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tritonmarketresearchamey · 5 months ago

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Everything as a Service Market: Insight into Key XaaS Types

The emergence of cloud has transcended connectivity expectations since its inception, gaining popularity across IT, BFSI, and government sectors. As per a recent Google Cloud Survey, around 41.4% of enterprises plan to surge investments in cloud-based services in 2023 to build resilience during economic uncertainty. However, every cloud user has specific requirements that can be met by innovation in the infrastructure. In this regard, XaaS or anything as a service model, combines various IT tools that enable enterprises to attain agility and automation. Triton’s estimates suggest that the global everything as a service (XaaS) market is set to reap $2610.98 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 20.94% during the forecast period 2023-2030.

The central rationale behind XaaS service is to enable companies to decrease costs and streamline operations via a subscription-based internet-based model. The deployment of this computational service has multiplied across sectors, with many players offering software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and other XaaS types. For instance, Cisco and Telenor extended their partnership to explore XaaS flexible and scalable models to attain a wider partner ecosystem and customer base.

XaaS: A Paradigm Shift from On-Premise to Cloud

With a rising focus on reducing IT process costs, the demand for cloud migration and computing services has accelerated in recent years. For instance, as per industry sources, the shift from in-house data center facilities to public cloud service helps businesses save around 40%-50% of running expenses on average. The growing volume of data requiring real-time monitoring has elevated demand for various XaaS deployment models.

Some of the key types supporting market growth include:

Software as a service:

SaaS leads the type segment, attaining revenue worth $177.37 billion in 2022. In recent years, the demand for this service soared three-fold and is anticipated to witness perpetual growth with rising SaaS integration in IT infrastructures. For instance, on March 21, 2023, Snow Software unveiled a new version of its SaaS management solution to support IT companies in managing surprise costs, mitigating compliance risks, and optimizing overall expenses. Additionally, the model offers flexibility by allowing real-time collaboration. Dropbox, Google GSuite, and Cisco Webex are some widely opted SaaS models.

Also, its ability to efficiently deliver services over the network at a lower cost has prompted adoption by government bodies. The pay-as-you-go setup has enabled governments to partner with companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc., to ease maintenance burden and streamline operations. For example, the Government of New Zealand partnered with Microsoft to launch a SaaS initiative to enable companies to overcome traditional business challenges. Such developments are expected to fuel the government category’s growth in terms of vertical at a CAGR of 22.11% during 2023-2030.

Infrastructure-as-a-service:

The IaaS module is expected to witness the fastest growth over the forecast period, rising at a CAGR of 21.80%. The robust deployment is mainly because of the model’s ability to prevent the high costs and complexity of procuring and operating real servers and data center equipment. Azure, in this regard, helps companies manage the infrastructure while they attain, install, configure, and maintain software like middleware.

Further, the rise in cloud adoption across SMEs has widened the market’s growth. Our analysis suggests that nearly 69% of small businesses utilize cloud-based software regularly in Canada. Companies like Hootsuite, Shopify, and FreshBooks have further surged the use of XaaS services in the region. Digitalization trends like the rising adoption of mobile applications have compelled various companies to seek scalable solutions, a key driving factor for the North America everything as a service market.

Platform-as-a-service:

PaaS is a widely opted computing approach as it hosts hardware and software that eliminates the need to install in-house gear and software to create a new application. Compared to an on-premise option, the PaaS infrastructure provides enterprises with substantial cost benefits. Besides this, the emergence of corporate PaaS, which overcomes the complexities of basic PaaS infrastructure, is projected to boost the segment’s growth.

As enterprises seek to standardize operations via data-driven technologies, PaaS is expected to witness substantial demand across end-user sectors, especially IT and telecommunication. For example, recently, Dell Partnered with PaaS provider Expeto and mobile networking equipment vendors Athonet and Airspan to enable integrated connectivity across public and private 5G and LTE networks. Given the rise in such collaborations, the IT and telecommunication vertical is anticipated to witness the fastest growth at 22.48% of CAGR from 2023 to 2030.

While the above-mentioned infrastructures are widely opted across verticals, the rising popularity of analytics and IoT is expected to widen the market scope for other as-a-service infrastructures, including analytics-as-a-service and device-as-a-serve.

Remote Trends pave the way for XaaS Uptake

The pandemic-induced remote working culture transformed operations across industries, including healthcare. Remote healthcare services have accelerated the desire for cloud technologies for monitoring, diagnostics, consultation, etc. As healthcare becomes more patient-centric and data-driven, various market players are leveraging the scalability of XaaS to access and share electronic health records. Besides, the rising adoption of wearable devices, big data, and IoT in the healthcare sector is expected to elevate XaaS solutions’ deployment, creating novel opportunities for the everything as a service (XaaS) market.

FAQs:

Q1) Which are the key verticals using XaaS solutions?

IT & telecommunication, healthcare, BFSI, and government are among the key verticals using XaaS solutions.

Q2) Who are the major players in everything in the service (XaaS) market?

Microsoft Corporation, Adobe Systems, Tata Consultancy Services, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Microsoft Corporation, Oracle Corporation, SAP SE, Amazon.Com Inc, Salesforce Inc, Cisco Systems Inc, and VMware are major players in the everything as a service market.

#Everything asa Service Market #XaaS Market forecast #XaaS Market #ICT #Enterprise Solution #triton market research #market research reports

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mrudula01 · 1 year ago

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Everything as a Service Market: Insight into Key XaaS Types

XaaS: A Paradigm Shift from On-Premise to Cloud

Some of the key types supporting market growth include:

Software as a service:

Infrastructure-as-a-service:

Platform-as-a-service:

Remote Trends pave the way for XaaS Uptake

FAQs:

Q1) Which are the key verticals using XaaS solutions?

IT & telecommunication, healthcare, BFSI, and government are among the key verticals using XaaS solutions.

Q2) Who are the major players in everything in the service (XaaS) market?

0 notes

tritonmarketresearch · 2 years ago

Text

Everything as a Service Market: Insight into Key XaaS Types

XaaS: A Paradigm Shift from On-Premise to Cloud

Some of the key types supporting market growth include:

1. Software as a service:

2. Infrastructure-as-a-service:

3. Platform-as-a-service:

Remote Trends pave the way for XaaS Uptake

#Everything as a Service Market #everything as a service #xaas market #ict #information technology #enterprise solutions #market research #market research reports #triton market research

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xaallo · 3 years ago

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Myuutsu could feel it- had been, for a while now. PAIN. someone's in pain, and quite a good deal of it. he hasn't been around anywhere near long enough to know his way around the ship, but enough wandering and following his inner empath compass, and the boy finally finds his way to the medbay.

hees Xaallo propped up on the medical table, injured, and immediately a wave of fear and concern wells up in him, filling the whole bay with a sense of unease and discomfort. he can feel Xaallo's pain as if it were his own, and it aches. it stings. but it doesn't stop Myuutsu from running over to the margaven, eyes wide with worry. he puts a small, trembling hand on the buck's arm, and winces as he'd just been stabbed.

"... Xaa hurt..." he sniffles. "why are you hurt?"

If there was anyone Xaallo didn't want to see him like this, it was Myuutsu. That was just a boy, first of all. A boy who'd seen his fair share of hardship. But part of him knew he wasn't going to be able to hide their skirmishes from the child forever.

" Hey kid." Xaallo sounds tired. It's the injuries, and his bodies attempt to heal around them, but also knowing he's going to have to explain this now. Now, of all times. Naively, he'd hoped for the first of it to be over and that they were going to be able to hide from anymore attacks. The dull aces in his chest told him he was wrong.

"....Remember when we first met? I found you out there, in the forest, and you told me some bad people were looking for you?" He begins to explain. Xaallo takes in a breath and it takes effort.

"Well. Bad people are looking for us too. And they hurt me. But I'm ok, I promise. I'm a strong buck."

#ask #telekinetiq #// :') grey this should be illegal

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symeraid-s · 4 years ago

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My 2020 Awards (Music & Anime)

Music

Song of the Year: xaa-xaa – Horror This is the most played song on my playlist this year and it’s deserved. It’s just a really great song with one of the best intro’s of the year. Kazuki’s voice is perfection.

Honourable Mentions:

SID – Siren This one could technically be considered SOTY, but I thought that Horror deserves it a bit more. Still, Mao’s vocals give me chills

Taemin – Criminal It’s definitely one of his best songs and one of this year as a whole. And you know… it’s Taemin.

MY FIRST STORY – Underground Has a cool beat and great vocals. I also adore the lyrics.

QUEEN BEE – BL Probably has the best beat/Bass-line of this yea. Also showcases Avu-chan’s range.

Artist of the Year: xaa-xaa (Horror, Happy Wedding, Reito Ningen) I love this group. They constantly put out Bangers only and yet always end up under my radar. But this year, with the rest of the J-Rock scene being kinda dead, they really stood out. All of their songs landed on my playlist this year, so they really deserve it.

Honourable Mentions:

Kenshi Yonezu (KANDEN, Campanella, Canary) This guy is just one of the most interesting Japanese artists currently active. His Stray Sheep album is also really good.

Stray Kids (gods menu, Back Door) This year, Stray Kids really took me over. They had two very well directed Comebacks with amazing Music Videos.

TWICE (More & More, I Can’t Stop Me, Cry for Me) I didn’t really care for them in the past years, but they really delivered good music.

Super Junior (2YA2YAO, Burn the Floor, the Melody) TIMELESS was my favourite album of the year and the tracks we already got for the Renaissance sound really good. The Sub-Units (especially D&E) also had good comebacks.

Best Music Video of the Year: Stray Kids – gods menu This music video is a piece of art. There are no unclean cuts or weird jump-cuts, the Transitions are really fluid and the editing in general is just genius. Even if somebody doesn’t like Stray Kids, they can appreciate this video.

