Having experienced rapid growth, HDFC Standard Life (HDFCSL) needed to scale up learning and development to accommodate the rush of new hires and reach all employees. HDFCSL launched a companywide learning management program based on the SumTotal Learning Management solution that delivers, tracks, and analyzes the progress of blended online and instructor-based training, raising employee participation to 100% within 5 months.
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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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Unencrypted communication between users’ workstations and the backend SAP servers is a significant vulnerability to your SAP environment. This can put the confidential data inside your SAP systems and your entire business activity at risk—and have a negative impact on your customers. Find out how to reduce business risks and improve audit results through encrypted communication and two-factor user authentication for SAP.
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Fair Isaac Corporation’s FICO scores—the global industry standard for objective, profitable risk assessment—are the most widely used consumer credit scores in the world. Fair Isaac was using a simple in-house license manager to protect new installations of the FICO score, but as new implementations spread around the world, the company decided it needed a new system to manage its licenses. Learn about its chosen solution.
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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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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), designed to quickly stimulate economic recovery in the US, also marks the start of a new era in the regulation, oversight, and accountability of the use of public funds. Agencies at all government levels will be challenged to maintain focus on programs that achieve long-term results—while ensuring they adhere to the complex requirements for stimulus funds. Learn more.
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Given the dramatic events in the capital markets, everyone is wondering what will happen next—and what the implications are for the wider economy. Learn about the crisis both in the capital markets and the wider economy; explore likely future economic scenarios and the challenges facing companies outside the financial sector—and discover the actions your company should take in order to respond to these challenges.
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As financial institutions look to the future, there’s bound to be a careful reappraisal of the role and responsibilities of risk management. Were the tools available to risk managers fit for purpose? Was the approach to risk management appropriate? Examine lessons that have been learned from the current financial crisis, and get 10 tips to help you address weaknesses in risk identification, assessment, and management.
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One company executive has a growing influence in today’s boardroom—the chief financial officer (CFO). And the role of the finance organizations that these CFOs lead is expanding as well. Examine the changing role of the finance organization in today’s business environment, learn how your CFO can take on a more prominent role in defining company strategy, and find out how you can develop a best-run finance organization.
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Electronic connections with corporate customers determine much of a bank’s competitive differentiation and cost structure. But many banks are held back by outdated file transfer systems, which make it difficult to reliably connect to clients and rapidly deliver new services. Learn how using a managed file transfer platform can help banks simplify data transfers, lower costs, and deliver compelling services to customers.
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Today’s economic environment requires you to evaluate whether your current financial institution is in it for the long haul and can offer the full breadth of services that you may need. Many of these vital services can be delivered from one source—your bank. Your primary concern in selecting a financial services institution should be the security of your assets and data. Find out what to look for, and what to avoid.
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Most financial offices run at least three separate industry-specific software packages—often from different vendors. The problem with having all of these different solutions is that most of them require their own databases and do not integrate very well with each other. Document management systems (DMSs) are becoming popular with financial advisors, as they help organize the office and provide risk management. Learn more.
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Of the many industries that are attempting to go paperless, the insurance industry has been on the leading edge of a completely digital environment. For companies in insurance industries, as well as other types of organizations looking to digitize their offices, there are a number of implications. Learn about the realities of a paperless office environment, and how your company can take steps to become paperless.
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Swiss financial services company Global Refund needed to replace its antiquated customer relationship management (CRM) system. To find a mobile-enabled, user-friendly solution that could handle the company’s 15 million yearly transactions, Global Refund turned to TEC. Learn how TEC helped Global Refund turn its long-list of 40 vendors into a short-list of four, and shave two months off the selection process.
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Chief financial officers (CFOs) are under greater pressure, scrutiny, and accountability at companies large and small. An ideal CFO is a steward of decision-support information, cost controller, and more. With data supplied by some of the world’s most successful CFOs, get insight into what CFO responsibilities should be today to achieve extraordinary results, and how they should change to meet future challenges.
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Many chief financial officers (CFOs) have started to take on new strategic roles. Their goals are to enforce stricter controls to ensure legal and regulatory compliance, offer strategic insights into the internal and external business environment, and connect the business strategy with daily operations through performance tracking. Learn more about the changing role of the CFO in today’s finance organization.
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Investment banks, hard-hit by the subprime meltdown and credit crunch, are grappling with a dramatically different deal landscape, all while coping with massive write-downs, staff cuts and budget cuts. Learn how client-centric strategies and customer relationship management (CRM) tools are helping banks maximize the value and loyalty of their client bases, take advantage of new opportunities, and do more with less.
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In the wake of the subprime meltdown, many financial services firms are coping with huge write-downs and high market volatility by cutting staff and budgets. But even in uncertain times, smart financial firms can find ways to grow. Learn how you can use customer-centric strategies and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to maximize the value and loyalty of your client base and gain insight into new opportunities.
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This white paper highlights the key challenges facing the financial services industry, and discusses how the 2007 Microsoft® Office system can help financial institutions affect business performance with innovative and powerful enterprise capabilities that extend far beyond improving personal productivity.
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With its recent rapid growth, Bank of Choice found that paper-based loan approval processes were standing in the way of providing the fastest and most effective customer service. The bank decided to adopt a document management system (DMS) based on software from a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner. Find out how the bank improved customer service, reduced the costs associated with meeting regulatory compliance, and more.
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The insurance industry’s turn from an underwriting-oriented vision to a customer-centric view has been painfully slow. Success isn’t just a matter of delivering superior products and services, but of incorporating customer insight into enterprise strategy on an ongoing basis. Learn how you can use your customer segment data for customer analytics that can help you determine which segments to grow and which to retain.
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The payment card industry (PCI) Data Security Standard establishes common processes and precautions for handling credit card data. Although achieving PCI compliance can seem daunting, the requirements represent security best practices that should be observed by any organization with IT systems and data to protect. Learn about network scanning and security assessment solutions that can help you manage PCI compliance.
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Designed to improve consumer financial services, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) includes security provisions for protecting confidential electronic financial information. For the approximately 9,500 financial institutions affected, compliance can be complex and process-intensive. Learn about network security auditing and vulnerability management solutions that can make GLBA compliance faster and more cost-effective.
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Recruiting IT talent to insurance companies has never been easy—but today, demographic pressures make the task of IT staffing even harder, as IT professionals retire and fewer new graduates become available to fill the positions. IT outsourcing may not offer the help you seek. To make sure your company can survive and prosper, learn how to find ways to hire qualified IT staff, and keep the IT staff you already have.
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Recent EquaTerra market research finds a consensus among western business leaders that increased globalization is inevitable—and that it will generally be beneficial. Quickly and efficiently leveraging opportunities created by globalization is the best way to avoid being overwhelmed by its challenges. Learn how to compare buyer and service provider data and get insight into developing a responsive global strategy.
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For many companies, the second largest cost after people is facilities. Solutions have evolved from traditional out-tasking and outsourcing to the more recent strategy of integrating facilities management and real estate under a single service provider. But first, understand marketplace realities: provider capabilities don’t always line up with buyer expectations. Learn about the challenges of integrating these services.
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Chief financial officers (CFOs) and procurement directors want to speed up and simplify the outsourcing provider selection process, to reduce costs and gain benefits sooner. Here are key issues you should consider when fast-tracking the process of scoping and negotiating a sourcing transaction. Collaboration and interaction are key to shortening the process while still achieving your end goal. Find out more.
