Archive for the 'Industry Events' Category

E-Pay Innovator Drives Mobile Commerce in Developing Countries

Published on May 23, 2013 in Events, Industry Events, Layered Technologies, LT News, PCI Compliance, Strategic Partners and Technology Bits. 0 Comments
Posted by Steve Chu

It was a pleasure to serve as a judge for the e-Pay Innovation award at the recent ETA Expo in New Orleans, LA. The winner of the $10,000 award was Trak for developing technology aimed at moving Brazil’s population from a paper payment system to a more efficient electronic format.

The ETA Technology Committee oversaw the event, which was part of the 2013 Annual Event and Expo in New Orleans. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided funding for the winner of the e-Pay Innovation Award and offered scholarships for several startup companies to exhibit in the Payments Next Zone section of the Expo.

The focus of the event was to find startup companies that have a unique payment solution to offer to the unserved and underserved populations of developing countries. The Gates Foundation has a core belief that the developing populations around the world can rise out of poverty much faster if they have access to technology. Electronic payment technology can quickly replace ancient barter systems and rapidly increase commerce, especially in countries where the masses are just now gaining access to mobile phones.

The winning Trak system presents a unique electronic method for processing Beleto transactions in Brazil. Beleto is an old way of presenting paper invoices to the end-use customer who then physically presents payment at the merchant’s bank. The Trak Beleto incorporates a smartphone app that stores customer- and merchant-account information and provides a faster, more streamlined way of completing transactions. Trak is using the Beleto offering in Brazil as a proof of concept to bring to other countries that have no advanced method of conducting transactions beyond old fashioned bartering systems.

The ETA Technology Committee will continue working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to discover innovative payment solutions that can be brought to the unserved and underserved populations around the world. The next event will be at the ETA Strategic Leadership Forum which will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona in October. I would welcome the opportunity to continue serving as a judge on this distinguished panel. It was an honor to meet the legends, entrepreneurs and visionaries in the payment industry who have developed unique and beneficial offerings. And I look forward to watching the evolution of these great ideas as they come to fruition and become available to the masses.

About the Author: As Regional Sales Manager for Layered Tech, Steve Chu (@stevendkchu) brings over 9 years of experience to the Payment and PCI Compliant Hosting industry. His background prior to Layered Tech was with HMS/Micros Systems, which provides a point-of-sale solution for the hospitality industry, and also with global IT consulting firm, Sogeti Capgemini.

Tips to Guard Against Hacks and Attacks

Published on April 29, 2013 in Events, Industry Events, Industry Expert, Layered Technologies, Security, Security News and Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Posted by Jeff Reich

I attended the 2013 InnoTech San Antonio Technology Innovation Conference & Expo on April 17th. InnoTech is the region’s largest business-to-business technology event.

This conference has grown to the point of needing to move to the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

Along with the tracks offered in Mobility, Women in Tech, Infrastructure, Big Data with Analytics and IT Leadership, I participated in the Cyber Security Symposium. I moderated a panel of experts on Security – It’s All About Perspective. The panel had representation from corporate leaders, consultants and higher education. The panel members were Mark Krisak, Director of Information Security, HEB; Chip Meadows, Sr. Security Analyst, UTSA; Joe Oranday, Vice President, Enterprise Information Security, Frost; Steve Werby, President and Senior Information Security Consultant, Befriend.

We had a lively discussion with the audience of around 100 people. Even though we discussed technology and some of the newer techniques to deal with hacks and attacks, the takeaway from the gathered experience on the panel was to focus on the basics. When the panelists were asked what the one best thing was that an organization can do to protect itself, the answers were:

Keep your patches current
Focus on user security awareness training
Deliver metrics on your program to track progress and get support
Work with your users

These solutions are not new and do not require deep technical knowledge. I think we can all learn a lot from these experts.

I will be presenting a session on Hacktivism at the 2013 ETA Annual Meeting & Expo on April 30th through May 2nd in New Orleans, LA. I hope to see you there.

About the Author: As Chief Risk Officer at Layered Tech, Jeff Reich (@LayeredTechCRO, +Jeff Reich) drives the company’s security and compliance services and guides risk mitigation efforts for clients. With more than 30 years of experience, Reich is a well-known risk management and security expert in the industry. He holds CRISC, CISSP and CHS-III certifications and is an ISSA Distinguished Fellow.

CA Announces AppLogic 3.0

Published on July 27, 2011 in Cloud Computing, Grid Computing, Hosting Industry, Industry Events, Infrastructure and Strategic Partners. Closed
Posted by Kevin Van Mondfrans

This week CA Technologies announced Applogic 3.0. This comes after VMware announced vCloud Director 1.5 and Citrix acquired Cloud.com. This was an exciting month of events for the leading Cloud OS platforms. This is interesting to Layered Tech and our customers because this illustrates the rapid maturing of cloud platform technologies. It exemplifies that these technologies initially targeted to service providers like Layered Tech are also adopting many of the capabilities enterprises are looking for to build out private, hybrid and secure multi-tenant cloud environments.

Today, Layered Tech utilizes both CA Technologies AppLogic and VMware vSphere to provide unique multitenant and private cloud services to our customers. We have long standing relationships with both companies and are one of the original adopters of 3Tera AppLogic before server virtualization, orchestration and automation was called Cloud. As one of the early adopters of the AppLogic 1.0 platform, we have a unique insight and relationship with CA Technologies. I would like to share a few thoughts regarding the latest release.

