78% of the companies have dedicated social media teams and only 26% of the companies have social media as the part of their marketing strategy. This shows that, they don't recognize the value of social media marketing and they don't trust social media data for decision making. Companies using social media for marketing or promotion mainly use two strategies for monitoring:

• Restrict to hash tag mentions: A strategy that leads to high precision at the cost of many missed mentions.
• Unrestricted keyword search: An approach that could generate numerous false positives.

But these strategies lead to false results. Now the question arises how to monitor social media accurately?

Rohini Srihari (Chief Scientist at SmartFocus and a contributor to Econsultancy) in her article “how reliable are social analytics?” talked about several ways for monitoring social media accurately. Some of them are:

• For comparison across brands and different content sources, you should consider the various features like share of voice, sentiments, sudden spikes etc.
• Sentimental analysis is best for analyzing trends like change in public perception.
• For location based analytics, a researcher should ensure that a sufficient number of samples have been obtained.

To know more follow this link: https://econsultancy.com/blog/66466-how-reliable-are-social-analytics/

In an environment where low interest rates are prevailing in US, investors are again facing the famous question of all times – Where to invest?

Here, an interesting option has now come to the rescue of investors that provides a part of the answer to the above question i.e. Mezzanine Debt in the Commercial Real Estate segment.

“Mezzanine debt is a fixed-income product that produces a consistent dividend yield and is secured by the borrower’s interest in the underlying property.”

As any other investment, mezzanine debt also has virtues as well as risks. Its virtues that have made it a favorable choice include:

• High single-digit to low double-digit coupons
• Backed by hard assets
• Occupies commercial real estate segment where individual investor is under-allocated
• Helps in diversification of portfolios
• There is transparency involved
• Demand for such high-yield subordinate loans is expected to increase
• Reduced lending by banks on commercial property

The risks that need to be considered before investing in this option include:

• Interest rate risk
• Downturn in real estate performance

Thus, mezzanine debt offers a great opportunity for investors as its demand is showing an increasing trend, but its pros and cons have to be kept in mind while making the investment decision.

To know more, please read this highly informative article by Bruce Batkin, CEO and co-founder of Terra Capital Partners, at fa-mag.com:

http://www.fa-mag.com/news/the-case-for-mezzanine-debt-21503.html?section=3

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

- John F. Kennedy

Change management is an important part of today’s business. Poor change management can lead to a loss of an important opportunity. This problem can be handled by equipping project managers with the skills and abilities to manage change. But are they ready for it?

According to Mike DePrisco, Vice President for Academic and Educational Programs at PMI, “We’ve seen the losses shrink over the past nine years. Part of this is due to having more engaged sponsors for change initiatives, but it also has to do with learning leaders making sure project managers have better skills and strategies.”

For training the project managers in this, PMI relies on the PMI Talent Triangle which includes the following 3 elements that lead to their holistic development:

• Technical Project Management
• Leadership
• Strategic and Business Management

Besides these, Satish Subramanian, author of “Transforming Business with Program Management”, identifies lack of sustainable vision as a problem which change leaders face. For this, he has suggested few management tactics that learning leaders can apply with project managers in their change implementation plan. Some of them are:

• Articulate the plan
• Deliver the right training
• Get leadership on board

To know more, please read the following article by Kate Everson, Associate Editor at Chief Learning Officer, at clomedia.com:

http://www.clomedia.com/articles/6249-turn-project-managers-into-change-managers

Millennials are the young adult between the age group of 18-34 years and according to reports total buying power will fetch $1.3trillion annually.  Millennials are diverse in terms of attitude, behavior and language, due to which marketers are facing problem in targeting them. According to Sujan Patel (Entrepreneur and Marketer, VP of Marketing at When I Work), there are some common characteristics shared by all of them. He discussed some tips on targeting millennials, they are:
• You should have an attractive mobile marketing
• Target social groups, instead of life stages
• Be relevant and engaging
To know more about these tips, please follow this link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246199

In this competitive world, most of the organizations are struggling to attract customers. They are advertising on TV, newspaper, billboards. But, they are not getting success.  Here are some successful marketing strategies used to target the right customer at the right place and at the right time are:

·         Content marketing is one of the most powerful marketing strategies. This includes articles on website, e-newsletters, videos and articles on other website.

·         Make advertisement look visually good by adding pictures. According to a recent survey by Hubspot A/B, images used in tweets increase clicks by 36%, increase retweets by 41%, increase in leads by 55%, and increase visit by 31%.

·         Use responsive design, website technology for detecting the customer’s device and providing reformatted website according to the screen size.

