The document provides guidelines for writing an effective client brief for communications agencies. It emphasizes that a well-written brief leads to better work, saves time and money, and makes the remuneration process fairer. The key principles of a good brief are to have a written brief, clarity of thinking in the brief, and clearly defined objectives. An effective brief focuses the work, provides the necessary context and information, and sets clear targets to measure success.
HP Discover 2012 Case Study: McKesson Redirects IT to Become a Services Provi...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingDirect podcast from HP Discover 2012 on how health-care giant McKesson has revamped it's IT approach and instituted a cultural shift toward services.
Rick Radermacher was recruited to improve and grow the account service team and strategic planning at Bigelow agency. He made several impactful changes including rewriting the creative brief for clearer client input, establishing standard hourly rates, implementing performance reviews, improving relationships with key clients, partnering with external firms for better media and PR capabilities, and driving new business opportunities and award-winning creative work that significantly grew clients' businesses. His leadership helped transform agency operations, client services, and creative output.
Creative agencies are often called in to brand their clients but have a difficult time doing this to themselves. This paper from Swystun Communication provides highly practical and creative lessons for standing out.
Passion in Service
This document discusses the importance of passion in customer service and outlines AQ's solutions to help organizations develop passion among frontline staff. AQ believes that frontline staff who are passionate about serving customers can create exceptional customer experiences that drive repeat business and positive word-of-mouth. AQ works with companies to measure service quality, coach staff, and incentivize passion through customized programs aimed at continuously improving customer service.
Marketing your business is extremely beneficial. There are a variety of marketing methods and it has become important to reach local customers. EDDM, also known as every door direct mail, is a cost-effective marketing tool for small business, allowing them to reach their local customers. We have include some helpful tips on how you can create an effective EDDM postcard and increase your business traffic and sale.
Blackwater Creative is an "un-agency" that prides itself on establishing strong client relationships and providing exceptional service. They consider budgets but prioritize long-term relationships and client satisfaction. Their diverse team supports clients in achieving their goals efficiently. Blackwater operates primarily on a retainer basis to provide ongoing support and spread out costs for clients. They aim to be a true marketing partner rather than just an agency focused on profits.
This document provides guidelines for writing an effective client brief for communications agencies. It emphasizes that a written brief is crucial for setting clear objectives and expectations upfront. The brief should clarify the current situation, the desired destination or goals, and how success will be measured, but not dictate how agencies do their work. This ensures agencies can be creative while understanding the goals. A written brief followed by discussion allows all parties to be on the same page and align their efforts. Proper briefing saves time and money by avoiding wasted work from unclear or changing directions. It also enables fair payment based on results. The guidelines recommend brevity, focus, and concrete, measurable objectives in the brief.
The document provides guidelines for writing an effective client brief for communications agencies. It emphasizes that a well-written brief leads to better work, saves time and money, and makes the remuneration process fairer. The key principles of a good brief are to have a written brief, clarity of thinking in the brief, and clearly defined objectives. An effective brief focuses the work, provides the necessary context and information, and sets clear targets to measure success.
HP Discover 2012 Case Study: McKesson Redirects IT to Become a Services Provi...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingDirect podcast from HP Discover 2012 on how health-care giant McKesson has revamped it's IT approach and instituted a cultural shift toward services.
Rick Radermacher was recruited to improve and grow the account service team and strategic planning at Bigelow agency. He made several impactful changes including rewriting the creative brief for clearer client input, establishing standard hourly rates, implementing performance reviews, improving relationships with key clients, partnering with external firms for better media and PR capabilities, and driving new business opportunities and award-winning creative work that significantly grew clients' businesses. His leadership helped transform agency operations, client services, and creative output.
Creative agencies are often called in to brand their clients but have a difficult time doing this to themselves. This paper from Swystun Communication provides highly practical and creative lessons for standing out.
Passion in Service
This document discusses the importance of passion in customer service and outlines AQ's solutions to help organizations develop passion among frontline staff. AQ believes that frontline staff who are passionate about serving customers can create exceptional customer experiences that drive repeat business and positive word-of-mouth. AQ works with companies to measure service quality, coach staff, and incentivize passion through customized programs aimed at continuously improving customer service.
Marketing your business is extremely beneficial. There are a variety of marketing methods and it has become important to reach local customers. EDDM, also known as every door direct mail, is a cost-effective marketing tool for small business, allowing them to reach their local customers. We have include some helpful tips on how you can create an effective EDDM postcard and increase your business traffic and sale.
Blackwater Creative is an "un-agency" that prides itself on establishing strong client relationships and providing exceptional service. They consider budgets but prioritize long-term relationships and client satisfaction. Their diverse team supports clients in achieving their goals efficiently. Blackwater operates primarily on a retainer basis to provide ongoing support and spread out costs for clients. They aim to be a true marketing partner rather than just an agency focused on profits.
This document provides guidelines for writing an effective client brief for communications agencies. It emphasizes that a written brief is crucial for setting clear objectives and expectations upfront. The brief should clarify the current situation, the desired destination or goals, and how success will be measured, but not dictate how agencies do their work. This ensures agencies can be creative while understanding the goals. A written brief followed by discussion allows all parties to be on the same page and align their efforts. Proper briefing saves time and money by avoiding wasted work from unclear or changing directions. It also enables fair payment based on results. The guidelines recommend brevity, focus, and concrete, measurable objectives in the brief.
Gaining Digital Business Strategic View Across More Data Gives AmeriPride Cul...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a discussion on how improved data allows for more types of work in an improved organization to become even more intelligent, and to find new efficiencies and benefits.
Most startups experience a tension between product and service sales at some point in their lives. While Professional Services can generate revenue and customer insight, they can also distract a startup from its core mission: building a successful product.
This presentation looks at the opportunities and risks associated with setting up a Professional Services team within your company.
Richard Royer, CEO of Primaris, attended two marcus evans Summits where he had 13 one-on-one meetings and secured a $120,000 deal with one company. At the Summits, he also met with another company that has a $1 million project in the final approval stages. Royer states that these deals likely would not have occurred without the Summits, as they provided direct access to high-level decision makers and helped shortcut the normal lengthy sales process.
Supplying small to medium businesses with the full suite of creative services it takes to start up, grow and stay front of mind. Creative thinking, considered design and practical advice to help shape your brand and your business.
Agile is a philosophy that values individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change. It aims to deliver value to customers faster through iterative development cycles. While Agile provides benefits like faster feedback and adaptation, transitioning to Agile can be challenging for established companies due to required changes in mindset, processes, and culture. Lack of documentation under Agile also poses challenges when new teams must support software later.
The Davis Group is a 15-year company providing virtual administrative support services such as marketing, customer service, human resources, and accounting. They have a team of well-trained employees and use the latest technology to ensure high quality and reliable services. The company aims to continuously improve and provide better results than previous work. Services are tailored to each client's needs.
Health Net aims to become a great customer solutions company by understanding customers' needs and integrating services to solve their problems. The company conducted research finding customers want partners, not just products. This led Health Net to focus on targeting specific customer segments and providing seamless solutions through multiple coordinated services. The company's strategic plan involves improving basic customer service, defining its brand promise around solutions, ensuring competitive products, and boosting efficiency to support integrated customer solutions by 2009.
