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Instaclustr adds PostgreSQL to managed platform in public preview

2021-09-14T13:34:11+10:00

PostgreSQL joining Cassandra, Kafka, Redis, and other open source data technologies as a fully- and expertly-managed service part of Instaclustr’s growing platform

COMPANY NEWS by Instaclustr: Instaclustr, delivering reliability at scale through its fully managed platform for open source data technologies, today announced the addition of PostgreSQL to its Managed Platform, now available in public preview for Instaclustr customers. Managed PostgreSQL offers complete database management and optimization, along with comprehensive support and monitoring backed by Instaclustr’s team of PostgreSQL experts.

PostgreSQL has earned rising popularity as an especially advantageous and versatile database that is straightforward to get started with – particularly in its license-free open source version. However, managing PostgreSQL at scale is considerably more complex, requiring dedicated attention and expertise to continually tune deployments for performance, security, and cost efficiency. Properly monitoring PostgreSQL and managing replication, failover, and version upgrades demands hands-on expertise to thoroughly meet enterprise requirements in mission-critical environments.

For customers who understand and seek the benefits of PostgreSQL but have hesitated with the operational overhead of self-management, Managed PostgreSQL delivers a fast and secure path to achieving fully managed and optimized PostgreSQL deployments. Instaclustr’s managed PostgreSQL offering follows the company’s recent acquisition of credativ, the global consulting company with 20+ years of experience providing comprehensive service and technical support for PostgreSQL, alongside other open source data technologies. Just six months after this acquisition, Instaclustr has now extended its capabilities beyond PostgreSQL consulting to add PostgreSQL to its fully managed, fully open source data infrastructure platform.

To ensure customers can get the most out of their PostgreSQL deployments, Instaclustr is also introducing Application DBA Support as an optional service. With this offering, Instaclustr provides DBA assistance to support, maintain, and optimize customers’ application components running in PostgreSQL.

“As a popular and powerful open source database that requires expert management to unlock its full potential, Postgres is a natural addition to our Managed Platform of pure open source technologies,” said Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer at Instaclustr. “With this public preview, our customers now have the opportunity to get started with Instaclustr-managed Postgres. Whether migrating to Postgres or reducing the internal complexities and costs of operating the database, we invite customers to discover the many advantages of deploying Postgres within the Instaclustr Managed Platform.”

Following the public preview, general availability of Managed PostgreSQL will include Instaclustr’s industry-leading support and SLAs. Existing customers can get started with Managed PostgreSQL by logging into the Instaclustr Console and creating a PostgreSQL cluster. For more information on the new PostgreSQL General Availability, Instaclustr customers can contact their Instaclustr Customer Success representative or the Instaclustr sales team.

About Instaclustr

Instaclustr delivers reliability at scale through an integrated data platform of open source technologies such as Apache Cassandra^®, Apache Kafka^®, Apache Spark^TM, Elasticsearch^TM, Redis^TM, Apache ZooKeeper^TM, and PostgreSQL^®. Instaclustr allows companies to focus internal development and operational resources on building cutting edge customer-facing applications. Instaclustr now has more than 100 million node hours and 7 PB of data under management across its open source technology suite.

For more information, visit and follow us at Twitter.

Wham, bam, SolarWinds SAM keeps you ahead of server and application downtime

2021-09-05T21:32:54+10:00

REVIEW PROMOTION Any business network with more than a handful of devices needs a good systems and applications monitoring tool. It will proactively alert you to outages and abnormal behaviour and allow you to see your environment's health on a single pane of glass.

You don't want to be the IT Manager who receives a call from the Managing Director ain't why the mail server is down if you weren't already aware. If you don't have a monitoring tool then you need one; it's that simple. This allows you to free you and your team from manually checking infrastructure to focusing on other tasks and managing your equipment by exception. It also means you're ahead of the business and end-users in the event something goes wrong. You're not waiting for someone to walk in and ask, "Hey, are you aware the file server isn't working?" because you'll already know, and how many other devices and applications are affected, and be in the triage stage.

An attractive option over the years has been Nagios, which is free and open-source, and cross-platform. Though, this comes with a downside too. Nagios is predominantly a toolkit to bring together a range of scripts and agents that deliver server, network device and application insights to the Nagios dashboard. As such, companies using Nagios successfully typically have a basic experience or have staff dedicated to scripting and configuring and maintaining the product. The cost to get into Nagios is low - simply download it and install it on a suitable device - but this can be a false economy and in the long run, may well cost significantly more than a commercial product. Nagios support is largely crowd-sourced and thus there's no guarantee for solutions to things your team cannot resolve internally. Still, if you'd rather spend your time programming instead of monitoring systems, Nagios could be an option for you.

