requires big time analytic capabilities. While revenue at Sears has declined from $50B in 2008 to $42B in 2011, rivals like Wal-Mart. Target and Amazon have grown steadily with better profit. Amazon’s retail business has gone from $19B in revenue in 2008 to $48B in 2011, passing Sears for the first time.
Sears used IMS (IBM’s first generation database product) on mainframe plus Teradata. Its ETL process using IBM DataStage software on a cluster of distributed servers took 20 hours to run. Since their adoption of Hadoop back in 2010, one of the steps (taking 10 hours out of the 20 hours) ran at 17 minutes. Their slogan is “ETL must die”, as they would like to load raw data directly to Hadoop. The old systems consisted of EMC Greenplum, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Exadata (four boxes) for analytical workload. That is all being replaced by Hadoop, Datameer, MySQL, InfoBright, and Teradata.
AppZero Offers Go Daddy Rescue Program
This free application migration offer is available to Go Daddy customers through the end of the year. Additional migrations, if any, will be priced on a case-by-case basis.
Commenting on the program, Greg O’Connor, AppZero CEO notes, «The Go Daddy situation is a great example of why there is a real business need to avoid cloud lock-in. AppZero’s Zapp application migration software will identify, extract, and migrate server applications from/to any cloud and will do it in minutes. In this case, for each Go Daddy customer, we will do the first two migrations no charge and deliver those applications to any cloud of choice. At the very least, this offer gives Go Daddy cloud customers the breathing room to make strategic decisions.»
Four Minute Lesson on Infrastructure as a Service
As a follow up to my article on Infrastructure as a Service, here is a four minute video:
Cloud Computing Is the One True Path
Walking around Cloud Expo in Santa Clara yesterday, sitting in on various sessions, grabbing conversations with old friends and new acquaintances, I learned a few things:
The technologists are still ahead of the customers. Although AWS has been around since 2006, the impression here is that most enterprises are still migrating to the cloud very slowly. I take this as a good sign, as the best is yet to come. I wrote last year that it was still only Year One for the cloud; this may still be true.
I love PaaS and its potential, but this seems be a mystery still to many companies. I think it’s because decades of legacy, stovepiped architecture, applications, and data have resulted in 80-90% of IT budgets and time to be spent on routine operations rather than innovation. This habit is hard to change, especially so since most people, to be honest, would rather focus on the routine rather than the innovative, because the innovative is hard.
Green continues to emerge. At Cloud Expo and what I’ve seen in the industry in general, it’s taking a sensible, efficiency-oriented approach, rather than cast in apocalyptic global warming or nanny-state terms.
There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry lately. I’m seeing dozens more companies who seem to be staking their claim to a single area of superior core competence, and are waiting for someone to buy them out.
Great to see the Holland pavilion in full swing. Lots of fresh ideas in the areas of collaboration, cloud management, and real-time monitoring.
Cloud’s inevitability is as strong as ever, even if most people’s day-to-day routine may not pick up on this. But one speaker said the amount of data on the Internet continues to double every five years or so, and I’m starting to hear the word “yottabyte” thrown around. The disconnect is that grand, abstract visions don’t help anyone get the milk delivered today. But we need to know that, even with a perpetual Moore’s Law, data storage and transmission does have a price (eg, 18 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth delivered by Rackspace), and as we start to think in terms of billions and trillions of gigabytes we simply must have the means to deal with this amount of data. Cloud computing is the one, true path.
Swivel Secure launches in North America
Swivel Secure, a provider of tokenless authentication technology that is capable of securing Microsoft Office 365 as well as other cloud and virtual private network (VPN) remote access solutions, announced its expansion into North America and the opening of its first office in Seattle, Washington.
Swivel Secure is a UK network security solutions provider that has pioneered the development of tokenless, multi-factor authentication technology. The Swivel authentication platform, first launched in 2003, is now used in over 35 countries by governments and global enterprises in a range of sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals and logistics as well as in hundreds of smaller businesses around the world.
Swivel’s strategic entry into North America marks the launch of an aggressive channel expansion programme targeting value added resellers (VARs) in the Washington State area and beyond.
“The market for tokenless authentication is growing rapidly as US businesses start to take cloud solutions seriously,” comments Fraser Thomas, VP International, Swivel Secure, who is spearheading the US expansion and VAR recruitment programme. “Given that Swivel is an approved tokenless provider for Microsoft Office 365, a Swivel partnership will enable VARs to offer a compelling remote access proposition for businesses that are migrating to the cloud, together with those that are employing more traditional VPN solutions.”
The unauthorised access of sensitive corporate data is one of the biggest fear factors holding businesses back from migrating to the cloud. Securing a corporate infrastructure with multi-factor authentication means that business owners can be assured that only permitted individuals will be able to gain access to their corporate systems.