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Indiana, US-based Old National Bancorp owns multiple financial services operations and offers a range of services. With over 3,000 employees, the bank needed a comprehensive policy-based e-mail retention plan to address compliance, legal discovery, and the exponential growth of message stores. Learn how an e-mail retention solution helped the bank meet compliance, scalability, and information life cycle management needs.
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Financial services companies need the right solutions to manage the delivery of trading applications. But this challenge grows ever more complex, with regulatory initiatives forcing trading services to provide market access in a timely manner. Learn the issues involved in effectively managing the delivery of electronic trading applications and order management systems—and how to ensure consistent delivery for end users.
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St. George Bank is Australia’s fifth largest bank, with over 8,500 employees. Along with teaching its channels about the bank’s products, St. George must ensure its partners comply with Australian financial regulations. To replace a cumbersome paper-based system used to train its distribution channels, the bank installed SumTotal learning management system (LMS). Find out how the bank benefited from the LMS solution.
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Genius Project4Domino and Microsoft Project are both project management tools, and though their range of features is different, they are also complementary. Using the solutions together can bring a well-rounded project management solution to companies of all sizes. Learn how they can be used to ensure consistency and eliminate downtime, so your long-term strategic project plans are a success.
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As the banking industry goes global, the need to be available 24/7, increased demands for customer service, and reduced budgets have introduced new pressures to small to medium banking firms. And with the ongoing challenges of regulatory compliance, firms need financial services software that can reduce the risk of noncompliance while addressing the scale of their operations. Find out how an integrated solution can help.
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An online American bank, providing various financial services, needed to replace its legacy script-driven batch job processes with a job scheduling solution that could handle the bank’s growth. The bank’s IT team, however, faced two major hurdles affecting growth: both batch job processes and script-writing were manual and inefficient. A job management solution helped the bank achieve new levels of growth. Learn 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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Data security breaches are a common occurrence in business. As such, today’s business climate needs to find better ways to collaborate—without compromising sensitive information. Documents can be kept more secure through best-practice, persistent security strategies that provide end-to-end protection beyond the firewall. By deploying such a strategy, you can securely accelerate business and gain competitive advantage.
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Inventory has been—and continues to be—the lifeblood of the distribution marketplace. While many companies are slow to adopt new strategies and technologies, a growing number of distributors are leveraging inventory practices to improve key metrics like customer retention, gross margins, and inventory turns. Read these research survey findings to find out how you can make better inventory management technology decisions.
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In today’s increasingly competitive global economy, manufacturers must find ways to improve quality while maintaining compliance with government and industry mandates. But in the search for a suitable enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, many are often left with empty promises. Discover why key capabilities such as traceability are vital in an ERP solution—especially for high-precision manufacturers.
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When it comes to the business challenges of the distribution industry, one solution does not fit all. Packaged with smart functionality to address key business issues, Infor’s products have successfully fulfilled the needs of distributors worldwide. Learn how its enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) solutions have helped companies improve market position, streamline business processes, and more.
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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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Migration can be risky and expensive if handled by inexperienced developers. Seemingly small things can lead to bigger issues and cause performance problems. Hence, the services of a professional migration service provider who has executed similar projects is recommended. Learn about the different ways you can completely migrate from Windows to UNIX and Linux, so that you can make an intelligent, informed decision.
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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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While the growing trend among companies today is to implement stronger password policies to increase network security, it seems that many still struggle with finding the most cost-effective solution. Read about what a recent survey of over 600 IT professionals discovered about password policies, and find out why implementing a low-risk, cost-effective, and secure password management solution is just what you need.
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Companies looking to expand their facilities and strategize their way into the marketplace often focus most of their efforts on bottom line results. During the process, they factor in infrastructure costs but often pay little attention on how to control them. Find out how a Web-enabled solution that puts infrastructure management sharply in focus can help you easily access distributed information while helping curb costs.
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As with any project, implementing a new content management system (CMS) for your web site must start with a set of ideas outlining the types of services, capabilities, and desired outcomes you wish to have. Choosing the right Web CMS will undoubtedly take some time, but with the proper guidance—and this handy system pocket guide—you’ll be on your way to a successful implementation and a number of new opportunities.
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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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As a fast-growing company, you have the same objectives as any business. But you’re probably finding it challenging to gain the control you need to achieve these goals without sacrificing your IT budget. And when you try to achieve control, it’s often at the risk of slowing down your business. Find out how having enterprise-wide visibility of your business processes and activities can put you back in the driver’s seat.
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Compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is mandatory. As such, businesses must think seriously about their data storage security and the day-to-day encryption management of their customer data. As a merchant or credit card processor, will you be ready when the auditors come knocking? Learn more about the foolproof way that many businesses are passing PCI DSS audits.
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Enterprises are becoming increasingly aware of their fiduciary duty and legal obligation to protect confidential and personal information. As such their IT departments must find a way to effectively secure storage tiers from unauthorized access and viewing. Discover why today’s storage security technology with integrated encryption processing is the type of solution that many IT professionals are turning to.
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This report identifies the major IT issues faced by small to midsized businesses (SMBs), including information silos, lack of IT staff, and outdated business applications. Because they lack the right information to meet customer expectations, SMBs have difficulty reacting quickly to fast-changing market dynamics and growing their revenue. Find out how the elimination of information silos can create a more consistent effective customer experience.
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Industry research shows that one of the most important challenges facing supply chain professionals today is supply chain visibility. As companies scramble to adopt a way to gaining better visibility into their supply chain, they quickly realize that it’s not as simple as it seems. While achieving the right type of visibility is the first step, leveraging it to take quick and effective action is the key to its success.
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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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Years ago, businesses primarily focused on how to compile valuable information that could be shared within the organization. But today’s regulatory requirements have changed all that. By adhering to several fundamental guidelines, organizations can improve data accessibility, and at the same time create a proactive e-discovery environment. Find out why establishing content management principles is critical to your success.
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Today, financial services firms are increasingly focusing on organic growth—forcing contact centers to drive cross-selling efforts as well as strengthen customer relationships. But in order to contribute to profitable growth, they must be able to quickly identify and address customers in a personalized fashion and present offers that are highly relevant. Discover how a customer interaction optimization solution can help.
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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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For Dillard’s Inc., copying thousands of documents a day was just part of the routine. It soon came to realize, however, that this practice was not only wasteful, but costly too. To manage its documents more efficiently, the company turned to Xerox’s Document Centre multifunction system and DocuShare software. Since installing the new system, Dillard’s has reduced its copying costs from $1.54 (USD) per print to 28 cents.
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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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With the globalization of business, the rise of virtual offices, and an increase in traveling employees, travel and entertainment (T&E) spend is ever increasing. While business travel is considered a vital function and a cost of doing business, it’s not always seen as a category of spend that can be controlled and reduced. To efficiently manage T&E expenses, the procurement department must be involved. Find out why.
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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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To retain the integrity and availability of your key operational data, your server infrastructure must provide effective data backup and recovery. When used with a storage area network (SAN), a data protection manager (DPM) can help increase your storage space, reduce time needed to create backup, and allow for quick recovery of data when disaster strikes. Learn more about this scalable and cost-effective solution.