Another well-known option is Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager, SCOM. This comes with wide enterprise-grade support from Microsoft itself, as well as many partners. For many organisations, this is paired with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), now rebranded as Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM) Cloud Infrastructure and Management. It's quite a mouthful and while support is there, it's expensive and often regarded as cumbersome and difficult to use. Some regard SCOM as being in charge of them, instead of being the tool that lets them be in charge of their own network. Still, SCOM is embedded in many a large Microsoft-based environment, but even so, an alternate server and application monitoring product can work well as a complement to it.

Another option with a low barrier to entry is PRTG, and you can set it up easily without any cost for up to 100 sensors, where a sensor is any individual thing you wish to monitor. For example, a server's HTTP and HTTPS responsiveness would be two sensors, while the same server's CPU usage, disk space, RAM and ping response time would add another four sensors. Thus, the volume of sensors can add up quickly but it's definitely a tool you can get set up and at the very least pinging all your devices. The company behind PRTG, Paessler, tout it as a network management product and while the capability is there to monitor web-based applications to an extent this is not what it is primarily known for, and compared to alternatives it can feel flat here.

Another commercial offering is Manage Engine, which provides a reasonable degree of functionality but again handles network uptime effortlessly, falling short of comprehensive application monitoring and insights.

Seeking a comprehensive solution to monitor network infrastructure, servers - both on-premises and on a cloud, as well as applications with deep insights, iTWire looked to SolarWinds SAM - the name literally meaning "Server & Application Monitor."

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SolarWinds has been in the business of providing trusted enterprise-grade management and monitoring tools for years, spanning servers, databases, networks, applications and other options. It's staked its reputation on delivering products the IT team will love, simplifying setup while providing advanced and deeply functional utilities, and genuinely letting the team manage by exception.

SAM provides a free trial, with pricing starting at $1980 for a ten-node subscription. The product includes application monitoring templates for over 300 products out-of-the-box with further community-developer support for a further 1100+ products, meaning it goes way beyond simple ping. Pinging a server to see if it responds lets you know the operating system is up, but not if IIS or Apache is responding. Testing the HTTP/S ports may then let you know the webserver is up, but your application could still be giving 404 errors for all you know. By contrast, having support for the application means the results are richer and more informative, giving genuine insight into how the application is performing. This is equally true for specific network hardware devices and server types.

SAM's automatic discovery makes it simple to set up, while its customisable dashboards and easily implemented alerts and reports gives you the data you need when you need it. It brings an ease-of-use that is foreign to SCOM; it brings insights that exceed that of Manage Engine, it provides features not available in PRTG at any price, and its simplicity is in stark contrast to Nagios with little ongoing maintenance required. iTWire found SAM easy to set and forget, with minimal work required to add new devices or applications later. Its facilities to figure out the dependencies between applications and devices really stand out.

SAM knows all about Active Directory, AWS, Azure, RabbitMQ, Windows, Linux, IIS, Apache, Docker, and so much more, giving you full end-to-end visibility across your entire enterprise hybrid multi-cloud world from one dashboard. It's agentless so you don't need to install or update, any extra software on all your production machines.

You can customise monitoring with your own scripts if needed, and you can analyse the data surfaced to inform server capacity planning and right-size your hardware based on actual usage.

What’s more, SAM works with SolarWinds’s product suite to bring a range of features competitors can only dream about. These include:

AppStack, the ability to seamlessly integrate with other SolarWinds modules to give full application stack visibility to correlate performance issues stretching over other layers
PerfStack, to easily create organization-specific charts to correlate performance issues using all the metrics collected by SolarWinds
Orion maps, to visualise the health of servers and applications on a map with a signature ‘time machine’ feature that, quite literally, lets you travel back in time to see historic events, downtime, alerts, and see exactly what happened in the past.

In all our tests SolarWinds SAM proved its value over and over again, letting me know every time something went awry and pinpointing precisely where I needed to divert my attention. And, it’s worth mentioning that SolarWinds actively and consciously works to become a leader in enterprise software security, ensuring the security and integrity of the software it delivers to customers through continuous enhancements of its product development, threat detection and prevention.

If you don't have a server and application monitor on your network then you need one, and you owe it to your network's health, your business, your customers, and your own peace of mind and sanity to check out SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor now.

See for yourself how easy and effective it is in this official video:

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Indonesia Taps 8x8 CPaaS to Enhance Mobile Experience for Business-to-Business (B2B) Customers in Indonesia

2021-08-03T16:52:15+10:00

Deploys 8x8 SMS API to Ensure Mobile App Security with One-Time Password (OTP) Multi-Factor Authentication

COMPANY NEWS: Cloud communications platform provider 8x8 (NYSE: EGHT) has announced that Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) Indonesia is using the 8x8 CPaaS SMS API to provide distributors and retailers with a secure mobile experience for managing orders and deliveries.

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners or CCEP Indonesia, as one of the leading consumer goods companies in the world, operates eight manufacturing facilities in Indonesia, selling and distributing seven categories of non-alcoholic beverage brands to serve more than 450,000 large and small retail outlets in the world’s fourth most populous country.

