This year's FAST Forward Summit in NYC will be held on March 11th, 2010. As a proud sponsor of this event, Orckestra will be meeting the attendees at its booth. This Summit is designed to give unique access to some of the world’s leading visionaries and practitioners in Enterprise Search - with presentations from industry experts, guest speakers and customers you will learn how:
Organizations use Search to understand customer preferences and apply this insight to automatically adapt and match user expectations.
Search technology can help re-create and generate revenue through the irresistible draw of social media sites.
Search has broken free from being just a text box to creatively using maps and images as navigational tools.
Search provides a platform to create new vertical business models.
Search is being used to nurture internal talent, understand the wisdom of crowds, drive operational efficiency and increase productivity by creating social networking applications.
Search is allowing government organizations to provide new visibility and transparency to citizens and provides innovative capabilities for public safety and security initiatives.
Register now for this event on the FAST Forward Summit Series site.
Future Electronics, a longtime client of Orckestra, was recognized with four 2009 Channel Marketing Awards from NEDA (National Electronic Distributors Association). Among those, FutureElectronics.com earned a Gold Achievement Award in recognition for best Web promotion.
Orckestra is proud of being part of this success and congratulates Future Electronics for all the awards!
Read the full press release here.
After three good days of meetings and sessions at the 2009 Microsoft World Partner Conference, I CAN definitely affirm that it is my favourite Microsoft event.
The drive and variety of the global Microsoft partner ecosystem give me the energy for the rest of the year and help clarify the direction that we envision as business deciders.
This year, more than ever, I feel that the upcoming Microsoft stack has reached a maturity that will continue to bring a lot of tracking in the enterprise and SMB markets. SharePoint 2010 looks astoundingly powerful in combination with Office 2010, especially in multi-user document editing and merges. This basically means that you will be able to work in team on your latest PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets. I’m looking forward to see the capabilities of SharePoint 2010, which seems to have lost its "O" in its name (MSS 2010?). Well, Microsoft managed to vary the name in every version of the product...
Search and FAST Technologies will also bring enterprise and Internet search to a new level in an already very popular platform (SharePoint). I believe that SharePoint future is even more golden that it is today. Expect very impressive market traction with these solutions.
Windows 2008 R2 with Hyper V brings the cost down on virtualization while getting really close to VMWare in terms of capacity, even as allowing you to manage physical and virtual machines all in one package (which VMware does not support).
Windows 7 is going to fill the blank left by Windows Vista with its very stable base. The industry has already recognized Windows 7 as a really good upgrade to Windows XP for enterprises (Windows 7 boots an XP compatible mode in case you have to run your application under an XP native mode).
Silverlight 3.0, with its ever-growing number of RIA applications, Expression 3.0, Windows Azure and cloud based computing, which is going to support other technologies like Ruby, PHP or Java. All these technologies and services will strengthen and help position Microsoft adequately in the ever-changing industry of deployment and hosting of applications brought by cloud computing. This will also help grow the presence of the Microsoft Web Platform in the Internet ecosystem.
All of the products mentioned previously are a fraction of what they are putting on the market, but two elements that I have retain so far is Quality and Maturity. They systematically continue to increase and get better with each version of their products and the polished aspects of the solutions are obvious. Having been in contact with the Microsoft ecosystem of solutions for more than 12 years, I really feel that this wave of products (mainly 2008 R2s and 2009s) will help bring more value than ever to the partners deploying solutions to customer.
Finally, talking about partners, Microsoft is changing its Partner Program to Microsoft Partner Network. The typical Certified and Gold Certified appellations that we have been used to are going away. Partners are going to be qualified more vertically with a larger number of competencies. Partners will also be encouraged to enrol in the Partner Service Ready offerings with Microsoft Consulting Services to get lead engagements. Time will tell what these changes will have on the way we do business and engage with customers, but one obvious change that I foresee is the greater specialization of each partner.
That being said, there are still one more day to go, and I really feel that this event is always well invested time and money and rich in business opportunities. Oh and by the way, next year's WPC2010 will be held in Washington, D.C.
See you there.
A research conducted this week by UberCEO.com demonstrated that the Top 100 Fortune CEOs are all, except a few exceptions, missing from the Social Media community. The main observations are:
This tells us that big bosses are not really understanding (or do not want to understand) what are the new strategies and tools that could help them communicate with their target audiences. Social Medias are a great way to dialogue with customers, partners and employees. These top CEOs are simply stuck in the last millennium and are missing a great opportunity to reinforce their fragile brand image...
Here’s a great slideshow from UberCEO.com illustrating their research:
A recent study from HubSpot shows that more than 50% of Twitter users are actually doing nothing with their account (information on over 4.5 million users). They are not following anyone, they don't even have one follower and no updates have been published.
In my opinion, the media coverage that Twitter enjoyed during the last year is probably the source of all these inactive users... People are hearing about Twitter, create an account to see how it works, check if some friends and family are online and finally discover that Facebook is probably cooler and let their Twitter account die. Sadly...
Another research from the Harvard Business School shows that the median number of lifetime tweets per user is only one. Furthermore, 90% of all tweets are done by only 10% of the active Twitter users. The editors mentioned that “On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.” They concluded by saying that Twitter is more like Wikipedia, a one-way communication tool, rather than a peer-to-peer communication network.
Read the opinions and thoughts from Orckestra's leaders and discover more about the different IT projects and consulting mandates that are part of the company's day-to-day business.