technology 24 Jan 2024
GoodFirms, a universally renowned B2B ratings, and reviews platform, released its recent survey research report-"Social Media Marketing - Top Tips, Challenges, and Trends to Look for in 2024". The survey aims to gather valuable advice, suggestions, and recommendations about social media marketing along with the trends for the year 2024.
GoodFirms’ survey highlights that more and more businesses are embracing social media platforms to grow, promote their brand, and enhance sales by implementing appropriate social media strategies. It also identifies the key benefits of social media marketing, as indicated by the respondents as large audiences, cost-effective marketing, improved brand awareness, increased customer engagement, and enhanced customer experience.
According to this social media marketing survey findings, 11.6% of the surveyed businesses spend more than 75% of their marketing budget on SMM. While 15.8% of the respondents spend 50% to 70% of their marketing budget, and around 32.9% of the businesses spend 25%-50% of their budget on social media marketing.
LinkedIn won as the best social media platforms with 93.5% opting for this platform, 71.4% Instagram, 68.3% Facebook, 61.9% Twitter, 42.8% YouTube, 33.9% Tiktok, 25.6% WhatsApp, 21.5% Reddit, and 6.5% interest.
The survey attempted to find the type of content posted by the marketers and the results are as follows; 92.6% opting for blogs, 87.1% for images, 74.7% investing in short-form videos, 62.3% post infographics, 38.4% plan for podcasts.
Evolving trends, customer preferences, rising competition, and privacy concerns are the significant challenges marketers face while implementing a social media strategy, as perGoodFirms’ survey.
Additionally, the research reveals the top tips on social media marketing: know your audience and omnichannel presence, measure your social media marketing efforts, engaging and exciting content, include entertainment, implement social listening, AI-powered personalized content, and post frequency.
"Growth of AI, automation, influencer marketing, the dominance of video content, the rise of AR/VR, the explosion of social commerce, social responsibility/sustainability, and user-generated content are some of the top social media trends to look for in 2024," says GoodFirms.
GoodFirms concludes that social media cannot be ignored, as it has become an integral part of every business, whether it's a small startup, a big established brand, or a freelance blogger. The social media platform offers numerous advantages for the business sector as the future of SMM is predicted to be highly influenced by technologies like automation, AR/AR and artificial technologies.
Key Findings:
cybersecurity 23 Jan 2024
Silverfort, the leading identity protection company, today celebrates raising $116M in series D funding, bringing the total amount raised to $222M. Brighton Park Capital (BPC) led the round, with participation from existing investors including Acrew Capital, Greenfield Partners, Citi Ventures, General Motors Ventures, Maor Investments, Vintage Investment Partners and Singtel Innov8. Mike Gregoire, founding Partner at BPC and former CEO of CA Technologies and Taleo, will join Silverfort's Board of Directors as the company scales and continues its journey to transform and lead the identity security market.
100%+ Year-Over-Year Growth, At Scale
The investment follows another record year of more than 100% growth where Silverfort added tens of millions in new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), and hundreds of new enterprise customers, including the largest global financial services, manufacturing and retail companies. Ranked as the #1 Best Startup Company to Work For in Israel for the second consecutive year, Silverfort intends to grow its global team, already located across more than 15 countries, and will use the additional funds to expand its platform with new innovative product modules and accelerate its go-to-market strategy with an emphasis on channel partnerships.
Identity Is Every Attacker's Weapon of Choice – And There's a Reason
Compromised identities and credentials are the #1 tactic for cyber threat actors and ransomware campaigns to not only break into organizational networks, but to spread inside networks. A core reason identity is the most vulnerable element in the enterprise attack surface, is the market misperception that Identity and Access Management (IAM) providers who are in charge of managing identities are capable of securing identities. In reality, they are not in a position to secure identity effectively, due to two major limitations:
Where No Identity Security Platform Has Gone Before
Silverfort spent years purposely designing its platform to eliminate the silos and blind spots that identity security suffered from for many years, which no other solution has managed to address so far. The platform extends modern identity security measures to every enterprise resource, on-prem and in the cloud, including systems that no other solution can protect, in an effortless and instant manner. It enables Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR), Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM), and real-time protection for privileged users and service accounts an attacker's prime target. By enabling these modern identity security controls holistically, even for previously unprotectable assets, customers are able to stop identity-based attacks everywhere (including by some of today's most dangerous threat actors), and comply with regulations and cyber insurance requirements.
