New HP’s FunDex To Help Businesses Win in Mobile App Economy

HP has announced new software releases designed to help organizations deliver mobile applications that delight customers and score 5-star ratings. The innovations harness HP’s unique assets in big data analytics,application lifecycle management, IT operations management and security to enable organizations to accelerate the delivery of every phase of the mobile app lifecycle, from creation and pre-production, to delivery and post-production management.

“HP allows us to take big data and make it actionable, so we can deliver exceptional user experiences on our mobile speech translator app,” said Yan Auerbach, COO, SpeechTrans (@SpeechTrans), a leading speech translation company. “Previously, it took us up to three weeks to fix an app issue and now we can address any problem in less than 2 days. Leveraging HP software has enabled us to achieve consistent 5-star ratings in mobile app stores – a key driver of new customers and revenue.” Video: learn how SpeechTrans uses HP Software to increase their number of downloads, boost their Android ratings, and go from three to five star reviews in the app store.

Mobile applications are increasingly becoming the “front door” for a company’s brand, and future revenue and market share often depends on an end user’s immediate overall app experience. Mobile application users expect world-class performance, availability, security and quality, as well as contextual understanding that delivers the right content at the right time.

However, delivering an enjoyable and useful user experience is a non-trivial task – mobile developers, testers, and IT management must contend with a complex and constantly changing web of challenges. These include developing apps for a constantly expanding array of devices, operating systems, networks, and platforms, understanding and acting on the massive volumes of user and device data, and accurately predicting scale and usage levels to enable peak app experience.

HP’s latest innovations are designed to address these challenges by combining its proven assets in application development testing, monitoring and systems management with HP Haven analytics, HP security software, and elegant SaaS-based interfaces. Together, these capabilities result in solutions that help make designing, delivering, and managing mobile applications an intuitive, collaborative and fun process. Businesses can use HP’s solutions to accelerate application delivery, test and monitor apps across multiple devices and operating systems, and provide mobile users with exceptional and secure experiences.

Continuously Improve the User Experience to achieve a 5-Star Mobile App
HP has released a unique new offering that leverages the HP Haven big data platform to allow businesses to gain visibility into the health of their mobile apps and measure overall user experience. HP App Pulse Mobile constantly monitors and analyzes performance, stability and resource usage on mobile apps. The tool provides a “FunDex” score that provides a top-level view of problems that negatively impact the user experience with recommendations to explore and fix the root cause of each issue.

Accelerate Application Delivery with the Power of Big Data

HP has released a new version of its Agile project management software to assist mobile teams in adopting Agile practices and delivering high-quality mobile applications faster:

·         A new version of HP Agile Manager supports real-time integration with HP’s  Application Lifecycle   Management software so that no matter how fast Agile teams deliver, they can have data-driven insights that facilitate quality assurance with each release  

·         HP has also released an enhanced version of Application Lifecycle Management that greatly simplifies the task of defect and test management across fast-moving mobile dev and test teams and extends support across a wide array of browsers and platforms.

Test across Multiple Devices without Compromising Time to Market

HP has delivered new updates to its mobile testing software designed to help customers automate realistic performance and functional testing and manage their mobile test lab to accommodate for network behavior, regardless of constraints:

·         The new version of HP Mobile Center speeds and simplifies app testing on real devices supporting both native iOS, Android and hybrid applications including common JavaScript frameworks such as JQM, Angular and Sencha, and adds support for seven different languages (English, French German, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese)

·         A new version of HP Network Virtualization, with an enhanced user interface and updated performance optimization capabilities helps app development teams incorporate real mobile network conditions in development and testing, ultimately enabling the delivery of apps with an ideal user experience. 

·         A new version of HP Service Virtualization provides critical capabilities for driving mobile development without delays, by extending support for popular protocols such as Websphere MQ, SAP RFC/IDOC.

