Comprehensive software reviews to make better IT decisions

Q headlines a bevy of announcements at AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas that shed more light on the cloud service provider’s AI strategy and where its differentiation from other vendors lies.

Automation is not a silver bullet solution to your workforce productivity challenges. Optimization and automation (optimation) must be used together to remove root cause inefficiencies and best use the features and capabilities of your automation solutions.

Traditional accounting practices are tailor made for waterfall project management. Organizations that have transitioned to the use of standing product teams using Agile and DevOps need to transform their accounting practices as well or they will leave valuable capital expenditure dollars on the table.

IBM is changing the terms of its ubiquitous Passport Advantage agreement to remove entitled discounts on over 5,000 on-premises software products, resulting in an immediate price increase for IBM Software & Support (S&S) across its vast customer landscape.

Lean IX and Apptio have partnered to produce an integrated solution that better informs the strategic decision-making process with improved visibility into an application’s total cost of ownership and alignment to business capabilities.

So you’ve gone Agile. You do daily scrums, retrospectives, and all the “right” Agile ceremonies. But still your organization isn’t quite convinced. It is now critical to balance the drivers and goals of both Agile and traditional thinking in order to achieve organizational success.

Finastra launches securities financing transaction regulation (SFTR) support ahead of the European Union’s April 11, 2020 deadline.

Three global banks launched a blockchain-based platform to bring the promise of open ledgers and contracts to the loan management market.

Wolters Kluwer suffers security breach after poor security management.

Consumers using mobile devices for bill payment is creating new challenges for merchants and their banks.

POS system purchases are being driven by ease of integration. Identified as having the most satisfying of all POS systems when it comes to integration, Restaurant Manager displays that it understands the needs of restaurant operators.

As pick-up/takeout has been the only operating option for restaurants for the last few months, Silverware’s release of its “In-Seat Contactless Platform” will assist COVID-19 “new normal” restaurants to deploy mobile-first, phone-to-table contactless features that were once a convenience but are now features of necessity.

As COVID-19 swept across the globe, many food and beverage operators were forced to switch to pick-up or delivery methods only. PAR’s novel solution PARk it supplies operators with a mobile method to continue serving their customers during this time.

As restaurant, hotel, and casino operators begin to open their doors once again to guests, concerns around accepting cashless, contactless payments will rise. In the new normal, POS platform provider Agilysys’ InfoGenesis delivers on EMV and PCI compliance to enable secure and hygienic credit or debit payments.

This post provides a review of Zoom’s 2023 conference, Zoomtopia 2023. Core aspects covered include what major product releases and upgrades Zoom announced at Zoomtopia 2023, and what these announcements mean for Zoom’s market positioning in 2024.

Zoho, a multinational software and web-based business tool provider, has announced the launch of Trident – a hub that brings Zoho’s pre-existing and new unified communications capabilities into a single pane of glass. How will Trident’s addition to Workplace impact customer migrations from Microsoft and Google.

To revitalize and strengthen business transformation, Avaya has outlined a five-step plan for restructuring its product lines, go-to-market strategy, and balance sheet. This tech note evaluates these five steps, highlighting the main contingencies for each step’s successful rollout.

This note highlights the top three trends to watch for in the 2022 UCaaS marketspace: AR/VR digital workspaces will see sustained investment; UCaaS and customer experience management technologies will continue to blend; and speech functionality will become more sophisticated through AI-driven technology.

Enterprise Connect is North America’s premier conference for advances in communications, collaboration, and customer experience technologies. In this note, Thomas Randall provides his trends and keynote highlights for Enterprise Connect 2021, held September 27 to 29.

On August 24, 2021, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise briefed its Q2 performance for FY21. Q2 saw positive revenue growth of 11.4% YoY, delivering 20% against the previous year.

Traditional accounting practices are tailor made for waterfall project management. Organizations that have transitioned to the use of standing product teams using Agile and DevOps need to transform their accounting practices as well or they will leave valuable capital expenditure dollars on the table.

So you’ve gone Agile. You do daily scrums, retrospectives, and all the “right” Agile ceremonies. But still your organization isn’t quite convinced. It is now critical to balance the drivers and goals of both Agile and traditional thinking in order to achieve organizational success.

