Sophos extends network security portfolio with entry-level and enterprise hardware, software

Sophos has extended its network security portfolio with new entry-level and enterprise class appliances, including additions to its range of SG Series firewall/unified threat management appliances and Wi-Fi access points.

Sophos released the first of its new generation of network security appliances, the Sophos SG Series, in April. Sophos has now added six more firewall appliances for a total of 12 SG Series models. As with the existing models, each uses the latest Intel multi-core technology to provide optimal performance. The new appliances include four desktop models ideal for small office deployments and two new 2U models that utilise the fastest Intel chips and deliver extensive redundancy and customisation features. Further desktop models will be available later in the year with integrated wireless connectivity, including two which support the 802.11ac standard.

The company has also released the Sophos iView virtual appliance, addressing what a recent Sophos survey on Spiceworks of SMB IT managers identified as their most significant frustration with existing firewalls from any vendor – insufficient reporting. This was the number one complaint with 35% of respondents saying they would like greater reporting options. 

With over 1,000 built-in reports, including regulatory compliance reports, Sophos iView will give IT managers the extra depth they need. Users can also build their own custom reports and dashboards, focusing on problem areas or users on their network. Available as a virtual appliance only, Sophos iView supports VMware, Hyper-V, Citrix, and KVM virtual environments.

As a dedicated reporting appliance, Sophos iView can offload reporting duties and provide a range of added capabilities such as:

· Compliance reporting for industry standard regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, and GLBA

· Consolidated reporting across multiple UTM firewalls for a complete view of all network traffic from a single console

· Long-term persistent log management and storage for security and backup with convenient access for audits or forensics

· Licensing that is based on storage requirements, with the entry level vSI-Light including 100GB of storage

In addition to the SG Series and iView appliances, Sophos also announced the AP 100, the first in a new generation of wireless access points that support the latest 802.11ac protocols, and an entry level access point, the AP 15. As with previous Sophos wireless access points, the new AP15 and AP100 models can be managed directly from the Sophos SG Series appliances, meaning the wireless network is tightly integrated with the firewall protection.

"Small and medium business have a diverse set of needs when it comes to the locations they need to secure, firewall performance requirements and reporting capabilities” said Bryan Barney, Senior VP and GM of the Network Security Group at Sophos. “By extending our portfolio with the new SG Series models and virtual reporting appliances, we’re making it simple for our customers and partners to simply secure their increasingly distributed environments.”

IBM Watson Explorer sports natural language processing

IBM has launched Watson Explorer, a tool which combines data exploration and content analytics capabilities. Typical organisations only use 12% of their data, says the company, leaving untapped information that could be leveraged to make smarter decisions. 

New Watson Explorer features include advanced content analytics capabilities giving users a view into structured and unstructured data which can help them to deliver better performance and real-time results. Watson Explorer provides the bridge between cloud-based services and on-premise proprietary information, making it the logical first step in a Watson journey.

Take, for example, a customer service representative at a global retailer. Hundreds of billions of customer service calls are handled annually, during which an average customer service representative interfaces with over ten different systems per call, requiring them to move between different applications, run multiple searches, mentally correlate the information and respond to the customer all in real-time – a monumental undertaking. When a customer calls with questions, representatives face a struggle to create a consistently excellent experience for their customer due to challenges finding, organizing, analysing and correlating the right information for that specific customer at that moment. 

Cognitive exploration can enhance a user’s ability to use information to make more informed, evidence based decisions. It does this by providing information and understanding from relevant sources, much like a human would. With Watson Explorer, for example, a representative is able to ask a question in natural language and instantly retrieve relevant content, expertly culled from a variety of data sources, both structured and unstructured. Watson Explorer's content analytics feature leverages the power of natural language processing to enable organizations to extract meaning from content such as customer comments, messages, social media, legal documents and research reports

"Exploration of data is part of a journey toward discovery of valuable information to help organizations make critical business decisions,” said Stephen Gold, VP, IBM Watson Group. “We are continually looking for ways to provide enterprise customers with tools that will make a difference to their employees and drive results for their bottom line. Watson Explorer brings cognitive capabilities to users at every level, giving them real-time access to the valuable information often locked in structured and unstructured data."

Key functions in Watson Explorer include:

Explore - Watson Explorer combines content and data from many different systems throughout the enterprise and public sources and presents it to users based on their role and current activities, which can dramatically reduce the amount of time spent looking for information, and increasing their ability to work smarter. 

Analyse - Watson Explorer's content analytics capabilities enable users to uncover trends, patterns and correlations from unstructured information using natural language processing technology, delivering insights in hours or days rather than or weeks or months. Those insights are then available to users in real-time as a 360-degree view.

Interpret - Watson Explorer provides the ability to integrate a growing list of IBM Watson Developer Cloud services for an enhanced experience leveraging the combined strength of exploration, analytic and cognitive capabilities. As new capabilities are developed by IBM and exposed in the Watson Developer Cloud, they will be made available to qualified Watson Explorer users who license the Watson Developer Cloud services. The available services for integration with Watson Explorer at the time of release are: question answer, user modeling, relationship extraction, message resonance, concept expansion, language identification and machine translation.

Watson Explorer is currently available as two principal offerings:
Enterprise Edition provides search and 360-degree information applications across multiple sources, as well as the ability of qualified customers to license cognitive services from the Watson Developer Cloud to help enhance, scale, and accelerate human expertise.

Advanced Edition includes all of the capabilities of Enterprise Edition plus advanced content mining and content analytics to help organisations take the next step with advanced content mining and analytics capabilities to aggregate, analyse and visualise massive amounts of unstructured content to expose new insights.

The Singapore government and the National University of Singapore (NUS) recently announced IBM Watson alliances. Read about the Singapore government collaboration here and the NUS partnership here.

Lenovo forecasts it'll sell 100 million mobile devices this year

Source: Lenovo. From left: Liu Jun, EVP, Lenovo, President Mobile Business Group, Lenovo and Chairman of the Motorola Management Board; Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo Chairman and CEO; and Rick Osterloh, President and COO, Motorola Mobility celebrate the closing of Lenovo’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Here Osterloh demonstrates the latest features of the new Nexus 6 smartphone in front of the company’s new logo. 

