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Essential registry repairs and defragment steps for a system

December 9, 2019 Humor

If you’re someone who struggles with the performance of their system and relies on various software applications to boost the performance, this article is for you. Many factors contribute to the performance of a system. While you should have a powerful processor and RAM, It is vital also to have a versatile software collection.

Platforms and tools like anti-viruses, RAM Boosters, and other cleaners that are available in the market today. Due to the extensive digital exposure, we also incorporate several security measures to prevent hacking and breaches. Compared to the past decade, the new era of technology is full of availability of various tools and assets for systems.

It is not enough for best performance

We may still fall short-hand despite all of our endeavors. Our systems might still lag or have some performance problems. The software applications we have might not be working properly. Despite our diligence in taking care of the system, it might still falter. Why? Well, the short answer is it might be due to the useless junks and fragments of various files in your system, as well as the registry errors. These two happen to be the hidden culprits of a lagging system.

It is not your fault

People seldom realize the importance of disk defragments, or the functionality of registries. Hence, you end up spending more on fighting viruses, hacking attempts, and overall performance-boosting. However, these two: Fragments and Registry errors can render even the most robust of applications useless. In other words, regardless of how complete your system is, if you have these two problems, the applications themselves will find it a problem to run.

What is Defragment

Defragment is a process that enhances the entire performance of your system. Your system contains a lot of files, some of them gets removed or deleted. Whether you install a software or other tool and then remove it, it may have left some fragments behind. Similarly, it is also possible that spyware has infiltrated your system. Overall, all of this contributes to the unnecessary consumption of your hard disk space that puts a load on the hardware.

It is paramount to maintain optimal hard disk space for better performance of the system. Yes, even though they are our storage units, they still require apt space for the systems to work properly. While fragments seem like a small-fry, it is a big deal. Because when the fragments pile up, there may easily be gigabytes of consumed space. It is almost like removing furniture or other unimportant things from your house but not cleaning it. Eventually, your house will become downtrodden, right? The same thing happens on the computer. If you do not perform defragmentation, then it will end up malfunctioning, and there may be consequences. The process cleans your computer off any remnants of various files and unnecessary components.

Steps to conduct defragmentation:

Go to Start Menu
Open Control Panel
Go To Systems and Security
On Administrative Tools, click on ‘Defragment Your Hard Drive.’
First, click on Analyze Disk Button to conduct analysis.
After Analysis, click Defragment Disk Button

It is important to note that the window’s defragmentation only works if there is at least 10% of fragmentation available in the disk. Only after Analsis will you be able to defrag the hard drive. The process is long, and it may take time, sometimes it is instantaneous. You don’t need to restart your system after the process.

What is Registry

The registry is the files that every windows platform has. From windows phone to full-fledged operating systems, they all have a registry. It is a collection of files that saves the changes you make to your system from any mediocre change like themes to the substantial ones like system performance and application settings.

Every single component and software, regardless of how minuscule, even the drivers, have a registry. However, like any other part of the system, they have the potential to get corrupted or face an error. When that happens, an application may stop working properly. It can happen to any component of the window, and you may never notice.

You won’t notice until your system seizes or goes corrupted. Abrupt powercuts or shutdowns, and lags, or sudden unsaved changes, forcing applications to close, and several other similar actions are responsible for registry errors. It may start small, but once an error is inflicted, it may end up messing with an entire system. It is similar to ending up with a glitchy system.

Hence, the Registry fix comes into play. There are several tools available that help in conducting registry fixes nowadays. Windows itself offers a method to use commands and initiate registry fix or clean up to maintain a fair balance of system performance.

Steps to Fix Registry:

There are three methods to conduct a registry fix. Windows now come with an automatic repair option, and you can use that. Then there’s Refresh, and if nothing works then, you may have to use the third option, Reset. The following are the steps for each one of them.

Automatic Repair

Go to settings
Go to the general window
Click on Advanced Startup Panel
Click on Restart Now
From the options screen, click on troubleshoot
Go to advanced options in troubleshoot
Click on Automated Repair
If you get an option to perform a login, comply

The repairing sequence will begin after that, and all you have to do is wait.