When trying to implement Agile as a defined process, Scrum turned BAs or other roles into order takers with the title “product owner.” This undermines the entire value proposition of product management.

No matter how good your product roadmap and backlog are, they are only as good as your audience’s ability to understand your vision and priority.

The scrum master is like the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring that every piece fits together at the right time to create something greater than the sum of the parts. You don’t have to know how to play each instrument, but you do have to understand what each part contributes to the overall masterpiece.

Tools are important to product teams, but only when they support solid people and processes.

Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho, describes a major release of new apps and services focused on enabling hybrid work.

This note outlines Info-Tech’s Three C’s of Enterprise Collaboration framework to help buyers effectively navigate the collaboration software marketspace.

Zoho Workplace – a global enterprise collaboration platform – has reported that it is now supporting 15 million users and is experiencing a surge in usage for its business applications. However, compared to Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite, Zoho still has a long way to go in this marketspace.

Teams is designed for close integration with SharePoint, but the latest Box/Teams integration has organizations wondering if they can use Box instead. This note outlines the extent that this is currently possible and offers some best practices.

Box CEO Aaron Levie recently announced that the company will allow employees to “work from anywhere” until January 2021.

Software that facilitates enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) is always key to getting work done, but now, with many businesses operating under the necessity of working from home due to COVID-19, it is more essential than ever.

Q headlines a bevy of announcements at AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas that shed more light on the cloud service provider’s AI strategy and where its differentiation from other vendors lies.

This note outlines some tips and tricks that you should be aware of when embarking on the installation and configuration of a Kubernetes cluster. Such an endeavor should only be attempted if the need for an enterprise-grade container orchestration solution is required.

On May 24-25, Informatica held its annual conference in Las Vegas – the first time “in-person” since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These are the trends we predict will be most important is it relates to Enterprise Architecture in 2021.

Transparency, explainability, and trust are pressing topics in AI/ML today. While much has been written about why these are important and what organizations should do, no tools to help implement these principles have existed – until now.

IBM is changing the terms of its ubiquitous Passport Advantage agreement to remove entitled discounts on over 5,000 on-premises software products, resulting in an immediate price increase for IBM Software & Support (S&S) across its vast customer landscape.

Student retention, already a major concern at higher education institutions, is an even greater concern as students are unable to learn in person and on campus.

Some major LMS conference cancellations or online alternatives have been announced in an attempt to limit the spread of COVID-19, though not all have canceled.

As the world responds to the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, closed schools in some affected areas are turning to eLearning and web conferencing to maintain continuity in course delivery and/or studying.

Plans to require four online high school credits in Ontario, Canada, have changed: the required credits have been reduced to two and made opt-outable.

Instructure has responded to pushback from both users and investors about their proposed sale to a private equity firm.

This is the third maintenance release since Sakai 19 was released in spring 2019. Thanks to its open-source community, Sakai is continuously providing fixes, security updates, and improvements to its users.

Evaluating vendor proposals is one of the most critical aspects of the RFP process, secondary only to negotiations. The ironic thing is that we've seen too many clients try to abbreviate this activity, take short cuts, or even avoid it altogether. Providing ample time for your team to review the vendor RFP responses is critical to a quality review process, while not rushing the evaluation process ensures that you understand their complete offer and proposal.

When leasing IT equipment, the lessor (the company providing the equipment) has one main obligation. However, most leases overlook this critical aspect completely, exposing the lessee (the organization leasing the equipment) to unnecessary risk.

If you want to lease IT equipment, you have many options with regard to potential lessors (the leasing companies). In fact, some manufacturers lease equipment directly to their customers … or do they?

SortSpoke’s novel approach to machine learning answers a longstanding problem in financial services – how to efficiently extract critical data from inbound, unstructured documents at 100% data quality.

Check your contracts and you will find that the vast majority contain a force majeure clause. This provision states the conditions by which a party does not have to perform under the contract if it experiences an event beyond the party’s control.

If you are experiencing pressure to lower your IT expense, a reverse auction might be a quick, efficient answer to ensure you are getting a competitive price.

IDeaS’ G3 revenue management solution will be highly sought after by properties looking to leverage data to make informed pricing decisions.

