Author: Sudip Nandy

Recent College Grad? Start Your IT Career With Vertex

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

Are you a recent or soon-to-be graduate with a degree in Computer Science or Information Technology? Or do you have demonstrable skills as a software developer? Vertex is adding entry-level to senior members to its team of talented developers and analysts. Launch your career as a software developer with us!

At Vertex Computer Systems you will learn the world of consulting, work with varied clients and industries helping them solve critical problems. You will develop digital transformation solutions, cloud-based custom applications, analytical solutions using AI/ML algorithms, data science & visualization solutions using Microsoft, Salesforce, Open-Source platforms, and other cutting-edge technologies.

We offer a great working environment that is informal and collaborative, allows you to bring out your best, contribute immensely, and learn on the job. We value and listen to your ideas.

Prior work experience is not a requirement for us.

The job location will be Sharonville, Ohio (Cincinnati) post removal of pandemic era restrictions.

If you’re interested in starting your career with a leading Information Technology Services company, please send an email to [email protected] with a detailed resume of your academic background, and your work experience if any.  We are hiring immediately but have flexibility with start dates to accommodate various graduation schedules.

You can find more information about Vertex at www.vertexcs.com.

Supporting Ukraine

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

Dear Ukraine,  

All of us here at Vertex are saddened to see the plight being faced by your country and your people.  

We are impressed with your courage and resilience in the face of this horrible foe. The stories and images that we see in our newsfeeds and on our TVs of uprooted lives and destruction of property are tough to watch. We hope and pray that you will all survive this brutality, and that peace will reign on your land soon. 

We know that many of you have had to flee your homes and your jobs in the face of this crisis.  

While you are fighting this adversity, we want to let you know we are here to help you. If you have information technology skills, we would like to talk to you about working for us. Please send an email to [email protected] with details of your work experience and technical specialties. 

Vertex Gives Back

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

Part of Vertex Computer Systems’s guiding philosophy is a spirit of giving back to the communities in which we live and work.

We’re pleased to report that our charitable donations for 2021 went to twenty organizations in India and the U.S. with a focus on those that aided children in their local communities with food and education. The individual charities were carefully vetted to ensure that eighty percent or more of contributions go to providing services. We hope to continue, and even expand, these giving programs in the coming years.

Building an Organizational Culture That Supports DevOps 

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

DevOps is at its core is a set of best practices for developers and IT operations that aims to shorten release cycles and increase software quality. As such, it is closely related to other development methodologies such as Agile Software Development, CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment), and Kaizen.

As DevOps has matured, several toolsets have emerged to support the application development lifecycle, providing version control, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, testing, and release management capabilities. The best tools in the world, however, will not ensure success if the development and IT organizations are not committed to instilling the culture necessary to support it.

Click here to read another article about how a strong DevOps culture at Vertex achieved the development paragon of zero defects code.

Our top five practices with the strongest correlation to organizational culture are:

  1. Organizational investment
  2. Team leaders’ experience and effectiveness
  3. Continuous delivery
  4. Organizational performance
  5. Lean management practices

Organizational Investment

DevOps success begins at the top. IT and development managers need to break down the silos between development, testing, deployment, and operations to create a cross-functional, unified team capable of working across the entire development lifecycle. While technology stacks and tooling aid in the quick and reliable development of applications, it is really the shared responsibility and ownership that increases the team’s velocity.

Experience and Effectiveness

Leaders of DevOps teams need to be experienced across the spectrum of IT disciplines in order to break down potential barriers and ensure that their teams are performing at the highest potential.

As a DevOps engineer at IBM said in an article published by InfoWorld, “We needed to answer some basic questions and determine the problems we were trying to solve…If you don’t know how the work is actually done, you don’t know which problems are worth solving.”

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is the DevOps approach that aims to produce software in short cycles. By developing in short cycles, teams can reliably release their software at any time. With CD, development teams can build, test, and release software faster and more frequently. As a result, they can reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering each change. A repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery. Rather than throwing code ‘over the wall’ to QA and Operations, integrated teams can achieve heretofore unexpected release cycles.

Organizational Performance

The transformation to a DevOps organization takes a large investment in time, money, and resources. The ability to clearly and accurately measure the performance of your DevOps team is critical to improving efficiency and tracking success.