Refreshing Procedure

Refresh is one of the more preferred options. Due to the new windows features, before refreshing the system, there will be back up for everything. As it won’t affect the files, you will end up receiving all of your applications and other data intact. Do the following:

From the settings click on Change PC Settings
Go to Update and Recovery Option
Select Recovery from the option.
There will be an option of refreshing your PC without affecting your files. Select it.
Instructions are simple to follow through

It will take longer than automatic repairs, for obvious reasons. The windows are essentially deleting everything and refixing everything by reinstalling everything while keeping the data intact. It is also one of the preferred methods.

Resetting the System

This should be the last resort. The option will undoubtedly delete all the personal changes, files, data, and applications and essentially take the windows back to the point where it was newly installed into the PC.

From the settings click on Update and Security
Select Recovery and click on Get Started
Click on the ‘Reset this PC’ option.
Follow through by selecting Remove Everything
Follow any other steps according to your preference.

With defragmentation and registry repairs, you will certainly witness a drastic improvement in the performance of your system. There are also several tools available if you do not want to play with the windows. They are generally safer and automated, available in the market. Some are up for subscriptions and others for free. However, generally relying on windows self-sufficient settings is a better option.

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How to keep your online game running and bug-free

December 9, 2019 Big Data

Today’s game consoles offer functionalities — such as platform crossplay — that are something of a miracle. Because every game runs differently, especially across different systems and networks, these new perks come with backend complexities that, without the proper strategies in place for monitoring and observability, can negatively impact the gaming experience.

So, how are today’s companies staying ahead of these challenges to ensure the best game experience? The answer: monitoring tools that help them observe their infrastructure in real time and provide timely feedback and internal notifications when things go wrong, so they know before the player does.

Red alert?

In my role at Sensu, I oversee the customer reliability team and regularly hear from our customers about the overwhelming number of alerts their teams are tasked with managing and addressing on a daily basis. It’s been our experience that alert fatigue can have a huge, often negative, impact on any organization, putting stress on monitoring teams dealing with them every day. In fact, in a recent report, 72% of CIOs say that alert fatigue is a big problem affecting their team.

Given the scale and complexity of gaming companies’ legacy monitoring setups, monitoring teams are constantly faced with thousands of critical errors. With so many alerts, it can be virtually impossible to tell not only which issues to escalate, but which are impacting players (and how). Under these circumstances, team morale is understandably low, and turnover is typically very high. As games continue to make the shift to online, companies are faced with the decision to entirely re-evaluate their approach to monitoring, migrating from their legacy toolset to a next-generation solution designed for scalability.

While monitoring tools may make it easier for gaming companies to stay ahead of potential bugs and server issues, what do these behind-the-scenes technologies really mean for the player and their experience? To name a few:

Uninterrupted online streaming
Seamless crossplay
Quicker updates to bugs and errors
Less downtime, more game time

Companies such as Industrial Light & Magic, Weta Digital, Verizon Media, ArenaNet, and Activision, which includes Demonware — a global online gaming company that creates and hosts online services for popular video games such as the Call of Duty series and Guitar Hero across various consoles — have introduced new monitoring solutions to their internal teams to replace legacy solutions that couldn’t keep up with the demand of today’s online gaming ecosystems.

Focusing on what matters

During Monitorama 2018, Demonware presented on how the company was able to reduce daily alerts and notifications by addressing underlying issues to ultimately create a more engaged monitoring team. Previously, the Demonware monitoring team felt overwhelmed with the volume of alerts and notifications they were receiving on a daily basis — they received literally thousands per day, each of which needed to be addressed with an antiquated system. Keeping up with these alerts for a team of their size was daunting, and the task of vetting these alerts and addressing the issues seemed impossible.

After implementing a modern monitoring platform that could keep up with the company’s scale and complexities across various game titles and consoles, Demonware reduced the volume of alerts by 99% — from thousands of alerts to only ten per day. With a proper monitoring solution in place, Demonware’s monitoring team better understands the issues affecting their games, and now has the data and insights needed to resolve long-standing bugs, resulting in a more reliable and quality experience for their players.

Detect and correct issues on the fly

Over the years, online video games companies have evolved from the traditional development model to the fast-paced DevOps model which provides the flexible and rapid “feedback” loop to detect and correct issues on the fly. With next-gen monitoring solutions in place, monitoring teams are able to quickly identify and resolve specific anomaly patterns in their applications which could have resulted in the game going down for an extended period of time while the issue was being addressed.