As part of CCEP Indonesia’s digital transformation journey to expand its efforts to the front end of the business, the company launched the Klik Toko app as an integrated digital solution for all Business-to-Business (B2B) customers in Indonesia.

“Our customers, including general trade outlets, are the most important and vital part of our business, and we are committed to create the opportunity to provide a fast and a superior service for them, including investing in digital technology. Klik Toko is one of the central elements of our transformation efforts as we invest in making it easier for our partners to do business with us,” said Lakshman Peiris, Marketing Director of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Indonesia.

“The partnership with 8x8 enhances Klik Toko’s security while accelerating and automating user verification. In addition, this delivers a great onboarding experience, allowing users to securely use the app and gain the benefits offered through Klik Toko.”

CCEP Indonesia partnered with 8x8 to deploy multi-factor authentication services for the Klik Toko app to ensure data and systems are accessed securely. When a person creates or logs into a Klik Toko account, the 8x8 SMS API enables user verification by connecting the app to CCEP Indonesia’s back-end systems. A one-time password (OTP) is generated and sent to the user via a SMS message, which must be entered within a specific timeframe to gain authorized access to the account.

The Klik Toko app has seen increasing adoption since being launched while providing CCEP Indonesia with operational efficiencies as well as being great for business partners. “A well-designed app with great collaboration capabilities helps to create a safe and convenient way in building strong communication and engagement with customers,” Peiris added. “We’re looking forward to evaluating results and seeing how we can utilize other 8x8 CPaaS capabilities in the future as usage increases.”

“Organisations around the world are enhancing customer engagement to meet the new requirements of a mobile-first business environment and workforce,” said Olivier Gerhardt, Managing Director of CPaaS at 8x8, Inc. “Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Indonesia recognizes the importance of providing its business partners with a frictionless, secure mobile experience. We look forward to working with them to introduce more personalization and other real-time communications services to achieve their business goals.”

About 8x8 CPaaS Solutions
The 8x8 CPaaS portfolio of APIs and embeddable applications, including SMS, voice chat apps, video and performance monitoring, empowers organisations to extend and customise communications that reimagine workflows and customer interactions for enhanced employee and customer experiences. The low code, no code capabilities enable organisations with any level of technical capability to leverage digital channels and even embed video meetings into apps and websites in minutes. Through a network of more than 160 top-tier carriers covering over 190 countries and territories, 8x8 CPaaS allows organisations to reliably and securely reach their customers no matter where they are.

Get the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Communications Platform as a Service 2021 Vendor Assessment excerpt to learn more about 8x8's CPaaS capabilities and why the IDC MarketScape recognised the company as a Major Player.

About Coca-Cola Europacific Partners

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners is one of the leading consumer goods companies in the world. We make, move and sell some of the world’s most loved brands – serving 600 million consumers and helping 1.75 million customers across 29 countries grow. We combine the strength and scale of a large, multi-national business with an expert, local knowledge of the customers we serve and communities we support.

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Indonesia operates eight manufacturing facilities in Sumatra, Java, and Bali employs a direct workforce of more than 5,500 people and distributes a million cases of refreshing drinks to more than 460,000 outlets across the nation. We are also committed to make a distinct and positive contribution to the areas we operate, by running various initiatives, such as: Bali Beach Clean Up, support Green School (Adiwiyata School) program, Coca-Cola Forest, and Waste Bank Development Program in several cities.

Coca-Cola Europacific Partners is listed on Euronext Amsterdam, the New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange and on the Spanish Stock Exchanges, trading under the symbol CCEP. For more information about CCEP, please visit www.cocacolaep.com & follow CCEP on Twitter at @CCEP.

About 8x8, Inc.

8x8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT) is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software-as-a-Service provider of contact centre, voice communications, video, chat and API solutions powered by one global cloud communications platform. 8x8 empowers workforces worldwide to connect individuals and teams so they can collaborate faster and work smarter. Real-time business analytics and intelligence provide businesses unique insights across all interactions and channels so they can delight end-customers and accelerate their business. For additional information, visit www.8x8.com, or follow 8x8 on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Tecala Ranked on Channel Futures MSP 501—Tech Industry’s Most Prestigious List of Global Managed Service Providers

2021-07-27T12:44:44+10:00

COMPANY NEWS: Tecala, Australia’s award-winning technology services and IT consulting provider, has announced that it has been named as one of the world’s premier Managed Service Providers in the prestigious 2021 Channel Futures MSP 501 rankings.

Tecala has been selected as one of the technology industry’s top-performing providers of managed services by the editors of Channel Futures. For the past 15 years, MSPs from around the globe have submitted applications to be included on this prestigious and definitive listing. The Channel Futures MSP 501 survey examines organisational performance based on annual sales, recurring revenue, profit margins, revenue mix, growth opportunities, innovation, technology solutions supported, and company and customer demographics.