New english on passive e book alt txt rev nov19BrianThornton36
This document provides an overview of the OnPassive business opportunity, which presents a new online marketing system driven by artificial intelligence. Some key points:
- OnPassive's product is a "smart business solution" suite that includes all the tools needed to run an online marketing business, such as rotators, funnels, email marketing, and more.
- The system is designed to automatically generate income and business growth for both active and passive members. It aims to make online marketing success accessible to everyone through its plug-and-play features and money-back guarantee.
- The founder, Ash Mufareh, has experience in affiliate marketing and online businesses. OnPassive represents a revolutionary new model
IQ ERP - SAP Greenfield Projects - Interview with James MaunderInterQuest Group
Twinings implemented a broad SAP system across its global head office and tea blending facility. The implementation was a success due to focusing on people, process, and technology. For people, Twinings built a dedicated team with both business and SAP expertise and fostered collaboration. For process, Twinings adopted rigorous project management and change control. For technology, Twinings utilized SAP solutions like Solution Manager but encountered challenges with data migration and complex modules like APO. The implementation helped improve Twinings' business processes and IT capabilities.
The document discusses corporate communication, providing examples of how language can be interpreted differently internally versus externally. It also summarizes various frameworks for understanding the structures and flows of internal and external communication. Key aspects of corporate communication discussed include management communication, marketing communication, and organizational communication.
The document outlines an approach to content and communications strategy that focuses on understanding why an organization communicates (their objectives), who they need to reach, what message to convey, and where to share that message. It emphasizes identifying the natural conversations occurring in social media and finding ways to contribute meaningfully. The approach strives to keep strategies simple, practical, and tied closely to establishing brand identity while creating value for audiences. It is led by an experienced strategist and aims to deliver measurable results through collaborative work tailored to each client's unique needs and goals.
Case Study: How Dell Converts Social Media Analytics Benefits into Strategic ...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how social media can create a gold mine of information for businesses of all sizes and how proper analytics and response can created a competitive advantage.
DataDreamin presents: A Cup of Data vol 4 - Spilling the Tea on UX Design Principles - November 12th, 2021 by Elena Migunova.
You know how to build recipes and dashboards, got your Tableau CRM skills. But how do you create EFFECTIVE dashboards? This session will teach you how you can become a design hero and give you the right tools to apply UX design principles to your Tableau CRM dashboards.
The document is an event management proposal from Flexible Solutions to a client. It proposes planning and executing a tailored event to meet the client's needs and goals. Key services include researching the client and market, planning the event, executing it, and reporting on outcomes. The cost is $20,000 covering initial research, planning, event execution, and follow-up reporting and analysis. The proposal aims to provide an event that increases the client's reach and is a success.
Must Know Postgres Extension for DBA and Developer during MigrationMydbops
Mydbops Opensource Database Meetup 16
Topic: Must-Know PostgreSQL Extensions for Developers and DBAs During Migration
Speaker: Deepak Mahto, Founder of DataCloudGaze Consulting
Date & Time: 8th June | 10 AM - 1 PM IST
Venue: Bangalore International Centre, Bangalore
Abstract: Discover how PostgreSQL extensions can be your secret weapon! This talk explores how key extensions enhance database capabilities and streamline the migration process for users moving from other relational databases like Oracle.
Key Takeaways:
* Learn about crucial extensions like oracle_fdw, pgtt, and pg_audit that ease migration complexities.
* Gain valuable strategies for implementing these extensions in PostgreSQL to achieve license freedom.
* Discover how these key extensions can empower both developers and DBAs during the migration process.
* Don't miss this chance to gain practical knowledge from an industry expert and stay updated on the latest open-source database trends.
Mydbops Managed Services specializes in taking the pain out of database management while optimizing performance. Since 2015, we have been providing top-notch support and assistance for the top three open-source databases: MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL.
Our team offers a wide range of services, including assistance, support, consulting, 24/7 operations, and expertise in all relevant technologies. We help organizations improve their database's performance, scalability, efficiency, and availability.
Contact us: info@mydbops.com
Visit: https://www.mydbops.com/
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/mydbops
For more details and updates, please follow up the below links.
Meetup Page : https://www.meetup.com/mydbops-databa...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mydbopsofficial
Blogs: https://www.mydbops.com/blog/
Facebook(Meta): https://www.facebook.com/mydbops/
For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/temporal-event-neural-networks-a-more-efficient-alternative-to-the-transformer-a-presentation-from-brainchip/
Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at BrainChip , presents the “Temporal Event Neural Networks: A More Efficient Alternative to the Transformer” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
The expansion of AI services necessitates enhanced computational capabilities on edge devices. Temporal Event Neural Networks (TENNs), developed by BrainChip, represent a novel and highly efficient state-space network. TENNs demonstrate exceptional proficiency in handling multi-dimensional streaming data, facilitating advancements in object detection, action recognition, speech enhancement and language model/sequence generation. Through the utilization of polynomial-based continuous convolutions, TENNs streamline models, expedite training processes and significantly diminish memory requirements, achieving notable reductions of up to 50x in parameters and 5,000x in energy consumption compared to prevailing methodologies like transformers.
Integration with BrainChip’s Akida neuromorphic hardware IP further enhances TENNs’ capabilities, enabling the realization of highly capable, portable and passively cooled edge devices. This presentation delves into the technical innovations underlying TENNs, presents real-world benchmarks, and elucidates how this cutting-edge approach is positioned to revolutionize edge AI across diverse applications.
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Gaining Digital Business Strategic View Across More Data Gives AmeriPride Cul...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a discussion on how improved data allows for more types of work in an improved organization to become even more intelligent, and to find new efficiencies and benefits.
Most startups experience a tension between product and service sales at some point in their lives. While Professional Services can generate revenue and customer insight, they can also distract a startup from its core mission: building a successful product.
This presentation looks at the opportunities and risks associated with setting up a Professional Services team within your company.
Richard Royer, CEO of Primaris, attended two marcus evans Summits where he had 13 one-on-one meetings and secured a $120,000 deal with one company. At the Summits, he also met with another company that has a $1 million project in the final approval stages. Royer states that these deals likely would not have occurred without the Summits, as they provided direct access to high-level decision makers and helped shortcut the normal lengthy sales process.
Supplying small to medium businesses with the full suite of creative services it takes to start up, grow and stay front of mind. Creative thinking, considered design and practical advice to help shape your brand and your business.
Agile is a philosophy that values individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change. It aims to deliver value to customers faster through iterative development cycles. While Agile provides benefits like faster feedback and adaptation, transitioning to Agile can be challenging for established companies due to required changes in mindset, processes, and culture. Lack of documentation under Agile also poses challenges when new teams must support software later.
The Davis Group is a 15-year company providing virtual administrative support services such as marketing, customer service, human resources, and accounting. They have a team of well-trained employees and use the latest technology to ensure high quality and reliable services. The company aims to continuously improve and provide better results than previous work. Services are tailored to each client's needs.