It's official: Lenovo has smartphones from Google. Lenovo and Google announced October 30 US time that Lenovo’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility from Google is complete. The acquisition of the Motorola brand and Motorola's portfolio of smartphones like the Moto X, Moto G, Moto E and the DROID series, as well as the future Motorola product roadmap, positions Lenovo as the world’s third-largest maker of smartphones.

Lenovo will operate Motorola as a wholly-owned subsidiary, with Motorola’s headquarters in Chicago, US. With the completion of the acquisition, Lenovo welcomes nearly 3,500 employees around the world who design, engineer, sell and support Motorola’s devices.

“Today we achieved a historic milestone for Lenovo and for Motorola – and together we are ready to compete, grow and win in the global smartphone market. By building a strong number three and a credible challenger to the top two in smartphones, we will give the market something it has needed: choice, competition and a new spark of innovation,” said Yang Yuanqing, Chairman and CEO, Lenovo. 

“This partnership has always been a perfect fit. Lenovo has a clear strategy, great global scale, and proven operational excellence. Motorola brings a strong presence in the US and other mature markets, great carrier relationships, an iconic brand, a strong IP portfolio and an incredibly talented team. This is a winning combination.”

Liu Jun, Lenovo Executive VP and President of Lenovo’s Mobile Business Group, is Chairman of the Motorola Management Board. Rick Osterloh, a Motorola veteran, will remain President and COO of Motorola.

“Motorola has already built solid momentum in the market, and their recent results show consumers are excited about their exceptional products that stand out for their design and simplicity,” said Liu. “With the complementary strengths of our two companies, we expect to sell more than 100 million mobile devices this year – including smartphones and tablets – by leveraging the Lenovo brand’s leading market position in China, our shared momentum in emerging markets, and Motorola’s strong foothold in mature markets like the US.”

Motorola already has strong momentum in the marketplace led by new product launches and innovations which have provided solid growth. Beyond smartphones, the Moto 360 watch has captured consumer attention and established Motorola as a company expanding into emerging mobile device areas. As previously stated, Lenovo expects to make the Motorola business profitable in four to six quarters.

Google will maintain ownership of a majority of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, while Motorola will receive a license to this rich portfolio of patents and other intellectual property. Motorola will retain over 2,000 patent assets and a large number of patent cross-license agreements, as well as the Motorola Mobility brand and trademark portfolio.

The total purchase price at close was approximately US$2.91 billion (subject to certain post-close adjustments). The transaction has satisfied all regulatory requirements and customary closing conditions, including clearance by competition authorities in the US, China, EU, Brazil and Mexico, and by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). This is the fifth time since 2005 that Lenovo has been cleared by CFIUS to acquire a US business.

Konica Minolta partners De Lage Landen to support printing services with leasing arrangements

Konica Minolta has signed a global leasing framework agreement with De Lage Landen (DLL) for Optimized Printing Services (OPS). DLL, a provider of asset based financial solutions, is a fully-owned subsidiary of the Rabobank Group.

"We are rapidly expanding the contracts and execution of our OPS business with global major account (GMA) customers to meet their growing needs," said Jun Haraguchi, Senior Executive Officer, Konica Minolta. 

"One of the fundamental requirements by GMA customers is competitive financing solutions for printing equipment and related services with a consistent rental/leasing programme available all over the world - and that's what we believe we have accomplished with DLL."

"There are considerable benefits to delivering innovative financial solutions to Konica Minolta's GMA customers," said Steve Riggs, President Office Technology Global Business Unit, DLL. "We look forward to working together with Konica Minolta to offer a customer-focused approach that will achieve immediate benefits and reduce the burden on the balance sheet."

Konica Minolta and DLL has already been working together across the globe to serve a variety of customers, providing reliable and competitive financing solutions under existing local and regional agreements. With this agreement the two companies are committed to developing a competitive programme for GMA customers with extended global coverage of 26 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific regions.

In Asia Pacific, the countries are: Australia, mainland China, Hong
Kong, Turkey, New Zealand, Singapore, and Korea. Both companies plan to discuss expanded coverage on regular basis.

Twitter and IBM to produce new insights together

First Apple, now Twitter. Twitter and IBM have announced a landmark partnership that will help transform how businesses and institutions understand their customers, markets and trends – and inform every business decision. The alliance brings together Twitter data that distinctively represents the public pulse of the planet with IBM’s industry-leading cloud-based analytics, customer engagement platforms, and consulting services.

Source: IBM website.

The collaboration will focus on three areas:

Integration of Twitter data with IBM analytics services on the cloud
IBM plans to offer Twitter data as part of select cloud-based services, including IBM Watson Analytics, a new cognitive service that brings intuitive visualisation and predictive capabilities to business users; and a cloud-based data refinery service that enables application developers to embed data services in applications. Entrepreneurs and software developers will also be able to integrate Twitter data into new cloud services they are building with IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud or IBM Bluemix, a platform-as-a-service.

New data-intensive capabilities for the enterprise
BM and Twitter will deliver a set of enterprise applications to help improve business decisions across industries and professions. The first joint solution will integrate Twitter data with IBM ExperienceOne customer engagement solutions, allowing sales, marketing, and customer service professionals to map sentiment and behaviour to better engage and support their customers.

Specialised enterprise consulting

IBM Global Business Services professionals will have access to Twitter data to enrich consulting services for clients across business. Additionally, IBM and Twitter will collaborate to develop unique solutions for specific industries such as banking, consumer products, retail, and travel and transportation.

"Twitter provides a powerful new lens through which to look at the world – as both a platform for hundreds of millions of consumers and business professionals, and as a synthesiser of trends,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and CEO. “This partnership, drawing on IBM’s leading cloud-based analytics platform, will help clients enrich business decisions with an entirely new class of data. This is the latest example of how IBM is reimagining work.”

“When it comes to enterprise transformation, IBM is an undisputed global leader in enabling companies to take advantage of emerging technologies and platforms,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO. “This important partnership with IBM will change the way business decisions are made – from identifying emerging market opportunities to better engaging clients, partners and employees.”

With the development of new solutions to improve business decisions across industries and professions, IBM and Twitter will be able to improve business decisions. For example, the integration of social data with enterprise data can help accelerate product development by predicting long-term trends or drive real-time demand forecasting based on real-time situations like weather patterns.