Deliver Beautiful Experiences that Perform and Scale

HP has unveiled new performance engineering solutions designed to help teams continuously scale mobile apps in the face of peak user loads and maintain availability and responsiveness:

·         Supporting mobile performance testing, new releases of widely adopted HP LoadRunner and HP Performance Center are now integrated with HP Mobile Center, giving mobile QA and development teams’ continual access to real devices in their performance test scenarios.

·         New updates to HP’s cloud-based load testing service: HP StormRunner Load improves performance analytics, extends international geographic coverage to create local load, and supports additional native languages (adding both Chinese and Japanese).  HP StormRunner Load’s intuitive user interface makes it easy to scale both web and mobile load tests to over one million virtual users.

Deliver Secure Mobile Applications that Protect End Users

Just as mobile applications are the front door for a company’s brand and path to revenue, they also serve as an entry point for hackers and security breaches. To help deliver secure mobile applications, HP provides application development and testing that infuses security into coding and testing processes. The new releases of HP Application Lifecycle Management solutions are fully integrated with the HP Fortify application security suite, which is designed to assess and test security at every step of the application development lifecycle, and is continually updated with state of the art algorithms and programming practices.   

“As businesses get serious about their mobile application strategy, they realize that point solutions fall short in helping them to quickly create and deliver amazing mobile experiences that are secure, high-performing, and beautiful,” said Saurabh Saxena, Country Director - India, HP Software. “HP is uniquely positioned to lead in the mobile market by bringing together our proven assets in application development, operations management, security, and big data to help businesses deliver winning mobile apps that delight customers and positively impact their brand, revenue, and market share.”    

Carriers Advance Initiative to Scale Ethernet Service Interconnectivity

Following its GEN14 announcement of the project launch in November, the MEF has now approved the next phase of the MEF Ethernet Interconnect Points (EIP) project to standardize guidelines for current and future Ethernet Carriers around the globe.  In a first for the MEF, the organization has assembled some of the largest Ethernet Operators, all under one roof, for the purpose of streamlining how they interconnect their Carrier Ethernet services. The EIP project complements a separate, newly introduced MEF initiative – the Services Interconnect Program (MEF-SI) – that will give hundreds of small wholesale Carrier Ethernet Operators the opportunity to offer standards-compliant Carrier Ethernet services quickly for their customers.

The EIP project will provide rapid feedback from prototyping to help the project participants agree on a common approach to interconnecting by using MEF specifications. EIPs comprise all aspects of Ethernet interconnect – including all the requirements needed to provide a customer with an end-to–end Ethernet service spanning multiple operators. Specific aspects include: location selection, External Network-to-Network Interface (ENNI) parameters, and alignment of business processes.

With more than 50 current MEF specifications for Carrier Ethernet architectures, connectivity services, and service lifecycles – and many more in the pipeline to cover the emerging area of Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) – demand for implementation guidelines for multi-carrier environments is growing rapidly. The EIP project is developing use cases representing topologies and service characteristics typically used by carriers that interconnect their Carrier Ethernet services with one another to create end-to-end Carrier Ethernet services.    

BT’s Cloud of Clouds Helps Customers With Diversified IT Environments

BT has announced a new generation of cloud services that allow large organisations around the world to connect easily and securely to the applications and the data they need, independently of where they are hosted. They will empower customers to integrate and orchestrate the IT resources hosted on their own private clouds as well as on BT’s global cloud platform and on the platforms of other leading cloud providers. The new services take advantage of BT’s global network infrastructure and build on BT’s long standing expertise in the delivery of enterprise-grade cloud services. They rely on innovative technology developed by BT and its partners in the fields of diversified infrastructure management, service management, global network optimisation, application performance acceleration and security.

