Amanda Hawthorne joined the Managed Solution team as a Corporate Talent Manager on October 28, 2015. Amanda spent the last few years working HR at another tech firm in San Diego. She studied Human Development at UC Davis and is currently wrapping up an HR Certificate at UCSD Extension. Amanda is passionate about all things corporate culture and looks forward to supporting the team at Managed Solution.
Amanda was born in sunny California, but grew up in the suburbs of Atlanta. She returned to the West (Best) Coast in 2004. Out of the office, Amanda enjoys taking advantage of San Diego's craft beer and music scenes and loves spending time with her lab-mix, Mayla. She's a novice gardener and proudly grew her first tomatoes this summer. Another fun fact about Amanda is that she was a volunteer doula in college and has assisted in ~20 labor/deliveries.
Please join me in welcoming Amanda Hawthorne to the Managed Solution team!
At Managed Solution, we strive to be the best technology based company by investing in our top assets; our people - CAREERS
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Jet.com - E-commerce challenger eyes the top spot, runs on the Microsoft cloud
Marc Lore is perhaps best known as the creator of the popular e-commerce site Diapers.com, which was eventually sold to Amazon. Now, the entrepreneur and his team are ready to compete head-on with the e-retailing giant through an innovative online marketplace called Jet.com. To get up and running quickly, Jet built its entire e-commerce platform, including development and delivery infrastructure, on Microsoft Azure, using both .NET and open-source technologies.
Business Challenge
In 2010, Marc Lore sold his company Quidsi (which ran e-retailing sites like Diapers.com and Soap.com) to Amazon for $550 million. Four years later, Marc is competing against Amazon directly—with the creation of a new online marketplace called Jet.com.
There are many reasons to think that Lore might just pull it off. For one, he plans to eliminate any margins from product sales. The company’s only source of revenue will come from membership dues, eliminating the kind of mark-ups that Amazon charges and passing the savings on to the customer. In addition, an innovative pricing engine will work to reduce or eliminate costs in the e-commerce value chain, especially fulfillment costs and marketplace commissions.
“Our pricing engine will continually work out the most cost-effective way to fulfill an order from merchant locations closest to the consumer,’ explains Lore, Co-Founder and CEO of Jet. “The engine will also figure out which merchants can fulfill most cheaply by putting multiple requested items into one shipment. And so we can cut probably 10 percent of a cost of a typical e-commerce transaction just by being smarter about fulfillment.”
With a value proposition like that, the company is confidently looking forward to explosive growth. “We want to be one of the leading e-commerce destinations in a very short period of time—18 to 36 months,” says Mike Hanrahan, CTO at Jet.
To fuel that growth, Jet was able to quickly secure more than $220 million in financing. Meanwhile, aggressive marketing has already created a user base of more than 400,000 customers—even before the site launched.
Next step: find the right cloud partner to support the company’s ambitious growth plan. “We realized that we simply did not have the resources to build and manage the kind of datacenters and development infrastructure to meet our growth strategy,” says Hanrahan. “So we quickly decided on a cloud model.”
Solution
The decision to work with Microsoft Azure was driven, in part, by the .NET development platform—and Visual F# in particular—which was a good fit with the microservices architecture used to build Jet. As Hanrahan explains, “The event-driven, microservices paradigm eliminated a lot of the overhead that comes with a service-oriented architecture such as Amazon uses, meaning that everyone can build all their systems in parallel and then publish and subscribe to an event bus. We found that F# works very well with this paradigm, especially the immutable data streams that are a key part of our microservices architecture.”
The Microsoft Visual Studio development system is the primary IDE for back-end infrastructure, with Node being used on the front end. To get its code through development and into production as fast as possible, Jet uses a mix of Azure App Service, Azure Web Roles and custom servers, with deployment happening from Jenkins.
Jet also has many open-source middleware components, which it runs on Azure Virtual Machines, including Elasticsearch, RedisLabs, Hadoop, and Event Store—an open-source event-sourcing data store.
Jet is taking advantage of several other Azure services to streamline its development processes. For example, to make it easier for merchant partners to integrate with the platform, it has created a developer portal for its APIs using Azure API Management.
Jet is also using Azure Key Vault to store encryption keys as well as Azure Application Insights, which will provide real-time alerts to its developers to help them identify and triage problems as they occur. Application Insights also enables Jet to learn, in real time, how customers are using their application, so they can implement an agile build-measure-learn cycle.
