Happy New Year, y’all, here’s hoping it’s a prosperous and blessed New Year for us all, and that the Mayans were wrong.
Security is a paramount concern in cloud storage today, so woe betide the platform provider even perceived as being the least bit cavalier about security.
Box.net is covering all the bases when it comes to the security of its platform as the cloud storage provider recently announced a new set of tools and access controls for the enterprise. Company officials also announced a product integration with Intel to deliver what they characterize as “additional protections for users and increased admin capabilities for IT managers.”
Not that Box.net was any slouch when it came to security before the recent announcements; you don’t get to provide storage for 77 percent of the Fortune 500, and get 100,000 businesses using your service if you slack off on security. The company’s just ensuring that it remains state of the art.
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Amdocs, a telecommunications provider, recently noted in a blog entry by Naomi Weiser recently noted that two shoppers recently bought $100,000-plus Ferrari and “a new home via eBay subsidiary PayPal’s mobile app on Cyber Monday.”
Don’t try this at home with Mommy and Daddy’s smartphone, kids.
Most of us use smartphones to purchase more, uh, modest items. Songs on iTunes, for example. But we’re heading towards big ticket territory, Weiser writes, noting recent findings from data research and analysis firm comScore show that in September two-thirds of all smartphone owners made more substantial purchases on their phones.
British retailers Argos, ASOS and Debenhams are trying to find ways to sell their products through mobile apps. American retailers like Toys R Us, JC Penney, Lowes, and Best Buy are testing such approaches as giving store reps mobile phones to help shoppers instantly compare prices and match them when necessary, Weiser says.
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A recent white paper from lyrix.com, titled “Why Every Enterprise Needs a VoIP High Quality Speech Enabled Auto Attendant,” does a good job demonstrating why, with growing bandwidth and the ubiquity of SIP, “it is finally feasible to deliver high quality speech applications from the cloud.”
There are good business reasons to automate some or all of your call answering -- but the spelling of names on a DTMF keypad can be tricky or impossible on some smartphones and is illegal (and dangerous) while driving.
What you need is a high quality speech-enabled auto attendant, which its supporters would even describe as “prohibitively expensive and technically challenging,” involving premised-based installation of a dedicated server and expensive speech recognition licenses.
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“In these difficult times, companies everywhere are looking for unique ways to cut their costs.”
So say officials at AireSpring, a provider of IP communications services. While the company is right, aren’t all companies always looking for ways to cut costs, be times flush or thin?
Sure, products such as those offered by AireSpring might seem a bit more attractive when cutting costs is a matter of survival to a company, but well-run companies will always be in the market and on the lookout for such products.
And of course it helps to find quick, easy and relatively painless ways of cutting transportation, sales, and operations costs. Well, guess what hits the trifecta there? That’s right – conferencing. Put fewer people in the air from here to there, and not only do you save money and time, the employee probably appreciates not having to fly to St. Louis yet again for something that can be taken care of via conferencing technology.
