How customer voice
drives business

The IaaS market is dominated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure which together have over 60% market share. AWS alone has almost 50% share, although growth is beginning to slow. The extraordinary dominance and growth of AWS and Microsoft Azure is largely driven by organizations that have decided to exit private data centers, and firms looking to build competitive advantage through large-scale digital transformation. Iaas + PaaS Combinations The research firm Gartner has posited that the market for standalone IaaS platforms is shrinking and that these vendors will remain niche vendors. The market is moving in the direction of combined IaaS/PaaS offerings where both systems have been architected to work seamlessly together.  AWS, Google, and Microsoft are all examples of vendors that combine these capabilities in a single platform. AWS offers its Elastic Beanstalk PaaS which is fully integrated with its IaaS platform. Similarly, Google offers the Google Compute Engine IaaS platform alongside Google App Engine. Microsoft Azure also offers the Azure IaaS platform with the integrated PaaS called App Service for building, deploying, and scaling web apps. Pure-play IaaS Niche vendors But what of the so-called niche players in the IaaS space? Should these vendors be on […]

Greater emphasis is being put on the quality of learners’ experiences. This trend encourages greater focus on intelligent personalization, self-guided learning, and mobile accessibility within learning systems. The entrance of Gen Z into the workforce will bring a greater demand for communication skills development, video content, and mobile accessibility. The growth of nontraditional and nonlinear career paths necessitate the normalization of retraining throughout your career, including personal skills development and customized learning paths.  Workplace learning is changing. New economic realities, evolving workplace dynamics, and a fresh generation of employees are aligning to shift how corporate-driven learning is conducted. What are the primary drivers of these changes, and what are the implications for corporate learning professionals? Cornerstone’s talent management and content production teams shared their view on the top corporate learning trends. As one of the most reviewed standalone talent management and learning management products on TrustRadius, they have some unique insights to share. Here are three current corporate learning trends, according to Cornerstone, and what they mean for you. 1. Rise of the Learner’s Experience The primary, overarching change that Cornerstone professionals identify is how corporate learning has become an employee-driven, employee-demanded aspect of the modern workplace. This shift is […]

Mobile accessibility to your learning platform is a must-have, not a luxury. Professional skills, like communication and conflict resolution, are an increasingly robust content area often tailored to Gen Z. Microlearning isn’t new- figure out whether it’s useful to you before factoring it into your buying decision. Artificial Intelligence can be beneficial, but don’t get FOMO- ask vendors the hard questions to figure out how much it actually matters for you. If you’ve seen any “trends of 2019” articles, you’ve probably seen references to “microlearning,” “mobile-first,” and the all-present, inescapable “AI.” As 2020 approaches, which trends should you focus on, and which ones are smoke and mirrors? We had Cornerstone, a 20-year incumbent in corporate learning management, lend us their Content team to help us pull back the curtains on 4 of the most important trends for 2020. Here’s what each trend means to software buyers like you, and how it might influence how you buy and use learning management systems. 1. Mobile Accessibility Trend Status: Need to Have Mobile access to learning content is now a necessity in your platform.  So what’s driving this trend? Doug Segers, Head of Original Content at Cornerstone OnDemand, argues that mobile accessibility emerges […]

The ability of  VoIP technology to connect data, audio and visual elements all into one platform allows access to assistive and accessibility features that were not once achievable. With things like audio-to-text conversions and automated voicemail transcriptions, VoIP software has been supplying hearing impaired and deaf individuals with effective and essential communication tools for years. The VoIP software industry has proven to help provide Assistive and Accessible Technology for those with disabilities.  The Hearing Aid Compatibility Act of 1988 (HAC Act) requires that all telephones manufactured in, or imported by, the U.S. for general use, and all “essential telephones”, must be hearing-aid compatible. Essential telephones are generally defined as coin-operated phones, phones made for emergency use and phones for those that require hearing-aids.  In 2017, the FCC released an order that made modifications to hearing-aid compatibility and volume control requirements for wireless and wireline telephones. Through this order, the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act was designed to ensure that all of the FCC’s hearing-aid requirements are applied to all “wireline telephones used with advanced communication services, including phones used with Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services.” With those revisions in place, all wireline telephones used with a VoIP service in the […]