Bosch’s release of its INTEOX camera solution moves beyond the legacy “closed circuit” model of surveillance infrastructure to a Camera-as-a-Platform (CaaP) approach, enabling third-party apps at the surveillance perimeter edge to create innovative video-based business solutions and decisions.

Milestone Systems’ recently announced 2019R3 and 2020R1 software releases introduce several new features and capabilities to its XProtect video management software and related Smart Client.

COVID-19 continues to sweep across the globe and significantly impact various segments of the tourism, retail, and restaurant sectors as well as other public venues. As economies begin to reopen and COVID-19-related restrictions begin to be lifted, organizations need a way to monitor and comply with occupancy limits and policies. Genetec’s recently announced Occupancy Management Package enables businesses to tap into their security and surveillance system to count people, visualize data, and manage occupancy density rules.

This note offers guidance to organizations considering elevated body temperature/fever detection solutions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to assist with reopening and return-to-work efforts.

With many video management system (VMS) vendors adding automatic license plate capture capabilities, the uses for this technology are expanding rapidly.

The US Department of Health and Human Services and the Indian Health Service (IHS) have formalized an overarching plan to support improved clinical and nonclinical operations across IHS, Tribal, and Urban healthcare facilities through RPMS EHR and HIT modernization.

Cerner and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are working together to expand access to clinical data battling the COVID-19 pandemic by sharing de-identified patient data with health researchers.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, healthcare organizations are looking for ways to expand digital patient care options. Patient management systems like Experian’s eCare NEXT help providers connect new digital clinical workflows to established workflows and revenue cycles.

COVID-19 has disrupted critical healthcare projects and implementation plans. Despite the considerable challenges faced by many healthcare organizations MEDITECH has been working with them to shift to virtual EHR implementations.

Grand Lake Health System (GHLS) in St. Mary’s, Ohio, had telehealth on its 2020 application roadmap. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, GLHS chose Allscripts’ telemedicine solution called FollowMyHealth.

Between mid-February and April, athenahealth reported a 3,400% increase in demand for telehealth services. In response to this unprecedented need for patients and providers to connect virtually, athenahealth introduced an improved and integrated telehealth solution.

On June 17, 2021, Smarp briefed Info-Tech on the latest updates to its communications and advocacy platform. Based out of Helsinki, Smarp provides solutions for over 300 companies worldwide, with industry specializations in professional services, banking, and fintech.

Breezy HR has made video assessment and interviewing tools free for business clients for a minimum of 60 days, in light of efforts to prevent COVID-19 pandemic spread.

What is changing in the HR technology space as a result of COVID-19? Some organizations are seeing an uptick in interest and customer support, while others are providing free access to their product.

ADP is offering updates and webcasts to keep customers informed during the COVID-19 response. There’s a significant impact anticipated for employers, including complex compliance, financial, and strategic issues surrounding workforce management.

Cornerstone is acquiring Saba, a learning management system, to further invest in its learning offerings and gain reach in the market. With this acquisition, the organization intends to accelerate product development.

Cornerstone acquires Clustree to incorporate AI into its learning solutions. As a result, Cornerstone’s Learning Suite displays deep knowledge of employee skills, which can inform promotions or job changes, areas for learning, and recruiting decisions.

Q headlines a bevy of announcements at AWS re:Invent 2023 in Las Vegas that shed more light on the cloud service provider’s AI strategy and where its differentiation from other vendors lies.

Acronis hopes to overtake many competitors in the data recovery and endpoint protection solution space by forging partnerships with many MSSPs and appealing to the SMB market. The company has doubled down by hiring the former CEO of GoDaddy, who is committed to reinvesting in its technology and increasing and improving its product line.

Backup and recovery operations was once a set-it-and-forget it design architecture with a static reference architecture. Then along came the cloud, disrupting everything about how data is stored and processed. Now, more than ever, organizations are looking for their solution providers to lean in and help them navigate the shifting tides of “cloud backup.”

In this note, I interviewed Himadri Das, head of automation at TietoEVRY. Areas that were covered include important things businesses should consider for implementing AI-based solutions, the maturity level should their practices have, the possible risks of adopting AI, and areas of AIOps that need more improvement.

