Several of our clients have made substantial bets recently on strategies that merge mutually supporting bricks and mortar and Internet retail approaches. The synergy argument has the added benefit of making it easier to track results when you can integrate f2f retail with the electronic variety. The impact on the customer experience discussion continues.
It used to be quite a contest to recount your worst “in person” retail experience vs. your worst Web-based debacle. We’re noticing more and more in client conversations that the certainty of Web interactions increases the quality of the customer experience over time. This is no accident.
On the Web, every click and page view is tracked. All this analytics data drives an ongoing process of shopping optimization. Amazon is a case in point, where on any given day a team of people is testing dozens of new features on live customers – millions of live customers – whose shopping carts paint a picture of what works.
In the f2f world, the quality of your shopping experience depends on the maturity, mood, local management, etc of the person on the other side of the counter. I’m not suggesting for a minute that you should execute every transaction on the Web; the value of a high-quality f2f experience cements the brand (particularly for old guys like me).
After a 20-year relationship with the local John Deere dealer with lots of positive f2f interaction, I filed for a quick divorce after receiving the latest misdiagnosis of a problem with a piece of equipment – and request for a large check.
Spending about 15 minutes online took me to a forum of tractor enthusiasts (really…) where three or four folks immediately weighed-in with ideas. A link to an online John Deere resource provided me with parts for about 50% of what I would have paid the local dealer. The impact of a bad f2f experience lingers.
Developing and maintaining a high-performing information architecture on the site continues to be key to building and retaining large traffic volumes from site visitors. The same applies to infrastructure and security. If it all works, site visitors will be back. If not, they’ll look for another site. It looks less likely that they’ll be back at the local John Deere parts counter though; it’s just too easy on the Web.
According to Experian Hitwise, in early March Facebook surpassed Google as the most visited Website in the US. Though the traffic levels between the two were close, Facebook’s year-over-year growth jumped 185%, while Google's traffic grew by only 9%! Like it or not, social media is radically changing how we interact online – and no group is more plugged into social media than teens (73% of all teens online use social media – Pew Research, March 23, 2010). For organizations targeting the teen market, such as our college and university clients, this news is another wake-up call for developing an effective and adaptable Web presence.
Admissions Marketing
Engaging prospective students through their preferred channels is particularly important for admissions marketers. Competition is fierce for the best applicants. Recent economic challenges have increased the need for effective recruitment as funding from endowments, gifts and other non-tuition based sources shrinks. Until recently, colleges drove admissions by casting a wide net for prospects, and then spent significant time and resources targeting a subset of prospective students who were deemed “interested” and well qualified.
The challenge now is the target audience is spending more and more time online communicating through social media channels. As a result, they’re paying much less attention to email – who has time to sift through an inbox full of junk mail to figure out what’s relevant – and barely skimming the glossy printed admissions brochures arriving in the mail.
Social Media vs. Your Website
So, how is communicating via social media different than just posting information to your Website? The Website is well understood and relatively stable means to:
Social media has grown explosively over past several years – particularly Facebook – and is still rapidly evolving; key factors:
Social Media – Communities
Some of the many ways you can leverage social media for to help meet admissions objectives:
Social Media – Retaining Control
While embracing social media creates significant benefits, it also presents some serious pitfalls – get ready for the whole world to see (and discuss) whatever is good and maybe not so good about your campus. Typically, content on your Website goes through some review process before it’s published – to ensure accuracy, relevance and quality (no typos, etc.). This is not necessarily so with social media. The key to minimizing the risk of errant content is having and enforcing social media policies. At a minimum, your social media policy should address:
As with any policy, compliance with your social media guidelines will be much more effective if policies are clearly communicated, consistently enforced and supported by your institution’s senior executives.
Social media is a powerful mechanism for engaging prospective students (to increase applications) and accepted students (to improve yield). But having a strategy in place as well as appropriate policies and guidelines to safeguard your brand is critical to social media success. Ideally, your use of social media should be part of a broader Web strategy, one which blueprints your overall approach to Web engagement – from social media services and Web application platforms to the roles and responsibilities for of the people responsible for creating, managing, delivering and governing content.
The move toward widespread virtualization is usually accompanied by new systems architecture. This would address load balancing, failover and high availability, and also support WAN-based access for remote offices and workers (e.g., sales people who work from home). Because it's designed for efficiently replicating data from one site to another, this architecture streamlines disaster recovery.
Why is this? The data in a virtualized environment usually encompasses virtual machines (VMs), a configuration database and user data. The size of this data depends on your environment – whether it’s desktop or server virtualization. Beyond that, other components of the virtualized environment, such as hypervisors and connection brokers can be easily put in place to accommodate the replicated data from the main site to a DR site.
Other issues you need to consider when replicating data to your DR site include: network bandwidth, size of your data files and deciding if your DR environment will be a hot or cold site. Your choice of operating systems makes little difference in terms of DR, because the operating system is part of the overall backed-up data that is sent to a DR site.
