Software & Technology by MarketScale

Data is now considered to be the most valuable commodity on Earth, which is why enterprises and government agencies look to leverage it to their advantage. And yet, warehousing massive amounts of data requires modern technologies and new ways of thinking.

On today’s podcast, Judson Graves, director of analytics solutions at ViON, and Chrisitan Shrauder, director of federal systems at Yellowbrick, offer their insights into the challenges of storing big data.

“There’s too much data, and it’s always growing exponentially,” Graves explained, but storing tons of data at an unlimited scale isn’t a problem. The challenge is storing it so that it’s readily accessible in a useful way, and in the demand of time required.

The world has transitioned to a real-time workload with people wanting answers in seconds or minutes, not hours or days. Arranging data so that it’s available for immediate analytics and evaluation is of top priority.

Shrauder went on to say that he’s occupied with developing systems that can support real-time ingest and ad hoc queries at scale, and can store data so that it’s optimized and makes sense. The way to do that is by implementing the latest and greatest in hardware and software. This also includes rethinking the physical architecture of data centers.

“Anything that is going to work in the future will have to scale incrementally without causing massive downtime," Shrauder said.

When asked about his opinion on public versus private cloud solutions, Graves maintained that all the coolest technological advancements, from self-driving cars to artificial intelligence, required hardware and software combinations that weren’t available at the time in a public cloud environment.

"If you have a real workload, I don’t ever see when a private cloud or a personal infrastructure would not be needed," Graves said.

He went on to relay the essential keys to data warehousing: speed, scale, simplicity, security. Solutions that address those four factors will drive successful storage operations in today’s business environment.

Home renters and businesses of all sizes are feeling the squeeze of soaring rents across the United States’ largest metropolitan areas.

Ecommerce has long been ascribed as the killer of brick-and-mortar retail, but the price of staying in business is also contributing to closures across the country. Menswear retailer Barneys recently had annual rent raised by more than $11 million on its Manhattan flagship location and has been forced to consider several options to cut back costs.

Steven Kalifowitz, President of Localize.City, a software technology startup that uses AI to give prospective home renters and buyers a wealth of high-level data insights, has followed the volatile New York City real estate scene.

“A place like Barneys can get really squeezed because a landlord wants high rent and because so many of these landlords have been here for so long, they don’t mind keeping a store empty for a certain time until they can get the right price.” Kalifowitz said. “The landlords in New York City are less concerned about month-to-month income when they can get such a big jump from someone else. And they have the cashflow to wait.”

Also contributing to the increase in rent prices is an imbalance of access to information on properties between landlords and renters.

“Until now, there’s been a large asymmetry of information. The people who own properties know a lot more than those who don’t. With that asymmetry going away, it’s changing how people are able to find properties and negotiate them,” Kalifowitz said.

Technology may be giving power back to buyers, but retailers are still at the moment fighting a two-front war against ecommerce competitors and leverage-holding landlords.

American Made is a recurring segment appearing on Business Casual, MarketScale's weekly live radio show airing Friday mornings at 8 a.m. CT. On American Made, hosts Daniel Litwin & Tyler Kern have a conversational corner on American policy affecting American business.

On this segment, Litwin breaks down the bipartisan Stopping Bad Robocalls Act bill, why robocalls are under fire, how they harm important communications between company and consumer, and the newest powers granted to the FCC.

Companies are like superheroes in that they all have an origin story, explaining how they started and began to build something meaningful. In this episode of the Software and Technology Podcast, host Tyler Kern sat down with Amaryllis Payment Solutions co-founders Ori Hay and Adi Ekshtain. They discuss their origin story and how the two recognized the demand for third-party aggregators in payment services that would revolutionize the industry.

Before co-founding Amaryllis with Ekshtain, Hay spent more than a decade working in credit card processing services and saw the coming wave of e-commerce transactions. “I recognized that this is where things are going to go,” he said.

When Ekshtain wanted to create a third-party payment processing partner for e-commerce, he turned to Hay, a noted developer, patent holder, and expert in FinTech.

