Clustering Grid Whitepapers and Ebooks

It is a given that data fuels online marketing success. the best online marketers capture trainloads of data generated by the online activity of customers and prospects. they analyse that data to deliver targeted search and display ads, personalised emails, product recommendations, and marketing on social websites. they are using just one slice of the customer data pie. Untapped by most online marketers are vast stores of data produced by customer activity in offline channels � in stores, through mail and catalogues, via call centres, and at kiosks. this offline data represents a huge opportunity for online marketing, and marketing as a whole. it reflects customer transactions in stores and through other offline channels in pound values far greater than online purchasing. it may include valuable contact information, demographic profiles, behavioural patterns, and profitability and lifetime value scoring. integrating these dual data stores of online and offline activity is the ultimate objective for multichannel marketing. this consolidation would give you a single view of multichannel customer activity and let you measure and optimise performance across all channels, delivering personalised marketing with pinpoint precision. But customer data integration cannot happen overnight. And marketers cannot afford to wait to advantage of multichannel marketing opportunities.

Differentiation is a business decision made at the highest levels about the company's positioning and values how the company adds value to a customer relationship. There are many ways a company can make those decisions, and many different approaches to doing so. The most successful companies adopt a positioning that offers sustainable competitive advantage a way of adding value that competitors cannot easily duplicate. Developing appropriate differentiation can be a challenge for business-to-business marketers, and for good reason. To be successful, a company's positioning must hit all the bases: it must have toplevel support and buy-in, but be easily understood and embraced throughout the organization, not only by sales and marketing people, but also by the rank and file, who will be charged with the responsibility to bring it to life. Good differentiation also requires striking a balance between a company's past, present, and future. Aspirations are wonderful, but when a company has a huge installed base, it may take quite a while (and cost quite a bit) to change the market's perception. A good example: Ford's campaign several decades ago to position itself with the line, "Quality is Job One," when there were millions of ailing Pintos limping along roadways.

The later in the system development life-cycle that major errors are discovered the more expensive it is to fix them: defects found in released software are 80 times more expensive to fix than defects found in the specification stages of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) are the most often the least consistently executed.

Data center sprawl has been the enemy of IT innovation for far too long. Over the past 40 years, IT infrastructures have been built in a piecemeal fashion. With systems deployed for specific applications and connected in an ad hoc manner, most data centers today are a labyrinth of teams, tools, and processes. Monolithic, hard-wired systems require excessive manpower to operate and do not scale easily. When an urgent application need emerges, the solution is often to simply add more hardware. Over time, these practices have increased complexity and stifled flexibility. Most data center assets today are underutilized and straining business performance to the breaking point. As a decision maker focused on increasing your competitive advantage, you are likely searching for new ways to free untapped IT capacity and react quickly to business opportunity. For mission-critical environments, this is especially crucial as minutes of downtime can mean lost business. The solution for tomorrow's business is a converged infrastructure-- one that aligns IT with business demands. A converged infrastructure consists of: �A common modular infrastructure �A common network fabric �Comprehensive cross-domain control �Comprehensive power and cooling management If only that infrastructure were available now. Blades-based architectures are a smart design for a common IT, including modular building blocks, common components, and standard design.

When virtualization first appeared on the radar screens of IT managers and CIOs in the late 1990s, it was seen as a technology that could help reduce costs. By moving applications and storage from a physical to a virtual environment, companies could reduce server numbers and slash operating expenses. However, while virtualization was successful in helping companies achieve cost reduction, there are growing signs that the technology is helping companies achieve a lot more. In reviews of customer sites, IDC is finding examples of how virtualization is being used to increase agility, simplify IT environments, and help business leaders better manage their technology resources. For many organizations, virtualization has become a critical element that sits at the very heart of their IT infrastructure. As part of its Total Business Transformation (TBT) project, National Foods has implemented a highly consolidated and virtualized server infrastructure using the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE) on HP-UX 11i. For National Foods, like many other companies, the initial key driver was cost reduction. However, as the deployment progressed, National Foods' IT managers realized that virtualization could help in many other ways. It allowed them to speed the deployment of new applications, more effectively protect IT from disaster, and generally become more agile and responsive to changing business requirements.