The Morpheus cloud management platform (CMP) has moved beyond its original focus on DevOps automation and self-service. Morpheus provides a management control plane to enable users to deploy workloads anywhere. Such a control plane is the way of the future for managing complex enterprise technology stacks.

COVID-19 has forced software companies and their suppliers to refocus efforts around prioritizing systems and workflows that are nearly 100% digital in nature. As a result, Info-Tech has observed the quick emergence of six market themes that are highly relevant post COVID-19. This note series will profile key vendors and how they fit into the post-COVID-19 world.

In the market for software? Learn why it's important to have multiple vendors at the negotiation table.

The Morpheus cloud management platform (CMP) has moved beyond its original focus on DevOps automation and self-service. Morpheus provides a management control plane to enable users to deploy workloads anywhere. Such a control plane is the way of the future for managing complex enterprise technology stacks.

IBM is changing the terms of its ubiquitous Passport Advantage agreement to remove entitled discounts on over 5,000 on-premises software products, resulting in an immediate price increase for IBM Software & Support (S&S) across its vast customer landscape.

With lots of functionality being provisioned/deployed at the tenant level, Microsoft is happy to sit back for now, watch, and start auditing in the future.

VMware has issued the highest Common Vulnerability Scoring System 3 (CVSSv3) rating, 10.0, on a vulnerability (CVE-2020-3952) found on its VMware vCenter Server version 6.7 software. VMware now has a patch to address this vulnerability, and administrators are urged to install the patch as soon as possible.

ServiceNow’s Orlando release introduced Now Intelligence, a set of features that strengthen ServiceNow’s lead in the AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) and digital transformation space.

It’s simply not enough today to pit your traditional application security toolkit against today’s advanced threats, especially those attacks that target APIs or mobile platforms. Bolstering your CI/CD pipeline by introducing more advanced and accurate SAST, SCA, IAST, and DAST will most certainly improve your security posture, but the journey does not end there. There are attacks and use cases that need careful consideration for how you approach security. Appdome believes it has those unknown challenges addressed and can significantly improve your application security program with very little effort from your development and security team, a welcome change from solutions that required a good bit of work to introduce problem-free into your code base four years ago.

In June 2023, I decided to remove the password on my primary email account as well as the one used to log-in to all of my devices. Did I wait too long? Am I too optimistic this will work without issue? Are there kinks that still need to be worked out? I recently attended Identiverse 2023 and got a FIDO2 hardware token intending at some point in the future to go passwordless. Why wait though? I was pumped up with all the passkey and passwordless sessions I attended and was eager to try this out and share my experience.

If you’re in the market for a password manager or are interested in secrets management, Bitwarden has a powerful platform for you. This unified platform is delivered via a thoughtful and intuitive UI, which Bitwarden Password Manager users will recognize. Bitwarden ranks as top of the Leader Quadrant in SoftwareReviews under the Password Management category, and the company believes its optimized, wide-range passwordless solution set will address most organizations’ needs.

Next-generation firewalls were smarter than previous firewalls, able to deeply analyze traffic and integrate with complementary security solutions. Today our needs are more complex, however, with a 742% increase in software supply chain attacks over the past three years. Sonatype Nexus Firewall has been paying attention and claims its firewall product is smarter about these attacks.

Have you ever thought of what else you could do to take your security operations center (SOC) to the next level and focus on prevention? Look no further – external attack surface management (EASM) was a popular managed service and topic of discussion at Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) Conference 2023, named after a popular public-key cryptosystem.

Hillstone Networks has positioned itself as a robust and feature-rich provider of not only hardware but also security solutions. With its ZTNA 3.0 release and support for centralized management of IoT assets and incident response, the company embodies a next-generation firewall.

Starting May 2021, these measurements will inform the search ranking algorithm. Google's objective is to promote websites that are fast, responsive, and visually stable. How can optimize your website for good Core Web Vitals?

How can software marketing and sales teams win in 2021? Learn how emotions affect software buying habits and how to build better customer relationships.

Mouseflow introduces live heatmaps to its web analytics platform to allow users to gain unique insights from large data sets with just a glance!

5G networks are the next generation of mobile phone service delivered at higher frequencies that requires shorter distance between “backpack” sized cell sites. Municipalities are challenged when negotiating with carriers regarding the installation of these small cell sites due to the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) 5G Order on Small Cell Siting.