“I thought it was a very smart idea and it came at the right time,” Ekshtain said.

The two partnered to build a dot net software for payments, the first commercially-viable mobile face-to-face payment solution.

“Back then with Microsoft, there was nothing to build real infrastructure on,” Hay said. “Since Adi is the technology guy, he came to me saying there’s a new thing called dot net.”

Ekshtain continued, “We struck a partnership with the Microsoft technology center. Together with them, we built the first-ever payment gateway built on Microsoft dot net technology. That proved to us we could build an economically-viable software, and it allowed Microsoft to have a case study of a financial system that is mission-critical.”

In this episode, Ekshtain and Hay also discussed the significance of the platform’s flexibility, the uniqueness of the payment solution, and how competition has followed their lead.

On this episode of our Software & Technology Podcast, host Tyler Kern sat down with frequent guest Kevin Levi, vice president of marketing for OrecX, to discuss innovative ways to use customer call recordings for smart, informed marketing campaigns and other uses.

OrecX provides contact centers and Business Voice Over IP Providers with full-featured, reliable, and very easy to use call recording software at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions.

Companies often use call recording for monitoring the performance of their employees, customer service, compliance, and dispute resolution. But there are other uses for this technology, including learning from your customers, Levi explained.

“In terms of ‘the voice of the customer,’ many organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars commissioning analyst reports to learn about their buyers,” Levi said. “But if you’re listening to call recordings of your customers, you’re getting firsthand information that’s even richer than that data.”

Taking it a step further from the voice of the customer, Levi said call recording can help marketing teams assemble more accurate buyer personas. “It’s imperative to keep their ear to the ground,” he said.

Motivating staff is another compelling way to use call recording. “Imagine firing up your staff by playing an exciting customer-praising recording … with a customer’s positive reaction to a product, or a marketing campaign,” Levi said. “That can go a long way.”

Without question, automation has improved the lives of millions. The speed, consistency and efficiency of automated processes has saved businesses money while producing more goods in less time.

For consumers, this has meant cheaper prices and consistent quality.

Anton Korinek, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business has researched the future implications of automation extensively.

“From the perspective of business, A.I. is a great thing. It will allow us to produce so much more, earn much greater profits,” Korinek said. “But the societal challenge that it creates is the distribution of resources that it leads to will be increasingly unequal.”

“What has happened in the past half century or so is automation has increasingly crept up on what has been in some sense our last bastion of advantage over the machines, which is our intellect,” Korinek said. “In the last decade now, we have seen major advances in artificial intelligence and we have seen that even in areas we thought were ‘robot proof’, that computers can actually perform the most critical tasks.”

Forecasting the future of automation is something that comes with wildly different opinions, but its continued implementation will certainly change the workplace as we know it going forward, and society will have to decide the best way forward.

Computer services pioneer, Navy veteran, two-time presidential candidate and philanthropist Ross Perot has died after a five-month battle with Leukemia.

“We have lost a true Dallas Icon,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson tweeted. “Ross Perot was a veteran, successful businessman, and philanthropist who spent his life working hard to make our city, state and country better. My thoughts and prayers are with the Perot family during this difficult time.”

A legendary business career began in Dallas in 1957 when Perot joined IBM as a computer salesman. Between exceeding expectations and having larger ambitions, he left the company in 1962 to venture out on his own.

Perot became a multimillionaire after taking his company, Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS), public in 1968 just six years after its founding. He later became a billionaire when the company was acquired by General Motors Corp. (GM) for $2.5 billion in 1984.

The partnership was short-lived, however. After just two years, GM purchased Perot’s shares back for $700 million, according to the New York Times, and he cut ties with the automaker.

Perot soon after went on to found Perot Systems Corp. in 1988, which also went on to become a billion-dollar enterprise. It was acquired by fellow Texas-based company Dell Inc. in 2009 for $3.9 billion.

More than the money he brought in during his career, Perot may be better known for the amount he gave back.

According to the Dallas Morning News, the Perot Foundation was responsible for approximately $90 million in donations to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. His family also donated another $50 million to fund the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in downtown Dallas, built in 2008.

