Demarc extensions have been a recurring gray area in the telecommunications industry for years. There is often misconception when it comes to who actually performs the Demarc extension. This confusion can lead to finger pointing and eventually a bad reputation for those involved. Understand the issues surrounding the Demarc extension and how they can be resolved from the very beginning.
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Wireless broadband systems are becoming ever more complex at an unprecedented pace. Verification of such an intricate system in a short development cycle is a challenging and tedious task. This white paper throws light on the need for automated test frameworks required for a wireless broadband system. It discusses two approaches that can help accelerate the verification process of physical layers and higher layers respectively of the protocol stack in wireless broadband systems.
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Today’s mobile software companies face a daunting challenge: How can they achieve quality while getting to market swiftly? After all, speed is king in the mobile market. The trade-off between speed and quality in mobile software development is an illusion—or should be. Get a closer look at the situation with a framework that presents a way to use quality assurance (QA) processes to accelerate development.
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Today’s technology and application leaders are pressured to deliver functionality that drives efficiency, innovation, and growth—while reducing costs. As a result, technology and application portfolio management (APM) are top business priorities. Learn about a framework for implementing an APM program that can enable your company to monitor and analyze the impact of application changes and reduce portfolio complexity.
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Acts of cyber aggression could lead to a cyber war or worse. Capitol Hill is giving attention to this security issue, and vendors are creating new offerings and expanding existing programs—creating new opportunities in the defense industry and opening doors for new players. Learn more about the blurring between information security vendors servicing the private sector and those in the defense and intelligence industry.
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Currently, India’s population is approximately 1.0009 billion. The middle class is large and still growing; wages were low, but now are some of the best in various industries; many workers are well educated and speak English; and investors are optimistic and local stocks are up. Despite political turmoil, the country presses on with economic reforms. But for potential investors, there’s still cause for worry—find out why.
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To do their jobs, knowledge workers use the gamut of media and technologies. However, although the proliferation of new means to locate and access data has multiplied the amount of information available to these workers, it’s also made the efficient dissemination, management, and processing of data more burdensome. Find out more about how collaborative tools are—and aren’t—being used in the information-sharing workplace.
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Business networks have come to the fore in the past decade, as the power of customers and consumers has increased relative to the manufacturers and retailers that serve them. These networks enable these companies to deliver faster innovation to customers at lower costs by sharing investment, assets, and ideas. Find out how information technology and communication (ITC) systems can help you unlock new market opportunities.
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Want to know more about distributed agile best practices for software development projects? Find out about the challenges and lessons learned from this implementation of distributed agile for teams distributed across US, Europe, and India. Discover how this large, globally distributed project for a large telecom vendor realized such benefits as better collaboration, higher quality product, and on-time delivery.
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Mobile and Internet technologies are now the de facto standards for daily communication. Service providers take the opportunity to launch innovative solutions. One such is femto cells: small base stations and access points providing last-mile access and better coverage in densely populated areas. Learn about the differences between unlicensed mobile access (UMA) and second generation/third generation (2G/3G) femto cells.
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Long-term cost savings and extensive feature sets make voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phone systems an attractive option for many businesses. But with prices for a single VoIP phone ranging from $150 to $700 (USD) or more, switching to VoIP can be an expensive proposition. Find out what to look for in a VoIP phone system, how to buy, what you can expect to pay, and how to get the most out of your investment.
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The constant launch of new telecommunications products creates stiff competition, and to manage increasingly complex product portfolios, you should ensure your processes are optimized, your data is accurate, and your solutions are integrated. The first business area you should focus on is order management. Find out how you can better address the challenges of the order-to-cash cycle, decomposition, provisioning, and more.
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The publishing industry is experiencing dramatic changes that are forcing companies to re-examine their operations, and to implement new processes and technologies to help them in the future. To handle the new cyclical flow of content in digital media, publishers will have to discover new ways to produce and deliver content to meet the changing demands of the market, using an integrated publishing model. Learn more.
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You need a new Internet protocol (IP) phone system—but you’re not quite sure which features and functions would best meet your business operation’s needs. It’s important to know if you’re better off migrating to a hybrid IP PBX system or to a pure IP system. Answer this question and 10 others so you can be prepared to talk with resellers and vendors about IP phones for your voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) system.
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Looking for a new business phone system? To find a premise-based private branch exchange (PBX) solution that meets your needs, you should ask yourself several key questions about your current situation. Be sure to specify your business requirements up front to PBX providers—and know which you’re prepared to drop in return for a lower cost. This checklist can help you ask the right questions and keep track of the answers.
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A hosted Internet protocol private branch exchange (IP PBX) system can provide an easy way for small to medium businesses (SMBs) to move to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and get a new range of features and capabilities. While there are several IP PBX options, hosted applications are usually quicker and cheaper to install. Discover the critical features and services your SMB needs in a new hosted phone system.
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Effective CRM deployment can bring many productivity gains. And although free customer relationship management (CRM) tools may sound great to overburdened company directors, there are five reasons why free CRM tools should be avoided. For one, free isn’t always free, as hidden costs can undermine your budget. Find out about the other reasons why it’s better to tighten your CRM budget now, rather than go bust later.
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A national health insurance company’s spreadsheet-based telecom management process was leading to time and money wasted as staff tried to make up for lack of spend visibility. Further pressure to prepare the telecom function for upcoming merger activity pushed the company to find a technology that would effect immediate cost savings and long-term telecom expense management. Read more about the solution the company chose.
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Internet protocol (IP) and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) systems allow inexpensive transport, cheap phone calls, and simple management of a single network. But the true value is in the new applications IP enables, such as unified communications (UC). How can you use UC to further decrease costs, enhance productivity, and improve customer service? Learn how to go beyond messaging for real-time call control and more.
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Although Active Voice is a global provider of business telecommunications, it didn’t have a dedicated solution for sales automation or customer service. Sales reps lacked what they needed to follow up on leads and were losing valuable opportunities. But when the company implemented an e-customer relationship (e-CRM) solution, its users gained mobile access to valuable customer information. Learn about the other benefits.
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Dramatic progress in communication and media industries are pushing service providers to seek new differentiation strategies. Next-generation services can play a major role in your future as a service provider. But first you need to understand the implications for your operational- and business-support systems—in particular your billing system. Learn how to make the most of next-generation services to generate revenue.
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Internet protocol multimedia subsystem (IMS) is transforming service providers’ networks by helping roll out blended voice-data-content services for wider markets. But before you implement IMS architectures to deliver more complex offerings, you need to know how IMS impacts your IT environment—and to address vital questions related to profitability and pricing, return on investment (ROI), and quality of service.
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Today’s reality for service providers is about dealing with falling voice revenues—and keeping existing customers. Some providers look for alternative sources of revenue via digital content and gaming. But as this happens, the product offerings become more complex, and the role of partners more and more important. Automated partner settlement solutions can play a very crucial part in your partner strategy. Find out how.
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Like other successful technology solutions, once proven in an enterprise environment, virtualization spreads quickly. While virtualized resources can address your growing capacity needs, they can also pose significant challenges—with long-term success depending on how well you can manage the virtualized system. Learn about what tools you’ll need in order to provide seamless physical and virtual server management.
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What does it take to give your clients a better customer experience? While there are many answers to that question, a common answer these days is “through a customer relationship management (CRM) portal.” Learn everything you need to know about CRM portals, including their key characteristics, the different kinds of CRM portals available, who is using them—and most importantly—how they improve customer service.
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To be successful today, companies must form and maintain strong profitable relationships with their customers. Failing to maintain a complete 360-degree view of all customers’ interactions can leave a company in a weakened competitive position. While customer relationship management (CRM) can improve customer interaction, it’s important to know which system will provide you with the best total cost of ownership (TCO).
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With today’s varied communication technologies, there are more ways than ever to stay in touch—and more pressure to respond immediately. This and the need to prioritize multiple messages prove that companies must provide employees with tools suited to managing an increased flow of messages. Learn more about second-generation enterprise communication solutions and how your company can deploy them for maximum benefit.
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In today’s competitive market, creating and maintaining successful customer relationships is vital. That’s why everyone involved with the customer must work together as a team. In most companies, sales, engineering, and marketing often use separate systems—causing communication gaps in customer support. Discover how sharing information through integrated customer relationship management (CRM) can help bridge those gaps.
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Most businesses recognize the strategic importance of customer relationship management (CRM), but some small to medium businesses (SMBs) continue to use basic contact managers or simple spreadsheets to track customers, manage leads, and collaborate on sales. Achieving great results requires more than just installing CRM software. Learn how assessing your business’s CRM maturity level can help build your road map to success.
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In the computing world, a dramatic shift is taking place—enabling a new way for IT departments to manage services. The promise of a leaner, more efficient data center has many businesses clamoring to go virtual. In the rush to virtualize, however, they have forgotten the painful and expensive lessons learned from introducing risk into the physical environment. Find out how detective controls can mitigate those risks.
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Do you think great IT performance is achieved through luck or chance? You can bet real money it’s not. But regardless of how you measure up to high performers, there are a few steps you can take to improve your processes—starting with controlling change. Find out how this simple and significant way to improve performance and processes can help you achieve your operational effectiveness and efficiency objectives.
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It seems that these days you need a password for everything. And with so many to remember, it’s no wonder helpdesks are bombarded with calls that tie up the IT department’s resources. Password inflation and the resulting fatigue increasingly frustrate not only end users, but the support teams that deal with the fallout of strict password polices as well. Find out how some businesses are putting an end to this madness.
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There’s no disputing the fact that content management systems (CMS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) are closely related. From reuse, the ability to loosely couple service and functions, to being able to combine services into a new form, SOA and CMS share many common threads in the enterprise world. Find out how the forces that have made SOA so important today are now doing the same for CMS in web site management.
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Most companies are aware that the buying processes of the world and its buyers are changing, but many have yet to recognize the need to make changes within their own sales force. Often sales professionals don’t have the proper skills or tools needed to be successful. But by integrating the four sales process components, they’ll be able to capture information that can be used to place them high above the competition.
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As the growth of electronic records continues, two major trends in the world of document and content management have now become intertwined. In view of these trends, companies are beginning to assess their current record management practices, and what has resulted is the clear need for electronic records management (ERM). Discover how ERM can provide a cost-effective solution for your growing business.
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Billions of dollars are spent each year on business travel worldwide, of which over 5 percent is spent on tracking and reporting expenses. But is it possible to complete an expense report with virtually no human intervention? Now, automated corporate travel and expense management solutions are making this possible—reducing both direct and indirect costs, and providing significant savings to your bottom line.
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Although information technology service management (ITSM) is not a new discipline, many organizations have yet to adopt it as a part of their IT service improvement strategy. To be successful, businesses must start by building a custom road map. Read about how focusing on long-term, strategic objectives—including a realized return on investment (ROI)—can greatly improve your IT service delivery and support.
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In the public sector, where it’s often more about process than the business case, recompeting a current outsourcing relationship doesn’t always make the most sense for ensuring continued value. Due to the cost and time investment in the recompete process, it can often cause more problems than solutions. In many cases, outsourcing agreements simply need to be updated to meet changing business requirements. Find out how.
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In the past 10 years, business process and IT outsourcing markets have become globalized, raising some key issues for outsourcing buyers. How can you develop a service delivery model for your business that fully exploits global sourcing opportunities while supporting overall corporate strategies, goals, and principles? By developing a set of integrated capabilities and processes as part of your core competency.
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Empirical evidence demonstrates that the benefits of a distributed IT services model are considerable—yet many companies still resist the change. If IT professionals took the time to fully understand the positive impact of distributed services models on both cost and value, they’d be better equipped to fight organizational resistance and develop a road map for successful change. Find out how you can build yours today.
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A contact center is a mission-critical component of any organization’s operations—regardless of who they service. Yet stakeholders often remain dissatisfied with its performance. In the past, contact centers benefited from advances in information and technologies, yet many companies struggled to determine how they could take advantage of these benefits. Find out how embracing both old and new technologies today can work.
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For many organizations, undertaking IT and business process outsourcing involves everything from finding and assessing providers, to selecting locations, to determining which services are required. But the hardest part of outsourcing occurs after the deal is done. To help businesses ensure consistency in outsourcing governance, there are nine critical factors to keep in mind that can help guarantee its success.
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Collaborative tools are becoming essential to sharing data in today’s office environment. You need a solution that can grow to accommodate new projects and uses—and a storage system that is flexible enough to meet initial demands and adapt to changes. Find out how a multiple-node storage area network (SAN) can maximize the scalability and functionality of your collaboration tools, and ease storage administration.
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Many businesses today rely on telecom expense management (TEM) for mission-critical functions ranging from sales to service to customer relationship management. But despite its overall importance, nearly one-third of a telecom staff’s time is spent on processing orders and invoices. Maximizing the potential of a telecom system requires a data-driven approach. Find out how Map-To-Win is helping businesses do just that.
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The days of telephone switchboard operators are long gone. In today's electronic age, through private branch exchange (PBX) technology, operators have been replaced with Internet protocols that automate the switchboard process. But how can you make the most of your modern phone system when you're not really sure how it works? Discover some tips and tricks that can help you understand—and optimize—your business phone setup.
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In recent years, the BlackBerry smartphone has transitioned from being a small-scale productivity tool to a widely used mission-critical platform. This shift has prompted IT organizations to explore what key technical capabilities and internal process standards are needed to ensure superior performance and availability. Discover why traditional monitoring technologies have failed, and what new approaches have emerged.
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Every enterprise must be prepared to confront an incident that threatens the security, privacy, or general operations of the company or its customers. But how is it possible to respond to an incident quickly, without interrupting corporate operations? By building an incident response team (IRT) with the right skills, authority, and knowledge to properly deal with a range of known—and unknown incidents. Find out how.
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Like telephony, radio, and television, the Internet has become the ultimate disruptive technology—dramatically changing many aspects of daily life. With each technological revolution, sales professionals have had to learn how to use disruptive technology effectively. Find out why some software firms are now launching their products under the Sales 2.0 banner, and how you can use it to leverage Web 2.0 technology.
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While there are numerous strategies for dealing with the restoration of functions through a recovery process, there is only one for continuing operations with minimal interruption. It’s called a reserve system, and it’s vital for business continuation. It’s fast and easy to activate, simple to move, low in cost, testable, available, and highly reliable. Find out how it compares to some of the more traditional strategies.
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Once a revolutionary concept, data warehouses are now the status quo—enabling IT professionals to manage and report on data originating from diverse sources. But where does log data fit in? Historically, log data was reported on through slow legacy applications. But with today’s log data warehouse solutions, data is centralized, allowing users to analyze and report on it with unparalleled speed and efficiency.
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As part of their compensation strategy, many businesses today are looking for software products that can manage commissions, sales incentives, and bonus programs. But with the number of companies now offering a variety of viable solutions, it has become even more difficult to know which one to choose. To help you select the right solution for your organization, consider these key evaluation factors first.
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Telephony is a key element of convergence—and the primary reason for the hype surrounding it. But why is telephony so important to convergence? Voice or telephony traffic is very sensitive to latency on the network. The fact that converged networks must provide timely and reliable delivery of voice traffic makes it a key component to a successful converged solution implementation. Learn more about how it all works.
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Is your business tangled in a maze of voice data networking equipment that burdens your staff and is cumbersome to support? If the answer is yes, then you may want to think about network convergence over Internet protocol (IP)—the foundation for IP telephony, unified messaging, and multimedia customer contact centers. Find out more about how your business can benefit from data and voice convergence solutions today.
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Most spam, viruses, phishing, and e-mail denial-of-service attacks can be traced back to a single common cause: lack of e-mail protocol authentication. This lack of authentication means that a receiving mail server cannot reliably verify that a particular message is in fact from the sender it claims to be from, making it harder to distinguish friend from foe. Find out more about new standards that can help.
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While a great deal of attention has been given to protecting companies’ electronic assets from outside threats, organizations must now turn their attention to an equally dangerous situation: data loss from the inside. Given today’s strict regulatory standards, data loss prevention (DLP) has become one of the most critical issues facing executives. Fortunately, effective technical solutions are now available that can help.