Visually presenting data assists the public understanding of complex issues. Using GIS mapping tools is an effective way of layering data from various source for quantitative analysis.

Esri made several big announcements at its Developer Summit in Palm Springs, CA, in March 2019. ArcGIS for Developers is a suite of developer tools and resources specifically for the creation of web-based and native applications.

Esri recently hosted the sixth annual Public Sector CIO Summit. Key topics included the role of emerging technology, emerging trends like location intelligence and smart cities, and the need to create “wins” to demonstrate IT’s value.

The recent Schrems II invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield has added a layer of difficulty for organizations that operate across borders, as they now require additional contractual clauses and measures in place to ensure data can transfer freely. Privacy program management vendor Proteus-Cyber offers a streamlined solution with the release of its Transfer Impact Assessment tool.

By exploiting a five-year-old configuration error, a hacker was able to access Amazon’s S3 cloud storage buckets on which Twilio’s code was loaded. As a result, customers were able to unknowingly download the modified code for twenty-four hours.

Qualys VMDR and Ivanti have announced a new partnership dedicated to improving the detection and patching of vulnerabilities. Announced July 30, the Qualys and Ivanti Partnership have already gone live as an integrated component of the VMDR solution.

IBM is changing the terms of its ubiquitous Passport Advantage agreement to remove entitled discounts on over 5,000 on-premises software products, resulting in an immediate price increase for IBM Software & Support (S&S) across its vast customer landscape.

TrustArc is partnering with BigID to add protection of sensitive data to its roster of data privacy and compliance capabilities. The move closely follows a partnership announced by two other major players in the data privacy and governance space, OneTrust and Integris.

RiskSense announced on July 13 its new version of the cloud-delivered RiskSense risk management platform. The main draw of the program is its holistic risk calculation across CVEs and CWEs.

Contact center as a service (CCaaS) enterprise providers are steamrollering ahead with embedding generative AI functionality in their platforms – whether organizations are prepared for it or not. In this post, I explore a positive outlook for how generative AI can be used to enhance organizations' customer experience capabilities while generating ROI. This includes: 1. Listing the major use cases for generative AI in the contact center. 2. Discussing how we might calculate ROI from utilizing generative AI in the contact center. 3. Considering what organizations can do to prepare for CCaaS vendors’ release of generative AI functionality.

ServiceNow’s Orlando release introduced Now Intelligence, a set of features that strengthen ServiceNow’s lead in the AI-powered IT service management (ITSM) and digital transformation space.

Business Insider reported three years ago that 80% of businesses will invest in chatbots by 2020. And it was not alone in making such predictions. So, where do we stand with this technology? Who is using chatbots and where? Read on to find out.

Business Insider reported three years ago that 80% of businesses will invest in chatbots by 2020. And it was not alone in making such predictions. So, where do we stand with this technology? Who is using chatbots and where? Read on to find out.

Siri, Google, Cortana, and Alexa are always listening. This isn’t news. However, workers at Apple have access and have been reportedly listening in on more private moments which could include confidential medical or legal information.

JDA’s Workforce Management and Warehouse Labor Management software functions are now offered in an integrated manner to drive productivity gains in the warehouse.

Many people are challenged by the economic constraints of car ownership. Rising vehicle prices, registration fees, automobile insurance, ongoing maintenance, fuel, and parking fees can bleed people dry. In response, technology companies are developing innovative ways to offset the costs.

A powerful combination of supply chain visibility and global trade management is now available through E2open and its acquisition of Amber Road software.

SAP and Uber Freight are taking on a joint venture to integrate Uber Freight into SAP Logistics Business Network. The goal is to simplify load management and execution by enabling customers to leverage transportation rates from the Uber Freight network of reliable drivers. As a positive “side effect,” better utilization of unused trucks can make a positive impact on environment. For those looking for a convincing reason to go with one supply chain management system or ERP vendor over the other, this might be it.

Multibillion-dollar firms still primarily use spreadsheets for demand forecasting, but this approach leaves a lot of room for enterprise software vendors to displace manual work with solutions better suited for large enterprises, and hence gain significant revenue in this space.