Archive for May, 2011
How Automated Invoices Save Time and Money
We live in a technological world where tedious tasks can be performed with agility and ease. Computers and software can do most of our work for us, whether it’s filing our taxes or ordering groceries. The benefits we gain—namely more time and less margin of error—make this kind of technology appealing to businesses as well. [...]
Full StoryAccess Is Underrated: Your Hatred Of Microsoft Access Is Largely Unjustified
At one time, Microsoft Access was the most popular database platform. While not as popular as Excel, Access still dominates the Windows desktop database market and as part of the Microsoft Office family, it’s still in many organizations. It remains in use by my many people but is not as popular for a variety of [...]
Full Story4 Problems Commonly Associated With Thin Client Computing And Terminal Servers
Although thin-clients are a great way for companies to simplify their IT architecture while reducing costs and improving security, there are a few drawbacks that you should be made aware of. User Resistance Thin clients restrict much of the local machine capabilities, such as access to USB thumb drives or CD drives. They also prevent [...]
Full StoryFuture CIOs and CTOs: The Secret To Creating And Executing A Winning Information Technology Career Plan
Mark Herschberg is a CTO who has hired over 100 people, interviewed over 1000, and taught career management to engineering students at MIT and mid-career people at SUNY. He also ran the Job Discussion section of www.JavaRanch.com (a 200,000 person website for software engineers). Mark knows what it takes to reach the highest levels within [...]
Full StoryState Of The Industry: Quarterly Financial Results of Ten Publicly Traded Cloud Software Companies
Software Advice has put together an infographic that expresses the most recent financial results for ten publicly traded cloud apps companies, including Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Most of the companies made acquisitions in the last year, so there has been a lot of activity in the market. The infographic expresses quarterly revenue, quarterly operating income and [...]
Full StoryAttract PC Repair Clients And Promote Your IT Consulting Business Using Game Shows
Ted Jordan has a Masters in Engineering from UC Berkeley, so he’s very strong in technology. Ted used to run a computer repair company called JordanTeam Computing LLC and would do a lot of presentations to promote his company. A Mom was impressed, and asked if he knew how to teach kids how to make computer [...]
Full StoryTop 5 Ways that Customer Experience Analytics can Improve Ability to Execute.
“Execution” in business terms is about taking any given strategy in a market and bringing it to fruition in the most effective manner. One of the most critical components of a successful execution strategy is ensuring that your front-line systems and personnel have the necessary knowledge to make critical real time decisions. For example, can [...]
Full StoryIncident Timeline: How a Predictive Analytics Approach Proactively Forecasted 2+ Hours before an IT Outage Was to Occur
The timeline and screen shot below shows a real-life example of how a predictive analytics for IT approach helped alert systems administrators to a performance problem two hours before service was impacted. Administrators initiated failover processes which prevented any services from being impacted despite the eventual server crash. 2:15 am Netuitive alerts NOC on disk [...]
Full StoryThe Difference Between Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN)
Once again, I’d like to clear up another confusion of terms amongst enterprise hardware enthusiasts. Today, I’ll be showing the difference between Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). The 2 terms sound very similar and are often used in the same discussions. And they’re both somewhat physically similar since each appears to [...]
Full StoryProviding Social Customer Care: Combining best practices of CRM and Social CRM
Social media is the topic of the day promising better customer engagement, enhanced brand awareness and (although sometimes difficult to measure) improved ROI. As corporations have become more comfortable with using social networks for traditional marketing, branding and public relations purposes, we are now seeing companies expand into using social media for customer care and [...]
Full StoryOptimizing And Personalising Online Customer Experiences Through Predictive Analytics
24/7 Customer is the pioneer in Predictive Customer Experience solutions. They help companies, with several thousand agents, to move their phone contacts to online through a unique integration of predictive SaaS technology and contact center operations. Consumers are constantly looking for smarter, better solutions, often getting frustrated that they could not solve their problem in [...]
Full StoryHow IT Professionals Can Get Promoted (Get a pay raise in your technology career)
By Tony Deblauwe: Working hard is only a small part of how promotions occur. In most cases you have to go beyond your day-to-day job duties and connect with a variety of people in the organization. Through your influence, drive, and attitude, you can build a positive trail that will make you invaluable to your [...]
Full StoryWhy Is Multi-Core So Important?
These days, it seems a computer manufacturers are moving more towards a dual-core or multi-core architecture when developing new hardware. In fact, you’re probably running a duel core or Multicore System in your business right now. And this doesn’t just apply to personal computers. Multi-core Processing is also becoming of increasing importance when talking about [...]
Full StoryIBM Reveals Their Predictions About The Future Of Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Sandesh Bhat is the VP of Web and Unified Collaboration Software for IBM Collaboration Solutions. He has some unique insight into emerging trends in CRM. Particularly, how social media is changing the way businesses manage customer interactions. For more information on social CRM – including a recent study on the topic – you can visit [...]
Full StoryHow To Write A Lead Generation Letter For IT Consulting Services
Finding new clients is one of the biggest problems for small IT consulting firms. Although most service providers in this industry have excellent technical qualifications, they often lack the business skills required to start and operate a business. That’s why I wanted to provide occasional tips and tricks – intended specifically for IT consultants – [...]