·         For transparency, use social media marketing.

·         And at last, try to relate with target customers.

To know please follow this link:  http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/competitors-arent-01222954

IOT refers to sensors that communicate over the Internet without human intervention. According to McKinsey and the Global Semiconductor Alliance report, surveyed 30 GSA members who were senior executives at semiconductor companies, “IOT has potential, but it has several hurdles which can delay it.” These hurdles are:
• Security and data privacy
• Customer demand
• Limited consensus on standards
• Market fragmentation
• Elusive new revenue sources
• Technology shortcomings
To know more about these hurdles and how they can affect IOT implementation processes, read an article “Internet Of Things: 6 Obstacles” given in the informationweek.com by Thomas Claburn (Writer at InformationWeek) at: http://www.informationweek.com/mobile/mobile-devices/internet-of-things-6-obstacles/d/d-id/1320434

In today's competitive world, many organizations are planning to apply DevOps. DevOps is the practice of operations. In this practice, development engineers participate together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support and it is also the collision of two major related trends: Agile Operations and collaboration between development and operations staff. Continuous improvement in devops can help organizations to be efficient and innovative. Here are some practices used by DevOps professionals to turn monitoring practices into an important part of their fast-paced product delivery cycles. They are: Consolidate your tool set, Enrich data with contextual information, Rethink the reporting of operational problems, Automate what doesn’t scale, Applying knowledge based algorithms for monitoring data gives you actionable result. To know more about these practices and devops, follow: http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/17/4-ways-to-radically-improve-app-monitoring-with-devops/

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A’s) are an important part of the financial scenario. Every day, new deals are made across the globe and companies are brought together. But, the fact remains that only few such deals succeed. So, why do M&A’s happen? What are those special elements that differentiate the successful deals from the failed projects?

The answer to these questions is given in the following article at Investopedia.com, where Elvis Picardo, Vice President-Research and Portfolio Manager at Global Securities Corporation, Vancouver, explains why companies undertake M&A transactions; gives the reasons for their failures that are Integration risk, Overpayment and Culture Clash; states the impact of M&A on capital structure, financial position, market reaction and future growth; and finally, presents some examples of well-known M&A transactions.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102914/how-mergers-and-acquisitions-can-affect-company.asp

A Financial model is a model that represents the financial operations or financial statements of a company in terms of its business parameters and forecasts future financial performance.

-NASDAQ

Financial modeling is one of the most used tools to supplement financial decisions. Be it, valuation of something as small as assets and liabilities of a business or something as large as the whole business itself or an altogether new business, financial modeling is an essential part.

Read the following article by Sui Chuan at ValueEdge to know more about the pros and cons of this holy grail of finance:

http://www.value-edge.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-financial-modelling/

The FICC (fixed income, currencies & commodities) trading business has seen its ups and down. It’s no longer as attractive as it used to be prior to the Global Recession of 2008. But, this does not mean that it has lost its charm. In first quarter of 2015, U.S. investment banks have seen a notable increase in the FICC trading revenues. These have shown a more than double increase than Q4, 2014 revenues. This increase can be attributed to the increase in debt and the removal of cap from Swiss Franc.

The following article at Forbes.com byTrefis Team reports the total as well as FICC revenues of five largest investment banks – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch and Citigroup. These figures show JPMorgan’s dominance in the FICC trading as it has highest revenues and lowest volatility. Apart from that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are the only two other banks that rely more heavily on FICC trading revenues to drive their top line. But in terms of volatility of revenues, their coefficient of variation for FICC is almost twice as volatile as their equity trading revenues.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2015/05/14/q1-2015-u-s-investment-banking-round-up-ficc-trading/

Building customer loyalty in the insurance sector has always been a difficult task. But, now there’s some good news in this regard. According to Insurance India, an IMRB International study, ‘Customer loyalty in insurance market with respect to product and services has improved’. This change has been observed due to improvement in products and services like timeliness of the alerts/ reminders for premium due dates, timeliness of receiving the premium receipts for payments made etc. as well as due to customer driven reforms and guidelines set by IRDA.

Another important observation made in the study was the need for improvement in services of the agents, because as compared to bancassurance and other mediums, customers were found to have weaker perceptions and experiences about the companies where agents were involved.

Apart from this, the study also reported that there are 60% Truly Loyal customers and new customer loyalty was highest when insurance was purchased online.