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The media industry is undergoing radical and rapid change driven by liberalization, privatization, and digitization. Broadcasting is no longer highly regulated, but is ever more dynamic and competitive—and the logistical challenges of production planning for TV and radio ever more complex. Implement a composite resource planning and scheduling solution to maximize your equipment, facilities, and employees.
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Today, all retailers that process, store, or transmit cardholder data have a fiduciary responsibility to protect that data. As such, they must comply with a diverse range of regulations and industry mandates. However, many retailers struggle with the task of implementing the proper policies and controls. Discover how log management and intelligence (LMI) can help you simplify and accelerate the compliance process.
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Understanding the full scope of risk in today’s complex business environment is a must for achieving compliance with governmental mandates and industry regulations. However, many companies have a limited perception of risk and struggle to make compliance an enterprise-wide, integrated process. Compliance is no longer a one-time isolated project; it’s an ongoing effort—and you’re just tens steps away from discovering why.
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Developing business acumen isn’t easy, but it is fundamental to business alignment. What does that mean exactly? It means understanding what it takes for a business to make money, and it involves the financial literacy of how strategies, decisions, and actions impact the bottom line. Through classroom-based training, your managers and employees can learn how these connections are made to the business. Find out more.
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There’s a war going on, and many companies are fighting it—and losing. It’s a war to attract and retain great talent. While projected economic growth is fueling demand, companies of all sizes are finding it difficult to get and keep skilled employees. What can be done to stop this talent crisis? Organizations must make talent management a top priority. Find out how this simple tactic can lead your organization to victory.
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Organizations today, in the face of increased global competition, need educated managers and employees who can solve problems, understand complex issues, and learn new skills quickly. This means that training organizations need to provide learning opportunities that effectively address these issues in ways that produce high retention rates. But if lectures don’t work, then what does? Enter discovery learning.
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DIRECTV is one of the largest broadcast satellite providers in the US. Faced with increased competition, the company decided to transform its supply chain by synchronizing its material requirements with its main equipment providers and automating its return materials authorization (RMA) process. With the help of SAP Solutions and Services, DIRECTV has improved its processes and reduced nonqualified returns by 20 percent.
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Managing growth is a monumental undertaking—and one that Valero Energy Corporation has mastered. But as one of the largest oil refinery companies in North America, with revenues exceeding $90 billion (USD), the company needed to find a way to fit new applications into its existing infrastructure in a quick and cost-effective manner. By switching to SAP’s NetWeaver platform, Valero saved $480,000 (USD) in the first month.
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A recent study by Jupiter Research found that e-mail marketers using Web analytics click-stream data to generate targeted e-mail campaigns produce an impressive average click-through rate of 14 percent, and a conversion rate of 3.9 percent. Can your business claim numbers this high? If not, find out how you can with Web analytics tools that will help you gain insight on your subscribers’ behaviors while increasing sales.
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In the past, training was seen as a preventive action or default activity. Then learning came into the forefront as a proactive initiative that was more strongly linked to enhancing performance. This radical change from training to learning has created a new awareness of measurement that chief executive officers (CEO) need to take note of. Discover the 7 key learning indicators that can get you started on the right path.
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Look at any office around the world and you’ll see how the workplace has changed dramatically in the last decade. Rapidly changing technology coupled with geographical dispersion has meant that organizations need to be more flexible than ever. Workers too have had to face this constant change and need to retool themselves to not only adapt, but survive. Discover how collaborative technology is becoming their saving grace.
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Purchasing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a huge investment for any business—and knowing whether or not you’re buying the right system for the best price isn’t easy. Before meeting with your ERP vendor to negotiate the contract, there are a few important things you should take into account. Discover ten tips that can help you reach an agreement on pricing and service levels quickly and painlessly.
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In today’s fast-paced business environment, providing customers with timely support when problems occur is critical. But in order to do so, information must be readily available throughout the enterprise. By integrating your customer support, defect tracking development, and knowledge management systems, your business will benefit from improved customer satisfaction and retention, as well as increased staff productivity.
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The University of Maryland School of Medicine had already experienced VMware technology as a way to consolidate its servers; what it didn’t realize was that the company’s solution could also address its disaster recovery needs. By combining two storage technologies—creating a common storage area network (SAN)—the school has reduced unexpected downtime from hours to seconds and has saved thousands of dollars in hardware costs.
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As the Microsoft Exchange environment continues to grow, building and managing the underlying IT infrastructure becomes increasingly difficult for Exchange administrators. Adding more and more storage can lead to frequent system downtime and slower response times. Discover seven ways your administrators can spend less time on day-to-day Microsoft Exchange management—while planning for future growth in the process.
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The pressure to reduce costs, increase network performance, and improve productivity has been a constant battle for IT and telecommunications groups alike. While new technologies have emerged to help solve some of these requirements, in many cases they have proven to be inefficient and expensive. Find out how Layer 2 link balancing technologies can help your organization build a faster, smarter wide area network (WAN).
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Many companies spend an inordinate amount of time and money ensuring their documentation meets regulatory standards. But in order to streamline the document submission process in a cost-effective manner, companies should adopt document management technologies coupled with collaborative document transformation tools. Learn how these tools can help your company accelerate its submission-compliant document workflows.
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Is it possible for a business to ensure uninterrupted, secure, and high-performance access to network-based business applications and web sites? Yes. With network load balancers, user requests are evenly distributed among available servers so that individual servers do not become overwhelmed. Learn about the basics of load balancing and how it can improve the performance and security of your business applications.
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As the global marketplace continues to become more competitive, enterprises are struggling with how to retain their competitive edge. While many have transferred their databases to internet protocol (IP) to replace outdated systems, some have yet to upgrade their phone systems as part their strategy. Discover how migrating to voice over IP (VoIP) as part of an overall telecommunications strategy can help your business.
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Customer information system (CIS) projects in the utilities industry have earned a reputation for being disruptive to business, very expensive, and always behind schedule. As a mission-critical cash register for utilities, it pays to examine CIS more closely. Learn about the perspectives on strategic CIS assessment frameworks and how a structured solution can help you improve the agility of CIS without a huge investment.
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Today’s configuration management tools focus on collecting and reporting statistics, logs, and failures, but fail to address the need for analyzing this data to determine best practices for improving efficiencies. That’s why Configuresoft has developed software that enables you to link core systems configuration and change management disciplines into actionable analytics. Find out how it can work for you.
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Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) helps ensure that projects are delivered on time and within budget, and creates a system for improving accountability. Once KPIs are established, there needs to be a way to easily track this data—otherwise it will become an arduous task that may be done improperly. Learn how leveraging integrated project management software can help drive your business process improvements.
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According to Web services provider IronPort, over 92 billion spam messages are sent around the world daily. While it may seem like an uphill battle, several strategies are available that can help. To combat these threats, many organizations are implementing new technologies to secure their inboxes by blocking unsolicited messages. Discover what other tactics your business can adopt to help e-mail deliverability.
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Managing a newly deployed voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) integration project is not as easy as some IT managers believe it to be. Delivering voice traffic over the IP network is time-consuming, and requires the right tools and a proper budget. To fully understand the costs associated with IP telephony implementation, businesses must first conduct a thorough evaluation of their management options—prior to deployment.
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Human resources (HR) systems have been around for many years, providing robust and efficient solutions for companies of all sizes. When properly designed, implemented, and maintained, these systems allow companies to engage and nurture their employees and critical processes. When these systems are neglected, however, the result is a loss of competitive edge, increased employee dissatisfaction, and unnecessary costs.
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Many companies struggle to adapt to their ever-changing workforce, as employees start the job and then leave for better offers. Competition is fierce—and retaining highly skilled job candidates has never been more difficult. In order to achieve their business goals and stay competitive, many companies are turning to integrated talent management (ITM). Find out how you can get started on your ITM development plan today.
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Why choose on-demand when there are so many integrated software solutions on the market? Because on-demand packages provide a number of benefits that can help IT focus on innovation and creating true business value, rather than dealing with network headaches. But along with the benefits there are a number of challenges. Read more about these challenges and how you can manage your on-demand implementation project.
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Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2003 is frequently deployed in small or midsize applications. And while many customers view it as an excellent small network-attached storage (NAS) solution, they often move to larger, proprietary file server appliances when their needs expand beyond its capacity. This approach, however, adds more expense and complexity. But with Sanbolic’s Melio Cluster, capacity can be added as needed.
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Microsoft System Management Server 2003 and Operations Manager 2005 storage monitoring solutions provide the necessary tools to centrally manage and monitor Windows client and server infrastructure. Now, Sanbolic’s LaScala clustered volume manager and related products offer a complementary toolkit which enables administrators to centrally configure and assign storage assets in a storage area network (SAN) environment.
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Administrative errors can and do happen, but native tools do little to aid administrators in this area. While Microsoft’s Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) is a great tool for managing group policy, it has its limitations. Discover how to implement best-practice approaches to help successfully extend the deployment of group policy to your server security settings, while reducing costs and minimizing errors.
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Effective IT disaster recovery (DR) and planning is essential for every business. However, IT environments have become so complex that safeguarding the business against disasters can present some major challenges. One way to improve your business disaster recovery planning is by pre-testing DR scenarios using network simulation. Find out how a simulation testing solution can help you better protect your business.
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Are you on top of data security compliance? Is your source code secure? Are you looking for a new approach that can help ensure these things are taken care of? With SourceAnyware Hosted solution—which provides 128-bit SSL encryption—your data is protected and your source code is secured from attacks. Find out how SourceAnywhere can help you lower total cost of ownership and improve your development team productivity.
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The nature of software is that it constantly evolves, requiring regular updates throughout its lifetime as new features are introduced. But managing and implementing these changes is often left to experienced administrators who are often overwhelmed with other projects. Find out how moving to a delegated administration model can help your business improve its administrative productivity, system availability, and security.
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When you connect to the Internet, you do so through the Windows Socket (Winsock) layer. While this layer is an integral part of the Windows operating system and acts as an interface between your computer and the Net, it cannot distinguish the difference between good traffic and bad. MicroWorld Winsock Layer (MWL) technology helps by sitting on the Winsock layer and analyzing the traffic—before it gets to your computer.
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Today, more and more companies are purchasing goods from overseas. But once those goods are on the water, many companies find it difficult to keep track of where they are at any given time. Ineffective container management leads to extra costs, but with Sage ERP X3’s import tracking functionality, business functions are tied together in a single database—enabling real-time access to information and improving productivity.
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In a 2006 SAP survey, 93 percent of respondents experienced data management issues during their most recent projects. The problem: many organizations believe that they are using master data, when in fact what they are relying on is data that is dispersed throughout the enterprise. Discover the importance of master data and how the ideal master data management (MDM) solution can help your business get it under control.
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Spam has become a global epidemic. And because it is constantly evolving and mutating, spam makes it difficult to separate good e-mails from the bad. While most mail servers have mechanisms to combat spam, they often require third party solutions to eradicate spam from the network. Find out more about the shortcomings of established filtering methods, and how one community-based approach to filtering can work.
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Have you ever received a call from your existing long-distance phone company asking you to switch to its service and wondered why they are calling? Chances are the integrity of its data is so poor that the company has no idea who many of its customers are. The fact is, many businesses suffer from this same problem. The solution: implement a master data management (MDM) system that uses an accurate data matching process.
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Ensuring the quality, accuracy, and security of customer data has never been more important than it is today. The growing potential for privacy breaches and tighter compliance regulations have created unique challenges and responsibilities for many data providers. Here we discuss some of the key privacy issues surrounding data management, and how partnering with a provider of master data management (MDM) software can help.
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Virtual private networks (VPNs) are optimized to perform specific functions within the remote access architecture. But deploying the often complex mix of approaches for managed and unmanaged devices can affect your security. Blue Coat RA provides a new approach that bridges the gap between traditional and endpoint security technologies—helping businesses meet remote access requirements in a simple, cost effective manner.
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Businesses today are increasingly committed to Web-enabled applications as a cost-effective way of delivering critical business solutions. But as more and more businesses follow suit, it becomes increasingly apparent that better performance and availability across the Internet must be realized by the early movers in order to maintain their lead. With the deployment of advanced products and services, this can be achieved.
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Today, more business than ever is done in branch offices or at remote sites, but very few IT resources are actually hosted there. To reduce costs, businesses often consolidate applications—but consolidation can lead to poor performance. With the right solution, however, acceleration techniques—like bandwidth management and protocol optimization—can be properly dispersed to remote applications, helping increase performance.
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According to Symantec, 40 percent of malicious attacks target your browser. With Web content threats quickly on the rise, there’s an opportunity for businesses to enhance their Web filtering strategies. Enforcing appropriate use policy and providing robust Web content security, however, requires a dynamic filtering solution that can mitigate a variety of content security threats—not only today but in the future as well.
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Although secure sockets layer (SSL) is a ubiquitous enabler of e-commerce and outsourcing, it creates a special challenge for network administrators and security professionals because its encryption is known to decelerate data. In order to regain control over application delivery—when everything business-related is encrypted—organizations need to look toward SSL-aware solutions that can help decipher and accelerate data.
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A clear customer focus is an essential part of improving business effectiveness and efficiency. But how can businesses achieve global customer visibility in today's competitive market? With the implementation of a master data management (MDM) solution, businesses can gain multidimensional, real-time visibility of their customers, resulting in improved competitiveness, higher profit margins, and reduced business risk.
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Managing IT assets is a vital corporate function—and a source of potential liability if not performed properly. By effectively managing IT assets, businesses can be assured that each IT dollar has been well spent. With an asset management solution, your IT staff can monitor application usage and budgets more accurately, and improve in-house IT support and performance—resulting in greater efficiency and reduced costs.
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Explosive data growth, shrinking backup windows, and unreliable restores are just a few of the issues you have to manage on a daily basis—especially if you’re using a legacy tape backup application system. But you can still use your legacy system by extending its life and enhancing its reliability with a hardware-based disk compression solution. Find out how, and considerably reduce your backup and recovery times.
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The capacity of today’s storage systems is increasing at an astonishing rate. But the truth is: the more storage you have, the more you use. So, how do you create an efficient data storage system? And how much space can it really save you? Advanced single instance storage (A-SIS) deduplication can reduce storage consumption up to 95 percent—helping you conserve disk space, while keeping your system overhead low.
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Storage system administrators are constantly battling with growing volumes of data. But can you create more space-efficient storage? You can. With a data virtualization solution like NetApp Snapshot, administrators can create point-in-time copies of data volumes—consuming only a fraction of the space normally required. Find out how using data virtualization tools can help reduce your ongoing data storage management costs.
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Every company faces different challenges and has different needs in regard to enterprise resource planning (ERP). Choosing the right ERP system can be difficult because there is really no one-size-fits-all ERP solution. However, there are certain basic principles that apply to nearly every company’s situation. Find out what they are, and learn how you can increase your chances of a successful ERP implementation.
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E-mail archiving systems are no longer simply tools that focus on regulatory compliance, but instead are multifaceted systems that can help companies satisfy legal discovery requirements, improve messaging-related storage management, and assist in disaster recovery efforts. While there are several solutions available, a hosted solution can offer a number of important benefits you should consider.
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Does your business have a records management policy that addresses e-mail? Well if it doesn’t, now’s the time to consider adopting one. To meet Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) requirements, businesses must create and enforce a clear corporate messaging policy. With Fortiva’s on-demand archiving solution, your legal team can easily develop e-mail policies—making compliance with legal discovery demands much easier.
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With the recent amendments made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), businesses must take a closer look at how they manage their electronic data. Recent studies have shown that many companies are not prepared for how these changes will affect their business. To improve their governance procedures to meet these new requirements, businesses must invest in technology that can adequately preserve electronic data.
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It’s no secret that there is a bevy of deployment options available with most customer relationship management (CRM) solutions today—ranging from customized to out-of-the-box. But with choice comes complexity. In order for CRM buyers to choose wisely, they must find a deployment approach that best matches their needs while delivering superior performance, application integration, and functionality. Find out how.
