Cloud Management Collaborations Made Simple

Michael Garrity — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:35:00 GMT

One of the great advantages of utilizing cloud computing is the ease with which companies and individuals can collaborate in a transparent and immediate manner.

Last week, IT operations solution provider OpDemand unveiled enhancements to its product that will help facilitate the collaborative management of cloud infrastructure for agile development teams. The OpDemand solution will now be able to securely share management duties and track changes to cloud systems with an intuitive, graphical news feed.

OpDemand users can manage cloud platforms that belong to other OpDemand users, and once they’re granted access, they can start, stop, deploy, clone, destroy, lock, unlock and post messages to shared platforms. The management actions will be published in the real-time news feed with an emphasis on who changed the platform, when and why. The graphical interface is built upon OpDemand’s GitHub integration.

Creating a so-called “master” OpDemand user and sharing environment with team members lets teams centralize access controls, cloud credentials, billing information and environment creation. Adding these centralized controls to the real-time audit trail offers the necessary security for team-based administration of production applications and services on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Users are required to have a metered OpDemand account to take advantage of these collaboration features, which software developers, operations engineers and system administators can sign up for free of charge to also gain access to the OpDemand Web console, command-line utilities, REST API and infrastructure blueprint library.

Three New Additions to the Adobe Marketing Suite

Michael Garrity — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:00:00 GMT

At this week's Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in London, hot on the heels of the release of Creative Suite 6 and the Creative Cloud, the software company announced three new products.

Each release is aimed at helping marketers “Build compelling personalized experiences that address complex digital marketing problems,” says Kevin Cochrane, Adobe's vice president of enterprise marketing.

Content management on the Web is fundamentally changing and it was with that in mind, Cochrane explained, that Adobe crafted a set of new products to help digital marketers focus on creating not only compelling content but also compelling user experiences. He identified three primary issues that digital marketers face in the current environment.

The first is, obviously, driving revenue growth, especially with consumers who seem to become increasingly indifferent toward online advertising. On today’s Web, users are interested in targeted, personalized experiences, or they’re not interested at all.

The second consideration Adobe made was with regards to marketing budgets, specifically ensuring that every dollar spent on a digital marketing campaign is spent wisely. Thus, Adobe's solution is designed to help marketers optimize their spending by measuring and analyzing the impact of their efforts to determine the most efficient places in which they spend.

Finally, Adobe wanted to find ways to monetize a marketer’s audience by making each user they reach a valuable asset in driving conversions.

The resulting products were Adobe CQ 5.5 Social Communities, CQ eCommerce and CQ Cloud Manager.

Cloud Manager
A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) app for businesses to quickly launch marketing initiatives in the cloud, providing access to an integrated set of Web Experience Management (WEM) services for the creation, management, measurement and optimization of user-personalized experiences on websites, mobile devices and social media.

After starting a marketing campaign, Cloud Manager lets users remotely control a complete digital marketing solution from the cloud, leverage capabilities available through a rich partner ecosystem and monitor Adobe CQ and cloud infrastructure using real-time metering capabilities, among other handy features.

E-Commerce
An integrated solution that also leverages Adobe’s WEM platform. eCommerce manages and optimizes the buying process for websites, mobile devices and social media by delivering a branded, personalized experience incorporating the hybris multichannel commerce software.

Extending the reach of personalized digital marketing campaigns across these channels allows marketers to present a targeted experience to consumers from the point-of-engagement to the point-of-sale, regardless of the device they’re using. In addition, e-commerce sites and apps can be delivered on-premises or from the cloud, and using eCommerce in tandem with Cloud Manager lets marketers speed the creation of branded, personalized e-commerce sites that continuously scale to meet demands across all channels.

Social Communities
Marketers can better leverage social engagement across owned digital properties to build loyalty and drive conversions. Information from leading social networks (gathered, again, over multiple channels) helps organizations make a social connection with users by allowing them to log into their Facebook or Twitter accounts, and then use their profile information to personalize the consumer’s experience.

This product can also be used with other sources, like a CRM or website profile, to create a more comprehensive view of each unique customer.

Plus, new social plugins make it possible for customers to share content with their friends, making every new customer a potential brand advocate, and immediately increasing each consumer’s value. Using this solution with eCommerce lets businesses embed social elements into the product selection and purchasing processes of their owned properties.

This new suite of digital marketing products has been built to appeal to each unique consumer’s interests from the beginning, and then maintain that personalized experience throughout the purchasing process to increase the chances of conversion, maximize the value of the money spent and, with any luck, create a lifelong customer and brand advocate.

'Net Features : cloud manager

Cloud Management Collaborations Made Simple

Three New Additions to the Adobe Marketing Suite