Fundamentals of marketing

You need a plan that is well-constructed and appropriate for your business. Marketing is critical to the success of any business because without your potential customers knowing about your offer they will never have the opportunity to become customers. Marketing is the way you reach them, by communicating with them and showing people you have what they need. To construct your plan, you need to address three key areas:

Grazed from CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr, the cloud management company, today announced the first city in its Cloud Leaders Tour 2018 event series. Portland, OR, known for its thriving tech community, will play host on February 23, 2018. The Cloud Leaders event will feature talks by prominent local and national IT executives who have successfully leveraged cloud computing technology in their organization.

Attendees of Cloud Leaders Portland will learn how to shift their organizations toward a cloud-first approach, learn new skills that are unique to the cloud, network with peers, and dig into the latest industry issues and trends. They will also gain insights from the latest Cloud Management Report, which surveys experts on the development of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) in their organizations.

Blue Medora is an innovator in monitoring integration software for the most common application performance, cloud and database management platforms.

BindPlane is a first-of-its-kind monitoring integration service that connects the health and performance data on the top enterprise technologies with the world’s best IT performance monitoring and analytics platforms. The new integration service is a departure from the traditional platform-to-plugin approach and instead provides a single monitoring integration service that connects any analytics platform to the health and performance data on the top enterprise technologies instantly.

I recently saw an announcement from VMware reminding people that vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 are nearing what the virtualization giant is calling "End of General Support" or EOGS.  I guess that’s the more polite way of saying End of Life (EOL) what with no support being offered and all.  Mark your calendars, these two VMware products each reach EOGS on September 19, 2018. 

EOL, or EOGS for those playing the acronym game at home, dates tend to sneak up on people as this isn’t necessarily something everyone pays close attention to.  How many people actually disregarded the numerous attempts by Microsoft to migrate off of Windows XP?  Plenty.

For these two virtualization products nearing the end of support, VMware warns:

ZeroStack, Inc. today introduced new management and control features that improve IT governance of cloud resources while further reducing cloud operations and management overhead. The services are:

• Network sharing, which allows IT administrators to take gold images of networks and share them selectively with users or customers, and
• Quota-based monthly billing and cost management, which help MSPs and enterprises alike ensure proper billing for resources.

Tintri, Inc, a leading provider of enterprise cloud platforms, today announced Tintri Centralized Upgrade, a new management capability of the Tintri Global Center (TGC) that enables customers to deploy centralized upgrades of multiple Tintri storage systems across data centers with no disruptions.

TGC customers today spend just a few minutes per day to manage thousands of VMs-that includes the ability to set policies for quality of service, cloning, snapshots and replication. With Tintri Centralized Upgrade, the upgrade process is automated and requires no storage expertise. The user simply authorizes the upgrade with a single click and Tintri does the rest. The software will automatically take care of errors, rollback if needed and notify end users. With the latest updates, TGC now provides easy access to a dashboard, real-time metrics and the hardware page from a single console.

However, with all the devices and programs marketed towards creative professionals, it can be hard to decipher which are useful and which are wastes of money. To make a more informed decision, creatives have to remember that they’re living in an increasingly connected and collaborative world.

With that in mind, cloud-based tools become the obvious choice. Not only do these applications provide top of the line tools to complete tasks, but they give the ability to share work in an instant. If that sounds good to you, check the tools below to optimize your creative business.

Technology can help you to take control of your finances

First and foremost, technology can help you to take control of your finances. This is an essential part of running a successful business and is not something to be overlooked. Instead of rifling through messy piles of receipts and invoices, digitizing your information will help you to avoid mistakes and make more accurate predictions. Online banking is also a great idea if you want to keep a close eye on every transaction that is taking place. In addition to this, you can use excel to create databases that represent outgoing costs such as your monthly wages. Just make sure that you visit excel semi pro before you move forward with this plan. That way, you will have all of the necessary information at your disposal.

Written by David Marshall

Google has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Xively, a division of LogMeIn, Inc. for $50 million.

To better set the stage for the growing market landscape, the company said by 2020, it’s estimated that about 20 billion connected things will come online, and analytics and data storage in the cloud are now the cornerstone of any successful IoT solution. 

Google stated the deal will "complement" its Google Cloud efforts to provide a fully managed IoT service that easily and securely connects, manages, and ingests data from globally dispersed devices. Adding, "With the addition of Xively’s robust, enterprise-ready IoT platform, we can accelerate our customers’ timeline from IoT vision to product, as they look to build their connected business."