Honourable Mentions:

Stray Kids – Back Door Has the same great editing as gods menu, but there is one(!) unclean Cut. But it does have my favourite shot of the year.

Xaa-xaa – Horror It’s really well made and basically a Horror movie in cue with the music.

QUEEN BEE – BL Has a really creative production design and colour scheme and some really nice transitions.

BUMP OF CHICKEN – Acacia This is just a Music Video straight out of Nostalgia. And it’s animated by Studio BONES, so your argument is invalid.

Dance Performance of the Year: Taemin – Criminal First of all: It’s Taemin. This man can make everything look effortless, no matter how hard it actually is. And dancing with your hands tied is really f**king hard! Let’s just cut this short before I actually get into a five page long analysis about why this choreo is so amazing and just say: It’s one of the best K-Pop choreos of all time.

Honourable Mentions:

Super Junior – Burn the Floor Probably has one of the coolest concepts of this year, but isn’t perfectly executed. The combining of classical and modern elements is really interesting though.

Stray Kids – Back Door It’s energetic and has one of my personal favourite choreo elements of the year.

BTS – Black Swan A cool choreo, but appears to be a bit overproduced. Still, that MMA performance blew me away. It’s also sad, that it got overshadowed by Jimin’s solo dance in the MV.

Dreamcatcher – Scream It’s one of the coolest Girl Group choreos and one of the few, that actually reserved a spot for a missing member, by replacing her with a masked dancer (take notes, EXO!)

Rookies of the Year: E’LAST (Swear, Tears of Chaos) They had one of the most interesting debuts this year, but got massively overlooked. The Comeback they had a few months later was definitely better executed and actually great, but was still overlooked. E’LAST really deserves more attention, please listen to them. If you don’t, them you could at least watch one of their dance covers of Black Swan, gods menu or Criminal.

Honourable Mention:

GHOST9 (Think of Dawn, W.ALL) They also had a really interesting debut concept, but their Comeback was a bit weaker.

Most Underrated Comeback of the Year: E’LAST – Tears of Chaos It’s a really amazing song with great styling, but was overlooked, because the group is from an unknown label and the stages were partly cut, since they couldn’t afford full promotions. Still, please check it out.

Honourable Mentions:

CIX – Jungle People somehow didn’t like this song and I can’t understand it. It definitely had one of the best breakdowns this year.

ONF – Sukhumvit Swimming This song needs more than one listening to like it, but it’s honestly one of the funniest/ most nonsense Comebacks of the year.

Super Junior D&E – No Love D&E is probably one of the best subunits and the song just slaps.

ONEUS – TO BE OR NOT TO BE It has an amazing build up, but the refrain is a bit weak. The Breakdown is the best of the year though.

Most Underwhelming Comeback of the Year: BTS – Dynamite Honestly, the Instrumental of Dynamite is really great, the execution of the rest is just… questionable. I still don’t understand, why this couldn’t be a Korean Comeback. About a year ago, they insisted that they were Korean artists and that they would not release and English song, but look were we are now. And I don’t even want to start on the Autotune. Jimin sounds like a chipmunk and I wasn’t able to pick out the difference between the rest of the vocalists. This could have been a Jungkook solo for all I know. With a better execution, this could have been a good song, but how it is, it’s just a stale earworm.

Honourable Mentions:

BTS – Black Swan It’s kinda the same problem. The Autotune is obnoxious and makes the song too forgettable. Without it, it could be great.

Super M – 100 It could have been better, but sounds a bit phoned in. There’s also a lot of questionable styling.

VAV – Made for Two Similar to Dynamite it also has a great instrumental with a weak execution, but it’s still a nice send off for Baron to the Military.

EVERGLOW – La Di Da The chorus and bridge are really good, especially the chorus, I love this chorus. But sadly the verses and rap fall flat. The rap-part is also slightly obnoxious.

Worst Comeback/Song of the Year: BLACKPINK – HOW YOU LIKE THAT I’m sorry, Blinks, but I really don’t like this song. The lyrics are all over the place, it rehashes the same formulas musical and video wise and the worst part is: It sounds like four songs stitched together. I kinda like the bridge, but the rest of the song is actively obnoxious.

Honourable Mentions:

BTS – Respect The entire 7 Album isn’t really good, but this song is just annoying. The way it starts really grates my nerves and, come on guys, this is basically a Cypher, when did you forget how to do this?

BLACKPINK feat. Selena Gomez– Ice Cream Whoever green-lit these lyrics deserves to be fired. Selena Gomez also sticks out like a sore thumb.

TREASURE – MMM Just… just… No! YG, go home, you’re drunk!

IZ*ONE – Secret Story of Swan The chorus is probably the most obnoxious one, I’ve heard all year. The Music Video is also a technicolour nighmare.

Anime

Anime of the Year: Jujutsu Kaisen This Anime has just really amazing Animation, some of the best animated fights of 2020 and, damn, the characters are engaging. Sukuna really seems like he could be one of the new greatest Manga/Anime antagonists. Park Seonghoo really proofed himself to be a really great director, so now it’s pretty clear, that Crunchyroll is to blame for the train wreck God of High-School turned out to be.

Honourable Mentions:

Attack on Titan the Final Season As a Manga-reader, I really appreciate that MAPPA is not censoring anything from the Marley arc. They really proved, that they can hold the torch from WIT.

Fugou Keiji: Balance Unlimited It’s just a really well made Mystery show, with interesting main characters, but not for the reasons Tumblr says.

ID:_Invaded A really interesting Sci-fi original Anime, with probably one of the coolest protagonists this year.

Moriarty the Patriot One of the most underrated Animes of the year, but Saito Souma really gives an amazing performance.

Opening of the Year: Fugou Keiji: Balance Unlimited (SixTONES – NAVIGATOR) It’s just a really cool song, with a very nice verse. The full version also has a really cool rap-part. It’s just a really well made OP and, even though the Animation isn’t the best, it really hits all the right notes. I also like how in sync with the Song the Animation is.

Honourable Mentions:

Moriarty the Patriot (Tasuku Hatanaka – DYING WISH) Just has a really nice intro and build-up, as well as good high-notes.

God of High-School (KSUKE feat. Tyler Carter – Contradiction) It certainly is the best animated OP of the year, but goes a bit too hard with the Techno for me.

Attack on Titan the Final Season (Shinsekai Kamettechan – Boku no Sensou) It fits the new tone of the season surprisingly well and yeah, it’s basically a banger.

Jujutsu Kaisen OP 1 (Eve – Kaikai Kitan) The song is pretty standard, but it looks really pretty and there is a panda running on a rooftop, so…

Ending of the Year: Jujutsu Kaisen ED 1 (ALI feat. AKLO – LOST IN PARADISE) This is one of the few Anime songs that actually gets me to stand up and dance. The Animation is pretty adorable and, damn, the final chorus hits way too hard in the full version, holy shit. I liked ALI fine for Wild Side (the Beastars OP), but this song really knocks that out of the park. This really is a band I’ll keep an eye out for.

Honourable Mentions:

Fugou Keiji: Balance Unlimited (OKAMOTO’s – Welcome My Friend) This was my ED of the year, before we got LOST IN PARADISE. It has a great intro and I really just adore the song.

ID:_Invaded (MIYAVI – Other Side) It’s really boring Animation-wise, but the Cologne Cathedral may be in it, so that’s a plus. On the other side, the song is really awesome and hits way too hard. I swear, this entire Anime is just a MIYAVI fan convertor.

Haikyuu!! To the Top!! 2 (SPYAIR – One Day) It’s a really nice song, certainly one of SPYAIRs best, there is only one problem: You just don’t hire SPYAIR for an Ending!

The Great Pretender (Freddy Mercury – The Great Pretender) I mean, it’s Freddy Mercury! How can you not like it? Also, the Animation is cute.

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withered-rose-unbreakable-lotus · 6 years ago

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Hey, what do you think is behind the decline in interest in VK in the West? It’s ridiculous how much the fandom has died down. Is it just because of the rise of kpop and the general decline in interest in all sorts of rock? Or are other factors at play - like how toxic the fandom could be?

In my opinion, kpop doesn’t really have much to do with it. People liked visual kei because it was different. What I think is responsible, because I’ve seen many fans admitting they grew out of it because of it, is a list of things (bear with me, it’s gonna be long):

1) disbands: While disbands were always a big thing in the visual kei scene, with more and more people translating stuff for fans and, bands getting on social media used by mostly western fans, like facebook and twitter, more western fans were exposed to how often this actually happens. Some fans maybe thought that visual kei is dying because of it, but truth is, disbands were always there, with smaller bands we might have never heard of, because there was sooo little information for us back then. Also, many big names in the visual kei scene have disbanded the last 5 years, which is why many fans thought that putting so much devotion and spending money on sth that could be destroyed at any moment isn’t worth it. For example (I am sorry if I am not wording this well ^^’), I knew fans who left vkei because they were tired of liking a band and then these bands kept disbanding. There is no stability. American artists and kpop artists do not break up or retire that easily, you know? And some fans want that stability or become too hearbroken when having lost a band they’ve been supporting for 10 years, or sth, and don’t want to go through that anymore (it might sound a little bit too much or dramatic, but there are fans out there who genuinely feel things about these bands, they have found some short of shelter in them and their music, so losing that band might hurt a lot and the best way to move on is by cutting ties with anything like them). In my case, this is the reason I barely like new bands anymore. I like finding newbies and keeping an eye on them but I do not actively follow them unless I am convinced they are in it for the long run. And honestly, so far, I’ve been lucky with this, because most of the people I chose to follow are still around, either as bandmen or sth else, or trying with new bands that I happen to like. Of course, I have lost some favorites too but I get it. It’s a hard life to live and, some people eventually change their mind, but not every fan feels this way and if they do, they try to “retire“ from the whole thing like their favorite artists and move on with their life. (I am in no way saying that a bandman shouldn’t leave his band when he feels like it, even if he is 20 years active. It’s their life, their rules and we should all respect that, but it seems to be hard for many people to do so, sometimes)