In a “traditional” client-server environment without virtualization, backups are usually only done for the actual user data (especially if the data is on a network share) and not for operating systems or applications. And if your end user devices are PCs, backing up individual PC operating system environments, including individual user customization can be daunting if not impossible.
Even if your IT department keeps a golden image of the applications loaded on end-user PCs, it typically doesn’t include customizations. This is where virtualization can definitely help; each user’s environment is a virtual machine which contains all applications and any customizations (assuming the user is using a persistent desktop).
From the standpoint of server virtualization, a complete back-up of your server VMs should be easier to execute because the VMs will likely reside on some type of centralize storage. Most storage systems support storage replication which makes this really easy to accomplish for back up proposes. The replicated data can be easily sent off site via high speed network to a DR site.
One of the problems I’ve seen with sending large amounts of data across the network is the time it takes – some sites don’t have the network bandwidth to handle the data. This is where WAN optimization becomes your friend! WAN optimization will let you send large amounts of data across potentially long distances by applying compression, de-duplication and data packet optimization features regardless of the transport protocol or latency sensitivity. This boosts WAN performance and reduces costs by optimizing existing bandwidth. Keep in mind different WAN optimization solutions work better with certain types of data, it's important to do your homework – and perhaps a pilot – before you invest in this technology.
Finally, you need to think about how you configure end user systems to access your DR site if your main site goes down or becomes inaccessible to your staff.
In conversations with current and prospective clients over the last few weeks, most believe the economy is in recovery. Yet these same CIOs have two sharply divergent views on the state of IT and the approach they're taking to develop roadmaps for the future. I've labeled these perspectives restoration and transformation – see how they align with your thinking.
The restoration perspective sees the challenges ahead in terms of past funding levels, headcount, skills and gradual change in the technologies deployed across the enterprise. Particularly in those industries impacted by an eroding tax base (state & local government, higher-education and healthcare), the focus is on keeping the lights on (literally in some instances), hanging on to talented professionals during recurring rounds of reductions and making the most of an uncertain technology investment environment. Coupled with increasing regulatory requirements, the CIO’s job is becoming more challenging each month rather than less so.
A transformation perspective appears to be gaining ground across other industry verticals. There is a recognition that the world has dramatically changed, and isn’t likely to return to the old paradigm. Ever increasing levels of IT functionality are being offered to the business, emerging capacity on demand models (partly cloudy?) SaaS, DaaS and PaaS approaches are opening up brave new worlds for CIOs functioning as architects intent on differentiating their businesses with IT.
Funding makes a heck of a difference. Building an effective business case that clearly correlates results with spend is back in fashion.
How well does your SAN handle crunch time? I’m talking about periods of heavy random read/write scenarios, such as:
Depending on how you’ve got things architected, you should have no problem provisioning high-performance storage for all your applications. Got a slow SATA array? You can greatly boost its performance by applying cache principles to the entire SAN, not just a single array – and, not just a write cache, but an intelligent read cache.
Now, imagine taking this a step further. Let’s add an SSD cache in front of your entire SAN (operating at over 1 million IOPS) and make it intelligent with data profiling… OK, let’s turn on the lights and get real. You can make this happen today with the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator. NSS lets you configure a write cache and a read cache for your entire SAN using two technologies: SafeCache and HotZone. Here’s how they work:
SafeCache is a designated area on your SAN, such as an SSD array, where all application writes are sent. By using an SSD array (or any faster LUN on your SAN), the writes are high performance, and acknowledgements are much lower-latency. Writes are also sequentially written to the final SAN target, which is any typical SAN resource (SATA array, FC array, etc.) You can see how this would greatly increase the overall performance of the SAN, and subsequently all applications utilizing the SAN storage. With all writes going to the highest performing LUN on your SAN, the write performance becomes predictable regardless of which array is the final target, and predictability is a very good thing in our business.
HotZone is also used as a cache, but it is a designated read cache. Unlike SafeCache, HotZone can be used for the entire SAN or prioritized by application. HotZone intelligently recognizes data that is accessed on a more regular basis, and makes a copy available on the SSD array (or other faster LUN you designate). As the data is used less, the data profiler will remove the data from the HotZone and redirect access to its normal location on the SAN resources. Again, you get faster, more predictable storage performance.
How fast you ask?
Lab tests of the FalconStor NSS SAN Accelerator show that adding a solid-state layer of one percent of a SAN´s total storage capacity will increase overall SAN performance more than 100 percent. Compared with achieving an equivalent performance increase by adding spindles alone, the FalconStor NSS is a bargain – even for organizations with modest budgets.
If you’re having performance issues or contemplating adding disk to boost SAN performance or reliability, please contact us for a no-obligation storage assessment.
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