"IBM brings a unique combination of cloud-based analytics solutions and a global services team that can help companies utilise this truly unique data," said Chris Moody, Vice President of Twitter Data Strategy. "Companies have had successes with Twitter data – from manufacturers more effectively managing inventory to consumer electronic companies doing rapid product development. This partnership with IBM will allow faster innovation across a broader range of use cases at scale."

OPPO expects to be in 20 markets worldwide by end-year

OPPO, an electronic product manufacturer, plans to have a presence in 20 markets worldwide by the end of 2014. The company said during its global strategy launch in Singapore that it will build on its strong presence across Southeast Asia to create a footprint in the Middle East and Australia among other parts of the world. The company entered Australia in early September.

Source: OPPO.
Li speaks during the global
launch.

The global launch is part of OPPO’s strategy to bring its “Designed for Life” philosophy to the world. Speaking at the global launch, Sky Li, General Manager of the OPPO overseas mobile phone business, said: “At OPPO, we firmly believe that our customers deserve a product that is specially designed for them. Design matters because it transforms technology from a tool into an essential part of our day to day life. 

"We believe design is about giving people the solutions they need in a form they love. We are delighted today to be taking this philosophy to a global audience, bringing meticulous, innovative and trendsetting products to a wider audience that meet the specific needs of each individual market. This represents one more step in OPPO’s journey of enriching lives through our products. We are also particularly proud that OPPO’s employee family now includes members from so many markets worldwide.”

Beyond its strong customer base in China, OPPO currently holds the no. 4 position in Vietnam in terms of sales and is no. 5 in Thailand. The company also has 6.5% market share in Indonesia, making it no. 4 in the country. OPPO further ranked first in the Chinese 4G smartphone market in July 2014. 

The company introduced two smartphones during its global strategy launch: the N3, the world’s first phone with an automatic swivel camera, and the R5, the world’s thinnest smartphone.

Read the blog post on the new phones here.

Cisco reports Intercloud momentum around the world

Cisco's Intercloud initiative is progressing well, says the company. At an update during Cloud Expo Asia 2014, the company noted that the Intercloud partner ecosystem has grown; new offerings are now available for the Intercloud; and that it has further invested in the Intercloud strategy.

Source: Cisco. The Intercloud ecosystem.

"Today it's about connectivity. Tomorrow it'll be about commerce, and after that it'll be about information," pronounced Nick Earle, Senior VP, Global Cloud and Managed Services, Cisco.

Cisco's vision, he said, is to enable standardised cloud applications and highly secure hybrid clouds through a coalition of clouds that talk seamlessly to each other, in the same way that the Internet is a coalition of networks that talk seamlessly to each other. Such a coalition would advance Cisco’s plan to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the demands of the Internet of Everything. 

The Cisco Intercloud Fabric enables this coalition. Available as of late September, the set of solutions allow businesses on the one hand to build secure hybrid clouds and extend their data centres to public clouds as needed, and cloud providers, on the other hand, to offer a complete hybrid cloud solution. 

Earle said the Intercloud is a true coalition of clouds, enabling virtual machine (VM) portability, so cloud workloads can be transferred from any cloud (or stack) to any other cloud, independent of the hypervisor, the software that controls a particular cloud. Policy extensibility is a must, so that the same policies for parameters such as networking and security are identical no matter which cloud the workload has been sent to. 

These practices would be analogous to creating an ecosystem so that someone can visit the same fastfood chain in different countries to eat a hamburger which is made the same way, with the same size and the same taste around the world, if the hamburger were a workload, its size and flavour were policies, and the countries were clouds with different languages spoken and different levels of sales tax. 

According to Cisco, the Intercloud Fabric unifies the management of public cloud services, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and other offerings, while also enabling hybrid cloud workloads to be ported seamlessly between public cloud providers, private clouds and Cisco Cloud services as needed.
Cisco Hybrid Cloud bundles back up the initiative with technology offerings combined with services. Also launched in late September, these bundles further help businesses to create hybrid clouds. One bundle, for example, allows customers already using a private cloud to extend that infrastructure to Cisco’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering. 

The completed acquisition of Metacloud, which deploys and operates private clouds with an OpenStack-as-a-service model, was also announced in late September, as was the addition of over 30 partners to the Intercloud ecosystem. 

The new partners, which include Asia-headquartered companies like LG CNS, NTT DATA, and Wipro, mean that the Intercloud is extended by 250 additional data centres in 50 countries. 

"If everybody works together... it'll give rise to the world's biggest marketplace," Earle said. "It's not about technology. It's to change the business outcomes which are the future of technology."

BT will leverage Cisco Intercloud Fabric to develop hybrid cloud services that connect with the Cisco Cloud and with the cloud and managed service offerings of Cisco Powered Intercloud Providers. The BT Cloud Compute infrastructure, available in major economies across the Middle East and Asia Pacific, will become fully Intercloud-enabled to support highly secure, global hybrid clouds with workload portability for BT’s customers. Ruth Rowan, Chief Marketing Officer, Asia, Middle East and Africa for BT, said that the company has Intercloud fabric across 17 countries in Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa as well as Europe. "We've done that because of interest from our customers," she said.

Equinix and Cisco have also teamed up to provide enterprise customers with more secure, resilient and efficient interconnections to public clouds. Equinix also plans to deploy key Cisco technologies and services across its Cloud Exchange, including the Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switch, Cisco APIC, and the Cisco Evolved Services Platform.

The two companies announced in September that they plan to develop a hosted private cloud solution that utilises the Equinix Cloud Exchange to deliver secure private access to cloud service providers in Equinix data centres globally. Cisco plans to deploy Intercloud capabilities in 16 Equinix markets including in Asia.

Existing partners are also rolling out more functionality for the Intercloud. Telstra, which became Cisco’s first Intercloud partner in March 2014, announced the expansion of its Cisco Cloud Services capability beyond Australia to Hong Kong and Singapore in September.

Cisco continues to recruit and enable partners across the Intercloud ecosystem, including in Asia. Earle says it can take 12 weeks to engage with a potential partner before the company agrees to join the Intercloud. "You'll see more Asian companies announced in calendar year 2015," he said. Some of the challenges, he noted, include companies that prefer to go it on their own, or which do not believe in the ecosystem model.  

Further momentum for the Intercloud is expected through Cisco Capital, which has earmarked US$1 billion to provide financial solutions that help Cisco customers and partners accelerate the adoption of Cisco technologies needed to transition to Cisco-powered clouds. Cisco Capital offers will focus on financing Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI); facilitating technology migrations; and providing flexible payment structures. 