The following metrics are a great start for measuring DevOps performance and progress:

  • Lead Time – The time it takes to implement, test, and deliver code
  • Deployment Frequency – The number of software deployments over a period of time.
  • Change Failure Rate – While shortening and increasing the frequency of release cycles is the goal of DevOps, management should also look at failure rates.
  • Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) – How long it takes the organization to recover from a failure and release a fix.
  • Customer Ticket Volume – This is ultimately a measure of end-user satisfaction. Bugs and errors that are missed in QA are often detected by the end-user. The number of customer tickets marked as problems or bugs is an important indicator of application reliability.

Lean Management Practices

A recent article in Communications of the ACM stated that “DevOps is about good development practices that continually deliver product features (Agile) effectively with minimal wasted efforts (Lean) which are overseen by good governance controls (Information Technology Service Management, or ITSM). To that end, a growing consensus within the information technology community is that DevOps = Agile + Lean + ITSM.”

Contrary to popular belief, while DevOps may eliminate the traditional ‘waterfall’ method of project management, it does not brush aside Agile/Scrum either. Nor does it do away with traditional IT organizations rather than force a transformational shift.

Vertex Computer Systems Has The Practices AND The Tools

Look to the DevOps experts at Vertex to guide your way to the efficiencies of DevOps and to help you choose the right tools to create repeatable, clean releases. We Got IT.

Using Salesforce to Drive your Manufacturing Growth

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

You may already think of Salesforce as a powerful Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) application, but it can also help manufacturers to identify, prospect and track opportunities, customers, and cases to drive revenue and growth opportunities. Manufacturers who take advantage of the full breadth of Salesforce’s functionality realize improved revenues and growth margins – all while lowering their SG&A and Operations Costs.

How Can You Improve Your Revenue?

Vertex Computer Systems has helped manufacturers conduct B2B marketing campaigns that expand their ability to understand and respect their customers and ultimately contribute to the continued success of those valued partners. Similarly, Salesforce Sales Cloud can be utilized to attract and engage new customers before, during, and after the sale. If you’re serious about keeping track of your customers at every stage, Vertex has the Salesforce expertise to help you leverage customer relationships to grow sales and improve customer satisfaction.

Because Salesforce provides a true 360° view of the customer, manufacturers can get a clearer understanding of customer needs as well as their journeys through the sales process. Would you like to shorten the cycle from prospect to sale? Salesforce provides standard and custom pricing solution options to help manufacturers accelerate deals. The Partner Portal’s Community Cloud can also enhance collaboration with a manufacturer’s business partners for greater efficiency.

Key Salesforce Features That Help Manufacturers Grow Sales Revenue

  • B2B marketing campaigns
  • Lead scoring and automated assignments
  • Lead-to-Cash process optimization
  • Custom pricing solutions to accelerate deals and maximize gross margins
  • Partner Portal access via Partner Community for maximum collaboration
  • Streamlined/automated customer service experience
  • True 360° view of the customer providing revenues, returns, support costs, et al

The other side of the profitability equation involves the standardization, optimization, and automation of processes. If you’re interested in lowering your SG&A and operations costs, Salesforce can help. Did you know you can eliminate manual spreadsheets, replacing them with real-time processing, reporting, and alerts? Salesforce provides your Manufacturing team instant access to the same up-to-date detailed information. That’s just one way of many that Salesforce enhances operations.

Key Salesforce Features That lower SG&A and Operations Costs

  • Eliminating manual spreadsheets with real-time processing, reporting, and alerts
  • Demand Forecasting – both revenues and units
  • Contract management
  • Simplified order processing/ERP integration
  • MS Outlook/Gmail integration
  • Reduced customer service and support costs
  • Integrated, automated, and streamlined credit checking

If you want to leverage Salesforce to quickly move the needle for your manufacturing firm, give Vertex a call. You won’t be disappointed.

How The Internet of Things (IoT) is Transforming the Way We Do Business

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

In just a few short years, small internet-enabled devices, known collectively as the Internet of Things (IoT), have transformed how we live in ways that continue to grow and evolve.

The IoT revolution really began with consumer-facing products – smartwatches, thermostats, and television remotes. While today your IoT-enabled refrigerator might tell you that you need to get more milk or your smart garage door opener may send you a text asking if you meant to leave the door open, the IoT is now set to transform and revolutionize business processes and operations.

While the roots of Industry 4.0 started in the 1990s, it is the rise of interconnected systems communicating via the internet that is truly leading to a revolution in manufacturing. Not only can machines on factory floors communicate more intelligently with each other across physical and geographical barriers, but these smart machines are also able to monitor, detect and predict faults, suggesting preventive measures and remedial action before downtime occurs.

