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Cloud Consulting, CRM Software, Web Push Notifications

3 Best Cloud Migration Strategies You Must Know About

For Business purposes companies nowadays have adopted cloud computing platform. There are hardly any companies we’ll find wh does not use cloud today, such as the popularity of cloud. For the successful run of business, there might be many reasons but it is essential to migrate to the cloud platforms in cloud consulting services.

Why Should We Migrate?

As the introduction and updation of newer technologies take place, it is highly recommended to use and adopt these technologies n order to stay in the competition. IT does have many advantages in terms of speed, storage, processing of data, cost and much more it’s the go-to platform every company is adopting right now. Migration isn’t something which can be done overnight, significant planning is required wit required resources. Inclusion of planning should be why you want to shift, what you’re keeping with you, and where is the destination where you will keep all the data again. Let’s dive deep into the strategies.

Strategies

With the necessary resources, the planning of migration is concrete, for achieving the desired result, we can follow a strategy. Though there are many strategies we can use to complete the job, today we will look at the three R’s of the cloud migration strategy. It is very essential to determine the current environment, its dependencies, licenses, types of applications and servers. Organizations that opt for the migration of data and applications to the cloud use these strategies. They are as follows:

Rehost
Revise
Refractor

Rehost

It’s also known as “lift and shift strategy”. This is the most commonly followed strategy when the applications are needed to migrate to the cloud. Involvement of lifting a part of the application or whole application from one on-premise or existing cloud environment and shifting it to another cloud environment, that is why the name. in the process of shifting of an application to the new cloud platform, sometimes there is a need for change in the host configuration. Is your business concerned about operational cost and quick migration without any need of disturbing the existing application workflow?

Revise

Unlike the rehosting strategy, in this strategy, a part or whole application is optimized before migrating to the cloud. This strategy is also known as “re-platforming”. Preoptimization of application really helps in better performance of application rather than improving the entire code architecture. Organizations can leverage more cloud benefits by optimizing the applications rather than just moving them, but rehosting is way cheaper as compared to revising strategy.

Refractor

Not at all similar to the other two strategies. It is too complex as compared to rehosting and revising. It is also known as “re-architecting” because even though this strategy is the most expensive one amongst all three, but it offers the best possible benefits when it comes to cloud migration of data and application in an organization and the refractor approach makes changes to architecture structure of the application. The requirement of time, as well as knowledge about the cloud platform itself, is necessary for the refractor approach and services offered.

There are two types in this strategy namely, partial and complete. In Partial refractor, only a part of the application is modified, since it happens in sequence it results in faster migration whereas, in complete refractor approach, the entire modification of application takes place, which is pocket-friendly and high in performance.

Conclusion

It is not easy to choose an appropriate migration strategy for an organization. Many factors must be considered before taking a decision which includes the right cloud service provider, optimization of necessary application processes, migration strategy, overhead, costs, and more.

Ouriken’s cloud consulting services identify and prioritize cloud applications, optimization, cloud migration which helps your business. Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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CRM Software, Digital Solutions, Website Designing

8 Free Ways to Promote Your Business

Every business wants their products or services to be seen by potential customers. But, most of the traditional ways for promotion costs money and not everyone can afford it if they are just starting up the business. Well, there are ways to promote your business without spending a dime. So, let’s get into the list of the ways of 8 ways to promote your business. These ideas will not cost you money but they will surely cost you some of your precious time.

Optimization of Website for Search Engines

In this digital world, what people do when they want to buy something? Well, they search for the product or service on Google or other search engines of their choice. The process of information gathering takes place about the product. They try to collect data from the internet so if your website is not the list which they are searching for their information on, so you virtually do not exist.

The easy fix for this is to hire a digital agency that can do the optimization of your website for you but, even in that case you need to be aware of the process, so that Google cannot penalize your website for some wrongdoings or against its algorithm. By reading some guides on SEO you can tweak your website and rank higher on Google and on other search engines as well. The good thing is agencies would not be able to fool you if you know some of the processes.

Business Listing

Vendors are being searched on business directories by buyers. If your products are mostly B2B, add a free listing on IndiaMart, Trade India and Indian Yellow Pages. These are some popular business to business directories.