Hashtag: #cea14

Avaloq hires regional director, regional product manager in Australia

The Avaloq group, which provides integrated solutions for wealth management, universal and retail banking, has reinforced its commitment to the Australian financial services sector with two new hires.

The company has appointed Nick Frolich as Regional Director, responsible for market development, and Mani Kastellas as Australia Regional Product Manager of its banking and wealth management solution.

Source: Avaloq. Frolich.

Frolich has more than 25 years’ experience in the IT industry, working with leading financial software and BPO providers. He was previously Financial Services Industry Lead at SAP. 

Before joining Avaloq Kastellas previously worked at Bravura and Simcorp. With over 20 years’ experience in financial services, Mani has worked in various roles across financial services including Macquarie Bank, Challenger and ING.

Peter Scott, General Manager Asia Pacific for the Avaloq group, and Executive Board member, said: “The decision to develop our presence in Australia reflects increasing levels of new business demand following the recent go-live of one of Australia’s largest banks with Avaloq. It has been a strong year in the Asia Pacific region for the company, with a series of client wins and the creation of a new regional BPO centre underway in Singapore. We believe that Nick and Mani will help us to develop our client base in Australia to further contribute to this growth.”

Tata Communications launches IZO platform for enabling hybrid clouds

Source: Tata Communications website.

Tata Communications, a provider of A New World of Communications, has launched IZO, a global network platform for enhanced hybrid cloud enablement. Through IZO, businesses can go to a single provider which offers access to a full ecosystem of network, cloud and data centre connectivity, whether they want to use a private, hybrid or public cloud.Vinod Kumar, Managing Director and CEO, Tata Communications says, “We’re taking the necessary steps towards making the Internet Fit For Business by bringing a new level of predictability and reliability to the public Internet that does not exist today. This isn’t something we can do alone and we’re joined in this initiative to bring about a new era of internet, by some of the world’s leading ISP and cloud providers as we collaborate to achieve a common goal. Cloud, in every form, continues to transform the way businesses operate, innovate and generate revenue. Our role is to make sure that we’re delivering a network that supports and enhances everybody’s network cloud.”

The IZO network platform takes the public Internet and engineers it for predictable routing, together with enterprise cloud connectivity and interconnected data centres. It brings together a growing ecosystem of over 20 service providers, including two of the largest cloud platforms - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure - and over 50 data centres across the globe.

Benjamin Tan, VP International Business, StarHub says, “Enterprise adoption of cloud and the use of dedicated business internet access has been on the rise in the past few years. These trends are here to stay and rapid growth is expected in the coming years. In Singapore, StarHub operates an extensive fixed business network that provides a wide range of data, voice and wholesale services to serve businesses of any size. We are pleased to partner with Tata Communications to address opportunities emerging from these ICT trends."

The platform comprises of IZO Internet WAN, IZO Private and IZO Public - each of which tackle a significant issue faced by enterprises managing cloud solutions:

IZO Internet WAN 

IZO Internet WAN brings the security, flexibility and predictability of a private network to the public Internet through partnerships with 20 service providers around the world. It provides businesses with deterministic routing of traffic with guaranteed end-to-end SLAs and business-standard reporting, translating to faster deployment times, whilst reducing their total cost of ownership by up to 30%.

IZO Private 

IZO Private connects businesses to cloud service providers via private network connectivity. Through a global partnered interconnect arrangement under the AWS Direct Connect programme with Amazon Web Services and Azure ExpressRoute programme with Microsoft, companies now have access to a one-stop-shop for end-to-end management to ensure network performance and a better end-user experience.

IZO Public 

IZO Public tags and prioritises content with guaranteed performance for Tata Communications enterprise customers. For businesses looking to deliver large volumes of content over the Internet, this service provides high performance, reach, and capacity, ensuring a good user experience.

Melanie Posey, Research Vice President at IDC, says, “The cloud is the new IT architecture for the next-generation enterprise. However, next-generation network architectures that are similarly dynamic and scalable have been slow to emerge. Neither enterprise WANs (expensive, static, and complex) nor the public Internet ("best-efforts" reliability, performance, and security) provide the right mix of scalability, rapid deployment capabilities, and multi-carrier reach required for secure, enterprise-grade connectivity to an ever expanding array of cloud-based IT and application resources. 

"Tata Communications' IZO enterprise WAN and cloud enablement platform leverages its extensive global network and the reach of its partner ecosystem to enable global organisations to harness the cloud – be it private, hybrid or public.”

Hashtags: #networkcloud, #yourIZO

Singapore accelerates momentum for cloud strategy

Singapore reaffirmed its commitment to the cloud and takes a further step on its Smart Nation journey through the enhancement of its Cloud Service Provider Registry (CSP Registry) with near real-time analytics.

Announced at CloudAsia 2014, the additions will give potential cloud consumers more information on performance and availability of a CSP on top of current existing static listings via the Registry. This will help enterprises when making a choice on which CSP they would wish to utilise, said the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore.

The CSP Registry was conceived to engender trust through transparency for the benefit of cloud adopters by making available online information about CSPs. This was facilitated by services such as a self-disclosure form and information on a CSP's Multi-Tier Cloud Security Singapore Standard (MTCS SS) certification.

The near real-time analytics enhancement has been enabled with a signing of a Memorandum of Intent with Compuware to access information on CSPs' availability and performance in near real-time. Compuware will provide free use of software tools and expertise for the performance and availability monitoring of CSPs via the Registry. The MOI was signed by IDA's Assistant Chief Executive Khoong Hock Yun and Compuware's Regional Director, ASEAN, Koh Eng Kiong.

"The enhancement to our Cloud Service Provider Registry will better enable potential cloud adopters to understand what each provider is offering with near-real time tools. These will encourage greater trust and adoption of the cloud. Alongside this is an encouraging takeup of the Multi-Tier Cloud Security standard for clarity around CSPs security service levels. All of this will help in Singapore's drive to be a Smart Nation," said IDA Assistant Chief Executive Khoong Hock Yun.

The MTCS SS was launched last year by IDA, together with Singapore Standards Council, under the aegis of SPRING Singapore. It provides specifications for CSPs to give clarity around their security service levels for customer understanding, while also increasing the level of accountability and transparency from them. Local CSPs which are keen to adopt the MTCS SS can tap on SPRING's Capability Development Grant based on their eligibility. This covers up to 70% of qualifying project costs. 