Hubspot’s ‘human’ voice, vast collection of educational materials and networking events have solidified its place as the authority on inbound marketing — and also as one of the most popular marketing automation platforms in the field.  Hubspot has many draws: its forever free CRM, its integrated sales, marketing and service hubs, and its wide network of support.  But Hubspot might not be the right fit for everyone.  We will give you a break down of Hubspot — what this tool is, who it is most appropriate for, and what users have to say about this platform. Then, we will give you the same information on 5 of its top competitors.  These top 5 competitors were chosen based on comparison traffic on TrustRadius. When buyers explore Hubspot, they most frequently compare it to these 5 tools. Let’s jump in. Hubspot: Getting to Know a Marketing Automation Favorite Hubspot offers software solutions for sales teams, marketers and service reps. While Hubspot offers sales and service software, it is most widely reviewed for its marketing automation solution. Hubspot’s marketing automation software has received 1479 reviews and ratings on TrustRadius (overall score of 8.4), which gives us key insights on what users really think about […]

PaaS is a development and deployment environment in the cloud that makes coding and deploying applications much more efficient for developers and IT professionals. It is a platform for building scalable software delivered over the web with modest up-front investment. There are three main PaaS platform flavors, and it’s important to understand the difference between them before investigating which product to purchase. 1. PaaS tied to a SaaS product  These PaaS offerings are tightly connected to commonly-used SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Workday, or Intuit. The purpose of this kind of PaaS is to create a developer ecosystem around a SaaS application. It does this by providing a platform allowing ISVs to create new capabilities that run on the core SaaS platform. Examples of added capabilities might be custom business processes, platform extensibility, data model customization, or a broad range of new functionality. Many of these platforms have low-code/ no-code capabilities, meaning they can be used by less technical resources.  In this way, new capabilities can be rapidly created to meet market demand and then sold into the customer base directly or via an application marketplace.  Examples of this kind of PaaS are:  Workday Cloud Platform Salesforce App Cloud/Lightning Google App […]

As the skills necessary for employees to excel in their roles change more rapidly, businesses are realizing the importance of continued professional learning and development. To ensure their talent stays top-tier, organizations can turn to corporate learning management systems (LMS) to stay competitive. Corporate learning management systems (LMS) are platforms designed to help companies teach and train employees, customers, and/or partners. They can provide industry-agnostic technical and professional skills development, as well as serve specialized training and knowledge. If you want to help provide your employees with continued training and skills development, but don’t know how best to do so, we can help! If the 139 listed corporate LMS products and over 1600 reviews seem daunting, we’ve provided a topshelf breakdown of what the software is, what it can do, how it can help you, and how to begin evaluating and comparing products. Let’s not bury the lead: What can corporate LMS do for you? 5 benefits of corporate LMS #1 Cost Savings Continued training can be expensive. Flying employees and trainers to a centralized location, putting together an event, and possibly paying for a venue itself can be cost prohibitive. Corporate LMS software aims to mitigate these costs. While […]

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a virtualized computing infrastructure provisioned over the Internet. Typically, IaaS providers provision everything that would normally be found in an on-premises environment such as servers, storage and networking hardware in addition to the virtualization layer. IaaS platforms usually also include multiple services like monitoring, load balancing and clustering, and storage capabilities such as backup, replication, and recovery. IaaS is an alternative to Private Data Centers An IaaS environment is an alternative to running a private data center. Modern businesses increasingly do not want to invest in and manage servers, storage, and networking for private data centers for a number of reasons, notably cost. Building a private data center is extremely expensive. However, renting the infrastructure from a major cloud service provider reduces logistical and financial barriers to entering new markets without being constrained by IT resources.  Benefits of IaaS If your organization’s IT resources are provided by an on-premise data center, switching to an IaaS replaces high costs for equipment and personnel with an easy-to-manage and much more affordable cloud services model. In particular, IaaS scales infrastructure components up and down with demand and avoids the difficulties of over-provisioning endemic to on-premise systems.  Who Uses IaaS IaaS, […]

