Back in the year 1885 William Lever of Lever Bros said that “Half of the marketing money you spend is wasted—trouble is you don’t know which half.” However, there is a fair chance that substantially more than half of your marketing investments are being squandered.

Today most lead generation activities are not followed up appropriately by sales, for non-intuitive and legitimate reasons. The legitimate reason for no-follow-ups is generally that the leads are unfiltered and low-end. They might be organizations from the wrong verticals that are very small to be in the marketplace. Similarly, they might be students or consultants who responded to any specific offer.The non-intuitive reasons can include situations like where someone called a couple of times but with no response. This means if the lead generated it tough to work out, it is most often dismissed. As less as five percent of the leads are followed up by sales.

There are also cases of long term leads that are mostly ignored by sales as they are not looked upon as helpful in influencing the present period’s quota. There are organizations that are qualified without any immediate interest that are ignored by sales and marketing, which is a huge waste as the cost to recognize those are qualified versus the ones that are not are in turn are frequently duplicated and loses the potential benefit.

Therefore, lead management comprises of the overall business process and practices in an enterprise that is directed towards gathering the new consumers, retaining the old ones and also setting up a positive brand image. It is an intricate process that includes elements like capturing lead intelligence, lead generation, filtering leads and distribution of qualified leads to the marketing team for lead nurturing and also high priority leads to the sales team for transitions. The main aim of an efficient lead management program is to assist, manage and track the overall lead Lifecycle until it results in sales that in turn maximize the revenues and ROI.

Service providers of lead management offer the B2B enterprises with an easy and powerful way to make use of a solution based marketing automation platform that allows the lead management throughout the lead cycle. The software comprises of the following:

• Lead Generation
• Business Intelligence
• Lead Qualification
• Lead Nurturing
• CRM Integration
• Collaboration
• Analytics

Therefore, if you want to attain the best of all your marketing initiatives, optimize the expense and maximize the ROI then it is advised that you resort to the appropriate lead management solution.

Know more on - Marketing Automation, Lead Management software

Trends and usage patterns for mobile phones have witnessed a significant change over the past few years. Today a mobile phone has many more uses than just primarily making and receiving calls. With the advent of Smartphone’s people use their mobile akin to a computing device owing to its mobility and flexibility. This apart, with the predominance of the social web today most individuals use their mobile phones for social gaming and networking, mailing and storing important documents. This trend has compelled the mobile application developing companies to research on the multiple organization and individual demands in order to develop the apt mobile application.

Technology too has an essential role to play developing the mobile application development market. The modern day sophisticated consumers demand mobile applications that offer them with greater processing capacity, elasticity, consistency, security and can be seamlessly integrated with other applications as well. This makes service providers come with tools, expertise and the processes that are essential to assist the ISV’s develop high-end mobile applications in a cost-efficient manner.  This apart, online shopping too has acted as a catalyst for mobile application development. This is because today most consumers prefer to directly shop online using their mobile phones, rather than logging in from their laptops or desktops. This in turn has formed a new channel for mobile operations and consumers today want applications that would help them to complete their online journey smoothly.

Today service providers specializing in software product development have delved into the realm of mobile applications understanding the changing audience demands and finding out ways and means to cater to them. With their years of experience and technological know-how they focus on multiple areas, that includes the following:

·         Location-Based Services (LBS)

·         Mobile Media Streaming

·         Presence & Social Networking

·         Messaging & Syncing

·         Mobile Advertisement & Ad Engines

·         Mobile VoIP

·         Gaming

In the recent past Android and android software development   also have gained prominence owing to the prevalence of these two technologies. Keeping all the latest mobile trends and technologies, service providers today are developing mobile applications BREW, J2ME, Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows mobile. They are conceptualizing mobile applications as well as extracting requirements, for instance UI design, wireframes, prototypes, user stories and many more.  In addition to that the companies also are involved in setting up server-side and infrastructure, for location and mapping services and incorporating third party elements on the server-side such as SMS/MMS, billing, feeds, ads, content and and many more.

