Posts Tagged ‘marketplace’

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Gerard Ibarra from Secure Quorum. Secure Quorum is an easy-to-use emergency notification system and crisis management system that resides in the cloud.

Are You Prepared for an Emergency?

Every company’s management team faces the challenge of having too many things going on with not enough time in the day. It’s difficult to get everything done, so when push comes to shove, particular projects and issues need to be prioritized to be completed. What do we have to do today that can’t be put off to tomorrow? Often, a businesses fall into a reactionary rut where they are constantly “putting out the fires” first, and while it’s vital for a business to put out those fires (literal or metaphorical), that approach makes it difficult to proactively prepare for those kinds of issues to streamline the process of resolving them. Secure Quorum was created to provide a simple, secure medium to deal with emergencies and incidents.

What we noticed was that businesses didn’t often consider planning for emergencies as part of their operations. The emergencies I’m talking about thankfully don’t happen often, but fires, accidents, power outages, workplace violence and denial of service attacks can severely impact the bottom line if they aren’t addressed quickly … They can make or break you. Are you prepared?

Every second that we fail to make informed and logical decisions during an emergency is time lost in taking action. Take these facts for a little perspective:

• “Property destruction and business disruption due to disasters now rival warfare in terms of loss.” (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research)
• More than 10,000 severe thunderstorms, 2,500 floods, 1,000 tornadoes and 10 hurricanes affect the United States each year. On average, 500 people die yearly because of severe weather and floods. (National Weather News 2005)
• The cost of natural disasters is rising. During the past two decades, natural disaster damage costs have exceeded the $500 billion mark. Only 17 percent of that figure was covered by insurance. (Dennis S. Mileti, Disasters by Design)
• Losses as a result of global disasters continue to increase on average every year, with an estimated $360 billion USD lost in 2011. (Centre for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters)
• Natural disasters, power outages, IT failures and human error are common causes of disruptions to internal and external communications. They “can cause downtime and have a significant negative impact on employee productivity, customer retention, and the confidence of vendors, partners, and customers.” (Debra Chin, Palmer Research, May 2011)

These kinds of “emergencies” are not going away, but because specific emergencies are difficult (if not impossible) to predict, it’s not obvious how to deal with them. How do we reduce risk for our employees, vendors, customers and our business? The two best answers to that question are to have a business continuity plan (BCP) and to have a way to communicate and collaborate in the midst of an emergency.

Start with a BCP. A BCP is a strategic plan to help identify and mitigate risk. Investopedia gives a great explanation:

The creation of a strategy through the recognition of threats and risks facing a company, with an eye to ensure that personnel and assets are protected and able to function in the event of a disaster. Business continuity planning (BCP) involves defining potential risks, determining how those risks will affect operations, implementing safeguards and procedures designed to mitigate those risks, testing those procedures to ensure that they work, and periodically reviewing the process to make sure that it is up to date.

Make sure you understand the basics of a BCP, and look for cues from organizations like FEMA for examples of how to approach emergency situations: http://www.ready.gov/business-continuity-planning-suite.

Once you have a basic BCP in place, it’s important to be able to execute it when necessary … That’s where an emergency communication and collaboration solution comes into play. You need to streamline how you communicate when an emergency occurs, and if you’re relying on a manual process like a phone tree to spread the word and contact key stakeholders in the midst of an incident, you’re wasting time that could better be spent focusing to the issue at hand. An emergency communication solution automates that process quickly and logically.

When you create a BCP, you consider which people in your organization are key to responding to specific types of emergencies, and if anything ever happens, you want to get all of those people together. An emergency communication system will collect the relevant information, send it to the relevant people in your organization and seamlessly bridge them into a secured conference call. What would take minutes to complete now takes seconds, and when it comes to responding to these kinds of issues, seconds count. With everyone on a secure call, decisions can be made quickly and recorded to inform employees and stakeholders of what occurred and what the next steps are.