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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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Earlier-generation spam systems all share a common weakness—they rely heavily on analyzing content that can easily be manipulated by spammers. As such, state-of-the-art antispam systems must go beyond content examination by analyzing messages in the full context in which they are sent. Find out how using a multilayer defense approach can help you successfully eliminate spam and blended threats in your enterprise.
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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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It’s almost a certainty that every company will, at some time or other, face a significant incident. As such, many experts are turning to enterprise incident management. It empowers professionals from a variety of fields to work together to solve problems in a coordinated, disciplined manner so that budgets can be justified and progress can be made quickly. Learn how incident management can benefit your business.
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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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Just when malware design seemed to have reached a plateau, new and more complex attack techniques have now emerged. For a while, security controls designed to manage spam, viruses, and malware were working, but as a result of this success, the threats they protected against were forced to change. Learn about today’s key security trends and how you can fight against the sophisticated new generation of Internet threats.
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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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Customer relationship management (CRM) software can work as a strategic business initiative to help companies accelerate sales while enabling staff to satisfy every customer. But your software is only as good as your business processes, which are good only if employees adhere to them. Monitor your team’s performance with four crucial steps—for a successful CRM implementation, and a successful and growing business.
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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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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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For years, manufacturers have been driven by sales forecasts and the need to maximize production efficiency at every level of operation. But in order to be successful, manufacturers must look toward adopting a lean mentality. While lean techniques are more easily applied to some manufacturing styles than others, new software tools are now able to deliver the benefits of lean to both high-mix and low-volume operations.
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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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In the face of shrinking budgets and increasing demands, public sector agencies must transform themselves into providers of value-added services. By developing strategic human capital management (HCM) operations, they can align and engage every employee in the pursuit of organizational mission delivery. The most cost-effective approach to this challenge is through the integration of a comprehensive HCM solution.
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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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As supply chains continue to grow in size and complexity, companies are focusing more of their energies on managing supply chain risk. While the topic is gaining prominence in boardrooms, many companies do not yet fully comprehend the risks they face. But understanding risk is the first step to managing it—and using the right IT tools can help. Learn what steps you can take to better address your supply chain risks.
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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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As an international leader, the American Management Association (AMA) was focused on maximizing the advantages of instructor-led training, while minimizing its disadvantages. Before adding a blended learning offering to its core business, AMA needed to define its strategic targets, and turned to Eedo Knowledgeware for help. Since launching its blended learning offering, AMA has greatly increased value to its customers.
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Lufthansa, one of the world’s leading airlines, wanted to improve the way it trained its Miles & More loyalty program customer service staff. Traditionally, training was a five-day, classroom-based workshop, but the company now wanted more flexibility in its training approach. By moving to a blended learning content management system (LCMS), Lufthansa experienced a 65 percent savings on course development costs.
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The reasons most enterprises upgrade to an IP PBX system range from wanting to replace outdated equipment, to saving money, to adding needed functionality, to keeping up with growth. To evaluate competing offers from both established and new vendors, you need to learn about the market, background information, technology, standards, and the features and services that are critical and important to enterprises. Learn more.
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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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To understand the meaning and value of dynamic content, you must first look at the various approaches to e-learning. Traditional e-learning hard-bakes content into static material, causing updates to become a very lengthy process. Dynamic content strategies, however, delivered through evolving learning content management (LCM) technologies, provide efficient, error-free content revision. Find out how LCM can benefit you.
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Euromadi was looking to automate its business processes and increase effectiveness. With hundreds of suppliers all over the world, it needed a system that could help manage the relationships of more than 220 associate companies. By integrating business process management (BPM) with an enterprise content management (ECM) system, Euromadi has increased productivity and reduced data input and maintenance by 30 percent.
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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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Customer relationship management (CRM) is being adopted by businesses worldwide. But the key question for many executives as they create their CRM strategy: how can they gain strategic advantage if their competitors are implementing these same CRM systems? The answer: through integration. Find out how leveraging your existing information assets can turn CRM from a tactical project into a key strategic initiative.
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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 world of business is constantly evolving, often making it difficult for midsize businesses to keep track of their leads and contacts. While larger companies have benefited from increased efficiency with sales automation (SA) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, midsized enterprises haven’t been as fortunate—until now. Learn about their challenges and discover how SA and CRM software have helped.
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When it comes to US Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, safe change actions are critical. But what’s the best approach for file integrity monitoring and change detection? While there are many solutions on the market, continuous file integrity monitoring (CFIM) is winning over the competition worldwide. Find out how CFIM can handle your operational control monitoring requirements.
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If the auditors came knocking, would you be prepared? When they do come, you’ll need to be ready to answer some tough questions regarding your change management processes. Implementing and assessing change management controls for Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance in the US can be a very expensive and time consuming process. Find out how you can reduce the SOX burden by improving the way you manage your change processes.
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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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Delivering full-service home care services to over 1.5 million people in the US was challenging enough for Apria Healthcare. Added to that was the need to meet government and industry regulations and maintain the highest standards of skills and knowledge. To overcome these challenges, Apria implemented a learning content management system (LCMS) that has helped the company deliver the rapid training it was looking for.
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Kadaster, a national mapping and cadaster agency, was looking for an improved method for training its staff of 2,600. The company realized that effective training would be critical to its success, so it turned to a blended e-learning solution that would allow easy interaction with its current systems. With over 1,200 staff already using the new system, Kadaster is well on its way to reaching its training objectives.
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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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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) can benefit from the expansive use of IT just as much as their larger counterparts. And in many cases they have to, because of their interactions not only with remote users, but with suppliers and customers as well. To this end, an SMB’s IT infrastructure needs to be resilient and secure. To ensure end-to-end care of data assets, businesses need to adopt the right strategy. Find out how.
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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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Aon Corporation’s business is part of a highly regulated industry that maintains strict licensing requirements. With these constantly changing requirements, the company realized its outdated procedures and processes were no longer adequate and that a learning management system (LMS) was what it needed. The company turned to Cornerstone OnDemand for help, and since adopting LMS, Aon has achieved 100 percent compliance.
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While today’s regulatory environment poses significant challenges to businesses, it should be looked at as an opportunity—one that turns compliance efforts into capital gains. You can accomplish this with an internal audit of your change management policies. This checklist will help your business prepare for a high-level process audit while providing tools your IT managers can use for maximum results.
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The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) was created by credit card companies to protect cardholder data, ensuring that merchants and service providers maintain the highest degree of information security. However, many retailers are still questioning its effectiveness and necessity in light of the high cost of compliance. Read this white paper to find out what this cost really means for your organization.
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While most organizations have some integrated sales and marketing (ISM) elements in place, few have adopted a comprehensive approach. To achieve this, they must identify an ideal goal, establish a supply chain strategy, and then work methodically toward that objective. While the appropriate path to achieve ISM differs from company to company, there are a few key steps that can help simplify the process.
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The blade server market is one of many fast growing in the IT industry, helping large businesses resolve issues with power, cooling, and space constraints in their datacenters. But what about the mid-market customer whose needs are very different? Hewlett Packard (HP) addresses these needs with the launch of its new HP BladeSystem c3000—a complete blade server and storage solution designed with the mid-market in mind.
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As businesses become increasingly dependent on technology, service quality becomes more important. With so much riding on IT’s performance, a new service-centric model has emerged: service lifecycle management (SLcM). Based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles, SLcM provides a framework that enables organizations to optimize business outcomes and facilitate continual service improvement.
