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CMS IT Services Offers App Development services in India. To know more visit us. 

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CMS IT Services is one of the leading IT Service Providers in India.

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CMS IT Service one of the leading IT Service Providers in Bangalore, India.

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As the cloud and data centers continue to evolve and work on more digital strategies, your business operations will heavily rely on the robustness and seamless integration of your IT ecosystem for new platforms and support new initiatives.

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CMS IT cloud migration storage and management solutions, your business can be seamlessly integrated into the Cloud environment.

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A lot of things are based on the overall IT architecture and infrastructure resources you have. However, every enterprise IT landscape requires some generic IT guidelines.

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Digital transformation does not remain to be an option anymore, it’s become a business imperative for most enterprises. Companies are aware of the increasing importance of a successful digital experience.

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Since the dawn of digital transformation and technology advancement, one of the most popular concepts is IoT – Internet of Things that has been making things easier globally.

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SMB Cloud – More than just a Technology Platform

When it comes to small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), the cloud is a solution, not just a technology.

There is too much hype around cloud and not all SMB players understand just how moving to the cloud can translate into tangible business benefits for them. They are not interested in what your cloud solution can do – they are only interested in what precisely can your cloud solution does for them. For example: when a farmer in Rajasthan purchases a mobile for the first time in his life, all he expects out of the device is to be able to make calls and pay the bill at the end of the month. He also expects a quick problem resolution should something go wrong with his phone. The workings of the mobile tower make no difference to him. Plain and simple!

SMB’s cloud expectations are no different. They want a solution that gives them wings to grow their business. A simple, effective plug and play solution to meet their business goals.

So your pitch of IT capabilities will never make sense to them unless you back it up with specific business benefits that can be gained from those capabilities.

Let us elaborate this a little further. CMS provides two key cloud services:

Corporations using huge IT infrastructure are well-acquainted with these cloud services. CMS builds Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) and provides workload management and VPC maintenance services. And big corporations usually look for the following IT capabilities in a cloud solution:

Hosting

Data Storage

Virtual Desktop

Unified Communications

Workflow Management

Security Management

Mobility

Web services

Read more about cloud capabilities of CMS IT Services:  Managed Cloud Services

Any general cloud solution provider will offer everything we have outlined above. For an SMB however, the wow factor lies in the ability of the solution provider to consult, guide and handhold them through the cloud transformation journey. This is the biggest advantage that CMS IT Services brings to the table.

Here is a glimpse of how CMS exhibit cloud solution and help SMB personnel to make informed decisions:

On-Demand IT Solution with the following benefits –

Pay only for what you use

Quick and easy deployment

No or minimal in-house IT staff requirements

Scalability on business demands

ERP, CRM, and other business apps cloud migration

IT security, data protection, and adequate back -up

No business downtime due to systems failures

At the end of the day, designing an agile, responsive on-demand IT solution is not enough. Educating your users about its benefits in the right way is equally critical.

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Information Security – A Collective Responsibility

Security breaches have turned to be regular news headlines. And these breaches occur everywhere, from small to big companies, and in every industry, from retail to IT.

The threat posed by cybercriminals to critical IT infrastructure and business interest is a dangerous reality of today. It is further worsened by the fact that many businesses operate in different geographical locations. The applications and systems are accessed from multiple devices making businesses more susceptible to cyber threats than ever before. This has made cybersecurity a critical board room priority now.

The dual security challenges for organizations:

Nobody wants their business to get hit due to security compromise, and many companies are charting out strategies to deal with increasing cyber threats.

However, as companies expand their business presence, it is becoming increasingly complicated to come up with a uniform security framework that works seamlessly spanning across all latitudes and longitudes.

The reason behind this is very simple, different countries have different security obligations and regulatory compliance that companies must adhere to. For example, HIPAA in the US for health care providers and MiFID in the EU for financial services. So security management has double obligations both on regulatory and technology front.

On one hand, organizations have to tighten their security measures and on the other hand, they are bind to legal obligations. How can organizations handle this twofold menace?