To know more, please read the following article at business-standard.com which summarizes the study:

http://www.business-standard.com/article/finance/customer-loyalty-has-improved-in-insurance-imrb-international-study-115051300967_1.html

In Software-as-a-service (SaaS) all the data, app and app meta data is managed by the vendor. This created the feeling of dissatisfaction among customers. To make the customers satisfied, a new technology is launched "Container-as-a-service" and with some improvement in CaaS, an upgraded software (CaaSi) Container-as a service for ISV (Independent Software Vendors) has been developed. In CaaSi the data is managed by customers and, app and app meta data by vendor. CaaSi model is the mixture of on premise and SaaS benefits. For example, automatic effects, network effect, scaling ease etc. benefits are from SaaS and Accounting (include Capex and Opex), data access, cost transparency, data ownership, direct integration etc. are from on premise. Cloud service providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft added CaaS in their service list. To know more about CaaSi and CaaS, read an article "Goodbye, SaaS - hello, Containers-as-a-Service" by Peter Yared (Sapho) at: http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/09/goodbye-saas-hello-containers-as-a-service/

According to Enza Lannopollo (Researcher at Forrester), "organizations ability to protect the customer's privacy is the building block of trust and long-term relationship." According to the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF) annual research report surveyed 15000 respondents, about 49% of respondents say that lack of trust limits them from downloading the app, 72% of the respondents are not happy with sharing personal data and 34% of the respondents say that lack of trust stops them from buying online apparels.
This shows that trust is one of the most important factors while buying, downloading or sharing personal data on mobile apps. Craig Piezle (executive director of the Online Trust Alliance), offered 9tips for making an effective transparency process:
1. Communicate the value to the consumer.
2. Have a clear and concise privacy policy written for the customers, not for your legal team.
3. Provide the ability for consumers to opt out.
4. Restrict any sharing with third parties.
5. Have a lawyer’s privacy policy with icons.
6. Consider having privacy policies written in multiple languages.
7. Define your retention practices.
8. Move from a compliance mindset to stewardship.
9. Embrace doesn’t track.
To know more about the benefits of using transparency and why transparency is important in today’s customer driven society. Read an article “Big Data: Protecting Privacy Is Good For Business” by Pam Baker (Author of Data Divination: Big Data Strategies) at: http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/big-data-protecting-privacy-is-good-for-business/a/d-id/1320367

Cloud computing has become an essential element in the business setting. Still, there are a number of corporates, who stay away from it because lack of trust on cloud computing security. This has been caused by several myths and misconceptions.

Sue Poremba, Information Security Writer, in her article on Forbes, has tried to clear 7 misconceptions about security threats in cloud computing. They are:

• Misconception #1: The public cloud is more easily breached.
• Misconception #2: All cloud apps are created equal.
• Misconception #3: You can rely on the cloud service provider to protect your business.
• Misconception #4: The end user is powerless when it comes to securing the cloud.
• Misconception #5: The corporate network provides protection even when using cloud apps.
• Misconception #6: The real problems are the lack of security features, gotcha contracts, and no transparency.
• Misconception #7:  have strong authentication mechanisms broadly implemented.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2015/05/12/7-common-misconceptions-about-security-threats-in-cloud-computing/

Businesses today are going through a fundamental change. Now IT sector has taken the center stage. It has become an essential part of all business processes. The state is such that all technology platforms and application architectures which were being used till now are becoming obsolete and there’s an urgent need to revamp them.

In their place, a new platform is emerging, called as The Third Platform or SMAC i.e.

• Social Media
• Mobile
• Analytics
• Cloud

According to IDC, the analyst firm that coined the Third Platform term, the platform will disrupt one-third of top incumbent firms in every industry.

Bernard Golden, Vice President, Strategy for ActiveState Software, in his article at informationweek.com has explained Third Platform innovation with the help of an example of Airbnb. He further explains that this isn’t a unique situation; every company has to work on this. For this, DevOps (integrating application development and operations, with automation throughout the application lifecycle) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) are coming into picture. They will help companies to deliver world-class applications with end-to-end automation.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/interop/paas-devops-and-the-third-platform/d/d-id/1320114

Social media marketing is considered to be the best way to reach the prospective customers. But it could be a disaster also, if not done with proper planning and strategy. Jeff Foster (Co-founder and CEO of Tomoson) in his article “How to build a social media marketing strategy that works,” discussed about some tips for building a good social media marketing strategy. That are:
• Understand your goals
• Create measureable objectives
• Characterize your customers
• Look at the competition
• Develop your messages
• Choose a content plan
• Choose your channels

For building an effective social media marketing strategy an organization need to define their mission that could increase their sales, creating brand awareness, etc. One should choose one or two missions at a time to make marketing more effective. To know more about these tips and their benefits, read an article: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/246085

The Retail industry is very competitive. Retailers need to apply analytics to analyze consumer behavior and retain them. Predictive Analytics help retailers to predict the response of customers regarding new offer, discount or product. But barrier of culture and stage fright, stop them to apply big data analytics.