Managed services providers that qualify for the list must pass a rigorous review conducted by the research team and editors of Channel Futures that rank applicants using a unique methodology that weighs financial performance according to long-term health and viability, commitment to recurring revenue and operational efficiency.

“We are delighted to have been ranked in the Top 50 MSPs globally as well as the Number 1 second year running for Mid-Market companies in the 2021 Channel Futures MSP 501 rankings,” said Pieter DeGunst, Managing Director, Tecala Group.

“These rankings highlight our ongoing commitment to our customers to support their growth as they continue to invest in cloud and digital transformation, intelligent automation and security to improve their operations. Achieving a leadership MSP position in Australia is also testament to the calibre of skills and experience our growing employee talent base holds and we are well equipped to proactively seize opportunities to further digitally enable our customers.”

This year’s list attracted a record number of applicants and was one of the most competitive in the survey’s history. Winners are being recognised on the Channel Futures website and will be honoured at a special ceremony at the MSP Summit held on 1-2 November in Las Vegas as part of the Channel Partners Conference & Expo.

Since its inception, the MSP 501 has evolved from a competitive ranking into a vibrant group of innovators focused on high levels of customer satisfaction at small, medium, and large organisations in public and private sectors. Today, many of their services and technology offerings focus on growing customer needs in the areas of cloud, security, collaboration, and support of hybrid work forces.

“The 2021 Channel Futures MSP 501 winners are the highest-performing and most innovative IT providers in the industry today. They stand head and shoulders above the competition,” said Robert DeMarzo, vice president of content for the Channel Futures and Channel Partners Conference & Expo division of Informa Tech Channels. “Coordinated by Channel Futures MSP 501 editor Allison Francis, this year’s list was clearly one of the best ever on record.”

“Vendors that are aligned with the Channel Futures MSP 501 are driving a new wave of innovation in the industry. Through their partnerships they are demonstrating a commitment to moving the MSP and entire channel forward,” said Kelly Danziger, general manager of Informa Tech Channels. “We extend our heartfelt congratulations to the 2021 winners and gratitude to the thousands of MSPs that have contributed to the continuing growth and success of the managed services sector.”

The complete 2021 MSP 501 list is available on Channel Futures’ website.

Background

The 2021 MSP 501 list is based on confidential data collected and analysed by the Channel Futures editorial and research teams. Data was collected online from March 1-May 24, 2021. The MSP 501 list recognises top managed service providers based on metrics including recurring revenue, profit margin and other factors.

About Tecala

As an end-to-end Managed Services Provider (MSP), Tecala supports mid-market clients throughout Australia and overseas. Rooted in a consulting and advisory background, their methodology is built on understanding their clients’ business objectives first, enabling them to provide technology solutions that deliver brilliant outcomes. Taking a strategic approach, Tecala implements and optimises a range of services including managed cloud, infrastructure and user support services along with security and intelligent automation as well as a comprehensive, as-a-Service practice that includes infrastructure, data protection and disaster recovery. Interconnectivity is provided for both data and voice via their national network services.

For further information please visit: tecala.com.au

About Channel Futures

Channel Futures is a media and events platform serving companies in the IT channel industry with insights, industry analysis, peer engagement, business information and in-person events. Our properties include Channel Futures MSP 501, recognising the most influential and fastest-growing providers of managed services in the technology industry,.

ExtraHop Experts Contribute Network Detection and Response Expertise to MITRE ATT&CK Framework

2021-06-30T10:43:47+10:00

Cybersecurity knowledge base expands to support evolving security landscape

COMPANY NEWS: ExtraHop, the leader in cloud-native network detection and response (NDR), today announced that ExtraHop researchers consulted with MITRE in the development of the new network detection and response methodologies included in the latest version of the ATT&CK framework.

This key contribution from ExtraHop provides new guidance for organisations as they integrate NDR into their security operations. It also builds on the company’s leadership around the MITRE ATT&CK framework, which is natively integrated into the ExtraHop Reveal(x) 360 interface.

MITRE ATT&CK is a globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. The ATT&CK knowledge base is used as a foundation for the development of specific threat models and methodologies in the private sector, government, and the cybersecurity product and service community. The growing body of network attack behaviours in the MITRE ATT&CK framework serves as both a useful resource and a strong signal for organizations that NDR is a vital tool for detecting and responding to advanced threats.

“ExtraHop was one of the companies that contributed to our development of ATT&CK for Containers,” said Justin Roberts, cloud/containers lead for the MITRE ATT&CK team. “As we all work to help companies stay protected against attacks using knowledge bases like ATT&CK as a common language, contributors like ExtraHop, with expertise and experience with real-world attacks, help us support the security community in reaching that goal.”

