Ulrika Hedquist, who writes for Computerworld New Zealand, recently reported that analysts from both Gartner and IDC agree the CRM systems market is still in good trim, being worth $1.06 billion in Asia-Pacific and Japan last year “after having grown 21 percent year-on-year.”
She says that IDC is seeing “a continued focus on customer-centric initiatives and this includes using mobility, collaboration, BI, social networks and CRM,” citing Rasika Versleijen-Pradhan, senior services analyst at IDC New Zealand: "This continues to be a key area of investment for many organizations.”
Gartner's own research points to healthy investment in loyalty management, multi-channel, web and interactive customer offerings in Australia and New Zealand, “particularly in the banking, telecoms, financial services, insurance and airlines sectors, as well as government,” says Praveen Sengar, principal research analyst, e-commerce and CRM at Gartner, adding that SaaS adoption is showing healthy signs in Australia and New Zealand, with Salesforce.com growing by 35-40 percent, according to Hedquist.
Versleijen-Pradhan told Hedquist that adoption levels have somewhat stayed the same, “only that small-sized companies see it as being more relevant and important for their business.” Interestingly, the analyst added that “for the time being” the majority of organizations' preferred choice is on-premise. That’s probably the case, but one can expect to see the numbers continue to shift to hosted options.
Read more here.
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Recently TMC’s Erik Linask did an interesting podcast with Doug Mohney, a contributor and editor for TMCnet concentrating on the satellite industry.
As Linask said in the podcast, Mohney is scheduled to attend the STS 135 launch – Atlantis, the last planned U.S. space shuttle mission, on Friday, July 8 – the last NASA cargo run to the international space station. Linask wanted to know what the chances were for a good, on-time launch.
Mohney thinks they’re pretty good, “no showstoppers” so far, no major issues that might throw off the launch. Weather is always unpredictable, of course, but as Mohney noted, the weather’s pretty good down in Florida this time of year.
Linask wanted to know what a lot of people want to know – hey, why are we retiring the space shuttle? After all, haven’t we sunk a lot of money in this program? Mohney explained that there are two primary concerns – safety, being the primary one, especially after the loss of Columbia a couple years ago. It’s basically still an R&D program, it’s not state of the art, reliable enough to count on for regularity. Bottom line, every flight is a risky one.
And, of course, cost. It’s a heck of an expensive project, needing thousands of people to support it. NASA claims it costs $450 million per launch, others say it’s closer to $1 billion. Split the difference if you like, you have to justify those numbers somehow, and in its current state the program isn’t doing that.
Read more here.
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Forget all the horror stories you hear about millions of passwords being swiped with ease implying that they’re not important. They are. Don’t treat your passwords cavalierly, using your first name or “123456” as your password on the theory that “Hey, if a hacker wants to steal it he will anyway.” Enterprise password management begs to differ.
Passwords are, in fact, your first and best defense against identity theft.
So it’s a bit puzzling why passwords ”remain one the of the most fragile” means used by businesses to safeguard their user accounts, networks and data, as industry observer Ken Hardin writes, “despite constant warnings that users are simply awful at managing passwords and that even the best passwords cannot replace other measures, such as encryption, to protect your most valuable assets.”
Hardin points to some useful resources for enterprise password management, in the “Enterprise Password Management Guide” put together by The National Institute of Standards and Technology, of interest to enterprise password management pros and more sophisticated users. It deals with what Hardin says are “hardwired issues relating to what might appear to be something as simple as passwords,” dispensing such advice as “be sure to encrypt files on hosts that contain passwords to make life harder on hackers,” and “lock out users who make excessive, repeated failed attempts to log on.”
Read more here [http://it.tmcnet.com/enterprise-password-management/articles/193251-useful-resources-enterprise-password-management-presented.htm].
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Today’s Cool Factoid: If you have an eight-character password, adding one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for a hacker to crack it using a brute force attack, from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.
It might pay to try to memorize that extra character or capital letter in your password or to use password reset software to beef it up.
Blogger John P., who writes for OneMansBlog.com, says hackers “have developed a whole range of tools to get at your personal data.” Despite what you hear about thousands and millions of passwords being stolen in the blink of an eye, a strong, unguessable, unique password is still the best defense you have against personal data loss. Password reset software can help greatly with that.
Quick: Is your password – yes, we know you use the same one everywhere – at least eight characters and a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, with at least one symbol or number tossed in somewhere? If it is, pat yourself on the back.
John describes a Brute Force Attack in the blog post stating it assumes you probably use the same password for lots of stuff and it doesn’t try to get it from your bank since their security’s up to snuff. But other sites you use – “the Hallmark e-mail greeting cards site, an online forum you frequent, or an e-commerce site you’ve shopped at” – probably aren’t, and are much more hackable.
Read more here.