Business risk can appear at your company's doorstep at any time -- and in many forms. Systems go offline when aging components fail, natural disasters strike, key networking connections don't work, or a local contractor cuts a power cable. Security issues can emerge and threaten the integrity of business data. All work could come to a halt -- or portions of the business could see systems go offline, while others continue to operate normally. No matter the scenario, businesses must plan for such contingencies and what they will do about them when they appear -- unbidden -- and affect their end users and end customers and their ability to do business. Maintaining productive and smoothly running business operations is absolutely mission critical -- and that is even more evident in today's challenging economic conditions. The critical components of an effective IT infrastructure -- servers, storage, software, and all of the networking links -- must be up and running, all the time, to maintain business momentum and employee productivity. In many small and even midsize businesses, current IT systems may not be up to date or easy to manage, and this situation sets the stage for potential problems down the Of course, a variety of IT and business challenges are associated with acquiring and maintaining the most effective IT environments to support ongoing operations.

Organizations of all sizes strive to be more productive and run low cost operations. Particularly in difficult economic times, many organizations will evaluate various cost-cutting initiatives in order to weather the storm. However, enterprises need to be careful to pursue cost cutting measures that won't negatively impact day-to-day operations or constrain long term growth. Employees need to do their jobs more efficiently than before, so it is vital to keep IT infrastructure up-to-date. Ideally, organizations should not make deep cuts in investments that may jeopardize future growth, such as product improvements or hiring of key personnel. Much has been written about wide area data services (WDS) and its ability to improve productivity and collaboration across the enterprise. However, WDS investments can often be justified solely on the basis of cost savings. These cost savings can be achieved without negatively impacting operations � in fact, in most instances WDS helps organizations run better while cutting costs. Riverbed has over 3500 customers, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, who are using our WDS solutions to reduce costs while improving productivity. Many Riverbed customers have seen a return on investment in just a few months because of the significant hard savings in areas such as bandwidth reduction and IT consolidation.

In total, deploying Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile in this scenario resulted in a NPV of $3 million dollars and an IRR of 61%, along with a one year payback, all without relying on any "soft" benefits -- in fact those soft benefits are the key drivers for many Riverbed customers, but even without them you can be confident that deploying Riverbed solutions in your company can help you achieve your strategic IT goals, while ensuring that your company is operating as efficiently as possible. Many Riverbed customers see paybacks well under six months, and in some cases as short as one or two months when IT costs are particularly high. That said, for most Riverbed customers cost savings isn't really the primary driver for the investment. Instead it's the opportunity to truly transform the IT organization by delivering higher quality of service at a lower cost, and enabling projects that were impossible before. Riverbed can multiply the effectiveness of your current IT investments. For more information, please visit www.riverbed.com, contact your local reseller or Riverbed representative. We would be happy to work with you to calculate the ROI for a project at your company. As the economy turns and IT budgets remain flat or get reduced, doing more with the infrastructure you have has never been more important.

In 2007, IDC conducted 12 interviews with Riverbed Steelhead customers in order to assess their experiences after deploying the WAN optimization solution. Given that Riverbed Technology has added features and functionality to Steelhead over the past two years, IDC worked with Riverbed to update and add to this research by conducting eight additional in-depth interviews with Steelhead customers. In this study, as in the 2007 study, IDC found that customers were able to reduce IT costs, improve IT staff efficiency, increase availability for users, and trim time to market with new revenue-generating opportunities. Highlights from the updated IDC research are as follows: The aggregate analysis yields a three-year ROI of 457% and a payback period of 6.9 months. On average, customers avoided $979,973 in bandwidth costs annually. Customers have saved $782,740 on average annually by avoiding the purchase of new servers and tape backup equipment. Restore time has been improved by 83%, on average, since the deployment. IT operations benefits in server, network, and application management are equal to an average savings of 10.9 full-time equivalents (FTEs). The number of weekly help desk calls has been reduced by 17%. On average, each user has 15.3 hours of more productive per year.

In total, deploying Steelhead appliances and Steelhead Mobile in this scenario resulted in a NPV of $3 million dollars and an IRR of 61%, along with a one year payback, all without relying on any "soft" benefits -- in fact those soft benefits are the key drivers for many Riverbed customers, but even without them you can be confident that deploying Riverbed solutions in your company can help you achieve your strategic IT goals, while ensuring that your company is operating as efficiently as possible. Many Riverbed customers see paybacks well under six months, and in some cases as short as one or two months when IT costs are particularly high. That said, for most Riverbed customers cost savings isn't really the primary driver for the investment. Instead it's the opportunity to truly transform the IT organization by delivering higher quality of service at a lower cost, and enabling projects that were impossible before. Riverbed can multiply the effectiveness of your current IT investments. For more information, please visit www.riverbed.com, contact your local reseller or Riverbed representative. We would be happy to work with you to calculate the ROI for a project at your company. As the economy turns and IT budgets remain flat or get reduced, doing more with the infrastructure you have has never been more important.