"ExtraHop has admired the work the MITRE team has been doing for years, and we’re honoured to have been able to contribute to the latest version of the ATT&CK framework,” said Jeff Costlow, CISO, ExtraHop. "But the work isn’t over. Cyber attacks are only growing more sophisticated, and we must remain proactive and vigilant. That’s why we’re committed to continuing to work alongside MITRE, as well as our customers and partners, to continue identifying new attack techniques and developing ways to detect, investigate, and respond to them quickly."

To learn more about how ExtraHop and MITRE work together, check out the blog here.

To try ExtraHop Reveal(x) for yourself, check out the live interactive online demo.

About ExtraHop

ExtraHop is on a mission to arm security teams to confront active threats and stop breaches. Our Reveal(x) 360 platform, powered by cloud-scale AI, covertly decrypts and analyses all cloud and network traffic in real time to eliminate blind spots and detect threats that other tools miss. Sophisticated machine learning models are applied to petabytes of telemetry collected continuously, helping ExtraHop customers to identify suspicious behaviour and secure over 15 million IT assets, 2 million POS systems, and 50 million patient records. ExtraHop is a market share leader in network detection and response with 30 recent industry awards including Forbes AI 50, Cybercrime Ransomware 25, and SC Media Security Innovator.

Stop Breaches 84% Faster. Get Started at www.extrahop.com/demo

Talend extends APAC presence with cloud data infrastructure in Australia to serve customer growth

2021-06-30T08:42:41+10:00

Helps customers maintain data sovereignty requirements and improve organisation's data health

COMPANY NEWS: Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a global leader in data integration and data integrity, today announced the opening of its newest regional cloud data infrastructure in Australia to support Talend’s expansion and growth in Asia Pacific (APAC).

Talend’s new cloud data infrastructure will provide Australian enterprises with confidence and clarity into their data while addressing regional data sovereignty, privacy, residency, and performance requirements. The Sydney-based cloud infrastructure, operated on Amazon Web Services, Inc (AWS), will be operational to host customers in July 2021.

According to Gartner, “the events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud. Even absent the pandemic there would still be a loss of appetite for data centres." Gartner forecasted in other research that Australian Public Cloud spending would reach USD 7.3 billion by the end of 2021, increasing 18.4% from last year, with cloud application services (SaaS) spending rising by 16.9%.

“Our underlying technology platform based on Talend has helped us disrupt the traditional, static financial services model, creating a real-time data-driven business and culture across our organisation" said Andrew Bates, Chief Technology Officer at Harmoney. "Having a Talend instance located in the Australia/New Zealand Region will assist us to further align with regional requirements given potential future data legislation changes and benefit our customers. I'm very excited about the company's future growth across Australia and New Zealand and look forward to a productive ongoing relationship with Talend."

As industry and government regulations evolve, Talend's customers can maintain flexibility to keep up with the changes. By reducing compliance and operational risk with a cloud data infrastructure deployed independently in Australia, Talend can maintain high standards regarding data residency, security, data sovereignty, and operational best practices.

“Our clients are increasingly adopting Cloud capabilities to help improve customer service, drive innovation, or just to keep up with competition. Cloud gives our clients the power to transform and reinvent their business,” said Thierry Lotrian, Partner Analytics & Cognitive at Deloitte Australia. “It is fantastic to have Technology organisations like Talend investing in the local Australian market when it comes to Cloud infrastructure enabling Australian businesses and government alike to ride the next wave of technology driven innovation. Having the data centre in Australia will play a critical role in complying with the data sovereignty requirements that many of our clients have in Australia.”

A unified approach to data, consistent with organisational needs and governance practices, requires fully transparent data management processes as well as documented and communal data quality standards. Talend Data Fabric is a single platform that delivers complete, clean, and uncompromised data in real-time. As more data is ingested and analysed, Talend helps companies clearly understand, in a quantifiable way, the overall reliability, risk, and return of their data, — one of their most valuable business assets.

"Every business is now in the data business. In support of Talend’s growing market, I'm delighted to announce the addition of new cloud data infrastructure in Australia," said Stu Garrow, Senior Vice President and General Manager APAC at Talend. "As strategic partners to our customers, it's important that we offer insight on holistic, big-picture data solutions that solve business problems and give clarity and confidence in their data. I'm excited to see Talend's continued growth and this significant investment to create a framework designed for data health solutions of our customers' success."

For more information about Talend Data Fabric, see this page: https://www.talend.com/products/data-fabric/

About Talend

Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a leader in data integration and data integrity, is changing the way the world makes decisions.

Talend Data Fabric is the only platform that brings together all the data integration and governance capabilities, to simplify every aspect of working with data. Talend delivers complete, clean, and uncompromised data in real-time to all. This unified approach to data has made it possible to create the Talend Trust Score™, an industry-first innovation that instantly assesses the reliability of any data set to bring clarity and confidence to every decision.

Over 6,500 customers across the globe have chosen Talend to run their businesses on trusted data. Talend is recognized as a leader in its field by leading analyst firms and industry media. For more information, please visit www.talend.com and follow us on Twitter: @Talend.