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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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Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) is a popular tool for the Windows platform that offers essential version control features and helps promote team collaboration. However, while it performs certain functions well, it’s not optimized for remote access, lacks many critical security features, and suffers from stability problems. Find out why many developers are now switching from VSS to SourceAnywhere Standalone.
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When implementing customer relationship management (CRM), organizations often lose sight of their customers and focus on efficiency gains instead of looking at the bigger picture from a customer perspective. But organizations that can build a business-centric system flexible enough to quickly respond to changing customer needs will have a sustainable competitive advantage and enjoy profitable growth for years to come.
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A business phone system is only as effective as its implementation. Despite its streamlined architecture, installing a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephone system can present some challenges. The key to a successful rollout is a well-planned, phased approach. Following these 10 steps can help you lay the foundation for a system overhaul as well as streamline your business communications for many years to come.
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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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What’s the difference between the right enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and the wrong one? What it’ll do to your bottom line. Knowing which questions to ask when researching your options, however, can help mitigate this risk. Here are five essential criteria that should top your list when evaluating ERP vendors. Find out how exercising due diligence can help you choose a system that won’t drain your IT budget.
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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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It’s an inescapable, undisputable fact that most organizations have conflict between IT security and IT operations. Having been given two distinctive—yet potentially contradictory—goals, in a sense they were destined to be at odds with one another. What does it take to bridge the gap between these two teams to achieve compliance? Can standardized processes and software tools help (or hinder) this effort? Find out here.
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Choosing the right professional services automation (PSA) solution may be one of the most important decisions a billable services organization will ever have to make. It’s a decision that can clearly impact your company’s bottom line, so it’s crucial that you get all the facts—up front. When talking with PSA vendors, knowing what questions to ask in order to make an informed selection is vital. Read here to find out why.
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With the growing significance of services to the bottom line, it’s never been more important to effectively monitor, measure, and manage your services business. Knowing which key performance indicators (KPI) can help drive success and contribute to your bottom line is essential. But with over 150 KPIs available, where do you start? Discover how these few small key improvements can help your service business performance.
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Effective resource management not only impacts profitability, it generates loyalty that translates to competitive advantages in recruiting and retaining the best people. System inefficiencies, however, often make it difficult for businesses to find time to improve their resource management processes or upgrade their systems. Find out how these five steps can help your business in its resource management planning efforts.
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The competitive nature of the financial services industry today and the changing landscape of the customer approach to investing puts an onus on suppliers to consider how well they are dealing with customers’ business transactions. In order to provide better customer service—while at the same time improving operations—these organizations must invest in a system that allows real-time visibility of the entire process.
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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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The number of leads captured from conventional channels is steadily declining due to the increasing importance of web sites. While Web analytic and e-mail marketing solutions provide useful data, they do nothing to capture leads. If there was a service that could prospect all your web site visitors, would you use it? Find out how LEADSExplorer is helping businesses convert their web visitors into potential leads.
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Ensuring customer quality is the key to customer loyalty and retention. When a company treats its customers like it doesn’t know them, it’s bad for business. This occurs when companies work with disparate data—using one database for sales, another for marketing, and a third for operations. Developing a real-time solution that provides a single view of the customer is by far the best way to increase customer satisfaction.
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Recent surveys have shown that 76 percent of respondents rated customer loyalty as extremely or very important to top management. Many companies feel they exercise due diligence in this area, but as global competition increases and markets mature, they’ll have to go that extra mile. To better measure customer’s attitudes and behaviors, companies must make loyalty management an integral part of their business strategy.
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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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Company employees, business partners, and customers all demand secure and low-response-time access to business applications—from wherever they are. While SAP addresses this need through its enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution, when security features are added the application response time is slower. So what’s the best way to test global SOA deployments? Read this white paper to find out.
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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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Increasing user productivity is an ongoing challenge for many companies. While an abundance of online information and applications is available to them, facilitating fast and secure access to the information can be a complex task. An integrated provisioning and single sign-on (SSO) solution provides secure access to the network from the moment an employee starts the job—enabling full productivity from day one.
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The threats faced by small to medium businesses (SMBs) are multidimensional and must be handled differently from big enterprises, given the smaller number of personnel dedicated to look after them. The ideal security software for SMBs looking to protect their information systems would be the combination of antivirus, antispam, and content security solutions, combined with a powerful network firewall. Find out why it works.
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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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Bluecross Blueshield of South Carolina (BCBSSC) had been using optical character recognition (OCR) technology for many years, but wanted to improve productivity by automating its claims processing system from document and data capture to document storage. By integrating AnyDocCLAIM into its existing automated system, BCBSSC has increased its processing speed and averages more than 400 claims per hour.
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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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The amount of malware that is being released around the world is increasing at an alarming rate. To combat these cyber-crimes, new layers of protection are needed that take advantage of automating the entire malware protection cycle—from sample collection, analysis and classification, to remediation. By combing automation with Panda’s Collective Intelligence, targeted attacks can be detected more quickly and efficiently.
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For advocacy firms, safeguarding client information is of paramount importance. One key concern for these law firms is the presence of vulnerabilities in their networks due to the general lack of user awareness in information security issues. While there are a number of solutions on the market to combat threats, MicroWorld’s suite of security solutions provide highly advanced protection that businesses can rely on.
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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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Duke Realty Corporation—the largest publicly traded office and industrial property owner in the US—needed to find a more organized way to process the nearly 20,000 invoices its thirteen locations handled each month. To ensure data was properly captured and processed, Duke Realty turned to AnyDocINVOICE solution and has since been able to create a faster, more visible invoice process that uses 50 percent less staff.
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More than 95,000 documents arrive annually at Baton Rouge’s Department of
Finance in the form of invoices, purchase orders, confirmations, and more. In an effort to get this vast amount of documents under control, it sought an automated indexing solution that would eliminate the need for filing cabinets. Since deploying BROKERit, the department has increased productivity and realized an annual savings of $58,000 (USD).
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In order to meet the increasing need to extend services around the world, companies must be able to consolidate data centers and business applications while adhering to compliance rules and security regulations. While SAP addresses these business needs through its enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, the question of how to test these global enterprise SOA deployments still needs to be answered.
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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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Blade computing is a new computing architecture that provides a highly dense, scalable, and powerful flexible platform to support businesses’ software needs. Blade architecture was once used for simple server consolidation, but it has now become a way of managing IT assets, which provides significant business benefits. Find out how a blade system can benefit your company while optimizing your existing infrastructure.
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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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Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have changed. What was once used to help sales personnel maintain records of contacts, sales-related activities, and individual team progress has now become so much more. But since CRM is now intertwined with other sales management solutions, it has left businesses that have implemented it in a bit of a quandary when it comes to the global sales market. Find out why.
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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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To understand the complex relationship between business and customer, there are several questions companies must ask. How much do we spend on advertising to reach out to customers? How much do our customers spend on purchasing our products? With customers scattered all over the globe, it’s difficult to know. With an organizational hierarchy management solution, finding the answer to these questions just got easier.
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What kind of tangible return on investment (ROI) can you expect from your enterprise resource planning (ERP) software? The answer: a lot more than you might expect. Purchasing ERP software represents a significant financial commitment, but in most cases, the software pays for itself within the first year—and will continue to generate cost savings for many years after. Where do these cost savings come from? Find out here.
