Tag: notifications

xMatters Releases Enhanced Platform For Targeted Notifications To IT Teams For Operational Continuity

xMatters Inc. today announces the latest release of its cloud platform for enterprise alerts and notifications. Designed to deliver notifications and messaging that enable business continuity and the availability of mission-critical applications, xMatters enables IT teams to alert key stakeholders of service disruptions, technical issues, external emergencies or other sources of business and technology interruption. The new release features enhanced collaboration functionality, an upgraded integration agent, improved mobile support and messaging capabilities as well as increased data quality. The xMatters platform enables enhanced communication between teams encountering an incident that threatens to disrupt day to day operations by enriching the quality of the user interface for collaboration and its attendant messaging capability as illustrated below:

The screenshot above illustrates an incident that requires attention and an accompanying message to a team member to take ownership of the event in question given the unresponsiveness of a different team member. The xMatters user interface provides a method for the responsive team member to elaborate on the chosen course of action by way of a comment that correspondingly updates the larger, background reporting dashboard featuring blue, green and red squares. As shown above, today’s release illustrates features the ability to add two-way, free text notes about an incident as it unfolds. In addition, customers can configure xMatters deployments to notify immediate team members, vendors, senior management and executives as deemed appropriate. Importantly, xMatters also delivers enhanced integrations between the xMatters cloud and on premise enterprise applications both behind and outside the purview of corporate security and enterprise firewalls. The integration of the xMatters cloud with on premise applications enables IT teams to configurae notifications from xMatters by configuring rules that automatically identify issues such as a database failure or anomalies in network traffic. The conjunction of the ability of the xMatters cloud to automate application integrations with its rich user interface for collaboration and messaging renders today’s release an especially valuable addition to the exploding space of business continuity software. Expect xMatters to build on its early traction in the targeted notification space, particularly as the larger market for cloud-based collaboration software deepens its footprint within the enterprise.

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BigPanda Emerges From Stealth To Manage Deluge Of IT Alerts And Notifications

BigPanda today launches from stealth to tackle the problem of managing the explosion of alerts and notifications that IT administrators increasingly receive, daily, from myriads of applications and devices. The Mountain View-based startup integrates alerts and notifications from disparate sources into a consolidated data feed that parses unstructured data into structured data to create an aggregated alerts and notifications data repository. BigPanda’s proprietary analytics subsequently run against the integrated data repository to enable the creation of topologies and relationships, time-based analytics and statistical analytics as indicated by the screenshot of an incident dashboard below:

Examples of statistical analytics include probabilistic determinations that the concurrent appearance of notification A, B and C is likely to lead to outcome X as suggested by historical data about the conjunction of the notifications in question. The platform’s machine-learning technology incrementally refines its analytics in relation to incoming data and thereby iteratively delivers more nuanced analyses and visualizations of notifications-related data. Overall, the platform enables customers to more effectively manage the tidal wave of data from notifications that bombard the inboxes of IT administrators by facilitating the derivation of actionable business intelligence based on the aggregation of notifications from discrete systems and applications.

As told to Cloud Computing Today by BigPanda CEO Assaf Resnick, the platform integrates with monitoring systems such as New Relic, Nagios and Splunk and additionally provides REST API functionality to connect to different applications, deployment infrastructures and ITSM tools. Moreover, BigPanda today announces the finalization of $7M in Series A funding in a round led by Mayfield with additional participation from Sequoia Capital. The $7M funding raise brings the total capital raised by BigPanda to $8.5M, following upon a $1.5M pre-Series A seed round of funding from Sequoia Capital. Deployed as a SaaS application that runs on AWS infrastructure while leveraging a MongoDB NoSQL datastore, BigPanda fills a critical niche in the IT management space by delivering one of the few applications aimed at consolidated notification management and analytics. As applications, infrastructure components and networking devices proliferate with dizzying complexity in the contemporary datacenter, platforms like BigPanda are likely to morph into necessary components of IT management as a means of taming the deluge of notifications produced by disparate systems. Meanwhile, BigPanda’s early positioning in the notification-management space renders it a thought leader as well as a technology standout.

Base Enhances Sales Productivity Platform With Real-Time Analytics And Rich Data Visualization

Base, the CRM that leverages real-time data and analytics, recently announced the release of a bevy of new features and functionality that brings real-time, Big Data analytics to cloud-based sales productivity management. Base’s proprietary technology aggregates data from sources such as phone calls, in person meetings, social network-based prospects and news feeds and subsequently produces real-time notifications to sales professionals. As a result, sales teams can minimize their manual input of sales-related data and instead take advantage of the analytic and data visualization capabilities of the Base platform. The Base platform testifies to a qualitative shift within the CRM space marked by the delivery of enhanced automation to sales operations workflows resulting from the conjunction of real-time data, predictive analytics and data visualization. Uzi Shmilovici, CEO of Base, remarked on the positioning of Base within the larger CRM landscape as follows:

Base picks up where other CRMs have left off. Until now, legacy cloud Sales and CRM products like Salesforce have been accepted as ‘the norm’ by the enterprise market. However, recent advancements in big data, mobility and real-time computing reveal a need for a new generation of intelligent sales software that offers flexibility, visibility, and real-time functionality. If you’re using outdated technology that cannot adapt to the advanced needs of modern day sales teams, your competition will crush you.

Here, Shmilovici comments on the way in which big data, real-time analytics and the proliferation of mobile devices have precipitated the creation of a new class of sales applications that outstrip the functionality of “legacy cloud Sales and CRM products like Salesforce.” In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Shmilovici elaborated on the ability of the Base platform to aggregate disparate data sources to produce rich, multivalent profiles of sales prospects that augment the ability of sales teams to convert leads into qualified sales. Base’s ability to enhance sales operations by means of data-driven analytics are illustrated by the screenshot below:

The graphic above illustrates the platform’s ability to track sales conversions at the level of individual sales professionals as well as sales managers or owners within a team. VPs of Sales can customize analytics regarding the progress of their teams to enable enhanced talent and performance management in addition to gaining greater visibility as to where the market poses its stiffest challenges. More importantly, however, Base delivers a veritable library of customized analytics that illustrates a prominent use case for the convergence of cloud computing, real-time analytics and Big Data technologies. As such, the success of the platform will depend on its ability to continue enhancing its algorithms and analytics while concurrently enriching the user experience that remains integral to the daily experience of sales teams.