Security has to become a part of organizational culture & collective responsibility:

Information technology has touched virtually every enterprise in the world. Hence, fostering data security for business assurance is indispensable.

Security is a shared responsibility. Be it, employees, business partners, or stakeholders, personnel with access to sensitive data should not view security as an unwelcome cost of doing business. Rather, awareness about threats and vulnerabilities should be on top of the mind even for casual technology users in an organization.

Even a minor security lapse can result in serious security risks that have the capability to jeopardize business operations and result in serious loss. Organizations can prevent this by following these 3 steps:

A thorough vulnerability assessment of people, processes, and systems must be conducted, scoped, and reviewed with the assistance of security experts.

When designing new systems, launching new business applications, or upgrading existing systems & applications, training must be conducted for employees.

Lawyers and other relevant experts must be consulted while foraying into new markets and ensure that all legal and compliance issues are examined critically.

Organizations must realize that while security laws remain static for some time, technology is a dynamic agent. It keeps changing fast, and changing technology brings new types of threats undoubtedly.

So while laws on information security might not get updated with technological changes, companies must look beyond their legal requirements and take a robust security stance.

The way forward:

The threat posed by cybercriminals to critical business infrastructure must be taken seriously. Companies must maintain effective security frameworks, monitor unwanted and abnormal activities, and conduct a security review of all the systems, applications and networks frequently.

Organizations must implement industry best practices without fail in order to reduce cyber risks. Security must be ingrained as a part of company culture; every employee must understand and work with the feeling that security is a collective responsibility.

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Artificial Intelligence – Humans and Machines working together

AI is all about machines simulating human intelligence. Cognitive Automation leverages the AI techniques that simulate human brain functioning, helping in complex processes towards decision making, task completion and achieving the goals. Automation has played a pivotal role in propelling this era of remarkable advancement to the next level.

Recently, a fortune 100 bank, $68 billion annual revenue and nearly 50,000 employees, improved their operational efficiencies through intelligent bots. Currently, they have deployed more than 2,000 bots, minimizing the cost by 30%, reduced time spent in handling complex processes by almost 50%, and achieved 100% error-free. Industry 4.0 in manufacturing is also primarily fueled by cognitive intelligence. Predictive analytics is being used to identify elements that can reduce product quality, causing subsequent failures.

For Pharma industry, predictive modeling could help identify new potential candidate-molecules with a high probability of being successfully developed into a drug that safely and effectively acts on biological targets. The intelligent devices are already helping inefficient collection and collation of patient/subject data, thereby augmenting the process of reporting adverse events.

Cognitive Automation

For RPAs to be of next-generation, almost every enterprise must incorporate cognitive capabilities. Cognitive RPA will have to replace the older version of AI to work on lines of human brains. Though often considered the same as AI and working on the same principles, contextual analysis and technological building blocks, cognitive computing is precise in imitating the human thinking process.

Businesses working with traditional bots find themselves restricted in automation since the software bot works on certain organized data fed in a steady format such as databases or spreadsheets. Also referred to as “dark data” that ignore information from non-structured sources like e-mails and videos, 80% of information collated by the enterprise is dark data.

Cognitive RPA, on the other hand, has the capability of processing the data from other sources within the business that are not structured too. As per McKinsey, the existing RPA data becomes watertight and accelerated through a cognitive cloud that in turn increases the ROIs by approximately 300%.

Another remarkable feature of cognitive bots is their unsurpassed ability to learn further with time, that will slowly and steadily make the entire repetitive and routine process human-free, enabling humans to shift their focus to more qualitative tasks.

Benefits of Cognitive Automation

Businesses that fail to acknowledge and embrace cognitive RPA can face a serious threat of losing in the future.

AI not only reduces cost and improves quality but also enhances productivity, further resulting in better employee engagement by pulling them out of boring and uninteresting tasks, thereby minimizing employee turnover while boosting employee satisfaction and minimizing training and recruitment. The focus should be on business and wisely apply AI to drive strategic decision making and fulfill objectives.