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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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Chances are, if you’re backing up your data, you’re using backup tape as your solution. But advances in data management technologies are making disk-to-disk (D2D) backup a vital component of any sane data protection strategy. In fact, D2D backup provides answers to the challenges threatening traditional tape backup strategies. Find out how to evaluate the different advanced data protection solutions available on the market today.
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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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Accounting firm Fox and Fiorino P.A. knew there had to be a better way to take care of billing. With most of its billing being entered manually, no real-time reporting was available to ensure accuracy. So in 2003, the company implemented BillQuick. With this automated time-keeping and billing solution, Fox and Fiorino has improved the quality of its information, reduced overtime, and increased revenues and cash flow.
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For AG & Co., embracing new technology was the only way to go if it wanted to continue increasing its revenues. Although it had purchased a new computer system back in 1986, the old software products it was using were non-integrated, making it difficult to keep track of engagements and billing. Billable time meant revenue, so AG & Co. opted to implement BillQuick, and has since reduced its overhead and increased profits.
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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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The first step in any enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation involves bringing together the team that will plan and implement the project—your ERP task force. But who should be a part of this task force and why? Selecting the right people is imperative and can play a major role in determining the success or failure of your ERP effort. Find out about what you should beware of when assembling your team.
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When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) communications, two of the basic requirements for regulatory compliance are having a reliable network and a high quality dial tone. So why would you want to settle for anything less? To ensure that both are obtained, many companies are entrusting their data—and their compliance responsibilities—to the Inovis Multienterprise Expert Services Hub (MESH) platform. Find out why.
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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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Implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—even for small to medium businesses (SMBs)—is a smart move. But depending on the type of business, there can be many different processes to integrate—making it difficult to know what type of system to choose. For growing project-based companies faced with the challenge of managing many complex projects, the ideal ERP system should be customizable yet scalable.
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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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Identity theft and credit card fraud affect all businesses—and the problem is only getting worse. In order to combat these threats, credit card companies have joined forces to introduce the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). For financial institutions, complying with PCI DSS by using real-time monitoring and selective enforcement software can help to relieve the burden of unauthorized changes.
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Deploying and migrating JaveEE applications is hard work, the kind that is error-prone, repetitive, and time-consuming, resulting in lost man-hours, soaring costs, and potential configuration issues that are bound to pop up later. In response to this complex environment, Phurnace Software has created a software application that accelerates the deployment of JavaEE applications and helps to minimize errors.
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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 organizations are struggling to satisfy the demands of a constantly evolving business environment. Lowering costs and responding to changing markets are a few of the challenges they face. Another is understanding how to leverage mission-critical applications as they develop new composite applications. Find out how deploying a service-oriented legacy architecture (SOLA) can help—and save you time and money.
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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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Nearly half of all US companies have serious data quality issues. The problem is that most are not thinking about their business data as being valuable. But in reality data has become—in some cases—just as valuable as inventory. The solution to most organizational data challenges today is to combine a strong data quality program with a master data management (MDM) program, helping businesses leverage data as an asset.
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“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack!” That saying and Internet site searches go together like ham and eggs. To help maximize search effectiveness, many online retailers are now establishing competitive advantages through site search analytics. By manufacturing and analyzing search content, they’re improving the relevancy of search results, thus closing the gap between searching and finding—and buying.
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The security provisions of the US Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) are complex and process-intensive, and non-compliant financial institutions and their officers have suffered penalties as a result. With QualysGuard’s vulnerability management and policy compliance solution—including on-demand auditing capabilities—financial institutions can easily meet the key security guidelines that are detailed in the GLBA.
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Despite the defensive efforts of firewalls, intrusion detection, antivirus solutions, and the like, criminals, careless employees, and contractors have exposed more than 158 million digital records of consumers personally identifiable information since 2005. With this critical need for stronger network security, Qualys has developed an on-demand solution that effectively manages these vulnerabilities.
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While most information vulnerabilities stem from external intrusion and theft of data, there remains a greater potential for information to be lost, stolen, or accidentally erased by internal sources—the employees. Don’t let this be the case with your business! Information vulnerability management (IVM) is a corporate issue—one that needs addressing. To learn how you can reduce your exposure, download this white paper.
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As with all things, there’s a good side and a bad side—the Internet is no different. Although it improves communication between businesses and customers, it can also overwhelm customers that are bombarded with marketing e-mails on a daily basis. Customers want more convenient contact channels. Smart companies understand this and are responding by adopting a multichannel approach to customer relationship management (CRM).
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As a provider of employee benefits, CIGNA must observe a bevy of regulatory compliance mandates. Because much of its efforts are compliance-focused, it continually embraces technology, searching for new products to better manage its benefit offerings and track its security risks. With QualysGuard’s vulnerability management solution, CIGNA has mitigated vulnerabilities and remained up-to-date with compliance regulations.
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With a vast global network that supports over 60,000 employees, vulnerability and risk management programs are crucial for Oracle GIT. To further enhance its IT system risk management capabilities, Oracle deployed QualysGuard’s on-demand software vulnerability and compliance management solution. Since its deployment, Oracle has optimized its scanning capabilities and automated its demand security auditing processes.
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As one of the largest Internet marketplaces, eBay proclaims that the trust it enables between buyers and sellers has been the key to its success. To ensure continued success, eBay wanted to standardize its network security auditing and remediation processes, and turned to QualysGuard’s vulnerability management solution. With Qualys’ automated solution, eBay can now quickly and easily remediate any network vulnerabilities.
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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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Web analytics has never been an exact science—which can make the process extremely frustrating. How can you be 100 percent certain that the data you’re working with is always accurate? To deal with this and many other questions that will arise, businesses must gain a better understanding of how well their analytics tools work with their existing data integration solutions, and how using testing platforms will help.
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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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When testing firm Promissor’s system kept crashing, it knew it was time to make a change. With over 800 employees made up of part-timers, temporary workers, and employees on various pay cycles, its payroll team was constantly reconstructing lost time sheets and wasting valuable time. Since implementing an automated Web-based solution, it has benefited from improved data collection accuracy and reduced manual processing.
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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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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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IT managers today face plenty of problems when it comes to protecting remote office data—problems that agentless architecture could eliminate. Many organizations outsource their data protection, which can be costly. But an agentless architecture disk-to-disk (D2D) software solution can offer your business bottom-line benefits that range from lower administrative costs to pay-as-you-grow scalability and increased security.
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Online advertising has grown so fast that it has surpassed billboards, magazines, and cable in spending. Local advertising is growing even faster, and the need to provide competitive services to advertisers is becoming imperative. As demand for local listings increases, a tool enabling advertisers to manage their own web site listings will not only save them significant operating dollars, it’ll provide a competitive edge.
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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’s all this hype about wikis anyway? According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, wikis are descending from the crest of a hype wave and coasting into areas where real business value can be recognized. Why? Because their ability to allow corporate users to collaborate on any number of internal projects in an online environment where everyone is given an equal voice is not only empowering, but speeds the process of innovation.
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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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In their efforts to accelerate time to market and improve business process efficiency, many marketing organizations adopt customer relationship management (CRM). But CRM often falls short in exploiting the exponential growth of content associated with product and brand marketing. By using a digital asset management (DAM) solution, however, you can increase productivity and achieve a favorable return on investment (ROI).