IDA also worked together with the Singapore Accreditation Council, under the aegis of SPRING, to develop an accreditation programme for MTCS certification. "The new accreditation programme provides a stringent set of criteria to ensure that certification bodies conduct good certification practices in accordance with international best practices. CSPs which are certified against the MTCS SS by accredited certification bodies will provide greater assurance on cloud security to cloud users," said Steven Tan, SPRING's Group Director (Quality & Standards).

While adopting the MTCS is voluntary, certification by a Certification Body will be a requirement for CSPs participating in future public cloud service bulk tenders from the Government. IDA has received 13 industry proposals for its next tender which is currently under evaluation.

As part of IDA's roundup on the state of the cloud's ecosystem in Singapore, Khoong also shared that the Technology Evaluation Programme has shown promising results. Launched in 2011, more than 100 requests have been submitted in areas such as scalable media platforms, video analytics and video content search using images. Evaluation licenses arising from the requests have resulted in sixteen percent going on to commercial licensing.

IDA's Software-as-a-Service Enablement Programme also ended recently in March. This programme helped enable companies to make their software available in the form of a Software-as-a-Service. Since its launch, IDA has funded a total of 20 SaaS enablement projects across industry verticals such as the construction, healthcare and manufacturing sectors.

CloudAsia is co-organised by the IDA and co-located with Cloud Expo Asia & Data Centre World for the second year.

NetApp makes major push into cloud with software, services and partnerships

NetApp has announced new software, services, and partnerships that simplify data management across clouds at NetApp Insight North America 2014. The announcement included a new version of the NetApp clustered Data ONTAP operating system, Cloud ONTAP, OnCommand Cloud Manager and NetApp Private Storage for Cloud. These offerings enable customers to embrace the hybrid cloud while maintaining control of their data and ensuring choice. 

“Hybrid clouds will be the backbone of IT today and tomorrow,” said George Kurian, Executive VP of Product Operations at NetApp. “We help enterprises maintain control of their data as they bridge their on-premises architecture with the cloud of their choice. The NetApp Data Fabric for the Hybrid Cloud is the right architecture for building enterprise-class hybrid clouds. Our software improves the economics, flexibility, and business impact of a customer’s existing infrastructure, while our cloud technology solutions give customers the needed confidence in our ability to help them navigate the future.”

As the hybrid cloud continues to gain traction within the enterprise, NetApp believes that the data management elements in different parts of a hybrid cloud must be connected and work together to form a coherent, integrated, and interoperable system. This “data fabric” enables data to be consistently managed, transported seamlessly from one part of the cloud to another. It also enables enterprises to apply consistent policies and services to the data in the hybrid cloud regardless of the application, technology or cloud infrastructure provider.

“One of the ways in which CIOs can be successful in supporting the goals of their business is by controlling data. The management of data growth while also enabling the business to gain more insight from the data itself, is the key challenge for a hybrid IT organisation. NetApp is focusing on helping CIOs maintain data control on their terms — by allowing them to choose the public cloud service providers they want to work with and only when they need their services,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Research Director, IDC.

NetApp's announcements include technology components to bring the NetApp Data Fabric vision to life, including:

· Clustered Data ONTAP 8.3 
Enhancements to the company’s software-defined storage operating system help organisations of all sizes improve their levels of availability, performance and efficiency. New support for NetApp MetroCluster Disaster Recovery Software provides enterprises with uninterrupted recovery from failures across data centers. Critical business applications can continue to operate in the event of disasters or planned outages. 

The latest version of the software includes performance optimisations for all-flash nodes so that customers can maximise performance without sacrificing rich data management, protection, or flexible data movement. The new software includes increased efficiency that significantly improves the cost per gigabyte and cost per IOPS.

Cloud ONTAP 
Cloud ONTAP brings the power of clustered Data ONTAP to the public cloud. The first release of Cloud ONTAP combines the power of clustered Data ONTAP with the scale of Amazon Web Services (AWS). The software, which is built on clustered Data ONTAP 8.3, uses patented NetApp technologies for non-disruptive operations, seamless scalability, and efficiency and combines them with the on-demand computing benefits of cloud services. This approach provides a consistent set of data services throughout a hybrid cloud environment. 

AWS is the first platform provider to run Cloud ONTAP services on its cloud environment and NetApp is collaborating with Microsoft Azure and Verizon Cloud for future releases. To help customers take advantage of Cloud ONTAP, NetApp is offering a range of cloud-friendly and traditional data centre service licensing options.

· OnCommand Cloud Manager
OnCommand Cloud Manager enables efficient and easy provisioning of clustered Data ONTAP instances between private cloud and public cloud providers. A simple and intuitive graphical user interface gives customers and partners seamless visibility into their hybrid cloud environment and eliminates the complexity of storage setup and movement of data from one location to another.

· NetApp Private Storage for Cloud
NetApp also introduced NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for SoftLayer and announced the new NetApp Private Storage for Cloud family. NPS for Cloud enables customers to use multiple clouds and maintain control of their data on a single NetApp data storage device strategically placed in select colocation facilities. 

NetApp has tested cloud connectivity with many Equinix locations and with select alternate colocation facilities worldwide. The cloud solution combines cloud elasticity and savings with the performance, availability and control of private, dedicated enterprise storage. SoftLayer, an IBM company, is the latest cloud provider to partner with NetApp with an NPS for Cloud approach. Other NPS for Cloud solutions currently available are NetApp Private Storage for Amazon Web Services and NetApp Private Storage for Microsoft Azure.

· Strategy, design, deployment, and transition services
New services offered include the Enterprise Transformation Workshop for Cloud, which helps customers envision and architect the right cloud storage strategy for a successful evolution to the hybrid cloud. For organisations looking to optimize the deployment of NetApp technology in their infrastructure, NetApp offers the Efficiency and Optimization Service. This service performs a comprehensive storage-level health check and analysis to help pre-empt transition problems and enhance performance. Additionally, for new and existing customers moving to clustered Data ONTAP software, the clustered Data ONTAP Migration Service, RapidData Migration QuickStart Service, and self-help migration tools facilitate a smooth and simple transition.