"Silverfort is one of the rare companies that has successfully envisioned how a large market will need to transform to solve a tough problem – in this case, identity security," said Mike Gregoire. "The company has a track record of building innovative products at scale that exceed customer expectations, combined with excellent go-to-market execution. Silverfort's deep market expertise and vision for the identity security market, as well as their ability to build a winning team and culture, are second to none. We're thrilled to join Hed, Yaron, and the rest of the Silverfort team on the next phase of their journey to not only reshape the identity security market, but lead it."
Enabling Modern Security on Top of Every Authentication
With its patented technology, Silverfort connects to the entirety of an organization's identity infrastructure in a matter of hours, from cloud-native identity providers (which are only aware of what happens inside their specific silo) to legacy on-prem directories such as Active Directory (which are missing basic security capabilities). Silverfort's unique platform architecture:
"Identity has become the weakest link in enterprise security, and solving it requires a new approach – a unified, end-to-end layer of security that covers all the silos and blind spots of the identity infrastructure," said Hed Kovetz, Silverfort's Co-Founder and CEO. "We are very excited about our new partnership with BPC, which will allow us to accelerate our platform vision and strong business momentum. We look forward to reshaping the way identity security is done in every company, to effectively answer today's and tomorrow's cyber threats."
cloud technology 23 Jan 2024
Five Year Strategic Collaboration Agreement to Transform Media Production Through Distribution Workflows in the B2B Supply Chain
Ateliere Creative Technologies, a leading developer of cloud-native media supply chain solutions, today announced a landmark five-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This collaboration can redefine media production and distribution, offering innovative cloud-based solutions for the media and entertainment industry from the initial stages of capture via the business-to-business (B2B) supply chain right through to content delivery to consumers. This SCA will drive new product and feature development, boost customer adoption of the Ateliere platform, and enhance marketing and general awareness efforts with significant support and funding from AWS.
"Ateliere's platform, natively built on AWS, already employs a vast array of AWS services, powering our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings," said Ryan Kido, CTO of Ateliere Creative Technologies. "This move marks a significant step in Ateliere's journey as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member, demonstrating AWS's commitment to Ateliere's vision and belief in our potential for significant impact in the media and entertainment industry."
As a long-standing member of the APN, Ateliere remains one of only a handful of companies within the Media Management category in AWS Marketplace, offering Ateliere Connect™. The cloud-native ConnectTM platform is designed to orchestrate the supply chain of media content, enabling efficient management, automation, and delivery from a central location, while minimizing storage costs and increasing global collaboration. Users can decrease long-term storage costs by more than 75%, reduce QC time and costs, and increase profit margins with quicker time to market.
Ateliere Connect is a prime example of the innovative offerings that the collaboration with AWS will continue to nurture and evolve. Additionally, Ateliere has consistently participated in Beta programs for new AWS services, as well as established AWS services such as Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), and Mountpoint for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), all of which are beneficial to its technology.
"The new SCA is a natural progression in our commitment to AWS and their commitment to us," said Dan Goman, CEO of Ateliere Creative Technologies. "It is a prime example of the innovative offerings that this SCA will continue to nurture and evolve and a shared vision to deliver exceptional solutions in the media and entertainment space."
Customers of Ateliere stand to gain substantially from this SCA. They will have access to an expanded set of features and services, accelerated product delivery, and comprehensive solutions spanning from 'camera to consumer'. Joint marketing efforts and increased financial support for Proof of Concepts (POCs) and pilots further cement the customer-centric approach of this collaboration.
cybersecurity 23 Jan 2024
Stellar Cyber, the innovator of Open XDR, announced a new partnership with Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity and compliance company. Through this alliance, Proofpoint and Stellar Cyber customers benefit from an out-of-the-box integration enabling swift email investigations and real-time response actions to email-driven attacks.
Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection monitors emails to identify suspicious emails and potentially malicious attachments and URLs. Once identified, the findings are shared with Stellar Cyber automatically. Stellar Cyber’s Open XDR platform ingests, normalizes, and analyzes Proofpoint findings and other collected data to deliver a comprehensive threat picture. As security analysts conduct investigations, they can instruct integrated third-party products – including Proofpoint – on corrective actions.
“Protecting organizations against email-borne attacks is a top priority, and security teams need a way to automatically correlate threat telemetry across the entire attack surface in order to quickly remediate threats,” said Andrew Homer, VP of Strategic Alliances, Stellar Cyber. “This new partnership with Proofpoint is the latest example of Stellar Cyber delivering on its Open XDR strategy to provide customers turn-key integrations that improve productivity and threat detection.”
“Email attacks remain the number one entry point into an organization, and the level of sophistication of these attacks continues to grow exponentially,” said D.J. Long, Vice President, Strategic Alliances & Business Development, Proofpoint. “We’re thrilled to work with Stellar Cyber on this strategic alliance to help customers protect against advanced email-based threats and unify their cybersecurity defense.”
Through this alliance, Stellar Cyber and Proofpoint give security teams an advantage over attackers, resulting in the following:
automation 23 Jan 2024
UiPath, a leading enterprise automation software company, today announced Pradeep Kumar is joining the company as Senior Vice President of Services and Customer Success. Reporting to Chief Customer Officer Kelly Ducourty, Kumar will lead the company’s strategic initiatives to enable customer success through unparalleled support and execution of digital transformation goals with the UiPath Business Automation Platform.
Most recently, Kumar worked as Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPE Services at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, where he led the HPE services business to assist companies with accelerating digital transformation. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President of Global Shared Delivery at HPE, a worldwide organization responsible for delivering solutions and services to HPE customers.
At UiPath, Kumar is a critical partner to customers worldwide, aiming to help them achieve breakthrough business outcomes, increase their competitive advantage, and build operational excellence in automation at scale.
“As our more than 10,000 customers worldwide transform through AI and automation, our ability to support every step of their journey toward remarkable business outcomes is paramount,” said Ducourty. “Pradeep serves an essential role in our commitment to deliver exceptional customer experiences, and our unified Services and Customer Success team under his leadership will enable our customers to achieve their goals faster. Pradeep’s impressive background in customer success will drive meaningful and impactful journeys for our customers as they build greater capacity for AI- and automation-first business processes.”
“I am thrilled to join UiPath, which I believe is at the nexus of revolutionary change as businesses strive to become leaders in their own right through AI and automation,” said Pradeep Kumar. “I am passionate about building high performing teams in customer-centric environments and working side by side with customers to collaborate on shared goals and exceed their expectations. We have an incredible opportunity to add value to our customers as they scale and grow, and I look forward to ensuring every customer achieves success with the UiPath platform.”
Kumar earned a Master of Business in finance from Monash University in Australia and is a member of the Chartered Management Accountants of the United Kingdom.
cloud technology 23 Jan 2024
Today, OpenText™ , the information company, announced the release of its Cloud Editions 24.1, and with it, its latest OpenText Aviator innovations. OpenText Aviator™ powers multiple AI use cases by enabling secure information management and governance across knowledge bases without customers having to move their data. The new enhancements and integrations available in Cloud Editions 24.1 demonstrate the evolution of the strategic approach to how work can be reimagined with the application of AI to business workflows, opentext.ai.
The imperative to adopt AI now spans every industry and business sector, and it only continues to gain traction. By next year, Gartner predicts that 30% of major organizations will lean on AI-generated personalized content - an exponential leap from just 2% in 2022. Similarly, Gartner also forecasts that by 2026, specialized generative AI systems will automate 20% of routine tasks across diverse industries. This acceleration highlights AI's prominent role in revolutionizing operations across all business sectors, and OpenText stands ready to support this transformative journey.