While deploying RPA, the business process improves, obliterating the older ways of simply doing things causing technological dysfunction. Reduction in manual work, the rate of errors drastically reduce that reflects on the bottom line and public relations. In the long run, businesses save millions by cutting costs, achieving higher ROIs and avoiding lawsuits or fines resulting from poor quality.

Key Collaborations in Organization due to Cognitive Automation

Automation is enabled by combined work of technological expertise and non-technical staff for them to rethink and then build on process improvement. Thus, cognitive automation facilitates both employees-bots and business-IT collaboration.

Communication between salesperson and customers is on many levels, be it B2C or B2B. There are multiple aspects that must be considered to close a sale. While the bots can take care of the mundane characteristic features of selling through automation, employees can collaborate with customers on another front to make the entire process more precise and fetching. Similarly, end-to-end automation encourages more interactions among employees across various verticals and departments. Cross-functional teamwork becomes a mandate for careful strategic thinking and execution.

While automation brings in business velocity, it also brings together a collaboration of the right people to trouble-shoot the problems when the process goes awry and work closely with problem-solvers for the best solution and ideas on-time.

Human-Centric Business

Digital transformation is the new yardstick. In the business of technology, if the latest advancement is not leveraged and utilized in digital transformation, businesses will be left behind in the trending razor-sharp competitive world. Businesses on top are reaping the outcome from the unification of robotic process automation (RPA) and cognitive automation that was otherwise never been imagined to be feasible in the past. Globally, organizations have started to take advantage of AI adoption and become faster, more efficient and essentially customer-centric. In just the last 24 months, AI and cognitive machine learning technologies have enabled an unprecedented amount of business transformation while keeping the system human-centric.

Using intelligent predictions, we not only gain the ability to be more effective in our decision-making but also are able to provide engaging and immersive customer experience. It has become increasingly clear that using intelligent predictions and usage of tools such as AI and ML is no longer optional. While cost optimization remains an important factor, delivering error-free transactions, creating new service models, etc. is now made possible with intelligence fused bots. The human-centered systems have paved the way for maximizing utility and advanced human learning faster than ever in documented history.

On contrary to bots replacing humans, automation validates the fact that human-ness and human-centric businesses are more important than before for a robust digital workforce, bringing the business leaders at the forefront.

Bridging the Gap

AI platforms can be exhaustive at times and need humungous expertise before extracting valuable reports. Though these platforms are quite fetching, and leading enterprises are gaining momentum through advanced capabilities from chatbots and predictive analytics to spot fraud and foretell failures and much more. However, sometimes they are not feasibly applicable across the functions.

Cognitive automation enabled IQ bots to facilitate the use of best of RPA and advanced cognitive AI through due diligence more easily for complex logics and less structured data to be interpreted accurately and competently. Finance and HR departments can be more efficiently automated through cognitive AI for data enrichment and assists in better management and utilization of data. Therefore, cognitive automation becomes a conduit to patch the gap of huge RPAs and AI platforms.

Conclusion

AI has already made a remarkable impact on the business environment globally. Cognitive automation will in all possibilities accelerate the conventional AI. AI is maturing, and cognitive capabilities are growing by each day and only those businesses will thrive the harsh market volatility who continuously seize these possibilities.

CMS-IT has considerably demonstrated expertise in Cognitive Automation across Manufacturing, Pharma and CPG industries and currently works with Global organizations to help them become more intelligent and personal in their interactions with the consumer world. Their focus on automation to deliver KPIs is remarkable, thus equipped to take complete advantage of RPA and cognitive automation for better customer understanding and deliver best-in-class IT solutions.

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3 Ways How Cloud applications are Transforming the Mobile Workforce

The rising tempo of Cloud adoption enabling the mobile workforce is transforming the way we do business. According to IBM, over the next four years’, workloads hosted on the public cloud will grow by 44%. This means that almost half of the future mobile workforce will work outside of their office cubicles. Two of the most significant developments in Cloud technology to enable mobile workforce are email management and online work environments. And the third one is mobile security.