2) fandom. Like you mentioned, fandoms can be toxic. It happens with every fandom, though, not just visual kei, so I wouldn’t like to point fingers, especially because I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of my best friends through the fandom, most of whom aren’t even in it anymore. :P I can tell you with certainty that our lack of translators is entirely the fandom’s fault, though. People just don’t get what reblog or share with credits means and some people grow tired of it, you know? Contrary to common belief, translating a video of 30 minutes or an entire interview might take someone more than just a day, maybe even a week, and if people don’t respect that, then unfortunately the translator has to cut being nice to everyone and continue being a fan in privacy (they don’t get paid for this, they got their jobs, their families, but still wish to spend time sharing sth they love with others and helping them learn more about it through translating, even though, between us, some of those translations are illegal because we need permission to translate magazine stuff etc (a visual kei artist once said that, saying yes translations are great but guys be careful because some things are copyrighted and you might get in trouble), but some people just wish to take and take without helping others get to the initial source to find out more, too. I think there are still many visual kei fans out there, they just no longer blog about it because they want to enjoy it by themselves and without the negativity and opinions of anyone else. I started as a private fan for example. I liked fangirling on my own, I didn’t want anyone to intervene with that because it was my sole way of having fun, I didn’t want anyone to ruin it for me, but eventually, I wanted to help the bands spread their info beyond their social media and I am currently running 3 fanpages, 1 of which is on hiatus. I still get shit while doing that, by the way, there are still know-alls among us but I am not going to let anyone spoil it for me. So to cut everything short, I think that fandom could have played its role as to why so many left and why those of us left, became so quiet.

3) Some people might bite for this one but it’s a mixture of “Mainstream“ and “platform“. I believe the best people to talk about this are old-schoolers. When bands like A9 and the Gazette entered the scene, most old school visual kei fans had already started barking about the fact those bands were copying their predecessors and that they don’t really make cool music (they were making shallow stuff for their tastes, aka mainstream stuff). Truth is that, fans of that “new/2nd generation“ visual kei era are acting like old-schoolers did, when their faves came out, to the newbies coming out now, aka people following bands like Xaa Xaa or Kizu. But if you pay close attention you might notice this: When bands like A9 and the Gazette came about, old schoolers seemed to be very few among us, weren’t they? Many seemed to have disappeared and given up, because to them, visual kei was dead. Honestly, I follow many old schoolers right now. They are still around. They just don’t fangirl as loud as the rest of us do. They stick to old pics and the occasional updates from visual kei artists of that time that are still active like Sugizo, Malice Mizer members, Buck-Tick members, etc. This is what I see happening now too. There are still people listening to visual kei of the 2000s. They just aren’t loud enough and the new fans of visual kei are more present on twitter than here or facebook. Why? Because visual kei bands are also on twitter now and they can immediately fangirl on the posts of their favorites by retweeting the pics. (It also adds that some visual kei artists reply to those retweets either with words or likes) So yeah, I think we are few here now because many have moved to twitter and also because new bands sound mainstream to us fans of bands from the 2000s.

4) the Visual Kei scene. Ok, I am not that sure about this but I think it plays a role to this somehow. There are several visual kei artists that claimed visual kei is dead the last few years. I won’t name who cuz only one name comes to mind right now, but I know I had read it from many more people. I don’t know how the visual kei scene is like in Japan right now, but I know there are more bands forming than in the past, most of which are not serious about it (see bands disband within a year). This happened in the past, too, I don’t know to what extent though, but we didn’t know about those as much as those who actually had sth to say and still do to this day. I’ve heard artists complain that the new kids entering the scene have no concept. That all they care about is looking cool and nothing else. They are lucky to have more means of promoting their stuff, though. Twitter reaches out to western fans, some bands get a music video from their first release and maybe cool costumes from their first release, things that bands of older times would beg for, when they started. And still these kids do not use those means as creatively as they could so, they fail to impress the old fans enough to get an active following that fangirls about them everywhere. Not all new bands. But most. Like, Kizu, for example seem to have a vision (i am not their fan by the way, I have just seen some of their stuff and they seem to be in it for real). So, the result of all this, is fans getting bombarded by 100 new bands each year and having hard time sticking to anything. So they just retweet sth and comment about it and that’s it. They do not get into long talks about music or concept or anything because most of these bands have no concept. I dunno, I think it plays a role. And also, sth that I hadn’t thought about and was also brought up on twitter. Some big venues have closed in Japan the last two years and due to the big amount of bands wishing to perform, they are all struggling to find dates to perform. In other words, there is so much competition right now that if you aren’t a big name by now, you gotta wait in line for scheduling your lives. One of my favorite bands was like “yeah no live this week, everything was closed.“ and I was surprised. Also big events have stopped happening. I don’t know if you had experienced that but there was a time Nico Nico, the channel had several bands hosting their own shows. It was mostly PSC bands that did that but due to tough schedule it stopped. There was also the Xmas live, a festival with many bands which was broadcasted each year and that I’ve heard nth about the last two years. The show does still happen they just don’t broadcast it anymore. There was another festival called Stylish Wave. That stopped being broadcasted too so many events that were broadcasted for free are no longer happening so this is why I am saying that we’ve lost lots of the hype from Japan’s side too. I knew so many people who were looking forward to such events and then we’d all gif everything and translate stuff. It’s no longer there though. Only one interview show is still broadcasted on Nico Nico for free, the rest is paid stuff.

So yeah, all in all, these are the basics that I think played an important role in losing western fandoms. Of course, this is just my opinion, many people might disagree. Thank you for the question, I am always glad to exchange opinions on visual kei stuff. ^^

#mdp #reply #answered

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erpinformation · 2 years ago

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crazy4tank · 4 years ago

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EXCLUSIVE: HotCars Checks Out Magnus Walker's Porsche 996 Collection

New Post has been published on https://coolcarsnews.com/2021/01/14/exclusive-hotcars-checks-out-magnus-walkers-porsche-996-collection/

EXCLUSIVE: HotCars Checks Out Magnus Walker's Porsche 996 Collection

Magnus Walker has made the name for himself as a Porsche influencer with a collection that includes many methods from air-cooled 930 Turbos to front-engined 944 track stars and even a SEMA-bound 914 art vehicle . But Walker is also branching out beyond Stuttgart's products, recently picking up a pair of E-Type Jaguars and exploring a new relationship with Mercedes-Benz .

Clearly, he's not really treading the same well-worn path since many Porsche purists, who tend to dislike anything that's not strictly an air-cooled 911. I recently visited Walker's The downtown area Los Angeles Arts District headquarters in order to chat about a new video this individual released in partnership with NativeFour entitled "Ascension" and was amazed to discover he also counts four various versions of the infamous 996-generation 911 in his stable.

[embed]https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ppkl9ck-Pk4&start=18[/embed]

Now, everyone to know anything about Porsches has definitely heard all the hype about water-cooling, IMS bearings, and headlight styles that render the 996 probably the most controversial car of all time. Yet when I recently took the high-mileage 996 Cabriolet out for the test drive , I came aside incredibly impressed, so I had to test Magnus Walker on what he enjoys about such a divisive model since it fits into Porsche's long plus storied history. Luckily, he had been happy to launch into an off-the-cuff description of his 996 collection, which usually runs the gamut from earlier base models to a rare high-spec (and high-mileage) 911 GT2 which he believes Darth Vader could have powered.

ASSOCIATED: Here’s Why Porsche’s Boxster And Cayman Are Perfect Sports activities Cars For Serious Gearheads

As Master pointed out, any conversation about the 996 generation immediately devolves into a discussion of Porsche leaving air-cooled motors behind in favor of water-cooling, which resulted in IMS bearing flaws, and divisive headlight designs. Walker himself basically too concerned about such things, though he or she did admit he prefers the particular 996. 1 headlights on his Pads Red 1999 Aerokit car ( identifiable by factory option program code XAA under the frunk hood ), which were shared with both the GT1 Le Mans racer and the 986 Boxster.

While some 996 owners might lie awake during the night worried their IMS bearing may implode any day, Walker focuses read more about how his car drives—296 hp and 258 lb-ft of torque in the rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive coupe that weighs in at less than 3, 000 pounds seems pretty good.

RELATED: Looking Back On the Audi RS2 Avant Hot Emerge

Right after early 996 buyers went upward in arms, decrying the decision to permit the 911 to share so many areas of the body with the lower-priced Boxster—including everything forwards of the front doors—Porsche made the headlight change for the 996. two generation by essentially swapping within the "broken-eggshell" headlights that had earlier been reserved for the 911 Turbocharged. Besides the looks, this headlight style also allowed for better air flow to the car's front-mounted radiators, which usually helps to support the 996. 2's larger 3. 6-liter flat-six motor that was rated at 320 hp when new (despite the embrace displacement, the 996. two in coupe form nevertheless weighs in at less than several, 000 pounds whenever equipped with a manual transmission).

Incredibly, Walker found their Slate Grey 996. 2 with regard to only $5, 000 after posting on his popular Instagram give food to that he was in the marketplace. Sure, it's high-mileage (he confesses he doesn't even know how a lot of miles the odometer shows) and it has been repainted, but once again, Master focuses on the fact that it drives remarkably well. Try finding a better vehicle at that price anywhere—good fortune.

