Category: News

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Financial service firms, including banks, brokerages, security firms and more, are among the types of organizations that can take advantage of the endless benefits of cloud computing architecture. Many financial organizations have made the move to cloud solutions, while other organizations are examining such a move. However, for regulated firms, there are significant legal and regulatory challenges that IT teams must navigate before moving to cloud architecture.

HOB, the market leader in pure software-based remote access solutions, seeks to help IT teams at financial institutions better understand the benefits of cloud computing and how to overcome regulatory challenges with a new e-paper now available for free download on the HOB website. The e-paper, titled "Clearing the Haze on Cloud Computing in the Financial Services Industry," describes various concerns financial institutions may have about cloud computing and offers insight on how to overcome these challenges…

Grazed from MobileMarketingWatch. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new report from cloud services provider Bluelock is highlighting the benefits and advantages of cloud infrastructure as a service. “There’s a lot to consider when it comes to the cloud buying process,” the company says. “Security, compatibility and managed services are just a few important offerings cloud buyers have to consider. But, what matters most to cloud consumers?”

The findings of a recent survey from the company were compiled to form a telling new infographic that draws a strong picture of what matters most to the IaaS consumer now, and what they expect to care about in the future. To learn more, and to view the infographic, visit: http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/infographic-what-customers-actually-seek-from-iaas-providers-36043/

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bill.com, the leader in integrated bill payment, invoicing and cash flow management solutions for businesses, today announced that it has launched the Bill.com App Center, which for the first time creates an open, SaaS-based platform focused on streamlining workflows and supercharging productivity not just for CFOs but for entire companies. Whereas the finance function historically has been an island, unaware of purchases or sales that impact cashflow until often too late in the process, the Bill.com App Center has now created critical bridges to the finance operation by integrating essential business tools from cross-company departments into the finance system.

The Bill.com App Center is designed to solve financial professionals’ most common business needs, streamlining workflow by bringing together key tools, such as combining expense management, online mail management, and accounting systems…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Box, the Silicon Valley darling that has disrupted enterprise cloud storage and file sharing, will broaden its scope into the content-creation space with a new online note-taking application. Box Notes, to be unveiled on Monday at the company’s BoxWorks conference in San Francisco, will provide a word processor-like interface where colleagues can add content to the document and co-edit it in real time.

The application, which will be a standard component of the Box product, is in a limited test release. Interested testers need to request access by signing up at Box.com/notes. The company is looking at next year for releasing it in final form. "This is our first step into content creation and productivity [software]," said Chris Yeh, Box’s senior vice president of product and platform…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services has altered its Reserved Instance (RI) terms to enable customers to make certain changes after the contract is signed. Even with new powers to modify a contract, setting initial terms is not as simple as it sounds. Cloudability is stepping in to try to make it easier.

AWS Reserved Instance customers may now change the availability zone in which a RI runs or the network attributes assigned to it, but they can’t vary the lifespan set forth in the contract. RIs come with one-year or three-year subscriptions. In the past, customers were stuck with whatever RI attributes they signed up for, over the duration of the contract. But the RIs also come with a significant discount over Amazon’s on-demand server prices…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

inContact (SAAS), the leading provider of cloud contact center software and contact center agent optimization tools, today announced the market availability of the second major release of its award-winning cloud contact center platform in 2013. The new cloud software release is designed to enhance personalized service experiences, delivering more 1-to-1 connections with customers while providing game-changing contact center effectiveness.

“As the cloud contact center leader, we are excited to deliver our second major software release in 2013, enabling our customers to stay on the cutting edge of customer service technology,” said Paul Jarman, inContact CEO. “Unlike legacy premise solutions that lock customers into an 18 month cadence of waiting for new features, inContact gives our customers the continuous innovation they need to address their most pressing contact center challenges.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Federal agencies plan to fully deploy data center consolidation, mobility, security, big data, and cloud computing (the Big Five) efforts in the next two years, but their networks aren’t prepared for the additional capacity or complexity, which will result in network bottlenecks, according to a study released by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT, and underwritten by Brocade.

While agencies have a long way to go in preparing their networks for the Big Five, the report indicated some agencies are laying the groundwork for the Big Five now. Forty-three percent of network managers report that they have taken steps to improve security measures and 46 percent plan to do so. In addition, agencies have taken steps or plan to take steps to improve network policies, add bandwidth, increase openness and adherence to open standards, as well as reduce network latency…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Lee Cheyan Lee.

ZTE, the No.2 telecom gear player in China ranking behind Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, provides cloud solutions to China’s telecom carriers, such as China Telecom, major Internet firms, oil and energy companies, a senior executive said. Zhu said he was targeting a 10 percent contribution from cloud and enterprise business to ZTE’s overall revenues in 2013, up from around 7-8 percent last year.

He declined to break down the revenue figure for cloud computing, which allows organisations to tap a network of servers on the Internet to store, manage and process data and applications. The Shenzhen-based company, which has been profitable in the first half of the year after posting its first-ever loss for the whole 2012, took in revenues of 37.6 billion yuan ($6 billion) in the January-June period, down 11.9 percent from last year…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Path. Author: Aditi Tyagi.

The application hosting providers need to deal with numerous types of responsibilities in order to deliver the type of service that is expected of them. Unfortunately, the hosting system is not perfect. Therefore, some system related difficulties are expected to lie ahead. In this article, you will discover five of the most daunting security challenges that the application hosting providers are bound to face in the near future.

Internet Connectivity Concerns

For any type of business, the pieces of vital information are considered as the cornerstones for the industry. The internet connection and the mediums can allow most types of online businesses to utilize the pieces of information more efficiently. This is possible by permitting the clients and other members of the market to gain access to the types of business information that they need at the moment. This capability is currently offset by numerous challenges that the providers receive. This is as far as the connection security is concerned. The security concerns are highly related to the disintermediation for the data access capabilities of the system…

Grazed from GeoNexus.  Author: David Crankshaw.

If you are building a SaaS startup, you know exactly how well you are doing on your key metrics.  But then you wonder (and get asked), how well am I doing compared to other SaaS companies? And more importantly, if I knew the metrics of other SaaS companies, would I adjust my strategy?

Each year Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm that specializes in SaaS firms, conducts a survey of key operational and financial metrics.  The survey participants included 155 companies from around the world (but mostly from the U.S.). About a third (58) of the companies were small with under $2M in revenue.  David Skok, at his For Entrepreneurs blog, published the results of the 2013 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey. It’s a long post with fascinating detail. Here are eight graphs from the survey. See Skok’s article for the rest…