RICOH Pro C7200sx Series Scoops Mid-Volume CMYK+ BLI PRO Award

2021-06-28T10:33:31+10:00

New gold and silver toners enhance digital print enhancement capability

COMPANY NEWS by RICOH: RICOH a leading provider of workplace technology, today announced that the all-around production consistency of the colour sheetfed RICOH Pro C7200sx Series has been recognised with a Buyers Lab (BLI) 2021 PRO Award for Mid-Volume CMYK+ Production Device from Keypoint Intelligence. The independent seal of approval for document imaging hardware and software follows robust testing against a comprehensive set of technical criteria.

David Sweetnam, Director of EMEA/Asia Research & Lab Services, Keypoint Intelligence (parent company of BLI), said, “We were especially impressed by its performance over our production length test suite, where, over a series of six challenging 1.5 hour workflows generating over 37,000 clicks, the device never suffered a colour drift across the 42 colours in the FOGRA39 media wedge of more than DeltaE00 3.8, neither did it exhibit a front-to-back or page-to-page registration shift of more than 0.4 mm, earning it our coveted 5 Star rating in this category.”

“The RICOH Pro C7210sx/x is designed from the bottom up as a production workhorse,” added Martin Soane, European Lab Manager, Keypoint Intelligence. “The device’s fifth imaging station allows printshops to go beyond CMYK, including fluorescents, white, clear, and invisible red.”

This latest accolade for Ricoh also coincides with the availability in July of new gold and silver toners for the Pro C7200x Series providing graphic artists and commercial printers with new opportunities to broaden their product range and create market differentiation through striking digital print enhancement capabilities.

Developed for the fifth colour station on the Ricoh Pro C7200x digital colour sheetfed press, the toners deliver great visual impact for high value added print. The additional colours can transform a broad range of applications from catalogues, posters, flyers, direct mail, and brochures to business cards, greetings cards, tickets, invitations, certificates, and packaging.

The addition of gold and silver toner adds to the most extensive array of additional colours available on any digital press today. The other colours available include a high-opacity white, clear, fluorescent neon yellow, fluorescent neon pink and invisible red. They enable print providers to deliver high-value applications with special effects, visual pop, gamut expansion and/or security features.

The new toners are retrofittable, enabling existing users to expand the capabilities of the Ricoh Pro C7200X presses they operate today.

Henryk Kraszewski, Senior Product Manager Commercial & Industrial Print, Ricoh Australia, said, “We are thrilled that the C7200x Series has been recognised by Keypoint Intelligence with a Buyers Lab (BLI) 2021 PRO Award for Mid-Volume CMYK+ Production Device. This is the second time that the Pro C7200x Series has received a BLI Pro Award. This will provide Australian users with the additional level of confidence in the device’s ability to deliver robust and reliable feature functionality as well as an amazing customer experience.

“At the same time, we expect that the new innovation in our toners will open up exciting new business opportunities for highly creative jobs which can now incorporate gold or silver in material which requires that extra standout wow factor.”

About Keypoint Intelligence

For 60 years, clients in the digital imaging industry have relied on Keypoint Intelligence for independent hands-on testing, lab data, and extensive market research to drive their product and sales success. Keypoint Intelligence has been recognised as the industry’s most trusted resource for unbiased information, analysis, and awards due to decades of analyst experience. Customers have harnessed this mission-critical knowledge for strategic decision-making, daily sales enablement, and operational excellence to improve business goals and increase bottom lines. With a central focus on clients, Keypoint Intelligence continues to evolve as the industry changes by expanding offerings and updating methods, while intimately understanding and serving manufacturers’, channels’, and their customers’ transformation in the digital printing and imaging sector.

About Ricoh

Ricoh is empowering digital workplaces using innovative technologies and services that enable individuals to work smarter from anywhere.

With cultivated knowledge and organisational capabilities nurtured over its 85-years history, Ricoh is a leading provider of digital services and information management, and print and imaging solutions designed to support digital transformation and optimise business performance.

Headquartered in Tokyo, Ricoh Group has major operations throughout the world and its products and services now reach customers in approximately 200 countries and regions. In the financial year ended March 2021, Ricoh Group had worldwide sales of 1,682 billion yen (approx. 15.1 billion USD).

For further information, please visit www.ricoh.com.au

Barco Research Finds Meeting Rooms Take Centre Stage in Australian Hybrid Workplaces

2021-06-28T10:07:39+10:00

Meeting Barometer drops as people struggle with virtual collaboration, on the impending return to the office

COMPANY NEWS by Barco: In its newest, international survey, Barco Clickshare, a global leader in visualisation and collaboration solutions, has surveyed the engagement and needs of Australian employees in meetings and identified five key trends that business decision makers simply cannot afford to ignore when preparing for a flexible, future fit hybrid workplace.

