Posts Tagged ‘Technology Partner’

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 Peter Evans from ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is a complete email marketing and marketing automation platform designed to help small businesses grow.

The Challenge of Sending Email Simply

You need to send email. Usually, that’s a pretty simple task, so it’s not uncommon to find users who think that sending a monthly newsletter is more or less the same task as sending a quick note to a friend about going to see a movie. In fact, those two email use-cases are completely different animals. With all of the nuances inherent in sending and managing large volumes of email, a plethora of email marketing services are positioned to help users better navigate the email marketing waters. It’s tough to differentiate which features you might need and which features are just there to be a “Check” in a comparison checklist. ActiveCampaign set out to make the decision-making process simpler … We knew that we needed the standard features like auto-responder campaigns, metrics reports and email templates, but we also knew we had to differentiate our service in a meaningful way. So we focused on automation.

Too often, the “automation” provided by a platform can be very cumbersome to set up (if it’s available at all), and when it’s actually working, there’s little confirmation that actions are being performed as expected. In response, we were intentional about ActiveCampaign’s automation features being easy to set up and manage … If automation saves time and money, it shouldn’t be intimidatingly difficult to incorporate into your campaigns. Here is a screenshot of what it takes to incorporate automation in your email campaigns with ActiveCampaign:

No complicated logic. No unnecessary options. With a only a few clicks, you can select an action to spark a meaningful response in your system. If a subscriber in your Newsletter list clicks on a link, you might want to move that subscriber to a different list. Because you might want to send a different campaign to that user as well, we provide the ability to add multiple automated actions for each subscriber action, and it’s all very clear.

One of the subscriber actions that might stand out to you if you’ve used other email service providers (or ESPs) is the “When subscriber replies to a campaign” bullet. ActiveCampaign is the first ESP (that we’re aware of) to provide users the option to send a series of follow-up campaigns (or to restrict the sending of future campaigns) to subscribers who reply to a campaign email. Replies are tracked in your campaign reports, and you have deep visibility into how many people replied, who replied, and how many times they replied. With that information, you can segment those subscribers and create automated actions for them, and the end result is that you’re connecting with your subscriber base much more effectively because you’re able to target them better … And you don’t have to break your back to do it.

SoftLayer customers know how valuable automation can be in terms of infrastructure, so it should be no surprise that email marketing campaigns can benefit so much from automation as well. Lots of ESPs provide stats, and it’s up to you to figure out meaningful ways to use that information. ActiveCampaign goes a step beyond those other providers by helping you very simply engage your subscribers with relevant and intentional actions. If you’re interested in learning more, check us out at http://www.activecampaign.com.

-Peter Evans, ActiveCampaign

This guest blog comes to us from Dave Meizlik, Dome9 VP of marketing and business development. Dome9 is a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. With Dome9, you get secure, on-demand access to all your servers by automating and centralizing firewall management and making your servers virtually invisible to hackers.

Three Tips to Securing Your Cloud Servers

By now everyone knows that security is the number one concern among cloud adopters. But lesser known is why and what to do to mitigate some of the security risks … I hope to shed a little light on those points in this blog post, so let’s get to it.

One of the greatest threats to cloud servers is unsecured access. Administrators leave ports (like RDP and SSH) open so they can connect to and manage their machines … After all, they can’t just walk down the hall to gain access to them like with an on-premise network. The trouble with this practice is that it leaves these and other service ports open to attack from hackers who need only guess the credentials or exploit a vulnerability in the application or OS. Many admins don’t think about this because for years they’ve had a hardened perimeter around their data center. In the cloud, however, the perimeter collapses down to each individual server, and so too must your security.

Tip #1: Close Service Ports by Default

Instead of leaving ports — from SSH to phpMyAdmin — open and vulnerable to attack, close them by default and open them only when, for whom, and as long as is needed. You can do this manually — just be careful not to lock yourself out of your server — or you can automate the process with Dome9 for free.

Dome9 provides a patent-pending technology called Secure Access Leasing, which enables you to open a port on your server with just one click from within Dome9 Central, our SaaS management console, or as an extension in your browser. With just one click, you get time-based secure access and the ability to empower a third party (e.g., a developer) with access easily and securely.

When your service ports are closed by default, your server is virtually invisible to hackers because the server will not respond to an attacker’s port scans or exploits.

Read Two More of Dome9′s Security Best Practices

This is a guest blog from Librato about Metrics. Metrics brings all of your monitoring data together in a unified hosted environment, enabling you to detect signs of problems early, minimize their impact through automated actions, and quickly find and fix their root cause.

Measure Everything!

If you’re a SaaS or PaaS provider, making sure that you deliver the Quality of Service that your users expect is probably your highest priority. This means that you rely on continuously monitoring all aspects of your operation that can alert you to unusual events and help you find and fix the root cause of any service degradations. User complaints cannot be the first sign of trouble, and there is no time to hunt for data that has not already been collected.