ASSOCIATED: 5 Reasons Why You Should Buy The Porsche GT3 RS (5 Explanations why The McLaren 600LT Is Actually Better)

Probably the most prized example in Walker's 996 menagerie is the GT3 instantly on display behind his garage doorway. Unfortunately, it's not an unicorn GT3 RS, which is Walker's number-one preferred Porsche GT model ever unfortunately he never sold in America. Possibly to generate up for that dearth, he do have his "base" GT3 straight into the renowned Porsche fine-tuning shop SharkWerks to get a lookover before picking it up within 2018.

If SharkWerks had their way, there's a great chance this GT3 could keep plan a legit GT3 RS plus live up to its matte black engine, mirror caps, and side lines that hearken back to the renowned Brumos Porsches of old. During factory trim, the 996 GT3 remains impressive to this day thanks to the 3. 6-liter Mezger engine, which usually pumped out 380 horsepower having a screaming redline of 8, two hundred RPM.

RELATED: Magnus Walker First appearance New Show ‘The Next Huge Thing’ Featuring E39 BMW M5

When Walker's GT3 isn't the ruler of the hill in his 996 selection, then the black 2002 GT2 over takes the cake. It's most likely the most valuable, simply due to the rarity factor, even though he bought from Paul Kramer of AutoKennel with around ninety, 000 miles on the clock. (It also benefits from $50, 000 within receipts passed along from the earlier owner, who daily drove this in California. )

The GT2 reigned as Porsche's legit range-topping supercar until the first of the Carrera GT in 2005, thanks to twin-turbos bolted onto the Mezger flat-six. Compared to its modern Turbo, the GT2 employed improved turbines, larger intercoolers, revised ELECTRONIC CONTROL UNIT tuning, and rear-wheel-drive only, which usually earned it the "Widowmaker" name because amateurs might have struggled in order to tame up to 477 horsepower plus 472 lb-ft of torque (those statistics are for 2004 models—Walker's 2002 model year would have been ranked slightly lower, at 456 race horses and 457 lb-ft of twist).

As a sign showing how far every automaker in the industry comes since the early-2000s, especially with regards to turbocharging, the range-topping 996 GT2's specifications actually compare quite closely to the present 992-gen Carrera S, which usually Walker refers to as the non-Turbo turbocharged . The only difference is that in which a 996 GT2 would have weighed (at most) 3, 175 pounds in the factory, the 992 Carrera Ersus can balloon up to over 3 or more, 700 pounds with ease.

Walker may prefer the GT3 meant for spirited driving, but the GT2 offers its pros, too. It functions slightly softer suspension and has a lot more interior amenities (all-leather everything), however the best part might be when that enhance kicks in and the GT2 shows why it was capable of a four. 0-second sprint to 60 kilometers per hour way back in 2002. Master describes his GT2 as the Porsche Darth Vader might have driven, partly thanks to the blacked-out wheels, but this individual wanted me to convey that he is on the lookout for some original factory GT2 wheels instead.

They may be hard to find, since they're not shared with turbo charged and measure 8. 5 ins up front with a whopping 12 in . out back—but that's the kind of rubberized required to tame the GT2's remarkable boost when it snaps heads back again on the Angeles Crest Highway that will Magnus Walker could almost contact home by now.

Resources: excellence-mag. com, autokennel. com, instagram. com, stuttcars. com, and sharkwerks. com.

NEXT: Here’s How The 718 Spyder Qualifies As The Most Enjoyable Porsche Ever

#Famous Collections

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clarencenicholsonata · 4 years ago

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6 Actionable Steps to Reduce Customer Churn on Your Ecommerce Site

The ecommerce industry is highly competitive. Anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare can start a dropshipping business, and many do. This drives up the price of advertising online and makes the cost per acquisition for each new lead rather high.

But even if the cost of acquiring a new client in your niche is higher than the first purchase they make, it’s not a big deal. The real value of each customer is not their first purchase, but their LTV, or lifetime value.

Put simply, if it costs you $100 in marketing fees to get a new client, but over the course of three years that this client stays with you, you earn $1000, it’s a net profit.

The problems begin when customers leave before expected, leaving you with little to no return on revenue. If customer churn in your business is higher than average, it could have serious consequences for your bottom line.

Want to learn more about customer churn and how to make existing customers stay longer with you? Hop on to this ten-minute read, and you’ll learn just that.

What is customer churn and why should you care?

While your ecommerce store is doing fine, it can be easy to disregard improving customer churn. After all, why would you spend time and energy on the 10% of customers who leave if you can always get new leads from ongoing marketing campaigns?

As it’s evident in 2020, you can never know when the next stock market crash occurs and sends the economy in a downward spiral. This is probably the best time to have a loyal customer base.

But even if we forget about the state of the global economy in 2020, reducing customer churn is still a worthy business goal. It’s an essential part of conversion optimization that can help you reduce marketing spending and increase customer LTV. And that’s always a good thing.

Besides, high customer churn may indicate that you have a problem with your business that you don’t address. If you figure out what this problem is in the process of reducing customer churn and improve it, the long term benefits will extend far beyond the scope of conversion optimization alone.

With that in mind, here’s how to reduce customer churn.

1. Analyze the Reasons for Customer Churn

There are a lot of tips that may help you improve customer churn. There’s just one tip that will give you a sense of direction in what you’re doing. You need to understand the reason people leave to make sure you’re fixing the right issues.

This is a huge issue because, for the most part, you won’t know why a person left. You’ll just see a percentage of how many people left your company.

According to research by Esteban Kolsky, only 1 in 26 unhappy customers will actually leave a bad review. The other 25 will silently choose your competitor.

Since one person is bound to leave a bad review when they leave, you can start studying your failures from there.

Start by Analyzing Customer Feedback

You don’t need to guess what people think about you. You can gather all the information you need by looking up reviews online. Form a list of review websites in your industry and look for customer feedback. If that doesn’t help, check your Facebook page for reviews or just google “your company review” and look for user reviews.

You don’t want to focus on the positive reviews, though. Pay close attention to negative feedback on all platforms and analyze it. Doing a Twitter audit to see what people write about you helps as well.

If some of your former patrons were generous enough to go in-depth on what they didn’t like about the company, it’s great for you. Despite some bad publicity, you can learn what you should improve upon. This negative review of HubSpot on TrustRadius is a great example of a disgruntled yet fair customer.

A one-time complaint may not be a cue to action. If you’re seeing multiple people saying that your software lacks this one feature or your customer support takes too long to answer, you know what to do.

Ask Your Customers for Feedback Directly

Now that you’ve seen what one out of 26 people who leave have to say, let’s try to understand why the other 25 left. The easiest way to do this is to ask for feedback when they’re leaving.

If in your business model leaving means canceling an account, ask them what led them to cancel when they do that. You can handle this with a pop-up survey on the cancellation screen or by having your support team ask them this question when managing a cancelation ticket.

If churning customers in your niche just never come back, target those who haven’t bought from you for a long time with a survey email marketing campaign. You can try to bring them back while you’re at it. You’ll learn how to do that later in the article.

Interviews customers

Do you run a B2B company that has few high-paying clients? You’re in the best position to ask for feedback! Either you or a sales representative must have a relationship with the client that is about to leave or have left already. Just reach out to them and ask for honest feedback.

For most other businesses, this can prove to be too hard. But if you can manage to get some of the former clients on a phone call and ask them why exactly they left, it would be amazing.

A first-hand account of what happened and why they chose your competitors is just what you need to understand what aspect of your business you need to improve. Make sure you’re listening to their criticism, not antagonizing them, though.

Measure customer satisfaction

The last point on learning more about why customers leave your business is more about prevention than post-churn analysis. Run customer satisfaction surveys that include at least a CSAT (customer satisfaction score) and NPS (net promoter score).

Running these surveys is relatively easy to handle. Get yourself a survey software and run quick pop-up surveys like this one from Hotjar.

If you don’t have the budget for the software, you can just create a Google Form and send it via email or any other engagement channel. The most basic CSAT survey is a question like “How happy are you with our service” on the scale of one to ten. The NPS is a question like “How likely are you to recommend our service to friends” on the same scale.

Make sure to include an open question asking for a comment in case the person doesn’t like the service. Some people will skip it, but you’re still going to receive some advanced feedback.

Now that you’re equipped to understand why customers churn, let’s look at some common problems and common solutions to them.

2. Make Your Onboarding Process Intuitive

This is an extremely useful tip for XaaS companies. Free trials are essential for growing the customer base, and as you may already know, many people never return after a trial. According to Stripe’s Patrick McKenzie, 60% is a conversion rate of trials requiring a credit card that you should strive for. If your numbers are below that, you have room for improvement.

Does the number of people who never return after a trial include some who genuinely didn’t like your product’s features or found a similar product for a more competitive price? Sure. But it also includes people who struggled with using your product.

Create a customer journey map for your onboarding flow, look for weaknesses, and make sure you reach all of your customers. For instance, HBR showed that providing a tutorial at an early stage can reduce churn by 6%.

If you need a working template, steal this roadmap from Intercom that they’ve dabbed C.A.R.E.

3. Re-engage Customer are at Risk of Churning

If your client shows signs that suggest they may leave soon, you need to act before they do so. What tactics you’re going to use depends on what type of business you run. The general premise stays the same in any industry. Find people with high churn potential and target them.

If a customer stops visiting your website or app, try to engage them via a channel that they tend to respond to most. Reach out to them if they haven’t made a purchase in quite a while. Automated email triggers are amazing for this. Give them a great deal on a product or introduce something new, and they may come back to make another purchase.

Now, what if a customer stops responding to your engagement channel? There’s no point in bombarding them with emails if they just don’t open them. This is why you need more than one channel of engagement.