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Wi-Fi has become the access method of choice for users at the office, at home, and on the road. According to research, nearly 200 million Wi-Fi chipsets were sold in 2006 alone. But can Wi-Fi work effectively in a wireless local area network (WLAN) environment? Yes it can. To deliver Wi-Fi more reliably to increasingly diverse devices requires a self-configuring platform that covers larger areas and higher user densities.
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For consumers, fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) means a world where integrated voice and data services are available anywhere through a single mobile handset. For carriers, FMC represents a lucrative opportunity to leverage inexpensive technology. This technology, however, has its technical challenges, making performance hard to predict. To be successful, carriers need to understand the factors that influence this behavior.
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Today, dozens of independent operating companies and international carriers offer Internet protocol TV (IPTV) services to homes around the world. But IPTV for in-home distribution has been a weak link in the IPTV delivery chain—until now. Ruckus Wireless multimedia systems can help overcome current Wi-Fi limitations and enhance subscriber experience by uniquely enabling a whole-home network for video, voice, and data.
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Radio communications are subject to unpredictable behavior due to environmental dependencies and various types of interference. But with the proper operating parameters and an agile antenna system, many of these impairments can be mitigated. Using smart antenna technology like Wi-Fi, with its adaptive real-time system, you can greatly improve the transport of demanding applications in challenging wireless environments.
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It is widely acknowledged that unauthorized changes made to an IT infrastructure cause up to 80 percent of a system’s unavailability. So what key ingredient is needed to reduce that percentage? By adding change control to an existing or planned change management infrastructure, businesses can improve IT service availability, lower compliance costs, and accelerate their IT infrastructure library (ITIL) implementations.
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There are key systems in every infrastructure where unapproved change can pose significant business risk. These guidelines show you how to properly categorize these systems in order to identify those that have risk characteristics. By learning how to identify critical change control failure points in your infrastructure, you reduce the threat of costly downtime, potential security breaches, and compliance weaknesses.
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Before an organization can truly realize the cost and agility benefits of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA), there are a few concepts it should know about. By understanding the various stages of SOA adoption and by knowing what technologies are available, an organization will stand a better chance of succeeding in its SOA initiatives. With these seven steps, effective SOA can be realized.
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Corporate governance encompasses the processes and systems by which organizations operate—and it affects every business. To effectively participate in governance processes, businesses should consider closed-loop service oriented architecture (SOA). Although stand-alone applications for governance, management, and security exist, find out why they do not enable the demand and value management that closed-loop SOA offers.
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Corporate IT departments and independent software vendors (ISV) alike are faced with a number of similar business challenges. One such challenge is the problem of how to derive additional value from their existing Windows and UNIX software applications and create advantage with Web-enabled solutions. Discover the pros and cons of Web-based and Web-enabled applications—and learn about the solutions that lead the pack.
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Linux operating systems are taking the world by storm, and have seen double-digit growth rates for seven consecutive quarters. With its promise of higher performance and better stability and security, Linux has become the alternative to traditional Windows-based servers. By deploying Linux in key strategic areas and taking advantage of application publishing solutions, you can lower your costs and speed time-to-market.
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The communications landscape has never been more complex nor offered so many choices and solutions as it does today. As more employees go mobile, companies need to be able to offer better communication capabilities to their people. The convergence of technologies involved, however, can cause service provider issues and create confusion for customers. To solve these issues, several questions need to be asked.
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When it comes to data and storage management, midsize organizations often face similar issues to those of their larger counterparts. Rapid data growth, business continuity, and data archiving are just a few of the problems they must deal with. By coupling IP-based storage area network (SAN) technology with Ethernet-based SAN connectivity, however, organizations can gain higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
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With the increasing complexity of the data center and its dependent systems, data center automation (DCA) is becoming a necessity. To replace the costly and inefficient human aspect of managing the data center, IT departments must adopt DCA solutions. Combined with utility-based computing architectures, these solutions can provide greater dynamics in the environment and facilitate speed of response to market demands.
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For small businesses with limited budgets and IT support, customer relationship management (CRM) has been out of reach. Until now, these small companies have missed out on the benefits provided by CRM because most applications were built for larger companies. New technology, however, has now emerged that levels the playing field for these smaller businesses by providing a fully customizable and affordable CRM system.
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What can user-driven applications like Morello and Microsoft’s Office SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 do to help your web content management strategy? By combining the two, users can develop web applications and collaborative workspaces themselves rather than acquiring IT development input. In doing so, they unlock the silos of working practices and content stores, and add significant value to the web content management strategy.
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Non-profit organization The March of Dimes realized that to continue its success, it would need to find more efficient and effective ways to work. Its human resources (HR) department was doing most of its HR and payroll processes manually—for over 1400 employees in various locations. To automate these processes, it turned to a Web-based application and has since significantly cut down on processing time and expense.
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There are many factors to consider when purchasing a new phone system. In addition to planning the scale of your proposed system and how long you expect to use it, you should also think about the number and type of features you need, from call hold and speed dial, to computer telephony integration (CTI). Put your money where your voicemail is: find out about the latest phone system features and improve your bottom line.
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Any geographically distributed business with three or more remote sites has likely dealt with tape-based backup systems. If this sounds like your business, then you certainly understand the complexities involved with managing growing data—not to mention the risks. The good new is that an agentless, multisite backup and recovery software solution is available that can offer a high-speed alternative to tape-based systems.
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Would spending millions of dollars and countless hours securing your data center be enough for it to pass a compliance audit? While many businesses work hard at securing their data centers, they often forget to secure remote office data. With the consequences of non-compliance ranging from financial penalties to job loss and worse, it could mean the end of your business. Don’t let compliance become your Achilles heel.
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Today’s IT professionals are often challenged by unrelenting changes in the enterprise, increased data growth and compliance regulations, and geographic distribution of assets, to name a few. Keyboard/video/mouse (KVM) over Internet protocol (IP) can help by providing an effective tool that can remotely manage servers—regardless of their physical location. When looking for a KVM over IP solution, you should consider some basic requirements first.
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An estimated 55 percent of users of business critical applications work in remote locations. With so many users working remotely, networks become congested and user productivity suffers. Until now, wide area network (WAN) monitoring and shaping has required special appliances, but there’s a new alternative software-based solution available that leverages the power of the user’s PC—providing unprecedented traffic control.
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Is it possible to easily migrate from legacy tape devices to encrypting tape drives and still keep costs to a minimum? The answer is yes. With a comprehensive key management storage security system, a manageable and affordable migration process is achievable with a simple 3-step process. This process includes many benefits, such as a complete feature set that enhances system auditability and minimizes operational costs.
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What can a managed Subversion solution do to help .NET businesses solve their integration problems? Subversion meets the challenge of software development by allowing teams to use branching and tagging methods that help them work better with their QA organizations. It also saves .NET businesses a lot of money over setting up and maintaining a development infrastructure in house, which keeps the cost of ownership manageable.
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Software development best practices can save you money and make your team more productive. When software development teams don’t invest in a solid development platform, it makes their work harder and often ends up costing them more money over time. A hosted platform, however, provides a level of convenience and savings that makes it the obvious choice for today’s IT development, management, and consulting organizations.
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What does Visibility’s .NET enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution have that others don’t? .NET technology. And because it contains no legacy code, it provides a system that’s accessible using a web-browser and has a user interface equal in functionality to a client-server application. In fact, any client PC with Internet Explorer 5.5 or later can operate it—without compromising the quality of the user experience.
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Today’s complex enterprise networks present unique challenges to those whose task it is to manage and secure them. Existing security measures that worked yesterday may not be sufficient tomorrow. But by combining Configuresoft’s Enterprise Configuration Manager (ECM) with Microsoft’s System Center 2007, businesses can secure their data, protect their bottom lines from costly downtime, and meet regulatory standards.
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IT is often characterized as distinct groups pursuing individual agendas and launching disconnected initiatives to increase operational efficiencies. To overcome this, organizations need a set of capabilities that can help improve coordination between IT and the rest of the business while facilitating effective service management. Adopting foundational technologies and a best-practice benchmark is a good place to start.
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How can you get the most out of a customer relationship management (CRM) solution while reducing operating costs and increasing overall profitability? By purchasing a hosted CRM solution that’ll provide the benefits of an on-premise CRM solution without the need for a complex implementation or the assistance of an in-house IT team. Hosted CRM is a cost-effective solution that promises a quick return on investment (ROI).
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Organizations of all sizes face similar challenges when managing storage—not enough capacity or protection. Help has arrived with Internet small computer system interface storage area networks (iSCSI SANs)—and they're steadily gaining momentum. With iSCSI SANs, businesses can effectively manage their storage needs, while lowering costs and increasing security. Find out why many industry leaders are choosing iSCSI today.
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Every day, sensitive business information finds its way into the wrong hands—through external breaches or internal theft. Such data is highly regulated, and any risks of exposure can result in stiff penalties and legal liabilities. Many of these security risks lie in the test/dev environments, and as such require a solution that protects data application clones from unauthorized access without jeopardizing its integrity.
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The growth of application data has placed an enormous burden on IT organizations to maintain acceptable application performance and availability. The weight of managing and navigating through vast amounts of inactive data has caused outages and raised budgets, among other problems. Active archiving software, however, addresses complex data management issues and delivers lasting benefits to organizations and its users.
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Fax hardware plays a crucial role in the sending and receiving of business documents. With high-volume use over time, instabilities in performance can occur. Therefore, how well fax boards and fax software applications perform together becomes an important consideration. With IQ Express intelligent fax board series, fax servers send and receive corporate documents electronically—reducing costs and improving productivity.
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Three strikes—your out; that’s what lockout management does. But employees often forget the many passwords needed to access information. What ensues is a flood of calls to the help desk that, over time, can become a huge administrative burden. Adopting a strong password policy is critical. By implementing a lockout management strategy via automated management solutions, businesses enhance security and improve workflow.
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Are virtual appliances really more advantageous than physical appliances? For businesses looking to decrease server complexity, increase load balance, and optimize scalability and mobility, the answer is yes. Virtualization has brought distributed computing to a new level and provides many key benefits. This white paper looks at four of those benefits and uncovers why more organizations need to consider making a change.
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While virtualization technology can simplify server management and reduce operating costs, in production environments it presents a disaster-recovery challenge. The problem: simply backing up a host server doesn’t always ensure that data within virtual machines is recoverable. With Acronis’s True Image, IT managers can rest assured their data, settings, applications, and operating systems are protected against disaster.
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Aerospace and defense (A&D) has unique security needs. Avoiding the unauthorized sharing of technical information and intellectual property is essential. Product development systems (PDSs) provide the secure, real-time collaboration A&D needs, including extended and secure collaboration of distributed product development processes. PDSs control access to intellectual property, mitigating information sharing risks.
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To boot or pre-boot, that is the question. There’s no doubt that operating systems (OSs) are complicated given the sheer amount of code that must be flawlessly interfaced and the potential vulnerabilities that can ensue. While full disk encryption (FDE) is one step closer to a more secure OS, encryption without strong authentication isn’t enough. For security-conscious users, pre-boot authentication is the only way to go.
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On top of the many challenges faced by IT managers today comes yet another challenge: ensuring efficient and secure user access to SAP. Because of the unencrypted communication between users’ workstations and the backend servers, the SAP environment—and the confidential data it stores—become vulnerable. With a secure single sign-on solution to SAP, however, you can significantly improve the security of this environment.
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Today’s business environment is more mobile than ever. With more employees traveling—using laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and home computers to conduct business—vulnerabilities increase. Companies are now protecting their digital assets with full disk encryption (FDE). Recent advances in FDE allow businesses to protect data stored on users’ mobile devices, without jeopardizing intellectual property.
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Fax servers are essential for the financial services industry. Their reliability and security help transmit financial information quickly and safely. Financial institutions, however, also have workflow and document needs due to lots of back-office paperwork. Luckily, there are fax servers on the market that help financial institutions optimize workflow and business processes—organizing and reducing paperwork backlog.
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Keeping up-to-date on security features is challenging for any size business. Making your computer system secure without sacrificing usability isn’t easy. In fact, careful planning is absolutely necessary to ensure a secure system that works for you. Whether you’re worried about hackers, phishing, or internal breaches, there is a security solution to help you protect your critical data.
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Why is Vyatta’s open source networking approach so successful? Because it is in touch with today’s users needs. By eliminating the reliance on specialized hardware, Vyatta’s open source, Linux-based approach to networking is changing the way networks are being purchased and deployed. With its strong community of users, Vyatta is challenging even proprietary networking vendors like Cisco. We challenge you to find out more.
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How can you get the most out of your virtualization project and avoid the common mistakes made by many businesses? By adopting a strategy that’ll allow you to be free of risk and save on your pocketbook. Don’t let your virtualization project become another implementation failure; make it a success. Sensitizing yourself to the five mistakes common to many enterprise virtualization implementations is a good place to start.
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With ever-changing technology, businesses often spend too much time and money trying to sustain their outdated systems. But is it possible to maintain a legacy system without the substantial costs of frequently updating it? By adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA)—which provides a suite of automated tools and services for migrating and extending legacy platforms—businesses can maximize quality and minimize costs.
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Systems integration with service-oriented architecture (SOA) helps you reuse the functionality in your mainframe applications. Extending your mainframes to an SOA through Web services will accelerate your time to market, keep your costs low, and help you avoid undue risk. Keep your business dynamic and current, and stay competitive in today’s marketplace—modernize your existing mainframes with SOA.
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In the rush to explore the “next big thing” in software technology, it’s easy to forget the huge investment you’ve already made in mainframe assets. These assets have performed the business functions that they were designed for, but it’s OK to remain open to new solutions too. By leveraging existing assets while moving to a service-based architecture, you can extend your existing business resources while saving money.
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Color printing used to be reserved for only the most important documents, where the high cost was justifiable. As printing technologies have advanced, however, color printing has been added to the everyday office environment. Today, the demand for color printing is growing as more and more organizations discover that they can print in color as easily, quickly, and inexpensively as in black and white.
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Corporate e-mail usage is expected to jump 38 percent by 2009. Can our future data centers handle this load? By using QLogic’s fibre channel host bus adapters (HBAs) in the Microsoft Exchange environment, your data centers can handle the load without degrading overall performance—thus providing the bandwidth and throughput you’re going to need.
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The Solaris operating system has become the top choice for hosting data center applications. Sun Solaris platforms consistently exceed the reliability requirements of enterprise data centers while at the same time reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). QLogic fibre channel solutions are a perfect match for Solaris environments and successfully meet the input/output requirements of enterprise applications.
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IT organizations today are faced with the constant pressure of reducing costs at the service desk, while at the same time ensuring optimal customer service. To accelerate their IT infrastructure library (ITIL) initiatives, many are implementing service resolution management (SRM) systems. With the addition of SRM, these organizations can address the core issues required to operate an efficient and strategic service desk.
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As products become more complex and customer expectations continue to rise, service and support become increasingly difficult. So how can service and support managers transcend these problems and use each customer interaction to build customer loyalty and drive service leveraged revenue? By empowering customers with Web 2.0 technology and enabling users to manage their own experiences. Find out how.
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Server and data center consolidation has never been more important. Issues such as server sprawl and increasing costs have made consolidation the number one priority among IT managers. New virtualization technologies, however, are helping data centers combat these problems. Learn about the factors that are driving consolidation initiatives today, and find out what best practices can be used for ensuring its success.
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As your business grows, so too does the complexity of your data center. Along with this complexity, there are problems such as the inflexibility caused by operating systems, applications, and associated data, which are bound to the hardware they are installed on. Discover eight ways to optimize the infrastructure in your data center using virtualization products designed to work with your current technologies.
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Today’s data centers are an increasingly complex mixture of server platforms, hardware, operating systems, data, and applications that have accumulated over time. So how do you take your data center from a tangled mess of suboptimal servers which may be hampering your service levels, to one that can maximize performance? With the use of virtualization technology, data center optimization can become a reality.