Plan for emergencies and hope that you never have to use that plan. Think about preparing for emergencies strategically, and it could make all the difference in the world. Secure Quorum is a platform that makes it easy to communicate and collaborate quickly, reliably and securely in those high-stress situations, so if you’re interested getting help when it comes to responding to emergencies and incidents, visit our site at SecureQuorum.com and check out the whitepaper we just published with one of our customers: Ease of Use: Make it Part of Your Software Decision.

-Gerard Ibarra, CEO of Secure Quorum

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Mike Lauricella from Plivo. Plivo is an open communications and messaging platform with advanced features, simple APIs, easy management and volume pricing.

Bridging the Gap Between the Web and Telephony

Businesses face a fundamental challenge in the worlds of telephony and messaging: Those worlds move too slowly, require too much telecom knowledge and take too long to adopt. As a result, developers often forgo phone and SMS functionality in their applications because the learning curves are so steep, and the dated architecture seems like a foreign language. Over the last twenty years, the web has evolved a lot faster than telephony, and that momentum only widens the gap between the “old” telecom world and the “new” Internet world. Plivo was created to bridge that gap and make telephony easy for developers to understand and incorporate into their applications with simple tools and APIs.

I could bore you to tears by describing the ins and outs of what we’ve learned about telephony and telecom since Plivo was founded, but I’d rather show off some of the noteworthy ways our customers have incorporated Plivo in their own businesses. After all, seeing those real-world applications is much more revealing about what Plivo does than any description of the nuts and bolts of our platform, right?

Conferencing Solution
The purest use-cases for Plivo are when our customers can simply leverage powerful telephony functionality. A perfect example is a conferencing solution one of our customers created to host large-scale conferences with up to 200 participants. The company integrated the solution into their product and CRM so that sales reps and customers could jump on conference calls quickly. With that integration, the executive management team can keep track of all kinds of information about the calls … whether they’re looking to find which calls resulted in closed sales or they just want to see the average duration of a conference call for a given time frame.

Call Tracking
Beyond facilitate conference calls quickly and seamlessly, many businesses have started using Plivo’s integration to incorporate call tracking statistics in their environments. Call tracking is big business because information about who called what number, when they called, how long they talked and the result of the call (sale, no sale, follow up) can determine whether the appropriate interaction has taken place with prospects or customers.

Two Factor Authentication
With ever-increasing concerns about security online, we’ve seen a huge uptick in developers that come to Plivo for help with two factor authentication for web services. To ensure that a new site registrant is a real person who has provided a valid phone number (to help cut down on potential fraud), they use Plivo to send text messages with verification codes to those new registrant.

Mass Alert Messaging
Because emergencies can happen at any time, our customers have enlisted Plivo’s functionality to send out mass alerts via phone calls and SMS messages when their customers are affected by an issue and need to be contacted. These voice and text messages can be sent quickly and easily with our automated tools, and while no one ever wants to deal with an emergency, having a solid communication lifeline provides some peace of mind.

WebRTC
An emerging new standard for communications is WebRTC — open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities. WebRTC make communications a feature of the Web without plugins or complex SIP clients. Plivo already supports WebRTC, and even though the project is relatively young, it’s already being used in some amazing applications.

These use-cases are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how our customers are innovating on our platform, but I hope it helps paint a picture of the kinds of functionality Plivo enables simply and quickly. If you’ve been itching to incorporate telephony into your application, before you spending hours of your life poring over complex telecom architecture requirements, head over to plivo.com to see how easy we can make your life. We offer free developer accounts where you can start to make calls to other Plivo users and other SIP endpoints immediately, and we’d love to chat with you about how you can leverage Plivo to make your applications communicate.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a note at hello@plivo.com, and we’ll get back to you with answers.

-Mike Lauricella, Plivo

This is a guest blog from Native Rank. Native Rank provides an effective solution for improving your visibility across search engines, social networks and web maps. They are a full-service search and advertising solution for small to large businesses both on a local and national level.