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is finally recognized by many as a necessary part of developing any company culture and achieving HR and talent management goals. This is particularly true in a competitive job market, where millennials prioritize D&I in the workplace more than older generations. Given the close relationship between the two, effective HR management software can also enable better diversity and inclusion in your business as well. While D&I is more commonly prioritized than it used to be, how businesses should go about creating a diverse organization is less well’defined. Of HR professionals we surveyed on how their organizations deal with bias or discrimination in the workplace, some form of training is by far the most popular method of internal-facing D&I enablement for companies. Unfortunately, there’s a mountain of evidence pointing to the fact that training isn’t effective, and can even be harmful. So what should companies and professionals do instead, and what tools can help them along the way? Dr. Alicia Ingersoll, a diversity and inclusion researcher at Utah State University with an emphasis on diversity in leadership positions, provided some insights from what the data has been telling experts in the field. She has experience with both […]

Customer success management software (CSM) is a vital component of many CS teams’ successes. Customer success management software is designed to provide tools to ensure that customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product. Typical customer success software provides features such as customer engagement analytics, product usage tracking and adoption, renewals dashboards, NPS surveys, and other customer-centric insights. Customer success software should not be confused with customer relationship management software (CRM). CRM software focuses on managing business data pertaining to customers and ensuring positive customer support experiences. CSM software on the other hand, enables customer success managers to help their clients attain their goals. Customer success software is less about tracking customer data and tickets, more about managing the ongoing delivery of value and the assessment of client outcomes. On TrustRadius, leading Customer Success platforms are ChurnZero, Intercom, ClientSuccess, Gainsight, and Totango. These tools stand out from the crowd on TrustRadius by having high overall star ratings (their trScore) and research frequencies (how many buyers are checking out these tools). In this blog post, we’ll highlight these popular tools and what their current users like about them. ChurnZero ChurnZero is a customer success platform designed to help SaaS companies prevent […]

I recently sat down to have a conversation with Jane Menyo and Tiffany Beddow, Senior Director of Solutions Marketing and Director of Customer Marketing at ON24 (a leading webinar software). We discussed what makes for the best webinar software, and what webinar trends are on the horizon for 2020. Despite the emergence of Unified-Communications-as-a-Service Platforms (UCaaS) which aim to consolidate every online communications tool into one, a majority of buyers actually enjoy having separate tools for web conferencing, webinar, and even VoIP. There are several reasons why buyers want to invest in a webinar-focused tool for their online events. Let’s dig in. Webinar Benefits Jane and Tiffany shared that one of the biggest benefits of webinar software is its demand generation capabilities. Using webinars for demand generation entails creating informative and engaging sessions that drive leads and accelerate them through their buyer’s journey. Leading webinar tools on the market will provide you with attendee analysis and reporting to analyze the performance of your webinar and its surrounding outreach campaigns. Remember that webinar software is ideal for larger group meetings or online events with wide audiences of up to hundreds or thousands of participants. Owing to this, webinars are typically much […]

This post walks through the 5 top ecommerce solutions for small businesses, based on third-party reviews collected on TrustRadius.  The top 5 products included in this post are WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix.  Information such as common use cases, reviewer demographics, and favorite reviewer features are highlighted for each product.  Figuring out what type of ecommerce software will fit your business best can feel like an uphill battle, given how many options are available. This is especially true if you’re just starting your own online businesses, or if your business is a small ecommerce operation with tight budget constraints.  Based on reviews collected by TrustRadius, we’ve come up with a recommendation for the top 5 ecommerce products for small businesses.  The products below are a mix of different types of ecommerce software. The three types of software in this article include solutions designed specifically for ecommerce businesses (e.g. Shopify and BigCommerce), content management system (CMS) products (e.g. Wix and Squarespace) that have strong web design capabilities, and ecommerce plugins (e.g. WooCommerce).   Even though CMS products are not specifically designed for the ecommerce industry, this type of software is often used to build and maintain ecommerce websites. The two CMS […]

