Author Archive: Guest Blog

This is a guest blog from Citrusleaf’s Brian Bulkowski. Citrusleaf is a database technology company. They offers a new type of NoSQL database based on the best practices of proven database and distributed technology. The company’s NoSQL database platform, Citrusleaf 2.0, solves a key problem that challenges today’s most data intensive, mission-critical businesses: how to optimally store and access terabytes of schema free data in real-time, with high throughput, ACID compliance, and 24×7 uptime.

Citrusleaf and SoftLayer: Taking NoSQL to the Next Level

Citrusleaf is the NoSQL OLTP (transaction-oriented) database behind some of the world’s largest advertising platforms. Our record of reliability and performance is the reason our customers choose us over any other database. We specialize in low-latency transactions on terabyte sized, billion-object databases. We fit well with analytics systems such as Hadoop or SQL-based “ETL” analytics architectures. Since Citrusleaf is fully reliable like a traditional database and has the speed of a cache, complexity is greatly reduced which leads to higher reliability and substantial cost savings.

Customers store actionable data for their internet applications on our platform. A typical use case is a server-side user data store. The advertising industry has moved to server-based user information storage as end users have become concerned about “tracking cookies” and other browser-side storage. Sophisticated advertising platforms are capable of associating users even after cookies have been cleared – through logins at partner sites, IP addresses and browser fingerprints. In the case where the user has elected not to be “tracked,” session management techniques allow “frequency capping” to limit the repetition of ads.

Read the rest of Citrusleaf’s Guest Blog! »

This guest blog was contributed by Wendy Nather, Research Director, Enterprise Security Practice at The 451 Group. Her post comes on the heels of the highly anticipated launch of StillSecure’s Cloud SMS, and it provides some great context for the importance of security in the cloud. For more information about Cloud SMS, visit www.stillsecure.com and follow the latest updates on StillSecure’s blog, The Security Samurai.

If you’re a large enterprise, you’re in pretty good shape for the cloud: you know what kind of security you want and need, you have security staff who can validate what you’re getting from the provider, and you can hold up your end of the deal – since it takes both customer and provider working together to build a complete security program. Most of the security providers out there are building for you, because that’s where the money is; and they’re eager to work on scaling up to meet the requirements for your big business. If you want custom security clauses in a contract, chances are, you’ll get them.

But at the other end of the scale there are the cloud customers I refer to as being “below the security poverty line.” These are the small shops (like your doctor’s medical practice) that may not have an IT staff at all. These small businesses tend to be very dependent on third party providers, and when it comes to security, they have no way to know what they need. Do they really need DLP, a web application firewall, single sign-on, log management, and all the premium security bells and whistles? Even if you gave them a free appliance or a dedicated firewall VM, they wouldn’t know what to do with it or have anyone to run it.

And when a small business has only a couple of servers in a decommissioned restroom*, the provider may be able to move them to their cloud, but it may not be able to scale a security solution down far enough to make it simple to run and cost-effective for either side. This is the great challenge today: to make cloud security both effective and affordable, both above and below 10,000 feet, no matter whether you’re flying a jumbo airliner or a Cessna.

-Wendy Nather, The 451 Group

*True story. I had to run some there.

This is a guest blog from UserVoice CEO Richard White. UserVoice offers a complete customer engagement solution that gives businesses a simple process for managing customer feedback and support functions all from a single, easy-to-use environment.

What NOT to Do in Support

The fact that you’re reading this blog post means you probably understand social media. You probably also understand why providing great customer service is important, so I’ll spare you that as well. What you may not know is that there are much better tools to provide outstanding customer service than the ones you’re already using. Here are four big tips for you as you’re planning your support channels:

1. Don’t build a custom contact form.
Building a custom contact form on your website takes valuable time and resources away from your core business. Instead, sign up and get a widget from UserVoice (or one of our competitors) and in less than 30 seconds you’ll have a contact form that supports any number of custom fields you want to add, allows you to append your own customer-specific metadata, supports attachments and, most importantly, will auto-suggest relevant FAQ articles even before the customer submits the form.

2. Don’t use shared email for customer support.
It’s true that you can take managing customer support via a shared email inbox pretty far. You won’t really feel the pain until a couple of issues slip through the digital crack because it wasn’t clear who on your team was responsible for following up with the customer. But why go through that? These days you can choose from a number of inexpensive, purpose-built tools, like UserVoice, targeted at companies that want to provide better customer service. Starting at $5/mo you can have a complete support solution that will grow with your business when you are finally ready to add that 2nd or 3rd support rep to your team.

Read the rest of UserVoice’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from FaxLogic CEO Eric Lenington. The unique FaxLogic service combines the best of analog fax, Internet fax, and fax servers to create a highly reliable, secure and scalable collaborative environment.

