Expert Advice

As a wide-eyed 17-year-old business undergrad living in Montreal, Canada, I was given a unique opportunity to make some well-needed spending money by buying and selling liquidations of branded t-shirts. The proposal put before me was simple enough; I would purchase 1,200 t-shirts from a Quebec-based...

For any of us who grew up in the age of digital, it's starting to feel like deja vu all over again as companies large and small flock to social media darling Facebook. It's not hard to understand the allure, given that there are over 400 million members -- 100 million of which live in North America;...

year over year, the amount of Internet traffic has grown and will continue to grow. These trends are facilitated by the continuous growth of smartphone usage and the recent introduction of the iPad. This growth in Internet traffic means that most websites today are expected to see more traffic and m...

Working for a disaster recovery solutions designer is often difficult. After being bombarded by ad slogans, magazine articles and just plain life experience, many company executives are looking to achieve a mythical figure for server uptime. Perceived uptime of 99.999 percent -- or "five nines" --...

Smarter organizations today realize that attending to the quality of customer experience could just be the differentiator that they were on the lookout for. When Patricia Seybold introduced "Quality of Customer Experience," the entire world sat up and noticed. Why QCE? There area several reasons: QC...

Marketing data does yet not evolve the way individuals evolve. The inability for marketers to quickly adapt to rapid changes in how their customers behave is undermining the effectiveness of their communications. How, then, can what is learned about an individual be leveraged into a better experienc...

No company can afford to have a disaster disrupt its business. Despite this, the opportunity and technology costs of a feasible disaster recovery plan have traditionally been too high for the masses to properly plan for and ensure continuity. However, recent advancements in infrastructure and the pr...

There's no shame in admitting that audits are hard. For those of us in IT, hearing the word "audit" probably brings up a groundswell of negative connotations and the corresponding aggravation and headache: We know from having lived through it that tech-heavy regulatory audits -- annual PCI assessme...

The majority of today's contact centers employ well-designed, sophisticated self-service strategies, but even with a highly successful self-service application boasting a high call-completion rate, people will always need to talk to people. That is why there will always be a need for live service in...

Server virtualization has crossed the proverbial chasm. Not long ago, when deploying new servers, one had to justify making them virtual, rather than physical. Now, IT managers in many organizations have decreed "virtual first" policies, requiring new server deployments to be virtual unless there is...