Try to find a channel your customer responds to. SMS marketing, social media, and push notifications in the app are great channels to start with. If they don’t respond to any of those, try including this customer in a retargeting ad campaign.

Make sure you set a limit on how much you interact with a customer before it’s time to admit they’ve left you and won’t be coming back. There’s no point in wasting your marketing budget on a small fraction of customers who do not engage on any level.

4. Try to Reduce “Involuntary” Churn

Not all customers leave because they don’t like your product or customer service. Some just default on a monthly payment because their credit card fails and don’t come back. Credit card expiry of dunning is responsible for a small percentage of customers leaving, but it’s a type of churn that you can easily optimize.

How can you prevent this from happening? Track the credit card expiration dates and send out pre-dunning emails reminding the customer to update his credit card information.

Make sure these emails are not aggressive, though. A subject line like “Did you update your payment details” will do much better than “YOUR CARD IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE.”

Since pre-dunning emails are not going to work for every customer, you’ll need to create a chain of recovery emails as well. Create automated emails that get sent to customers who missed a payment asking them to update credit card details. Don’t forget to retry their credit card, though. Sometimes it fixes the issue.

Another minor improvement that may reduce involuntary churn is making password recovery easy. If a person’s credit card failed and they don’t remember the password, they may as well look for alternatives before contacting your support for recovery.

5. Improve customer experience

If you’re going to follow the very first tip in this article, you’re going to measure the customer satisfaction score. It’s a simple survey that shows how much are your customers happy with your services on a scale from one to ten. You can expand this survey and ask questions about satisfaction with your product and customer support to learn what you should focus on.

If your customer churn is high, it’s more than likely that customers are not happy with the support they’re receiving. According to Gladly’s 2020 Customer Expectation Report, 51% of customers are willing to switch brands after just two negative customer service interactions.

Besides, improving customer service has great potential for customer retention. 65% of U.S. consumers say they value customer experience higher than advertising when it comes to choosing a brand. According to PWC, you can also charge a 7%-16% premium for your services if you have stellar customer experience, so the benefits of improving CX go far beyond reducing customer churn.

Humanize Your Customer Service

Your first priority is humanizing customer service. Personalize communication and create a new copy for standard answers.

If your business is not that huge, you probably won’t be able to fully personalize customer service. After all, advanced tracking software is not free and you may not have the budget for that. However, you can still do some personalization.

At the very least, always refer to a client by their first name. If you have a customer relationship management system (and you probably should), make sure it displays all interactions with the customer so that any support agent handling them knows their full history with the company.

An admin panel like this shows the sales reps all the interaction history and lets them know the context your company has with this client. As a result, the sales rep has more instruments to have a better conversation with them.

Then, you want to have a look at your standard support copy and improve on it. Rewrite the parts that sound a bit robotic and add a bit of sympathy in there.

You want your customers to know that you care about them. According to the Institute of Customer Service, you can increase customer trust by 12% if you increase CSAT but just 10%. If customers do trust you more, they’ll be more likely to complain instead of leaving.

Engage on Multiple Channels

The next thing you should do is expand the channels that you’re available at. Gladly report shows that 86% of customers expect you to interact with them on multiple channels. They also expect you to recognize them on different channels.

The easiest way you can do this is to ask them to provide you with all the contact details and sort them together in your CRM. You’ll need to include at least the five top customer service channels discovered by Gladly.

Provide Faster Services

Did you notice that the graph above shows that the help center is used just as frequently as Facebook Messenger for support? This indicates that customers will opt for a faster way of solving their problem even if they have to do it themselves.

Creating a help center can be a lot of work, but it may take some workload off your support team’s shoulders. What’s even more important, it helps you solve common problems faster, providing a better experience.

Another smart way to use social media to provide a faster answer is to run a chatbot. Configuring one in Facebook Messenger or in your live chat won’t be too much work, but it will save you and your customers a ton of time.

Include answers to frequently asked questions and you’ll have a happy customer and a happy support team member who doesn’t have to answer them twenty times a day. Make sure to include the option to connect to a human fast, though. Not all customer support problems can be solved by a scripted conversation.

6. Create a knowledge hub

There are a lot of direct methods of confronting customer churn. There’s also an indirect one. James Parsons, a Forbes contributor from Content Powered, offers an insight — keep customers coming by creating a knowledge hub on your website.

As it’s always the case with content marketing, this strategy is a long-term one, but the payoff may be worth waiting for. Most successful SaaS companies, from Moz.com to Wishpond, have a blog or a learning hub. Apart from its obvious goal of driving traffic via organic search, it serves another purpose.

It grooms leads from the very first stages of the sales funnel and communicates to them that your company is the expert in the field. As they start to rely on your advice, provided it’s really good, fewer active customers will consider jumping ship.

People trust authority, so having a blog or a learning hub is going to add another psychological trick up your sleeve. On the more practical side, creating an easy-to-understand learning center for the product you’re selling is going to facilitate onboarding.

A help center like this one on the Adobe website helps reduce customer churn that happens when onboarding fails. It helps customers get answers to their questions faster with no need to contact the support. Bonus: Improve Your Product Let’s face it. You can track CSAT and NPS, you can implement all the best practices of reducing customer churn, but if your competitors have a better product for a lower price, you’re in danger.

One of the best ways to reduce customer churn is to improve your product. This is why Adobe is able to remain on top of the competition. The company offers an unprecedented package of services so the customers practically have nowhere to churn.

Now, you may not be aiming to become a SaaS giant like Adobe, but it’s helpful to follow the words of the company’s CEO Shantanu Narayen: "Reduced churn is the new growth."

Do what Adobe does, study your customers’ needs, and improve your product to match them.

Your exact course of action depends on your industry and your target audience. The main advice is to get constant feedback from your customers and follow it to fix bugs and add new features and products.

That’s not something you can improve overnight, but the benefits you can reap from this are also long-term.

It’s Never Too Late to Reduce Customer Churn

Not all steps from this guide can be implemented fast, but all of them have long-term benefits. Reduce customer churn rate, and you get a net gain in profits.

If you have to choose one step to implement first, make it analytics. Start gathering data to see how many customers are actually leaving you and why do they do it. This will give you a headstart and help you decide what tips to implement afterward.

Invest in improving your business based on the feedback you gather, and your competition will be spying on you, not the other way around!

About the Author

Michael Doer is a content marketer who’s focused on combining creativity and strategy in his work. Follow him on Twitter and text “I found you on Wishpond” to get more free marketing tips.

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jeramymobley · 5 years ago

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Subscription Models Expand Access To Your Brand

It’s back to school season and just on time, Nike has rolled out the Nike Adventure Club for ‘Generation Alpha’ – for those ‘consumers’ aged 2-10. When you think about subscription services, you likely think about tech or tech-adjacent brands. Amazon has Prime and AWS Cloud Computing, Microsoft has Office 365 and Azure, Apple has iCloud and Apple Music. There’s any number of permutations of ‘XaaS’ (Whatever-as-a-service) models.

In business, the ‘XaaS’ model can significantly impact cash flows, representing a shift from capital expenditures in which large sums of money are spent at a single time to operating expenses which essentially distribute the expense over time. But also, for consumers too. A new mobile device might represent a significant expense that will likely be obsolete in a few years, whereas a subscription service might entitle you a new device every two years, without having to pay cash up front.

Nike’s service will allow kids to select Nike and Converse shoes “for the right-fitting shoe as their feet – and tastes – evolve.” In addition to shoes, the subscription service comes with adventure guides, filled with outdoor games and activities that parents can do with their kids. Pricing tiers are range from $20/month for 4 pairs of shoes, to $50/month for a new pair every month. Parents will have the option to upgrade, downgrade, or pause the subscription at any time.

As reported by The Motley Fool, “In providing footwear, we’re always trying to answer, ‘What do kids want?‘” said Dominique Shortell, director of product experience and retention for Nike Adventure Club. “But an equally important question is, ‘What kind of experience are we providing for their parents?’ We want to make shopping for footwear as convenient as possible for them.”

While it may seem like this approach could lead to wasteful consumption, Nike says shoes that have been worn as part of the Nike Adventure Club will be assessed once they’ve been returned. Those in good condition will be donated to a nonprofit and given to kids in need. Those that are unusable, will be recycled via Nike’s Grind program, which grinds up old athletic shoes and turns them into playgrounds or running tracks. This ensures that used shoes don’t end up in the landfill.

Mara Signer, research and insights manager for consulting firm Smarty Pants, explains the trend, “Not only are families relying on convenience-driven subscription services ranging from streaming content to dinner solutions to apparel, but there is also a dramatic increase in these services designed specifically for children. Yumble is sending weekly kids’ meals to their doorsteps; toy subscriptions like Tinker Crate, Little Passports and Kiwi Crate are delighting kids with new playthings and adventures each month; and Rockets of Awesome and FabKids are making sure new outfits arrive each month.”

She adds that positioning the subscription as part of an adventure club is smart on Nike’s part since less than a third of generation Alpha consumers find the brand exciting, adventurous, or fun. “Including an activity in each shoe may be the ticket to boosting kids’ perceptions of the brand as being all of those aspects.”

The subscription model may also be an effective way for premium brands to hedge against a global economic slowdown. If prices continue to rise and incomes aren’t keeping pace, consumers will be looking for new models that help them access the brands they want without having to overextend themselves. And as long as brands can offer their products and services ‘as-a-service’ without being wasteful, they may provide a more accessible way to grow relationships with consumers.

