SigmaWay Blog

Mongo DB announces its latest open source NoSQL database release 2.6. This release introduces greater automation features like incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, visualization and alerts on more than 100 parameters in order to improve provisioning and management. Users can access network resources more efficiently along with an integrated text search in 15 languages with the help of Mongo DB query language. To know more about the features and efficiency of this release, follow the article of Toby Wolpe, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/mongodb-2-6-hits-general-availability-so-whats-in-it-7000028148/

ISO 9000 family addresses various aspects of quality management. It provides guidelines to organisations ensuring that their services and products consistently meet customer requirements. To know more about the latest version of ISO 9000 (ISO 9001: 2008), follow:

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/management-standards/iso_9000.htm

Handling phone calls to serve your customers is definitely important for your company. But, have you ever calculated how much it costs you? A research by ContactBabel, shows that for making a live agent call, it costs you £ 3.87 in average!

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can be effective in reducing this cost. According to the report, it can bring down your operational costs by 6 times. Also, with increasing usage of smartphones, a new type of IVR menus can be provided known as Visual IVR, where a caller can navigate a visual IVR menu between 4 and 5 times faster than a traditional audio IVR menu. The direct impact will be enhanced customer experience.

Read at http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ivr-self-service-costs-6-times-less-than-a-phone-call-59403.htm for more research findings on how IVR can help you reducing your costs.

An article by Zach Miners, news reporter of IDG news service, spoke about how the cloud storage and file sharing vendor, Dropbox, is expanding its scope beyond photo management and document collaboration. He also mentioned that when Dropbox users work together on a PowerPoint, Excel or Word file, Dropbox will display visual cues to alert them when someone else edits and then syncs the changes. Dropbox also incorporates a chat service in the Microsoft software's interface.

For more information visit http://www.itworld.com/internet/413888/dropbox-diversifies-beyond-storage-photos-collaboration-apps

Mark Russinovich, Member, Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that is integrated with a runtime environment, as opposed to code that is dropped into a virtual machine that's sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy kind of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something about the environment it is running in”. In a panel on "The Future of PaaS in an IaaS World" at Cloud Connect Summit, with a high level of disagreements among panel members, much has been revealed about PaaS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/what-is-platform-as-a-service-experts-disagree/d/d-id/1141665

As industry experts suggest, PaaS solutions can make things easier and accelerate the drive towards business goals. It leads to the question that why they are not as popular as IaaS and SaaS? One has to explore the history of PaaS solutions to get the answer! PaaS, unlike IaaS and SaaS, is still relatively new and simply does not yet have the share of mind that other cloud technologies enjoy. It is also a fact that some initial PaaS offerings did not quite hit the mark, as they were too narrowly focused and not able to offer everything what organizations may have needed. PaaS solutions, particularly those developed within the open-source community, are highly modular and flexible while remaining very secure. This gives organizations the option to plug and play as necessary. PaaS solutions allow for simplified, yet powerful development, but this is where things can get a bit tricky. Too much flexibility could impede accelerated development, which is counterproductive.

Gordon Haff, from Cloud Product Strategy team, Red Hat, reveals more about PaaS in his recent article. To read, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/27/why-your-company-shouldnt-pass-on-paas-to-develop-new-apps/

In a recent research by Commodity Technology Advisor, an analytical firm covering the ETRM and CTRM markets; it was found that cloud technology will be the next big thing for Energy and Commodities Trade and Risk Management (E/CTRM) solutions. More firms are accepting this technology replacing the on premise software model once preferred by companies. Cloud technology also helps in quicker realization of ROI. Other factors which help in accepting cloud technology are: speed of implementation, ease of integration, centralized vendor support and device mobility.

To read more why more firms are switching to cloud technology, follow the link below:

http://www.commodities-now.com/reports/technology/16598-future-of-commodities-trading-secure-in-the-cloud.html

The CloudMapper VMS application can be deployed with an Amazon Web Services AMI, on-premises or in a hybrid environment. This application can monitor 337 health metrics on AWS. Most enterprises use AWS in some way, but faced trouble capturing the cloud service's various metrics. With AWS rolling out new services and features rapidly, monitoring became more complicated. With a proper mechanism to address this issue, it took 2 long years to launch the visual monitoring system- CloudMapper.