And if you’re products or services are B2C then you can list your business on Just Dial, Ask Me and Get It for free. The biggest advantage of these platforms is that they have mobile apps and that attracts a huge audience.

If your business is selling software’s then SoftwareSuggest is a very good directory to list your business. The categorization of the software’s on this website is quite good, like HR, CRM, ERP, etc. Many small businesses have been profited by this.

Listing On Google My Business

Google is trying to make the search personal and now displays results that are tailored for your location. For example, if we search for McDonald’s, Google will show you the outlets in your city with a map. So, if your list your business on Google, it will be very beneficial for you, and it is necessary to get listed on Google as the rate of competition is increasing very rapidly.

Adding your business is very easy, Google made sure that the process is simple for addition and managing the added business for the location on the map.

Social Media is Powerful

Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, not only help you get more customers but also the engagement to get quality feedback from them for your products or services. One can get around 20% of traffic only from social media.

The key point in achieving most out of social media is the frequency of our posts, if we post regularly, the rate of popularity and loyal customers will increase. Business updates or news related updates can be shared with your industry. Competitor analysis on social media is very easy as well; we can follow some influencers and monitor their activity. Recommended is to post twice to thrice a week on Facebook and 2-3 times a day on Twitter.

Answering Questions

It happens most of the time that people don’t get their desired answers on the Google search, so they turn up towards forums on the internet to solve their problems. QnA sites like Quora and Yahoo answers are one of the popular places where you can find new customers. There are LinkedIn Groups that are also used for the QnA website.

How can we benefit from these sites? We first have to create accounts on these websites and start searching for your product or services; we will get a lot of questions related to your product or services. People will ask about the top companies that sell this product and they will compare different products and so on.

Always start by answering easy questions and then move the levels up a bit by bit. For Example in Ouriken, I searched for a web design and development company on Quora and got hundreds of questions related to the topic. Then, like I said start answering easy questions and keep recommending your website in the answers so that you will get organic traffic to your website that too, free of cost.

The same thing could be done on Yahoo answers and LinkedIn groups, all 3 of them are a good source for organic traffic and very influential. Talking about good things, all these websites are crawled or indexed by Google so your answers will get displayed on Google whenever someone will search for it. Tip for answering in these websites is to have the intention of helping the needy first then we can sell our things in between. Nobody likes hard upselling.

Attending Networking Events/Meetups

The Concept is to visit Events/Expos/Meetups and increase your network in order to find new customers. You can just search for “Business events in (your city)” and Google will come up with the list of upcoming events if there are any. Most of the events are free of cost, you just have to bear the travel expenses and they attract potential customers as well as distributors/resellers/consultants.

Gradually, there will be a realization in you that people attend these events just to meet other people and increasing their network, eventually increasing their customers. Meetup is a site through which we can meet a lot of entrepreneurs and startup owners meet frequently using this site. People with open minds come here to meet and or open for new ideas sharing and partnerships in the existing startups.

Uploading Videos on YouTube

Over 4 billion videos are played on YouTube every day, and this number is growing exponentially. So, uploading videos on YouTube of your product or service is a no brainer. The best part is, search results of your videos will appear on the Google search result page giving your website more visibility.

For product, a 2 min demo video of the product will do, and for service, you can upload a testimonial of the client and upload it. You should always remember to put keywords in the title or description of the video so it ranks up. If you come up with interesting content that has the potential to go viral and hit the jackpot, leads will flood into your inbox.

Offering a Deal to Customers

Deal sites like Groupon and Coupon Dunia attract millions of users to their portals. So, have a meeting with the deal website guys, brainstorm with them and come up with a deal that your customers cannot resist. And you can a good number of buyers at no cost.

Once you have decided the discount to give to your customers, the deals website will do the promotion for you. Since they have a large database of registered users. This process of offering deals will be more or less will remain similar in other websites as well.

Conclusion

These are just 8 ways, there can be or there are many more ways of promoting your business. You just have to be creative and have an out of the box thinking. Some of the points mentioned above will yield results instantly, and some will take its own natural time. If you’re on a tight budget for marketing you have to invest your time in it instead to promote your business. There are some startups who succeeded with literally ZERO marketing budget. If you have any other ideas to add in this list, I know there are. Feel free to comment down below.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, CRM Software, Digital Solutions, IoT

Why Businesses Must Integrate Artificial Intelligence [AI]?