Related Links: ecommerce solutions , embedded software developer

Data is an important corporate asset that needs to be safeguarded. With business managing terabyte of data, involving multiple entities, stakeholders, technologies and media globally, organizations are under pressure to maintain business dexterity and protect this business critical data. Loss of information can lead to direct financial losses. Data breaches show that data theft is primary goal of hackers and even malicious insiders.   Besides increasingly strict privacy laws   makes data protection more critical   and is becoming a central component of any organization’s operational process.

Though technology can add value but without proper strategy and execution solution, data protection can become a complex issue. Storing, transporting, processing and handling personal information is an organizations responsibility, and organizations should  ensure that this is done with confidentiality and efficiency. Develop a data protection plan that protects your data at various levels, such as:

• Create a protection plan by ascertaining importance of data.

Organizations need to primarily to evaluate all its data to determine levels of importance and create an effective data protection plan. By doing this they can place the most stringent measures on very critical information.

• Create a backup plan.

It is always essential that critical data is backed up on a regular basis to guard against the potential data loss. There are a number of approaches to data backup. Many reputable companies offer these services by means of a network Internet connection and stored at a data facility offsite.

• Restrict the number of users.

It is possible to limit the possibility for infiltration, by keeping the number of authorized users to a minimum. Data can be protected with effective identity access management .

• Encrypt the data.

Regardless of whether the data is stored on a database or backup, encryption of data is essential to any   data protection plan. Efficient backup services ensure that the data is adequately encrypted before it is transferred over the backup network and again at the site of storage.

• Pass phrases instead of passwords.

When it comes to authorized access to company data, pass phrases are becoming the favored security measure. These phrases are combinations of words that are easier for the user to remember, than random combinations of letters and numbers, yet much more difficult to infiltrate.

• Guard against viruses.

To protect against any threats, good data protection plan should have an anti-virus component in place. Viruses are irritants and can disrupt normal business operations. They are a threat to information security, and have the capacity of destroying data.

• Pay attention to your computer equipment.

Information security can become useless if the point of data entry or storage is vulnerable to hardware issues due to improper environmental conditions. Ensure that your computer equipment is kept dry and cool. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) will protect computers from damage in case of an electrical surge, thus protecting against data loss.

Businesses face a continuous challenge in protecting sensitive information. What they needs is   to deploy a comprehensive data protection framework across the information lifecycle. The key to effective data protection is implementing a holistic framework that includes data classification, data flow analysis and tools like data loss prevention (DLP), information risk management (IRM).

Read more on - risk management frameworks, mobile security services

The lead generation process largely influences the quality and quantity of the leads procured by a B2B company. Today there are many new automated lead generation solutions that can be implemented to ensure that marketing is able to ably coordinate with the sales team to identify and track the leads while the ones that don’t close are recycled back for further nurturing.

Since one of the most important goals of the marketing team is to be able to deliver better qualified leads to sales it is of utmost importance to filter them in the first phase itself. This first phase is when the prospect visits the website. Most of the time marketers focus only on those who have registered with the website, but in recent times this will not suffice. Since there is high possibility of anonymous visitors turning into prospective clients the quality of the lead generation process largely influences the quality and quantity of the leads flowing into the company.

Automated lead generation solutions can capture qualified leads, rich with background information of the anonymous visitors. Combined with a good lead scoring model marketers would be able to pick out those who have shown interest on a regular basis.
To get more sales-ready leads and to close more sales, marketing teams should carefully consider each lead generated, and in coordination with the sales team identify and track the quality of each lead and decide at which stage the lead is in the sales funnel. This way, they can also ensure that leads don’t close are recycled back to marketing for further lead nurturing. Usually, pre-qualified leads have a significantly higher conversion rate than cold contacts which helps sales achieve sales targets faster.

Advantages of using latest automated B2B lead generation tools include:

• Identifies high value prospects and decision makers.
• Provides real time insights into a website visitor’s intent.
• Procures actionable intelligence to convert a visitor into qualified sales lead.
• Relieves your inside sales teams from time consuming prospecting tasks.
• Sometimes, offers direct integration with your sales pipeline software and process.
• Provides improved conversion rates, sales performance and efficiency.
• Drives effective collaboration methodologies.
• Enables knowledge sharing across organization to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.

