In a move to mainstream predictive analytics, TIBCO Software this week rolled out the latest version of its Spotfire platform. Dubbed Spotfire 3.1, the latest iteration promises a natural language statistical experience. Spotfire 3.1 aims to help anyone in an organization get fact-based answers to questions that help drive revenue. The company says its software is not just for analytics gurus but also marketing professionals, business development managers and others who need forward-looking business intelligence in a hurry.

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SoftLayer Technologies, a provider of on-demand data center hosting and cloud services, has announced the addition of Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) to its best-in-class portal allowing customers to securely connect to their infrastructure environment through a Virtual Private Network (VPN). IPsec provides a framework of protocols for protecting transmissions over an IP network. This allows the creation of a secure VPN over the existing Internet, with data fully encrypted and secure when transferred between two points. IPsec resides at the network level and can be implemented regardless of applications used, giving remote users full access to their network and to robust data, voice, or video applications. “As we continue to enhance the SoftLayer customer experience, IPsec VPN services bring an additional option for remote access,” said Ric Moseley, SoftLayer Vice President of Network Operations. “IPsec provides customers an extremely robust pipeline for accessing information on their SoftLayer infrastructure. IPsec’s extensive level of access to remote applications makes it ideal for managing applications from a distance and increasing productivity.”

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When I saw David Skok's name on recent Ulitzer authors page I was pleasantly surprised. David is one of the key figures in the technology space for the past two decades, including his venture capital activities. Throughout his long career, he successfully launched a number of companies. He is a general partner at Matrix partners since 2001. Last time I mentioned his name in one of my blog entries was here in 2004. I had an email exchange with David in October 2007 when we started architecting our revolutionary Ulitzer new media platform. David introduced me to Christian, a trusted enterprise developer who had invaluable input while we were making critical decisions in the selection of our development platform for Ulitzer.

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Cordys, a supplier of software for business process innovation, on Wednesday announced it has added Cordys Process Factory and MashApps to the Google Apps Marketplace, Google's recently launched online storefront for Google Apps products and services. Cordys Process Factory offers a simple and effective mechanism for anyone in the world to create and deploy situational applications and MashApps, delivering Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities to the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools. Cordys MashApps are mashups of different services or web-based, process-centric applications for small and medium enterprises and departmental deployments. The availability of Cordys Process Factory and MashApps through the Google Apps Marketplace now allows Google Apps customers to create and use applications and business processes on the fly, at low cost and without IT involvement.

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Great companies are almost always run by great management teams. And great management teams know that the only way to improve a process is to start by measuring it. Good metrics should also be actionable, and drive successful behavior. In this post I hope to help show how to figure out which metrics matter the most, and how to design them in such a way as to drive behavior that will lead to the results that you want. This post is applicable to any kind of business. In a follow up post, I will use this technique to walk through the design of a set of metrics for a SaaS company. Since SaaS businesses (or any other subscription-based business) are different from standard software businesses, there are some interesting elements that we will uncover.

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