The CA AppLogic 3.0 cloud computing platform continues its focus to innovate on the application deployment layer with its intuitive drag and drop application deployment interface. The visual interface, which is the hallmark of AppLogic, continues to differentiate this platform from the others. AppLogic enables complete deployment of entire application environments including virtual load balancers, firewalls, web servers, application server and databases in a single motion.

Among significant new enhancements, AppLogic has added the capability to support:

1) vLAN tagging to further enable private networking and VPN;

2) Role-based user access to further separate observers, operators, admins and owners access levels and to improve security;

3) Support of OVF (Open Virtualization Format) standard to facilitate the import of Xen and VMware workloads from outside the Cloud;

4) Enhanced cloud operation with the global fabric controller to further automate the maintenance and addition of resources and the enrichment of usage metering capabilities

These are interesting enhancements, and enable a broader set of use cases for our customers with privacy requirement and who want to migrate VMware and Xen environments to the cloud.

Our broad portfolio of managed hosting services includes on-demand multi-tenant cloud services, dedicated virtual and physical environment, and compliance services. With the AppLogic platform we offer Virtual Private Servers (VPS) which is a multi-tenant public cloud with on-demand user portal, and Virtual Private Data Centers (VPDC), which are dedicated cloud environments and give you complete customization and admin access. In addition, we offer additional cloud services to meet enterprise high availability and compliance challenges.

Layered Tech applauds the advancements by CA Technologies, VMware and Citrix and we remain dedicate to offering the latest best of breed technologies with excellent service and support.

About the Author: As Vice President of Product Management at Layered Tech, Kevin Van Mondfrans (@VANMONDFRANS | +Kevin Van Mondfrans) is responsible for driving the Layered Tech portfolio of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and managed service offerings. With more than 20 years of experience product development and marketing, Kevin has been delivering innovative computing, storage, cloud and service offering with companies such as HP, Dell, and Savvis.

Layered Tech Sponsors Southwest’s First Multi-platform Web Conference

Published on August 24, 2010 in Events, Industry Events and LT News. Closed
Posted by Tom Eagle

Layered Tech is proud to be a sponsor of OpenCamp, the Southwest’s first multi-platform Web conference. Created by the same people who started WordCamp Dallas and DrupalCamp Dallas, OpenCamp takes place Friday, Aug. 27 through Sunday, Aug. 29 at the Addison Crown Plaza Hotel, located at 14315 Midway Road, Addison, TX 75001.

So, you may think that we’re blogging about a blogging event…that’s only partially true! OpenCamp is much more than a blogging event – it’s dedicated to the concept of removing both real and artificial barriers to bring together Webmasters, Web developers, bloggers, podcasters and social media enthusiasts, regardless of the tools they use, the medium in which they provide content, or the topics upon which they focus. There’s never been an event like this, so you won’t want to miss it.

We’d love to see you there and have you experience the many sessions that OpenCamp has arranged. Some of the industry’s top experts will present on topics ranging from social media to technical development, content creation, revenue generation and more. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, and .NET sessions will also be available, and there will be tracks that will appeal to all attendees.

Layered Tech will have a booth onsite, so be sure to stop by and learn about our latest and greatest news and offerings. If you are attending, be sure to check your attendee bag for a special offer from Layered Tech!

OpenCamp is going to be BIG…they are expecting well over 600 attendees. And to kick things off right in a Texas-sized fashion, be sure to attend Friday night’s huge opening event. At 7:30 p.m., the U.S. Army Golden Knights will do an amazing exhibition jump. You won’t want to miss this – a squadron of our country’s finest will parachute in formation, complete with smoke and pyrotechnics. Like we said, this is much, much more than a blogging event!

To learn more about OpenCamp or to register, visit the OpenCamp website at http://openca.mp/. We hope to see you there!

We Launch New Partner Program and Give Channel Members Tools to Deliver Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing

Published on March 22, 2010 in Hosting Industry, Industry Events, Layered Technologies and LT News. Closed
Posted by Tom Eagle

Viva Las Vegas! We recently returned from a successful trip to the Channel Partners Conference & Expo 2010 in Las Vegas, where we launched our new partner program. It’s designed to give our partners all of the resources they need to deliver advanced dedicated hosting, virtualization and cloud computing infrastructures to enterprise customers. Our program is based on solution sets and added services so partners can engage more customers and shorten the sales cycle.

Being a Channel Partners exhibitor was great. We talked with hundreds of prospective partners about infrastructure solutions and their customers’ growing interest in cloud computing. Partners use our support to expand their offerings with cloud computing services, so rather than having a partner program just based on reseller discounts, we dove deeper and built a revitalized program that gives partners the tools they need to present Layered Tech services, explain their benefits and sell them in a way that shortens the partner’s time to revenue. We want strong and ambitious partners who, like Layered Tech, sell upstream to enterprises. Most of all, we want to help our partner community deliver value-creating cloud computing services to their customers because we believe that doing so will strengthen their customer relationships.

Our program gives each partner dedicated account managers, sales engineers and project managers to answer questions and provide customized support. When partners log into our new feature-rich Partner Portal (available soon), it automatically applies the proper pricing, discounts and special offers based on their silver, gold or platinum status.

Our Partner Portal will also feature:

Automated online ordering to streamline selling
Joint marketing materials so partners can reach more customers and explain the new offerings
Training resources such as webinars to engage more customers
Deal registration so partners can easily register special deals to increase sales

We are committed to building our partner program and working with you to provide the support you need to succeed in expanding your offerings. If you’re interested in delivering our solutions as value-added services within your own core business, we’d love to partner with you!