“Being able to leverage so many off-the-shelf services and tools from Azure enabled us to go from zero to a full- fledged e-commerce marketplace in just about 12 months. That same system would have taken us at least two years to build on our own, plus capex costs,” says Hanrahan.
The company also relies on other Microsoft cloud services to run its day-to-day business, including Office 365 and Azure Active Directory. In fact, Jet’s entire operation is now run in the cloud using Azure. “We have no servers at all onsite right now, not a single one,” says Hanrahan.
Benefits
Working with Microsoft Azure cloud services has provided Jet with a level of flexibility and scalability that has been critical to its aggressive development schedule.
Moving from code to production in minutes.
By using App Service for its consumer front end, Jet has been able to dramatically streamline its development process, so that it can build, deploy, and scale consumer-grade web apps more rapidly. As Hanrahan says, “We’ve been able to get our critical code through our CI/CD process in a couple of minutes using App Service.”
Scaling automatically to meet customer demand
As with any popular e-retailing site, Jet requires extremely rapid and flexible scaling based on ever-changing customer traffic. To streamline this process, Jet was able to set up auto-scaling on both PaaS servers and App Service to scale its servers based on load or schedule. “Because both PaaS and App Service scale automatically for us, we are able to throw as many machines as we need at the front end, when we need them,” says Hanrahan.
As the company grows, Azure provides a wide range of storage options to handle virtually any amount of data. “Right now our data warehouse sits in a SQL Server instance, but we will be augmenting that using HD Insight,” says Hanrahan. Azure HDInsight is designed to handle any amount of data, scaling from terabytes to petabytes on demand.
With Azure, Jet has created a cloud infrastructure that’s ready to meet the company’s most ambitious growth plans. “To be one of the best e-commerce destinations in the US, we will have to handle millions of customers, placing tens of thousands of orders a day. That requires a top-class e-commerce system built on a flexible, open cloud platform. That is exactly what we got with Azure,” says Hanrahan.
Technological innovation is radically changing how and where we choose to work, live and play, essentially forcing us to rethink the built environment—and our place in it.
From broad access to WiFi and the ubiquity of smartphones to ever-lighter laptops and more powerful tablet devices, technology has created an inextricably connected world. With the virtual barrier between work and home all but gone, the way we think about real estate is fundamentally changing, says Elie Finegold, senior vice president of global innovation and business intelligence at CBRE.
“This industrial-era concept that there is a separation between work and home is becoming increasingly less relevant,” says Finegold. “Because you can work from anywhere, space has become more fungible.”
Finegold, an innovator and entrepreneur with expertise in real estate and technology, says there are three emerging trends reshaping the way people will use real estate in the future.
1. Radical mobility
The ability of people and machines to work from anywhere is transforming the utilization of traditional spaces. “If you conduct a survey and ask people, ‘Have you worked in a living room, a bedroom, a plane, an office, an elevator, somebody else’s house—even a bathroom?’ everyone is going to answer yes to almost every one of them,” Finegold says.
“There’s a whole set of tasks that were once capable of only being done in an office that we can now do from anywhere, and though working face-to-face with others will likely never become obsolete, companies are going to be looking for much more adaptable real estate frameworks as a way of managing both flex in the workforce and the diversity of working habits,” he adds.
By 2020, 40 percent of workers in the U.S. will be self-employed as freelancers, contractors or temp employees, which will further affect the role—and primacy—of traditional office space, says Finegold.
2. Collaborative economy
As people increasingly choose to share and crowdsource goods, services, funding and transportation, the real estate market must adapt to new ways of distributing demands, Finegold says.
The sharing economy created affordable solutions for consumers during the Great Recession and has offered unique income streams for people who need extra cash or more flexible work situations. For instance, Airbnb and Uber have enabled people to turn their homes and vehicles into sources of income.
As people migrate to cities, they may prefer to rent apartments or cars rather than own them. Similarly, if more people are going into business for themselves as freelancers or contractors, the demand for coworking spaces could outweigh the need for traditional office space.