Monitoring tools have allowed for gaming companies to stay one step ahead of delays and downtimes for their players, ultimately boosting team morale and avoiding a throwdown on a subreddit (as reviews and conversations are integral pieces of the gaming community).

As the gaming industry continues to evolve, companies and their monitoring teams are challenged with keeping up with the changing landscape. From understanding new infrastructure and tooling, to navigating the complexities of a new gaming platform — effective monitoring tools can ensure a seamless experience for both the player and the monitoring team tasked with delivering that delightful end-user experience.

Cameron Johnston is the VP of Customer Reliability at Sensu, where he helps customers solve their stickiest monitoring challenges.

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EYE CANDY

December 8, 2019 Humor

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

Dirty Job?

December 8, 2019 Humor

Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) is retiring at the end of December, but there is just one problem. He is currently the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, and no other senator wants the job. I mean, can you imagine being in charge of enforcing standards of behavior for senators and their staffs, investigating violations of federal law, and making sure all the senators follow the Senate rules? Especially during the impeachment?

The Hill spoke with a number of GOP senators, including current members of the committee. Their response? “Thanks, but no thanks.” One senator said “I’d rather have a root canal.”

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Power BI Service and Mobile October and November 2019 feature summary

December 8, 2019 Self-Service BI

The past couple of months have been nothing short of fantastic for the Power BI team. Even with the holiday season fast approaching, our engineers continued to work hard and deliver some of most anticipated features across Power BI service and mobile. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap all the announcements we made in the months of October and November:

Refresh your Power BI dataset using Power Automate

We released a new Refresh a dataset action to the Power BI connector for Power Automate. You can now trigger refreshes for your datasets in Power BI based on hundreds of Automate triggers. Whether your trigger is based on changes to items in your SharePoint list or updates to an Excel file in OneDrive or SharePoint Online or a complex day and time schedule, there are dozens of use cases where you can leverage this action. Check out the announcement blog to learn more.

On-premises data gateway management via PowerShell (Preview)

We rolled a public preview of PowerShell cmdlets that help you automate and manage tasks for Power BI data sources and On-premises gateways. These cmdlets are available in the PowerShell Gallery and can be installed in an elevated PowerShell session. Learn more

Contact lists for reports and dashboards

To help end users ask questions, raise issues with the data they see, or seek confirmation, we added a new feature that allows authors to configure the list of contacts, which can include multiple users and groups, for reports and dashboards in the Power BI service. When used with the New Look for the Power BI service, end users can quickly find and contact someone to make timely data driven decisions. Learn more

Power BI lineage view (Preview)

Understanding the flow of data from the data source to its destination is critical for building reports. To help you visualize this, we introduced a public preview of lineage view. The view encompasses the flow of all Power BI workspace artifacts including dataflows, datasets, reports, and dashboards and their connections to the external data sources. Check our announcement blog to learn more.

General availability of Automated Machine Learning

We announced that Automated Machine Learning (Auto ML) in Power BI is generally available in all public cloud regions. With this feature, business analysts without a strong background in machine learning can build ML models to solve business problems that once required data scientists. Most of the data science behind the creation of the ML models is automated by Power BI, while giving visibility into the process used to create your ML model to provide you with full insight. To learn more, check out the step-by-step tutorial that shows how to build your machine learning model using Auto ML or refer to the documentation.

Large models in Power BI Premium (Preview)

We supercharged Power BI Premium by releasing a public preview of large models. As you are already aware, Power BI datasets can store data in a highly compressed, in-memory cache for blazing fast query performance. This enables fast user interactivity over large datasets. However, these dataset caches were limited to 10 GB after compression. The new large models remove this limitation, so dataset cache sizes are limited only by the Power BI Premium capacity size. Check out https://aka.ms/LargeModels for further information such as availability by region, and how to set up your Power BI Premium capacity for large models.

Data protection capabilities (Preview)

As enterprises grow their Power BI deployments, reducing the risk for data leakage becomes critical. To help organizations govern their sensitive business data, we partnered with the Microsoft Information Protection and Cloud App Security team to release a public preview of data protection capabilities for Power BI. With this feature, you can now classify and label sensitive Power BI data using the familiar Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels used in Office, enforce governance policies even when Power BI content is exported to Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF, and much more. These are also applicable to Power BI mobile apps. Read our detailed documentation to learn more.