Perot also spent much of his later years ensuring American military veterans received proper healthcare. He himself served in the armed services after graduating from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland in 1953.

His service to the United States was far from over upon his retirement from the Navy. Perot left a major impact on American politics as a third-party candidate in 1992 and again in 1996. He received close to 20 percent of the popular vote in his first run, easily the most by a third-party ticket since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a member of the Bull Moose party in 1912.

Perot is survived by his wife Margot; his sister Bette; his son and four daughters and their spouses; 16 grandchildren and three step grandchildren.

In this episode of the Software & Technology podcast, host Tyler Kern sat down with Mark Bishopp, CEO of Amaryllis, a purpose-based platform that makes it easy for third-party payment companies to launch quickly and effectively. They discussed why third-party payment companies should expect more of a partner, and less of a vendor, with card processing solutions.

In his prior roles at Bank of America, Vantiv, and Price Waterhouse, Bishopp learned why partnering with clients first and foremost was critical to building the business relationship based on mutual experience. “I’ve often been in their shoes before,” Bishopp said. “It helped position me to see the challenges out there, whether its internal risk and compliance with the card brand themselves, to then come up with the best next step.”

Setting themselves apart, Amaryllis creates a client-specific experience and consultative knowledge for company card processing by offering complete platform solutions rather than one-off fixes, Bishopp said.

“Now it’s not just a technology solution but a value we can provide someone as a trusted advisor in the industry to say ‘Look, we’ve got your back,’” Bishopp said. “‘We’ve got enough experience and scars on our back to know what doesn’t work and bring that knowledge to each client. That differentiates ourselves from the competition which will say they have a solution in a box.”

Bishopp said Amaryllis’ open API platform uses very specific, customized modules built to the customers’ needs, which let them choose the ones that make sense for their workflow.

Investing in something that will never be used is not ideal. That is the goal, though, when dealing with emergency response and crisis management technology. In the unfortunate situation when it does need to be used, open communication can save lives, inventory, and the reputation of a brand.

Luckily, as technology has advanced, companies have the tools to be prepared unlike ever before. "Technology now allows us not only to reach you but make sure we reach you with the right message to the right people," Daniel Wagstaff, CEO of Pocketstop said.

Pocketstop is a communication technology company that specializes in emergency awareness. Companies can provide reassurance to employees in emergencies by alerting them that they are not alone and that assistance is on the way through technology, which was not available even a decade ago.

However, making sure the proper information is communicated is still crucial. Eliminating speculation is as vital as providing safety updates and directions.

"We're always communicating with authenticity, with transparency, to let people know, 'we know this, we don't know this, updates will be happening now.' That provides, reassurance," Wagstaff said. "Sometimes it's what you don't say, as much as what you do, that provides that level of insurance."

Companies endure unique safety challenges and making sure employees can be contacted when it is needed most is perhaps the most essential business initiative one must execute, especially in today's landscape.

It’s not just huge call centers in multinational companies that outsource their talent. Everybody outsources on some scale, whether it’s a startup that outsources the bookkeeping and back office duties for their business or even an individual who outsources their day-to-day needs to someone more skilled than they are.

In this episode of the Software and Technology Podcast, host Sean Heath sat down with Tim Witucki, senior vice president of development for Personiv to discuss smart outsourcing as a competitive edge in the industry.

Witucki has seen firsthand the role that smart outsourcing plays in a startup business, having worked in both startups and corporations that offer talent solutions. Austin-based Personiv helps businesses run more efficiently by providing outsourced talent for key process and business systems such as back office, recruiting, creative services, and customer engagement.

“As you know, talent is hard to find these days because startups, whether you’re launching in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or London, these high-touch roles are crucial to having a successful launch,” Witucki said.

In this episode, Witucki shared tips for finding the right outsourcing solution, including a critical factor for onboarding success — navigating cultural norms for a company and the outsourcing solution. He and Heath also discussed how outsourcing has helped companies grow in their respective sector.