BT’s ‘cloud of clouds’ vision builds on a roadmap for future service delivery and is underpinned by a wide range of services and industry sector solutions, delivered over BT’s global network infrastructure. The services are managed by customers through a single user-friendly service catalogue, using BT’s new Cloud Management System. They include:

* IT infrastructure and applications delivered “as a service” to customers across BT’s global network; 

* Seamless provision and integration of cloud and non-cloud services;

* Integration of private, public and hybrid cloud services to support all the IT needs of customers;

* Freedom of choice for customers by bringing together the best services in the cloud from BT and from world class partners such as Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Equinix, HP, Interxion, Microsoft and Salesforce;

* Transition to the cloud and a great user experience through globalnetwork optimisation, application performance acceleration and management capabilities leveraging proven technology from BearingPoint, Dynatrace,Ipanema, Riverbed and others;

*  Apps from BT allowing the deployment of applications on the cloud and supporting the development of new cloud services;

* Control and security of customer data to protect information and meet global and local regulations based on the BT Assure portfolio;

*  Support through a globally distributed operations model to deliver the required service level agreement wherever customers operate; and

* Accelerated transition to the cloud-enabled economy using BT Advise professional services expertise to get the benefits faster.

Melanie Posey, Research Vice President at IDC said: “ ’One size fits all’ does not apply to cloud services. Enterprises will be operating in diversified IT environments and consuming more and more cloud-based services from a range of providers. Therefore, enterprise customers need heterogeneous cloud frameworks that support a range of solutions tailored to different business requirements. They will want a provider that can serve as a trusted broker -- a partner capable of integrating and managing ‘multi-cloud’ IT estates in a secure fashion.  Global network infrastructure and broad ecosystems of third-party solutions are key components of diversified IT environments.  As such, BT with its ‘cloud of clouds’ vision is well positioned to guide enterprises into the next-generation of federated cloud IT.”

Luis Alvarez, CEO, BT Global Services, said: “In the future digital age, no business will be successful unless it makes the most of the cloud. CIOs ask for choice and flexibility, trusted security and the best know-how in the industry to meet their business challenges. This matches perfectly with our network-centric vision of the ‘cloud of clouds’ and leverages the experience gained through the cloud ecosystems we have already built for the global financial services and life sciences sectors. We’re investing with our partners to bring the widest possible range of options to connect our customers’ critical applications and data, wherever those are hosted, whenever they need them, on whatever device they use. We also aim to provide our customers with a strong end-to-end service level agreement guaranteeing performance, predictability and flexibility. And we have the expertise and capabilities required to defend and protect our customers, providing trust and confidence in the cloud. We aim to be the leading global cloud services integrator.”    

Where Are the Profits in Omni-Channel Selling?

A new JDA study reveals an enormous amount of money, energy and time retailers and consumer goods manufacturers are spending to improve their omni-channel sales capabilities. While this may not be surprising given the current business environment, the JDA report reveals an unexpected and disturbing fact: despite these significant investments, only 16 percent of companies say they can fulfill omni-channel demand profitably today.

This finding, and others are highlighted in The Omni-Channel Fulfillment Imperative, a new report prepared for JDA Software Group, Inc. by PwC. This study is based on a global survey of more than 400 retail and consumer goods CEOs from around the world, conducted in late 2014.

What is eroding retailers’ margins as they sell and deliver products across multiple channels? It’s simple: the high cost of fulfilling orders. A full 67 percent of respondents reported that these costs are growing as they increase their focus on selling across channels. Survey respondents reported their highest costs associated with omni-channel selling as:

* Handling returns from online and store orders (cited by 71 percent of respondents) 

* Shipping directly to the customer (67 percent)

* Shipping to the store for customer pick-up (59 percent)

The CEOs in the JDA study recognize that they need to continue investing in business improvements to enhance their omni-channel performance. However, reducing the associated logistics costs is not their primary focus. When asked to rank their top initiatives for improving business operations, CEOs’ number-one choice (57 percent) was spending capital on creating new customer experience. Similarly, when asked to rank strategic growth enablers for the year, reducing/reformatting physical store footprints to focus on expanding the ecommerce business was the top choice at 53 percent.