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As management visionary and author Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” No statement rings truer—especially when it comes to security risk reduction. By having an accurate depiction of your network, however, you can identify real-world security threats and learn how to evaluate your organization’s ability to respond to them. Find out how, with these seven essential steps.
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With the growing global epidemic of data theft, tougher regulations are being enforced by government bodies worldwide. As such, organizations need to work harder at proactive security. With the right technology, identifying network vulnerabilities and measuring overall security exposure becomes manageable. By using these eight steps as your guide, you can put an end to network security vulnerabilities once and for all.
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Whether you’re a manufacturer, vendor, or customer service company, the increasing pressure to make sales and decrease service costs affects you. The key to its success is to look at your customer experiences as repeatable life cycles. Instead of viewing sales and service as independent challenges—solved by using disconnected software packages—an integrated solution that accelerates the total life cycle may be the answer.
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Knowledge management (KM) can mean different things to an organization depending upon the nature of the initiative. KM is not a technology or set of methodologies, but a practice or discipline that involves people, processes, and technology. If implemented correctly, a KM initiative can improve the productivity and efficiency of an entire organization. With these ten basic principles, your organization can learn how.
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Today’s support organizations often face the challenge of providing efficient and effective customer service. Without the right tools, it can become an uphill battle. To gain true scale and effectiveness in service and support, many organizations are now turning to knowledge management initiatives like knowledge-centered support (KCS)—a business process that directly addresses the root causes of support inefficiencies.
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Are you moving to call-center multisourcing to save money? Did you know that many multisourced agents use varied and unreliable systems? This leads to unavailable agents and, consequently, long waits for your customers. Are all call centers like this? No. Call centers using a common hosted platform share tools and unify agent management, resulting in answered calls and positive customer experiences
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Supplemental product or technical data is typically delivered separately from the information contained within portable document format (PDF) files. This can make it difficult for users to locate the additional content for download. With the CopyFILE plug-in application, however, companies can integrate supplemental product information by using links within a PDF file—thus allowing content to be easily distributed.
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To build or not to build—that is the question. Is building an enterprise application from scratch better than modifying existing application code? With a .NET framework, the answer is an emphatic yes. Building applications from scratch using only .NET code not only provides cost savings, it also allows software developers to extend applications to users via the Internet—without sacrificing functionality or security.
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Bridging the gap between an application’s problem domain and its code can be difficult, even for the best software engineers. Bridging these two diverse worlds—each with its own language—requires a finished application that creates an intersection between the two. By building a domain-specific modeling (DSM) language and generator using MetaEdit+, engineers close the gap and pave the way to better productivity.
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For cheese producer Mozzarella Fresca, producing multiple products was a scheduling challenge, and it needed a solution that could do more than Excel-based tools. The Zemeter Scheduler solution was able to add 15 percent capacity by optimizing scheduling processes. In fact, from molding to packaging, Zemeter Scheduler increased efficiency without Mozzarella Fresca needing to invest in new equipment.
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There is no single antivirus engine on the market today that is the fastest and most effective at identifying viruses, spam, or other threats. According to a recent survey, 97 percent of organizations have antivirus software installed, yet 65 percent have been infected at one time or another since. One way to reduce the chance of virus infection is to install multiple antivirus scanners at the mail server level.
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Is it beneficial to use multiple types of virtualization software together? The answer: yes. Combining complementary virtualization technologies provides a stronger, more robust solution that reduces costs, maximizes return on investment (ROI), and minimizes the number of servers to manage. By consolidating these technologies, organizations can get the most out of the application, hardware, and operating system (OS).
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As the digital era evolves, media content companies are faced with a number of new challenges. One such challenge is that they can no longer specialize in one communication format. The advertising market is now a dynamic and complex forum making it difficult to manage multiple channel revenues. A standard, integrated solution, however, can facilitate the management of advertising revenues while increasing customer satisfaction.
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There was a time when picking out a book meant going to a library and signing one out. Today, readers expect content to be available through a variety of distribution channels—in both print and digital formats. To be successful, publishers must be able to observe the intellectual property rights of authors for each format and channel of distribution they offer. With a digital publishing management solution, it’s possible.
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Benchmarking is a process where companies compare their performance over time against their competition. In doing so, they can identify where their strengths lie and where improvement may be needed. The point of benchmarking is to focus on areas that will yield the best return. For companies to succeed in their benchmarking efforts and gain a sustained competitive advantage, five key steps should be considered.
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When it comes to disaster recovery (DR) software, companies should think of it as an insurance policy—not just software that recovers lost data. Being prepared for disaster makes good business sense, but oddly enough, few companies are. Because Linux distributions don’t include DR tools, companies must look to a file-based recovery solution that can recover the entire system and eliminate the need to rebuild.
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As with any hot market, point-to-point wireless is bait for the pathologically
opportunistic. In this atmosphere—often termed "anarchy"—trust can t be a matter of faith. To get in on the wireless opportunity without getting shafted, you need to know a few basic and incontrovertible facts concerning the difference between licensed and license-free wireless. In fact, a successful outcome depends on choosing the right one.
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"Wild West" is a metaphor often used to describe the wireless wide area network (WAN) business. But it s worse than that. In the Old West, everyone had a gun. In this business, customers are defenseless. What s going on? Well, for one, vendors are playing fast and loose with terminology that should mean something. Wireless is compelling, but how do you decide what s right for you—and who do you trust?
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Why do some customer relationship management (CRM) implementations fail? The answer: companies’ lack of understanding of their current CRM environments, and of what areas need modification or improvement. Companies with a clear understanding of what they need from a CRM solution—as well as of what CRM means to their business—are more likely to succeed. To clinch that success, some key elements should be assessed first.
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For most companies, e-mail is an integral part of the business workflow and a primary channel for communication. For these reasons, e-mails can be considered legal business documents and should be retained for a predefined period to satisfy government regulations. With an e-mail archiving system, message contents and attachments are stored in a read-only format, ensuring they are archived in their original state.
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Research shows that between 65 and 95 percent of all e-mail is considered spam. On an individual level, spam is an annoyance more than anything else, but on a company-wide basis, spam causes significant problems—and the cost to manage it is sizeable. Spammers are always one step ahead of antispam vendors, so to combat this persistent problem, companies need a single-source product that can eliminate spam for good.
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Over the past few years, vulnerabilities have exploded across all types of platforms—leaving IT security and operations teams scratching their heads. Today, many companies use the scan-and-patch method for managing vulnerabilities—a reactive security process that should be avoided. By combining assessment and remediation, companies create a vulnerability management program that can rapidly respond to emerging threats.
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Although layer-two networks are a viable, cost-effective alternative to traditional wide area network (WAN) services, they have some major security deficiencies. One of the key drawbacks of layer two is its inability to handle identity authentication—which creates serious theft and vulnerability problems. With a layer-two data protection solution, however, you can mitigate these types of security issues.
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Storage area networks (SANs) are complex structures that contain an infinite number of configuration possibilities—making the process of configuring the devices to be installed into the SAN a lengthy one. To simplify the process, QLogic’s configuration wizard provides users with some basic tools to guide them through common SAN tasks, enabling them to easily build stable and secure SAN fabrics for their storage solutions.
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The days of storage area networks (SANs) built with hubs and based on private, arbitrated loops are gone. Today’s fully public switches—which include a variety of switch features—make managing large SANs a lot easier. The key to a flexible SAN is the switch’s ability to create zones, which allows the SAN to be partitioned into various groupings and enables SAN managers to allocate storage where it makes the most sense.
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The first step to a successful storage area network (SAN) implementation is preplanning. Architecting a SAN not only helps solve issues of storage consolidation, it facilitates day-to-day data center support and maintenance. A SAN investment should save support dollars, not require additional support resources. With a sound implementation strategy, costly upgrades—and many headaches—can be avoided.
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With data theft on the rise, many companies are forced to improve their network security. And although they spend millions of dollars every year on securing these networks, the focus has largely been on securing the access to the network rather than protecting the information itself. Secure information sharing (SIS) solutions integrate additional intelligence into the process—and protect your data without added overhead.
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Research shows that the occurrence of multivendor Internet protocol telephony (IPT) environments is on the rise. As such, an increasing number of companies are faced with the challenges of using multiple tools to manage these environments. With a single, specialized IPT management solution, companies gain a unified view across the entire voice infrastructure—which can significantly impact total cost of ownership (TCO).
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Now that you have planned and assessed your new system, it’s time to explore the next phase of the integration process: design and pre-deployment testing. Part 4 of this 4-part e-book series provides a basis for the exploration of network design. In addition, it includes a report card that will help you select the appropriate design and validation software tools for your Internet protocol telephony (IPT) system.
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When deploying any new system, preparation is key—and Internet protocol telephony (IPT) systems are no exception. Part 3 of this 4-part e-book series provides some basic steps you can take to successfully deploy voice and data network services. A complete capabilities inventory has been included to help you ensure that every feature of your current system will be considered for inclusion in your new system.
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Chapter 2 of this 4-part e-book explores the Internet protocol telephony (IPT) life cycle, and discusses how understanding the key phases of this packet-based system can increase implementation success. By harnessing your knowledge about this system's natural rhythms, you will begin to establish key concepts that you can put into action—facilitating the management of the system and reaping its long-term benefits.
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As the era of traditional telephony draws to a close, the doors to the next generation in communications open. Chapter 1 of this 4-part e-book discusses electronic human voice communication and its importance in business today. It documents the underlying beliefs, philosophies, and observations of the future of telephony, and provides the basic concepts readers will need to guide them through the rest of the series.
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Data loss can be damaging to a business—hurting short-term stock prices, impacting customer relationships, and reducing revenues. As more companies conduct business via network communication, the need to protect their customer data and intellectual property becomes greater. With a data protection solution, organizations can secure their data in motion—without introducing unmanageable cost and complexity into the network.
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When it comes to security architecture, choosing a system that’s scalable and applicable to a broad set of security needs is a wise move. New security services for Internet protocol (IP) networks are emerging that enable new levels of scalability and manageability—while remaining completely transparent to the network. By applying this type of system, you build an optimal framework for future security applications.
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Spam considerably lowers user productivity, as it delivers unwanted, irrelevant, or anonymous e-mail messages. The best way to manage the incidence of spam is to measure it. The Spam Index—a tool for measuring improvement in spam control systems and for comparing spam control performance with competitors—is a method used by businesses worldwide to achieve lower spam levels and improve business performance.
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E-mail is a powerful business tool that most enterprises can’t live without. Unfortunately, along with its capability of accelerating commerce, productivity, and social interactions, there are some drawbacks—such as spam! Companies that rely on e-mail to do business simply can’t afford the negative affects of spam. However, new technology is emerging that helps stop spam and allows users to get on with business.
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In this new era of corporate governance, risk avoidance, and responsibility, organizations are more than ever held accountable if their data is not properly protected. As such, many are finding new ways to address security risks, by developing multiple layers of defense to reduce points of weakness. Deploying data encryption technology is a good place to start—but the key is making the right choice.
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Heightened awareness of vulnerabilities in sensitive stored data has resulted in the increased application of encryption technology. To secure data at rest, a well-defined process for handling the keys used to encrypt data—as well as the keys used to safeguard the data encryption keys—is essential. With the proper key management controls in place, companies can ensure that data is effectively secured and recoverable.
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In order to stay competitive, growing organizations need technology that allows them to react quickly to changing industry. According to recent polls, nearly 40 percent of midsized businesses are getting that technology through customer relationship management (CRM). With a rapidly growing market of choices, it’s important to look within your company to assess its needs and goals—before you commit to a CRM solution.
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If you could have a 360-degree view of your business, wouldn’t you want to take a peek? Most companies would say yes, but no business could benefit more from this panoramic view than large enterprises. Today, they’re getting that view—and more, from customer relationship management (CRM) technology. For large enterprises, CRM represents a powerful opportunity for positive change—and you ignore it at your own risk.
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How can you establish a priority-based mobile networking system that provides workers access to company and customer records that they can manipulate from the field? By employing a total solution system that provides various methods of transmitting data. While this type of system may be more costly to implement than a stand-alone pager or cell phone, the benefits it offers can directly impact your bottom line.
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Imagine this scenario: an infected laptop within your company has accessed the network and is spreading malicious code to thousands of other devices. This incident could cripple any business, but with network access control (NAC) products, companies can rest a little easier. NAC’s ability to measure, enforce, and report on an array of security issues has gained it attention amongst security conscious organizations.
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As proprietary network hardware appliances become obsolete, unified network platforms (UNPs) are slowly gaining momentum. UNPs are the new paradigm for networking and security—operating on a single system that can be implemented on off-the-shelf hardware. With a UNP, organizations can design, build, manage, and maintain secure networks, without the limitations and expense of vendor proprietary hardware and software.
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Malicious hacking and illegal access are just a few of the reasons companies lose precious corporate data every year. As the number of network security breaches increase, companies must find ways to protect data beyond the perimeter of their businesses. But how do they build a data-defensible architecture that will protect data on an ever-evolving network? The answer: by first developing an in-depth defense strategy.
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The supply of multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services and service providers has grown exponentially with the demand for Internet protocol (IP) and Ethernet services. But while MPLS enhances packet processing speed and network performance, it lacks in security. As government and industry compliance regulations increase, organizations must invest in tools that can ensure security without affecting network performance.
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Wide area networks (WANs) are essential to the majority of businesses, enabling effective communications within the organization and with customers, partners, and suppliers. As more bandwidth-intensive applications are added to the mix, these networks are expected to handle the extra load—which can decrease its performance. Ensuring WAN usage is well-managed eliminates unwanted traffic and accelerates business activity.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) face the same challenges as large businesses when it comes to IT management—they have increasingly complex systems they rely on to drive their businesses and gain a competitive advantage. Operating and maintaining a complex IT infrastructure requires specific skills, but getting the right staff at an affordable price can be a problem. Outsourcing IT management may help to ease the strain.
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In any organization, people remain one of the largest sources of value when it comes to business processes. But providing them with tools that can be easily accessed and used has its challenges. As we move into the era of service-oriented architecture (SOA), portal and collaboration software now delivers the essential people-focused capabilities businesses need, while adding significant value to the organization.
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How can a budget administrator, burdened with the task of gathering data from hundreds of spreadsheets from all over the organization, manage this monumental undertaking? Additionally, how to avoid using a costly packaged budget application that doesn’t take the organization’s business rules into consideration? The solution: a spreadsheet automation tool that easily adapts to the organization’s unique corporate processes.
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Today, companies are looking to improve work processes, comply with legislation, and increase productivity—and they’re implementing electronic document management systems (EDMS) to help them effectively manage their information. By deploying EDMS—which are capable of capturing, storing, and retrieving records, files, and folders—these companies are achieving unprecedented levels of control, efficiency, and automation.
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In the $1.8 billion market of document management services, only 10 percent is billed by dealers. So how can they increase their share of the managed print services trend? The dealer’s path to advantage lies in its service and supply organization. To make this transition, the dealer needs a tool that gathers knowledge of the client’s fleet and identifies where printing dollars can be saved.
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Many companies believe their employees are their most important asset—and spend significant amounts of money every year on their training and development. But how can these companies quantify what this investment will do to their bottom line? With the right tools, decision makers can gain the critical business intelligence they’ll need to confidently invest in their human capital, and measure and report on its impact.
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When considering any software solution, two things come to mind: flexibility and cost. With virtualization technology, multiple applications can now be hosted safely and securely on a single server, eliminating the overhead of running multiple operating systems (OS) per server. This capability can greatly reduce costs and help organizations deliver consistent service levels despite unpredictable workloads.
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Cox Communications, a leading cable provider, needed to find a way to centralize the IT requirements of its customer support team. With over a hundred users, its challenge was to move from single desktop applications to a centralized server which would offer many concurrent instances of the application—and minimize the cost. By deploying a virtualization solution, Cox realized a return on investment (ROI) of 300 percent.
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An important question facing IT professionals today is how best to harness computing power to further improve automated business processes. This is especially critical in business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. While service-oriented architecture (SOA) delivers the benefits of IT integration to business, it needs a programming language—such as Lisp—that can optimize its capabilities and scale in size and complexity.