Embedding paginated reports in applications (Preview)

We also announced the public preview of embedding paginated reports to allow ISVs and developers to embed pixel-perfect reports in their own applications using Power BI APIs. Check out the tutorial or read the documentation to learn more.

Upgrade classic workspaces to the new workspaces experience

We announced that you can now opt-in to upgrading classic workspaces to the new workspaces experience in Power BI. The Power BI new workspace experience has been General Available since April 2019. It offers improved security management, more flexible workspace roles, and new capabilities like a contact list to help you support your teams. Using the new workspace experience also enables several major features like shared and certified datasets and large models, to name a few. Learn more

November update for On-premises data gateway

We also updated the Power BI On-premises data gateway for the month of November. Version 3000.14.39 includes a new way to change the gateway’s recovery password and an updated engine to match the Power BI Desktop November update. Learn more about the updates in our release blog or check it out by installing the new gateway.

Updates to Power BI mobile apps

Lastly, we updated the Power BI mobile apps with the following features:

Android support for remote configuration of Report Server access settings – IT admins can now use their organization’s MDM tool to remotely configure those settings on both iOS and Android devices. See Configure Power BI mobile app access to Report Server remotely for details.
Cross-report drill through – You can now tap on a data point to drill through to access other reports and report pages. When you drill through to a target page, the content in that page is filtered based on the drill through settings.

Roadmap updates

We use the Power BI section in the Business Application Release Notes to share details on what’s coming in the next three to six months. These release notes are updated weekly with details on shipping dates, screenshots, and new announcements. Here’s what we disclosed recently:

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3 Ways to Fine Tune Your Budgeting and Planning Processes for the New Year

December 8, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Rami Ali, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NetSuite Planning and Budgeting

Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) teams play a crucial role supporting major corporate decisions of the CFO, CEO, the Board of Directors and department heads. Unlike accountants who are in charge of recordkeeping, financial analysts are charged with examining, analyzing and evaluating the entirety of a corporation’s financial activities and mapping out the company’s financial future.

The FP&A function is under constant pressure to provide more strategic value and insights for its organization. With many groups finishing up, or still working on, their 2020 planning cycle, the pain and struggles are still top of mind. Now is the time to fine tune the approach to planning and budgeting for the new year.

Here are three ways to get more out of your budgeting and planning process:

1. Increase collaboration.

When it comes to business, collaboration is vital. After all, no single department can do its job for long without the other departments pulling their own weight. But for some reason, when it comes to the numbers it can feel like every department is on its own. Data is often stuck in departmental or functional silos, making it difficult or even impossible for other departments to get the information they need to do their jobs well—to understand potential risks and opportunities for the business. Financial collaboration becomes easier when you stop relying on static spreadsheets. It starts with getting the entire team working with one, trusted set of numbers, and building on a foundation of accurate, up-to-date data. Teams should collaborate to eliminate version control issues and establish role-based permissions that enable process owners to control who can access and edit data.

2. Become more agile.

With the rising volume and complexity of data, automating manual tasks will allow FP&A professionals to truly rethink how they work every day. They can spend less time and energy on repetitive, manually intensive work, such as collecting, consolidating and reconciling spreadsheets, and free up more time for to serve as valued business partners. And to be a valued business partner, FP&A teams need to be able to tell management teams what the data means and make recommendations so the business can act on it, whether that’s a new product launch, customer segmentation initiative or supply chain inefficiency. Once the data collection process has been completely automated and data integrity is ensured, you end up with a harmonized and accurate view of the business. Not only will this save time but will also allow information to get to stakeholders more quickly and accurately.

3. Enrich your data analysis.

Businesses perform more efficiently when they are able to adapt and respond to the business climate. Using modeling techniques, predictive analytics, multiple ‘what if’ scenarios and rolling forecasts as part of the planning and budgeting process can help minimize uncertainty in the business. FP&A professionals are able to be more responsive in a fast-moving market and are able to deliver reliable analysis and operational reports to more accurately facilitate decision-making.

How to accomplish this?

