South Africa’s Electronic Communications and Transactions Act imposes “stringent record-keeping compliance requirements on organizations,” according to industry journal BizCommunity.com, requiring them to keep accurate records of all telephonic and other electronic interactions with consumers for at least three years.
Protecting the rights of consumers is part of the recent legislation, but as the journal says, “simply implementing a call recording system will not provide the optimum compliance with the increased legal requirements either.”
Last fall TMC had the news that Datatec acquired niche software security company Biodata IT SA, which was part of the group's strategy to grow its South African networking, convergence and security distribution business.
"The acquisition comes at a time when we are seeing growing demand among our customers for products that will enable them to meet, reach and exceed their security needs with particular reference to the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act," said Jacques Malherbe, the CEO of Westcon SA.
Matthew Balcomb, director of Majuda Software Southern Africa, an affiliate organization to Majuda Corporation International, which deals in call recording and quality management, said to fulfil the requirements as set out by the laws, “companies will need to do more than simply implement mere policies and procedures. A governance, risk and compliance strategy tightly integrated into the operations and the culture of an organization, is required."
Read more here.
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Of course one of cloud computing’s great selling points is its simplicity -- right? So why is Andre Yee blogging that “there's an issue with the adoption of cloud computing that no one is paying much attention to... until now. It's the issue of complexity.”
“Complexity?” Is this the same cloud lauded to the skies for how simple it makes IT for SMBs? Yes it is, but still, Yee has a point. “Could it be,” as he says, “that much of the problem with cloud computing adoption has to do with the fact that it's still too difficult and inaccessible to the average developer?”
There you go. Didn’t think of that one, did you? He mentions an Information Week article where Charles Babcock talks about an event at CloudConnect 2011 where Jinesh Varia, technical evangelist for Amazon EC2, “had problems guiding the audience through a hands-on session on how to deploy code on the cloud.”
And it wasn’t just a bollixed demo, heaven knows that’s happened to us all enough times: “When asked, no more than 10 percent of the crowd had previously deployed on EC2 successfully.” And as Babcock says in the article, “That untouched-by-cloud portion of the IT profession may be larger than many believe, given the trendiness of the term ‘cloud’ combined with the looseness of its definition.”
Read more here.
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Looking for cloud collaboration software apps? You’re in luck -- we’ve got quick rundowns for some of your top options condensed from the longer reviews available at Information Week.
Microsoft SharePoint Online. You might have heard of the vendor here, they have a bit of a track record. The app can be deployed either on-site or in the cloud, is available bundled with Microsoft's business productivity suite, online standard suite, or as a standalone offering for about $5.25 per user, with a 30-day free trial. It’s part of Microsoft's Office 365, and includes a portal, collaboration and social computing, content management, and search.
The Jive Engage Platform. This app melds together collaboration, community, and social media monitoring software, providing customers with blogs, tags, videos, social bookmarks, collaborative documents, polls, profiles, and status updates. It also provides social media monitoring, mobile applications, community analytics, and integration with legacy systems, and works on desktops and mobile devices including the iPhone and BlackBerry.
Google Groups for Business. As easy to use as the rest of the Google universe, the app gives users access to email, documents, folders, calendar, and videos. But unlike the free standard edition of Google Apps, Groups for Business costs about $50 per user per year, and may include a set-up fee. But companies can disable ads in the Web interface; Google offers a free trial.
Read more here.
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Annual enterprise video conferencing and telepresence system revenue growth is clipping along at a healthy rate, according to a recent study from Infonetics Research.
It grew 18 percent in 2010 to $2.2 billion, and should more than double by 2015, hitting $5 billion.
Growth is great, but BrightCom CEO Bob McCandless wonders how the technology itself is actually progressing, remarking recently that today's video conferencing and telepresence industry “has not moved far beyond the original technology of the original video technologies” in the early 1990s.
“Apple CU-Seeme, AT&T's videophone and the CAL-Tech CERN project were among the first real video conferencing systems that introduced people to live video communication,” states Mr. McCandless. “As an emerging technology, they set the standards for the majority of what the industry uses today.”
One of the dangers of perpetuating technology, McCandless said, “is that we do not move forward. We continue to use standards like H.323 or MCU based systems long after the industry probably should have moved on to something else. Imagine the consequences if we were still on the path of only using the same gasoline engines that were first made for automobiles.
Read more here.