3. Transportation revolution
The rise of autonomous vehicles and transportation—self-driving cars, multi-modal trucking, distribution drones, etc.—coupled with collaborative models like Uber, will make it easier for people and goods to move around more freely. It may also ultimately change infrastructure needs, Finegold says, cutting down on the number of cars on the road or in parking lots at any given moment, while simultaneously creating a competitive market for space utilization.
“There will be huge opportunities for redevelopment of spaces previously used for personal vehicles, from streetside parking spots to multilevel parking decks,” Finegold says.
While some of these trends may be in the distant future, aspects of all three already exist, and they are quickly creating new modes for people to access real estate, Finegold says.
“If you take all of these things together, they are breaking down traditional work/life balances and changing the real estate landscape,” Finegold says. “Companies are attracted to places where there are live/work opportunities for employees.”
Contact Us & See How Today’s Technology is Shaping the Real Estate Industry of Tomorrow 800-293-6593
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Watch Microsoft Mechanics for Power BI updates
On October 22, 2015 marks the launch of Microsoft Mechanics, an official new show and video platform for IT professionals and tech enthusiasts. Shows comprise informative demos, how-tos and insights from the engineers and tech leaders behind our technology each Wednesday or as news breaks, all in around ten or so minutes.
Beyond the news and blog announcements, it’ll help you to see the technology for yourself, get broader context and understand the potential application so that you can decide whether or not to explore further.
Massive Growth Pushes Managed Solution onto SD Largest Biz List
The San Diego Business Journal named Managed Solution the 66th largest private company in San Diego in 2015
San Diego, CA – November 05, 2015 – Managed Solution announced today that the company has been recognized by the San Diego Business Journal as one of the Largest Private Companies in 2015. (link to list)
As a highly honored and tenured managed services company and pioneer in managed, utility-based cloud computing, Managed Solution is now the 66th largest private company in San Diego, according to the San Diego Business Journal. Managed Solution is also recognized this year in the World’s Top 100 Cloud Computing Companies in the Talkin' Cloud IT Channel list, on Penton Technology’s eighth-annual MSPmentor 501 Global Edition and as one of the Top Managed Service Providers in Pioneer 250.
“We are excited to be part of this esteemed list of local enterprises and appreciate the recognition of its hard work by the SDBJ,” said Sean Ferrel, chief executive officer, Managed Solution. As a part of the dynamic business community here in San Diego, we are a technology company that empowers business, investing in them like none other. We will continue to be committed to the success of our clients and we are excited to work with companies using today’s cutting edge technology to shape the business of tomorrow.
Along with caring for our customers, much of Managed Solution’s growth can be attributed to our dedication to our employees and the community. Managed solution prides itself on workplace culture and participates in dozens of events in the community per year. “At Managed Solution, it’s not jut about bringing the latest and greatest technologies to businesses and government in the South West US, it’s also about giving back, particularly in education so our children will be prepared for the technology environment of the business world as they enter into adulthood.” Said Ferrel.
San Diego Business Journal’s Largest Private Companies List honors privately-held companies that demonstrate the highest annual revenue figures from 2014.
About Managed Solution
Managed Solution is the premier provider of outsourced IT support and managed services for small to large size businesses. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California. Managed Solution continues to deliver award-winning services paired with leading business technologies to assist clients in running their business efficiently.
For more information on Managed Solution’s community outreach visit our community page.
More Women Are Choosing Software Development Jobs
More and more women are choosing software development jobs- but how can the IT industry keep them there? As written by Jennifer S. on nhsocal.com
It's not much of a secret that the IT world is a bit of a boys club. This is even more true for software development and programming. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study in 2014 found that more than 80 percent of American software developers were male. That's not just a small majority; that's an enormous gender inequality problem.
More women breaking the glass ceiling
But despite this extreme imbalance, more women are choosing programming careers. Although the entire industry is about 80 percent male, 42 percent of software developers with less than one year's experience are now women.
This survey of 855 developers, recently conducted by the Application Developers Alliance and International Data Corporation, also reported that this percentage of women as new-hires corresponded with female enrollment in computer science programs and corporate computer training courses. That means this isn't just a fluke, but rather a trend of more women being comfortable with going into IT.
What are the hurdles and how should women overcome them?
Although this trend of more women going into software development is certainly good to see in terms of gender equality, there's still a long way to go. Women seem to be leaving the industry in droves, much more than their male counterparts. The Harvard Business Review reported on a Center for Talent Innovation study that found women working in science, engineering and technology are 45 percent more likely to leave the industry than the men in these particular fields.
