Everyone wants to use containers, but monitoring containers is hard. New ephemeral architecture introduces new challenges in how monitoring tools need to monitor and visualize containers, so your team can make sense of everything. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, David Gildeh, co-founder and CEO of Outlyer, will go through the challenges and show there is light at the end of the tunnel if you use the right tools and understand what you need to be monitoring to successfully use containers in your environments.
Cloud tools for Business Tasks
When it comes to running a businesses, it’s the small things that take up a ton of your time and effort. On another side, we’ve heard so much about the cloud and the benefits it offers in the form of saving time, money and effort, not to mention the reduced hassles of managing technology. Can we combine these two to use cloud tools for everyday tasks?
Yes.
Let’s look at a few tasks that we can do with cloud tools.
Appointments
One of the most painful tasks is to get an appointment with someone. This pain multiplies with the number of appointments you have to make for your business.
Let’s say, you want to get a sales appointment with the executives of a handful of companies to showcase your products to them. Imagine how much time you’ll spend to get an appointment with each of them. Cloud can ease this task for you.
ScheduleOnce, Appointy, TimeTrade, Calendly and SetMore are examples of such cloud tools that get appointments and manage them for you in a jiffy. They even integrate this with your calendar, so you can always stay on top of your appointments.
Customer Service
There is a staggering amount of cloud tools available in the area of customer service. Part of the reason for this proliferation is the fact that customer service is an integral part of every business, and also a time-consuming one.
In addition, every call and interaction you make with customers have to be tracked for analytics as well. This can require much effort, and one way to take some load off your shoulders, is to use a cloud-based CRM service. There are different tools with extensive customization options, so you can choose the one that best fits your business needs.
Hiring
Reports show that many companies prefer to hire freelancers to save on overheads. For this, you can make the most of cloud solutions like Upwork and Fiverr as they gave you access to freelancers worldwide.
There are cloud tools that can also ease the process of selecting and hiring full-time employees. These tools help you to connect with the right candidates to reach the best fit among thousands of people who’re looking for work. In this sense, cloud tools can be a blessing when it comes to hiring full-time employees and freelancer.
Payroll processing
Another complex task of any business is payroll processing. Paying your employees and freelancers, keeping track of the hours they worked and paying them is anything but simple. In addition, you have to manage meticulous records for the purposes of taxation and analytics, and this can take a substantial amount of your available resources.
To help you perform such a complex task, there are many cloud tools like QuickBooks, Payroll Mate and Payroll by Wave. Each of these tools can automate the entire payroll process, save records for tax and can even run analytics for you to give you an idea of how much your spend.
We hope this list helps to save some time and effort for you. Do let us know if you know more such tools.
The post Cloud tools for Business Tasks appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Cloudera sets IPO price at $12 to $14 a share, eyes near $2bn valuation
Cloud tech IPOs seem to be like buses; you wait ages for one, then two come along at once. After Okta went public earlier this month, Cloudera, a data management platform provider, said it expects its initial public offering price to be between $12 and $14 per share for 15 million shares.
The company expects 128,064,103 shares to be outstanding after its initial offering, putting its valuation at approximately $1.8 billion, and between $2.2bn and $2.4bn including options and grants.
Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, has consistently featured at the sharp end of top private cloud companies. Forbes had the firm in its top five private companies leading cloud computing in 2016, behind Slack, Dropbox, DocuSign and Stripe, while figures from recruitment firm Glassdoor last year, based on the top 100 cloud vendors list from Computer Reseller News, put the firm in the top 10 as a desirable employer, with CEO Tom Reilly given a 93% approval rating.
The company outlines its modus operandi in the filing to the SEC. “Cloudera empowers organisations to become data-driven enterprises in the newly hyperconnected world,” it reads. “We allow enterprises to operate, manage and move workloads across multiple architectures, mixing on-premises and cloud environments, including all major public cloud infrastructure providers. We believe that our solution is the most widely adopted big data platform, with a growing range of applications being built on it.”
As is often the case, Cloudera has recorded losses of $135.4m, $203.1m and $187.3m for its 2015, 2016, and 2017 financial years, adding that it expects the trend to continue ‘for the foreseeable future’. Since 2009 and its series A funding round of $5m, more than $1bn has been raised for the company, the largest being $740m in March 2014 led by Intel.
The firm adds that its competitors are in four categories; legacy data management product providers, such as HP, IBM and Oracle; public cloud providers with data management and analytics offerings, such as AWS, Google and Microsoft; strategic partners who may also offer competitors’ technology; and open source companies, like Hortonworks and MapR.
A letter from the founder, Christophe Bisciglia, examines the opportunity the company faces. “In 2008, we saw the confluence of big data and the cloud as a huge opportunity. In 2017, it’s clear that we underestimated it,” Bisciglia wrote. “The cloud is better, faster and much cheaper than it was then.
“There is more data available than ever before,” he added. “We thought we had big data back then. We were only getting started. New data is coming from trading systems, from jet engines, from diagnostic devices in hospitals, from factory floors, from cars and trucks, from people – from everywhere. Over the last nine years, we have learned that data makes things that are impossible today, possible tomorrow.”
As affirmed by Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners, the five cloud IPOs of 2016 – Apptio, Blackline, Coupa, Everbridge and Twilio – represented the lowest number since the financial crisis of 2008.