“Enterprises implementing private and hybrid cloud infrastructures rely on technology leaders to provide proven data center technologies, and NetApp and Brocade have been working together for over a decade providing highly available, reliable and high performance storage and storage networks optimised for the cloud. NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP and Cloud ONTAP technologies combined with Brocade’s data centre-proven Ethernet fabric and Gen 5 Fibre Channel fabric networks provide a robust and highly scalable infrastructure for enterprises implementing cloud architectures,” noted Jack Rondoni, Vice President, Storage Networking, Brocade. 

“Our joint success in developing private cloud solutions in the enterprise with FlexPod is the perfect foundation for hybrid cloud solutions. NetApp’s new hybrid cloud solutions complement Cisco’s cloud strategy, provide businesses with the flexibility to manage changing environments, and give customers a smooth on-ramp to the Intercloud,” commented Jim McHugh, Vice President of Unified Computing Solutions (UCS) marketing, Cisco Systems. 

“Many of our customers who are deploying mobile workspaces are turning to a hybrid cloud environment to combine the benefits of private cloud security and public cloud flexibility for their IT infrastructure to cut costs and maximise value. NetApp’s new hybrid software and services will offer a key component that can help customers build a simple and efficient strategy enabling IT infrastructures to grow and transform with their business,” said Calvin Hsu, Vice President, Product Marketing, Desktop and Applications, Citrix.

Fortinet shares its top eight 2015 trends

Fortinet has released its take on the most important developments and technologies to look out for in 2015. The thrusts to look out for? Security, cloud, mobility, wireless, analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined anything, and bandwidth.

1. Security breaches will be harder to stop

Security breaches and data leakage will continue to trouble companies of all sizes. The threat timeline over the last 10-15 years has shown that a new threat tends to be quickly answered by a new defence system. The threat then evolves, and a new defence system is needed. This has led to a myriad of disparate security appliances, software agents and management systems that in many cases are unable to talk to one other. When the bad guys tweak the threat life cycle, for example via the creation of advanced persistent threats or APTs, it becomes very difficult to stay ahead of the curve. Next-generation security architectures will integrate discrete security systems into a platform, which can correlate threat life elements and break the infection chain in different places.

2. Cloud technologies are finally taking root

All forms of cloud are starting to make inroads as a viable part of the enterprise infrastructure. Software as a service (SaaS) has reached a tipping point as most organisations trust a provider’s security capabilities. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is still focused on web applications for elasticity and redundancy. Cloud bursting, hybrid clouds and personal clouds will mean more sharing of distributed services, management and security.

3. Diversity in mobile apps and management

Unlike the PC market, the mobile device market (handsets and tablets) will not be dominated by Microsoft. There will be at least two to three platforms across the globe. This mobile diversity will mean management systems will need to be more flexible and open. Improved JavaScript performance will begin to push HTML5 and the browser as a mainstream enterprise application development environment. This will lead to richer applications and more focus on their usability, rather than larger and cumbersome applications.

4. Software-defined modular infrastructure becomes the norm

The control layer is being detached and centralised for many different parts of the infrastructure. Most of the initial focus is on the data centre with virtualisation, Software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage (SDS) and standalone switch fabrics. The effect is that APIs are being consumed at a much higher rate. In a world where the infrastructure is being dissected and segmented, APIs themselves are very important but is also a potential security hole to the network element.

5. The Internet of Things and industrial control systems (ICS) collide

The Internet of Things (IoT) is already estimated by Gartner to be made up of some 26 billion devices by 2020. Industrial control systems are rolling out IP all the way to the control and measurement points. These networks are separate today and individual in nature. However, both need to deal with cyber threats, which can cause huge damage across industrial complexes, public operational networks (i.e. power grids) or consumers.

6. Wireless continues to replace wired access

Wireless access is ubiquitous across most organisations. New enterprise buildings are less and less wired. Wireless systems are becoming the primary network access control mechanism, meaning that tight integration with authentication systems is essential. Wireless technology itself continues to improve with Wave 1 now rolling out rapidly and Wave 2 on the horizon in 2015.

7. Networking bandwidth continues to double every 10 months

Networking bandwidth requirements continue to expand at a rapid pace. The transition from 1G data centers to 10G data centers took about 10 years. The transition from 10G to 100G will be much faster. All parts of the infrastructure need to perform within the high-speed infrastructure. Traditionally CPU-based firewalls have fallen way behind the performance curve. More recently ASIC-based firewall appliances have taken a quantum leap in performance, allowing 100G interfaces and throughput in the hundreds of Gbps, saving space and power. Now high-speed networks can design security into the architecture without creating bottlenecks.

8. Analytics for everything that’s attached to the network

Big Data and analytics can be applied for different reasons. The biggest need is business intelligence but it’s also very important for security. The amount of data being gathered is staggering but segmenting the data can lead to more actionable results. For example, collecting WiFi presence of consumers in retail stores can lead to understanding their buying behavior. Monitoring where and when clients connect to the network can help determine security posture. Forecasting shipments based on real time data can lead to more efficient operations.

Singapore Computer Society changes categories for IT Leader Awards 2015

The Singapore Computer Society (SCS) has revamped its annual IT Leader Awards to promote entrepreneurship and innovation in the infocomm and nedia (ICM) industry. The changes were made in consultation with industry leaders from the public and private sectors, the association said.

Now in its 19th year, the IT Leaders Awards 2015 will recognise winners across five categories instead of four: 

IT Leader of the Year

Entrepreneur of the Year

Professional of the Year

IT Youth and 

Hall of Fame.

Entrepreneur of the Year is one of the new categories. "The Entrepreneur of the Year is being introduced to recognise the growing pool of entrepreneurs who are starting new ventures and we hope to encourage more individuals to come forward to share and inspire with their successful stories," the SCS said in a statement.

Professional of the Year, the other new category, replaces the Young Professional of the Year. This award recognises successful individuals for their achievements in their chosen fields. The Professional of the Year could be a mentor, educator, inventor, trainer, researcher or developer who has demonstrated outstanding achievement in any of the following ICM fields: 

• Research & innovation
• Development
• Applications
• Education & training
• Implementation & management
• Administration & support

Nominations end 31 October 2014. An award ceremony will be held during the SCS Gala Dinner & IT Leader Awards on 6 March 2015. The evening will see the gathering of close to 1,000 ICM leaders and professionals from the government and private sectors.