So why are they quitting? The CTI study also states that 44 percent of women in SET fields feel that without female role models in executive positions, they must "behave like a man" to move up the corporate ladder. Along with problems in advancement, women in technical jobs also don't seem to be happy with their pay. About 30 percent of women leaving the industry are doing so because of work conditions such as low salary and no advancement.
That being said, there are greater numbers of options for women to earn more and get promoted to a position where they can become a role model within IT versus other fields, especially when they have IT certifications.
A joint survey conducted by Network World and SolarWinds in 2011 found that out of 700 IT professionals, 56 percent stated that a certification lead to a salary bump while 28.8 percent said it leads to a promotion. This survey showed that any woman who wants to earn more and advance higher in the world of IT should seriously consider a computer-based training certification. New Horizons Computer Learning Centers of Southern California is a great place to find education ranging from basic computer training all the way to specific training like CompTIA certifications.
Healthcare Technology Firm Launches New Perioperative Solution on Microsoft Azure
Talis Clinical wanted to make an innovative anesthesia information management system more widely available, so it redesigned the application to run in the cloud on Microsoft Azure. Called ACG-Anesthesia, the patient-centric solution provides centralized, automated visibility into patient risk factors and changing physiologic conditions from the decision to perform surgery through recovery.
In addition, built-in advanced clinical guidance and evidence-based care protocols empower physicians to more effectively manage all phases of perioperative care.
Making healthcare smarter
Sharing data quickly and accurately across multiple processes is important for all businesses, but nowhere is it more critical than in a hospital setting where the right information at the right time can mean the difference between life and death. Among the most critical events in patient care is the intraoperative episode, where the anesthesia care team must simultaneously monitor and react to multiple physiological parameters.
To address those challenges, an application was developed and implemented at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic that integrates data from patient monitors, medical devices, and electronic health records (EHR) to provide centralized insight and multiparameter decision support. The anesthesia system was already being used in more than 270 operating rooms when the development team and an experienced medical entrepreneur decided to establish a new firm called Talis Clinical and offer the solution to other healthcare organizations.
Talis immediately began expanding the scope of the anesthesia system to include preoperative and postoperative events. In addition to improving patient care and safety, the extended solution would help healthcare providers get more value from the electronic health records (EHR) systems that many organizations had installed and augmented to satisfy recent regulations. Gary Colister, Chief Executive Officer of Talis, explains, “EHR technology alone does not provide the level of vigilance needed in perioperative care; it mostly enables the clinical team to record what happens.”
Moving to the cloud
Talis spent a year looking at an array of cloud platforms from specialized medical platforms to large commercial vendors. The new company decided that Microsoft Azure was the best choice for commercializing its application. “We went through all of these evaluations, and then we actually realized that we’re a Microsoft shop, with all of our technology built on a Microsoft platform,” says Colister. “We’re also moving very fast, and we needed to make sure that not only the individual pieces of software we deployed had the necessary robustness, but that our cloud partner had a deep awareness of our technology stack. It really came down to that support.”
Using the Microsoft Visual Studio development system, including Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Talis redesigned its anesthesiology solution to run in the cloud on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. The highly scalable, flexible environment provides a range of benefits, including easy integration with virtually any endpoint including diverse EHRs and medical devices. On the back end, Talis gained similar advantages, including support for its databases, which ran on Linux operating systems.
The solution, called ACG-Anesthesia, continuously collects patient data such as heart rate and blood pressure, and provides real-time, clinical views of specific patient conditions in multiple rooms. It also includes electronic case summaries and hand-off checklists so that comprehensive information can be shared efficiently with all members of a medical team. ACG-Anesthesia automatically pulls data from Talis clinical products, medical devices, EHRs, lab systems, pharmacies, and more.
In the operating room, the anesthesia care team uses an intuitive touchscreen to access and record information. Elsewhere, the supervising physician can use a mobile device to remotely monitor multiple rooms staffed by nurses or other members of the care team. In addition to providing a way to monitor patient health through a central interface, the solution pushes real-time alerts to devices including tablets and smartphones. It can be customized for a wide range of scenarios, including general, cardiac, and pediatric care.