Health Net aims to become a great customer solutions company by understanding customers' needs and integrating services to solve their problems. The company conducted research finding customers want partners, not just products. This led Health Net to focus on targeting specific customer segments and providing seamless solutions through multiple coordinated services. The company's strategic plan involves improving basic customer service, defining its brand promise around solutions, ensuring competitive products, and boosting efficiency to support integrated customer solutions by 2009.
New english on passive e book alt txt rev nov19BrianThornton36
This document provides an overview of the OnPassive business opportunity, which presents a new online marketing system driven by artificial intelligence. Some key points:
- OnPassive's product is a "smart business solution" suite that includes all the tools needed to run an online marketing business, such as rotators, funnels, email marketing, and more.
- The system is designed to automatically generate income and business growth for both active and passive members. It aims to make online marketing success accessible to everyone through its plug-and-play features and money-back guarantee.
- The founder, Ash Mufareh, has experience in affiliate marketing and online businesses. OnPassive represents a revolutionary new model
IQ ERP - SAP Greenfield Projects - Interview with James MaunderInterQuest Group
Twinings implemented a broad SAP system across its global head office and tea blending facility. The implementation was a success due to focusing on people, process, and technology. For people, Twinings built a dedicated team with both business and SAP expertise and fostered collaboration. For process, Twinings adopted rigorous project management and change control. For technology, Twinings utilized SAP solutions like Solution Manager but encountered challenges with data migration and complex modules like APO. The implementation helped improve Twinings' business processes and IT capabilities.
The document discusses corporate communication, providing examples of how language can be interpreted differently internally versus externally. It also summarizes various frameworks for understanding the structures and flows of internal and external communication. Key aspects of corporate communication discussed include management communication, marketing communication, and organizational communication.
The document outlines an approach to content and communications strategy that focuses on understanding why an organization communicates (their objectives), who they need to reach, what message to convey, and where to share that message. It emphasizes identifying the natural conversations occurring in social media and finding ways to contribute meaningfully. The approach strives to keep strategies simple, practical, and tied closely to establishing brand identity while creating value for audiences. It is led by an experienced strategist and aims to deliver measurable results through collaborative work tailored to each client's unique needs and goals.
Case Study: How Dell Converts Social Media Analytics Benefits into Strategic ...Dana Gardner
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how social media can create a gold mine of information for businesses of all sizes and how proper analytics and response can created a competitive advantage.
DataDreamin presents: A Cup of Data vol 4 - Spilling the Tea on UX Design Principles - November 12th, 2021 by Elena Migunova.
You know how to build recipes and dashboards, got your Tableau CRM skills. But how do you create EFFECTIVE dashboards? This session will teach you how you can become a design hero and give you the right tools to apply UX design principles to your Tableau CRM dashboards.
The document is an event management proposal from Flexible Solutions to a client. It proposes planning and executing a tailored event to meet the client's needs and goals. Key services include researching the client and market, planning the event, executing it, and reporting on outcomes. The cost is $20,000 covering initial research, planning, event execution, and follow-up reporting and analysis. The proposal aims to provide an event that increases the client's reach and is a success.
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Must Know Postgres Extension for DBA and Developer during MigrationMydbops
Mydbops Opensource Database Meetup 16
Topic: Must-Know PostgreSQL Extensions for Developers and DBAs During Migration
Speaker: Deepak Mahto, Founder of DataCloudGaze Consulting
Date & Time: 8th June | 10 AM - 1 PM IST
Venue: Bangalore International Centre, Bangalore
Abstract: Discover how PostgreSQL extensions can be your secret weapon! This talk explores how key extensions enhance database capabilities and streamline the migration process for users moving from other relational databases like Oracle.
Key Takeaways:
* Learn about crucial extensions like oracle_fdw, pgtt, and pg_audit that ease migration complexities.
* Gain valuable strategies for implementing these extensions in PostgreSQL to achieve license freedom.
* Discover how these key extensions can empower both developers and DBAs during the migration process.
* Don't miss this chance to gain practical knowledge from an industry expert and stay updated on the latest open-source database trends.
Mydbops Managed Services specializes in taking the pain out of database management while optimizing performance. Since 2015, we have been providing top-notch support and assistance for the top three open-source databases: MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL.
Our team offers a wide range of services, including assistance, support, consulting, 24/7 operations, and expertise in all relevant technologies. We help organizations improve their database's performance, scalability, efficiency, and availability.
Contact us: info@mydbops.com
Visit: https://www.mydbops.com/
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/mydbops
For more details and updates, please follow up the below links.
Meetup Page : https://www.meetup.com/mydbops-databa...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mydbopsofficial
Blogs: https://www.mydbops.com/blog/
Facebook(Meta): https://www.facebook.com/mydbops/
For the full video of this presentation, please visit: https://www.edge-ai-vision.com/2024/06/temporal-event-neural-networks-a-more-efficient-alternative-to-the-transformer-a-presentation-from-brainchip/
Chris Jones, Director of Product Management at BrainChip , presents the “Temporal Event Neural Networks: A More Efficient Alternative to the Transformer” tutorial at the May 2024 Embedded Vision Summit.
The expansion of AI services necessitates enhanced computational capabilities on edge devices. Temporal Event Neural Networks (TENNs), developed by BrainChip, represent a novel and highly efficient state-space network. TENNs demonstrate exceptional proficiency in handling multi-dimensional streaming data, facilitating advancements in object detection, action recognition, speech enhancement and language model/sequence generation. Through the utilization of polynomial-based continuous convolutions, TENNs streamline models, expedite training processes and significantly diminish memory requirements, achieving notable reductions of up to 50x in parameters and 5,000x in energy consumption compared to prevailing methodologies like transformers.
Integration with BrainChip’s Akida neuromorphic hardware IP further enhances TENNs’ capabilities, enabling the realization of highly capable, portable and passively cooled edge devices. This presentation delves into the technical innovations underlying TENNs, presents real-world benchmarks, and elucidates how this cutting-edge approach is positioned to revolutionize edge AI across diverse applications.
LF Energy Webinar: Carbon Data Specifications: Mechanisms to Improve Data Acc...DanBrown980551
This LF Energy webinar took place June 20, 2024. It featured:
-Alex Thornton, LF Energy
-Hallie Cramer, Google
-Daniel Roesler, UtilityAPI
-Henry Richardson, WattTime
In response to the urgency and scale required to effectively address climate change, open source solutions offer significant potential for driving innovation and progress. Currently, there is a growing demand for standardization and interoperability in energy data and modeling. Open source standards and specifications within the energy sector can also alleviate challenges associated with data fragmentation, transparency, and accessibility. At the same time, it is crucial to consider privacy and security concerns throughout the development of open source platforms.
This webinar will delve into the motivations behind establishing LF Energy’s Carbon Data Specification Consortium. It will provide an overview of the draft specifications and the ongoing progress made by the respective working groups.