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The computational complexity of problems faced by programmers today is growing exponentially. With accelerated changes brought on by the Internet, companies need to explore new methods of enabling their programmers to focus on these complex problems. When dealing with complex data, an object caching database system can alleviate the task of programming special code for persistent data while writing applications.
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New Star Asset Management was looking to maximize its existing sales channels and drive more information gathering via the Web. In order to achieve its aggressive targets, it needed to find a way to make better use of the Web, while reducing costs. Since integrating a Web content management system, New Star has seen a significant drop in Web-related expenditure—with cost savings of nearly 68 percent in the first year.
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The Web has become a vast potential business asset for many companies today. But while business users have the vision, it’s the IT department that actually creates and deploys the Web application. This often raises the question of Web site ownership. Empowering both parties with the right tools to match their respective skills can help address this question—and many others—for businesses in this confusing situation.
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One person’s freedom to pirate is another person’s loss of royalty revenue. Every day, millions of Internet users are downloading copyrighted materials—music, movies, TV shows, and more. Although this is illegal under most countries’ copyright laws, it doesn’t stop them. What’s worse is they don’t even see themselves as criminals. Piracy isn’t going away, and content owners and governments need to regain control.
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C# is a modern object-oriented language for application development. In addition to object-oriented constructs, C# supports component-oriented programming with properties, methods, and events. WinA&D is a complete Unified Modeling Language (UML) tool enriched with C#-specific details used to generate source code. This white paper discusses how C# constructs are represented by UML—for forward and reverse engineering.
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Understanding how a system really works is the first step toward using, improving, automating, or explaining it to others. The basic concept of a system is that it is driven by cause and effect—but there is so much more to understanding its full complexity. The best place to start is by learning how causal loop diagrams (CLDs) are used to model dynamic systems by identifying variables and causal effects.
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As a business employing IT, you may have encountered situations where the software application you purchased didn’t come with a help file. With no time to write complete documentation yourself and no budget to hire a professional technical writer to do it for you, what do you do? By applying the basic principles of cost-effective documentation, your business can develop impressive documentation quickly—for a minimal cost.
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Corporate leaders know that revenues are made from “better data.” And when your data is at risk, so is the survival of your organization. That’s why it’s essential to protect your revenues with “safer data”—and it’s also why the common business language is now one of risk management. IT departments are now learning this in many of the same ways that business people have always had to—including the hard way.
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SANs, NAS devices, corporate servers, and high-end workstations all suffer the effects of fragmentation because of their multiple physical disk drives. This is attributed to the impact of fragmentation on the logical allocation of files and their physical distribution. The solution to this problem: implementing an automatic defragmentation software solution, together with intricate modern hardware technologies.
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A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is now a standard business requirement. With origins as a system for sales teams, CRM has clearly evolved into a mandatory tool for providing benefit to the entire organization. However, methodology and training play instrumental roles in successful CRM implementations; if designed well, these critical components will ultimately ensure user buy-in and success.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) like yours are the lifeblood of the economy. However, you may feel you need an operational boost—one that transforms your enterprise into a customer-focused business with the ability for future growth. An integrated suite of applications can give your business processes the depth and flexibility to achieve what a collection of stand-alone applications cannot.
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Poor customer experiences can happen at any touch point within your company. It could be employees responding to customers requesting information, placing an order, or trying to resolve a problem. It could be the inside sales team. Or it could be the collections department. But by deploying an advanced contact-handling application, you can improve customer satisfaction—at all touch points.
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Most project-oriented businesses are faced with poorly designed, archaic computer systems that have inadequate project reporting and accounting structures. This can limit the information provided to project managers for project reporting. However, properly designed work breakdown structure (WBS) systems give cost and general accounting the ability to rely on a simpler chart of accounts, while providing more project management flexibility.
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Just as back-office automation became critical for competitive success in the last half of the twentieth century, customer relationship management (CRM) is today’s imperative for success. However, the key to creating business value with CRM is remembering that business strategy and technology strategy are linked. Companies that believe they can implement CRM capabilities based on technology alone will fail.
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The process of implementing a new enterprise solution is incredibly complex. This process can send your organization down a long road of beneficial—and sometimes painful—change. The good news, though, is that if the implementation is done right the first time, you won’t have to travel that road again. The key question: how do you do it right?
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Gruppo Tosinvest is by no means a single-process company. Beside a core focus on health care, it also runs businesses in the media, real estate, financial services, and engineering and construction sectors. With such an array of processes, controlling IT costs is of utmost importance. That’s why it decided to upgrade the enterprise software it had been running since 2001.
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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) need technology to survive in a competitive business environment. However, regardless of the business type, size, or industry, incorporating technology into existing frameworks involves risk—to productivity, customer service, operations, and the bottom line! The key to reducing risk and increasing productivity is thus the selection of technologies that will accommodate change in your business.
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.NET technology is a wake-up call, and some people are sleeping through it! Remaining competitive means mission-critical software systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, must be designed from the ground up for connectivity and integration. But software developers don’t advertise their shortcomings, and some ERP vendors—and by association, their customers—are being left behind.
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Customer-facing processes are challenging to manage because they are always changing. Conventional workflow automation and stand-alone business process management (BPM) technologies lack many critical components found in customer relationship management (CRM). However, converging BPM and CRM provides the responsiveness, cost-effectiveness, and manageability to achieve optimal results. The converged approach helps align priorities enterprise-wide, reduce risks, and unblock revenue growth potential.
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When businesses commit to implementing customer relationship management (CRM), they commit to realigning their entire organizations around the customer. More specifically, they commit to collecting the right data—and using it the right way at the right time. But if you’re the manager championing CRM in your organization, how do you create the CRM buzz and obtain executive buy-in?
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Choosing the right customer resource management (CRM) application involves looking at its ability to solve many business challenges—both expected and unexpected. Analyzing CRM applications for their problem-solving acumen can help your business successfully select a platform that improves the way you do business, drives profits, and reduces risk, while minimizing IT resource requirements.
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Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and receiving quality customer service is a major factor in their purchasing decisions. There are six key elements that can help distinguish your organization’s product or service from your competitors. By applying these key elements, you can unlock the lifetime value of your customers and build an outstanding referral platform for future growth.
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In the past few years, the number of county employees at the Prince William County Government in Virginia (US) has grown significantly, but with few additions to the administrative staff. Prince William County needed a system that would help its agencies process personnel action forms (PAFs) more efficiently, reduce mistakes, limit paper use, and provide a central repository for PAFs.
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The road to implementing customer relationship management (CRM) systems is fraught with risk and littered with failure. Paradoxically, reams have been written by industry practitioners explaining why CRM projects fail, yet the same patterns and mistakes are repeated—over and over again. While there is no magic bullet, following some simple guidelines can help assure CRM success for your organization.
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Selecting a new enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) solution is an undertaking that requires careful planning and managed execution. And in fact, there are a number of common mistakes that organizations make. Failing to execute the selection process in an objective and structured fashion can be an expensive financial mistake—as well as a fatal hit to your professional reputation.
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We all know that computers, generally speaking, have not been as reliable as phones. And the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) surrounding voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) has been, in some cases, justified. However, for VoIP the question now is not whether reliability can be achieved, but rather how much reliability you can expect from the options available to you.
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The average personal computer (PC) costs an enterprise $10,000 (USD) per year to own and maintain—five times the purchase price of the hardware and software! Is it possible to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of technology platforms? Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) manageability can be a crucial step in self-provisioning users and unburdening valuable network professionals.
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Enterprises of all sizes are adopting Internet protocol (IP) telephony for cost savings and productivity gains—but high quality voice service takes more than just buying the latest equipment. Is IP telephony right for your organization and your network? Get the straight facts from an industry leader—along with a 7-step assessment and deployment checklist for a successful implementation.
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La administración de un negocio familiar es más complicada que aquellos negocios cuyos dueños no tienen ningún parentesco, porque la familia dueña del negocio desempeña el rol central y dirige el negocio. La falta de una administración formal y efectiva es la mayor causa para problemas organizacionales.
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Channel partners are money-making sales and service arms for any vendor. Supporting partner leads can increase sales in difficult-to-reach markets, and expand customer bases in existing sectors as well. Greater revenues and larger market shares are vital to survival in today’s business world, but some simple tips can help maximize lead generation and open the door to closing more sales.
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Effective communication uses many senses, but visual communication provides huge amounts of information, and can convey all sorts of meanings. Face to face, we can rely on visual cues; however, the amount of information transmitted via distant communication is limited by cost and complexity. And when the costs of transportation rise, broader use of remote visual communications becomes increasingly practical.
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There is a considerable need to understand how technical performance and the problems within the technical infrastructure impact the capabilities of the business itself. The majority of companies can only measure specific asset and application performance, whereas many issues within the infrastructure lie at the transport level, where packet switching can present both great opportunities and major issues.
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Information management, which includes both data and content management, is an essential element of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Taking a service-oriented approach to information data can thus help you achieve greater value from your information assets. Implementing master data management (MDM) services can provide a multiplier effect, by delivering high-value business services over and above information integration services.
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Predictions of the death of software are overstated. In reality, businesses are becoming more reliant on technology, not less. What’s changing, however, is the number of options available for managing, delivering, and paying for software applications. Many independent software vendors recognize the benefits of offering software as a service--a delivery alternative that can present long-term benefits for all parties.
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Workforce planning allows an organization to determine if it has the right capability to deliver on business objectives, and enables it to maximize return on talent investments. By deploying a structured workforce planning process, organizations gain new insights and metrics about present and future workforce gaps. This will transform the talent management approach from reactive to proactive.
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Performance reviews are an essential and productive use of employee and manager time. A well-defined competency model can discover insights into individual, workgroup, and even entire workforce performance, helping enterprises gain true business advantage in their industries and marketplaces. Employee consultations and reviews, appraisals, and developmental decisions no longer need to exist as isolated business functions.
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The greatest threat to the security of the modern network is complexity. Threats to network security almost always play on missed details in the design of a network or a piece of software. These overlooked details enable much larger and potentially devastating security breaches to occur. However, this threat can be countered with a well designed network and vigilant safeguards.
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Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) has been adopted as the dynamic protocol of choice for pain-free management of network resources. The integration of the Domain Name System (DNS) and DHCP into a single network helps overcome traditional barriers to effective resource allocation. Indeed, combining DNS and DHCP enhances information security, thus providing a solution your organization can grow with.
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The Domain Name System (DNS) plays an important role in providing the information used by the Windows Domain locator service to connect and authenticate with Active Directory. But how can organizations with existing configurations using the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND)—the international DNS benchmark—be sure that migration to other server solutions will yield a dependable DNS solution?
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Domain name system (DNS) best practices are becoming more standardized. However, DNS services are often overlooked simply because they are so commonplace. The result is poorly configured services that are either not fully functional, or easily compromised. To ensure that the Internet remains a reliable medium for information and commerce, further implementation of secure and efficient DNS will be required.
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Small to medium businesses have typically built their own domain name system (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services, used Windows DNS/DHCP, or turned to a hosted service provider for these services. This approach may appear to offer tremendous savings, but contains many hidden costs and risks that are not always apparent until a catastrophic loss of service occurs.
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When Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) was created, the Internet was still mainly a vehicle for scientific collaboration. Indeed, the need for security has grown out of the increased use of the Internet as a commercial medium. That’s why new DHCP issues have come to the forefront that were simply not explored in the early days of the Internet.
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To understand the power of cache poisoning and pharming, imagine that you’re logging on to your Internet banking service. The page looks a little odd, but the address is correct, and it has the same fields as usual. You might enter your credentials without thinking twice. Unfortunately, you’ve just provided a criminal syndicate with the contents of your bank account.
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Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology has become a money-saving telecom option that brings the power of a computer to a user’s phone. VoIP devices, however, require more complicated configurations than the average network client. Indeed, without reliable and properly configured domain name system (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services running on a network, VoIP services are impossible.
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Organizations deploying next-generation business and communications applications are looking for ways to rapidly increase the use of existing Internet and core network resources. These network environments demand new management frameworks to simplify network configuration and deployment changes. However, existing point-based solutions do little to address issues of scale, usability, security, and network availability at the Internet protocol (IP) level.
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Increased complexity, coupled with the adoption of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), demands additional management overhead for enterprise- and carrier-class networks. This management need is compounded by requirement for corporations to implement IP version 6 (IPv6)-compatible networks to ensure capacity and service over the next decade. This transition will require careful planning, and naming systems will play a critical role.
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Today, in addition to their usual reporting and operational duties, human resources (HR) professionals are expected to bring value to the company in a number of significant respects, ranging from launching operational efficiency initiatives to providing strategic leadership. And now, compliance with the US Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act has imposed a new set of responsibilities on the HR organization.
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Wireless technology has become exceedingly popular and convenient in both residences and enterprises. Networks are now expected to aid IT support, government services, and public safety applications. That’s why the architectural strategies used to implement wireless mesh networks can have a profound impact on the performance and financial success of metro-scale and wide area wireless mesh deployments.
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Data entry and error correction are key roadblocks to return on investment (ROI) from customer relationship management (CRM) software. Manual data entry is time-consuming, and reduces staff effectiveness by taking them away from potential sales opportunities. Automating data entry is one way to reduce missed contacts and incorrect details, and to increase the volume and accuracy of contact entry.
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Organizational growth can come in many forms. It can be sheer increases in number of employees, customers, patients, members or constituents; it can involve launching new products, or entering new geographies; it can simply be increasing transaction levels. Regardless of form, managing growth confidently means relying not only on an organization’s people, but also on its business systems.
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Many businesses owe their very survival to improvements that would have been impossible without radical changes to business process systems. However, many of the promises implicit in these systems—dramatic increases in business success, with minimal negative impact—have proven to be overly optimistic for many, and flat-out fantasy for some.
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If you’re like most small to midsized business executives, your primary focus is on growing revenue and controlling company spending. However, you probably use paper-based processes to deal with company expenses. Without an automated system, you have limited ability to actively manage spending—and can only hope that spending decisions remain within budget and in compliance with company policies.
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The contact database sits at the heart of any successful customer relationship management (CRM) program. Indeed, most CRM efforts aim at improving revenues based on the contact database. But what about the information that never made it into the database at all? The investment in these leads will often be lost—and the sales may go straight to the competition.
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Today’s leading-edge business applications go beyond mere Web enablement, where publishing information to the Web is the primary motive (referred to nowadays as Web 1.0 applications). State-of-the-art enterprise software must also incorporate a single, integrated interface that links applications instantly to business processes and collaborative technologies. However, developing Web 2.0 applications is anything but trivial.
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Vormittag Associates, Inc. (VAI) provides enterprise resource planning software and associated services to clients in the manufacturing, wholesale, and retail industries. To facilitate everyday business processes, VAI began to consider a business portal. As a software provider, VAI was intimately familiar with a number of portal products, and decided that IBM Workplace Services Express was best suited for the company.
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In times like these, when IT spending is increasingly subject to cutbacks, finding out how to get "more for less" is as crucial to a company’s IT department as making sure that applications run smoothly. In Rome, Italy, Gruppo Tosinvest managed to prove that this challenge—which keeps legions of IT managers awake at night—can be solved.
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There are several ways to virtualize the front office, with at least four different solution choices available. The soundest advice may be for companies to start the process, and evaluate the alternatives based on their ability to solve real business needs. It’s time that the personal computer (PC) find its place in the data center—not proliferated around the workplace.
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New developments in telephony solutions have left some small businesses reeling; smaller organizations incorrectly assume there’s a steep learning curve for new products. However, there is no real reason for any business to be left behind. One-size-fits-all telephony is a thing of the past, and new flexibility can level the playing field for any size of business.
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Acquiring and retaining customers is crucial to an organization’s long-term success and growth. Finding new customers is more expensive and labor-intensive than maintaining a current client base. Haphazard marketing plans can be costly and ineffective, but customer loyalty solutions don’t have to be expensive. There are customer retention tools that can help your marketing teams hold on to your existing customers.