The IoT also allows manufacturing processes to be completely virtually visualized, monitored, and managed from remote locations. Industry 4.0 puts machines, people, processes, and infrastructure into a single, connected manufacturing process, which provides businesses with full disclosure over the entire workings of their manufacturing and production. Using this information makes overall management highly efficient.

Supply Chain Management

Just one way that the IoT will create efficiencies for the world of business, be it B2B or B2C, is in supply chain management.

From factory to shelf, the IoT cannot only make existing processes more efficient, but it can also detect potentially expensive problems in advance of them impacting your business. Picture a small component in a factory. As a ‘dumb’ cog in the machinery, the part could fail without notice, shutting down an assembly line for several days. As a ‘smart’ cog, a similar part could tell engineers that it was set to fail days in advance, automatically place an order for its replacement, and direct staff to its location in the factory to replace it.

The same technology makes it easier for businesses to track inventory around the world, creating opportunities for supply chain and logistics optimization. Connected manufacturing and the IoT provide employees with visibility over company assets worldwide. Standard asset management tasks such as transfers, disposals, and adjustments can be streamlined and managed centrally and in real-time.

Similarly, the IoT has been used to handle logistics for the maintenance of a shipper’s fleet. With equipment requiring regularly scheduled maintenance, knowing where a given truck is on a given day, scheduling it for service, and making sure that there are enough trucks in the right place to cover customer needs. Easier scheduling, reduced downtime, and balanced fleet usage all translate to savings.

Asset Tracking & Waste Reduction

IoT sensors on both vehicles and product packaging can provide insight into where a company’s inventory is at any given time. When a company always knows exactly where their inventory is, they can be agile with moving it to where the need is the greatest. Furthermore, the same sensors are able to detect changes in temperature, light, and other environmental factors, ensuring that potentially perishable items do not go to waste.

With real-time insight into buyer behavior, retailers can stay up to date not only with on-shelf product stocking, but also by tracking which goods are most popular in a given setting, allowing them to increase their profits with efficient sales and stock management.

Advanced Workforce

Frontline workers need access to accurate and up-to-date information in order to solve problems and increase productivity. Access to information, guidance, training, and support which was previously delivered in person can now be delivered directly to the shop floor.

Manufacturers and industrial companies of every size can now access digital transformation initiatives in order to maintain business operations and business continuity. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) can now be a part of the toolkit available to workers on the shop floor and are crucial to making the most of a workforce that is increasingly spread across the world.

Advanced Analytics & AI

With information coming in from sources as disparate IoT sensors on factory floors, lighting systems, sales data, supply chain, and customer demand, there are massive amounts of data to sift through. Thanks to advances in data and analytics, manufacturers are more capable than ever of using that data to make informed decisions to improve internal processes.

Taking it to the next level, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning can be leveraged to further process your data, using it to reach conclusions that go beyond the obvious. Some examples include forecasting market changes and predicting machine downtime.

Customer Engagement and Real-Time Insights

Stepping outside of the shop floor, as the IoT and its associated cloud platforms become more prevalent, companies will be able to gain deeper insight into how their products are being used, potentially leading to new marketing channels, improved customer service, product improvements, and ultimately, increased customer satisfaction.

Transform Your Business

As the IoT landscape continues to evolve, market research from Gartner and Cisco predicts that the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will grow even larger, improving asset management, operational visibility, safety, and security. With all of these interconnected devices, the amount of data grows exponentially. By partnering with a technology company experienced in supply chain management, big data, machine learning, and data visualization, you can transform your business for the 21st Century.

Do You Have More Salesforce Licenses and Products Than You Need? 

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

Let Our Salesforce Experts Audit Your Organization and Find Cost Savings

When Salesforce started out back in 1999, it was purely a cloud-based CRM, offering customers little more than the ability to manage their Accounts, Contacts Opportunities, and Forecasts. Today Salesforce is the biggest SAAS platform in the world, offering multiple editions and more than ten different license types and SKUs, leading to 100s of permutations and combinations.

While the basics of Sales Cloud licenses for managing your sales pipeline remain unchanged, there are more nuances when it comes to picking the right edition, license types, and mix of products that align with your company’s Salesforce vision. For instance, not all your employees may need a full Sales Cloud license, and a Service Cloud or a Lightning Platform License may be more suited for them. Similarly, choosing the right Experience Cloud License for your Customers and Partners could save you thousands of dollars, annually. These savings can be used for further accelerating your Sales and Marketing strategies by purchasing High Velocity Sales licenses for your inside Sales team, or Pardot for B2B Marketing.