Today, we’ll look at how Cloud computing applications enable these three fronts, which have been instrumental in enabling the mobile workforce.

Cloud application services have become the new corporate’s email address.

The integration of Cloud solutions with office suite email is like a digital blessing. This not only empowers the mobile workforce to remain constantly in touch via emails but also to synchronize better across multiple devices. Employees can manage their professional e-mails, share calendars and schedule their next meetings. Adopting Cloud application services relieves enterprises from mundane tasks like upgrading, patching or installing add-ons as all these will be handled by the service providers. Employees can focus on important tasks and do not have to bother with patching up an old e-mail system. In nutshell, less routine tasks and more focus on the strategic ones.

Teamwork made possible even without face time.

Remote access desktop and server environments have been a game-changer in enabling the mobile workforce. With Cloud-based workspace applications – employees can log in using devices of their choice from anywhere and start working. Since the workspace is hosted on the Cloud – employees can collaborate effectively even if they are working from different locations using the same applications. Data can be edited, documents can be shared and files downloaded, irrespective of what devices different employees are using.

A cloud application gateway is the new security gateway.

Security has always been the chink in the armor of the mobile workforce. In fact, many businesses have witnessed malicious cyber-attacks endangering mobile security. One of the important things to note here is – employees no longer demarcate between personal or employer-owned digital devices. They use both the devices for official work and personal time, making them (devices) highly vulnerable to security risks. So, many enterprises have begun deploying a cloud application gateway. This helps to secure corporate data while allowing employees the freedom to work from anywhere and with any device.

Mobile is the new normal for the workforce. Mobile-based Cloud computing applications ensure a smooth flow of information – no matter wherever an employee goes. Perhaps, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that without mobility one cannot build a reliable and scalable business model. The most important thing here is that security aspects should not be compromised. That’s where Cloud applications for a mobile workforce have a major role to play.

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The Future Drivers in a Connected World

Digital connectivity & communication is in a state of constant flux. At the heart of this change is the human journey with the internet.

It is rightly said that the internet is the most important human invention after the fire and the wheel. The Internet has helped us to connect with anyone from anywhere in the world, and it is going to play the role of a catalyst as we march ahead into a digitally-connected world. Most of the devices, platforms and technologies in the modern era revolve around the internet as humans learn new ways of communication with humans and machines.

Let’s look into the 5 future drivers in the connected world:

Smartphones will be at the forefront of this change. In the last few years, we have seen how smartphones are transforming from the role of communicator between two humans to a communication device between you and the entire world. Smartphones are progressing to a point where it can help you connect with your immediate surroundings and also with the other side of the world with the same ease. The possibilities of the devices are immense, for instance, a compass app in your mobile can point you the right directions when you lose your way, an embedded NFC (Near Field Communication) technology can tell you which nearby store is offering a discount when you are by a particular street or lane, and you can make quick payments even on the go. All these connection-based communications relying on your exact location at the moment and personal preferences are going to be a great game-changer in the future.

Many critics suggest that the Mobile App business model of acquiring users in the hope of keeping them loyal to their products and services will die a natural death soon. While there are some teeth in this criticism, but the fundamental truth is that, in the future, mobile apps will not just remain a platform from where you can book a movie ticket, order lunch or do some just money transactions. Essentially it means, as of now Mobile Apps are just more or less a bunch of “Push” medium. Like Ads notifications for generic products targeting a large group of people. In future Mobile Apps will switch sides and turn over a new leaf. It will become more of a push & pull medium where highly personalized products and services will be offered through one-on-one relationships. The stress will be on more meaningful and relevant interaction. For example, Google Now delivers information based on the personal habits of the users, which can be used for tailor-made consumption ads.