“Every time retailers receive an online order, they have a number of options to fulfill that demand. They can pull the product from a local store, send it from a centralized warehouse or ship it directly from the supplier. JDA’s new study demonstrates that most retailers lack the insight to make these decisions in a profitable manner — and are not sufficiently focused on this critical capability gap,” said Kevin Iaquinto, chief marketing officer at JDA. “They need intelligent logistics and fulfillment solutions that can reveal the hidden costs, and the customer service trade-offs, associated with every delivery option. In addition, to truly win in the omni-channel marketplace, retailers need the upfront demand forecasting tools to make sure products are already distributed across all locations in a manner that supports profitable delivery.”

While they might not be focused on actions today to create profitable fulfillment and delivery schemes, the JDA study leaves no doubt that CEOs are aware of the importance of profitable omni-channel fulfillment to their future survival. Seventy-one percent of respondents said omni-channel fulfillment is either a high or a top priority. And these CEOs are planning to invest an average of 29 percent of their total capital expenditures for 2015 on improving their omni-channel fulfillment performance.

The fulfillment capability most cited as needing attention was transportation and logistics, named by 88 percent of CEOs as a priority for the future. The second capability CEOs will focus on is improving inventory availability to fill orders, cited by 85 percent.

“Having products available, then finding the most profitable way to deliver them —are critical activities that lie at the heart of supply chain excellence,” noted Iaquinto. “The CEOs in the JDA survey clearly understand the challenges they have ahead of them with regard to fulfillment, and they know they will have to innovate if they are to be profitable while meeting customer expectations across channels. The good news is that advanced technology can help retailers and consumer goods manufacturers master omni-channel fulfillment. However, until companies fully leverage these solutions, they will fail to realize positive financial returns on their omni-channel investments.” 

See...Buy...Gone

In the first-ever live flash sale for Lenovo A7000 held at Flipkart office in Bangalore on April 15, 2015, Lenovo claims to have sold 30,000 units in 4 seconds.

Launched on April 07, 2015 in India, the A7000 being the world’s first Dolby Atmos equipped smartphone, has created a lot of stir in the smartphone market and has received overwhelming response from the consumers.

The Lenovo A7000 sale began today at 2 PM on Flipkart. The next sale of A7000 will be on April 22, 2015. The registrations for the next sale will start on Wednesday, April 15, 2015 at 6 p.m.

VMware's New Campus To House 1300 R&D Engineers

VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today inaugurated its state-of-the-art campus in Bangalore, representing a total investment of $120 million. With the addition of the new 438,000 square foot facility in South Bangalore, the IT major will house about 1300 engineers for its R&D from the new campuses.

Today, VMware employs over 3,300 employees in India, a figure expected to grow by more than 16 percent by the end of 2015.  The new facility will play a strategic role in VMware’s global growth strategy for the mobile cloud era. This milestone is in line with the company’s commitment to invest $500 million in India by 2017.

The new campus features a world-class Executive Briefing Center (EBC) to showcase VMware’s entire portfolio of solutions, providing customers and partners across Asia Pacific with the opportunity to see the company’s products and services in action, and discuss them face to face with executives and engineers.

Speaking at the new campus, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said: “Today, India represents a substantial element of our global R+D operations in the U.S., and continues to play an important role in our global growth strategy. Our continued support of the India government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative illustrates the important role this nation plays in the company's long-term strategic global growth plans.”

He added: “India may be perceived as a late adopter of new technologies, but we are seeing rapid transformation here. Customers here are enthusiastically adopting our advanced cloud infrastructure and end-user computing technologies. Our customers are transitioning to a new model of IT that is fluid, instant and secure.”

With a growing preference for smartphone devices amongst end users in India, VMware is also witnessing a strong interest and success for AirWatch, the industry leading enterprise mobility management and content management solution. AirWatch by VMware was recognized by Gartner as a leader in its 2014 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management.

Since inception a decade ago, VMware India has grown to become a strategic contributor to the company’s global innovation engine. The R&D team in India plays a critical role in product development in all of VMware’s strategic imperatives – the software-defined data center, hybrid cloud and end-user computing.

