Category: Technology

Article Contributed by Sujain Thomas

Businesses have become intensely competitive and there is need to make proper use of technological tools to streamline operations and increase efficiencies. This is the only way that business can grow. Most businesses are now inclined to extensive use of computer based databases that forms the backbone of business.  The database provides the platform for dealing with huge data and using it according to business needs.  Nowadays, it is unthinkable for businesses to exist without database support.  The speed of business is enhanced by using databases and it offers a powerful tool for marketing products and services to a wider range of customers – both existing and prospective.

The enhanced quality of products and services that businesses can offer to its customers and clients is a direct result of database applications.  The automated teller machine is a vivid example of how database can be used effectively to offer superlative service to customers. Similarly, the flight reservation systems of railways and airlines are built on the foundation of a robust database system. The abundance of data in the database has to be craftily managed and administered by using computer programs that help in storing data and modify it as per requirement to extract information that is useful for business.

Database Management Systems

Database Management Systems or DBMS as it is popularly known is system software that is deployed for managing databases. The system provides programmers and users with the opportunity of creating data in a systematic manner and manages its retrieval and update.  In order to ensure that company data is properly used and deployed, a group of professionals trained in Database Administration is entrusted with the job. As data accumulation keeps on acquiring phenomenal proportions, the task of organizing data effectively so that it can add value to business gains critical importance.

Creating and managing database environment

Oracle systems are well known for database administration and management and are widely used across all kinds of businesses. Oracle DBA consultingservices are available to support the needs of business in database management and administration. The services are essential to ensure that the database is always up and running with minimum downtime. This is achieved through close monitoring and by using the skills of troubleshooting. Certified professionals of database management companies are best placed to provide the technological support  for adding more value to business by making it grow at a fast pace.

More focus on marketing

With an eye on improved business performance, the role of database in lending more focus to marketing is what businesses can make most use of.  It is only common knowledge that efficient marketing holds the key to the success for any business and databases can be of great help in realizing the goals of marketing in a focused way.  Among different categories of databases, customer database is the most common across all types of business. The information about customers and their buying patterns are captured in the database and can be analyzed to identify the core group of customers that contribute the maximum sales value. By focusing on this group of customers it is possible to make the sales grow very fast and add substantial value to business.

Plan for incentives

Once the group of customers has been identified, marketing plans have to be revamped to attract them.  The target customers can be offered special privileges and discounts over certain value of purchase and even loyalty programs can be developed to boost sales. Customers can also be invited for special access to selected items before it is presented to the general public. It creates a feeling of exclusiveness that can encourage customers to engage in more buying.

Identify customer preferences

Suppose you have a music shop and you use the customer database to know about what kinds of music they prefer. This helps to focus on different customer groups according to their choice of music.  Databases can be effectively used for identifying what most of the customers prefer. This would help to know about the products or services that are in most demand and re-position the sales pitch for these items in order to attract more customers. It gives a direction to the marketing plan and drives it towards a fruitful completion.

Benefits of database

What has been cited above is just an illustration of one of many benefits that can be derived from databases. There are many more benefits besides marketing gains that can be derived from proper use of database.

• Database allows free flow of information across the organization if it is made accessible to all. It removes a lot of complexity in business as it is possible for all to know the status about most of the things that matter in business. The database is the only place where all information is made available without having to search for it here and there.
• Duplicate information is weeded out through the use of database and this leads to streamlining of work that eventually increases productivity. It can help to identify wasteful and duplicate work and also help in automating many processes that can speed up work.
• Quick access to critical information speeds up the process of decision making that actually helps to drive the business to the next level. Databases give more clarity to business that enables visualization of the growth of business in more definite terms.

Take help from consultants

Creating and maintaining databases require the services of trained professionals who are experts in administering database management systems. Select a consultant and brief them about your business needs to help them design the database and create its architecture. They will then install and implement the system that will be optimally configured for your business only. However, it can be scaled up as your business grows. They also help in database upgrades and analytics that are essential for keeping in tune with the growing business needs.

The better you are in managing data, better are the prospects of making your business grow faster as you gain more business intelligence for effective decision making.

About the author– Sujain Thomas helps businesses do analytics. She also helps businesses develop analytics strategy. She has years of experience in analytics, DB management, and big data. For more information about Oracle DBA consulting, visit this website.

If you are looking for an exciting career and a job you want to get up for every morning, IT is one area where you can enjoy all of that and more.

To get a good job in the IT sector, you can’t just jump into it. You will need the right set of skills, and that means you will have to look into training opportunities.

The type of certification you require will depend on the skills you already possess, along with your specific career goals.

Here are a few tips for finding the most suitable certification for you, starting with some entry-level certifications and moving onto some more specific areas where you can become certified.