The year is 2020. And there are 50 billion devices are connected to the internet. IoT is going to revolutionize the way people get connected to things, data and process which will directly impact both business and our lives. Because through the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, everything, yes virtually everything from the refrigerator in your kitchen to parking sensors in a shopping mall will be connected. And all this will happen through sophisticated chips and sensors embedded in the daily things that we use, collecting diverse data, and turning them into relevant information. It is a colossal cloud-based technology that can guide us in the smooth execution of day-to-day routine lives, solves specific civic issues and even assists in business operations. The most important thing about IoT is that not only humans can connect and communicate with machines. But there will be a machine to machine communications. The machine will talk to another and help solve specific human or business problems.

Statista currently pegs the market value of the Wearable devices industry at 8,862 million USD[1]. And why not? Take a simple wearable product like Kerv.- the first contactless payment ring. This means you don’t need to carry your wallet if you are going for trekking, sea surfing or any other activities where carrying a wallet might be uncomfortable, risky or outright impractical. With Kerv you can make your payment anywhere which has a contactless payment system symbol. You remain connected to your banking services wherever you go. Or take any health and fitness-related wearable devices which can measure your heartbeat, sugar or oxygen level in the blood, all in real-time and then share it across with your family physician. This real-time tracking gives the physician the much-needed control, especially in times of emergency which improves efficiency and patient satisfaction. Suppose someone suffers a heart stroke and the physician is immediately alerted on this. A physician can instantly scan through the medical history of the patient and start with the next course of treatment. These monitoring wearables are literally transforming the way people manage diseases and their lives. People are able to remain connected to medical help with these intelligent wearable devices.

It is not a cliché or gross exaggeration when someone says that 3D Printing is going to change the way we think about innovation, designing, manufacturing, distribution to sell or buy things. Forbes has already made predictions that 3D Printing is going to be a 5 Billion USD industry by 2020. So what is 3D Printing? To put it simply, it’s an additive manufacturing technology of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. And how it is going to change the business world in a connected world? With 3D Printing, you can customize the things that you want to create so that you can use and enjoy it the way you want. Now imagine in a hyper-connected world, someone has to just download the file of a dining table and can build and tweak it as per his/her choice and taste. There are plenty of interesting examples of 3D Printing happening right now. People are making shoes, houses, airplanes part, motor cars, and now even NASA is going to build MPS-130 CubeSat Modular Propulsion System with the 3D printing specialists Aerojet Rocketdyne.

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Challenges During Cloud Migration

Many company executives have make-shift cloud strategies managing cloud migration on their own. However most such initiatives run into problems and executives face many challenges in migrating to the cloud, arising out of some common mistakes. Many businesses go about without any specific cloud migration strategies but a thorough process evaluation and goal setting can help avoid some common and costly mistakes such as:

Lack of a Cloud Strategy:

Undoubtedly Cloud benefits businesses, but differently across the business spectrum with cost reduction and data control being the major benefits. One of the most common mistakes businesses commit is to get into it without a cloud strategy that outlines the objectives and goals of the initiative. Outlining a goal and assessing the process, accomplishments and benefits of cloud migration is the first step towards success. The strategy should consider the internal resources, the cloud provider, automation tool, migration team and host of other factors.

Uncertainty About What should move to the cloud:

For small businesses the choice of applications for cloud migration is easy and they can look at those with less than 50-200 VMs/workloads. However, in the enterprise space, there are hundreds and thousands of workloads making this assessment difficult and critical.

In making the choice, it is important to understand workloads, applications and databases. A clear understanding of what workloads are being used, when and how are they being used, which application is interacting with another, when it is happening, and which databases can be relied on, makes the choice simpler and more streamlined.

Choosing the Cloud Platform:

Once the decision to move to the cloud is made, it now becomes a matter of choosing the specific cloud platform. Different platforms–public, private or hybrid cloud platforms–have their own unique and different features, benefits, and challenges. Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are also choices that come with their own benefits and challenges to them.

A wrong choice can result in major costs, a slowdown in business processes, loss of access to applications, inability to compete in the market and other unfavorable outcomes. The important considerations in the choice of a cloud platform are cloud services, cloud maturity, its performance, costs and competencies of the provider.