Three primary specifications will be discussed:
-Discovery and client registration, emphasizing transparent processes and secure and private access
-Customer data, centering around customer tariffs, bills, energy usage, and full consumption disclosure
-Power systems data, focusing on grid data, inclusive of transmission and distribution networks, generation, intergrid power flows, and market settlement data
Your One-Stop Shop for Python Success: Top 10 US Python Development Providersakankshawande
Simplify your search for a reliable Python development partner! This list presents the top 10 trusted US providers offering comprehensive Python development services, ensuring your project's success from conception to completion.
Skybuffer SAM4U tool for SAP license adoptionTatiana Kojar
Manage and optimize your license adoption and consumption with SAM4U, an SAP free customer software asset management tool.
SAM4U, an SAP complimentary software asset management tool for customers, delivers a detailed and well-structured overview of license inventory and usage with a user-friendly interface. We offer a hosted, cost-effective, and performance-optimized SAM4U setup in the Skybuffer Cloud environment. You retain ownership of the system and data, while we manage the ABAP 7.58 infrastructure, ensuring fixed Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and exceptional services through the SAP Fiori interface.
Connector Corner: Seamlessly power UiPath Apps, GenAI with prebuilt connectorsDianaGray10
Join us to learn how UiPath Apps can directly and easily interact with prebuilt connectors via Integration Service--including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Open GenAI, and more.
The best part is you can achieve this without building a custom workflow! Say goodbye to the hassle of using separate automations to call APIs. By seamlessly integrating within App Studio, you can now easily streamline your workflow, while gaining direct access to our Connector Catalog of popular applications.
We’ll discuss and demo the benefits of UiPath Apps and connectors including:
Creating a compelling user experience for any software, without the limitations of APIs.
Accelerating the app creation process, saving time and effort
Enjoying high-performance CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations, for
seamless data management.
Speakers:
Russell Alfeche, Technology Leader, RPA at qBotic and UiPath MVP
Charlie Greenberg, host
Conversational agents, or chatbots, are increasingly used to access all sorts of services using natural language. While open-domain chatbots - like ChatGPT - can converse on any topic, task-oriented chatbots - the focus of this paper - are designed for specific tasks, like booking a flight, obtaining customer support, or setting an appointment. Like any other software, task-oriented chatbots need to be properly tested, usually by defining and executing test scenarios (i.e., sequences of user-chatbot interactions). However, there is currently a lack of methods to quantify the completeness and strength of such test scenarios, which can lead to low-quality tests, and hence to buggy chatbots.
To fill this gap, we propose adapting mutation testing (MuT) for task-oriented chatbots. To this end, we introduce a set of mutation operators that emulate faults in chatbot designs, an architecture that enables MuT on chatbots built using heterogeneous technologies, and a practical realisation as an Eclipse plugin. Moreover, we evaluate the applicability, effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on open-source chatbots, with promising results.
This talk will cover ScyllaDB Architecture from the cluster-level view and zoom in on data distribution and internal node architecture. In the process, we will learn the secret sauce used to get ScyllaDB's high availability and superior performance. We will also touch on the upcoming changes to ScyllaDB architecture, moving to strongly consistent metadata and tablets.
Discover top-tier mobile app development services, offering innovative solutions for iOS and Android. Enhance your business with custom, user-friendly mobile applications.
"Frontline Battles with DDoS: Best practices and Lessons Learned", Igor IvaniukFwdays
At this talk we will discuss DDoS protection tools and best practices, discuss network architectures and what AWS has to offer. Also, we will look into one of the largest DDoS attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure that happened in February 2022. We'll see, what techniques helped to keep the web resources available for Ukrainians and how AWS improved DDoS protection for all customers based on Ukraine experience
5th LF Energy Power Grid Model Meet-up SlidesDanBrown980551
5th Power Grid Model Meet-up
It is with great pleasure that we extend to you an invitation to the 5th Power Grid Model Meet-up, scheduled for 6th June 2024. This event will adopt a hybrid format, allowing participants to join us either through an online Mircosoft Teams session or in person at TU/e located at Den Dolech 2, Eindhoven, Netherlands. The meet-up will be hosted by Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), a research university specializing in engineering science & technology.
Power Grid Model
The global energy transition is placing new and unprecedented demands on Distribution System Operators (DSOs). Alongside upgrades to grid capacity, processes such as digitization, capacity optimization, and congestion management are becoming vital for delivering reliable services.
Power Grid Model is an open source project from Linux Foundation Energy and provides a calculation engine that is increasingly essential for DSOs. It offers a standards-based foundation enabling real-time power systems analysis, simulations of electrical power grids, and sophisticated what-if analysis. In addition, it enables in-depth studies and analysis of the electrical power grid’s behavior and performance. This comprehensive model incorporates essential factors such as power generation capacity, electrical losses, voltage levels, power flows, and system stability.
Power Grid Model is currently being applied in a wide variety of use cases, including grid planning, expansion, reliability, and congestion studies. It can also help in analyzing the impact of renewable energy integration, assessing the effects of disturbances or faults, and developing strategies for grid control and optimization.
What to expect
For the upcoming meetup we are organizing, we have an exciting lineup of activities planned:
-Insightful presentations covering two practical applications of the Power Grid Model.
-An update on the latest advancements in Power Grid -Model technology during the first and second quarters of 2024.
-An interactive brainstorming session to discuss and propose new feature requests.
-An opportunity to connect with fellow Power Grid Model enthusiasts and users.
Essentials of Automations: Exploring Attributes & Automation ParametersSafe Software
Building automations in FME Flow can save time, money, and help businesses scale by eliminating data silos and providing data to stakeholders in real-time. One essential component to orchestrating complex automations is the use of attributes & automation parameters (both formerly known as “keys”). In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll ever build an Automation without using these components, but what exactly are they?
Attributes & automation parameters enable the automation author to pass data values from one automation component to the next. During this webinar, our FME Flow Specialists will cover leveraging the three types of these output attributes & parameters in FME Flow: Event, Custom, and Automation. As a bonus, they’ll also be making use of the Split-Merge Block functionality.
You’ll leave this webinar with a better understanding of how to maximize the potential of automations by making use of attributes & automation parameters, with the ultimate goal of setting your enterprise integration workflows up on autopilot.
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift.pdfTosin Akinosho
Monitoring and Managing Anomaly Detection on OpenShift
Overview
Dive into the world of anomaly detection on edge devices with our comprehensive hands-on tutorial. This SlideShare presentation will guide you through the entire process, from data collection and model training to edge deployment and real-time monitoring. Perfect for those looking to implement robust anomaly detection systems on resource-constrained IoT/edge devices.
Key Topics Covered
1. Introduction to Anomaly Detection
- Understand the fundamentals of anomaly detection and its importance in identifying unusual behavior or failures in systems.
2. Understanding Edge (IoT)
- Learn about edge computing and IoT, and how they enable real-time data processing and decision-making at the source.
3. What is ArgoCD?
- Discover ArgoCD, a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes, and its role in deploying applications on edge devices.
4. Deployment Using ArgoCD for Edge Devices
- Step-by-step guide on deploying anomaly detection models on edge devices using ArgoCD.
5. Introduction to Apache Kafka and S3
- Explore Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming and Amazon S3 for scalable storage solutions.