In 2017, Artificial Intelligence became one of the hottest topics and is still attracting attention and investments. There was a void in businesses without AI – Artificial Intelligence, before that social networking, mobile apps, the Internet of Things, and Data Analytics have filled that void. Scientists have been working upon the technology and been talking about the benefits of AI from the past four decades, it’s about time that society’s AI dreams are coming true.

When the term AI is told, people think of the AI we encounter in personal lives which is web ads dependent and based on our search history, facial recognition on Facebook, or the IVR of banks or other companies. Or perhaps, some people think of personal digital assistants namely, Siri (Apple), Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft), and Google Assistant (Google). But AI applications impacted both consumer and business operations. For example, a Harley Davidson dealer implemented an AI-driven marketing platform into his marketing mix and the results were astonishingly high. He witnessed a 2930 percent increase in sales, which literally tripled his business over the previous year. But every AI integration is not as successful as that dealer. Social Networking and Smartphones were into the consumer world first then they moved into Business, in the same way, we can expect AI to seep into business applications in a natural way. However, with an increase in the volumes of people, places, and things plus there is also an increase in computing speeds and real-time processing power. AI applicability and business benefits are becoming a reality with immediate effect.

AI Estimations

A survey of Cowen and Company, currently 81% of IT leaders are investing in or planning to invest in AI. CIOs are also heralding to their companies for the integration of AI into their entire technology hub. Meanwhile, 43 percent are doing a proof of concept for AI, and 38 percent of organizations have already implemented AI and been planning to invest more into it.

Estimation from McKinsey research states that tech giants spent $20 billion to $30 billion on AI in 2016. Of that, R & D and deployment will get 90 percent and 10 percent to AI acquisitions. Artificial Intelligence will grow to a $47 billion market by 2020, says industry analyst firm IDC with a compound annual growth rate of 55%. Companies will spend around $18 billion on software applications, $billion on software platforms, and $24 billion on services and hardware, states IDC. Your business will risk irrelevancy if your business doesn’t already have a strategy to incorporate AI or machine learning (ML) into your development efforts by 2020 that too with this level of investment.

Related Post: What is Internet of Things [IoT]?

Exponential Growth of AI

Google, Amazon, and Facebook are leading the AI race right now, with Microsoft just behind between those three are catching up rapidly with the investment of a lot of time and resources in AI. With access to thousands of researchers on staff and billions of dollars set aside for investing in capturing the next generation of leading data scientists, proving these organizations a head start over the rest of the market. For example:
1. Google’s 25,000 engineers, only a few thousand are knowledgeable and proficient, that makes roughly 10 % and they are making efforts to make that number 100 percent.
2. The AI and research group at Microsoft grew by 60% through hiring and acquisitions in the first year of its operations.
3. FBLearner Flow is being used by over 750 Facebook engineers and 40 different product teams, which helps them leverage AI and ML. Over a million models have been trained on the new software.

Moreover, Infor, Microsoft, and Salesforce have also been researching and implementing AI in their business. In the market today, these tech giants are just a few of the serious artificial intelligence contenders. It makes smaller companies very tough to attract and retain the skilled work required to make their AI dreams a reality. Recruiting efforts won’t just be it to create an impact, but also the time required to conduct a new employee onboarding, supervised learning, and training to effectively scale AI programs.

Most companies lack analytical infrastructure and general knowledge needed to apply AI and ML to its full potential. Secured access of data without having to deal with multiple authentications must be enabled by engineers. Often it’s a case if the company has several isolated data warehouses or enterprise resource planning application systems. IT leaders must have the ability to bring large data sets together from several unique and varied data sources into centralized, scalable and observed data repository, for this they have to attempt to successfully deploy and conquer an enterprise-wide AI strategy.

Development of AI Applications Market Place

When it’s clear that the use of AI is important, not all companies have the IT budgets to hire the employees required to build AI-fueled applications that too in-house. For that reason, we can expect to see on an immediate effect, the rise of AI services marketplace in the near future. There is already an emerging form of companies providing AI self – service tools that are very easy to use for the non-data scientist and not that expensive to acquire. These AI market places will resell AI services and specialized algorithms that companies can completely buy and implement within their business, which will make the business process management more easier to handle. To compete in this race of AI, this marketplace will provide companies AI services which are in a modest budget.