Built-in clinical guidance supports complex decisions by calculating multiple parameters and events. As a result, the solution can alert caregivers to potential adverse conditions and reactions. And besides providing operational and clinical guidance at the point of care, ACG-Anesthesia helps hospitals collect and report data required by healthcare reform acts and other regulations.
Talis is also migrating other clinical products to the cloud, including a portal that establishes and measures protocols for preoperative testing and image-based, documentation technology that is used for assessment before anesthesia is administered. Both products are already integrated with ACG-Anesthesia. Brought to market in just two years, the suite is available across North America.
Improving healthcare
By taking advantage of Microsoft Azure, Talis Clinical can help medical organizations throughout North America improve patient care and safety at all stages of treatment and recovery.
Provides better support for innovation
With the Microsoft cloud, Talis was able to launch an innovative product that can help hospitals improve performance. “We have determined that Microsoft Azure can help us serve clients better than other traditional platforms,” says Colister. “We want our clients to feel like we can deliver the highest level of service that they expect. To be able to provide insights that help clinicians be more vigilant and at the same time produce legal documentation for compliance—that’s a big achievement in our space.”
Improves patient outcome
By providing timely, relevant data through remote apps and devices, Talis can help clinicians improve patient care. “The perioperative surgical care model is being studied at a lot of prominent medical centers around the country, and it emphasizes continuity and measuring patient information from the preop to surgery, subsequent physical therapy, and beyond discharge” says Karen Alexander, Vice President of Business Intelligence at Talis Clinical. “With Microsoft Azure, we can build the technology to implement this new care model and improve patient outcomes.”
Increases clinical efficiency
Talis is also improving workflow for hospital staff, which frees up valuable time where it matters most. “We’re talking to clinicians who tell us that our product saves them an hour each day in documentation, and it also reduces downtime because it’s more accurate,” Colister says. “With Microsoft technology, we’re creating solutions that make physicians more productive so that they can take better care of patients.”
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
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With the competitiveness of the real estate industry, agents need to utilize current technology to give them a strategic edge. Real estate agents are constantly on the go showing properties and meeting with clients, so they need a reliable device that offers unified communications and messaging to keep everyone up to date. Why Are Realtors Using Surface Devices? Surface Pro 3 is a lightweight, versatile device that helps facilitate productive face-to-face conversations to address customer needs and cement new relationships. This device helps realtors deepen customer loyalty by providing features and tools that serve their customers in a timely and personal way.
The Surface Pro has been said to be one of the most productive devices for realtors. It brings together the best of the tablet and laptop while providing portable, fast, full HD display. Some realtors who have already adopted to Surface Pro said they loved Surface, as they realized they no longer needed their heavy laptops and their lighter but limited iPads.
10 Reasons Realtors Are Using Surface Devices
Portability helps agents be productive anywhere by easily converting from a laptop to tablet when it’s time to head to a meeting or listing.
Long and powerful battery life is reassuring for agents because they could work remotely longer without having to plug-in.
Agents are able to pull up data instantly and effortlessly with Instant-on functionality. This makes it easier when researching property records and listings.
Agents can open multiple documents side by side to show clients different listings or compare market analysis.
Agents stay organized by using the pen to mark-up property listings and photos with drawings and notes. One click of your Pen opens OneNote3 so you can capture and sync your notes and doodles effortlessly.
The Surface Pen is highly responsive and lets you write, draw, and sketch on a pressure-sensitive display. Agents utilize this feature when discussing goals with clients and could provide an interactive experience.
Agents can be creative by utilizing the design apps to produce appealing property photos and listings.
Agents can show information to clients anywhere for better customer acquisition and retention.
Agents can Print or add storage with USB port and even collect signatures directly from the screen.
Agents can keep clients satisfied by using cutting edge technology and a personalized experience so they’ll keep using you again and again.
Managed Solution has years of experience deploying and implementing Microsoft technologies as a Microsoft Gold Partner. We work hand in hand with Microsoft to provide our clients with the most up-to-date technology solutions that drive innovation, productivity, and increased revenue.
Not only is Managed Solution proud to be a Microsoft Gold Partner, but also a digital adviser for real estate industries. For more information on real estate workflow solutions contact Managed Solution at 800-550-3795.
Contact Us & See How Today’s Technology is Shaping the Real Estate Industry of Tomorrow 800-293-6593
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