As the holiday season approaches, there’s a topic that probably appears on most HR pro’s business wish lists—reporting and insights that are more of a benefit than a hassle! According to reviewer feedback, reporting capabilities are frequently the lowest-rated features for the leading HR management software. Fortunately, HR and talent management software developers are doing their best Santa impression with better support for the next evolution of HR reporting, people analytics, in their products. People analytics is the consolidation and use of data to solve people-problems and answer personnel-based questions for businesses. Some research says it can yield massive ROI for businesses when deployed well. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, these are all fairly broad statements, because what people analytics looks like in practice can vary dramatically based on your business’s size and particular needs. However, there are some common themes across the field that can help you determine what benefits you can get from people analytics, as well as how much work it takes to implement. The problems people analytics can solve People analytics can benefit both your HR department as well as the broader company. For you HR professionals out there, people analytics provides a more robust method […]

Cloud computing defines the delivery of computing services over the Internet. To be more precise, cloud computing platforms provide access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications and other services that can be rapidly provisioned over the Internet.  Most technology buyers are familiar with the most well-known cloud computing model, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The other two are Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  How are these different cloud computing models different?  SaaS  Applications running in the cloud are offered to application consumers or end-users as a service over the Internet. The SaaS provider handles all the infrastructure and upgrades Consumers of the software service typically access it via a web browser and pay a monthly or annual subscription. This pricing model provides lower upfront costs to users and a reliable income stream to vendors.  PaaS  PaaS is a development and deployment environment in the cloud that makes coding and deploying applications much more efficient for developers. It is essentially a platform for building scalable software delivered over the web with modest up-front investment.  PaaS is designed to release application developers from the complexity of provisioning, configuring, managing, and updating hardware resources by providing the operational […]

As modern workforces become increasingly specialized and advanced, companies are recognizing the value behind investing in their personnel and talent. However, there are myriad processes that go into talent management, which can make the HR area vague and difficult to define. While many talent management software vendors make their products as inclusive as possible, not every type and size of business needs every talent management function. We surveyed talent management reviewers on TrustRadius to find out which talent management features are used the most by various sized businesses. For instance, employee self-service, recruiting, and onboarding are frequently popular functions across business sizes, but other modules’ usage can vary dramatically. These granular results can help provide a starting point for which capabilities are most essential to your business! Startups and Small Businesses (1-50 Employees) Among respondents from business with 50 employees or less, self-service capabilities, performance management, and compensation management are the most commonly used features. Self-service is the most frequently used capability, with 64% of small businesses leaning on employees’ ability to manage more of their own talent management, and broader HR, capabilities. Just shy of half of small business respondents (45%) also used performance management and compensation management features. […]

Marketing automation platforms—the swiss army knives of marketing—supposedly let you do it all.  They allow you to send out beautiful emails, coordinate social media campaigns, track customer behavior across all marketing channels, play nice with your CRM and give you all the reporting you need.   Yet marketers often have a love-hate relationship with their marketing automation software. We hear complaints like:  “To be able to use its features to the fullest, it requires experienced developers and can be difficult for new users to learn.”  “[There are] no tutorials for new users.” “Reporting on a few key metrics of campaigns could have been more intuitive and straightforward.” These pain points are very real for marketers.  We discuss what those marketing automation software fails are and what you can do to avoid them. 1.  Organizations lack trained professionals to effectively use the tool Marketing automation tools are robust, but they aren’t always user-friendly. Marketers often complain that their tool is difficult to use out-of-the-box, that there aren’t enough training resources, and that onboarding and implementation can be a very slow process.  “The platform requires high maintenance. So you’d need to make sure to have an agency partner or in-house developers to help […]

