Business and Marketing

The enterprise service bus, that is. New applications added to its platform promise access to custom solutions employed by large enterprises.

Lyris favors an open cloud environment.

Lyris today announced three in a promised series of “mini applications” that will allow its users to configure custom solutions by using enterprise service bus (ESB) approaches employed by large enterprises. The additions to its platform, Lyris says, will give all marketers the flexibility to choose, configure, and swap out application components with their own alternatives, or ones provided by Lyris or other technology vendors.

“The reality is that most marketing clouds are walled gardens not based on open standards, but on proprietary API scripting standards that are expensive and difficult to maintain. You need to rely on the vendor or app developers in order to tailor solutions to your business needs,” says Lyris CMO Alex Lustberg. “Marketers need to get set up quickly and so they go with a Salesforce or an Oracle that can be used out of the box. But they end up only using 10% to 20% of its capabilities. They are forced to make a choice of the least worst system.”

The three mini applications introduced by Lyris include:

• A data mapper to connect rich customer data and intelligence between Lyris and third-party cloud systems like Salesforce;


• a reputation monitor that does email scoring and enhances workflow capabilities;


• and a set of automatically generated engagement analytics that augment customer profiles with data from email interactions.

“Marketers need out-of-box solutions to get started, but when they want to do custom integration, how do they get it done?” posits Akin Arikan, Lyris's senior director of product marketing. “We didn't invent this architecture. For companies that don't have this underlying technology, our solution gives them a point-and-drag, visual way to configure new applications.”

Lustberg points out that marketers will require some minimal assistance from IT to master the system, but promises that on-staff marketing technologists are not necessary.

Business Breaking News: Top 7 Samsung Galaxy Apps for Business

Samsung makes some best business phones and tablets around. And now the company has launched a revamped app store for those devices that's filled with productivity-boosting applications. Galaxy Apps is a unique app store that has plenty of overlap with Google Play, but also boasts many options you won't find in the Google's app directory. If you own a Samsung phone like the Galaxy S5 or a tablet like the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, read on for seven of the best business and productivity apps in the Galaxy Apps store.

Business Calendar (Free)

The appropriately named Business Calendar might be the best calendar app available for business users on Samsung smartphones. The app lets you quickly zero in on specific chunks of your schedule by dragging your finger over multiple days, shrinking the view to include only those days. From there you can add or subtract days to get the optimal view of your upcoming week. It's also easy to toggle between day, week, month and year views. And Business Calendar features tons of options for setting reminders so you won't be late for an important appointment, and allows you to set up recurring alerts for those weekly business meetings.

Commodity Online News: Aluminium hit 16 month high after China s data lifted outlook