Ranking Well != Being Well Ranked

There is a common misconception in Search Engine Optimization: That if Company A was just on the first page for some random keyword, the sky would open up and leads would fall from the heavens. This is not always the case, and a better place to start the process of deciding what Key Words will be most effective for a client to rank for can be assessed in 3 easy steps:

1. In depth keyword analysis for terms that your customers actually use to find a business like yours. If you specialize in DUI law, keywords structured around your area of expertise will lead to a higher quality of lead than the search term, “Denver Attorney.”
2. Be realistic about who your competitors are and find where they are ranking organically. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. This will give you a good road map for what your competitors are doing and they are creating success.
3. If you have a physical location make sure your local maps listings for Google, Yahoo and Bing are optimized and Owner Verified. The Search Engines want to show your business to Searchers that are in your Geographic area..Please let them!

Once you have gone through those three easy steps, make sure that the SEO company you are working with has the same expectations that you have for your business. Targeted success metrics and milestones need to be at the core of your SEO strategy. Ranking for 50 Keywords that bounce at 90% will not result in more customers through your door. It is very important that the SEO firm you use has your business objectives in mind. If not you may find yourselves three or six months down the road having a very uncomfortable conversation about what success is.

If you’ve never made a concerted effort into SEO and SEM strategy, we’d be happy to share some of the tools we’ve developed to get you ranking well whether you consider yourself a local business or a national one. Head over to http://nativerank.com/ to see a few of our products in action and learn a little more about our service.

-Winston Cook, Native Rank

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 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 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 with David Lifson from our partner Postling. Postling is an ideal social media management tool for small businesses. Postling’s dashboard allows the user to take control of their online presence by aggregating all of their social media accounts in one place. David will be sharing some social media tips and tricks in a separate blog in the near future.

This is a guest blog from Jason Abate of Panopta, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in monitoring your servers and managing outages with tools and resources designed to help minimize the impact of outages to your online business.

5 Server Monitoring Best Practices

Prior to starting Panopta, I was responsible for the technology and operations side of a major international hosting company and worked with a number of large online businesses. During this time, I saw my share of major disasters and near catastrophes and had a chance to study what works and what doesn’t when Murphy’s Law inevitably hits.

Monitoring is a key component of any serious online infrastructure, and there are a wide range of options when it comes to monitoring tools — from commercial and open-source software that you install and manage locally to monitoring services like Panopta. The best solution depends on a number of criteria, but there are five major factors to consider when making this decision.

Read the rest of Panopta’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Gleb Arshinov of Acunote, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in online project management and Scrum software.

Implementing Project Management in Your Business

Project management has a bit of a stigma for being a little boring. In its simplest form, project management involves monitoring and reporting progress on a given initiative, and while it sounds simple, it’s often an afterthought … if it’s ever a thought at all. Acunote is in the business of making project management easy and accessible for businesses of all sizes.

I’ve been in and around project management for years now, and while I could talk your ear off about Acunote, I’d rather share a few “Best Practices” for incorporating project management in your business. As you begin to understand how project management principles can be incorporated into your day-to-day activities, you’ll be in a better position to understand the value proposition of tools like Acunote.

Read the rest of Acunote’s Guest Blog! »

I’ve been on the hook for a 3 Bars | 3 Questions interview for a few weeks now, and I finally found a few minutes to chat with Kevin about what’s going on in the world of SoftLayer Community Development. In the past two months, we’ve cranked everything up to 11 with the unveiling of our Technology Incubator Program and the Technology Partners Marketplace. Needless to say, we had a lot to talk about:

Over the past few weeks, we’ve posted video interviews and guest blogs from a few of our featured Technology Partner Marketplace participants, and you can expect to see more where that came from as we sign on new partners with killer applications and services that we can share with our customers. If you want to be one of those new partners, fill out our quick application, and we’ll get the ball rolling!

I’m looking forward to the next installment of “3 Bars | 3 Questions” because “The Mitch” – the man, the myth, the legend – will be in the hot seat.

-@PaulFord