Leslie Dinham (Teredata) in her article "two ways retailers are overcoming barriers to analytics adoption," talks about solutions to these barriers or adoption blockers. They are:

Barrier 1# Culture is the culprit: Employees get rigid due to working in the same culture, performing same job or duties. They don’t want to change their decision making process and roles. It becomes difficult to apply data analytics in this culture. The solution to this problem could be informing employee about the benefits of using data analytics and provide necessary training.

Barrier 2# Stage Fright: Many times, retailers won’t get success while applying analytics in their organization because they won’t able to choose the right team, tool or technology, won’t able to integrate new analytical capabilities into operations or the culture of the organization is not innovative. Paying attention while applying analytics in these things can help organizations to successfully apply analytics.

To know more about these barriers and solution to them, read an article at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/teradata/2015/05/13/two-ways-retailers-are-overcoming-barriers-to-analytics-adoption/

“Companies are pushing more sensitive and regulated data into the cloud. But, this journey is raising questions like 'security of data'.”

Applying software-as-a-service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) add on some more risk to the organizations. Ericka Chickowshi(specializes in information technology and business innovation) in her article “10 security questions to ask a cloud service provider” at Informationweek, discussed about 10 questions to be asked by companies from SaaS service providers before applying cloud. Some of them are:

·         Do you keep a signed audit trail of which users performed what actions when, both through their UI and API?

·         What is my role and your role in the protection of my data?

·         Do you encrypt all data transmissions, including all server-to-server data transmissions, within data centers?

·         What is your termination or ‘exit process’ for ensuring successful transition from services to an alternative offering?

·         Do you allow customers to perform scheduled penetration tests of either the production environment or a designated testing environment?

Asking these questions can help you to assess the risk. To know more questions and their reason for asking, visit the following link: 
http://www.darkreading.com/informationweek-home/10-security-questions-to-ask-a-cloud-service-provider/d/d-id/1320377

Cloud Services is one of the fastest growing market segments. Be it SaaS, PaaS or IaaS, cloud solutions are offering a lucrative opportunity for growth and innovation. But, is innovation, just in the cloud service enough for customer satisfaction and retention? The answer to this question is NO. For, consistent growth, innovation in other aspects of the cloud business is also required. One of these aspects is the billing and pricing model.

Currently, many pricing models are there in existence, such as, Freemium, flat rate, subscriptions, perpetual , multi-tier packages based on functionality, per user per click and CPU power / storage used etc. And the billing models are in the form of monthly, quarterly, annual, pay as you go and pay for what you use models.

But, what these models lack is flexibility, especially in SaaS segment. This is because cloud vendors do not want to change their cash flow models from a big full pie at a time to pieces of the pie in installments i.e. by taking customer payments from fully up front license bills to smaller usage bills split down to monthly fees. Also, in flexible cloud billing and delivery, there are a lot of complexities involved like in telecom billing.

There is a need for innovation in this segment as this is what the customers desire. This need has been identified and successfully catered to by Kahootz, a British cloud collaboration vendor. More such initiatives, leading to greater transparency and comparability will be the future of cloud pricing and billing in years to come.

To know more, please read the following article by Ian Moyse, Board Member, Eurocloud UK and Governance Board Member, Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), at business2community.com:

http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/cloud-promised-world-utility-billing-01221718

“Transferring data from your network to cloud includes processing and storing of the database and then processing for further use.”

Gerry Grealish (Perspecsys) in her article “Protecting the Data Lifecycle from Network to Cloud” at Informationweek, discussed about three phases for transferring data from your network to cloud and risk associated with them:

Phase 1# Data in motion: It is the term used for data as it is in transit. Risk is interference by third party. Cryptographic protocols, such as Secure Sockets Layer or Transport Layer Security can be used to protect data in this phase.

Phase 2# Data at rest: Data is stored in the form of file or database. Risk is reading of data by third party. Database solution can be used for protecting data like tools offered by CSP for encryption operations and there are various techniques like block level encryption technique.

Phase 3# Data in use: It is a data which is loaded into a process and is in the memory of the program that is running. And it is not protected by cloud service provider’s techniques like in-cloud based encryption techniques.

To know more about these phases and risk associated with them, read on: http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/protecting-the-data-lifecycle-from-network-to-cloud/a/d-id/1320249