Process of Migration:

Businesses need to understand the process of migration completely before initiating the process since not all applications can be simply shifted to the cloud (re-hosting). Some of them might need a significant amount of re-architecting (refactoring) in them and usually, businesses err by not being aware of what to re-host or refactor and when to do it. Another common mistake in cloud migration is trying to optimize a workload after it has been moved to the cloud while migrating an application without application mapping is equally so.

Need for Security and Compliance:

Businesses often do not understand the need for data protection and mistakenly believe that their data is protected automatically. The truth is that all the workloads and data may not be safe even if the cloud provider is compliant with HIPAA and PDI DSS. Companies have to ensure that data is protected and secure by encrypting it.

These mistakes arise from a lack of planning, knowledge of the process, understanding the offerings of cloud providers, the requisite resources and platform choices. With the latest cloud migration automation tools and services, companies can overcome the complexity and much of the costs and uncertainty of the migration process.

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Why Cloud is the best option for startups?

One of the biggest challenges for start-ups is the lack of resources to procure and manage IT resources.  A start-up with only 10 or 20 employees usually end-up dealing with an avalanche of IT tasks like website hosting, data storage, BYOD, CRM applications, numerous communication channels, online collaboration tools, payment processing and more. That’s where Cloud solutions can come into action.

Cloud gives start-ups a level-playing field. They get access to all the technologies that were previously beyond reach and can focus on their core business. Start-ups need not be concerned about the underlying platform, building infrastructure, employing experts to install and update software, manage or run servers/data centers or maintaining service or applications – all these are the KRAs (Key Responsibilities Areas) of the Cloud application and storage service provider.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a Public Cloud computing platform that offers an assortment of Cloud services like computing, analytics, storage and networking. It provides Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service and Web site hosting solutions on Cloud. Microsoft Azure is one of the most popular Cloud services in the market now.

Why Microsoft Azure is a dream for start-ups?

With Microsoft Azure solutions, enterprises can enjoy a host of integrated Cloud services like analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage and web. Through BizSpark for start-ups, Microsoft Azure is offering three years of free software, service, tech support and Azure Cloud Services.

What can start-ups achieve with Microsoft Azure?

Build a virtual machine for high-end batch processing and remote application access

Adopt Database as a Service with SQL Server capabilities for migrating database applications to the Cloud

Stream analytics to gain real-time insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure and applications

Create dedicated private networks for traffic management, load balancing and Domain Name System (DNS) hosting

Utilize media services for on-demand encoding, storing, streaming and indexing media playback files

Rely on BizTalk services for seamless integration of Cloud and the enterprise

Implement hybrid integration for server backup and site recovery, connecting private and public Cloud

Develop a security center for preventing, detecting and responding to threats with increased visibility

Connect, monitor, and control IoT assets for analyzing IoT data from sensors and other devices via Azure IoT Hub

There are many more solutions that Microsoft Azure provide and cater to a variety of business requirements. Since Azure is a flexible cloud platform, enterprises obtain the agility to grow their business with greater efficiency and be more responsive to change.

Microsoft Azure Solutions and benefits that can boost start-ups’ business function:

Development options for both web & mobile apps: Users can develop web and mobile apps for any platform and any device, and can use a variety of other languages like ASP, ASP.net, PHP, Python, or Node.js. Websites can be launched quickly using the application gateway. Moreover, Microsoft Azure provisions the monitoring of web and mobile apps.

Simple and secure data storage and backup solutions: Users can easily store unstructured text and binary data like images, video, and audio. Storage is highly available and massively scalable. Importing and exporting features enable users to move data quickly in a reliable environment. Moreover, it also avails Hybrid Cloud storage with exceptional data security features.

Better performance with SQL Database: The in-built SQL database functionality of Microsoft Azure supports massive scale-out and flexible data management. Start-ups can own data warehouse with enterprise-class features. They don’t need to buy an SQL Server license. They just have to pay for the database for the month or even for the days that they intend to use it.

Top-notch analytics for operational insights rendered in a simple way: Analytics and insights are key to business development. But for start-ups, it is extremely difficult to make business sense when they handle big data. That’s where Microsoft Azure’s HDInsight helps enterprises to manage and analyze any amount of data at a time. Start-ups can easily integrate HDInsight with Excel to visualize and uncover business insights.