The Blake Project Can Help: Get actionable expert guidance on Building A Competitive Advantage

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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symeraid-s · 3 years ago

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2021 Retrospective: Artist of the Year

ONF (Beautiful Beautiful, Ugly Dance, POPPING, Goosebumps)

As somebody who spend half of 2020 getting into ONF, seeing them get their deserved first win with Beautiful Beautiful was just… beautiful. The other three comebacks they had this year were also great. Ugly Dance is solid, POPPING is a great refreshing summer bop (with people dying in the MV) and Goosebumps came out of nowhere with a very undeterminable chorus and closed out an amazing year for them. They really had a great run and I hope they can continue this after their return from the military.

Honourable Mentions:

xaa-xaa (Gogatsu-byo, Ju Gatsu Itsuka Getsuyobi Barabara)

This band is the only Visual Kei band on my radar that seems to still be releasing music. The songs they released this year are all good and somehow this always surprises me, despite them releasing Bangers annually. I hope 2022 marks the time, where I’m not surprised anymore (I doubt it).

SHINee (Don’t Call Me, Atlantis, Superstar & Advice, BAD LOVE, Heartbreak)

SHINee finally came back from military, released an album, a repackage and a Japanese single, all in the span of six months and then Taemin enlisted. Yet somehow, their presence was still strong in the second half of 2021. Minho got back into acting, making history by playing a gay character in a K-Drama, being casted into two more dramas before the year ended. He also released a solo single. And Key released his mini album BAD LOVE, which is just full of bangers. And they did all off that while flirting on Instagram.

TXT (0x1=Lovesong (I Know I Love You), LO$ER=LO♡ER, Frost)

In 2020 I finally understood the hype around Stray Kids. This year, I finally understand the hype around TXT. Their concept of changing positions in the group with each comeback is unique and allows all of the members to show off equally. The musical direction they took this year also helped. Both 0x1=Lovesong (I Know I Love You) and LO$ER=LO♡ER are absolute Bangers (despite having dumb names) and feel like something not many other groups could pull off.

PURPLE KISS (Can We Talk Again, Ponzona, Zombie, Cast Pearls Before Swine)

Nominating a rookie group for AOTY? Yes, if it is PURPLE KISS. Both their debut and first Comeback were just impressive. They don’t sound or act like rookies at all. It really seems like they already spend years in this industry. I really hope they can do even more great stuff in 2022.

#disclaimer: just my opinion #2021 retrospective #onf #xaa-xaa #shinee #txt #tomorrow x together #purple kiss #part 2 of ???#next up: Album of the Year #but different #again i'm sorry

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xtravirt · 6 years ago

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Horizon, Horizon and Horizon – Clearing up the confusion!

by Curtis Brown

VMware’s virtual desktop and application publishing portfolio has gotten increasingly complex of late, with a mix of cloud and on-premises offerings, and this is even before you consider the components that make up the supporting pieces, such as User Environment Manager, App Volumes and integration with Workspace ONE.

In this article I hope to provide you with a (little) clearer view as to which Horizon to look out onto (pun intended).

The On-Prem option – Horizon 7

This is the ‘great original flavour’ of VMware’s desktop virtualization offering. The customer provides the tin to host it all on, builds a VMware vSphere estate (with VMware vSphere for Desktops included in the suite) and then layers on the VMware Horizon components for delivery of either Virtual Desktops or Remote Application publishing.

It does have several pro’s and cons –

You have flexibility on the scale and architecture, including geographic locations.

Scaling from very small to incredibly large, through the ability to leverage Cloud Pod Architecture.

Proximity to on-premises services and corporate network users can be an advantage, particularly for client/server resources.

Scaling down is expensive as you own the tin it’s hosted on.

It can generate VDI desktops, RDS Desktops and applications, using a number of delivery methods (Linked, Instant and full clones) of whatever specification you’ll need.

Being the most developed product, in combination with being in a customer-owned environment, it has a greater range of integration points with third party products, for example, there are numerous application delivery tools available.

When On-Prem is also Cloudy – Horizon View on VMware Cloud on AWS

This next offering is also the newest. VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (VMC on AWS) is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows a customer to purchase VMware vSphere environments on AWS. As an IaaS solution, the customer has more control over the estate than would be the case in most XaaS offerings, to the point that it is possible to deliver VMware Horizon View on the platform.

Functionally, this is the same as the on-premises Horizon View, right down to the point that you build your own servers for hosting the otherwise identical components, however, there are a small number of caveats. The biggest one of these is that you can’t use Linked Clones for delivering desktops – only full or instant clones are supported. Although given that Instant Clones are rapidly superseding Linked clones, this is not that much of a loss.

As this is a Cloud solution, there are still questions to answer with respect to connectivity to on-premises resources, though if application services are moved to AWS, this is less of an issue.

By leveraging multiple tenants and AWS connectivity, it is possible to scale outwards for geographical and resilience reasons. It is even possible to run a Cloud Pod federation that includes both on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS-hosted Horizon Pods. It’s a little more elastic than an on-premises solution in that you can scale down the VMware Cloud on AWS tenant.

Going Full Cloud – Horizon Cloud

The next option is VMware’s true Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering, Horizon Cloud. Currently, this is available in two flavours – Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud and Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. Each of these have slightly different attributes that affect use cases, however as both use a common management backplane, they’re similar to administer.

The key thing that separates the Horizon Cloud flavour is that because it’s a DaaS offering, the buyer is literally just an administrator of desktops – all the broker components and (in the case of the IBM Cloud hosted) infrastructure is controlled and maintained by VMware. If you require elasticity in scaling both up and down, this is the most dynamic offering as it is purchased in desktop capacity units as a subscription service.

Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud

This is hosted on an IBM platform based on VMware vSphere technology. This option is comparatively cheap and is intended to be the ‘all in one’ greenfield solution as the license includes the compute capacity as well as Horizon licensing.

It can provide full VDI desktops, or Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) based desktops and published applications. For VDI, it can produce non-persistent desktops using Linked Clone technology. There are several Nvidia GPU offerings for graphic intensive desktops, but only for full VDI.

While this solution offers VMware App Volumes for application delivery to the desktops (no user assigned disks), it does not support the use of App Volumes with RDSH servers, unlike the Horizon View offerings.

As a DaaS offering, rather than IaaS, integration is limited – for example, little ability to leverage virtualisation-based app delivery tools outside App Volumes and no agentless anti-virus.

Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure

By leveraging the same broker technology and management portal as Horizon Cloud on IBM Hosted, it is now possible to deploy on your own Microsoft Azure tenant. In this case, an appliance is used to automate the cloning process for deploying full clones in Azure – there is no Instant Clone capability here currently.

This is largely intended for those who want to do desktop virtualisation and already have Azure. It’s not particularly cheap as you must pay both VMware (for Horizon licensing) and Microsoft for the Azure VMs. While it has no App Volumes support at all, it does, however, have enhanced 3D graphics support through Microsoft Azure GPU-enabled infrastructure for RDS workloads.

Closing Thoughts

The choice is quite broad, but must be considered with care, leaning heavily on the use case. The discovery process is more critical than ever and should be embarked upon before signing on the dotted line for a product to ensure that not only is the solution sized and designed correctly, but that the correct platform is selected in the first place.

The Horizon Cloud DaaS offerings are compelling, but they aren’t a panacea – you still need to design and administer the solution. You’ve only eliminated the infrastructure support and moved your desktops further away from your users and their data.

Horizon View remains the most flexible product and, with the VMware Cloud on AWS support, even offers a cloud presence and better scaling options than previously. An interesting option here is a hybrid approach of Horizon View on-premises, but federated with an AWS hosted tenant for DR. The disadvantage is that you need to keep the platform running rather than throwing infrastructure issues over the fence to VMware and that infrastructure will be costly.

Ultimately, it’s a ‘choose your poison’ decision, which re-emphasises the point above – don’t rush in and buy first/design later – carry out a proper investigation into the options and decide based upon business requirements and use cases.

Xtravirt have been involved in End User Compute virtualisation projects of all sizes for many years, bringing a broad range of skills and experience to the table. If you are looking to deploy a new digital workspace solution or wish to enhance or upgrade what you currently have, we can help. We have a long track record of successful workspace projects and can provide advisory, design and implementation services to create the right solution for your organisation. Contact us and we’ll be happy to assist you.

#VMware #Horizon #Cloud #VMConAWS #aws #EUC #VDI #DaaS #xtracbrown

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brianobrienny · 4 years ago

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Executive Insights: A Conversation with the “Father of Business Intelligence” Howard Dresner

It has been a great pleasure over the years to meet and work with some amazing pioneers in the world of high technology. They all have several things thing in common – vision, passion, and ability to drive innovation and make their brilliant ideas become reality.

One such person is Howard Dresner, the Chief Research Office and founder of Dresner Advisory Services. I first met Howard over 30 years ago at DEC. The company was faced with the challenge of being successful in the field of information access, executive information systems and decision support system solutions.

This was also the early stage of Data Warehousing, and while these all worked together, they were comprised of disparate components. At the time we used “marketecture” concepts to explain such complex solutions.

I have since come to understand this as an “inside-out” versus an “outside-in” concept; we started with the products and concepts and built out from there. What was truly lacking was a unification concept that was easy to understand and consume.

I am proud to say I was in the room the day Howard Dresner coined the term Business Intelligence (BI) at DEC. I remember that moment vividly, with a single graphic that unified disparate concepts, and an umbrella term that would go on to change the IT industry forever.

Howard took the concept to Gartner, became a VP and Research Fellow, and established the Gartner BI practice and a successful BI customer conference. As we say — the rest is history. I joined Howard’s team earlier this year, and it has been great working in BI again — although I really never left, especially given how pervasive data and analytics have become in marketing.

Now in the thirteenth year of running Dresner Advisory Services, we had a chance to look back and discuss the state of BI, the changes we’ve both experienced in three-plus decades and discuss what the future may hold.