Conclusion

We have only seen a few examples of the major AI benefits, we will see a rise in the integration of the AI in the coming future. Having the roots in computer science since, a few decades. It is only now that this concept is getting popular among the organizations as well as the consumer applications, and the need for it increasing day by day. By embedding AI into the core functions of the software enterprise software providers are making AI a necessity. We can see this integration more in the coming years. For businesses, this will mean that they no more need to hire computer scientists or invest large capital to develop their own AI systems.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.

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CRM Software

Why is CRM software important for your Business?

In the business world, the value of preserving existing clients and growing the business is important. Customer relationship management (CRM) serves companies to get an insight into the behavior of their customers and transform their business operations to guarantee that customers are served in the best possible way. Some organizers have discovered the importance of CRM Software the tough way, but you don’t have to. And this has been possible thankfully because of this digital era, there are CRM systems that will do the work for you. All you need to do is follow the trends and personalize the method according to the requirements of your present and potential customers.

Some of the important points which make CRM must for your business:

Accessing Comprehensive Customer History

CRM software will help you earn more customers and be fast to serve the newly acquired and earlier gained customers. You will also have a record of your leads and contacts and can access them whenever you want. Those leads will not be lost. Using the CRM system you can have an entire history os customer trends and ways.ALso of those customers whom you had acquired before installing CRM into your system. This data is essential for the analysis of the preferences and trends of every customer. Once you understand this, you will identify what to offer them

Helps you Acquire new Customers

The CRM software you apply will not only help you track the history of recently acquired clients but further help you obtain new clients. The system will recognize targets and copy the necessary data into the ‘Opportunity of Business’, which is the CRM system that collects the details to utilize when required. A combined CRM system will benefit the employed Sales and Field representatives s to put this data to utilize and optimize conversion.

Saves Time

The reports on an integrated CRM system is centralized so that it is accessible at any point of time and to any entitled person on any authorized machine whenever required. You don’t waste precious time or a big opportunity waiting for the system to upload or the data to be secured. This boosts productivity which not only instantly translates into enhanced sales, but also builds a reputation for your business.

Helps Business Flourish and Expand

Speaking about reputation, a CRM software supports you with everything so that you can work with perfection and quickly, without any delay at all. It makes your brand image brilliant. Clients will view your company as one of the most experienced ones in the market. Your team will be the best. The point is, the individual employees must understand how to utilize it best and the business will prosper.

To Boost Brand Image

A loyal customer base is essential for the progress of any company and a perfect CRM system leads to you added customers and teaches you how to maintain a relationship with them and turn them true to your brand. So, the CRM system not only benefits the existing business and profits but also assists you to secure a steady prospect for your business.

Help Train your employees

A CRM system eases the employees understand how to go about the customer relationship management part so they obtain experience in the field studying from a software. The system also explains to these human employees how to examine important data and which data to concentrate on. So overall, the CRM system makes your employees and the administration teams further experienced and more productive as compared to what they were when you hired them. In this way, the performance of each employee will continue increasing with each passing day without any outside investment on your part to guide them.

To Reduce Cost

CRM system is good for your business as it is very cost-effective. You will obviously wonder how is that even possible when these tools are actually premium and don’t come cheap either. Well, look at the price cuts you are getting to make. Because of this tool, you can contract your whole analytical team and the marketing team keeping fewer people on the memo. Though you will have to make some cuts to your existing team which may be wrong ethically speaking. But if you commence your business with a CRM system integrated then you won’t require to make any cuts. You will hire only people you need and this will save time and capital that goes into the process of employing.

Ouriken provides a sharp CRM software that gives you the information you want in a way that you can utilize it. A perfect CRM gives you a solution to analyze your processes right from day one. We provide Zoho CRM Software that gives a good, smart and an ideal enterprise-ready package. Agile CRM Software has modern features that provide easy implementation and support at an affordable price.

We also design innovative services for your vision and assure flawless and complete implementation. We create and integrate the best products and solutions for your company and implement business support solutions to showcase your capacities and services.