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In today’s business world, heightened privacy concerns and tightened regulations such as the US Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act have forced organizations to improve their workflow and archival and records management processes. That's why many results-oriented organizations are now using workflow software—bringing together people, processes, and documents to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and meet compliance requirements.
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The future of customer service management (CRM) is changing—and SAP’s CRM 5.2 is a big part of the reason. SAP is known for constantly enhancing its products—whether it’s changing its tier architecture or introducing new dimensional components. But its latest in CRM technology provides many new features and functionalities, and introduces some of the latest trends. If you want to know more about SAP CRM 5.2, here it is.
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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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Most businesses today depend on their own IT departments to satisfy corporate governance objectives and meet increasing customer demand. Unfortunately, many have failed to clearly demonstrate to themselves—and to their customers—that they are truly managing their business. Only when the IT department understands what the business wants can it benchmark itself and build continual improvement plans that can meet these demands.
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Small businesses often become trapped by their outdated accounting systems, limiting their profits and arresting their growth. How can your business avoid this software trap? Planning and anticipating your business growth will help you minimize this costly mistake. Find the right accounting or enterprise resource planning solution to help your small business continue to expand and remain successful.
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Offering health insurance is critical to recruiting new employees and retaining current staff. Taking care of your employees and attracting future intellectual property is a high priority in any business. But is it possible to find an affordable health plan in today’s costly health insurance market? Discover what insurance brokers can do for your business.
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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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Developing a good disaster recovery plan (DRP) in today’s business world is a must. In fact, downplaying the importance of a DRP can be costly—especially if you’re a small to medium business (SMB) that is slow in adopting DRP. Recent studies have shown that 40 percent of businesses that have encountered a disaster close their doors within the following five years. To stay afloat, here are ten steps that should be taken.
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In order for a business to stay on top of compliance requirements required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)—and avoid financial penalties or possible jail time—it must take a good look at its IT environment and financial reporting processes. The collection, management, and analysis of log data are integral to meeting SOX requirements and as such, require a system that automates these processes across the IT infrastructure.
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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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Today’s extensive use of data collection tools coupled with the easy access to communication networks has woven more devices and systems into the fabric of our daily lives. As the scale of integration and complexity grows, so does the need for the appropriate paradigm to address it. In order to scale, system software architecture must be organized around a common-shared information model that can span multiple systems.
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Information lifecycle management (ILM) is rapidly gaining acceptance as a process crucial to the success of many IT initiatives. The reason for this is the importance of managing data. With the growing demand for ILM comes a variety of solutions that follow a disjointed, point product approach. By choosing an ILM software designed to scale to its needs, a business can benefit from software built on a unified platform.
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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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Data breach is a very real problem in business today. Every day, organizations store massive amounts of data inside database tables—data ranging from credit card transactions to product inventories. This valuable information is what runs the business. In order to protect this data and stay on top of compliance, an enterprise data management solution that respects information privacy regulations should be considered.
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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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Financial service institutions spend thousands of dollars every year on securing their networks from external breaches, but often fail to think about possible internal threats. Employee fraud has become a growing problem in the financial sector—one that many institutions are not fully prepared to handle. Implementing automated detection technologies, however, can be their first line of defense to eradicating this problem.
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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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When it comes to data, it’s all about location. Although more than 80 percent of enterprise data has a geographic dimension—such as stores, customers, and competitors—it’s rarely used in traditional business intelligence (BI) analysis. In order to react faster to market changes and to improve competitive advantage and operation efficiency, businesses should consider adding location intelligence tools to their BI platform.
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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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Protecting your company’s data is not only wise, but often legally necessary. In order to beef up their data security programs, more companies are implementing full disk encryption (FDE). In the past, FDE was software based, which left it open to greater security risks. With the advent of new technology, however, it is now possible to migrate from software- to hardware-based FDE while still protecting your existing systems.
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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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When you decide to implement a new fax software solution, you should review how the solution will be implemented and managed, as well as its ability to grow with your network. Within a Windows network, critical architectural, administrative, and usage concerns should be thoroughly considered. Review your options with this fax server overview outlining the benefits of different fax servers and e-mail integration.
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Secure transmission of health care information is critical to your medical organization and your clients. Volumes of critical medical data are sent to you every day, making it imperative that the information be sent quickly and safely. Fax servers are easy-to-use point-to-point systems that provide secure transmission of confidential information—saving you time and money while protecting all your sensitive 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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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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Environmental concerns are a focal point for businesses wanting to “go green,” and they are looking at every aspect of their operations, including their printers. Replacing even a portion of energy-inefficient printers with environmentally friendly ones will have a positive impact on the environment, helping to conserve energy and reduce waste. Saving energy is not only good for the planet; it’s also good for business.
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Chemical companies struggle with outdated manufacturing and financial systems, often not reaching their profitable goals. How can they give customers high-quality chemical products while improving the bottom line? Industry best practices can help you gain control over every aspect of your business by increasing your visibility into operations, helping production go more smoothly, and reducing costs and lead times.
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To survive in today’s global marketplace, companies must develop a competitive advantage. Your business can thrive with the help of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA). With the ability to implement business strategies more quickly, this greater flexibility will help your new business processes and empower your information workers—giving your company long-term growth and an ongoing competitive advantage.
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Globalization is one of the top issues affecting organizations’ supplier management strategies. True supplier collaboration can no longer be avoided: working closely with suppliers around the globe is the best way to streamline and reduce costs and increase value. With practical tips and techniques on how to achieve your vision statement, you can attain sourcing excellence while setting a pace that’s right for your company.
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VMware and blade servers have taken the IT world by storm. Virtual server use has grown over 50 percent, and blade servers account for 12.5 percent of all new servers. Can you incorporate them into your existing frameworks? Yes. Routers can scale server numbers with virtual interfaces, and with fibre channel storage area network (SAN) connectivity, you can reduce testing and development costs in VMware environments.
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Server consolidation is the reason enterprises deploy server virtualization technologies across their data centers, improving server and processor use. As more virtual servers are consolidated onto a single server, demand is increased on the central processing unit (CPU) and host bus interfaces. However, you can do more with less by deploying a fibre channel host bus adapter, enhancing your server consolidation levels.
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As clusters grow to address the problems of increasing application complexity, interconnect performance has become a key factor in overall application and clustered system performance. Finding the interconnect performance you need is a complex task— however, when compared with two other adapters, InfiniPath SDR Infiniband interconnected faster and scaled better on high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
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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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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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Worldwide, various standards have been created to provide some form of structure with respect to delivering products and services. Over time, however, the adoption of industry compliance guidelines has seen many pitfalls, specifically with the advent of technology. Developing a sound compliance strategy requires a unified solution—one that includes all the necessary components, but also keeps the business users in mind.
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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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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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Stable revenue and stronger customer relationships are what software companies want, and more are turning to software as a service (SaaS) platforms to reach these goals. Building an SaaS infrastructure is complex, and you need operations and engineering experts to manage your infrastructures. Start by following a step-by-step process—thus helping to increase your revenue and strengthen your customer network.
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For organizations deploying many servers, total cost of ownership (TCO) analyses favor blade over rack-optimized systems. Blade server systems—reducing both capital and operating expenses—exploit economies of scale when deploying servers in volume. Saving power, cooling, and space by more than 25 percent, the blade advantage is particularly relevant for servers working in conjunction with storage area networks (SANs).