Today’s community contributor is Zee Gimon, Digital Operations Manager at HUSPI Software Development. She loves to learn about new technologies and advances in the sciences, cook Chinese and Mexican food, and read Harry Potter to her kids. Check out the detailed reviews she’s written on TrustRadius about tools with which she has worked throughout her career. Whether you have one project or several going on, a project management tool is always useful to have. In my work as a Digital Operations Manager in the IT industry, I use two major ones for our internal as well as external projects: Jira and Trello. In this article, I’ll talk about the differences in their approaches and where each tool fits in the landscape of project management software. Jira Just a heads up, both Jira, and Trello belong to the company called Atlassian. While Atlassian acquired Trello, Jira has been their creation from the start.  Because one of my direct responsibilities is working with updating our website feature-wise, we have used Jira for this purpose because all our developers are used to the interface, workflow, and time tracking. 5 things I like about Jira 3 Jira disadvantages One Jira bonus is that it’s […]

Last year, Starbucks made headlines for closing over 8,000 stores to conduct anti-bias training in response to a racial bias scandal. It was a very visible event that many argue ultimately meant little. Starbucks’s response to this discrimination, mandatory training, is a common response to social injustice in the business world. Unfortunately, bias and sensitivity training is as ineffective as it is popular. Why is bias training so popular if it’s proven to be so ineffective? And what should businesses do to address bias and discrimination instead? The answers, while not always the easy way, can make a positive impact on employees and the business as a whole. Why Training is an Appealing Approach Trainings are a very standard way of addressing bias within a business. In a survey of HR management and talent management professionals, nearly half identified some form of training as the primary method of teaching employees and/or managers about bias. In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, it shouldn’t be surprising that “more training” is the answer to many obstacles, workplace issues, and company evolutions. Continued learning has become central to the HR and talent management playbook, with many HR products incorporating content like bias trainings as standard […]

As anyone in the recruiting space knows, the winter season, and December in particular, is a relatively quiet time for hiring. However, hiring will inevitably pick up again with the new year, and the race for top talent is a year-round marathon. Your overall experiences with recruiting and applicant tracking may have also changed in the last 5 to 10 years. The impetus has shifted from job seekers to find their top job opportunities to recruiters to attract the top talent in your fields in an increasingly competitive hiring market. Ad hoc manual approaches to recruiting increasingly risk letting your ideal candidate fall through the cracks or have a better application experience with your competitors. To help you kick off the next recruiting season right, we’ve created a Buyer’s Guide to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). The goal of the guide is to give you the core information you need on 8 widely used ATS providers, based primarily on insights from other users. We also break down some of the most important trends and evolutions in the recruiting space that can differentiate passable recruiting from winning the talent race. Important Trends to Consider for Your New ATS Recruiting needs vary dramatically […]

The PaaS computing model is usually thought of as being deployed in a public cloud, e.g., computing services provided over the Internet by third-party providers. For example, customers subscribing to NetSuite or Salesforce usually access these applications over the public cloud. But this is not the only model.  Public cloud  A public cloud is the provision of computing services over the public Internet. Public cloud services are usually sold on-demand and help companies avoid the high cost of purchasing and maintaining an on-premise data center.  > Shifts CapEx to OpEx and supports multiple tenants  > Offers a Pay-as-You-Go Model  Private cloud  A private cloud is provided to a single organization rather than the general public. It offers the same advantages of scalability, resource utilization, and self-service as the public cloud, but is provided in a data center operated either by the organization itself or a third party. > Leverages existing CapEx and can help reduce OpEx  > Intended for a Single Tenant  Hybrid Cloud  Hybrid deployments are a combination of on-premise, private cloud, and third-party public cloud services. Resources are orchestrated between the two clouds by management and automation software. > Bridges one or more private, public, or community clouds […]