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Administrative overload is a key problem in managing a human resources (HR) team. Health care rate hikes and not qualifying for high-end benefit packages are two serious concerns. Furthermore, missing filing deadlines can lead to legal fines and penalties. Outsourcing HR can be an effective way of providing high-quality HR services while avoiding risk, saving time, and protecting the bottom line.
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For today’s organizations, Internet access is a must-have. However, when they decide to open the door to the World Wide Web, the good—along with the bad—enters the network. Spyware and viruses can be distributed onto the network from untrustworthy web sites. In order to protect the best interests of the organization, an effective Web content filter is required.
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All organizations require the ability to create portable document format (PDF) files to maintain the interoperability, authenticity, and security of confidential information—while ensuring that the right person has access to this information. However, if your employees do not have an easy and intuitive way to do this, your organization may be at risk of violating compliance requirements.
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It has been estimated that two-thirds of all complex technology solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and performance management result in less than successful outcomes. Implementing a complex technology-enabled performance management solution is a worthwhile, but significant challenge. That’s why the implementation of technology must be a small part of a larger change effort.
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Setting up a performance management system can deliver immense value to your organization. But in order to successfully execute a performance management system, and to avoid critical missteps, you need to focus on the three important core processes that must be launched and navigated—before you launch the performance improvement process.
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Performance management systems have become an important tool in building an organizational culture of choice, and can deliver tremendous results. However, it’s not very common to have a comprehensive “road map” when embarking on a performance management system implementation—which can lead to serious mistakes in dealing with the people, process, and technology of performance management.
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When it comes to US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance, the role of financial information systems simply cannot be overlooked. This was recently underscored by a study naming "financial systems and procedures" as the most common problem among companies disclosing material weaknesses. Indeed, this weakness has prompted organizations to take a deeper look at their business processes—and underlying financial systems.
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A global marketing information firm was conducting paper- and telephone-based employee exit surveys. However, its manual process was time-consuming and costly. There was also the challenge of obtaining honest, accurate data from the employees in a completely confidential manner. Thus, the firm needed to automate its manual employee exit survey process, and replace it with a web-based application.
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IT departments play a key role in complying with the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Without the right technological solutions to record and monitor access to networks, financial systems, and sensitive data, company management cannot ensure the integrity of the information in their financial reports. That’s why technology that helps with SOX compliance and internal control management is imperative.
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Unfortunately, the portfolio management processes that experts have advocated for years—and that many organizations have implemented—often take the form of semi-annual or even annual meetings. However, this often raises balance or alignment issues only after millions of dollars have been spent. What’s needed is real-time information that can be used to conduct continuous, automated assessment of portfolio status.
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It’s only lately that people have been questioning the value of information they’re able to garner from within “spend data” warehouses. Why can t we leverage traditional tools to give the sourcing and purchasing community what they want? To understand the limitations of traditional data-cleansing technology, and why spend data necessitates special algorithms, we need to start with the basics.
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In the relentless search for ever-improving returns on investment and market competitiveness, some of the world’s biggest corporations are applying a model known as the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model to maximize supply chain efficiency. Simply gathering SCOR metrics information is one thing—but how do you actually make this information available to allow optimal decision-making for your business?
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One of the biggest “time-wasters” in not-for-profit organizations is the constant reentry of data from one system to another. For example, many organizations must manually reenter information from their fundraising applications to their accounting systems. This is error-prone, costs valuable time, and delays important reporting. The solution lies in finding efficient ways to share information—across the organization.
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When it comes to electronic discovery, the process of producing digital information as part of a legal matter, ignorance is no longer bliss. An overarching requirement is the need for organizations, especially general counsel, to comprehend what information it has, and where. This insight can prove invaluable as parties negotiate conditions of discovery and prepare strategies in support of litigation.
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The capacity for service-oriented architecture (SOA) to provide a framework for next-generation enterprise telecommunications services has become a reality through the maturing of Web services technology. Such communications services can now take their rightful place alongside collaborating business processes to allow enterprises to achieve a fully integrated SOA, an architecture that can grow with the business and grow with technology.
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Security is a vital consideration when evaluating enterprise Internet protocol (IP) telecommunications solutions. In addition to delivering business benefits, a voice over IP (VoIP) system may also become a target for unauthorized users, and must be secured against threats. Indeed, if threats and vulnerabilities are not addressed, the results can be devastating with respect to lost productivity, resources, and reputation.
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Client relationship management (CRM) technology can help capital-markets firms streamline investment banking activities, increase brokerage trade volume, and meet compliance challenges. As a nerve center for information about clients, prospects, institutions, syndicate partners, and other contacts, the right CRM system enables capital-markets firms to share intelligence, coordinate activities, and derive advantage from an integrated body of corporate knowledge and relationships.
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As the web has evolved from being an information exchange medium to a medium of business transactions, it has become critical for businesses to ensure their web sites are available 24x7. And since the user experience is governed by how well site-associated application components perform, effective and proactive monitoring that drills down to the root cause of problems is imperative.
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The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) provides a comprehensive and consistent set of best practices for IT service management (ITSM), promoting a quality approach to achieving business efficiency in the use of information systems. The key paradigm shift that ITIL s ITSM best-practices taxonomy seeks to achieve is the movement away from management of silos, towards management of services spanning multiple silos.
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As telecommunications networks grow in size and complexity, enterprises and service providers are faced with an increasing burden on operating expenses. In particular, the amount of power consumed and heat dissipated within even a single rack of communications servers is now a very real budget consideration. Clearly, lowering these numbers is the concern of all communication platform designers.
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Thanks to pressures in the telecom equipment manufacturing industry, application-ready platforms (ARPs) in Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) are increasingly indispensable. ARPs must provide standards-based platforms to support diverse sets of applications. The ATCA ARP provides such a platform, but in light of the ATCA specifications that define the basis for the platform, ARP implementations still present some interesting challenges.
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As digital information has become more and more critical to businesses, firewalls—which once served as the walls of the fortress, have now become an archaic means of defense. Thus, as threats evolve, responses must change as well. Rather than focusing protection solely on perimeter security, it is imperative to look at protecting data at the source—inside the database.
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Industry observations indicate that few enterprises have been successful in implementing seamless networks to provide consistently updated customer information across multiple channels of access, including data stored and used within and outside contact center applications. There are several reasons for this lack of success—in particular the method by which these multichannel contact centers were developed in the first place.
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The global trade industry is changing faster than ever before. It’s now possible for importers to have a level of visibility into their business that was impossible a few years ago. Importers realize the profound effect this information will have on their ability to be profitable, and are eager to implement information solutions. So what’s the best application for you?
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Time was, information technology (IT) systems lasted much longer. Organizational restructuring was uncommon, as business did not really require it. However, with ever-shrinking business cycles, IT must now be capable of quickly adapting to changing business needs. That’s why present-day IT systems must be built to change—and services-oriented architecture (SOA) may just hold the key.
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In 1999, specialty chemicals manufacturer Rohm and Haas Company wanted to move to a new platform to simplify the complexity resulting from over 300 disparate information technology (IT) systems. First, Rohm and Haas wanted to adopt common global processes to increase efficiency, and implement smart sourcing strategies. Second, management needed a better way to see customer trends and evaluate competitors.
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Héma-Québec manages the collection and distribution of blood and blood products for the province of Quebec (Canada). As Héma-Québec worked to enhance availability and quality, company leaders identified a need to make changes in the organization’s information technology (IT) systems. In June 2001, the company decided to implement a new system for the procurement and distribution of fractionated blood products.
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When Luxembourg-based AZ Electronic Materials was carved out of Clariant International and sold to a private equity firm, the new company was given one year to wean itself off its parent’s information technology (IT) system. AZ beat the clock by three months, working with partner Accenture to roll out SAP business software across nine countries and six manufacturing plants.
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Some four decades after early “data processing strategists” realized the importance of a comprehensive, manageable approach to truly integrated information, the typical organization is no closer to achieving those objectives. The question must be asked, then: will we ever achieve true, well-architected enterprise-scale information management? And if so, when? The answer (and the good news): probably—and soon.
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Can you deliver integrated and reliable information in a format that all users can understand? Are you able manage that from a single console that allows you to support your performance management, reporting, and query and analysis requirements? By extending the reach of knowledge within the organization, you can efficiently and effectively manage your operations through better visibility and transparency.
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Business intelligence (BI) is often an area of friction between information technology (IT) (who provide information) and the business users (who need it to do their jobs). By allowing you to connect goals, metrics, and people across the enterprise, an enterprise BI standard helps organizations manage and optimize information flows like other business processes, leading to improved alignment and transparency.
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Brady Corporation is a world leader in identification solutions that help companies improve safety and security. Founded in 1914, its divisions operate some twenty enterprise resource planning systems. However, even with Brady’s move to centralize about half its financial information on SAP R/3, serious data inconsistency issues were hampering reporting reliability. To resolve these issues, Brady turned to OutlookSoft Everest.
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During the past decade, organizations of all sizes have made significant investments in enterprise application software. Unfortunately, the level of integration between these systems has become less effective and more expensive than originally envisioned. The question is how to leverage the considerable investments organizations have made, in order to maximize the value of the information stored in these discrete infrastructures.
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Analysis of the tasks and time in information technology (IT) projects invariably reveals the presence of a familiar recurring burden: testing—often still performed manually and inefficiently, yet accounting for a substantial proportion of the budget. Can some simple and effective focused measures have a dramatic and positive impact on the success of key projects? That depends on your approach.
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Installing software and patch updates can be frustrating and time-consuming for IT staff and users alike. But it's critical to update your computers regularly to keep security filters current. This need increases exponentially if your users are mobile and geographically dispersed. Should this continue to be the responsibility of your IT staff? Or should you outsource this function to a managed service provider (MSP)?
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Just behind fire and the wheel in a list of the world’s greatest inventions comes information lifecycle management (ILM). Without a doubt, ILM will revolutionize every facet of the computing landscape. And along the way, it will probably generate more hype than all the high-tech buzzwords of the past five years combined. But does it solve a real problem?
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A new trend is emerging in the world of storage management, and it’s called information lifecycle management (ILM). Just what it is, however, varies significantly from vendor to vendor. Generally, ILM is a strategy for policy-based information management. Its mandate: to provide centralized management of all information assets, aligning storage resources with the value of the data residing in them.
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While open innovation is a hot topic, capitalizing on opportunity requires a holistic strategy—not just increased collaboration. Companies must have repeatable, compliant, and responsive business processes. These processes must be supplemented by a global information infrastructure that provides a single source of the truth, along with alignment across departmental silos, and solutions that evolve without coding.
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A global telecommunications provider was mired in a hardware-centric architecture for its network applications. Even with a sizeable computing infrastructure investment, failure of server components was inevitable, and application failover schemes were risky. The provider needed a more cost-effective way to scale its operational support system (OSS) applications—without sacrificing dependability.
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While it’s great to find ways to keep up with mountains of e-mail, organizations must remember that e-mail is not a lightweight communication tool anymore. For people and organizations swamped by critical information, throwing messages away is just not an answer. Increasingly, knowledge workers are turning to searching to manage the volume and value of information sitting in their in-boxes.
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Organizations undertaking information technology and business process outsourcing typically are very focused on "doing the deal." This involves assessing service providers, determining geographies from which to source services, developing contracts, defining service levels, and a myriad of other tasks. Yet arguably the hardest part of outsourcing occurs only after the deal is done—performing ongoing outsourcing management and governance.
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Compliance with the US Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is not a one-time project, but a sustained effort to gain visibility into processes affecting financial reporting accuracy. Most IT controls are manual, error-prone, and resource-intensive. However, there’s a new, radical solution: an automated IT control framework in which all the information required to verify compliance is available in a single reporting system.
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Today’s information technology (IT) organizations are dealing with the consequences of exploding infrastructure complexity. At the root of the problem is uncontrolled server sprawl—servers provisioned to support a single application. Organizations that have implemented hardware virtualization have unwittingly created a new problem: operating system (OS) sprawl. IT organizations have to find ways to address this critical challenge—today.
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Knowledge workers by the millions are leveraging desktop search (DTS) tools. However, with change comes risk, and failing to proactively establish policies and lock down a centrally managed DTS solution can result in significant civil and criminal liabilities. But by following a few basic principles, companies can realize the full benefits of this new technology, while enhancing their information security.
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Today’s $12 billion (USD) knowledge management (KM) market provides comprehensive solutions to large organizations. However, implementing such solutions requires significant resources and depends on behavioral changes by employees. As a result, KM efforts often fall short of their goals. Shifting focus to end user features offers significant benefits to government organizations and their employees—and improves the odds of success.
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To date, the best option for discovering and extracting information from software applications has primarily been manual, with automation tools serving in support. These initiatives are tedious, long-term, and high-risk. Companies try to lower monetary cost by outsourcing such projects. However, the time to completion and risks remain unchanged at best. The solution? Automated documentation and transformation of software applications.
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In the automotive industry, companies face an ongoing struggle for market share and constant pressure on margins. To differentiate themselves in this competitive environment, many companies focus on sales and service operations, which are key to providing a high-quality customer experience. With that in mind, companies must automate processes and leverage integrated information to increase efficiency throughout the value chain.
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Large or small, every company can profit from streamlined processes, insightful business intelligence, and systems that are flexible enough to grow with changing business needs. SAP Best Practices for Automotive comprise preconfigured business scenarios that cover the most important requirements of the automotive supplier industry, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), supplier relationship management (SRM), and a business information warehouse (BW).
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For those who haven’t yet taken the plunge, the time has come: Predictive analysis will become a competitive necessity by the end of this decade. This is primarily thanks to its capacity for turning customer intelligence into actionable information for improving the accuracy and efficiency with which organizations target specific customers and prospects—effectively lowering the cost of marketing campaigns.
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The news certainly isn’t what it used to be. Today, rising costs, stagnating circulation figures, and falling advertising sales characterize the newspaper market. There is hardly any capacity for new magazines, while new media and changed consumer habits are fragmenting the market. Consequently, gaining the loyalty of your customers and increasing your company’s attractiveness is crucial—now more than ever.
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Book publishers and information service providers are facing numerous challenges—production costs are on the rise, revenue windows are shrinking, and successful authors are few and far between. Publishers need to keep track of intellectual property, make better use of it, and improve their marketing and sales activities. But doing all that requires accurate, up-to-the-minute information, across the entire organization.
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Outsourcing is increasingly embraced by manufacturers seeking ways to reduce costs, increase agility, and enhance market competitiveness. Yet poorly managed distributed manufacturing operations compromise visibility and quality control, which in turn erodes execution, management effectiveness, and profitability. To truly optimize the value of outsourcing, business systems and procedures must be deployed that create a collaborative, transparent information environment for manufacturing.
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Rising costs, stagnating circulation figures, and ever-increasing competition for advertisers—times have never been tougher for newspaper and magazine publishers. It takes reliable, up-to-the-minute information to deliver the products and high-quality service your customers demand. But all too often, business processes span multiple departments and information technology (IT) systems, slowing responsiveness and impeding access to crucial facts and figures.
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The media industry is undergoing radical change, driven in large part by new technologies such as the Internet, online publishing, and digital broadcasting. And at the heart of the industry is intellectual property. As the number of media and delivery channels explodes, you need to know how to manage rights inventory, license revenue streams, and royalty payments—efficiently and profitably.
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Most chief executive officers (CEOs) have developed strategies that push their companies to achieve certain goals. So why are so many companies failing to achieve these goals? Because their twenty-first century vision is being held back by twentieth century processes and IT systems. The missing ingredient: information. And the key to facilitating the flow of information lies in integrated processes.
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When business uncertainties are frequent and compliance with regulations is mandatory, it can be a challenge to keep information technology (IT) synchronized with strategy for maximum business value—while reducing IT cost. An IT portfolio management framework, coupled with an IT governance framework, can provide visibility into projects and IT assets, keeping them aligned to business objectives at all times.