Full StoryMike 2.0 Open Framework Is An Intelligent Approach For Overcoming Information Management Challenges
The amount and complexity of information within organizations are growing exponentially while practices and standards for managing information are still immature. This results in severe information overload for people and organizations, low data quality, missed business opportunities and suboptimal customer experience. Organizations are confronted with several key challenges managing their information: There is often a [...]
Full StoryNew Paypal Credit Card With E-Ink Display
Something you should know about me is that I travel a lot internationally, and I purchase a lot of services online using PayPal. As a result of this, my purchasing activity tends to throw up a lot of red flags. I’m constantly getting my account incorrectly blocked for potential fraudulent activity. And getting it unlocked [...]
Full StoryWhat’s the difference between CRM and Marketing Automation?
This is a Guest Post by Adam Blitzer. Adam is COO and Co-founder of Pardot, based in Atlanta. Marketing automation technology has become a hot space because it gives marketers tools to quickly create, deploy and track online marketing campaigns and deliver higher-quality leads to sales. Often, this software is used in combination with a [...]
Full StoryReal-World Artificial Intelligence Has Arrived: A ChatBot Can Automate Your Customer Service, Support and Interactions
eGain ChatBot™ is a lifelike, conversational virtual agent providing a unique, interactive and personal way for users to get answers and assistance on websites, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A customer simply chats with the chatbot, and it acts as a human contact center or sales agent, providing answers, processing data, and [...]
Full StoryThe Top 7 IT Consultants and Tech Support Companies in EVERY STATE!
Finding new clients is a constant uphill struggle for IT service providers. Every hour you spend knocking on doors or making cold calls is an hour is a lost billable hour that you’ll never get back. And likewise, business owners have a hard time finding skilled, trustworthy IT service providers who can fix their tech [...]
Full StoryQuick Survey: Are Desktops Obsolete For Business? The answer may surprise you.
The Laptop vs Desktop debate got much more interesting in 2011. For a long time, laptops have been outselling desktop computers in terms of overall market share. Of course, desktops are still cheaper on a dollar-for-dollar basis. And for an organization that doesn’t want their IT assets to leave the building, there may be no [...]
Full StoryTop 21 Hosted SaaS CRM Reviews
CRM is a hot topic at the moment. As business marketing has made a mass exodus to the web over the past few years, proper tracking and statistics are now absolutely essential to the marketing of any organization. Shooting from the hip is no longer enough. After much research and debate, I’ve finally put together [...]
Full StoryThe Difference Between Managed and Hosted VOIP
M5 is one of the largest specialized hosted VOIP companies on the market. Today, I’ll be interviewing M5 CEO Dan Hoffman about some of the latest trends in Managed and Hosted VOIP. What is the difference between Managed and Hosted VOIP? I hear these terms thrown around a lot, and there seems to be some [...]
Full Story7 Software Audit Secrets
This is a guest post by Robert J. Scott, Managing Partner, of intellectual property and technology law firm, Scott & Scott, LLP. I am a lawyer that represents businesses in software audit cases initiated by software publishers and their trade groups including Business Software Alliance and the SIIA. I work with a team of lawyers [...]
Full StoryThe Difference Between Cloud Thin Clients And Dumb Terminals
Let’s imagine it is 1980, you have just arrived at your office and all is quiet. There are no PC fans letting you know they are alive and well, your closets have paper and pencils in the them, and your air conditioner hasn’t been left on overnight to keep the server(s) cool. With no PC [...]
Full StoryFrom Pigeonholes to Paperless (The ROI Of A Paperless Office)
Introduction: In 1898, Edwin Seibels introduced the modern lateral file cabinet and revolutionized record keeping. Until then, businesses folded papers in envelopes and placed them in pigeon drawers or boxes. Seibels recognized that finding and opening envelopes was wasteful and folding wasn’t necessary since papers could stand on end vertically in a filing cabinet drawer. [...]
Full StoryWhat Has The Sony PlayStation Breach Taught Us?
As you probably know, the Sony PlayStation Network has recently been the target of a major security breach that has potentially compromised the personal information of over seventy million gamers. Although it’s still too early to know what the long-term effects of this breach will be, there are certainly a number of important lessons that [...]
Full StoryThe Compliance Conundrum: Monitoring Apps with Compliance in Mind
In some industries, application issues are not just a bother for users and customers, but can bring on financial pain. This February, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank experienced an outage which affected its ATM machines, allowing people to withdraw large sums of cash regardless of their account balances. Last spring, the IT department of a large U.S. [...]
Full Story6 Keys To Success And Employee Buy-In When Rolling Out A New CRM System
Change in any organization inevitably attracts resistance. Implementing a new CRM strategy is no exception to this rule. Here are six tried and true tips to boost CRM strategy implementation success: 1 Keep it simple: If a CRM solution takes too much effort to learn and use, sales people will resist incorporating the extra work [...]
Full StoryCommunication Skills Are Vital For Success In An IT Career
Jim Anderson is a 25-year veteran of the IT industry. He’s worked at the big boys (Boeing, Siemens, Alcatel, and Verizon) as well as a number of start-ups. He was on the front line of that whole dot.com thing, and can provide some interesting insight into that time period. The main thing that he’s noticed [...]
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