Winners of the IT Leader Awards 2014 are: 

Rosina Howe, Group Director of Innovation and Infocomm Technology, Land Transport Authority, named IT Leader of the Year. Howe developed Singapore’s land transport service strategy through the innovative use of ICT. Under her leadership, the use of ICT permeates through all key business functions including strategic units such as policy formulation and transport planning which helped the country and organisation to win numerous international awards and accolades. 

Yong Ying-I, Chairman, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame this February. She spearheaded the formation of the IT national agency and under her leadership, significant milestones were achieved such as the full liberalisation of Singapore’s telecommunications market. She also led the development of the national blueprint to transform Singapore into an advanced and intelligent nation powered by infocomm.

The Young Professional of the Year 2014 is Nicholas Chan, Founder of Azione Capital and Managing Director of Fredrik Marine IT Services. He has co-founded at least ten companies, seven of which were technology companies ranging from IT services for trading, HR to the marine industry. He is now the CEO of a successful business providing IT Services for the requirements of the global maritime industry. He hosts the monthly Singapore Entrepreneurs Network, the largest entrepreneur/technopreneur group in Singapore on MeetUp.com since 2005. 

The IT Youth award went to Tay Wei Kiat, Co-Founder of Oompr!. Tay created The Wicked, a collaborative online puzzle. He is also the brains behind the used textbook marketplace, BookINBookOUT. Oompr! is another social marketplace. 

IBM opens new cloud centre in Mumbai, rolls out cloud services for OpenStack

IBM has expanded its global cloud network with a new cloud centre in Mumbai, India and a new suite of cloud services for OpenStack. 

With the addition of the new centre in Mumbai to its global footprint, IBM adds new resiliency service capabilities for its clients. The Mumbai centre joins Asia Pacific facilities in Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Melbourne opened this year alone as part of IBM's US$1.2 billion investment in cloud centres in every major market worldwide.

The driving forces behind the adoption of cloud computing worldwide include requirements for businesses and governments to store certain data locally to comply with data residency regulations, as well as a growing desire for startups to expand their businesses globally. IBM estimates about 100 nations and territories have adopted laws that dictate how governments and private enterprises handle personal data.

The new Mumbai IBM Cloud Center is part of IBM's commitment to continue to grow IBM's Cloud presence around the world. This effort includes IBM's business consulting division, which features cloud experts with deep industry knowledge who are located around the globe to enable clients to move to cloud. These experts are dedicated to working face-to-face with clients to address all of their industry specific needs as they transform to the cloud era.

“This new Mumbai centre is IBM’s latest investment to create the most extensive global network of cloud facilities in the industry to help clients expand globally with cloud and tackle data sovereignty issues,” said Lingraju Sawkar, Director, Integrated Technology Services, Global Technology Services IBM India / SA. “Through this new centre, we are able to help usher businesses into the cloud era while delivering the levels of security that allow them to experience the benefits of this new environment and ensure they remain protected.”

Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the new, 31,000 sq ft Mumbai facility offers an array of solutions including proven cloud resiliency services. These services guarantee customers uptime of 99.99% across any IT environment, including traditional IT, public, private, or hybrid cloud deployments. In the event of an outage, the centre’s support team can recover data in minutes to ensure that is has little to no impact on business operations while going virtually unseen by customers.

Clients around the world are using IBM Cloud Centers spread across every major market to help them adopt cloud for growth and innovation. New Zealand-based Finzsoft Solutions, a financial technology provider, has for example turned to the IBM cloud to offer solutions-as-a-service to clients as the company expands in Australasia and across the Asia Pacific region. 

Under a five-year cloud agreement, Finzsoft will move its core and vertical banking applications, including its Sovereign application, to the IBM Cloud. The agreement to host Finzsoft applications in the IBM Cloud at IBM cloud centres in Auckland and Wellington will enable Finzsoft to speed up the deployment of its solutions, reduce costs and provide security and resiliency to its customers. The cloud-based model enables Finzsoft to meet the growing demands amongst its client base for operating models that deliver agility, availability and stability.

Under the new agreement, Finzsoft will leverage IBM Cloud Managed Services for New Zealand as well as infrastructure from SoftLayer, an IBM company, enabling Finzsoft to take advantage of IBM's global network of enterprise-grade cloud centers in every major market and allowing for data sovereignty and other requirements to be met as they move to the cloud.

"IBM's reputation as a global technology and innovation leader was key to our decision to enter into this agreement. Working with IBM will give our clients confidence that we are offering our solutions through a robust and secure cloud environment, something which is extremely important to tier one banks and finance companies. Having the IBM global brand behind us will strengthen our business proposals to our clients and enable a continued focus on the development and delivery of transformational and scalable solutions for our clients," said Andrew Holliday, Managing Director, Finzsoft.

"The banking sector is rapidly transforming. The focus on digital, mobility, online banking and granular customer data means our customers want greater flexibility and more personalised and integrated solutions. This agile, on-demand and real time access to solutions as-a-service through the IBM Cloud will also help transform how our customers approach core banking refreshes and upgrades,” added Holliday.

"The rapid transformation of the banking industry is being driven strongly by digital technologies. Finzsoft chose IBM for very clear reasons – security, enterprise-grade capabilities, global network and our ability to be a transformation partner. Working with Finzsoft to deliver these leading applications as-a-service demonstrates that IBM is a leading provider of cloud services with a compelling value proposition to enterprises," said Robert Varker, Business Unit Executive, IBM Integrated Technology Services.

In addition to the need for a global network of cloud centres to address growing client demands, companies also looking for a secure, dedicated and highly available environment that enables greater flexibility and an open cloud. To address this, IBM is also introducing the IBM Cloud OpenStack Services via the IBM Cloud marketplace. This will enable greater interoperability between existing IT systems and off-premise cloud workloads and provide clients with the means to more easily deploy an OpenStack cloud.

Microsoft gives Office 365 subscribers unlimited cloud storage

Getting productive on the cloud with Microsoft suddenly got that much easier with the October 28 (Singapore time) announcement that all Office 365 subscribers will now receive unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost, the company announced in its OneDrive Blog and Office Blog.

Source: Microsoft.

"For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes," said Chris Jones, Corporate VP for OneDrive & SharePoint at Microsoft in the OneDrive blog post. 

The move emphasises Microsoft's direct competition with Google's Google Drive, which has allowed collaborating on a document stored in cloud storage for some time.