Why the (Right) Cloud is the Best Place for Your Documents

Every business produces and consumes documents — this includes both paper and digital, both those created internally and those received from customers and business partners — all needing to be sorted and organized and most needing to be safely stored and easily retrieved (and ultimately, securely disposed of when they are no longer needed). The vast majority of companies find themselves trying to do this today in highly fragmented ways and usually with radically different approaches for paper documents than with digital ones. Often different departments, or even different groups within a department, develop their own way to deal with “their” documents, a way that “works for them.”

Digital documents are usually stored on in-house servers, on “shares” with folder structures that may only make sense to the person that originally built it — not to the person trying to find something in it. And few companies can say that they don’t have reams of paper files stored in file rooms or in “personal” file cabinets. FaxLogic helps our customers solve this problem by seamlessly integrating their paper and digital worlds.

We do this by supporting their existing network of fax machines, scanners and multi-function printers (the “gateways” to the digital world for paper documents) and by incorporating key features of current technologies that we are all familiar with – like email and search engines – into the realm of organizing, archiving, retrieving and sharing documents. FaxLogic is a cloud-based service, running on a cloud-based infrastructure, and it uses “the cloud” to safely and securely store our customer’s documents (whether paper or digital). This was no accident, and that is what I will focus on in this article, trying to “demystify” the cloud a bit, and discuss why it’s the best place for your documents.

Read the rest of FaxLogic’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from 3DCart Co-founder and CEO Gonazlo Gil. 3DCart is a technology partner with a robust eCommerce platform hosting thousands of merchants all over the world … And it’s clear they have an enduring drive for innovation and value.

5 Must-Have Features in a Hosted Ecommerce Provider

In 1997, the concept that would eventually become 3DCart came into existence. I developed 3DCart with the idea of putting every single ecommerce tool and resource at the fingertips of web entrepreneurs so anyone with a computer could start their own online store. Today, we’re still going strong, and we pride ourselves on launching new ecommerce features before the competition has a chance.

The market for shopping carts has exploded over the past decade. If you’re considering the ecommerce business, choosing a shopping cart can get overwhelming. Because not all ecommerce software solutions are created equal, we’ve put together a list of five must-have features for aspiring entrepreneurs to consider when choosing a hosted ecommerce provider.

1. PCI Compliance to Protect Customer Information
You hear about it on the web, on the television, in the magazines: cyber-theft. Recent instances of online fraud (like the hack of Playstation’s network) have caused online shoppers to stiffen up when it comes to sharing financial information. For your sake and the sake of your customers, it’s important to put the minds of shoppers at ease as soon as they discover your brand.

Born from new rules created by the Payment Card Industry, PCI compliance standards are stringent guidelines for ensuring your online store is up to code in terms of security. The last thing you need as an online storeowner is responsibility for losing sensitive personal data to fraudsters. Beyond general culpability, you run the risk of losing trust in your brand, which could sink your business entirely.

The process for reaching PCI compliance is vigorous and expensive. That’s why most ecommerce software providers undergo PCI compliance measures on their own — so online stores can offer security to their customers. It offers a little more peace of mind on both sides of the business relationship and ensures your transactions go through smoothly.

Read the rest of 3DCart’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Verecloud, a technology partner that makes it easier for small- and medium-sized businesses to shop for, select, purchase, manage and monitor the performance of their cloud services and related spending.

Cloudwrangler from Verecloud

Ubiquitous Internet access and technological advances in virtualization and IT management have caused an explosion in the availability and adoption of cloud services. Just a few years ago, it would take hours – if not days – to activate a new cloud service for a customer. SoftLayer can now perform this feat with servers in minutes, and other providers of email, CRM and accounting solutions have equally fast turn-up times.

The cloud gives small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) access to enterprise grade technology so that they can compete more effectively with little, if any, capital investment, so those SMBs are prime consumers of cloud services. By moving to cloud services, their businesses gains flexibility and affordable scalability to throttle their infrastructure and services up and down as their business grows, changes, moves locations or becomes more mobile.

Even with all of those benefits, adding a little cloud here and a little cloud there ends up making it difficult for these SMBs to manage all of the disparate services. Who is paying for what? Are they accounted for in expense reports? How can you allocate the costs to your sales, marketing, operations or support departments? Is IT aware of all of the cloud services? What happens if someone leaves the company and you need to deactivate their access and reassign all of their data to other employees?

Read the rest of Verecloud’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Tim Falls of SendGrid, a technology partner that provides cloud-based email infrastructure for reliable delivery, scalability, real-time analytics and flexible APIs for customers who want to focus on driving their own growth and profitability.

Understanding the Value of [Email] Infrastructure Services

The Fall of DIY … As We Know It
Today more than ever before, businesses depend on third party services to operate efficiently and achieve their objectives. As a business leader, you have countless web applications and software as service solutions at your fingertips, which collectively address just about any problem or demand imaginable. Examples include cloud-based file storage, cloud and dedicated web hosting, recurring billing applications, online HR management portals, APIs for telephony and geo-data, and managed email infrastructure and delivery services. Startups and established corporations alike can utilize these tools quickly and simply with a credit card and a few clicks on a trackpad.

