EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Webinars are boring…until you think outside the box and utilize creative ideas to wake up the minds of your attendees. Pick one of these ten creative options to revitalize your webinars in 2020.

“Webinars are boring!” I’ve heard those exact words from both marketing leaders and webinar attendees. And for the most part it’s true. If you are still doing webinars in which the third-party pundit speaks first, then your company spokesperson gives a product pitch, your audience is probably mumbling those same words.

Few people like the process of completing their taxes every year. But no one wants to be scammed out of the monies owed to them by the government. Be especially careful about those that contact you regarding your taxes, and confirm the sources of those emails and calls whenever possible.

Five years and $1 billion in R&D investment has led to this. Cisco has positioned itself to be a jack-of-all trades routing supplier to network service providers and web-scale data center operators.

Today’s cloud-centric enterprises require agile infrastructure that can scale up and down as capacity requirements evolve. Nowhere is this shift in infrastructure requirements more apparent than in the world of application delivery controllers (ADCs) and load balancers. Today’s enterprises are shifting away from monolithic ADC appliances in favor of lightweight, per-application software ADCs and load balancers.

At SAPPHIRE Now 2019, SAP introduced new cloud services that reach far beyond their installed base and make them a solid option for anyone looking for application or analytics solutions in the cloud. The new data and analytics offerings are not a departure from their commitment to current customers; they extend increased business value for all medium and enterprise companies looking for rapid return on their cloud investments. 

Two primary streaks of innovation drive the need for more flexible, scalable technology at the start of the 2020s. First, digital and mobile business models continue to push organizations to expand their use of data far beyond traditional, structured, and centralized data management. The promise of big data platforms to easily allow for global data collection and analysis has never been realized. Second, modernization and innovation cycles that used to recur every five to seven years have been condensed. Most organizations trying to stay ahead of digital transformation are not ready for the speed and agility necessary to maintain a competitive advantage in a digital world.

In summarizing the teachings of Charles Darwin, Louisiana State University business professor Leon C. Megginson said the following at a convention of the Southwestern Social Science Association:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

We have come a long way from the days of theoretic business process optimization. A massive wave of digital transformation is leaving electronic footprints and fingerprints that enable the ongoing optimization of business processes based on facts and figures. As a result, we are seeing a wave of new vendors in the business optimization market, which includes process mining and robotic process automation (RPA).

Process mining technology extracts business application data, tags it based on time and location within a business process, visualizes the business processes, logs variations, and makes recommendations for process improvement based on built-in advanced analytics. RPA technology identifies repetitive business processes with potential for automation and codifies the logic necessary to take intelligent action without human intervention. In some more critical areas, the RPA engine makes recommendations for validation by human decision-making.