To increase the possibility for the sales teams to make a personalized connection with qualified prospects in real-time marketing automation tools can be implemented by B2B companies.

Read more on - social media campaigns , Lead Management

With technology advancing day by day and the advent of smart phones, many people and businesses are utilizing mobile applications to assist them with the planning of their lives and businesses. Smartphones are increasingly replacing feature phones in stores and becoming more and more powerful, these are suitable for an increasing number of tasks which have previously been restricted to laptops or desktops. The development of mobile applications has allowed users to enjoy real time information on any device, from anywhere and at any time.

Mobile applications are gaining tremendous popularity throughout the world. There is a great demand for smart phones nowadays; as they include various mobile applications to deliver innovative and exceptional features. Smart phones can do almost anything one would have wanted to do on a desktop computer.It may be Internet browsing, emails, social media, games, photos, music, movies, maps and much more. There is a galaxy of mobile phone applications available today and users can download anything from news update applications, games or navigational applications.Mobile computing is a phenomenon that is steadily increasing and in fact, each year, more and more consumers are turning to their mobile devices for many uses making the android software development  increasingly important.

Today iPhone and Blackberry have gained popularity as business phones because of their smart business applications. The significance of mobile apps in today's time is convincing and it will soon turn into a needy perspective in the days to come. With people  increasingly switching over to high end mobile phones there is a rapid increase in the demand of Smartphones and a consequent have led to the booming of several mobile app healthcare software  development companies. Mobile application development is possible in almost all categories and especially business apps in a way that makes life as well as workflow better.

The changing needs of a customer have made it necessary for developers to be ready to create applications that successfully meet  only current demands and also foresee potential future requirements. Parter with a service provider who are capable of tailoring their services to suit your demand and have the required advisory services. They must be able to  meet customer requirements by providing reliable programs, rapid lead times and competitive pricing and also be capable of upgrading services by using cutting-edge technologies. Mobile application development should always be left in professional and expert hands. By outsourcing your mobile solutions or mobile apps from any reputed mobile solutions company and benefit to the most.

Related Links:   Mobile social networking apps , product development services

Simply put, Identity Access Management (IAM) is a process that monitors the kind of data that a person has access to. It can be defined as a cross-functional practice that includes establishing individual identities of people and systems and offering the system association and application-level accounts to these identities. There are several executives who are of the opinion that IAM is purely an IT function, but the process impacts every business unit across the organization. It is therefore essential that business units have a thorough understanding of IAM and ways to handle it. This apart, IT teams should also understand the manner in which IAM can help in various business processes and provide effective solutions that cater to corporate objectives, thereby not making an enterprise vulnerable to any security attacks and risks.

Developing an IAM Strategy
When you are developing an Identity Access Management strategy, there are certain aspects that you must take into account. They are:

• The organization"s requirements
• The risks related to IAM strategy and the manner in which they can be addressed
• The method to approach IAM within an organization and effectiveness of IAM
• The procedure of authenticating users
• The process of identifying users and the percentage of users that are present in an organization
• Monitoring of the users is accessing the IT resources in an inappropriate way
• Access approvals that are given to the users
• Tracking and recording user activities

Keeping all these aspects in mind, service providers of information risk management and data protection have introduced identity access management solutions with advanced features such as:

Strategy and Design
Here the service providers a methodical requirement analysis and planning essential for setting up a base for an efficient IAM strategy. The company evaluates the end-user"s requirements through various avenues that comprise field assessments and executive workshops thereby setting up a strategy and IAM route map. It also helps with technology evaluation, business case analysis and solution architecture.

Digital Identity and User Lifecycle Management
This comprises of design and management of data for identifying individuals to approve them digital transactions. It is also important to monitor these identities over a span of time.

Access Management
This offers a comprehensive solution for enterprise access management including single sign on, web access management, information rights management and coverage access control.

Service providers with advanced IAM solutions enable you to sustain and optimize your IAM strategy. The IAM has been always active and hence the systems associated with it too needs to change and update continuously. High-end IAM solutions cater to this through system improvements and upgrades.