Choosing the wrong licenses and products can greatly decrease the ROI on your Salesforce investment.  We often see customers come to us a few months or years into their Salesforce journey, complaining about the poor ROI from Salesforce. And often, we see the use of improper or underutilized licenses being the biggest culprit.

SMBs using Salesforce report an average of 26% more deals and 32% more leads. The journey to achieve those metrics starts by identifying the right licenses and products for your organization’s Salesforce journey. Unless you have the expertise in-house, teaming up with the right Salesforce Partner, at inception, to help define the roadmap and the right combination of licenses and products is the best way to maximize your Salesforce ROI.

Do you feel that you’re not getting the highest return on investment from your Salesforce system? If not, your organization may benefit from a License and Product audit by the team of Salesforce experts at Vertex Computer Systems. Contact us today!

An Overview of Salesforce Security & Compliance Measures

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

Salesforce has rightfully earned and held on to the title of the “World’s #1 CRM Platform” by going to great lengths to enable their customers to access to their data across all devices, all while ensuring the data is protected from unauthorized access. As the adage goes, “Security is only as strong or weak as the weakest link in the chain.” Salesforce, from its early days, recognized its part in its customers’ security chain and has taken all measures possible to protect customer data at every layer of the OSI model. They also offer powerful and flexible tools to their customers to secure their data exactly the way they want. Let’s look at the tools in each of these categories.

Infrastructure

  • Salesforce’s office sites, development centers, support, and data centers are secured by state-of-the-art technologies and are ISO 270001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 certified by an independent party.
  • Salesforce hosts multiple tenants on the same shared set of resources. Tenants are completely isolated from each other via an “Organization ID”.
  • In addition, the platform is HIPAA, FedRAMP, and GDPR compliant. A full list of Salesforce’s certifications may be found here.
  • These security measures are entirely under the control of Salesforce and have been made available to the general public for informational purposes alone. The ones below are more important to the Salesforce customer and require careful review, planning, and execution.

Encryption

  • All data is encrypted using TLS 1.2 the moment it leaves the user’s browser or mobile device. Data is always encrypted as it moves around within Salesforce’s own networks.
  • Salesforce offers the ability to encrypt data in sensitive fields at no extra cost, so they may only be accessed by authorized users
  • For an additional cost, customers may purchase Salesforce Shield, which encrypts all customer data, at rest.

Real-time Monitoring

  • Salesforce offers event monitoring at an additional cost for Enhanced Transaction Security and Threat Detection.
    • Enhanced Transaction Security offers customers the ability to define policies around sensitive operations such as login, API access, and reporting.
    • Threat Detection alerts customers in real-time to unauthorized access from session hijacking, credential Stuffing and other anomalies

Authorization

  • Salesforce offers a myriad of ways for customers to log in, ranging from traditional password-based logins to SAML or OAuth-based SSO.
  • In addition, users also have the option of a wide range of two-factor authentication mechanisms. The simplest one (which all users are enrolled in, by default) is through an activation code emailed to the user. Other options include text messages to the user’s registered phone, Salesforce Authenticator App, or a physical security key.

Application Security

  • The final and the most important piece of the security chain, from a customer’s perspective, are the security configuration options in the Salesforce app itself.
    • System and Object access levels
      • Profiles control Create, Read, Delete and Edit access to objects as well as access to fields. They also dictate the scope of what the user can do on the platform.
      • Permission Sets allow additional permissions to be added to the ones provided to a user by their Profile.
      • Permission Set Groups are a recent addition to the platform that allows grouping multiple Permission Sets together. They have been introduced to simplify the metadata representation of a user’s access levels and are projected to make Profiles less relevant soon.
    • Data access levels
      • For a user having at least Read access to an Object, access to individual records is controlled by a combination of Org-Wide Defaults, the User’s Role, the Object’s Sharing Rules, and Record Ownership. In addition, there are features like Sharing Sets, Queue Membership, Enterprise Territory Management, Manual Sharing, and Account/Sales and Case Teams that can provide a user access to certain records.
    • Process execution contexts
      • Custom Screens and Automations designed on the Platform using Code or Flows may be run under the System Context or User Context. It requires careful planning and execution on the part of an admin or developer to ensure these processes always run with the least privileges necessary and don’t turn into attack surfaces, or inadvertently expose sensitive customer information

The features listed above are merely an overview. There are many intricacies to configuring and fine-tuning data security in Salesforce. Although most small-to-midsize customers start out with an “open” model, where access to data is pretty much unrestricted to all users, the approach may not be suited to all customers and can quickly prove inadequate as the user list starts growing.