As great as spreadsheets are for some things, collaboration, agility and analysis aren’t words you think of when describing that tool. Yet, many FP&A teams continue to rely on spreadsheets to manage the planning and budgeting process. With spreadsheets it’s easier to introduce errors and harder to be collaborative, and they are unsuited for the complex dynamic planning and reporting organizations require. FP&A ends up spending the bulk of its time verifying that the numbers are up to date and accurate. As a result, the team doesn’t have time to work with stakeholders to deliver insightful analysis that will really help in planning for company growth.

NetSuite Planning and Budgeting facilitates both company-wide and departmental planning with modeling capabilities, approval workflows and reporting within one collaborative scalable solution. A cloud-based planning and budgeting solution makes data accessible, in real-time, to everyone who needs to see such information. Accessibility boosts participation and accountability, making it easier to get meaningful input and engagement.

For more information on planning and budgeting, download the e-book, High Impact Planning and Budgeting for all Types of Growth.

Posted on Fri, December 6, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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LyntonWeb Founder Talks Tech and Partnership with TIBCO

December 8, 2019 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 mins 30 sec.

Director of Customer Success for TIBCO Lynn Harrington sat down with LyntonWeb founder, Daniel Lynton, as he discusses what led him to found his company at such an early age, how it has evolved to keep up with data-driven marketing, and how its partnership with TIBCO has allowed the company to grow tenfold.

Lynn Harrington: Let’s start with your journey. How did you get into this industry, and where you are today?

Daniel Lynton: I started my company from my childhood bedroom 20 years ago and was just fascinated by technology and learning how businesses work. I still am today, and I enjoy learning how I can apply technology and automation to help our clients grow. For the first 10 years, we built custom web applications and content management websites and eventually got more involved in digital marketing. About 10 years ago we discovered HubSpot and were honored to be one of its first certified partners. I was able to apply that background in technology to build HubSpot integrations with CRM, e-commerce, ERP. That’s what brought me to TIBCO Cloud™ Integration. We became a partner about five years ago and we’ve grown our customer base tenfold.

LH: One of the things you’re really good at is understanding what your customers need and building it for them. How did you develop that skill?

DL: I think part of it is having the curiosity to ask questions because that’s what opened my mind to all of the possibilities that are out there in technology. If you have that, then you’re always thinking about what’s next.

LH: Why would somebody in the marketing space turn to integration?

DL: Well, marketing is very data-driven. Marketers are being held accountable for revenue generation, and without the data, marketers are doing things the old way. API integration enables our clients to combine and streamline data for a complete view of their customers. That allows us to sell the value of our services and it makes our agency more valuable when we have integrated services.

LH: Can you give us a couple of examples of why you think TIBCO has helped you to grow at the rate that you have?

DL: I would say the ability to shift from building custom integration software projects that we were doing pre-TIBCO and now, we use out-of-the-box connectors that are in the marketplace that are automatically supported in the platform and the ability to build our own connectors. With TIBCO Cloud Integration as our foundation, we’re able to focus our specialization on just one API connection. That has enabled immense growth because we have TIBCO, this multimillion-dollar engineering arm behind us with the support and technology upon which we’re building apps and integrations. Working with TIBCO has enabled us to bring integrations at scale to our customers.

LH: If you think back to five years ago and what you offer now, has there been a big change in the level of integration or the capabilities that you deliver to those customers?

DL: We have evolved. We’ve brought much more specialized integration services to the market. Five years ago, we were doing relatively basic CRM integrations. Leads get generated in a marketing system, HubSpot, and those leads get shared into a CRM, like Dynamics, NetSuite or Salesforce. Today, we’re finding ourselves building multi-point integrations on-premises with SQL databases, building those custom connectors. We are moving upmarket and building for midmarket and enterprise firms.

LH: Any advice you would give to somebody who’s just starting out?

DL: You may feel like you have a certain direction you need to be headed, whether it’s software or otherwise. I would say keep an open mind and take in as much information as possible so that you can make the decision that is right for you. Get your hands on the information, the software, and the code and experiment and tinker until you find the path you want to be on.

Grow your company by becoming a TIBCO partner. Learn more.

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The New Era of Account-Based Marketing

December 8, 2019 CRM News and Info

Business-to-business marketing is evolving — and it’s not just the industry itself. Vendor marketing efforts with customers can and should evolve as well. When you see a vendor selected repeatedly, or it officially earns a designation as a preferred vendor, it’s a sign of marketing evolution.