The trends, which are highlighted in Outlook For The Post-Covid Workplace, include:

Office optimism returns. Back to office scenarios are not only pushed by C-level management, they are completely in line with what employees want. More than half of the workforce is ready to return and 92 per cent is expected to be back in the office one or more days by the end of June 2021. They want to work less from home than six months ago (2 days in 2020 – 1.5 days in 2021).
The Barco Meeting Barometer takes a plunge as people struggle with an overload of virtual meetings. An index of -25, compared to +17 in 2020 and +63 in 2019, clearly shows that meetings deteriorate. 54 per cent feel remote collaboration does not come naturally.
The search for more engagement drives us away from virtual. We look for more in-person meetings and less virtual interactions. One in two employees goes back to the office to host a meeting. The preference for hybrid, in-person or virtual, meetings depends on the purpose and type of a meeting, as well as on the number of meeting participants. High engagement activities like decision-making, solution-solving or relationship-building require office-based meetings.
The laptop is our interface to the world. As the preference for people-centric tech becomes clearer, the laptop remains the number one tool for 69% of employees to host videocalls from. Traditional in-room systems are no longer preferred, in favour of BYOD and BYOM.
The employee-centric workplace arises. Hybrid meeting investments should be in sync with employee expectations on how and where they want to work and collaborate. Thirty-nine per cent believe that the company has not prioritised the investments they needed for better hybrid collaboration while 88 percent think that all meeting rooms need to be equipped with videoconferencing technology.

At the same time, Barco Clickshare has revealed the latest data from its Meeting Barometer, which shows the evolution in meeting expectation and the improvement of collaboration on a quarterly basis. The barometer is measured in the same way the Net Promotor Score is measured, by detracting the negatives (respondents that think meetings have worsened) from the positives (respondents that feel meetings have improved).

Barco's meeting quality index takes a plunge from +17 in 2020 to -25 now. The Meeting Quality Index suggests a cautious positivity about the quality of meetings compared to last year.

Claudio Cardile, ANZ Managing Director, Barco, said, “Meetings will continue to play a crucial role in tomorrow’s workplace, as they will be a key driver for business continuity, teamwork and innovation during the transition into a new hybrid reality. Connecting workers wherever they are in Australia and making hybrid collaboration truly flow will be the road to future success, higher engagement and productivity.

“At the same time, hybrid meetings will create opportunities for business leaders to change work culture, redesign the workplace and invest in usability and technology fully in sync with employee needs. Business leaders will need to focus on making a real impact on business outcomes starting from an employee-centric mindset.”

The Barco report on Outlook For The Post-Covid Workplace includes three main take-aways that will enable decision-makers to anticipate and keep ahead of competition, as they shape the hybrid workplace moving forward. These include:

Re-connecting with the organisation and with colleagues is crucial for employee engagement and retention. 60 per cent of employees think their employer should start preparing for hybrid work now.
One size does not fit all. Not all meetings are equal, not all employees have the same needs or requirements for collaboration. There are many differences across generations, gender, department and seniority level. Companies need to develop workplace strategies that allow for this kind of flexibility and empower employees to work the way they want.
Bring Your Own Meeting (BYOM) is the employee’s preferred choice for connecting to the world and to co-workers. The laptop is the heart of the meeting room eco-system and employees want to work with wireless & touchless meeting room tech that allows BYOM. 81 per cent believe that easy-to-use technology can make for a better meeting.

Cardile added, “The emerging hybrid workplace isn’t just about simply going back to our old-ways or about drastically changing present-day, virtual habits. It will be a careful balance between employee needs and business goals. For Australian businesses to daily bridge the gap between in-office and remote workers and allow them to be truly productive in meetings, both a change in work culture and technology investments like usability, BYOM and video solutions, will be crucial.

“As the return to the office gathers momentum, there’s no better time to start investing in an employee-centric work model. This includes enabling Bring Your Own Meeting in meeting rooms, implementing flexible work and installing easy-to-use, worker-centric collaboration technology. Only with the focus on usability and engagement in hybrid meeting solutions will businesses be able to move forward at the pace they have set out to achieve.”

The full findings can be viewed here: https://www.barco.com/en/clickshare/hybrid-meetings

About Barco

Barco designs technology to enable bright outcomes around the world. Seeing beyond the image, we develop visualisation and collaboration solutions to help you work together, share insights, and wow audiences. Our focus is on three core markets: Enterprise (from meeting, classroom and control rooms to corporate spaces), Healthcare (from the radiology department to the operating room), and Entertainment (from movie theatres to live events and attractions). In 2020, we realised sales of 770 million euro. We have a global team of 3,300 employees, whose passion for technology is captured in 430 granted patents.

About the study

The online survey by market research and advisory company Savanta, was based on an international study of 750+ white collar workers from different industries, seniority levels and company sizes. The sample consists of employees from seven countries: the UK, US, Australia, India, France, Germany and as to give a global overview of workplace trends.