Automation, API Management and Scheduler make work easy: Start-ups can easily automate tasks and process with Microsoft Azure. Simplified features such as Scheduler can run both simple and complex recurring schedules with ease. And API Management allows users to create and run a variety of APIs, and publish it to stakeholders like partners, developers and employees.

Better mobile managed services: No start-ups can afford to ignore mobile if they want to grow their business. Microsoft Azure Mobile Engagement allows users to maximize mobile apps usage, retention and monetization.

Massive savings with easy IT Management: Whether it is installing or upgrading software, managing data or file servers or building new applications – everything can be done in a snap without engaging internal resources or hiring a team of tech experts. For example, start-ups can launch a Windows Server or a Linux OS while using Microsoft Azure solutions. Azure helps start-ups save their working capital to a large extent and also allows employees to focus on their core business development.

These are some of the key features of Microsoft Azure and the business benefits that it brings to the start-ups. There are many more attributes and benefits that start-ups can draw from the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.

Please contact CMS IT for more information about Windows Azure, and how the solution can transform business for startups.

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Field Force Automation – A Game Changer for your Sales Team

What was once viewed as a bittersweet development, is now turning into a gamechanger for entire sales teams. In a data-driven world, organizations in general and sales teams, in particular, have understood how Field Force Automation has complemented the feet on the ground with greater transparency, offering incentives for efficiency. Field Force Automation, which effectively is the digital capture of on field data for back end process, offers organizations and sales teams with accurate data points and statistics that aid in improving performance outcomes. With numerous advantages from an operational perspective, it has brought life to the worm graphs in reviews. Here is a deeper look at some of the more important benefits for sales teams.

Resolution of issues, backed by real-time data

A lack of data and conflicting interpretations often led to unresolved issues between sales teams and other operations teams or clients. With Field Force Automation, the scope for misrepresentation or wrong interpretation is eliminated. All data is captured and stored on a real-time basis, which permits retrieval at any point of time, thereby ironing out conflicts on the basis of factual information.

Pre-empt recurrence of issues likely to fall in repetitive cycles

With the help of data captured on a real-time basis, it is possible for managers to understand issues that are highly likely to fall into repetitive cycles and initiate pre-emptive measures. This prevention and rectification help operational teams to bring in greater efficiency by slashing down on time and effort spent on issues. Traditional reporting processes offer little scope for capturing data in a manner that will offer information of use.

KPIs and performance metrics

Milestones of teams that sweat it out on the fields with clients are typically tracked through KPIs and performance metrics. With Field Force Automation it is possible for all stakeholders to keep track of KPIs. This will provide teams with the right inputs to meet targets or to give that extra push to become star performers. This lends an edge to teams that used to earlier work on assumptions of achieving targets, which may actually be a lot different from a recorded and accepted performance.

Daily Sales Report (DSR) Automation

This will probably count as one of the biggest differentiators from a sales executive perspective. Expected to submit reports at the end of every hectic day is highly likely to result in inadvertent errors. DSR Automation is the much-needed relief for entire teams sweating it out on the fields.

Real-time tracking and notifications

Managers earlier had the unenviable task of tracking field executives with calls, which may sometimes be ill-timed. With automated tracking, this empowers managers to draw up schedules in a more realistic and efficient manner.

Feedback mechanism

On the spot, the feedback mechanism offers invaluable information to managers which can then be used for de-briefing teams during review meetings. This feedback also helps in resolving issues that occur commonly.

Attendance and productivity management

Productivity needs to be the driving force, and administrative requirements such as attendance sometimes come in the way of productivity. By enabling virtual marking of attendance, that is verifiable, the effects help administration as well as the field executives, bringing in greater harmony.

Sales – IT integration

This is the giant leap of technology. While solutions existed on a different level earlier, the development of interfaces and flexible solutions have made it possible for Sales and IT to co-exist and script organizational success.