"OneDrive makes sure you always have all your important content on all your devices and enables multiple people to collaborate and co-author a single document at the same time. Gone are the days of not having that document right when you need it or managing multiple versions of the same document. 

"With OneDrive there is always just one source of truth available across all your devices. What’s more, with Office Delve, that important document your co-worker shared with you on their OneDrive actually finds you, versus you having to find it," adds Julia White, GM, Office 365 Technical Product Management, in the Office 365 blog post.

The feature will roll out over the coming months, starting with subscribers of Office 365 Home, Personal, and University. Users who can't wait to try the storage can click here to get on the list.

Pacnet opens Tianjin data centre

Pacnet, a provider of integrated technology solutions in the Asia-Pacific region, has officially opened its new data centre in Tianjin, China (TJCS1) to address growing demand for data centre and managed services in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Its launch parallels the objectives of recent government plans to integrate the Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei provinces into a single megalopolis, promoting China's economic restructuring and its consumption-driven and sustainable growth.

The facility is in the Gaocun Science & Technology Innovation Park of the Tianjin Wuqing District in China. Developed by Pacnet's equity joint venture in China, Pacnet Business Solutions (PBS) and the Tianjin Wuqing government, TJCS1 is capable of hosting 2,000 racks. The opening of this Tianjin facility is instrumental in helping to establish Wuqing's Gaocun Science & Technology Innovation Park as a leading technology hub in Northern China. 

"We are excited to launch one of our largest data centre facilities in the rapidly developing city of Tianjin.The facility further reaffirms our capabilities in meeting data centre needs of both domestic enterprises and multinational corporations in the world's fastest-growing economy," said Carl Grivner, Chief Executive Officer of Pacnet. "Today's opening of TJCS1 also positions Pacnet as an innovator in the data centre industry in China, enabling the delivery of software-defined networking (SDN) solutions in China."

According to Gartner, China's data centre capacity will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.3% through 2016. During this same time, IDC also estimates the total China Internet data centre services market to reach a value of US$3.9 billion in 2017, up from US$1.7 billion in 2012, working out to a CAGR of 25%.

"The launch of the TJCS1 data center facility is a key joint initiative by Pacnet and the Tianjin Wuqing Government supporting the development of the Tianjin Wuqing District into a leading technology hub in Northern China," said Zhang Yong, Secretary of Wuqing District Committee of the CPC, at the launch ceremony. "To date, the District has attracted over US$1.9 billion in investment capital and is home to over 1,400 enterprises."

TJCS1 is connected to the Beijing data centre of the China International Data System (CIDS) via Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN), a service platform that leverages SDN to deliver flexible and scalable bandwidth configurable by customers. Pacnet sets a benchmark in the data centre industry by enabling customers located in both facilities to flexibly allocate and scale bandwidth between the data centres based on their specific business requirements.

"Through this strategic collaboration, we can leverage TJCS1's strategic location, innovative SDN capabilities and world-class power, security, environmental and connectivity features to enable our customers to dynamically provision and scale bandwidth between our Beijing and Tianjin data centre locations," remarked Zhang Nianlu, CEO of China International Data System Company. 

The Tier III, 226,000-sq ft facility provides customers with colocation, connectivity and managed services backed by 24x7 expert, multilingual customer service and on-site remote hands support. Additionally, TJCS1 boasts N+1 and 2N redundant power and state-of-the-art security, environmental and fire controls. Customers locating in TJCS1 also obtain direct access to major domestic exchanges, points of presence (PoPs) and various carrier networks within China.

GetResponse sees the opportunity in an Asian strategy

GetResponse, known for its email marketing, is now a provider of online marketing tools, and focused on investing in Asia to be closer to clients from the region. 

Source: GetResponse.
Grabowski.

“Singapore, along with Malaysia and Thailand, is our first step to building our local presence in Asia. Currently, we are in the midst of planning to setting up offices here with local teams to underline our growth in the region,” said GetResponse CEO Simon Grabowski. “We’re also exploring options to expand our marketing activities, deepen our affiliate relations here and develop dedicated partnership programmes for our resellers.”

Grabowski further explained that Singapore’s attraction is as one of the biggest markets in ASEAN, with a highly developed economy and a growing startup scene. Companies here are quick to adopt the latest trends in online marketing technologies,” he noted.

“The EU and US markets are not developing as rapidly, while there is still room for email marketing to grow in Asia with consumer groups here being more willing to experiment with new solutions and technologies,” he added. “With the region also being one of the highest users of smartphones and mobile gadgets, there is also a demand for email marketing to be mobile-friendly to increase the effectiveness of a campaign – this is something GetResponse offers over other players here.”

Demand for email marketing is actually increasing, especially in ASEAN, according to Grabowski. “This region is also the fastest growing technology market globally but there is a lack of regional email and online marketing solutions. Email also goes hand-in-hand with digital and mobile marketing although small organisations may not have the budget for digital and mobile options. As such, we still think there’s a need for a comprehensive email marketing service such as GetResponse,” he said.

Besides email automation, GetResponse offer complementary marketing strategies and channels such as social media integration, landing pages and stock photos which can be customised for marketing campaigns.

The Landing Page Creator 2.0 software, for example, helps GetResponse clients create promotional landing pages and mini-sites, and can also collect data from potential subscribers. “This helps online marketers and SMEs here to create effective and comprehensive lists of information for their marketing campaigns,” Grabowski said.

“Marketing automation is also important here and we are developing a suite of tools such as lead scoring, tracking activity of website visitors to be linked with timely and relevant automated emails. Through improving the timeliness and relevance of our client’s messages, it can help to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.”

GetResponse has already differentiated small businesses from larger companies with different plans. For as low as US$15 a month, small businesses are given access to fully-automated marketing tools, while the GetResponse Enterprise version is for companies with more advanced email marketing strategies.

But what about email spam? “All of our subscribers are required to comply with our anti-spam policy which prohibits users from sending out unsolicited emails,” Grabowski said. “We also participate in industry initiatives to promote responsible, permission-based email marketing.”

The Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC) and Surety Mail, he said, are two such initiatives that work towards getting the right emails to those who want them.

Grabowski added that every message sent from a GetResponse account contains a link to unsubscribe which cannot be removed. “If a subscriber opts out, the link will automatically update the mailing list to take them out of future mailings,” he said.