Entry-Level Certifications

If you want to start a career in IT, many entry-level positions will require specific certifications to help you get your foot in the door.

Entry positions will involve dealing with software and technical procedures, and you will have to demonstrate to employers that you have at least a basic level of skills to carry out the tasks.

Getting a certification is the best way to not only improve your skills but to demonstrate that you have the right skillset and show what you are capable of. You should therefore seriously consider getting a recognized certification if you want to break into an entry-level IT position.

Some of the most in-demand include the following:

The Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification is an entry-level certification, and it is the perfect place to start if you want to break into the industry. This is more or less the industry standard, and it will demonstrate to employers that you can configure switches and routers and solve basic network problems. You can also specialize in an area like security.

It is a written exam that takes about 90 minutes, and it could help you to get a position as a network administrator or a systems administrator.

The CompTIA A+ Technician certification is another entry-level certification that is a great place for starting a career in IT. It will demonstrate your knowledge of PC maintenance, operating systems, and more, and it consists of two exams. It could help you to get a position as a desktop support technician or another related job.

The CompTIA Network+ is a similar certification for networking, where you will learn about hardware and the OSI model among other things.

The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification is recognized globally, and it demonstrates competency with information security. It will show employers that you can protect systems from attackers. It demonstrates more extensive skills, and the exam is larger and takes about six hours to complete. It could lead to a job as a security analyst.

The NetApp Certified Data Management Administrator (NCDA) certification is a storage-level certification, and it demonstrate show that you have a very good understanding of the NetApp storage systems.

More Advanced Certifications

If you have already broken into the IT industry and you want to take your career further, you may be interested in taking a more advanced certification.

The Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certification is a mid-level certification that shows that you can build solutions across a range of technologies. It involves different specializations like data platform, desktop infrastructure, private cloud, and more, and it is a five-step exam. It could lead to a position as a systems administrator or systems engineer.

You could also get certification in data science training online from a course provider, as you can find out from Simplilearn. This will provide you with the certification to prove your expertise in data science, and you will learn predictive analytics techniques and more.

Mobile App Development Certification

Mobile app development is a big and exciting area. It could help you to get a job working for a company, or you could find work on a freelance basis.

You could start by training up to be an Android Certified Application Developer, or get the GIAC GMOB certification.

Database Certification

You’ll always be in demand if you are good with databases, and you could get a job as a database developer, database architect, or data analyst.

Something like the IBM Info Management is a good option, and the ICCP CBIP and MCSA: SQL Server 2012 are also popular.

Cloud Certification

The cloud is another important area. More companies are moving to the cloud and adopting cloud technologies, and there is a lot of interest in this area, so it could be the perfect career path for you.

The AWS-CSA Professional certification is one of the most important, and others include the AWS-CSA Professional and MCSE: Private Cloud certifications.

Launch or Develop Your IT Career

Whether you want to enter the IT industry in an entry-level job, or you want to develop your career and take it further, these certifications all provide you with good options. Have a look at the certifications and decide which one would be most suitable for you right now at this stage in your career.

Then find somewhere you can get certified, which may be at an online course provider, and give your IT career a boost.

About the Author

Eve Howarth is a careers consultant who works mostly with college kids as they plan their futures. She writes about careers in her online articles which appear on education, college and career blogs.

Article By Emiliano Baidenbaum, an attorney for the Financial Services business unit of Hewlett Packard Enterprise

How can unrelated parties negotiate securely and transparently without having to rely on expensive intermediaries? Some programmers believe that bitcoin is the answer to that question and that it will revolutionize the way we do business.

What started as a nine page proposal in the white paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto (whose true identity remains unknown), has now become the way that more than 200,000 transactions per day are done. The rising popularity of bitcoin has caused markets and financial institutions to invest in the development of products based on this revolutionizing technology.

To understand what the buzz over bitcoin is all about and how to make the most of it, we need to become familiar with the concepts of bitcoin and blockchain, the opportunities that they are creating, and the approach that regulators are taking.

Bitcoin and Blockchain

The bitcoin technology is an open-source software (its license allows anyone to develop or improve the software program) that enables parties to complete a transaction without intermediaries and simultaneously records the transaction in a public ledger. The transactions represent the transfer of “bitcoin” units from one party to another, which are logged into a public ledger called “blockchain”.

Although the terms “bitcoin” and “Bitcoin” are generally used interchangeably, they are not the same. On one side, “Bitcoin” refers to the specific digital currency developed in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. A number of people are more familiar with this term. On the other side, the term “bitcoin” refers to a broader category of software programs that are linked to specific assets. A bitcoin is basically the accounting unit shown for each transaction in the ledger that represents the asset being transferred.