Most B2B marketing efforts begin from a cold start. Either a vendor is new, with a new product category, or it is entering a new market and attempting to penetrate an account for the first time.

Regardless, the marketing involved for those cold spots is of the missionary variety, and a smart vendor will try to identify target prospects by job titles or functions to find people in departments that are likely to have a particular business problem.

With little to go on, a vendor easily can send introductory materials to a prospect that is ready for more, causing a sales cycle to stall — or worse. The opposite happens too.

Still, marketing is a numbers game. You don’t want to overinvest in an account, but you want to capture the business by having the right content at the right time. Better marketing requires better information, and that’s where marketing has been evolving.

A successful vendor will look for similar situations in a target account — where it might have similar business problems to sell to. The second marketing and sales effort usually is more efficient, simply because the first customer acts as an internal reference.

We know all this, and after the first sale, the marketing effort shifts from missionary to account-based simply because of the internal lines of communications the vendor can leverage.

A smart vendor knows not to rely too much on those internal lines of communication, because even in the best circumstances, a customer is free to look around and duty-bound to make the best selection.

ABM to the Rescue

This is where account-based marketing can shine. As an example, consider IBM’s account-based marketing strategy led by Amber Armstrong, vice president and CMO for IBM Watson IoT.

As many people know, Watson is an advanced technology combining natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning and machine learning to answer questions.

A few years ago, Watson’s signal achievement was to win the Jeopardy! game show playing against some very bright past winners. That set a high bar.

Watson-based products include Maximo for enterprise asset management; TRIRIGA for buildings, facilities and real estate management; and IBM Engineering for engineering lifecycle management and physical products design.

Two threads run through Watson IoT and its products. First, they’re all designed to find needles in haystacks — bits of critical information that big businesses need, which can have material effects on the top and bottom lines.

Second, the universe of people who care about what Watson IoT can find, and who have the budgets to implement Watson IoT solutions, is rather small. Marketing to these people is another needle-in-a-haystack problem that prompted IBM to seek help.

It turned to
G2, perhaps the world’s biggest marketplace for businesses to discover, buy and manage software.

Marketing strategies that work at the director level are not likely to work at the C-level, simply because C-level execs are inundated wtih offers for solutions that will change their businesses for the better — but there’s only so much time in a day.

Frankly, the style of marketing that works at the director level often is not appropriate for those higher up, and it was those people Armstrong wanted to attract.

What to Do?

Getting the attention of and selling to the very top requires a two-pronged approach that Armstrong discussed in a recent interview.

The first part doesn’t differ much from conventional marketing. “We target on paid media and social media and we also target specific companies with specific messages,” she said.

One key difference is in the way Armstrong views G2, a firm that uses crowdsourcing to gather opinions of users to rate and rank companies and products.

G2 offers its customers the ability to customize “product profile pages” with pertinent information about their products, so that when prospective customers read the opinions of actual users, they can get additional information in the moment, without additional effort.

The G2 approach helps vendors break through the early marketing cycle and get a little closer to decision-makers during their deliberative processes, and that makes the initial sale look more like a follow on rather than an icebreaker.

Of course, G2 respects the privacy of its users, but just knowing that some interest was expressed by some person at a company often is enough to give salespeople something to work with.

IBM Watson IoT marketing targets a list of 3,400 major accounts, the small universe. Since each account has multiple divisions that could need any of the three Watson IoT products, identifying active buyers can be challenging. G2 enables its users to be more confident in identifying prospects and pursuing deals, including allowing users to get G2 Buyer Intent data.

As Armstrong puts it, “Old is new again.” The marketing techniques haven’t changed much but they’ve evolved, so that what used to be done with great effort now can be done more quickly and confidently, and with data that takes away the guesswork.

“When I started my career 15 years ago, we’d put together three- to four-page reference documents for customers,” she said.

That was time consuming, and she couldn’t be sure it was exactly what a customer needed. There always were wild cards too.

Would a customer talk to a prospect on the phone for a reference?

“With products like G2, the technology is now available to put a lot of information on a third-party review site. Customers can get feedback almost instantly,” Armstrong pointed out.