Read more on - application security, mobile security services  

With the introduction of multiple advanced Smartphone’s majority of business houses and professionals prefer to use them for regular work. The Smartphone’s provide excellent functions, features and competent applications to make the consumers demand it. Mobile solutions and mobile application development are just an extension to the maximized mobile use. Features such as touch screen, inbuilt camera, sound and display features, an internet accessing device and many more makes a mobile an innovative medium that enables users to stay organized, work flexibly and stay in touch with others.      

Mobile application development as well as mobile solutions needs to be resorted from an expert service provider. It is best to outsource mobile apps, such as an iPhone application development from an esteemed company and benefit from its expertise. The smart mobile application enables you to access numerous education courses, services associated with your domain, social networking and email apps, images, records and many more. Be it social networking, personal helps, education, entertainment, business networking, social gaming today there is a mobile application for all of them.

Furthermore, mobile application development programs are accepted worldwide by everyone with the increased awareness and its benefits. Recent market research estimates that in the forthcoming days mobile phones would be used much more than PC’s or laptops. A mobile being compact in size and by enabling us to do whatever a laptop does while we are moving from one place to the other; it becomes easier to use Smartphone’s. Advanced mobile handsets have their own advantages. Service providers specializing in mobile distributed software development focus on the following areas concerning mobile application development:

·         Location-Based Services (LBS)

·         Mobile Media Streaming

·         Presence & Social Networking

·         Messaging & Syncing

·         Mobile Advertising & Ad Engines

·         Mobile VoIP

·         Gaming

Mobile application development helps an individual in the following ways:

·         Helps end users to carry on their work in an organized manner

·         Any data you need is at your fingertips

·         Allows you to stay connected 24 x 7

·         Saves a huge amount of money

This apart mobile applications development  are often used for entertainment and gaming, hence it has its own recreation value. Improved graphics, 3D animations and high quality of sounds offer a memorable experience of gaming to the end users. Other important facilities such as 3G services helps the fans to watch cricket match live on mobile, send emails, interact with family and friends with social networking and much more.

Related Links: agile lifecycle management  , product engineering

The competitive business environment and the tough economic times demands  the  small and medium business enterprise  to be faster and  creative  to withstand the competition put forth by the large industry leaders. Traditionally, the availability of  resources signifies  the level of marketing activity that can be carried out by the enterprise. With such restrictions in expanding their marketing activity, staying ahead of competition was a tough challenge. However, with  technological innovations and the advent of  marketing automation solutions the  small and medium enterprises today can compete with their larger counterparts.

Marketing automation software helps enterprises automate the  repetitive tasks carried out by their marketing departments. Such actions allows  the marketing consultants  to concentrate on the more strategic aspects  such as developing marketing content and integrating sales and marketing campaigns.The automated solutions facilitates the marketing personnel and consultants to  specify the  criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes.These  are then interpreted, stored and executed by software.This not only increases efficiency of the marketing departments but also ensures reduction in human error.

In other words, marketing automation is the art and science of managing the timing, target and content of outbound marketing messages automatically. Further, the wide use of technology, Internet, and with the enterprises having a web presence, e-commerce and online shopping have become  the trend for every industrial sector. However, with competition prevailing in the environment, marketing activities need to scale upwards. The marketers need to build up strategies to educate and engage the prospects with valuable content that can facilitate lead nurturing and make them sales ready.

One of the main objectives of marketing automation is to produce a steady stream of "warm leads" for sales personnel to act on. To achieve this objective, enterprises  need to undertake lead scoring activities that will help them determine a prospects position in the marketing funnel and  prioritize them  on their level of interest and activity. This will not only ensure that the most qualified leads are passed on to sales team but also ensures a productive start. Further, these leads are also nurtured with  drip campaign messages either through emails and social media campaigns.

The  marketing automation software  are used both for the B2B markets  as well as  B2C markets and even longer sales cycle based business-to-government  dealings.The leaders in the industry offer enterprises next generation marketing automation solution that  provides both  B2B enterprises and marketers  a platform that is intuitive and responsive to the dynamic needs of commercial organizations. Powered by its intelligence and analytics, these marketing automation solution ensures end-to-end integration, from designing the lead generation campaign that helps to acquire qualified leads in their sales funnel, generate  effective and customized lead management programs. This facilitates enterprises to achieve shorter sales cycles leading to increased ROI.