The ledger where bitcoin transactions are registered is called “blockchain”. Blockchain is a single database that is massively distributed. The transactions are published to the entire network for validation by multiple sources and then reflected into an irrevocable block entry. The importance of bitcoin resides in blockchain. Blockchain makes it possible to rely on a secure, public record of transfers of digital property. Unlike data kept by traditional administrators, bitcoins are recorded in a decentralized manner to ensure that there is no single point of vulnerability for loss or alteration of entries.

To perform transactions, users of bitcoin are required to obtain a “wallet”, comprised of a public key and a private key. The public key is basically an account linked to the user, and the private key is the password to access such account. Whenever users enter into a transaction, blockchain publishes the transaction to the entire network so that it can be validated by multiple sources. Once blockchain creates a new block entry for such transaction, the user signs the transaction using its private key and blockchain will irrevocably reflect that such transaction is linked to the public key.

The Benefits of Bitcoin

The nature of bitcoin could revolutionize the whole structure of the financial industry and how business transactions are conducted in general. Unlike in other platforms, transactions in blockchain are maintained digitally in an irrevocable manner that is publicly verifiable and secured against outage, destruction or alteration. This creates areas of opportunity mainly seen in the form of currency, recordkeeping and smart-contracts.

As discussed earlier in this article, the most popular use of bitcoin is as the digital currency called Bitcoin. This currency has commercial value (approximately USD$640 as of June 27, 2016) and can be freely exchanged by parties without the need to rely on financial institutions or banking authorities. This means that one party in certain country could perform a faster international transfer to another party in a different country without having to pay substantial transaction fees to banks or depend on currency availability in its country. While Bitcoin may free users from some of the issues relating to international bank transfers or central baking restrictions; it may expose them to more volatility in value and to less acceptance by market participants, in comparison to deals involving other currencies such as the US Dollar or Euro.

Other less known uses of bitcoin are in the form of recordkeeping and smart-contracts. Parties could reduce costs by relying on blockchain’s digital entries as record of a transaction, instead of keeping duplicates in storage. Also, the transparency of blockchain could facilitate the auditability of transactions performed by a certain party. In regard to smart-contracts, parties could develop programs that rely in blockchain to automatically execute terms of a contract, such as transferring bitcoins upon the occurrence of certain event. The challenge would be to ensure that the external data that triggers the transfer can be consistently validated by all sources in the blockchain network.

U.S. and International Regulation

The regulation of bitcoin is still in an early stage. The few authorities that have issued regulation in this regard have focused on the financial or currency-like use of bitcoin, with particular interest in whether to grant bitcoin legal tender status and how to prevent potential money laundering. How authorities will approach the other blockchain uses is not clear yet.

In the United States, regulators have begun to analyze bitcoin at both state and federal levels. So far, regulators have not recognized that bitcoin possess legal tender status, but the trend has been to accept its use.

The federal authorities have acknowledged that bitcoin is taxable property and that it could be treated as a commodity or security, in some cases. At the state level, New York was the first to regulate bitcoin by requiring a license to use bitcoin for e-currency activities and imposing compliance requirements (recordkeeping, reporting, cybersecurity, anti-money laundering prevention, etc.) for such purposes. California issued a similar regulation. Both Washington and Virginia are on their way to developing their own regulations. Additionally, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors started drafting a unified framework that will serve as a guide for all states.

At the international level, the development of regulations is proceeding at a slow pace. Other than Russia (which took the position of banning bitcoin as a type of currency) or Luxemburg (which granted the first payment institution license to a bitcoin provider), most countries have taken a wait-and-see approach. The European Union has not developed legislation in this regard, but the expectation is that it will focus on anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism regulation.

The future of bitcoin is uncertain, but it is clear that it will change the way parties to a transaction interact with each other. This technology is challenging traditional market participants and regulators to come up with innovative solutions that keep up with the digital revolution.

Data is one of the most important things that your business can possess. It will tell you if your are making the most profitable choice for your company or whether you may want to think about adjusting how you complete a job for a client. What kind of data can be useful when creating and growing a profitable enterprise?

Know Where Your Customers Are

Let’s say that you want to start a grout cleaning business in your neighborhood. While there very well be a market for that, you don’t know unless you have the information that supports your hypothesis. For instance, you will want to know how many homes or housing developments are located in your area.

Next, you will want to know how many people buy compared to how many people rent in a given area. This is important because renters may not be as worried about the condition of their grout compared to owners. Those who own a rental property may be more concerned with profit over nonessential cleaning tasks, which could take them out of the picture as potential clients.

