Mongo DB announces its latest open source NoSQL database release 2.6. This release introduces greater automation features like incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, visualization and alerts on more than 100 parameters in order to improve provisioning and management. Users can access network resources more efficiently along with an integrated text search in 15 languages with the help of Mongo DB query language. To know more about the features and efficiency of this release, follow the article of Toby Wolpe, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/mongodb-2-6-hits-general-availability-so-whats-in-it-7000028148/

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”
― Henry Ford
The quality of your product or service defines the success measure of your efforts. Now this leads to several questions like - What is ‘quality’? Why it is so important? To get answers to these questions we have to ask ourselves what is the level of standard we would like to achieve? ‘Quality’ is nothing but the final performance criteria which affects a company with respect to its customers, clients or consumers. For each product and service, requirements are specified which are known as ‘Quality Control’ parameters. The article deals with the details of different quality standards.

http://creative.sulekha.com/chapter-22-introduction-to-iso-six-sigma-tqm-lean-manufacturing-cmm-pcmm-cmmi-etc_273495_blog

ISO 9000 family addresses various aspects of quality management. It provides guidelines to organisations ensuring that their services and products consistently meet customer requirements. To know more about the latest version of ISO 9000 (ISO 9001: 2008), follow:

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/management-standards/iso_9000.htm

An article by David Linthicum, SVP at Cloud Technology Partners, talks about how Healthcare providers and payers utilize cloud platforms to store and access personnel records. He also spoke about the use of managed security services providers that will allow healthcare organizations to push some of the responsibilities to security experts.

To know more about security concerns in healthcare follow http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/blog-hub/2014/apr/11/healthcare-cloud-security-now-and-into-the-future/

Handling phone calls to serve your customers is definitely important for your company. But, have you ever calculated how much it costs you? A research by ContactBabel, shows that for making a live agent call, it costs you £ 3.87 in average!

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can be effective in reducing this cost. According to the report, it can bring down your operational costs by 6 times. Also, with increasing usage of smartphones, a new type of IVR menus can be provided known as Visual IVR, where a caller can navigate a visual IVR menu between 4 and 5 times faster than a traditional audio IVR menu. The direct impact will be enhanced customer experience.

Read at http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ivr-self-service-costs-6-times-less-than-a-phone-call-59403.htm for more research findings on how IVR can help you reducing your costs.

An article by Zach Miners, news reporter of IDG news service, spoke about how the cloud storage and file sharing vendor, Dropbox, is expanding its scope beyond photo management and document collaboration. He also mentioned that when Dropbox users work together on a PowerPoint, Excel or Word file, Dropbox will display visual cues to alert them when someone else edits and then syncs the changes. Dropbox also incorporates a chat service in the Microsoft software's interface.

For more information visit http://www.itworld.com/internet/413888/dropbox-diversifies-beyond-storage-photos-collaboration-apps

 Total quality management (TQM) tools help organizations to identify, analyze and assess qualitative and quantitative data that is relevant to their business. Each of these tools can be examined and used to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, standardization and overall quality of procedures, products or work environment, in accordance with ISO 9000 standards (SQ, 2004). Read more about the TQM tools from the following link:

http://totalqualitymanagement.weebly.com/tqm-tools.html

“Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.” – Peter Drucker. Total quality management describes a management approach to long term success through customer satisfaction. The primary elements of TQM are: Customer focus, Total employee involvement, Process centered, Integrated system, Strategic and systematic approach, Continual improvement, Fact based decision making, Communications. To know more on this aspect, please go through the following link:

http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/total-quality-management/overview/overview.html

Mark Russinovich, Member, Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that is integrated with a runtime environment, as opposed to code that is dropped into a virtual machine that's sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy kind of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something about the environment it is running in”. In a panel on "The Future of PaaS in an IaaS World" at Cloud Connect Summit, with a high level of disagreements among panel members, much has been revealed about PaaS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/what-is-platform-as-a-service-experts-disagree/d/d-id/1141665

As industry experts suggest, PaaS solutions can make things easier and accelerate the drive towards business goals. It leads to the question that why they are not as popular as IaaS and SaaS? One has to explore the history of PaaS solutions to get the answer! PaaS, unlike IaaS and SaaS, is still relatively new and simply does not yet have the share of mind that other cloud technologies enjoy. It is also a fact that some initial PaaS offerings did not quite hit the mark, as they were too narrowly focused and not able to offer everything what organizations may have needed. PaaS solutions, particularly those developed within the open-source community, are highly modular and flexible while remaining very secure. This gives organizations the option to plug and play as necessary. PaaS solutions allow for simplified, yet powerful development, but this is where things can get a bit tricky. Too much flexibility could impede accelerated development, which is counterproductive.