Q: Howard, you have been at the forefront of Business Intelligence literally since the creation of the concept, have been a BI practitioner and a thought leader and witnessed extraordinary change over that time. What is your take on the evolution of BI tool, technology, solutions and where is the market headed next?

A: Ultimately, we’re headed to what I call “information democracy” where all stakeholders have access to timely, relevant and actionable insights. While most people get hung up on tools – and there are some impressive ones – we still have the majority of users without access to actionable insight.

Q: I recently had the opportunity to interview Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at Hubspot and the “father” of Marketing Technology (MarTech) – Scott spoke about the phenomenon where software companies are incorporating services and services companies are incorporating software to redefine core concept of solutions. How do you see that impacting the Business Intelligence marketplace and how we define BI solutions?

A: I haven’t observed many/any software companies that want to venture into the services business. That said, many/most are concerned with customer success. So, having some services capability is key. Conversely, many/most services organizations seek higher margin businesses – like software. In the BI space, System Integrators (SIs) will leverage off-the-shelf software but also develop some of their own “added value” supporting higher margins.

Q: We often segment the success of customers in a market as “leaders, laggards and those in the middle”. What are some characteristics of leaders in BI today and what differentiates them from the other groups? Are their key technologies and best practices those in the middle can implement to step up and become leaders?

A: Technology does not define leadership in this space. What makes a difference is having a vision at the most senior levels for how information and insight are used to help align stakeholders with the strategy and mission of the organization. And, while technology is important, it serves as an enabler for a more evolved and visionary organization.

Q: Both of us have lived through major technology changers and paradigm shifts – PCs, client/server, networked business solutions, the rise of the packaged software/ISV industry and much more. How does the rise of cloud solutions and SaaS and “everything as a service” (XaaS) impact and define the future of BI?

A: We’ve been tracking the cloud and SaaS phenomenon for a decade and have seen it go from nascent to mainstream. However, conceptually, it’s not new. Many years ago, there was something called “timeshare” which offered similar benefits: no on-premises systems or software, and, with managed services, there was no need for technical staff. This made solutions affordable for many more organizations like Small and Midsize Enterprises (SMEs). Certainly, technology has advanced since that time. However, conceptually they are quite similar.

Q: Do you see skills gaps in today’s BI marketplace, and if so, what are they? As the recent global COVID19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated digital transformation, what has its impact been upon the BI marketplace and how will the landscape change?

A: As more people have access to business intelligence/analytics, data literacy has not kept pace. Again, technology and tools alone won’t move an organization forward. People have to gain insight and execute based on that insight. However, most organizations report only modest data literacy. To be fully successful, organizations should establish a mandatory data literacy program – to establish basic data fluency all the way to sophisticated data science skills.

Regarding Covid-19, we’ve been tracking its business impact since early this year. And, in fact, our survey will remain open until the pandemic ends at covidbusinessimpact.com. As a result of the pandemic we’re seeing greater demand for data-driven insights than ever before. Anecdotally, I’ve been told that BI projects that struggled for funding in the past are now getting funded and have greater urgency than before. In addition, organizations are focused on greater self-service, collaboration, governance and cloud-based delivery – all of this with an eye to enabling the digital enterprise.

Howard, thank you very much for your tremendous insights. We appreciate you showcasing why Business Intelligence is such an exciting place to be and thank you for your decades of outstanding leadership. Be sure to follow Howard and join him and the Dresner Advisory team for their monthly Luncheon Learning webinars, weekly #BIWisdom “tweetchat” (on summer hiatus until September, then Fridays at 1 PM EST) and for the upcoming Real BI Conference (virtual for 2020) on August 11-12 2020.

And to think I’ve been saying @howarddresner coined the term #BusinessIntelligence now for what 30+ years but the #incas were actually first! True #BIWisdom learn more at the virtual @RealBIEvent https://t.co/dXzAox0ehH

— Fred M. Isbell (@fmisbell) July 16, 2020

Howard is founder and Chief Research Officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC and founder and chair of the Real Business Intelligence Conference, Author and a former Gartner Research Fellow and Analyst Follow him @howarddresner

Fred is a Research Director at Dresner Advisory Services, a high technology industry marketing veteran and former Senior Marketing Director for SAP Global Marketing. Join him online: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

The post Executive Insights: A Conversation with the “Father of Business Intelligence” Howard Dresner appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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#Internet Marketing #Social Media Marketing #Email Marketing #Business

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syscommltd · 4 years ago

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Getting Network Infrastructures in Shape for The Big Return to Work

As firms gear up for a partial return to the workplace, what will this mean for those that have been charged with keeping business networks up and running during lockdown?

After nearly 15 weeks of having to deal with an almost overnight transition to a ‘distributed business’ and operating under a ‘new normal’, the general easing of lockdown means that businesses are now having to cope with a partial return to work that will ultimately involve the implementation of a hybrid business model consisting of home and office working.

And from a networking point of view, this new hybrid model means more challenges to face – and overcome.

There’s never been a situation where an organisation’s entire staff have had to abandon their offices for weeks at a time. And the strain on the networks forced many companies to re-examine just how suitable their underlying infrastructure is as they look to the future. Long before this crisis, networks were already experiencing transformation – both caused and facilitated by the rise of cloud, IoT, streaming media, 5G, and edge compute. Post pandemic, networks have suddenly been asked to cope with massive increases in demand – from remote workers, increases in online consumers, schools, healthcare and more.

Legacy Network Infrastructure Letting Businesses Down

Outdated legacy systems only make it harder for network infrastructure and businesses to keep up. The time is now to take steps toward building networks designed to adapt under today’s pressures. When it comes to networks, there won’t be a return to ‘normal’ – especially when continued unpredictability is the only thing we can accurately predict.

Networks need open, flexible solutions to real business challenges. The recent mass-scale network pressures felt by businesses have exposed many of the short-comings of their legacy infrastructure.

One key learning from the pandemic is that the more cloud-centric a business is, the more resilient it was. There is no doubt that cloud and modern infrastructure solutions will be an essential part of a path forward towards a new reality. It is imperative that businesses take this transition time to examine their IT strategy, asking the following questions:

Are your cloud and network strategies delivering the speed and flexibility your business requires?

Is your environment enabling the secure, connected and seamless experience your users demand?

Is your architecture built to take advantage of a much broader digital ecosystem over the coming years?

How confident are you that you have optimised the spend on your current infrastructure environment?

Seize the Opportunities Offered by New IT Infrastructure

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the world as we know it, presenting unique challenges that many business leaders have never had to confront before. With a continuously shifting landscape, IT resilience is key to protecting the health of both your people and your business as we return to the ‘old normal’.

In the coming weeks and months, technology leaders managing through the crisis should be looking at the optimisation of their estate and identifying how to emerge into a more competitive position. By taking action now in a few key priority areas, technology leaders can help their organisations respond to immediate operational, customer, employee, and financial disruptions, maintain business continuity as new challenges emerge, and realise a quick and competitive recovery after the crisis.

1. Focus on critical problems

While urgency is critical, the best way to tackle a challenge as big as COVID-19 is to think holistically and home in on your immediate, next, and future steps. Begin by identifying those processes and systems that must be stabilised to support the business. Prepare for the possible further degradation in performance by what-if scenario modelling and engage your business partners and suppliers to understand what changes can be made in order to mitigate future issues.

2. Put people first

The heart of this crisis has been decidedly human. Making changes that support employee health and well-being is critical, such as enhancing flexible working hours that allow people to balance remote work with family duties. Prepare for increased absences. For your most critical employees, take a moment to personally reach out and provide extra support.

3. Optimise your cloud infrastructure

Moving forward, activity in your cloud and pressures on your traditional infrastructure will peak more than usual. Is it ready to handle the load? Put a plan in place to scale cloud services, as well as hybrid and traditional environments, to meet increased demand. The plan should include compute, hosting, storage, network, telephony and collaboration suites.

4. Review security, risk and governance

Given the rapidity of our move to a ‘new normal’, there was undoubtedly a number of shortcuts being taken. Now is the time to re-examine weakened security and control measures that might have put your organisation at risk. This is also the time to be extra cyber vigilant, deploying more resources, working collaboratively with others in your ecosystem, and applying extra scrutiny to your lines of defence: Cyber criminals have been extremely active in using the COVID-19 outbreak to their advantage, stepping up attacks, targeting victims with misinformation on fake websites and phishing campaigns.

5. Continue transformation work

When pushed to save money, it’s easy to put transformation programs on hold during a crisis and revert to traditional working models. Resist the urge and continue to invest in high-value areas such as cloud, automation and agility – investing today will help the business survive and thrive in the short- and long-term. These hard-won programmes are the key to emerging more competitive and ready to respond to the newly transformed business environment.

6. Reframe funding

Given the widespread business and economic impact of COVID-19, there will be cost pressures within the technology function. To lessen the burden, consider opportunities to move to variable cost models, such as XaaS.

7. Adjust the IT operating model

Every change you make to navigate the COVID-19 crisis will impact your IT operating model across multiple dimensions: process, technology, governance, people, service delivery, performance insights, and data. For many organisations, the future is suddenly now, with their digital transformation plans having been massively accelerated and scaled virtually overnight. As you come out of the lockdown, now is the time to think about how you can drive value by embedding these changes together, using methods and tools such as agile working, collaboration and integrated cloud.

Summary

Now that your teams are returning back to work, investing in a modern network infrastructure will ensure resilience and lessen the impact of the pandemic. Fast, reliable, flexible and secure networks that can handle the capacity demands to support business continuity and accelerate digital transformation, have so far been a crucial component in enabling the new normal to succeed, and will be increasingly crucial going forward. Indeed, they will be indispensable in the future.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced businesses to rethink how they can both meet the evolving needs of their customers and employees while positioning themselves for growth. As a result, Syscomm would advise that businesses move further towards a model where the agile network responds automatically to business change – meaning that cloud and modern infrastructure solutions be an essential part of the path forward towards this new network reality.