Finally, you will need to know how much disposable income people have in a specific area to make sure that they would want to pay for such a service. Typically, a person is most worried about paying the mortgage, buying food and then paying for upgrades or cosmetic enhancements to their property.

Big Data Helps You Complete a Job at a Lower Cost

Instead of cleaning grout, let’s say that you were the owner of a kitchen cabinet refinishing company. You know that there are plenty of homeowners in your area who want the services that you sell and can afford your prices. While that is great to know, you can use data to further enhance profits and margin by letting it show you what type of materials to use during a given project.

For instance, you may decide that it’s cheaper to simply sand and paint existing cabinets instead of buying new ones. You may also see that buying existing units is cheaper than buying custom units. As long as the customer is OK with one or both of those ideas, you have increased your profits without offering substandard service to the customer.

Anticipate Lulls and Spikes in Demand

With big data, you can anticipate shifts in the way that your customers think or in the items that they desire. In some cases, your target market may no longer want what your have for sale because of a recession or because they don’t need to upgrade or update an existing product that they have.

However, there is a chance that your customer base may shift to those who haven’t had the time or money to remodel their kitchen or do interior work on their home in general. If you have the information about your potential market at your fingertips, you can start to penetrate those potential new markets before anyone else even realizes that there is one to court.

In really bad economic times, you may be able to use your data to identify new products or services that your customers may want or need. This can help you get through the tough times until the economy picks back up and you can start to focus again on your core offerings.

Big data is something that no business should ignore or underestimate. When used correctly, it can help to grow your company or even keep it from closing when times get tougher. Therefore, you should start collecting such data either on your own or through a third-party that may collect and share it with businesses such as yours.

Article Contributed by Jennifer Livingston

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is maintaining employee engagement. Irrespective of benefits, salaries and incentives, a working environment where employees are motivated and engaged is important since they feel they are working for a common goal, participating in formulating business strategies and objectives and supported to develop themselves. When the staff are not engaged with each other, it is difficult to retain them, business struggles with low productivity, and increased absenteeism. Top five drivers of employee engagement include innovation, pay, career opportunities, organization reputation and managing performance. The good news for many organization is that there are technologies which can create a motivated workforce and boost engagement.

Peer-to-peer platforms

Internal social media platforms are one of the ways managers can encourage employees to engage with each other. Social media platforms especially those with instant messaging capability allows the employees to send a simple message such as ‘thank you’ to a fellow co-worker. Social media may allow events such as internal nomination for recognition for various programs such as employee of the month.

Social media offers the business a way to engage with customers on social networks as well as keep the employees engaged. Social media technology platforms may also allow an organization collect important data and feelings about their products from the customers. Social media platforms include Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Skype and email. Employees can translate webpage as work platforms to promote better engagement with peers. Basically, this technology “creates a visible culture of recognition within the business to boost employee engagement”.

Instant tangible rewards

Tangible rewards are known to have more impact on employees in terms of improving their engagement and motivation than pay rises and cash bonuses. For example, a manager may use an online platform to instantly award credits or points to an employee. The employee will then have the choice to choose a reward which means something to them. Whether it’s an electronic gift, merchandise or an experience, the reward means more than cash related rewards. Most of these platforms in many organizations are used to monitor employee achievement and reward scheme performance and then used to give feedback to the employees.

Big Data

When managers use data collected from social media and online feedback platforms to improve efficiency and business processes, it means the employers have huge amount of information available for use. Instead of disposing the information, it is a wise choice to use it to give employees real-time performance reviews for their performance rather than the bi-annual manager-employee performance review meetings.

Instant feedback mechanisms

The bi-annual performance review meetings are known to be too infrequent to maintain a healthy employee engagement between the managers and their employees. However, instant feedback is good for higher engagement rates. Instant feedback helps the managers to gather more actionable feedback. Instant feedback mechanisms can be done through social media platforms or an online rating platform that can tell the employee how well he/she has performed.

BYOD, embracing mobile and more work flexibility

The three of them are meant to provide flexibility for the employee to work effectively. Bring their own devices to work (BYOD) continues to grow in any organizations where employees want to work with devices they are familiar with and not the ones provided at work. This is because most employees own smartphones and tablets. Linked to BYOD, is the ever-growing usage of mobile devices for work. In order to embrace the idea of employees to work from anywhere at any time, smartphone devices and personal computers have enabled companies to allow some of their employees to work from home. This has provided more flexibility for employees while maintaining a constant engagement between them.

With the availability of technologies which can enhance employee engagement, businesses should take advantage of this opportunity to promote and create a positive working environment. The global employee engagement has improved tremendously in the recent times. The main factor for this growth is because employees prefer working for companies which offer career progression, has solid reputation and rewards for performance.