This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
In the age of social media, effective customer and employee engagement is becoming an increasingly important business initiative. Companies that effectively engage their customers experience greater customer loyalty and repeated patronage. Companies that effectively engage their employees can expect greater employee satisfaction and productivity. However, as the number of social channels continues to grow, engagement becomes increasingly difficult as constant bombardment of these channels often leads to alienation and fatigue. Enter the 9 C's of Engagement. Employ the 9 C's of Engagement to connect with your customers and employees in an increasingly saturated social environment.In this interview at SXSW 2013, R "Ray" Wang explains how companies should be using the 9 C's of Engagement.
Partnership Announcements Enhance Ultimate Software’s OfferingsAmidst a crowd of 1500 customers, partners, and attendees, Ultimate Software held their annual gathering from March 12th to March 15th, 2013 in Las Vegas. Geared towards the medium sized to enterprise markets, Ultimate Software has steadily taken market share from ADP for payroll and expanded out into operational and strategic human capital management (HCM) capabilities. New mobile access, generation 4 cloud architecture, and timeline features for employee’s highlight Ultimate’s growing ambitions and customer requirements.At the event, Ultimate announced two strategic partnerships that bode well for customers and prospects facing an increasing level of customer complexity and growing need for global capabilities:
On March 21, Nokia came out swinging directly at Google and indirectly at the emerging WebRTC standard when it claimed that VP8, the video codec within WebRTC, contains Nokia intellectual property. Nokia's action complicates the issue of the default video codec within WebRTC because Nokia has stated that it will not license any of its patented technology to the IETF.
Microsoft has many of the necessary elements in place to continue its move of Microsoft Dynamics AX into large enterprises, but it still needs to fill several major functional gaps in its product offerings. This post outlines three major functional gaps that Microsoft will need to fill in order to compete effectively in the large enterprise space.
This week Google made two product announcements that generated a lot of press. The first is that it would be shutting down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. The second was the introduction of Google Keep, which people are referring to as the evolution of Google Notebook and a competitor for Evernote.
Sealed Air’s Global Migration to Verizon/Siemens Cloud-Based Unified Communications Services
As a global company with geographically dispersed manufacturing and laboratory facilities, Sealed Air had a vast communications asset base
The company had a distributed contact center strategy, with agents located in North America, Europe, South America, and the Asia Pacific region. With a variety of platforms and licensing arrangements, integrating the platforms and providing a consistent customer service experience was proving difficult.
Find out why Sealed Air chose Verizon/Siemens to resolve their communications issues.
Survey Data Shows How Third-Party Maintenance Options Provide Customer Leverage
In the first quarter of 2013, Constellation surveyed 184 organizations with maintenance contracts from Oracle or SAP; the purpose was to see what impact third-party maintenance has on contracts from the original software vendors. In the 184 organizations, 149 respondents actively negotiated software license contracts and recognized the availability of 3PM options. Based on the survey results and hands-on experience in assisting clients with contract negotiations, Constellation believes third- party maintenance plays a key role in providing pricing leverage and options in overall apps and contract negotiations strategy. Respondents who chose to switch to a third-party support provider saved up to 50 percent off Oracle’s and SAP’s list prices for maintenance fees.
In a time when technology vendors are starting to shun the “social” moniker, it was refreshing to hear the messaging at the NewsGator Collective 2013 Annual User Conference that NewsGator is all about “making social real” in the enterprise.
Big Data is a catchy phrase. Unfortunately, it is often misused and misunderstood. Often, Hadoop and Big Data are used interchangeably; as if the Apache Hadoop family of projects are the only solutions for Big Data, or that that only use for these projects is from Big Data. Neither is true.
Despite Silly Misconceptions, Big Data Brings New Hope for Better Decision-Making
Big Data is a silly term, overhyped and misunderstood. Big Data is often thought to equal Hadoop, especially among those who think that Hadoop is a product for solving Big Data problems. That is incorrect as Hadoop is actually a family of Apache open source projects for managing and analyzing data of all types. In fact, Big Data is a concept that has become a movement to once again treat data with probability theory and computational statistics. But for all the misconceptions surrounding Big Data, 11 innovative trends are occurring due to this movement:
Yesterday saw the launch of the much awaited Samsung Galaxy S4 (and a worthy update it seems, if hardly earth shattering — much like occurred with the iPhone 5). There has also been much talk about Android weaknesses, hardware or software market specialization as well as Google’s rising share price (and Apple’s currently falling one). [...]