Big Data Without the Insight | @CloudExpo #BigData #DevOps #IoT #AI #ML
The Big Bang Theory is the pre-eminent explanation for the origins of the universe. It proposes, from an explosion of atoms, the universe rapidly expanded and in doing so created everything we know. But it did so in an erratic, haphazard and unstructured way. For every life form, an infinite amount of inhospitable desolate galaxies, planets and black holes were also created.
Big Data is often associated with the birth of what is known as the Third Generation of IT and many are now at a crossroads: Do they continue down the current path, hoping to stumble upon a planet Earth as they navigate a sprawling universe of information and data that continually expands in a totally unstructured fashion? Or do they apply longer term strategy, investing now to refine their technology and capitalize on the explosion of information available.
[video] #BigData-Driven #DevOps at @DevOpsSummit | #IoT #SDN #Hadoop
DevOps is being widely accepted (if not fully adopted) as essential in enterprise IT. But as Enterprise DevOps gains maturity, expands scope, and increases velocity, the need for data-driven decisions across teams becomes more acute. DevOps teams in any modern business must wrangle the ‘digital exhaust’ from the delivery toolchain, «pervasive» and «cognitive» computing, APIs and services, mobile devices and applications, the Internet of Things, and now even blockchain.
FinTech at @CloudExpo New York | #BigData #AI #ML #DL #FinTech #Blockchain
Financial Technology has become a topic of intense interest throughout the cloud developer and enterprise IT communities.
Accordingly, attendees at the upcoming 20th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York, June 6-8, 2017, will find fresh new content in a new track called FinTech.
Top #DevOps Influencer: @DevOpsSummit | #AI #CD #Serverless #Monitoring
@DevOpsSummit has been named the ‘Top DevOps Influencer’ by iTrend. iTred processes millions of conversations, tweets, interactions, news articles, press releases, blog posts – and extract meaning form them and analyzes mobile and desktop software platforms used to communicate, various metadata (such as geo location), and automation tools. In overall placement, @DevOpsSummit ranked as the number one ‘DevOps Influencer’ followed by @CloudExpo at third, and @MicroservicesE at 24th.
[session] @Nutanix’ Persistent #Containers | @DevOpsSummit #SDN #DevOps
In recent years, containers have taken the world by storm. Companies of all sizes and industries have realized the massive benefits of containers, such as unprecedented mobility, higher hardware utilization, and increased flexibility and agility; however, many containers today are non-persistent. Containers without persistence miss out on many benefits, and in many cases simply pass the responsibility of persistence onto other infrastructure, adding additional complexity.
Aruna Ravichandran @DevOpsSummit Co-Chair | @Aruna13 @CAinc #DevOps
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of DevOps Product and Solutions Marketing at CA Technologies, has been named co-conference chair of DevOps at Cloud Expo 2017. The @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley will take place Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
City Harvest – A Case Study
Cloud is pervasive and is used across all sectors to do a ton of things. It’s no longer about corporates using it to gain business value and intelligence, rather it’s become an integral part of our everyday life. In fact, many small businesses and charity organizations are leveraging the power of cloud to improve their performance, efficiency and operations.
New York food charity called City Harvest specializes in collecting excess food from farms, grocers, restaurants and manufacturers and gives them free to more than 500 soup kitchens, community pantries and other community-based kitchens in New York.
One of the important aspects here is that City Harvest doesn’t move manufactured or cooked food., which means, it has to collect the raw ingredients like fruits and vegetables and deliver them quickly to community kitchens. During all this, it has to track the full chain custody of the food that is collected and delivered.
This charity has a fleet of 22 trucks and two tractor-trailers that make about 20 stops each day to collect and deliver food. Such a complex system requires high levels of operational accuracy and planning, and this is why it has turned to the cloud for help.
What it’s done is to have mobile apps that are used by drivers and the agencies to which it delivers. This gives it the ability to communicate in real-time. For example, when a driver makes a stop at a location, he or she can know what is available for pick-up. Once he posts it on the app, community kitchens can decide right away what they need and the same will be delivered to that kitchen within the shortest possible time.
The obvious advantage with such a system is that the food is collected and delivered fresh, so healthy meals can be served by these kitchens. Secondly, there is little to no waste and every kitchen gets to pick what they want from the available items. This way, City Harvest acts as a perfect bridge between the givers and users, and in the process ensures that no food is wasted.
Since all this data is stored in the cloud, there’s no more paper work involved. According to James Safonov, the IT head at City Harvest, it used to take the charity almost five days to reconcile paper work. With cloud, the same reconciliation is done in minutes, thereby saving the staff a huge amount of time and effort.
This additional time and effort is being spent in innovation and improving the efficiency of operations and getting more suppliers to their list.
For agencies and suppliers, this app helps them to see where their food is getting delivered. They can even get an understanding of the allocations made among community kitchens in real-time. This information can help them also to plan better.
For the users of community kitchens, this app is a blessing, Called Plentiful, this app helps them to register for food assistance and see what’s available in pantries and food kitchens. As a result, their wait time is reduced significantly and also eases administrative tasks for food providers and community kitchens.
Overall, a great example of how you can leverage the power of cloud.
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