So, what does this mean, and why is it worth recognizing and appreciating? Well, it means that your life is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago. And if you fail to recognize the opportunities and advantages that these resources offer, your competitors will soon leave you in their proverbial dust … if they haven’t already.

The gist:

• You don’t have to do everything yourself anymore … So don’t!
• Be the best at what you do, and rely on other experts to help with everything outside of your realm.

The Email Puzzle
Let’s face it. Email sucks. Not email in and of itself – obviously, it is an essential part of our lives and is arguably one of the most transformative communication tools in human history. But, from a business standpoint, the implementation and maintenance of an effective and efficient email system is truly a nightmare. If there is one thing that web developers across the world can agree upon, it may be this: Successfully integrating email into a web application just ain’t fun!

Read the rest of SendGrid’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Chris Lantrip, CEO of CyberlinkASP, an application service provider focused on hosting, upgrading and managing the industry’s best software.

The DesktopLayer from CyberlinkASP

Hosted virtual desktops – SoftLayer style.

In early 2006, we were introduced to SoftLayer. In 2007, they brought us StorageLayer, and in 2009, CloudLayer. Each of those solutions met a different kind of need in the Application Service Provider (ASP) world, and by integrating those platforms into our offering, DesktopLayer was born: The on-demand anytime, anywhere virtual desktop hosted on SoftLayer and powered by CyberlinkASP.

CyberlinkASP was originally established to instantly web-enable software applications that were not online in the past. Starting off as a Citrix integration firm in the early days, we were approached by multiple independent software vendors asking us to host, manage and deliver their applications from a centralized database platform to their users across multiple geographic locations. With the robust capabilities of Citrix, we were able to revolutionize application delivery and management for several ISV’s.

Over time, more ISV’s starting showing up at our doorstep, and application delivery was becoming a bigger and bigger piece of our business. Our ability to provision users on a specific platform in minutes, delete them in minutes, perform updates and maintain hundreds of customers and thousands of users all at one time from a centralized platform was very attractive.

Read the rest of CyberlinkASP’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Shmuli Goldberg of ClickTale, an industry leader in customer experience analytics, providing businesses with revolutionary insights into their customers’ online behavior.

Understanding the User Experience with In-Page Analytics

Since ClickTale’s start back in 2006, we understood that engaging visitors on a website is the first step to increase conversions. Although traditional web analytics are great for delivering general statistics such as number of visitors or pages per visit, they leave a big black hole when it comes to understanding what happens inside the pages themselves.

ClickTale’s In-Page Analytics feature set enables you to identify, observe, aggregate and analyze visitors’ actual interaction inside your site, so you know exactly what page elements work, what to optimize and how to increase visitor engagement.

Our wide range of web optimization tools include Mouse Tracking, Heatmap Suite and Conversion Analytics solutions, but was our Visitor Recordings feature that started it all. Giving you a front row seat to your visitors’ browsing sessions and delivering a thorough, in-depth view into what your visitors are focusing on and interacting with inside the pages themselves. All you need to do is grab the popcorn.

Our Heat maps are aggregated reports that visually display what parts of a webpage are looked at, clicked on, focused on and interacted with by your online visitors. See exactly what images, text and call to action buttons your visitors’ think are hot and what’s not!

Both these features allow you to instantly see how to go about optimizing your website instantly so you don’t have to guess.

As a fully hosted subscription service, ClickTale is quick and easy to set up. We believe our wide range of heatmaps, behavioral analytics and full video playback make ClickTale the perfect way to round out your traditional web analytics suite. For more information, please visit www.clicktale.com.

- Shmuli Goldberg, ClickTale

This is a guest blog from Troy Davis of Papertrail, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner that helps customers detect, resolve and avoid infrastructure problems using log messages.

Receive DB Slow Query Logs in Your Inbox

Want to wake up to important database and syslog messages with your bagel and coffee? Here’s how. It’s free and takes about 5 minutes.

Most of us run a database somewhere on our SoftLayer servers. Whether it’s MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, or another relational or NoSQL sibling, a responsive data store is critical to happy users. That’s why databases send slow queries to a log file. It’s much better than no logging at all, but as an engineer, I’d wanted more. I wanted to:

• View all my query logs in one place, without SSHing to each server for tail and grep. My workload shouldn’t scale linearly as I add systems
• Share log visibility with employees who don’t have server access or command-line knowledge (and email links to specific log messages to my developers and DBAs)
• Receive log messages in my inbox – or send them to my team or monitoring service – when I know they need attention
• Examine logs for related HTTP requests, daemon output, API invocations, and other parts of our stack — I can troubleshoot faster with start-to-finish logs on a single screen.

That’s where Papertrail was born. We built Papertrail to make log aggregation and log management effortless and usable. It’s the hosted log management service that we wanted as developers, systems engineers and tech entrepreneurs.

We know the hesitation you might have when approaching this kind of service, so our goal was to enable users to have Papertrail deliver those SQL slow query logs – or any other logs – to your inbox every morning for free:

Read the rest of Papertrail’s Guest Blog! »