6. Viewing Kafka Messages in the Data Lake
- Learn how to view and analyze Kafka messages stored in a data lake for better insights.
7. What is Prometheus?
- Get to know Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, and its application in monitoring edge devices.
8. Monitoring Application Metrics with Prometheus
- Detailed instructions on setting up Prometheus to monitor the performance and health of your anomaly detection system.
9. What is Camel K?
- Introduction to Camel K, a lightweight integration framework built on Apache Camel, designed for Kubernetes.
10. Configuring Camel K Integrations for Data Pipelines
- Learn how to configure Camel K for seamless data pipeline integrations in your anomaly detection workflow.
11. What is a Jupyter Notebook?
- Overview of Jupyter Notebooks, an open-source web application for creating and sharing documents with live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text.
12. Jupyter Notebooks with Code Examples
- Hands-on examples and code snippets in Jupyter Notebooks to help you implement and test anomaly detection models.
The Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) invited Taylor Paschal, Knowledge & Information Management Consultant at Enterprise Knowledge, to speak at a Knowledge Management Lunch and Learn hosted on June 12, 2024. All Office of Administration staff were invited to attend and received professional development credit for participating in the voluntary event.
The objectives of the Lunch and Learn presentation were to:
- Review what KM ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’
- Understand the value of KM and the benefits of engaging
- Define and reflect on your “what’s in it for me?”
- Share actionable ways you can participate in Knowledge - - Capture & Transfer
Have you ever been confused by the myriad of choices offered by AWS for hosting a website or an API?
Lambda, Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail, Amplify, S3 (and more!) can each host websites + APIs. But which one should we choose?
Which one is cheapest? Which one is fastest? Which one will scale to meet our needs?
Join me in this session as we dive into each AWS hosting service to determine which one is best for your scenario and explain why!
Freshworks Rethinks NoSQL for Rapid Scaling & Cost-EfficiencyScyllaDB
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Case Study: How Cloud Extend for Salesforce Integrates Complex Sales Efforts for PSA Insurance & Financial Services
1. Case Study: How Cloud Extend for Salesforce Integrates
Complex Sales Efforts for PSA Insurance & Financial
Services
A sponsored podcast discussion on how a cloud integration helped a major financial services
company provide productivity tools for account executives.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Active Endpoints
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on creating business
process integration, extension, and coordination even in a diverse cloud-
services environment.
We'll examine a case study that shows how account executives for a financial
services firm are integrating their sales and fulfillment efforts across
Salesforce.com customer relationship management (CRM) and other
business applications resources.
And, we'll see how the new Cloud Extend for Salesforce solution from Active Endpoints further
supports a range of business development and consulting achievements. These managed
processes, in essence, bind together critical sales and financial product delivery goals to better
support a long-term business engagement.
I'm here with the IT Director and the Marketing Director from PSA Insurance & Financial
Services to better understand how they've accomplished their vision for greater control and
management of diverse and dynamic sales and consulting processes using Cloud Extend for
Salesforce. [Disclosure: Active Endpoints is a sponsor of BriefingsDiret podcasts.]
Please join me now in welcoming our panel. We're here with Andrew Bartels, IT Director for
PSA Insurance and Financial Services. Welcome to the show, Andrew.
Andrew Bartels: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: We’re also here with Justin Hoffman, Marketing Director for PSA Insurance and
Financial Services. Welcome Justin.
Justin Hoffman: Thank you very much, Dana, glad to be here.
Gardner: We're also here with Eric Egertson. He is the Vice President, Business Development
and Strategic Accounts at Active Endpoints. Welcome, Eric.
2. Eric Egertson: Thanks Dana, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Gardner: It seems like you at PSA have been thinking for quite some time about how to do
things better and it sounds like you’ve had success with Salesforce in moving into a software-as-
a-service (SaaS) and cloud services capability and recognizing some of the advantages that
comes with that, but it seems like something was missing.
I’d like to go first to Justin. What was it that you wanted to do as marketing director? What was
missing from the way in which you were engaging with your clients? We're also going to find out
some more about PSA in a moment?
Stalled initiative
Hoffman: We actually had tried a Salesforce implementation two or so years ago and we found
that our adoption was not nearly what we would have hoped it to be. There were several reasons
for that. One, we really didn’t customize Salesforce to the degree that we
needed to. Two, there wasn't integration with any other systems. And, three, the
participation was voluntary. There was some interest, but it was somewhat
sporadic, and overall the initiative just petered out.
We did know that that having right CRM for PSA is critical for how we do
business and could help us capitalize on some lost opportunities and better
manage our existing client base.
We didn’t give up on the effort. We said to ourselves that we needed to get this right the second
time. We were open to staying with Salesforce and we were open to looking at other CRMs, but
we’ve learned a lot on our first round and we knew that we had to do better the second time.
Gardner: And what, in a nutshell, was missing? What is it that you really weren’t getting from
this that you wish you had?
Hoffman: We were sitting in a room with the whiteboard and said, "What should this thing be.
What should this CRM system do for us, our account executives, our sales and service people
that are going to be using it?" One of the things that really rung through was that it needed to be
easy and unintimidating.
We have some people who are very progressive technology users and they very much embrace it.
And we have other portions of the population for whom there is a bit of an intimidation factor.
We knew that if we did it right, we'd have to find a way to wash that away, put things in plain
English, make it simple and intuitive for people, and that would help drive adoption.
Gardner: As I understand it, this has been a challenge because you have a very diverse group of
services. You span insurance and financial services. You've been around for over 80 years. Tell us
a little bit about PSA, what you do, and then why it’s been such a challenge given the breadth
and depth of your portfolio?
3. Hoffman: We're an independent, multidiscipline financial services firm based in Hunt Valley,
Maryland. We also have two satellite offices, one in York, Pennsylvania and one in the DC Metro
Area, and we do a lot of things for a lot of different people.
On the business side of the house, we provide property and casualty insurance for businesses.
We’re also brokers and consultants for employee benefit plans and retirement plans.
For individuals we offer every kind of insurance you could ever need, from homeowners and
auto, to life, long-term care, and disability. We also have a private-client division that serves very
up-market consumers, those that have multiple homes, exotic cars, special collections, and need
very sophisticated insurance programs and advice. Finally, we also offer wealth management
services.
Different audiences
We do a whole lot of different things for a whole lot of different audiences. For organizations
that are laser-focused, that are in one industry, that serve one specific audience, I’d imagine
pretty much everything is easier for them. We need to develop systems, protocols, plans, sales
systems, and things of that nature that can work in all these diverse
circumstances to support these different clients and support them all
well.
Gardner: Let's go to Andrew. As IT Director, you were hearing what
your marketing director was saying. I imagine that you were eager to
try to find a solution for him. What is it that you did in terms of trying to fulfill this, and how did
you end up being able to get closer to the true vision that he had?
Bartels: As Justin has very eloquently put, we really present a value proposition at PSA, which
is a truly integrated set of services. That’s a phrase or a word that you hear a lot, but
unfortunately, in my experience, a lot of organizations fail to deliver where the rubber meets the
road, which ultimately is the actual transactional systems that they have in
place. What you find is that a lot of those systems are completely segregated,
and we at PSA faced that challenge. We obviously have a lot of transactional
systems on the back end to support various business units that present the
services to our clients.