"The latest Cloud Editions launch isn't just about enhancing our offerings or providing a solution. It's about enabling a paradigm shift in how businesses operate, how industries evolve, and how we collectively engage with technology in this era of rapid transformation," said Mark J. Barrenechea, CEO & CTO, OpenText. "Leveraging AI for impactful results depends on reliable data without it, even the most skilled data scientists will struggle. By expanding the Aviator portfolio in conjunction with our world class information management platform, Cloud Editions 24.1 empowers customers with the tools and insights needed to get ahead."
Now, being made available in Cloud Editions 24.1, OpenText has added the following enhancements to its Aviator portfolio:
"In recent years, we have witnessed how AI can profoundly change the world. Today, it is more evident than ever before that AI is the guiding compass that is steering businesses toward better efficiency, profitability, and intelligence," said David Milette, Cofounder and Chief Technology Evangelist at SQALogic Technologies Inc. "However, we are seeing in our industry that amidst AI's incredible power lies a conundrum: testing an evolving AI technology requires fundamental changes in the way we approach Quality Assurance as practitioners. Harnessing AI's tremendous potential demands a shift in responsibility and perspective; OpenText makes this simple. With its Aviator capabilities, our customers can seamlessly transform challenges into opportunities by gaining essential insights needed to identify and address potential issues, refine strategies, and ensure timely and successful deliveries."
From the first introduction of opentext.ai and OpenText Aviator in August 2023, the company quickly demonstrated its commitment to advancing its AI vision with the launch of its first set of Aviator capabilities to address multiple use cases across the enterprise:
OpenText Aviator for Business
OpenText Aviator for Technologists
Additional Resources:
cloud technology 23 Jan 2024
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. , the developer cloud optimized for startups and growing digital businesses, today announced the availability of Autonomous, Cloudways’ new managed WordPress hosting offering. Autonomous is designed to simplify and streamline the user experience and help businesses grappling with fluctuating website traffic save valuable time and resources.
Autonomous addresses a common challenge faced by many growing businesses balancing website availability during traffic surges without overestimating hosting needs and expenses. Traditionally, companies forecast how much traffic they anticipate and purchase hosting resources based on guesswork. However, this approach poses a dual risk: either falling short during traffic surges, leading to outages, or over-purchasing cloud resources, adversely impacting profitability. Businesses must ensure their websites can handle surges in website traffic, as these surges, often linked to evolving customer priorities, directly impact customer loyalty and trust. Any website crash during peak periods contributes to increased customer stress, reduces consumer trust, and damages the brand.
With Autonomous, resources are managed by Cloudways and automatically scale up as the traffic increases and then scale down once the traffic spike is over. As a result, customers benefit from a website that is operational during high traffic and also has a very predictable pricing model. The hands-off high availability and enterprise-level performance of Autonomous means that organizations’ websites can scale in line with the ongoing demand. This actively avoids having to force the business to migrate to a custom dedicated website solution, by removing the need to manage servers, possess IT skills, or risk spending thousands of dollars.
"We are incredibly excited to unveil Cloudways Autonomous, a revolutionary new platform designed to deliver unprecedented performance and availability for your WordPress websites,” said Suhaib Zaheer, SVP of Managed Hosting at DigitalOcean. “Cloudways Autonomous is engineered to effortlessly handle traffic spikes, guaranteeing that your website remains fast, reliable and responsive, no matter the demand. It is more than a service; it is peace of mind for businesses that rely on their online presence. We are proud to deliver the capability that our extensive customer base has asked us for, evidence that we listen to them, helping us set a new standard in web hosting performance and reliability."