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The world is focusing on environmental awareness, and reducing greenhouse gases is now an inevitable part of doing business. But how can you conform to compliance regulations and still remain competitive? Green-centric asset management implementations—valuable tools in resource conservation—are helping companies increase productivity and improve their bottom lines. Maybe getting greener isn’t so hard after all.
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For dried fruit producer Sunsweet, a spreadsheet-based planning system just wasn’t working. After reviewing several solutions, Sunsweet selected the Zemeter supply chain planning suite to eliminate the repetitive work involved in spreadsheet management. Zemeter’s accurate forecasting and planning process ended up saving Sunsweet money by increasing production line efficiency and reducing overruns by 18 percent.
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Forecasting and planning conventions dictate that planning far into the future is a necessity. But is long-term planning really the most productive way to organize your business? No, not really. Detailed forecasts and plans are needed only inside the “planning time fence”—a critical period for acquiring specific components and building certain products—and for many companies, only four to eight weeks into the future.
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Slowdowns, scalability issues, and security gaps hit Web applications where it hurts. Data center consolidations put distance between application servers and users—producing long round-trips and slow response times. Luckily, there is a solution. Deploying a wire-speed application system—in a unified single-platform design—boosts response times, improves infrastructure scalability, and safeguards against security threats.
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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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Customers, employees, and partners are an integral part of any business—each playing an important role in its success. But how is it possible to share vital information between them? In order to access information, understand trends, and build better processes, a system that enables multi-user collaborative technologies is required. Without these collaboration tools, business process management (BPM) cannot be successful.
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Just when you thought you had all your security measures figured out, along comes the portable storage device to make you question them all over again. With the popularity of portable consumer products—and their ever-increasing storage space—comes a greater risk of losing sensitive corporate data. To secure corporate data, companies must not only focus on perimeter security, but on internal security weaknesses as well.
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In 2004, there were 1.3 billion credit cards in circulation in the US. With fraud incidents on the rise, credit card companies are at constant risk of losing sensitive cardholder data. At the same time, strict payment card industry (PCI) requirements are forcing companies to put better systems in place to ensure clients are adequately protected. By implementing the right software tools, achieving compliance is 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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Improving the supply chain is essential for any company that wants to gain or maintain a competitive edge. To do this, companies are adopting sales and operations planning (S&OP) strategies. Years ago—when the pace of market change was slow—S&OP was a nice-to-have; today it’s a business imperative! But it doesn’t have to happen overnight. By taking a five-step approach, companies can implement S&OP at their own pace.
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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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In business, planning plays a fundamental role in analyzing and forecasting key financial data. While forecasting future events is one benefit of planning, it can also be used to achieve a series of objectives, including regulatory compliance. In order to achieve these objectives, companies should consider implementing a unified customer performance management (CPM) solution—one that takes compliance into consideration.
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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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By some estimates, there are over 8,000 sales taxing jurisdictions in the US—and they implement from 900 to more than 3,000 rate and tax-rule changes every year. Understandably, the accountants who try to guide small to medium businesses (SMBs) through the intricacies of tax compliance are having a hard time of it. However, solutions are emerging that are uniquely suited to SMB needs for sales tax compliance.
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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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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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Small to medium businesses (SMBs) often face the same challenges as large businesses—just on a smaller scale. One such challenge is finding a business solution that manages expansion and addresses complex reporting and compliance issues. Many SMBs are now adopting enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions—complete with tools to help them meet the current and future needs of their growing business.
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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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Industry today demands more quality of manufacturers, and as such, ISO 9001—the yardstick by which quality products and services are measured—is forcing more and more companies to become ISO-certified. However, companies can use a browser-based tool to help bridge any information gaps they may encounter during the process—and to give them the head start they need to intelligently manage their ISO certification.
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One of the first and seemingly simple questions that companies ask when making IT investments is “how much does it cost?” Many often find themselves wondering why—even after a successful implementation—their costs keep going up. When evaluating a mobile workforce automation project, companies should take the time to conduct a thorough total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis to detect hidden costs—and avoid nasty surprises.
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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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How do companies address the out-of-control costs associated with network printing? Many look to control them by outsourcing their managed printer services. The transition from basic dealer services to a holistic approach—where the dealer manages the print services for the entire organization—has its challenges. With printer fleet management tools, companies gain a competitive advantage and save on printing costs.
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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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For a lot of companies, making the decision to replace an existing business software system can be a difficult one. The process can be so unpleasant that many organizations may be reluctant to even get started, coming up with a number of reasons why they could probably get by with the systems they already have. If your company is struggling with this tough decision, you may want to ask yourself these ten basic questions.
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Choosing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package that’s right for your business can be difficult and time consuming. Finding a software provider and discovering what doing business with them will be like is as important as the overall functionality of the software itself. Before committing to a long-term relationship with any potential software provider, there are some really tough questions you need to ask them.
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Going mobile has become a growing trend, with many businesses reaching well beyond the use of cellular phones as their only lines of communication. Why? Because these businesses realize that linking the mobile workforce with the enterprise and its data resources—using mobile applications—is key to enhancing productivity, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Choosing the right devices, however, can be very challenging.
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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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Any organization that deploys multiple same-application servers with regularity could benefit from virtual appliances. Virtualization solutions eliminate the need to copy an operating system (OS) and application into each virtual environment, by creating a single, centrally installed master copy instead. It saves time on installation and enables greater levels of efficiency, manageability, flexibility, and resource use.
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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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It’s no coincidence that the surge in counterfeiting over the past decade has coincided with a huge increase in Internet access around the world, and the more recent shift toward broadband connections. The Web provides a shop window to the world, yet it is impossible to police. New, intelligent, automated monitoring technologies are beginning to offer powerful solutions to this rampant online problem.
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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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In 2004, Microsoft offered a midwestern-US-based financial services corporation a range of options to renew and replace its existing enterprise agreement. But without the right negotiating skills, how could it be certain Microsoft’s offer was the most cost-saving approach? The company engaged an independent consulting firm, and in less than three weeks recognized savings of 28 percent on a $3 million (USD) agreement.
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Traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions are becoming a thing of the past. Companies today are moving toward business solutions that can help maintain a competitive edge while empowering business executives across the enterprise. Operational BI is an approach that incorporates traditional BI best practices with the benefits of real-time information flow, resulting in more user-directed initiatives.
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Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) encounter many of the same challenges as larger companies in unlocking information from the data they collect, yet they lack cost-effective solutions. Many must choose between expensive business intelligence solutions or complicated homegrown solutions. With many hosted reporting solutions now available, SMBs have an option that may meet their requirements—at a fraction of the 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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While service oriented architecture (SOA)-based systems are great for re-using the existing IT infrastructure to implement newer business processes, they only help IT professionals. Thus, an SOA-based system is a technical answer to a business challenge—but in order to help businesses react to business changes, existing business rules management system (BRMS) technology should be included in the mix.
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Enterprises are using business rules engines (BREs) as a means to reduce the costs of managing change. However, because these business rules are stored separately from the application code, many questions need to be answered: Can you track changes to policies? What risks are involved in having business policies outside of code? And how can you minimize these risks?
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Risk managers and compliance officials in banking institutions often face problems of how to measure and monitor risk and incorporate risk practices. Solutions to these problems must be linked to decision-making processes, but they also need to increase the speed at which institutions can react to market changes. Can new risk management solutions really deliver compliance in a verifiable, measurable, and timely manner?
