Webinar spam

by Ken Anderberg

Every day, my Outlook inbox fills up with invitations to attend a variety of webinars. Here is a recent two-day sampling of topics covered by these online events: disaster recovery, workload automation, deduplication, aligning ITSM strategies, improving security, monitoring user activity, customer identity protection and IT automation. Who has the time?

Why am I so blessed to receive so many invitations, perhaps 10 to 15 every day? Simply because I am subscribed to several technology magazines, a situation I suspect is similar for a large percentage of Communications News' audience. There are a lot of technology-related magazines out there, as most of you know. Some, like this one, cover a myriad of topics important to IT management, and others focus on vertical segments, such as security or telephony.

Every time you sign up for one of these magazines, however, you also are signing up to receive e-mail invitations to attend Web seminars or virtual trade shows. (Note: Communications News does not conduct webinars, so we don't pester our subscribers with e-mails to attend.) And you don't just receive one such invitation per event; they keep coming until you sign up to attend and even more after the event has been held.

Why are they pushing you so hard to sign up for these events? First of all, these are commercial ventures, with sponsors signed on and participating in the presentations. These sponsors generally are guaranteed a certain number of attendees, so the publications keep bombarding their subscribers with e-mail promotions until enough people sign up. The sponsors receive the list of all attendees and generally follow up with calls or e-mails to sell their products or services to what are considered interested buyers.

I have participated in several such Web events, including one virtual trade show. My experiences, however, have been less than satisfactory. The webinars I have sampled lacked useful, hands-on information, often being more infomercial than educational. Even the stated interactive benefit of these is suspect, as you can pose questions to the presenters, but there is no guarantee an answer will be given. The process is kind of like sending a query into a dark room and hoping a voice responds with a useful answer.

Not all of these online events are the same, of course. I've only sampled a few. The ones I'm now ignoring in my inbox might be worthwhile, or they could still be a waste of time. I'll never know, because now these messages have become spam. Delete.

Ken Anderberg

kanderberg@comnews.com

COPYRIGHT 2008 Nelson Publishing
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

Radiant Logic launches RadiantOne Virtual Context Server

Thursday, 11 September 2008 08:25 Editor

Radiant Logic recently introduced its RadiantOne Virtual Context Server (VCS) that expands upon Radiant Logic’s identity virtualization platform. By extracting contextual information buried in application silos, RadiantOne VCS enables better integration of business processes.

RadiantOne VCS publishes information out of application silos by dynamically generating English sentences out of application metadata. Those sentences are organized into meaningful views acting as contextual links across business processes. This enables information to be searched, retrieved across application silos and updated in the right context.

As noted by Forrester Research’s report, Information-As-A-Service: Delivering Real-Time Information Drives Market Toward Mainstream on May 2, 2008, “Enterprises increasingly need the ability to search information across the organization more easily and quickly to meet business and legal requirements and to support information and knowledge workers. Yet searching across many types of databases and content can pose a challenge, especially if the data is archived or stored in multiple content repositories of different types.”

This information, often in the form of transactional data in the enterprise, is fragmented across business functions and buried into forms and application logic. Integrating this information without a common semantic layer has been a constant challenge of data integration. RadiantOne VCS bridges the void between understanding transactions within and across silos by translating low level data transactions into English sentences.

“By generating plain English sentences out of transactional data and linking those sentences by context, RadiantOne VCS creates a radical new way to integrate data silos,” said Claude Samuelson, PhD and vice president of engineering at Radiant Logic, Inc. “RadiantOne VCS’

patent-pending technology enables a simple keyword search (such as Google) to reveal the who, what, when, how, and why of data, all while enforcing the security that is critical to applications and users. And because RadiantOne VCS understands the nature of relationships between objects within an existing application, updates are performed within the context of an existing process.”

source http://www.wwpi.com/