“Autonomous has been a game-changer for our web development agency. It's not just a hosting solution; it's a strategic advantage,” said Weston Crewe, Founder of Local & Co and current user of Autonomous. “With Autonomous, we've confidently taken on high-traffic websites, delivering exceptional performance, scalability, and reliability to our clients. It's transformed the way we do business, enabling us to exceed our goals and earn client trust. Cloudways Autonomous isn't just an investment; it's an asset that propels us forward in the digital landscape."
cloud technology 23 Jan 2024
Genesys®, a global cloud leader in AI-powered experience orchestration, today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Radarr Technologies, a leading AI-based social and digital listening, analytics, and consumer engagement company. By combining the comprehensive public social media capabilities within the Radarr Technologies solution with the all-in-one Genesys Cloud™ platform, Genesys will empower organizations to unify the customer experience (CX) like never before, helping them create proactive, prescriptive engagement built to drive loyalty in the AI economy.
People around the world, especially digital natives, are using public social media channels to connect with businesses as an alternative to traditional service channels. Using public social feeds or direct messaging, they expect brands to turn these inquiries for service, support and information into meaningful experiences. With Radarr Technologies capabilities, Genesys will help organizations meet customers on the social channels of their choice so they can engage with them as naturally as they do with family and friends through rich social media-based experiences that are easy, contextual and personalized.
Following the acquisition, which is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2025,i Genesys will use Radarr Technologies social media insights as a critical source for its 360-degree customer view fueling Genesys AI. Genesys will be able to further connect attitudinal, sentiment and interaction data from across the CX continuum and provide the industry’s most comprehensive depth of consumer engagement touchpoints. Organizations using Radarr Technologies capabilities on Genesys Cloud will be freed from the silos and limitations that prevent them from delivering personalized experiences wherever their customers are by harnessing new insights and capabilities to create loyalty and gain a competitive edge.
“As consumers increasingly turn to social media platforms to connect with brands for support, these channels become a crucial and largely untapped opportunity for organizations to engage with customers and glean valuable business insights,” said Tony Bates, Genesys CEO and chairman. “Once the capabilities of Radarr Technologies are integrated into Genesys Cloud, Genesys can accelerate its transformation of the CX industry by helping organizations further connect every touchpoint into the end-to-end customer experience.”
To manage their social media presence, most organizations today rely on point solutions that are often disconnected from other customer engagement systems and departments. This can leave them struggling to identify issues, analyze insights and act on what matters most, resulting in fractured customer experiences and missed opportunities to drive business results. Through the integration of Radarr Technologies, Genesys Cloud customers will gain direct access to new conversation streams from public social media posts across multiple platforms, including Apple App Store, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Google Play, Google My Business and more. When combined with the Genesys Cloud platform's voice and digital offerings, including its leading private social media messaging solutions, organizations will have unmatched capabilities to listen to their customers on these channels and turn these inquiries into loyalty-building conversations.
Using the response engine capabilities of Radarr Technologies with Genesys Cloud, the combined solutions will empower agents by giving them holistic customer journey context and tools that enable them to connect with customers on their preferred social channels, whether responding to inquiries on public feeds or direct messaging. Additionally, the differentiated AI-powered Multilingual Sentiment Models within the Radarr Technologies solution will further strengthen the natural language processing (NLP) of the Genesys Cloud platform. This will expand organizations’ ability to detect regional slang and colloquialisms across more than 100 languages, including the top 10 spoken worldwide and more than 40 Asian languages and dialects. This allows organizations to better understand customer sentiment for enhanced ability to deliver personalized experiences at scale.
“Organizations have struggled to tap into the potential that social media can play in delivering differentiated customer experiences — Genesys is now in a better position to change that,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, president, McGee-Smith Analytics. “Connecting these public feeds with the orchestration of the customer journey will provide companies not only a more holistic understanding of consumer behavior and sentiment, but the tools to take action through more enhanced personalization and engagement. In adding Radarr Technologies capabilities to Genesys Cloud, the company recognizes the rising importance global enterprises are placing on social interaction management and analytics to achieve a complete unification of the customer experience.”
Page 858 of 1482