Read more on - social media campaigns ,Lead Management software

In this competitive world, where business acquisition is the way to move ahead, without leads no business online or offline can attain success. Therefore, to be able to understand the way to form closely targeted leads acts as the powerhouse behind a successful business. However, not every leads are equal in nature just like not every lead generation technique is created equal. For instance, if leads were not qualified in the selling process then you might be frittering time on disinterested projects. As a result the sales response figures drop and the business too suffers loss.

Online and Offline Lead Generation
Lead generation can be a complicatedtask. Offline lead generation methods requires catering to prospects precisely in physical locations and even touching base with them through the phone. Also the leads that get generated at trade shows and other similar events needs to be placed in a database and the contacted one by one. Similarly online lead generation might appear easy, but it is not. The ones involved in internet marketing and multi-level business have realized that this can be time intensive as they are sailing in a huge sea of consumers who are not even aware of their core business.

Advanced Lead Generation Solutions
Today company’s specializing in lead management campaigns have come up with lead generation and marketing automation solutions to make the task easy. These companies provide a marketing automation platform that enables enterprises to recognize, capture and convert the online leads into sales opportunities by offering actionable lead intelligence.

Lead generation solutions identified anonymous website visitors and intelligently evaluat their intent and interest to help in targeted sales approach. Furthermore it also recognizes the place of the prospects in the purchasing process with a sophisticated behavior analysis. The marketing teams can thus concentrate on lead nurturing initiatives that would lead to improved qualified leads and the sales team can close the deals quicklyand lessen the sales cycle. This results in enhancement of the entire sales and marketing productivity. The solution further allows you to capture qualified leads that are rich with the required data. The pre-qualified leads generated have a higher conversion rate than the other contacts with which the sales target can be attained quicker.

It is essential to understand that your lead starts and ends with you when the deal is closed. Therefore, what most companies require is a lead generation system that offers details about the latest technologies of attaining the qualified and centered leads. This apart, the system must also keep the companies on the same page with innovative marketing strategies that would help in building and enhancing the business better.

Read more on - Marketing Automation software, Lead Management

In any organization there is a continuous challenge in the way software development lifecycles deal with security. In spite of security measures with the use of automated security tools and penetration testing, there is not much reduction in security vulnerabilities. Effective application security uses  software, hardware, and procedural methods to protect applications from external threats. Security measures built into applications and a sound application security routine minimizes the likelihood of hackers manipulating applications and access, to steal, modify, or delete sensitive data.

Recent studies indicate that the application layer is one of the top risk areas where the most likely damage can occur, either by means of insider targets or lack of protection. Vulnerabilities at the application level are usually not detected by routine scanning methods such as automated network vulnerability scanning. Consequently, confidential company information can be uncovered, resulting in damage to a company’s customers as well as its reputation.

As organizations are put under growing pressure to protect sensitive data, they are starting to look toward protecting this data at the application layer. Typically application development allows companies to create new applications to suit their requirements. With real-world testing across large enterprises and multiple industries, serious flaws are often found in most software, i.e. both custom and popular third-party applications.

To ensure that there is no disruption in the workflow, these applications need to integrate with the legacy systems used by the company. In most organizations the biggest challenge is to avoid repeated mistakes among the developer community. It is therefore crucial for companies to recognize the need for application security policies because, without such policies, there is no reliable way to define, implement, and enforce a security plan within an organization.

An organization that develops secure codes, needs to certainly bring on a security professional who understands application security and secure application development.While focussing on network perimeters, developing new policies on handling sensitive information, implementing security awareness programs and patch and update systems,all significant gaps need to be plugged. Security can no longer be an afterthought, but needs to necessarily be embedded into the application development process early on. Invest in an application security framework that helps your organization develop effective security for your application portfolio.

With an efficient service provider organization can get all the essential help necessary to develop and deploy the appropriate security controls and technologies that include advanced authentication, encryption, authorization, code access security, device authenticity, FIPS 140 etc. For secure application development the requirement for robust and stringent privilege identity access management solutions are a must.

Read more on - mobile security, data protection