Ultimately from Justin’s vision and from the corporation’s vision, we wanted a
system that could bring all of this together. We went out and looked at a number
of different products knowing all the time that we had Salesforce in house, but
that we had a troublesome initial rollout. Ultimately, we came to a conclusion that Salesforce
was the right product for us, but we really had to roll it out in a different way, shape, or form.
Part of Justin’s vision, though, was that he and Senior Vice President-Business Development Ed
Kushlis felt that even though Salesforce is a relatively easy user interface, because of the
4. challenges that some of our users have, they felt it had to be easier. They felt it just had to, as I
like to say, lead us down the garden path.
So Justin and Ed brought the idea to me of what we call a "Warm-up Plan," and I'm sure Justin is
going to address that more, but the more I looked at this, the more I realized that, given native
Salesforce functionality, what they wanted to do wasn’t going to be possible. We weren’t going
to be able to do it without a lot of custom code.
This was a path that I wasn’t really all that keen to go down, because in my past experience,
when you attempt to custom code, a lot of money is invested upfront to develop a relatively static
product. In my experience, the idea didn’t stay static. Ultimately, people wanted to change what
had been created.
So you’d invested a lot of money to create something that then had to be changed and modified
again, and I was very, very against this concept. Justin, would you say we had our moments
there?
Hoffman: That’s right. We felt like we really knew what we wanted. A very large portion of
what we do is work with the salespeople to coach them, to help them make sure that they stay on
top of their opportunities, and really work their leads to fruition.
So we felt so strongly about it, but when we were presenting Andrew with our need, there didn’t
seem to be an option that made sense. Once he educated us in what it really meant to bring to life
our vision, we started to get our heads around it and to recognize that it wasn’t going to be
something that we weren’t going to be able to build one time, invest all of these resources in this
code and development, and then never be able to touch it again, never be able to evolve it.
Fluid and flexible
Just knowing us, knowing our organization, the way we're opportunistic, the way markets shift,
the way dynamics change, we needed to be fluid and have flexibility. Andrew helped us
understand how we were really going to be painting ourselves into corner, if we were to push
forward with the custom code route.
Gardner: So Andrew, you decided not to go custom code. You wanted this to be fluid and
dynamic. You wanted the folks to be able to relate to it, tease out the value and then improve on
that, sort of an iterative improvement over time. What did you find? What’s fulfilled that need?
Bartels: First, we looked at a product from Salesforce, which was something called Visual
Process Manager, which I saw demoed at Dreamforce in San Francisco last year for the first
time. I was very excited when I initially saw it. After we delved into it, for various reasons,
including the maturity of the product and the fact that it wasn’t a true cloud-based product, we
soon realized that Visual Process Manager at that time wasn't going to fulfill our needs. We really
needed something that was fully integrated into Salesforce.
5. As an organization, we spent a tremendous amount of time and resources getting our users
comfortable with the Salesforce UI. I had obviously invested a lot of time myself in looking at
options.
Finally, I'm quite a follower of Twitter. There are a number of people that I follow that I respect. I
came across a tweet about something called Cloud Extend. It was literally one tweet by
somebody that I follow on Twitter.
I clicked through and there I was on the Cloud Extend website. As I read about it, I suddenly said
-- obviously dealing with a webpage I clicked through to from a tweet -- "You know what, if this
does what they said can do, this is exactly what we need in order to achieve the goal of creating
warm-up plans" that Justin referred to earlier.
I filled out the web form, and the next day in the office, I called Justin and Ed into my office and
said, "You know guys, I’ve got to show you something." I must admit I was almost giddy. I said I
don’t want to get ahead of myself yet, but if this product does what I think it does, they’ve nailed
it. This is exactly what we at PSA have been looking for to help drive adoption.
I can’t emphasize enough how important driving adoption is when it comes to the
implementation of any CRM, never mind Salesforce. At PSA, we're dealing with very successful
individuals. We're not dealing with anybody that’s got a broken system, that’s doing something
that doesn’t work. Every single one of our associates has been successful in his career. So our
objective with rolling out Salesforce was to improve their effectiveness, to make them more
productive.
As Justin mentioned earlier, adoption is tough. When I looked at what I saw is the potential of
Cloud Extend, as it was defined there, I thought "Wow, this really is going to help us drive
adoption across the organization."
Gardner: I’d like to hear more about that adoption, but I think it’s important for us to dig in a
little bit deeper on what Cloud Extend for Salesforce is and does. So, let’s go to Eric.
Eric, how did this product come about? I'm sure you are probably delighted to hear the way that
it’s being described. But give us a little history about how you came to realize what was missing
and how an organization like PSA could benefit?
Moving to the cloud
Egertson: Dana, I’d be happy to do that. Andrew’s comments here really illustrate the benefit of
moving to the cloud for business process management (BPM) software like the software that
Active Endpoints develops.
Active Endpoints has been developing a commercial-grade process automation platform called
ActiveVOS since 2003, and our customers use this process automation platform to develop really
6. high-value applications. They deploy those applications on premises, and they get very high
return on investment (ROI) and very high value from those applications.
The barrier, though, to broader and faster adoption of products like
ActiveVOS is that with on-premise software you have to go through
acquiring the licenses and getting the capital expense approved and you also
have to go in and interface ActiveVOS to the systems that you want to use
in your process automation.
By moving to the cloud, there are two big benefits, and we’ve heard Andrew talk about those so
far. One is that you can get started at much lower cost and much faster because you don’t have to
provision hardware. You don’t have to acquire licenses through CAPEX expenditures, but
probably, even more importantly, Active Endpoints does the interfacing of ActiveVOS to the
systems that you want to use for process automation.
So with our product, Cloud Extend for Salesforce, which we are formally introducing at
Dreamforce at the end of August 2011, we built that product on top of the commercial-grade
platform, ActiveVOS, and we pre-integrated it with the Salesforce web services interfaces.
So people like Andrew and Justin can get started with the product very quickly. They don’t have
to worry about any integration or interfacing. They can just start building out their process
automation flows, testing them and, as Andrew said, you can quickly change those around. Those
interfaces use all open standards.
So they are very reusable, and it gives you a flexible platform, where Andrew and Justin can
tweak, change, and modify their process flows. It’s all done in the cloud. They don’t have to buy
licenses, but more importantly, they don’t have to integrate the services to the systems they want
to use in their process automation flows.
Gardner: When I first saw the demo of this, what jumped out at me was the fact that you don’t
know that you're in Cloud Extend. You feel like you're still in Salesforce that there is this visual
acuity, because I think you leverage the application programming interfaces (APIs) that you live
and breathe Salesforce, which is fine, but you get a lot more in the process -- and I guess that’s a
pun.
What is this visual benefit and how does that extend to other process elements that you might
want to bring into Salesforce that you couldn’t otherwise?