Talk to us about how we can help you move away from the complex and inflexible networks of the past and move towards an agile next generation network that will be more responsive to the business needs, reduce operational costs and increase the ability to innovate.

Talk to one of our network specialists today 0247 771 2000

Please fill out the form below and one of our professional and friendly team will be in contact with you.

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The post Getting Network Infrastructures in Shape for The Big Return to Work appeared first on Syscomm.

from Syscomm http://www.syscomm.co.uk/next-generation-networks/getting-network-infrastructures-in-shape-for-the-big-return-to-work/

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themaintenancecorner · 4 years ago

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When conducting damp surveys, the pinless function (or search mode) is the method I always use first before moving on to the pinned function. The search mode is a fantastic method of rapidly assessing the relative moisture content of solid walls and floors.

The likes of the Protimeter Surveymaster allows you to use this function to investigate beneath the surface to a depth of up to 19mm without causing any damage. This mode is perfect for searching behind wall and floor coverings such as ceramic tiles, wall papers, laminate flooring, plasterboard, masonry and so on. What’s more, surface moisture (e.g. condensation) has little effect to the measurement taken giving the user some certainty that the readings are sub-surface readings.

That sounds great, so what’s the downside you may ask. Well using the likes of a Surveymaster or MMS2 on ceilings and floors can be very awkward and surveying a large area like a flat roof can be very time consuming using these devices. This is where the brand new Protimeter Reachmater Pro comes in. In this review I will be looking into all the features of the Reachmaster Pro to find out whether this device is the next must-have for those investigating damp.

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Initial impressions

The Protimeter Reachmaster Pro will come with the following:

Reachmaster Pro

Semi rigid carry case

Spare abrasion plate

The list pricing will be £510, €610 and $669 (Excl vat).

Looking at the Reachmaster Pro you will see the familiar colours and textures that have defined the modern Proimeter line up. Protimeter have nailed the premium look and feel of this non-invasive moisture meter. This meter has three main components which are the telescopic handle, the display unit and the sensor unit.

The telescopic handle feels very robust. The grip is made from a grey rubbery non-slip material and it has grooves for the fingers to make it even steadier in the hand, at no point did I feel like this was going to slip out of my hand when using it. The telescopic pole has a yellow rocker switch which allows it to extend. It has six 80mm increments allowing for a full extended range of over 1m. This extendable meter will make hard to reach areas a breeze as well as drastically speeding up your survey time when conducting a moisture map over a large area.

The display unit is set on hinges so that you can face it towards you when taking readings and fold it back into place when storing away. The Display unit takes 4 xAA batteries which are simple to swap out with its sliding back plate. This will give you around 80 hours of continual use. The display unit and sensor unit both incorporate micro USB ports on the side allowing for firmware upgrades to be easily installed if any are released in the future.

The sensor unit on the end of the unit is also set on a hinge which allows a good range of movement meaning you will be able to test just about every type of surface that you can encounter. The sensor unit requires 2x AA batteries which you can access by removing two small screws. I am really glad Protimeter have opted for the AA battery rather than the 9v square type battery found in some of their other meters, the AA battery is just so much more simple to swap out and replace. This will give you around 500 hours of continuous use meaning that you won’t need to change the batteries very often.

At the end of the sensor unit you will find a wear/abrasion plate which is removable by 4 small screws. Even though this package comes with a spare abrasion plate, I would always advise for you to place the meter on a surface rather than swipe it across a surface as this will protect the device and abrasion plate for longer.

Testing

To turn the meter on you simply press the power button on the sensor unit and then the same again for the display unit. They will both then automatically connect through Bluetooth. When turning off the display unit it automatically turns off the sensor as well.

The scale on the meter runs between 0 to 1000. The colour on the screen goes from green (0-175) to yellow (175-200) to red (200-999). The sensor can be calibrated before using the meter by going into the calibration setting and holding the meter in the air. This can help minimise anomalies caused by abrasion to the wear plate and other changes to the nearby environment.

I was able to test the Reachmaster in both a residential property and a commercial plant room. I found it worked really well in both examples. In the residential property there was a suspected leak under a bath, after testing the floor I found elevated readings close to the bath panel. I lifted the floor covering and removed the bath panel and I was able to get right in underneath the bath and take readings. This would have been rather awkward with a pin type meter.

The sensor unit can turn to the horizontal plane which made things so much easier for me to reach what would have previously been inaccessible areas. I found that you really need to place the sensor flat to the floor as any angle can change the reading. I also found this is where the pause or hold feature was really useful, after taking a reading under the bath I was able to pause the reading and stand up and take my notes with the reading remaining on the display screen.

Within the same residential property, I tested the floor, ceiling and tried to test at skirting level. The floor and ceilings were absolutely fine but the meter struggled slightly with skirting level measurements due to its range of movement. The way to get around this is by either crouching slightly or facing away from the wall and holding the meter the other way. So, for me it might be just as easy to pull out the pinned meter if you need to test skirtings or low-level wall measurements.

For the commercial plant room there were some elevated readings where there had been a leak from a boiler overflow. I was able to make my way around the room very quickly and this is really where the Reachmaster Pro really shined.

This is also where I was able to make full use of the reference mode on the meter. Reference mode allows you to store a ‘dry standard reading’ of a material which you can then test against different areas of the same material. So, I was able to check an area of flooring that I knew to be dry and then contrast it against other areas in the plant room. Once in reference mode you will see two readings on the display. The first reading is the actual (or current) reading and the lower reading is the number above or below the reference dry standard that you originally take.

Sensitivity

Another feature of this device is the device sensitivity option. The device allows you to use the minus and plus buttons give you the ability to alter the sensitivity. To access this feature, you simply hold either of these buttons for two seconds then push the button to increase or decrease the sensitivity. There is a scale from -5 to +5 in sensitivity.

I believe that whilst in theory this is a useful feature, I think in reality it will not be a regularly used feature of the device. The sensitivity feature does not increase the strength or depth of the signal but instead simply alters the scale which can be useful when taking readings on the very high or low end of the scale. So, if for example you have an area of saturated flooring that is giving you a reading of 999 you could lower the sensitivity which could allow you to zero in on where the moisture is coming from.

During my testing I was never faced with an example of the meter reaching the maximum value and as the meter takes an average read across the 120mm depth I think it would be a rare occurrence for you to see 999. If a surveyor relies solely on this device and increases the sensitivity thinking that this will allow for a more accurate reading on a floor with multiple layers this will lead to a misdiagnosis of damp where the floor is actually dry.

The Science (in laymen terms)

I am hoping that I do not butcher the science too much but I will try and lay it out in the simplest terms that I can in as far as I understand it. I think this is important as I think this will explain the limitations of this device whilst also explaining why this device is not going to be a replacement for the likes of your Surveymaster or MMS2, and rather a compliment to it.

Non-invasive meters or capacitance meters typically use a dielectric moisture measurement method which uses radio frequency to measure the dielectric properties of a given material. A dielectric material is an electrical insulator that can be polarised by an applied electric field. The dielectric constant (or relative permittivity) determines how well a material can store energy when in contact with an electric field. Water has a higher dielectric constant than most building materials so the meter can calculate the dielectric constant and if it is high it will give you a high reading. The more water in a material the higher the dielectric constant and the higher the reading.

The downside is that metals have an infinite dielectric constant, what this means is that if you place a non-invasive meter against a bit of metal it will show you a high reading. The reason I have taken the time to explain this is because if you understand the limitations to any device you can then limit the amount of chance that you will misdiagnose a moisture related defect. The limitations between this type of measurement and the resistance meters are similar but different which is why ultimately you will want to use a range of tools when diagnosing damp in buildings.

The depth of measurement is an important aspect to consider as well. The Surveymaster for example reads to a depth of 19mm and the Reachmaster Pro reads to a depth of 120mm depending on the materials being tested. A depth of 70mm can be acheived in a multi-layered material, 170mm for Brick and 120mm for gypsum. A dense single material will see the best results in terms of how deep the meter will be able to read.

Let’s say you have a solid wall with suspected external penetrating damp, the Reachmaster with its deeper penetration may prove more useful in this example. I would also imagine it would also be very useful on testing large areas of EPDM flat roofing where sourcing a leak can often be difficult and time consuming.

However, if you want to test a cement screed that has underlying reinforced concrete you may fair off better with the shallower penetration. It is also worth noting that the Protimeter range takes an average reading across the depth of measurement rather than giving you the highest reading it encounters which is a good thing when it comes to encountering anomalies.

Conclusion

I was very impressed with this meter overall. I think if you are a roofing contractor or a surveyor who carries out inspections of flat roofs this will be the next must have tool.

For residential surveyors I would not look at the Reachmaster as a device to replace your existing kit, it acts as a compliment to the functionality found on the likes of the Surveymaster. It allows you to zip round a property and easily access areas which would have previously only been accessible by ladder for high areas or by kneeling down for low areas.

It allows you to take readings of awkward spaces like under baths or under kitchen units after the kick plates have been removed which would have been a very difficult task with a conventional meter.

And finally, it gives you that extra depth of reading which will assist you in a wider variety of dampness cases opening up more possibilities to investigate deeper into a substrate non-invasively.

Product Review: The Protimeter Reachmaster Pro When conducting damp surveys, the pinless function (or search mode) is the method I always use first before moving on to the pinned function.

#Product Review #Protimeter #Reachmaster Pro #Review #technology

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