Category: News

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

LiveVox Inc., the provider of cloud contact center applications, today announced it received a 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Award from Cloud Computing Magazine, a new publication from Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), a global, integrated media company focused on call center technology.

This follows LiveVox’s recognition earlier this month as Product of the Year from Customer Interaction Solutions, a leading contact center technology publication.

"LiveVox is pleased that its cloud contact center platform has been honored for excellence by a top call center technology thought leader organization," said Louis Summe, Chief Executive Officer, LiveVox. "Cloud deployment offers numerous ways to increase productivity and flexibility for contact centers, but vendors must prove how they can improve security and reliability for contact centers, while simplifying compliance management. We are proud to have been recognized for our efforts in accomplishing this."…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Sumo Logic emerged from the shadows Tuesday with $15 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Shlomo Kramer bringing its total to $20.5 million since its founding in April, 2010. Greylock and Kramer also participated in the Series A round.

The company, founded by Arcsight veterans Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, aims to bring log monitoring and analytics to cloud computing environments via a software-as-a-service model. In that arena, Sumo Logic is bound to face off against Splunk, which filed for a $125 million IPO two weeks ago, as well as Loggly, a company that spun out of Splunk (see disclosure.)…

Grazed from Sacramento Bee.  Author: PR Announcement.  

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today unveiled Desk.com, revolutionizing customer service for a social and mobile world.  Desk.com enables businesses to deliver personal customer service by offering a help desk that is social, mobile and simple to use and deploy. Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows any business to instantly work with customers over any major social network. Desk.com Mobile allows companies to carry a help desk in their pocket and answer customers on the go. Finally, Desk.com is so simple that any company, even one without an IT staff, can get up and running over a weekend. Businesses can sign up for Desk.com today for as little as $49.

Comments on the News:

• "We built Desk.com so that every company can deliver personal customer service in a social and mobile world. Desk.com is social at its core; its mobile app instantly lets any employee, anywhere, deliver awesome customer service; and it can be deployed quickly and easily," said Alex Bard, vice president and general manager, Desk.com…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Ted Samson.

Recession-fueled stagnation is slowly drawing to an end as U.S. companies are signaling they’re ready to sink some cash into growth and emerging markets. That spells opportunity for certain IT professionals: Companies are looking to hire and retain those who are skilled in areas such as mobility [1], cloud computing [2], software development [3], and big data [4].

Such is the big picture painted by two separate reports released this week. One comes from research company Hackett Group, titled "2012 IT Key Issues: Coming to Terms with the ‘New Normal’ [5]." It identifies Global 1000 companies’ key priorities for the year. The other is IT staffing company Bluewolf’s "2012 IT Salary Guide [6]," which provides an in-depth look at IT salaries and hiring trends…

Grazed from Developer Integration News.  Author: Vance McCarthy.

The explosive success of cloud computing, especially SaaS, will spark searches in 2012 for better ways to ensure security, privacy and enterprise-wide identity and access management, said Darren Platt, CTO and co-founder of Symplified.

Researcher have noted cloud security is attracting more interest from IT. In 2012, IDC predicts as many as 80% of all new commercial apps will be deployed from cloud platforms. Further, by the end of 2012, Forrester Research predicts that enterprises that tap into  the cloud will be using 10 or more cloud-based services or SaaS applications…

Grazed from WallStreet & Technology.  Author: Ivy Schmerken.

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Douglas Bonderud.

Cloud computing–it’s been the buzzword around technology markets of all types for the past several years and is finally starting to deliver on promises made. In many ways a more efficient reworking of the centralized data concept, cloud computing promises more for less by allowing a small or midsize business (SMB) to outsource any part of or all of their IT department. But while "as-a-service" options all offer greater ease of use and supposedly lower costs, does letting a cloud provider take full IT control really make sense?

The Great IT Debate 

For SMBs, the cloud represents two things: lower cost and improved agility. Many businesses love the idea of having no in-house servers, which should cut power costs and end the need for upgrades over time. In addition, the cloud’s promise to deliver almost any app and run on multiple operating systems makes many SMBs eager to buy in. Limited patching and downtime and always-on access sounds great to most business owners…

Grazed from Dynamic Business.  Author: Neil Glentworth.

Cloud computing isn’t new, having been in use by big business for decades in some form or another. Now the technology is readily accessible to SMBs, you need to separate fact from fiction to understand the benefits it can deliver to your business.

We keep hearing about how ‘the cloud’ is going to make us crazy-powerful and change the way we live. If that were true, it should’ve happened back when Hotmail started the trend for people to exchange information without requiring their own physical server for storage. That innovation did change things, but it didn’t rock the world quite as much as contemporary cloud computing aficionados are making out…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Heather Clancy.

Grazed from Talkin Cloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

Rackspace VP of Enterprise Strategy Andrew Schroepfer says the cloud computing company has a 1 percent monthly churn rate. How did Rackspace achieve such a low customer churn and high customer retention? Schroepfer offered some insights during the CA Technologies MSP Symposium today in Miami, Fla.

Schroepfer pointed to four lessons:

• We’re a great place to work
• We have a standardized services portfolio to keep things simple.
• We’re easy to work with
• Our employees focus on jobs that involve their core strengths…