Egertson: Andrew, and Justin can speak to the user experience as well, but the user experience,
when using Cloud Extend, is directly integrated into the Salesforce.com UI. As Andrew
mentioned, you don’t have to go out of Salesforce at all. As you're working on something in
Salesforce, there is a section in the Salesforce screen, where you can choose what type of process
flow you want to run as the user. You just click on a button and then you're stepped through a
series of screens, all of which appear within a pane within the Salesforce UI.
7. Direct integration
Developing the process flows is also integrated directly into the Salesforce UI. You go in and,
through a set of guidance trees, set up the series of steps that you want to walk a sales rep or
producer through. The sales manager, somebody like Justin working hand-in-hand with Andrew,
do that directly in the Salesforce user interface.
Gardner: Let's go back to Justin. You had this great thing that Andrew developed for you come
in. How is it that using Cloud Extend with Salesforce with your account execs led them down
this garden path? What did it do that got this adoption jump started and then into overdrive?
Hoffman: We believe ease of use to be a huge driver in adoption, being able to just ask questions
in plain English, present simple answers for them to choose or select, which then drives the next
set of questions that they’re going to be asked.
It just couldn’t be easier. It couldn’t be less intimidating. It washes away any anxiety that people
might have or any perception of "This Salesforce thing is a pain to use." The way that you’re
able to craft these guides is so straightforward, so easy to use, all that goes away.
I liken it to the concept of the airport kiosk. When you go to check-in, you punch in a few pieces
of information and all you’re doing is answering the questions that are presented clearly and
simply on the screen. There is actually very complex work that’s being done behind the scenes,
but you, as the user, don’t have to have any comfort level with technology, it's just there. There
are questions. You answer them, and all the information falls into the right place.
That concept is working for us and Salesforce and it just drives the general perception of, "This
thing is really easy to use and we’re getting all the information where it needs to be." All of the
reporting, all of the workflows, all of the views are populated sufficiently to support how we sell.
I’d like to elaborate on how we’re going to be using the warm-up plans. We knew that we didn’t
want to automate to the degree that we take this thinking out of the hands of our account
executives.
We're in a business where there is very long lead cycle. You might meet someone and you might
not get a first meeting with them where you actually come in and talk to them about their
business, what you can do for them for many, many months. After that, you might not get the
business for a year-and-a-half.
So it's really important to stay in touch with people, to build trust, to establish credibility, and to
work yourself along this very long lead cycle to stay focused, stay driving ahead, to get yourself
that first appointment. That’s where people really shine. Our hit ratio is quite high, once people
have gotten that first appointment.
These guides are really good about prompting people to take action, giving them options as far as
how they’d like to warm up this lead. Use your discretion as a salesperson. Are you going to
8. make a phone call? Then go ahead and here’s some coaching for that phone call. Are you going
to send an email? Well, we make it really, really easy to send an HTML email through
Salesforce. Are you going to invite them to one of our proprietary events? We make it really easy
to do that through our guides.
Guiding, not forcing
But, we don’t tell them how to heir prospecting and we’re not directly reaching out to the
prospect without our account executives because they know the relationship. They know the
stage it's in. They know the conversations they’ve had with the people. They know their pain
points. We’re really guiding them, but we’re not forcing them. We’re not overriding. We’re
respecting the fact that these are seasoned sales professionals.
Gardner: Back to you Andrew, I get this about how the sales folks, the account execs, can work
this the way that they work, that they don’t have to adapt their behavior and patterns to the
application. There is much of a meeting between them. At the same time, I’ve heard that as IT
Director, you didn’t have to get involved with defining how that would happen.
So help me understand how that works? How is it that you can outsource this, have it as a true
SaaS service, but also get that level of granular adaptability to these individual wants and
requirements?
Bartels: I think everybody can appreciate that. The corporate IT departments really have a lot
going on. Nobody is sitting around doing nothing. One of the challenges that many organizations
confront, when marketing or business development comes to them with an IT need, is where
does that fall in the priority queue when it comes to the priorities that are in front of IT?
One of the things was really refreshing about Cloud Extend is that it literally is as simple as
point-and-click. I am sure a lot of people listening to this have installed apps from the Salesforce
AppExchange. Getting Cloud Extend up and running in your Salesforce Org really is as simple
as installing one of those managed packages from the AppExchange. You click through it, and
boom, bang, it's done. It was amazing to me that it was as easy as they said it would be, and it
truly, truly was.
It's as simple as dropping the Cloud Extend UI into the various object pages that you’re looking
to use it in. Something that is really worth mentioning is that Cloud Extend is truly cross-object.
You get a lot of apps out there that you can use in leads, but you can't use in accounts, or you can
use them in opportunities and you can't use them in leads.
One of the things that was amazing about Cloud Extend is they thought through that. They said,
"Look, this workflow engine can be applied to almost any object in Salesforce and we need to
make it point-and-click easy to get it in and make it happen." From my point of view, it's the
ability to easily deploy an application this powerful straight into the Salesforce Org and then be
able to hand it over to the marketing and business development folks and say, "Go wild."
9. Justin and I have had a conversation backwards and forwards about how much support they
would need. The wonderful thing is that when you install Cloud Extend straight into Org, it
comes with a set of predefined guides that just work. You can pull up the guide design and say,
"Okay, how did they do this?" It literally is point-and-click.
Salesforce likes to sell itself as 80 percent clicks, 20 percent code. I can say that Cloud Extend,
to my amazement, was truly point-and-click. You don’t even have to install a separate application
onto a PC. The entire experience, both from the user point of view and from the designer point of
view, exists within the Salesforce UI. It is simply another app to click and select.
It ties into all your Salesforce profile permissions, and it just works. From an IT point of view,
from having to support the myriad of applications that we support, I can't tell you how refreshing
it is. I think Justin would agree with me here. If you can design a process on a whiteboard, you
can most likely design a process using Cloud Extend and the guide designer within the UI of
Salesforce.
Simple deployment
So from our point of view, the fact that we could deploy a workflow tool with the lineage that
Cloud Extend has, coming from its roots in Socrates and things like that, and plug it in without
deploying a single server or installing a single application was amazing for me and somebody
that was responsible for prioritizing the tasks that my team need to focus on.
This was truly eye-opening and I said to Justin that when I see products like this I really realize
that the cloud is coming of age. This is the future and this is what the future will look like.
Hoffman: To piggyback on what Andrew is saying here, I'm really excited that I'm going to be
able to sit down with, say, our Senior Vice President-Business Development Ed Kushlis and talk
through new ideas, changes in markets, and new opportunities. We can sit down with these
guides and play with them, and you don’t have to have an IT background. I don’t know anything
about code and I don’t have to, all I have to understand is what opportunity we’re seeing in the
market and how our people sell.
We can get a good way down the road of building a guide without having to grab Andrew and
engage him at least on the front-end. He is someone at the organization whose time is in very
high demand. He is not your average IT person and when I say that, he has got a great strategic
mind. He has got good business sense, it's true, and there are a lot of different people from the
ops side, from the business development side, from the administrative side who are coming to
him and asking for his help, his assistance on how we streamline things and how we can be
smarter about things at PSA.