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The complexity of the global economy is a powerful motivation for companies to look for new ways to increase efficiency and productivity. That’s why companies must have the ability to transform information into meaningful, accurate insights. Most importantly, these insights must be systematically interconnected, to align business strategy with tactics through a seamless integration of analytical, transactional, and collaborative processes.
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Increased global competition, pricing pressure, and the need to rationalize resources have made business and operational measurement vital on all organizational levels. That’s why business intelligence and data warehousing tools are no longer only for the exclusive use of financial controllers. Instead, they are everyday tools across company divisions, giving relevant and efficient information overviews of all areas of responsibility.
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A recent report by the European Commission noted that Europe is not investing in productivity-enhancing information technology and communications (ITC) as much as the US. The report also claimed that the situation is still worse for small to medium businesses (SMBs). Comparing the data from two recent Quocirca studies underlines the problem, and shows the price European SMBs are paying.
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Technology decision-making in larger organizations is about making existing IT platforms as efficient as possible. However, there are weaknesses in the day-to-day operation of such environments, particularly in storage and information management. Positioning information lifecycle management (ILM) in the context of infrastructure management provides an understanding of where we are today—and of how much further there is to go.
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Bad data threatens the usefulness of the information you have about your customers. Poor data quality undermines customer communication and whittles away at profit margins. It can also create useless information in the form of inaccurate reports and market analyses. As companies come to rely more and more on their automated systems, data quality becomes an increasingly serious business issue.
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Having the right information in the right place at the right time is critical to the success of any business, but it can be difficult to achieve if you’re not using the right software tools. Together, Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Office form a tool that connects information with people—as well as with the processes organizations use every day.
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Dashboards are a popular means to deliver important information at a glance, but their potential is rarely realized. The best software in the world will not produce a useful dashboard without effective visual design. To better understand the concept of business intelligence dashboards in the first place, it is thus vital to understand the common pitfalls of dashboard design.
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The ability to extract and present information meaningfully is vital for business management. Indeed, business intelligence tools enable companies to make better decisions, by providing the right information to the right people at the right time. Moreover, employees increasingly suffer from information overload, and require solutions that make informed decisions a more natural part of the everyday work experience.
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Switzerland-based Firmenich has been researching, studying and creating fragrances and flavors for more than a century. As part of an ongoing project to cut cost and increase throughput and margins, Firmenich sought a supply chain management application to eliminate information silos and automatically address other issues such as excess inventory, load imbalances, customer service, forecasting, and other, potentially expensive inefficiencies.
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In 1988, Gulistan Carpet, one of America’s leading carpet producers, implemented a custom enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to understand its business planning issues. But management soon realized this was not enough, and wanted to find a way to link this information with actual plant floor production operations at its three main plants. For a solution, it turned to Adexa, Inc.
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Executives in the life sciences industry work under tremendous competitive pressures. At the same time, they must meet regulatory guidelines and ensure that product safety remains a priority. Information must be meticulously tracked through all phases of a production cycle, which can slow production significantly. That’s why solutions for the industry must help streamline and simplify the regulatory compliance process.
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E-mail is more important to companies than ever, since sensitive information is e-mailed both inside and outside the organization. However, growth in overall e-mail volume, driven by more sophisticated spamming attacks, as well the need to ensure content is suitable for purpose, means that we now must reconsider how we view e-mail management within the organization.
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Utilities have always held information about their assets, but traditionally this has been held in different parts of the business and not integrated into single coherent systems. Good asset management is increasingly about being able to feed information from business processes across the company into an asset management system, and using information from that system for financial and operational improvement.
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IT management and governance systems have entered the mainstream, joining enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, human resources, and e-mail as part of the standard enterprise applications landscape. This has led to fundamental changes for leading chief information officers: their first consideration is now to make sure their own organization is systemically supported before systemically improving their customers’ organizations.
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Conventional enterprise resource planning (ERP) falls short in a few areas: competitive pressures are making it clear that business is still in need of more effective solutions. ERP II, however, delivers on the original concept of ERP. No longer is corporate information isolated in departmental silos, but it is housed with all corporate information, used to benefit the entire organization.
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When telecom operators interconect to send or receive different types of traffic, call detail records (CDRs) are generated at both ends. These CDRs need to be reconciled periodically to find errors, if any. While there are industry standards for resolving these errors, comprehensive reconciliation solutions do exist that focus on the issue from a billing perspective.
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Companies spend staggering investments to make and keep their offerings competitive. By providing a centralized location to store account history and detailed contact information for every buyer and automating what had been manual tasks, sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) have begun to positively impact sales efforts.
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Webcom Limited is a Canadian book manufacturer specializing in custom book production. Its heterogeneous IT infrastructure was resulting in discontinuous information flow, which impeded staffers’ abilities to collaborate throughout the steps of a book’s production. But when Webcom Limited migrated to an integrated Microsoft business management system, it saw a 33 percent improvement in the automation of job production workflow.
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PEMCO Corporation, a manufacturer of high quality mining products for multinational original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), realized increased on-time delivery performance and reduced customer service costs while preventing product shortages through just-in-time material availability. The improved quality of information and improved flow of product through the plant has even resulted in revamped employee morale and job satisfaction.
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The concept of getting business requirements right sounds straightforward. However, flawed requirements trigger 70 percent of project failures. The larger the number of stakeholder groups involved, and the more complex the processes, the more likely a project will fail. Success in large projects is not just about completeness, but also about getting complete requirements information early in the development process.
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Chief information officers keen to introduce service-oriented architecture (SOA) into their organization must deal with the many legacy applications that are potential roadblocks. To move to an SOA-enabled future, organizations have to service legacy applications, and evaluate which legacy application would give the best return on investment if modernized. The solution may be a process-oriented approach to legacy system transformation.
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Washington Information Network 2-1-1 (WIN 211), was the non-profit organization tasked with implementing an integrated call center solution in the State of Washington (US). WIN 211’s challenge was to define system requirements, and select a vendor that could interconnect eight call centers into a single, cohesive information service system. For a solution, it turned to UCN inContact.
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In order to support the requirements of voice deployments, next-generation networks must be capable of supporting a service equivalent to the existing public switched telephone network (PSTN), in terms of reliability. Furthermore, these networks must be capable of carrying voice services even under heavy load, while maintaining the integrity of the voice calls, under even the most extreme circumstances.
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The history of telecommunications management is rife with examples of good technology failing to meet business requirements. Historically, while business has needed management of service definitions, technology has focused on element management, leaving a gap between what is desired and what is possible. If operational expenses are to be lowered, this gap must be closed.
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With network operators facing eventual equipment obsolescence in their existing narrowband public switched telephone networks (PSTNs), the Multiservice Switching Forum (MSF) expects that end-to-end voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) solutions will necessarily replace PSTNs in the medium term. What are the primary issues that must be addressed to define a large-scale VoIP network capable of supporting full PSTN equivalence?
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As Internet and IP technologies are increasing service expectations, the number of resources available to create, deploy, and manage new services have reduced. The result is that expectations for new services are outpacing the ability to deliver them. We explore the limitations of traditional voice service architecture, and propose a new architectural solution to address these shortcomings.
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True multi-service, multi-vendor global networks are the future of the telecommunications industry. However, mazes of international standards and protocols can create barriers rather than solutions. For service providers and system suppliers alike, implementing standards for interoperability is far from simple. The MultiService Switching Forum (MSF) fills the void by developing implementation agreements that take standards from theory into practice.
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Widespread acceptance of the principles in the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is nearing a level that would indicate the communications industry is close to reaching a de facto convergence architecture. We look at similarities and differences between the MultiService Forum R2 (physical) architecture and the 3GPP R6 Core IMS functional architecture.
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Bandwidth managers can provide the basis of a large-scale solution for a quality of service (QoS) that can support public switched telephone network (PSTN)-grade services. A key aspect of the solution is the ability to be integrated with multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) traffic engineering capabilities, to provide a highly scalable, resilient, and rigorous solution for end-to-end quality of service.
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End-to-end performance monitoring on signaling and bearer links, and on inter-networking between service and transport provider domains, are the most complicated and necessary areas of a new management networks paradigm. The testability of next-generation networks (NGNs) and their components should thus be addressed in the context of the performance and fault management functional areas of the telecommunication management network (TMN).
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Given the types of overload scenarios encountered within traditional networks, similar traffic principles requiring overload management will be required within (NGNs). What, then, are the characteristics of overload protection within real-time communications servers? And what types of overload management methods are available for optimizing server performance?
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Network-level behaviors can impact the determinism of call admission control decisions for a particular bandwidth management deployment. However, different network routing and forwarding models can have different impacts when used in conjunction with the bandwidth manager. We examine these models, considering their ability to provide the deterministic admission control capabilities available within the public switched telephone network (PSTN).
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Imperfect product data can erode your gross margin, frustrate both your customers and your employees, and slow new sales opportunities. The proven safeguards are automated data cleansing, systematic management of data processes, and margin optimization. Real dollars can be reclaimed in the supply chain by making certain that every byte of product information is accurate and synchronized, internally and externally.
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The threat of spyware has risen to epidemic levels for many information technology professionals trying to protect their users and network. In response, many security vendors are creating anti-spyware software to seek out spyware and eradicate it from the enterprise network. Webroot's Spy Sweeper Enterprise is just such a product.
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In less than six months, RxAmerica was able to respond to unprecedented call volume—primarily from seniors seeking information on the US Medicare prescription drug program—by increasing their service representative population by more than 500 percent, and by opening 6 new call centers. The cornerstone of their solution: a hosted call routing platform.
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Anyone even peripherally exposed to business media that touch on enterprise application technology has seen the term service-oriented architecture (SOA) bandied about in advertisements and articles. Given the central role of SOA in information technology, it is important to get beyond a buzzword level understanding. There are three key concepts surrounding SOA: granularity, Web services, and change management.
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To comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), businesses need to be forthcoming to shareholders. Earned value management system (EVMS) is a set of best business processes and tools for enterprise project planning and control. Early warning signals and reliable information from an EVMS helps management ensure that material changes in the financial condition or operations of projects are communicated as required by SOX.
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Project-driven organizations face numerous challenges, including increasing competition, more demanding clients, and changing regulatory requirements. Many organizations also face internal challenges that range from dispersed employees and partners to disconnected business processes and disparate information systems. This paper explores the best practices that project-driven businesses should consider.
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Information workers routinely generate huge amounts of useful information in their documents. However, because this information is unstructured, it cannot be used by other applications. Smart documents tie an XML-based document definition together with a set of custom actions. Smart training centers can thus leverage XML-based documentation to expand information and minimize worker training costs.
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Read how a mid-sized hospital immediately found savings of $43,500 a year by implementing a secure employee scheduling and human resource information system payroll solution. It was a cautious beginning, with an initial roll-out of just four of the many available with emPath®'s Employee Self-Service (ESS) features, but there is the promise of more dramatic savings to come.
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Due to the changing regulatory environment and the complexity of business today, organizations are facing increased accountability. Security risks, however, can often be difficult to measure and even more difficult to understand by people outside of the department. The key to demonstrating improvement is to translate security information in to business terms. Organizations must align, manage, and measure security around business operations.
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Using aggregated dashboard views and establishing metrics can help IT audit and governance professionals and IT security professionals implement policies that keep secure networks operational. Such tools can distill information to its essence, offer decision support, allow problems to be identified and isolated faster, and permit greater accountability. Ultimately, they allow more efficient and cost effective processes.
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Enterprise software systems are critical elements of running a business. Unfortunately, they fall short when it comes to data access, analysis, and reporting. Business intelligence fills the gap. When looking at BI, start with a simple proposition: that everyone can do their job better if decisions are based on actual information rather than best guesses.
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Alltech, a multinational biotechnology company providing
natural solutions to the feed and food industries, found itself with a disjointed, IT infrastructure with overlapping accounting systems. Using a powerful dashboard, users can view information from sixty-three databases to manage the business more proactively.
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As much as 80 percent of day-to-day business activity is taken up by digitally-based messaging. Integrating telecommunications with your messaging environment is crucial. Second generation IPT leverages data networks, and increases productivity through voice application integration. It integrates directly with customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning systems, Lotus Notes, and Outlook, Word, and Excel, to digitally capture information for compliance and traceability.
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Deploying voice self-service (VSS) is undeniably attractive to enterprises because it improves the speed, consistency, and convenience of information sent to customers, and decreases costs. Knowledge bases play a key role in helping enterprises achieve greater return on investment because they link web- and speech-based self-services together. In particular the emergence of VoiceXML has truly shifted speech and IVR platform hosting options.
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A dashboard is a vital tool for monitoring the daily health of your organization. From a single interface, decision makers have access to key performance indicators (KPI)—actionable information that can be used to effectively guide and track business performance. Successful implementation of a dashboard is complex and requires a step-by-step process using a methodology that considers all aspects of the project life cycle.
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Enterprises must collaborate or they will surely stagnate. Guarded proprietary information has given way to collaborative approaches where information is shared both inside and outside the enterprise’s walls. To survive, an enterprise must be flexible enough to collaborate externally with suppliers and partners while fostering the same environment with its employers.
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The Expert Hardware Industry System provides critical information whenever you need it, in addition to full support in handling and controlling your business, easily and quickly. This will help you to substantially cut processing times, reduce errors and, as a consequence, make your processes more effective. All interrelated process are linked with the Expert Hardware System, which means that when a process is carried out, it automatically affects another.
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Safeway, the UK's fourth-largest supermarket, spends over £100 million (GBP) a year on their information technology (IT )operations. Five years ago, Safeway transferred its offshoring operations to Malta-based Crimsonwing. Since then, Crimsonwing has undertaken some 200 projects for Safeway, including a sales data warehouse, an intranet portal, and an integrated transport solution designed in conjunction with IBM.
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Global manufacturers want an integrated view of the shop floor. In response, manufacturing execution systems (MES) have emerged as a powerful tool for integrating plant-floor data with information provided by applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). MES can connect the world, and it has an exciting future when combined with promising technologies such as business process management (BPM) and service oriented architecture (SOA).
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Early adopters of radio frequency identification (RFID) are beginning to look at enterprise scale solution design and integration are emerging as key focus areas. Infosys has designed an optimal RFID architecture strategy based on lessons learnt from early adopters and Infosys experience in providing real time control and data acquisition solutions in the telecom and process control industries.
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Quality data in the supply chain is essential in when information is automated and shared with internal and external customers. Dirty data is a huge impediment to businesses. In this article, learn about the four critical success factors to clean data: 1- scope, 2- team, 3- process, and 4- technology.
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Persistent delivered web-based sales support and customer service solutions to a broadband data and VOIP provider. We helped our client rapidly build and deploy web front end systems for order entry, self-care, and customer care and also integrated these systems with their fulfillment, inventory, and billing systems using service oriented architecture (SOA). This resulted in improved end customer acquisition and satisfaction and improved time to market and significantly reduced total development costs.
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When raw materials providers, manufacturers, and retailers work together to calculate future order needs, they can all act on the best information available. Successful order forecast collaboration requires all members to share risks if forecasts vary, and to discuss issues as they arise. Accurate order forecasts drive sales increases, inventory decreases, and better decisions. With so many benefits across the entire demand chain, shouldn’t you look into order forecast collaboration with your partners?
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Business intelligence (BI) capabilities transform vast amounts of data into relevant information that organizations rely on to make decisions and manage performance. Most companies have some form of BI, and most are familiar with its benefits. However, in order to extract maximum advantage from BI initiatives, it is necessary to be aware of—and avoid—their seven “fatal flaws.”
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If you don’t have a data warehouse, you’re probably considering drafting a request for proposal (RFP) to screen vendors and ensure that your receive satisfactory information about the features of various hardware and software and their price. Writing an effective RFP that is well structured and includes different metrics will ensure that you receive the information you need and will make you look good.
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The notion of having disparate mediation systems in today’s service oriented telecommunications industry is no longer valid. The accurate and timely knowledge of customer information, such as usage patterns, preferences, spending habits and duration can provide competitive advantages to service providers. Learn about convergent mediation systems that can support multiple service types (voice, data, content) in this white paper.