Gelsinger said: “Innovation is central to our success, and our R&D teams in India have expanded rapidly in scale and capability to make a significant contribution to our global track record for innovation. This continues to be an important investment area, and we plan to grow the R&D team by 20% this year to build on our success so far, and also contribute to the government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative.”

R&D, Global Support Services, World Wide Customer Operations, IT and Sales & Marketing departments come together under one roof in an environment conducive to collaboration and innovation. VMware’s expanding operations in India are second in size only to those at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters in the U.S.

According to “Empowering Organizations in a Software Defined World”– an IDC report commissioned by VMware – customers in India are expected to save an estimated $4 billion between 2014 and 2020 by adopting a software-defined approach to managing IT. The corresponding figure for Asia Pacific and Japan is $92.4 billion. These figures reflect costs normally associated with servers, power consumption, cooling, real estate and server administration.

Leadership Playbook Prepares APAC Enterprises for New Style of Business

HP has announced a new Leadership Playbook in collaboration with IDC which outlines the key steps for enterprises across Asia Pacific (AP) to a successful transformation as they move to a new style of business. The Leadership Playbook asks the question: “Is your enterprise ready for the new style of business?”

Today’s enterprise is faced with challenges in dynamic and fast moving marketplaces as never experienced before. Organizations need to address relentless change, ceaseless information flow, radical collaboration, threats and uncertainty, total mobility, constant connectivity, instant gratification, new channels and new markets. Failure to do so risks growing customer irrelevance, market share loss to new disruptive competitors and shrinking profits.

“The enterprise that can move to a new style of business, one that embraces change, harnesses data, manages risk and stays connected, can turn those challenges into abundant opportunities” said Marshal Correia, vice president & general manager, Enterprise Services, HP India. “By combining the power of cloud, security, big data and mobility into solutions for a new style of IT the enterprise can make the complex simple, effectively bridge the old IT to new, resulting in business growth and transformation to new market dynamics.”

In the HP commissioned Leadership Playbook “Transformation Everywhere: Are You Ready for a New Style of Business”, IDC confirms that the marketplace in Asia Pacific has entered the “Innovation Stage” for the four pillars of 3rd Platform technologies: cloud, mobility, big data analytics and social. Enterprises in the region are accelerating adoption of mash-ups of the four pillars and starting to look at new innovation accelerators such as the Internet of Things and other emerging technologies.

“The most popular initiatives in the enterprise are currently mash-ups for cloud and mobility and all four-core pillar inclusive projects” said Sandra Ng, Group Vice President, Practice Group, IDC Asia/Pacific. “Delivering productivity-based automation is identified as the key business driver for tech CxOs, while the CEO’s top concern is adapting to the emergence of new business models.”

The Leadership Playbook recognizes that the transformation journey from old to new can be complex and lengthy, and recommends building strong partnerships between IT and CxOs. It identified that a strategy scorecard is needed with five key areas critical for success:

* Intent – a measure of the organization’s maturity for 3rd Platform transformation, to establish justification and secure executive sponsorship

* Process – measures capability to manage key processes such as tracking and analysis, vendor/service management, architecture, decision making and workflows

* Technology – measures attributes for tools and functionality, adoption, performance, management and business adaptability

* People – defines maturity of technology skills, cultural readiness, organizational structure and recruitment/training

* Metrics/measurement – the organization’s ability to develop key performance indicators, measure innovation and align to business outcomes

Combining a strategy scorecard with HP Advisory Services, an organization can navigate the complex process of IT transformation and develop a robust strategy to take advantage of these new dynamics for services and processes that drive innovation and growth. The services include end-to-end consulting, assessments and interactive workshops for IT strategy planning, enterprise architecture, IT governance, organizational change management, applications modernization and executable roadmaps.

For enterprises to thrive in 2020, transformation to digital business using solutions for the new style of IT will be critical to their success and will enable them to unlock the potential of new customers and new markets, and fight off disruptive competitors.