So if Ed and I have to get in that queue, well, we have to get in that queue. Alternatively, we can
get right in, work on these guides and get ourselves a good way towards creating these new
guides that will be dropped into Salesforce. If we can’t get it 100 percent ourselves, we are going
to get it pretty darn close. That gives us a lot of freedom and a lot of agility.
10. Gardner: Thanks for that, Justin. Let’s go to you, Eric. It sounds like you are making Andrew
look good because he doesn’t have to go through lot of clicks and spin his wheels getting this
thing running. You're making Justin look good because he is able to help his sales executives do
their job better. And you're making Salesforce look good, because you're able to exploit
Salesforce and all the resources that they have added to it and the single sign on, what have you.
So tell us little bit, Eric, what is going to happen at Dreamforce? We're here in August, and it’s
coming up fast. What’s going to happen at Dreamforce and where do you go next with this?
Egertson: At Dreamforce, at the end of August 2011, we'll make Cloud Extend commercially
available. We've been working with PSA in our early access program and, as you’ve heard,
they’ve had some success there rolling out the warm-up plans using Cloud Extend. I really liked
what Andrew said toward the end of his last comment there, where cloud computing is what
enables us to deliver the ease of use that customers always expect, but oftentimes do not receive.
If we had to roll this out all on premise and then have somebody like Andrew assign a
development team to make the interfaces work, that’s a big barrier to adoption. That’s a big
delay. By delivering this in the cloud, pre-integrated with Salesforce, it all just works. We’re able
to get our customers up and running quickly.
Back to your question though, Dana, at Dreamforce, the product will become commercially
available. We expect to sign up many customers at the show and immediately thereafter, we will
go live with this.
Cloud enabled
All of the Cloud Extend technology is already cloud enabled. It’s all based on open standards,
knows all about web services. It’s multi-tenanted, so that we can host hundreds of customers and
all of the data is segregated. It’s mobile-enabled. All of Cloud Extend guides will run on an iPad
just as well as on laptop or a desktop and it’s socially enabled.
We work with Salesforce Chatter. We work with Jigsaw, and we can work with LinkedIn. So all
of those things are there, as far as where we will take the product. We will continue to develop
along the lines of social and mobile, but we also have the capability to pull in other SaaS
applications.
Just as we’ve improved the usability and the sophistication of what you can do with Salesforce,
we plan to do that for other SaaS applications as well. Cloud Extend for Salesforce is built on a
commercial-grade development platform, and we can very easily, almost trivially, port this to
other SaaS applications to enable process automation within any SaaS application.
In terms of where we'll take this, we'll keep our eye on the trends in mobile computing and social
computing, as well as the plethora of SaaS applications that are out there. We'll be enabling
process automation and workflow in those SaaS applications as well.
11. Gardner: So Eric, the big question for me is, you are able to provide these process innovation
and flexibility benefits within those specific SaaS applications. How about across them? Is there
going to be an opportunity to extend business process value among and between different SaaS
that would be sort of that multiple cloud of clouds integration capability?
Egertson: That’s exactly the big picture, Dana. You’ve hit the nail on the head there. Even today,
as we work with PSA and other Cloud Extend for Salesforce customers, if they need to reach out
of Salesforce to another SaaS application or to an on-premises application again because the
underlying technology is our ActiveVOS process automation platform, it’s very easy for us to
enable that.
You can envision, in the very near future, an ecosystem where Cloud Extend is set up to integrate
with an interface to many different SaaS applications. With a little consulting work from us,
we're able to interface that to on-premise applications and do exactly what you described, Dana,
which would be to integrate across cloud applications, from a workflow or process automation
perspective.
You would probably always have one SaaS application as your host, say Salesforce, but it would
be pulling data from other systems, perhaps NetSuite, if it’s an ERP system, or Workday for HR
information. But, the host SaaS application could be one of those other applications that pulls
data from Salesforce.
The future, and it’s a near future for us, is that we will enable integration and process automation
across SaaS applications in the cloud.
Gardner: We're just about out of time. I want to circle back to Andrew and Justin. I know it’s
early, I know you are early adopters and it’s hard to quantify benefits when you’ve got such a
long lead value proposition that you are focused on, but are there any metrics of success here?
Do you have any either anecdotal or quantitative measurement that you can point to and say, this
is working for us in the following way?
Sales statistics
Hoffman: As you pointed out, it's a little bit early to point to that, but when you talk about the
metrics that mean something to us, there’s something that we knew to be intuitively true that I
came across in an article, and I’d like to read it to you. These are just some quick stats regarding
sales, what it takes, and where actually sales come from. They very much back up the concept of
the warm-up plan.
Again, these warm-up plans not only help guide people towards what they are going to do, but
they are going to keep people on track. They are going to keep people diligent about their follow-
up, so I’ll read them off to you quickly.
12. About 48 percent of salespeople never follow-up with the prospect, these are not industry
specific or PSA specific, they are just general sales stats. So, 48 percent of people never follow-
up with the prospect. Only 25 percent make a second contact. Only 12 percent make three
contacts. Only 10 percent make more than three contacts.
Now, if you look at where sales come from, only 2 percent of sales are made on the second
contact, 5 percent on the third, 10 percent on the fourth, and 80 percent of sales are made
between the fifth and twelfth contact.
Knowing that to be true in our guts and then to see these stats that we have just recently come
across, it makes us very certain that having these warm-up plans and the other guides that are
going to be available to us now are going to be huge difference makers for PSA.
Bartels: From my point of view, I look at the amount of investment of time and resources that
we have put into integrating our back-end systems and bringing data that is critical to the whole
sales process into Salesforce, any tool, Cloud Extend being one of them, that really allows us to
get the maximum return on investment on what we have done with Salesforce is huge. It’s
absolutely huge.
Anybody who's used Salesforce, customized Salesforce, and added custom fields that are specific
to their vertical realize very quickly that Salesforce can become a very deep product. Cloud
Extend really enables us to ensure that our account executives, even though they may not be
technology efficient, are really applying best practices when it comes to utilizing Salesforce and
collecting the information that we as an organization know is absolutely critical to collect.
So anything that helps and makes that process simpler is going to drive return on investment,
both in Cloud Extend, but most of all in the huge investment that we've put into Salesforce.
That’s just a big, big plus for us at PSA.
Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we're going to have to leave it there. You have been listening to
a sponsored podcast discussion on the new Cloud Extend for Salesforce solution from Active
Endpoints. We've seen how it’s enabled PSA Insurance & Financial Services to manage their
diverse processes and bind together critical sales and financial product delivery resources for
better business results.
I’d like to thank our guests. We have been joined here by Andrew Bartels, IT Director at PSA.
Thank you so much, Andrew.
Bartels: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: We have also been here with Justin Hoffman, Marketing Director at PSA. Thanks so
much, Justin.
Hoffman: My pleasure. Thank you.
13. Gardner: And lastly, Eric Egertson, he is the Vice President, Business Development and
Strategic Accounts at Active Endpoints. Thank you, Eric.
Egertson: Dana, thank you very much.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for
listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Active Endpoints
A sponsored podcast discussion on how a cloud integration helped a major financial services
company provide productivity tools for account executives. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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