This need for information is the main reason why “Measure Everything” is the new principle by which SaaS and PaaS clouds are managed and why many DevOps and Operations teams are using a variety of open source and commercial tools to monitor their infrastructure. In addition they often need to monitor data that is collected with custom tools because it is specific to their application environment. Since each tool comes with its own user interface, alerting mechanism and set-up requirements, the monitoring work-flow is disjointed, wastes time, and – most importantly – introduces problems when trying to correlate data from different tools for rapid root cause analysis.

Wouldn’t it be nice if – just as there are standard Database Management platforms – there were Time Series Data Management platforms that provide uniform visualization, correlation and alerting, and a scalable, redundant repository for your metrics? Ideally, that platform would be delivered as a service and could even be embedded by SaaS and PaaS vendors to allow users to monitor their services directly.

Librato Metrics is the platform we built to meet that critical need. Designed from the ground up with an “API first” approach, Metrics allows customers and partners to easily send it any time series data and understand how that data fits with other data they are collecting.

If you want to provide your users with monitoring capabilities, you can integrate and embed Metrics at whatever level best fits your needs: data repository, instruments for your own dashboards, or complete “white label” dashboards. By programmatically creating user accounts and transparently signing your users onto the Metrics platform, you can deliver a seamless experience.

We used “flexible,” “affordable” and “simple” as our key mottos in developing a business model for Metrics. Our goal was to make the platform easy to adopt and completely transparent, empowering every organization to take advantage of the “measure everything” philosophy. We charge a modest amount (in “micro-dollars” actually) per measurement, provide a 30-day free trial, and charge you monthly for what you have used … there are no minimum fees or lock-ins.

To make it easy to adopt Metrics, we provide connectors for a variety of popular collection agents such as StatsD, CollectD, and JMX. To help build a broad collection of useful collectors and connectors to existing tools, we’re building a community and ecosystem where Metrics users and tool developers can contribute. We hope you’ll try out the platform and help us grow our community!

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato

This is a guest blog from Mike Rabb, VP of business development for CopperEgg, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. CopperEgg provides real-time insight into the speed and availability of applications and services on cloud, virtual and physical server.

Knowing Your Apps Are Up and Running = Peace of Mind

Whether you are building or managing apps in the cloud, it’s important they stay up and running optimally. With cloud performance monitoring by CopperEgg you can do just that! RevealCloud Pro takes less than 10 seconds to install and provides performance monitoring so you can rest assured and know your apps are up and running smoothly.

With RevealCloud Pro you gain real-time insight into the speed and availability of services by monitoring CPU, network load, uptime, blocked processes, memory space, disk space and more. At the first sign of trouble, RevealCloud Pro can immediately alert you email, SMS or Pagerduty when performance in one or more areas is outside of normal ranges. You can even take action via a webhook. This enables you to uncover and correct performance issues often before the system goes down. In addition, historical tracking over the last 30 days enables you to uncover trends in performance and capacity that could otherwise go unnoticed.

With a rapidly growing customer base spanning over 50 countries, we know we are on to something good! Read what they have to say…

Customer Speak
Eduardo Fernandez, president of Shuttle Cloud, is a current Softlayer customer, and he shared a little about his experience with RevealCloud Pro:

“Our business is built in the cloud so monitoring performance is critical. With RevealCloud Pro, we have an easy to install and easy to use product that gives us everything we need to monitor our instances and ensure our systems are running optimally. I like the high level view RevealCloud provides of all instances on one screen so I can see the health of our systems at-a glance. By contrast, members of my team need to know in real-time if any of our instances are either not responsive or have a very high load, memory or processing issue. By receiving alerts as soon as an issue occurs via cell or email means we can address things immediately. We also use the historical tracking to monitor trends and look at activity during the overnight hours.”

In addition to cloud performance monitoring, RevealCloud Pro also works on servers located on premise, in the data center, or in virtual environments. RevealCloud Pro makes viewing multiple systems simple, and is ideal for those who want to compare performance among their servers with no hassle.

Offer for SoftLayer Customers
Experience RevealCloud for yourself … It’s addictive! Try RevealCloud Pro for free today.

- Mike Raab, CopperEgg

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 Eduardo Fernandez of MigrationBox, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner specializing in simplifying the process of transferring email and other types of data between services.

Take Control of Your Cloud Data

Online services are great, but moving your data to the cloud and moving it between cloud services is very difficult and time-consuming. Think about all the data that you have online: email, contacts, calendars, documents … What happens when you want to switch to a different provider? Maybe your company changed names or is acquiring another company or you want to move to a cheaper or better email provider. It’s really difficult to move this data, especially when you’re talking about hundreds or thousands of accounts.

I first ran into this problem about a year ago. I was doing consulting work for a client, and he asked me to move their company email to Google Apps. I found out that it’s really hard to transfer email in bulk. I’m a hacker, so it didn’t take me too long to come up with a tool that did a pretty good job at transferring the accounts one-by-one. Then I thought I could just make a product out of this tool so that other people could use it as well.

At that point, I found it wasn’t that easy.

Read the rest of Eduardo’s Guest Blog! »