Gordon Haff, from Cloud Product Strategy team, Red Hat, reveals more about PaaS in his recent article. To read, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/27/why-your-company-shouldnt-pass-on-paas-to-develop-new-apps/

In a recent research by Commodity Technology Advisor, an analytical firm covering the ETRM and CTRM markets; it was found that cloud technology will be the next big thing for Energy and Commodities Trade and Risk Management (E/CTRM) solutions. More firms are accepting this technology replacing the on premise software model once preferred by companies. Cloud technology also helps in quicker realization of ROI. Other factors which help in accepting cloud technology are: speed of implementation, ease of integration, centralized vendor support and device mobility.

To read more why more firms are switching to cloud technology, follow the link below:

http://www.commodities-now.com/reports/technology/16598-future-of-commodities-trading-secure-in-the-cloud.html

The CloudMapper VMS application can be deployed with an Amazon Web Services AMI, on-premises or in a hybrid environment. This application can monitor 337 health metrics on AWS. Most enterprises use AWS in some way, but faced trouble capturing the cloud service's various metrics. With AWS rolling out new services and features rapidly, monitoring became more complicated. With a proper mechanism to address this issue, it took 2 long years to launch the visual monitoring system- CloudMapper.

According to the developer ScienceLogic, CloudMapper can be used for:

·         Spot expensive AWS resources;

·         Aligning security policies with virtual private clouds;

·         Uptime; 

·         Selecting the best zone to use;

·         Visibility into AWS.

To read more, visit

http://www.zdnet.com/sciencelogic-launches-cloudmapper-tracks-aws-performance-costs-7000027935/

Unified communications platforms can be seen not necessarily as end points, but as beginning points for intrusion. It is a growing concern for organizations today. According to Kevin Riley, chief technology officer, Sonus Networks, as landscape architecture surrounds Unified Communication systems, emphasizing more on security is needed. A recent survey by the CIO Playbook reveals that 31% of organizations considered security and privacy issues to be a key challenge while implementing unified communication system. This concern is because integrating platforms requires opening up ports to enable the flow of data, which means additional unwanted traffic is able to flow freely. However, organizations can take precautions, like installing session border controllers (SBCs) to close ports that are not required and protect their networks from dangerous traffic.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/feature/Striving-for-secure-unified-communications

Few years ago, Internet marketing in India would have meant designing On-Premise solutions for activities such as CRM or ERP. Products and tools from global software vendors were available, but integration and customization often meant huge expenditure. Today, with the SaaS delivery model, software and related data are centrally hosted on the cloud and can be accessed through a Web browser, resulting in better operations with significantly less expenditure. Migrating to a SaaS model makes sense for an e-commerce company, but it is also relevant for a company which deals in the age-old business like auto loans. A principal reason for such industry-wide demand of SaaS is its ability to make decisions faster. Sunil Padmanabhan, research director for Gartner in India had said recently that "SaaS is extremely real in India and there is a large critical mass in adoption”.

To read more, visit reputed journalist Rajiv Rao’s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/in/reaching-for-the-cloud-indias-saas-journey-7000023820/

News by Ben Sisario, staff reporter of The New York Times, talks about how Twitter’s data pile has immense value to the music industry. He also mentioned that a successful partnership can help in proving its value to musicians beyond its well-known uses for communication and self-promotion.

To know more visit http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/media/twitter-and-300-team-up-to-find-musical-talent.html

Nucleus Research, a global provider of investigative and case-based technology researcher, finds in a study that leading vendors are giving importance to core Human Resources (HR), talent management and workforce management (WFM) functions and putting them onto a single platform. In this study Nucleus Research also finds that vendors are linking HCM with Big Data analytics and business intelligence (BI) to integrate functionality across the core competencies of HCM. To make data more accessible, they are integrating their data sets to compile analytics into common dashboards.

To know more, follow the following link: http://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwgeeks/article/Nucleus-Research-Value-Matrix-Finds-Competition-Intensifying-for-Human-Capital-Management-Vendors-as-they-Race-to-Deliver-Integrated-End-to-End-HCM-Platforms-20140410#.U0pYYFWSyZY