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Companies invest in information technology (IT) because they believe it will maximize their performance. The more a company knows about its customers, markets, supply chains, and internal operations, the more effectively it can pursue growth and profitability while avoiding risk and regulatory exposure. Unifying disparate systems with business intelligence (BI) systems, however, is not enough. For companies to truly differentiate themselves, they need to transform BI into business performance management (BPM) systems to leverage information discovered by BI and use it externally.
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Companies typically manage their proposal generation efforts using word processing documents, e-mail, and spreadsheets. However, more efficient and effective ways now exist that enable companies to collaborate with all interested parties. Online collaboration with a knowledge-based application streamlines processes, improves quality, and saves time, eliminating error-prone manual processes and redundancies.
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Jabil Global Services, a subsidiary of Jabil Circuit provides repair and warranty solutions to companies in computers, communications, medical equipment. To meet the demand for next day and same day returns, it needed to replace its in-house operations management system with a scalable and robust system. Learn how it used Click Commerce’s reverse logistics and depot repair solutions to manage its advanced exchanges and warehouse fulfillment, and credit receiving processes.
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Tellabs is a $1.3 billion (US) corporation that designs, manufactures, markets, and services optical networking, broadband access and voice quality enhancement. Tellabs was faced with a high volume and high cost product returns process. Improper documentation, lengthy processing times, and insufficient returns documentation was affecting customer service and limiting profitability. It worked with Click Commerce to implement their product returns application. The solution provides an efficient and transparent process, which allowed the business to be realigned for significant savings and improved customer satisfaction. The savings include reducing in-transit inventory by $1.76 million (USD) per month and reducing spare parts stocking levels from $7.5million to $1.9 million (USD).
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Arrow Electronics, Inc., a leading distributor of electronic components and computer products, supports more than 600 suppliers and 150,000 OEM and commercial customers with 200 sales offices and 18 distribution centers in 41 countries. Employees at Arrow were using spreadsheets and manual processes which made it difficult to support its large original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners (HP, IBM, EMC, Sun) and 1,500 member reseller network. Arrow worked with Click Commerce to build and implement Information Support Services, a centralized, easy-to-use platform that creates a company-wide view for Arrow to manage multiple channels and business units. It also enables OEM and reseller partners to work together on customer solutions.
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Organizations are overwhelmed with how to begin implementing identity and access management (IAM)
solutions. They are scratching their heads and asking, "Where do I start?" Even after implementation, security and information protection must be continually improved while ensuring compliance with regulations. Auditors continue to ask: "Are the right controls in place?" "Are they effective?" Download this white paper to learn more about defining the steps necessary to understanding and deploying IAM, giving enterprises a roadmap to an effective IAM program.
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The Internet is having an identity crisis. Long regarded as a powerful tool for cost reduction and service enhancement, the Internet is falling short of its promise because of the real and perceived threat of identity theft. Financial losses and insurance costs are mounting, as organizations struggle to protect their information perimeters and improve the strength of their authentication systems to ensure that the authorized user is present during the sign-in process. The widespread use and misuse of passwords as authentication tokens is generally cited as a cause of the accelerating erosion of user confidence and the increasing incidence of identity theft. It is generally agreed that passwords are not enough. Much has been lost, however, in the race toward person-present authentication systems. While the application of passwords is fraught with risk, the introduction of complex authentication infrastructures and cumbersome end user technology has eroded usability and increased the cost of security dramatically. This paper describes a new authentication approach that retains the simplicity and low cost of passwords, while gracefully introducing as much person-present assurance as is required by the application.
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Ignoring the warning signs of missing metadata? Gramm-Bliley-Leach, Sarbanes Oxley (also known as “SOX” and “Sarbox”) and the Patriot Act are forerunners of the regulatory trend that has elevated the need for metadata.
Increasing consumer demand for privacy and fallout from corporate accounting scandals are spurring regulatory agencies to putting better teeth into regulations; compliance increasingly depends on an ability to “prove it”—not just by certifying content, but also by demonstrating the process by which the information was developed and managed—and metadata is the key to traceability.
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Unwanted pop-up ads are intrusive Internet advertisements that are displayed when you access web pages. This white paper provides information about different type of pop-up ads, losses they cause, how they work, and suggests key features that a good pop-up ad filter software should have.
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Decison support systems range from simple electronic filing cabinets to complex data intensive and analytically sophisticated executive information systems. This primer provides an overview with real case studies.
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Start with a simple proposition - that everyone in your company can do their job better if they make decisions based on actual information rather than best guesses or how-we-did-it-last-year.
What if you could have everything that ERP, CRM and now BI vendors have promised you? Immediate access to all your data, with digital dashboards that show you the Key Performance Indicators that you need to run your business.
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To store its wealth of transactional data, Trail Operations employs an ERP solution comprised of JDEdwards, Process Data Historian (PDH) and EtQ systems. To ensure proactive rather than reactive business decisions, it is imperative that management at Trail Operations have reliable and timely access to this data. While their ERP solution met all of management’s data capture requirements, its cumbersome reporting capabilities proved inhibitive to providing the key performance indicator (KPI) information necessary for quickly recognizing trends and driving improvements.
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A growing company with a challenging payroll environment
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Corporate governance concerns, exacerbated by a weak global economy, have driven shareholder value to drop sharply in recent years. Boards of directors have intensified their pressure on CEOs to create execution-centric organizations and restore shareholders’ and analysts’ confidence. In this era, CEOs are looking to their information technology organization (ITO) to strategically and efficiently deploy technology solutions that enable business process innovation, resulting in world-class products and services on planned costs and release dates. Find out how your organization can develop skilled IT architects deliver total business solutions.
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In today’s hyper-competitive markets, the process manufacturer/distributor faces extremely challenging opportunities that require re-visiting the once-thought basics in their industry. Global competition, with information technology riding on a backbone of totally new communications infrastructure can return great rewards for the early adoptors, users, and masters. We will explore the set of economic drivers specific to process manufacturing/distribution and how important that they be satisfied for an appropriately fitting ERP solution. We are not discussing common process/discrete ERP features or functionalities, only the major ones needed for process manufacturer and distributors.
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The pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive, regulated, and in a permanent state of change. Customers demand instant attention, while suppliers require comprehensive leading edge services with regard to their products. Regulatory authorities require that the industry keep up to date with regulations, following them to the letter. Competitors are always inventing new ways to gain market share, while e-business presents new opportunities and challenges. All the while the pressure to reduce prices and to shorten order cycles is high. Pharmaceutical wholesalers comprise the lifeline within the pharmaceutical industry, providing continuity of supply and facilities for storage. They also offer a range of supporting services, such as information technology systems and product withdrawal notifications, which form an essential part of the total healthcare package. These companies and institutions all operate in an environment where speed and efficiency may mean the difference between life and death. However, the industry has a number of specific requirements that are critical for achieving success in the distribution sector.
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When your company’s ERP is implemented and running smooth (or maybe not) it’s now time to give your c-level management a bird’s eye view of how their company is running. C-managers are often not at ease with even the simplest use of computers. But in this information age those that don’t USE and LEARN from their corporate data put themselves, and worse, their company’s livelihood at risk because they may not know the pulse or health of their business.
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The government of Mesa County, Colorado, had been using an in-house, nonintegrated HR and payroll solution that was slow in processing reports and required manual reconciliation of workforce data. The solution also lacked the sophistication needed to manage the government’s payroll and reporting demands. The organization recognized that a change was necessary to improve the workforce-related information that upper-level management had at its disposal.
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With 10 remote office locations spread across nine states, Amerisure was in need of a communications platform that would enable the company to enhance the distribution of information to employees. Employees located in satellite offices, with no direct access to the home office, can feel disconnected from corporate headquarters’ operations and activities. Amerisure needed to communicate to employees in a timely manner that would allow the flow of accurate, important information, whether that data be employee-specific, such as salary, job, or benefit information, or company news and updates. In addition to a centralized communication platform, the company wanted heightened management of its workforce through the use of business intelligence tools that would allow it to track trends and have improved monitoring capabilities for each location.
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With a focus on marketing, sales, and distribution of the company’s interactive entertainment products, Nintendo of America’s 180 “managers of image” market Nintendo’s games throughout the United States and parts of Canada. Because these managers spend the bulk of their time visiting retail operations to successfully brand the Nintendo product, the company was searching for a way to communicate detailed information to them, as well as to the rest of the company’s workforce. Nintendo also wanted to simplify the benefits enrollment process for employees and allow them to change their personal data on their own and at their convenience, without contacting the HR department.
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Sainsbury’s Supermarkets has several ongoing collaboration programs with suppliers,having recognized early on that supply chain optimization benefits the end consumer by
ensuring the right product on the shelf at the right time and lowest cost. The UK grocer had already been sharing performance information along with several other forms of supply chain data with suppliers for several years, but found that suppliers had difficulty dealing with performance data that was buried in the mass of information being presented. In addition, suppliers had no formal channel for responding to, or improving, any performance issues that were identified.
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This workbook is designed to help firms that are in the process of investigating their need for more advanced business management and accounting software. Companies have a wide variety of potential software and system needs based on their size and industry. Determining exactly where a company stands in terms of needs and current technology will be necessary for deciding the exact approach it should take toward upgrading. This document has two types of information designed to make this process easier: interactive self-assessment tools and educational text based on IDC research covering the small and medium business (SMB) and enterprise applications markets.
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thawte Technologies is a Certification Authority (CA) which issues SSL Web Server Certificates to organizations and individuals worldwide. thawte verifies that the company ordering the certificate is a registered organization and that the person in the company who ordered the certificate is authorized to do so. thawte also checks that the company in question owns the relevant domain. thawte digital certificates interoperate smoothly with Apache and the latest software from Microsoft and Netscape, so you can rest assured that you purchase of a thawte digital certificate will give your customers confidence in your system and integrity—they will feel secure about transacting on-line. Information is a critical asset to your business. To ensure the integrity and safety of your information, it is important to identify with whom you are dealing and the data you are receiving is trustworthy.
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In this guide you will find out how to test, purchase, install, and use a thawte Digital Certificate on your Microsoft Internet Information Services (MS IIS) web server. Throughout, best practices for set-up are highlighted to help you ensure efficient ongoing management of your encryption keys and digital certificates. We will also touch on the role of thawte as a trusted third party and how using a thawte digital certificate can benefit your business by addressing unique on-line security issues to build customer confidence.
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Continuous process simplification of inherently complex enterprise applications should be the primary goal. Apptricity believes that the primary focus for business-
technology managers should be on achieving a rapid application integration and deployment to guarantee measurable return on investment (ROI). Business technology and business managers should not have to constantly recalibrate solution delivery objectives or re-scope project deliverables with reduced functionality because of finger pointing or other rationalized justifications. How can ROI be assured and achieved more rapidly? What are the major decisions faced by organizations relative to their information technology (IT) strategy, and how does this impact ROI? And why would a company choose an (application suite) versus extending in-house legacy systems?
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Learn how Altman Lighting Inc., a family-owned and operated international manufacturer of architectural and theater lighting fixtures overcame isolated customer information and business records by replacing their paper-based order processing system. Read how they improved productivity, centralized data, and gained real-time access to customer information and critical business information.
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Companies in virtually every industry today are striving to meet the ever-increasing demands of their customers. The issues of innovation, price, quality, and delivery have never been greater. Customers want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. To give customers what they truly want, manufacturers need to have a deeper understanding of the detailed attributes of the products that meet customer needs. Winning companies, those who will prosper now and well into the future, will need to manage the use of this knowledge with advanced information technology as their key competitive strategy.
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To keep pace in today's automotive industry, suppliers must be able to move information swiftly through and beyond their organizations. With manufacturing sites increasingly scattered across the globe, the ability to exchange information rapidly is key to staying in the competitive race. Learn about the growing need for interoperability and how to overcome its challenges.
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Today's cost conscious automotive environment requires that information technology (IT) projects be implemented rapidly, be delivered on time and on budget, and meet or exceed expected return on investment (ROI) projections. Learn how Cascade Engineering increased its efficiency and eliminated waste in virtually every aspect of its business, and saw cost savings of $500,000 per year as a result of business process improvement.
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This UltiPro Workforce Management technology white paper offers an overview of UltiPro’s technical architecture, and is primarily intended for information technology executives and professionals who want to better understand UltiPro’s technology advantages. After reading this white paper, the reader should have a clear understanding of the modular design and underlying technology of the UltiPro Workforce Management solution and the key benefits to the information technology (IT) organization.
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SalesFirst is the sales force and marketing automation component of the CustomerFirst Enterprise Suite. SalesFirst provides functionality that manages the marketing and sales process within your organization. It also allows you to track information about your prospects and gives a complete 360-degree view of each potential and existing client.
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The new reality for manufacturing CIOs is that budgets are far less than what they used to be and the ability to provide business intelligence to front line users in a simple and workable format is a new measure of information technology (IT) performance.
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Computers were meant to simplify common, tedious tasks. Patching multiple systems together is a band-aid approach to the critical issue of resource management. Should your limited information technology (IT) staff be maintaining a series of interfaces, over several servers and applications? Or should they focus first on delivering quality information to those who need it most? What if a system could deliver world class functionality, be simple to maintain, yet still be affordable and robust enough for the most demanding environments?
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Product lifecycle management (PLM) enables companies to manage all information regarding a product, from the initial design and engineering through to manufacturing, sourcing, support, and run down. Traditionally, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have successfully managed manufacturing-related information, but have at best, limited integration to the engineering systems such as product data management (PDM). Learn how the Vantage manufacturing solution offers a complete end-to-end solution that manages all aspects of a product's life.
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An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is your information backbone, reaching into all areas of your business and value chain. That’s why replacing it can open unlimited business opportunities. The cornerstone of this effort is finding the right partner. And since your long-term business strategy will shape your selection, it’s critical that your ERP provider be part of your vision.
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To ensure the integrity of the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation, the gaming authority is held accountable to the Native American Tribal Government. The gaming authority is required to provide detailed reports to its governing bodies regarding employee ethnicity and budgets. This information ensures that the gaming authority is acting in accordance with tribal regulations. Payroll processing and benefit tracking in this casino environment are fraught with many complexities. As a hospitality-based company, most of Tohono O’odham’s employees receive tips that need to be recognized as income. The company treats accruals and benefits in a unique fashion as it allows employees to carry over benefits from year to year and even receive accruals for accruals.
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When Stryker Corporation acquired Howmedica, it had only one year to integrate the new business and completely replace its information technology (IT) infrastructure. Learn how Stryker improved its rapid time to benefit, global capabilities, lowered cost of ownership, and achieved standardized business processes to provide world class service.
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In the mid-1990s Heinz was managing their product specifications, formulas, and quality information in the same manner as most companies. Their product information was stored in a variety of disparate systems, spreadsheets, text documents, and paper forms. Learn how it was able to continually leverage product information across the entire life cycle.
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Stockgroup includes accountability, integrity and open communication, within its set of core values, to achieve its objectives of being a financially strong and profitable business. That's why when it came time to replacing its CRM system to better manage accounts, schedules, sales forecasting, and marketing, Stockgroup selected Maximizer Enterprise as its CRM solution of choice - an easier to use system with a lower TCO.
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Before purchasing a complete CRM solution, StemCell's, sales and marketing managers met with the sales team and support staff to discuss their requirements and to gain insight into what information each department needed, how they wanted to work, and how their working styles impacted each others departments.
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Cash Converters was utilizing an earlier version of Maximizer to track contact details, basic phone notes and other communications. With its small team of sales, marketing, accounting and operations managers that managed the day-to-day operations of the business and its franchisees, the team began working out of the office more and more often. To assist them with this, they needed a solution that worked seamlessly with their business structure and processes, allowing them to work with updated information whether they were working at the office, at home or on the road.
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Learn how AVCOM Technologies, a provider of comprehensive information technology (IT) products and suites to high-growth middle market companies, integrated its business processes with Microsoft .NET Framework and "e by Epicor" suite.
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