(Image credit/Pixabay/ Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke)Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: the launch of Nutanix Clusters. The solution that enables seamless application migration and unified operations across clouds to help businesses accelerate their cloud journey with AWS. Coventry University’s bid to make the city the number one region for immersive technology has been awarded funding by UK Research and Innovation. Concentrix releases Advanced Biometrics Solution for Secure Work-at-Home Environment. Facebook has emerged as the most popular advertising platform for small and medium-sized businesses in the US, according to research by Borrell Associates.

Nutanix Hybrid Cloud infrastructure available on Amazon Web Services

Nutanix an enterprise cloud computing has announced the general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS. The extension extends the flexibility and ease of use of the company’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software. Nutanix products and services, Have to support metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With this announcement, Nutanix can delivers hybrid cloud infrastructure. An infrastructure that allows businesses to accelerate digital initiatives and optimise spending, priorities further amplified in the age of COVID.

Nutanix offers a single stack that integrates compute and storage, provides unified operations across private and public clouds, integrated networking with AWS, and license portability from private to public clouds, thus addressing key technical and operational challenges of the hybrid cloud era.

According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of organisations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model for their IT needs. Companies require the flexibility of multiple clouds. However, they continue to struggle with the complexity, operational silos, and costs of managing private and public clouds. Business need a unified solution that provides a consistent experience, tooling, and operational practices across clouds. A solution that allows companies to break down silos and reduce inefficiencies while enabling the advantage of flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.
With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to public cloud. This eliminates the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enables seamless mobility across private and public clouds without any re-architecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS. Customers now have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the added benefit of license portability across clouds, which has a direct impact on cost and resource optimisation.

Additionally, customers will be able to take advantage of the company’s full software stack on private and public cloud. This includes unstructured storage solutions Files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration and automation solution Era, and more.

Coventry University wins funds to make Coventry a technology hub

Coventry University’s bid to make Coventry and Warwickshire the number one region for immersive technology has been awarded funding by UK Research and Innovation. A partnership between Coventry University (lead) and the University of Warwick – Coventry and Warwickshire Creative Futures (CWCF) – will accelerate research, development, and innovation activity related to the immersive technology sector in the region.

This technology encompasses Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) devices. ‘Immersive’ refers to the technology’s capacity to recreate physical spaces and environments in digital simulations. Significant developments in immersive technology have been made across the automotive, manufacturing, gaming, creative culture and healthcare sectors.

The project marks a major strategic partnership, bringing together the research and commercialisation expertise of both universities. The initial seed funding award will enable the development of the project for a further funding submission in November.
CWCF will develop new collaborations between the universities and business partners, maximising the economic impact of new immersive technology products and services in the region’s diverse and creative environment.

Coventry and Warwickshire are already home to world-leading games studios including Ubisoft and Playground Games, as well as more than 3,000 businesses working on cross-sector development of immersive technology. Coventry University Professor Neil Forbes hopes this funding boost will help the initiative capitalise on the pre-existing strength of the industry in the region, and elevate it to the national leader in creative futures and the immersive sector.

Concentrix releases Advanced Biometrics Solution for Secure Work-at-Home Environment

Concentrix, a global customer experience solutions company has launched SecureCX. The solution is the CX BPO industry’s newest Work-at-Home (WAH) platform that provides next generation security features for WAH environments.

The global shift to remote working has accelerated the necessity for highly secure, off-premise systems access. Such access is needed to ensure the same level of security as that of an on-premise office environment.

SecureCX, Concentrix’ proprietary platform, provides advanced digital tools and technology for remote employee monitoring. Key features of SecureCX include biometric authentication/identification (facial recognition). Monitoring for mobile phone, shoulder surfing, background noise and the presence of any nearby recording devices or ports.

The fully hosted solution can integrate with WFM tools and includes business rules which can be customised based on requirements. SecureCX is supported by centralised, 24×7 monitoring for immediate alerts and resolution with automated actions for screen lockouts as well as real-time alerts and historical dashboarding.
Concentrix SecureCX takes the remote work environment beyond data and workstation security. It provides workspace monitoring to protect your customers and your business. The project marks a major strategic partnership, bringing together the research and commercialisation expertise of both universities. The initial seed funding award will enable the development of the project for a further funding submission in November.

Survey says Facebook popular for SMEs

Facebook has emerged as the most popular advertising platform for small and medium-sized businesses in the US, according to research by Borrell Associates.

The survey of 210 SMBs found that 88% of SMBs use the social media network to advertise. Instagram ranked second at 52%, followed by LinkedIn (35%), Twitter (26%), Yelp (15%), Pinterest (11%), TikTok (5%), Snapchat (3%), and Reddit (2%).

Over half (60%) of SMBs referred to social media marketing as a “necessary evil”, putting a less positive spin on the results. However, 47% admitted it was the best way to reach customers. 45% said the metrics provided by social channels were simple enough for them to understand and measure their campaigns with.

What’s more, some 40% of businesses said they posted more often during the COVID-19 pandemic and 24% had used live video tools. Another 20% even increased their social media spend while 55% cut budgets on channels including newspapers and radio.

The study also revealed that social media is a vital marketing channel for smaller businesses. This was underlined by the fact that two-thirds are not deterred from using it following a negative story. Given that almost half of them also described social media as the best place to reach customers, social channels and social media apps are likely to continue to see growth of their ad spend.

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