Combining customer data that’s been analytically vetted serves to democratize information and make it easier for both the vendor and prospect to get through initial evaluations. Use cases, customer stories, customer evaluations — all are available so that customers get what they need and avoid engaging in a sales process until they are ready.

That’s a small change, but it’s a big evolution in marketing.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

Denis%20Pombriant The New Era of Account Based Marketing
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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Cloud-Based Analytics: A Business Case For CFOs

December 8, 2019 BI News and Info

Part of the “Digital Finance Transformation” series that provides a framework for CFOs to move forward confidently on the journey toward digital transformation

Emerging technological advances resulting from today’s digital reality are penetrating all business fields with an impressive velocity – including financial operations. According to Gartner, “Leading organizations in every industry are wielding data and analytics as competitive weapons.” Cloud-based analytics is one of the contemporary innovative digital assets for finance operations that need to be assimilated into the strategy of any competitive market player.

Traditionally, CFOs aim to lower overall costs, mitigate any potential financial risks, and ensure smooth operations. Yet finance leaders are not in the front rows of “early adopters” of cloud-based analytics solutions, despite having a primary focus on data insights driven from their operations. Nonetheless, the maturity of today’s cloud computing environments has advanced to the extent of being an indispensable part of most enterprises’ business activities. The initial resistance of CFOs related to cost and security concerns about cloud-based analytics solutions seem to be a thing of the past, given the current level of cloud maturity.

Why should CFOs care about a cloud-based financial solution?

An insight-driven financial leader recognizes that with the evolution of Big Data, analytics does not refer simply to a daily operations handling process but is rather an inexhaustible source of valuable intelligence on the overall business well-being of the enterprise. According to the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot, commissioned by SAP in 2019, the top desired outcome of the surveyed companies’ current analytics and business intelligence (BI) efforts is increasing business agility and enabling faster decision-making. Data analytics in a digitalized market cannot be divided into silos, and financial insights should be driven in real time with up-to-date data.

Cloud-based analytics, regardless of the chosen deployment model (private, public, or hybrid), provides the following advantages to CFOs in their leadership of internal financial operations:

Bild Blog Cloud Based Analytics: A Business Case For CFOs

Cost efficiency. Costs generally decrease due to lower capital, maintenance, and downtime costs burdening the enterprise. This results in an overall lower consumption of IT resources and total cost of ownership. The service is a good “pay as much as you use” deal.

Security and data management. Current cloud-based analytics platforms provide the best and most up-to-date security protection. Providers are ensuring coherent upgrades, effective loss prevention, and rapid disaster recovery. Cloud-based analytics systems ensure adherence to data-governance standards and processes by providing data security (roles, authorizations, etc.), restricting access where applicable. Further, a cloud-based analytics platform grants the ability to build and maintain a central metadata repository (i.e., creating a data lake for the organization) across the entire landscape.

Business scalability and agility. Enterprises can scale usage according to their own needs and number of employees by increasing the number of users. In the same way, data storage volumes can be easily adjusted to a growing business environment. Cloud-based analytics solutions provide a flexible platform for future growth without incurring additional costs (other than subscription fees) or time-consuming upgrades.

Improved decision-making. Any authorized member of the organization can obtain real-time and efficient data insights that can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Improved productivity. Analytical data is consolidated and gathered in one place, breaking process silos and improving and speeding up overall processes. An analytics platform connects a wide range of disparate data sources, ranging from structured enterprise and third-party applications, in one place. It improves the analytical process by providing a large spectrum of applications, tools, and features, enabling intelligent and efficient discovery and processing of data. Furthermore, the best solutions offer a user-friendly, intuitive interface and facilitate collaboration over users’ business content.

Resource advantages. Cloud-based analytics enables a better allocation of data scientists, considering advanced features that save unnecessary manual effort in traditional data analytics.

Cloud-based analytics solutions are only improving with time and providing even more embedded features, such as artificial intelligence, that will only enhance the power vested in financial leaders. This marks the beginning of a new era, where analytics in combination with new digital tools recasts the role of the CFO. A CFO is no longer responsible for simply putting together a report to show the situation of the past, but is rather the core player in providing real-time strategic insights into business operations. Cloud-based analytics helps the CFO leverage the value of a large amount of data, make strategic predictions, and determine the overall direction of the enterprise.

For more insight, download the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot.

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