According to the developer ScienceLogic, CloudMapper can be used for:

·         Spot expensive AWS resources;

·         Aligning security policies with virtual private clouds;

·         Uptime; 

·         Selecting the best zone to use;

·         Visibility into AWS.

To read more, visit

http://www.zdnet.com/sciencelogic-launches-cloudmapper-tracks-aws-performance-costs-7000027935/

Unified communications platforms can be seen not necessarily as end points, but as beginning points for intrusion. It is a growing concern for organizations today. According to Kevin Riley, chief technology officer, Sonus Networks, as landscape architecture surrounds Unified Communication systems, emphasizing more on security is needed. A recent survey by the CIO Playbook reveals that 31% of organizations considered security and privacy issues to be a key challenge while implementing unified communication system. This concern is because integrating platforms requires opening up ports to enable the flow of data, which means additional unwanted traffic is able to flow freely. However, organizations can take precautions, like installing session border controllers (SBCs) to close ports that are not required and protect their networks from dangerous traffic.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/feature/Striving-for-secure-unified-communications

Few years ago, Internet marketing in India would have meant designing On-Premise solutions for activities such as CRM or ERP. Products and tools from global software vendors were available, but integration and customization often meant huge expenditure. Today, with the SaaS delivery model, software and related data are centrally hosted on the cloud and can be accessed through a Web browser, resulting in better operations with significantly less expenditure. Migrating to a SaaS model makes sense for an e-commerce company, but it is also relevant for a company which deals in the age-old business like auto loans. A principal reason for such industry-wide demand of SaaS is its ability to make decisions faster. Sunil Padmanabhan, research director for Gartner in India had said recently that "SaaS is extremely real in India and there is a large critical mass in adoption”.

To read more, visit reputed journalist Rajiv Rao’s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/in/reaching-for-the-cloud-indias-saas-journey-7000023820/

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software which helps to monitor your customer relationship before and after the sale of your products and/or services is on the rise and it is expected to grow steadily over the next few years. Thanks to Internet of Technology (IoT), its emerging trends can make way of some serious innovations and investments in CRM space in a very short time. To stay ahead in the winning race, it is vital that you should focus on it.

There are some reasons to do so. At present, CRM zeroes in on employees’ efforts facilitation to help the customers. But in the next few years, a shift in the paradigm will take place roping in advanced analytics. With this, you can be able to predict customer happiness and behavior. Then you will be able to use Big Data to use the numbers that can help you to respond to customers’ wants and needs and in some cases even before the customers are aware that they need your service!

So, are you ready to hop on the new trend? Read more on the new trend here: http://midsizeinsider.com/en-us/article/the-internet-of-things-will-revolutioniz .

OpenSSL is a popular cryptographic library used to digitally scramble sensitive data as it passes to and from computer servers so that only the service provider and the intended recipients can make sense of it. If an organisation employs OpenSSL, users see a padlock icon in their web browser - although this can also be triggered by rival products. Google Security and Codenomicon - a Finnish security company - revealed on Monday that a flaw had existed in OpenSSL for more than two years that could be used to expose the secret keys that identify service providers employing the code. They said that if attackers made copies of these keys they could steal the names and passwords of people using the services, as well as take copies of their data and set up spoof sites that would appear legitimate because they used the stolen credentials. This vulnerability allows anyone on the internet to read the memory of the system protected by the bug-affected code. In this way, they can get the keys needed to decode and read the data, according security researchers at the Finnish firm Codenomicon who discovered it. The bug is independently discovered recently by Codenomicon and Google Security researcher Neel Mehta. The official name for the vulnerability is CVE-2014-0160.

To read more, visit:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/heartbleed-web-security-bug-what-you-need-to-know-1.2603988

You may think that a call center business is pretty simple. But, as customers are changing their interaction behaviors, modernization of call centers is an imperative point of today’s business. Customer retention is an important parameter here and you must aim to reduce it to as minimum as possible because a slight reduction in it can benefit you by reducing your cost to a considerable extent. While looking at your call center business, you must aim for its effectiveness and must ensure that it is productive. But, the question is how should you go for it?

Mary Velan, author at Business 2 Community gives you some tips to revamp your call center customer experience from scratch. Read them here: http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/4-tips-modernize-call-center-customer-experience-start-finish-0840687#!DylE3 .