For more information, visit us on www.barco.com/clickshare, follow us on Twitter (@BarcoClickShare), LinkedIn (BarcoClickShare), YouTube (BarcoTV), or like us on Facebook (ClickShareBarco).

Talend Partners with Snowflake in Breakthrough Development to Deliver Healthy, Analytics-Ready Data at Scale Inside Data Cloud

2021-06-10T19:30:56+10:00

Technology collaboration assesses and improves data accuracy and reliability from directly inside Snowflake environments

COMPANY NEWS: Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a global leader in data integration and integrity, today announced that it is working closely with Snowflake, the Data Cloud Company, to offer an instant way for users to verify the quality of their data inside Data Cloud. Announced at Snowflake Summit 2021,

Talend Trust ScoreÔ for Snowflake leverages Snowpark to immediately assess and improve data accuracy inside a Snowflake environment, delivering quality data and helping companies drive quicker business decisions.

In a recent survey, at least half of executives don’t have a high degree of confidence in their company’s ability to deliver quality data in terms of data accuracy, consistency, accessibility, or completeness.

To begin to address this concern, Talend is collaborating with Snowflake to deliver data quality capabilities within Snowflake. This will make it possible for organisations to make sense of all their data with speed and accuracy and more easily address compliance rules and regulations.

"With Talend and Snowflake, customers will be able to confidently make business decisions with healthy data, to uncover new business opportunities, accelerate growth, and increase customer engagement that can generate new revenue streams,” said Tarik Dwiek, Sr. Director of Technology Alliances.

Leveraging Snowflake’s Snowpark developer environment and Java UDFs, Talend Trust Score for Snowflake with Snowflake makes it possible for customers to use sophisticated data profiling algorithms directly to perform reliability checks on their Snowflake data.

With a simple click, Snowflake customers will be able to increase their performance and accuracy by running quality checks on entire data sets without the use of external applications or moving sample sets. It also addresses data privacy and sovereignty concerns by keeping processing inside Snowflake so no data leaves the environment.

Talend runs, computes, and scales entirely natively within Snowflake using Snowpark and Java UDF, reducing risks, complexity, and costs, and helping organisations meet compliance rules and regulations.

“It’s not enough to simply collect, move and prepare data more efficiently. The need for trusted data aligns with conversations I’m having with customers and many of our consulting and delivery partners,” said Rolf Heimes, Global Head of Business Development, Talend.

“Data has become a black box that leaves us open to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and even catastrophic failure. There needs to be a way to provide a clear perspective on the reliability, usability, and value of the data in any organisation. As a first step, Talend has developed Trust Score for Snowflake to give Snowflake users an easy way to keep their business safer and bring confidence to every decision.”

For more information on Talend Trust Score for Snowflake, please visit this blog.

About Talend 

Talend (NASDAQ: TLND), a leader in data integration and data integrity, is changing the way the world makes decisions.

Talend Data Fabric is the only platform that seamlessly combines an extensive range of data integration and governance capabilities to actively manage the health of corporate information. This unified approach is unique and essential to delivering complete, clean, and uncompromised data in real-time to all employees. It has made it possible to create innovations like the Talend Trust Score™, an industry-first assessment that instantly quantifies the reliability of any data set.

Over 6,500 customers across the globe have chosen Talend to run their businesses on healthy data. Talend is recognized as a leader in its field by leading analyst firms and industry media.

For more information, please visit www.talend.com and follow us on Twitter: @Talend.

Forbury shortlisted as category winner in Proptech Awards

2021-05-28T15:59:50+10:00

COMPANY NEWS: Commercial real estate valuation software company Forbury has been shortlisted as a category winner in the inaugural 2021 Proptech Awards.

The competition is the first nationally co-ordinated awards for Australia’s property technology sector, and in the scale-up category of the competition, Forbury was shortlisted for the award for ownership, affordability and finance.

“We are excited to have been shortlisted for this award, especially when you consider the calibre of the other entrants,” says Scott Willson, CEO, Forbury, “Australia’s proptech sector is world leading and this was clearly on display on the night.”

Forbury works with Australia’s major real estate and commercial property management companies to help them quickly and confidently determine the current value of their assets.

Forbury says that during the past 15 years, the company has developed sophisticated software that removes much of the complexity from valuations and automates many of the most time-consuming processes.

Forbury lists current clients as including Investa, Dexus, Stonebridge, Stockland, Colliers, and Brookfield.

As well as the core valuation tool, Forbury says clients have access to bespoke tools that assist with retail development and portfolio building, and next month, the company launches its European operations with an office based in London.

“We look forward to continuing to work closely with our clients, both in Australia and the United Kingdom,” says Willson.

“By taking time to understand our client’s particular needs we will be able to ensure our software tools meet real-world requirements.”

“I congratulate all other winners in the awards and look forward to an exciting year ahead.”