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Your competitors are adopting business rules management solutions (BRMS) to achieve agility and reduce maintenance costs. With enhanced ability to store all business rules in one central location, enterprises have a unique opportunity to use non-conventional methods to test these rules, as well as their interactions with each other—without tying up their mission-critical software.
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At any given time, one in four mortgage providers is looking to upgrade its loan origination system. The reason: its current system provides low rates of automation—including some processing functions that are not automated at all. Using people to process loan applications decreases profitability of a company in several ways, but by automating more processes, profitability can be improved—and the hidden costs eliminated.
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Today, 70 to 80 percent of costs for processing loan applications are people-related. From a mortgage company’s perspective, this results in increased costs and decreased revenues. With ever-changing loan products, enterprises are forced to build or buy new loan origination systems periodically. And to meet these challenges, they’re choosing technology that focuses on solving business problems, not technical problems.
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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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“Get this to me ASAP. I can’t afford any delays.” Your customer service representatives hear these statements every day. Your clients are demanding speed and quality at every touch point: the days when they’d accept tradeoffs between product quality and timeliness of service are over. Organizations need to adapt to this reality—before their customers defect to the competition.
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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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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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Customer process management (CPM)—the convergence of customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management (BPM)—can deliver significant gains in efficiency and standardization for insurance companies. Whether it’s providing real-time quotations for insurance policies, identifying cross-selling and renewal opportunities, or managing claims, CPM extends across the enterprise to ensure that each customer interaction becomes an opportunity for service excellence.
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As competition in the financial sector increases, many financial services providers are seeking ways to improve customer service and profitability through process efficiency. By developing rich integration between customer data and allowing that data to be managed by the business users, customer process management (CPM) enables financial services organizations to adapt to changing market demands and maximize their competitive edge.
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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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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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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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Organizations that implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system should evaluate software with an eye to the must-have features of the application. However, choosing the right software is just part of the solution. Businesses that intend to grow and compete must create an environment that encourages people at all levels of a company to take customer service seriously.
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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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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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Finance executives must meet a growing number of challenges if their companies are to continue being profitable. So how can they deliver strong performance in every aspect of their businesses? The answer: by deploying a corporate financial management system that expands the capabilities of their core activities—a system that extends its reach to automate other processes within the enterprise.
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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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Software technologies can provide a single point of entry for prospects and health plan providers to educate new or renewing prospects on the full value of each offering. Behind the scenes, these technologies can also record all prospect preferences to allow sales, marketing, advertising, and product development to benefit from more targeted offerings and personalized messaging, at greatly reduced costs.
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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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The US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 applies to health care providers, health plans, and clearing houses that electronically maintain or transmit health information. Among other things, these entities are required to have data backup plans, disaster recovery plans, and emergency mode operation plans. Fortunately, there is a way to meet these security and contingency requirements.
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To many executives, health insurance cost increases are as predictable as death and taxes. That’s why best-in-class organizations are embracing strategies which optimize benefit cost per employee. To succeed, these companies focus on wellness programs, clear communications about benefits choices, and benefits automation as part of an integrated system. And to compete effectively, other organizations will need to follow suit.
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Recent changes in accounting standards and compliance, along with greater emphasis on managing risk and value, have introduced new key measures of bank performance and made it more important to coordinate the internal and external reporting of financials and risk. To meet these challenges, banks must do their utmost to more fully integrate their accounting data and processes.
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A decline in customer loyalty has put a great deal of pressure on financial institutions of late. Thus, as banks tailor products and services to meet customer demands, they must also boost revenue. That’s why it’s essential to target your most profitable customers with real-time insight that helps you drive revenue, increase profitability, and build long-term relationships with those customers.
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Banks face many challenges in today’s dynamic financial services marketplace. Banks must continuously enhance capabilities for risk and financial management to address market, credit, and regulatory environments that are increasingly complex. Thus, process support for your business strategies is crucial—which is why integrated tools are a must-have for financial accounting, cost controlling, risk management, asset-liability management, and profitability analysis.
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Thanks to recent accounting scandals and an increasingly competitive environment, many chief financial officers and the finance organizations they lead have started to take on new roles within the enterprise. However, given the current state of the finance function in US companies, companies first need to understand the challenges to finance—and the road map to increasing its strategic capabilities.
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With the advent of the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), security is no longer optional for health care organizations. As spyware risks grow, they must ensure that data is protected from unauthorized disclosure, and that it is available when needed. Thus, implementing anti-spyware measures is both a good business practice and a move towards ensuring regulatory compliance.
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Almost $75 billion (USD) is spend on trade and promotion funds every year. Unfortunately most enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are not equiped to handle the complexities of promotion causing false reports and inaccurate invoices. Small and medium businesses (SMB) have had limited choices, until now.
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Business Bank of California, a subsidiary of Business Bancorp (NasdaqNM: BZBC), has served California businesses since 1984. With assets of more than $620 million, Business Bank of California is ranked fifth of 25 locally based banks in the Inland of Southern California and offers retail banking, commercial, construction, and SBA lending. Business Bank of California operates in 15 locations in California. The branches are strongly focused on providing high-quality, personalized services to small businesses, professionals and consumers.
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There are compelling reasons to transform into an on-line corporation; more are surfacing daily. The common reason is the need to run the entire business under total, on-line, unified, synchronized operational and functional control. Learn how to monitor live action, and correlate and unify operations and finance to ensure the availability of instantaneous financial and operational performance insights.
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Effective planning is integral to the success of a bank. It helps define and ensure the achievement of the organization’s objectives. Understanding and implementing the planning cycle, which leverages forecasting, operational metrics, and multidimensional analyses can help management determine the feasibility of a strategy. An enterprise-wide, integrated planning and forecasting environment that reaches business units, products, customer segments, and geographies can align non-financial performance targets with high-level financial targets and help banks meet their goals.
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A balanced scorecard is a measurement system for management that provides real insight into the status of a business or some part of it. Developed by Kaplan and Norton in the early 1990s, balanced scorecards provide a control system that helps ensure the right balance between different, and often times conflicting, perspectives. For example, an insurance company may increase profitability by offering incentives to claims assessors for taking a tough stance on payout, but will soon find dissatisfaction among its clients that may lead to lost business. Scorecards help ensure this balance and are an improvement over more traditional single dimension approaches that tend to be based purely on expense management and business growth.
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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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Application Service Provision (ASP).There has been a trend in recent years towards the use of remote software services through application service providers. These are companies who make software applications available via the
Internet to users who, rather than buying software, pay rental fees for it. The software does not have to be installed locally, the application being available through any web browser, and all support and maintenance is handled by the service provider. CMMS vendors are not the only ones offering these solutions. CAD modelling, engineering design, finance packages, purchasing, ERP
and even your company Intranet can now be rented. This is an expanding sector and the signs are that major growth is about to take place. Earlier problems with slow data
transfer speeds, communication costs and data security have largely been eliminated and this has made ASP a very attractive proposition. This is clearly illustrated by the
proliferation of systems that have become available over the last three or four years with most of the major CMMS vendors now offering an ASP option.
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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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This white paper reviews the need for broader financial management solutions that enable the finance function to deliver greater transparency and visibility of business information. It also covers the growing requirement to improve both the efficiency of financial management and reporting processes, whilst at the same time maximizing the effectiveness of corporate performance activities.
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