Careful planning and execution, driven by an experienced Salesforce Consultant or Administrator can end up saving you a lot of time and money as you start to scale usage of the Platform. At the same time, a lack of proper planning and improper implementation can end up costing you time, money, and customer goodwill.

Vertex Computer Systems is a trusted Salesforce Solutions Provider with specializations in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Business Process Automation & Transformation. If you would like to schedule a Salesforce security audit or just learn more about Salesforce security, please contact us.

Cream Rises: Two Vertex Coders Finish in the Top Ten of the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

The India Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge is a contest that attracts some of the brightest minds in software engineering and pushes them to perform feats of coding ingenuity. For 72 hours in mid-October, over 1,000 people in India battled in this tournament of intellect, creativity, and skill.

Vertex is pleased to share that our own Bhavani Pallekonda, Software Engineer, and Jagadeesh Srirangapuram, Senior Software Programmer, rose to respective second and ninth places. Vertex congratulates Bhavani and Jagadeesh for their initiative and hard work as they completed a series of tutorials, browser-based interactive coding, and scripting. The Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge is part of the Partner Leadership Conclave 10, a virtual event that gives developers a chance to show off their skills and compete for prizes. “It’s an interactive way to learn the new things,” Pallekonda says. “Also, we were excited to complete the tasks.” Srirangapuram, who loves a good challenge, found the experience rewarding. “Initially, I never expected this high of a result,” he says. “But, it was fruitful. It was exciting to be challenged at each stage of the competition. I exceeded my expectations.”

 

Microsoft Cloud Challenge Winners

Two top-ten finishers prove our team’s talent, hard work, and spirit of success. “It’s a pleasure to see two of our associates place so highly,” says Sudip Nandy, Head of Delivery, Hyderabad. “Not a small achievement against more than 1,000 competitors. I’m extremely proud of them.”

Additionally, 14 other Vertex employees took part in the contest, and all finished respectably. “It was gratifying to see so much interest from our team,” Sudip continued. “Vertex was well represented, and I know that if challenging weather conditions in Hyderabad didn’t interfere – causing power outages – all our contestants would have come through with flying colors.”

Not only is this distinction a feather in the cap of our associates, but it also gains Vertex visibility in the Microsoft Partner Network. “Congratulations to the team for participating and kudos to Bhavani and Jagadeesh for making the top ten,” says Ganesh Iyer, Principal. “This is an incredible achievement and will help elevate our brand as an elite partner in the Microsoft ecosystem.”

A round of applause to Vertex’s full team of participants:

  • Thomas Anthony
  • Nihanth Balabhadra
  • Viswa Bandaru
  • Seetharam Bheemavarapu
  • Muralikrishna Chinigi
  • Prashanthi Geedula
  • Gopala Rao Gollapalli
  • Abdul Hak
  • Satish Kulala
  • Pradeep Madasu
  • Bhavani Pallekonda
  • Suvarchala Pantam
  • Jagadeesh Srirangapuram
  • Seetharama Rao Tungaturti
  • Gopinath Vemulapalli
  • Sudeep Yadagiri

Digitally Transform With Microsoft Power Platform

Posted on by Sudip Nandy

Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of applications that work together with the entire Microsoft Fusion ecosystem to enable the creation of software applications in no-code, low-code, and code-first environments.

The Development Tools

While Power Platform pulls in most of the Microsoft ecosystem of tools including Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other apps, it is based on four main components: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.

Power Apps

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, and connectors, as well as a data platform, providing a development environment that allows non-professional developers to quickly build professional-grade applications, connect with diverse data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on), embed dashboards, and deploy to iOS and Android app stores.

Power Apps is embedded with rich business logic and workflow capabilities that can easily transform your manual business processes into automated digital processes. The resulting apps can run seamlessly in both browsers and mobile devices and “democratizes” the previously developer-only app building experience to enable all users to create feature-rich custom apps without writing code.

Power BI

Power BI is a complete data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and visualization tool that integrates with the Power Platform ecosystem. With pre-built and custom data connections, industry-leading data security, tight integration with Excel and built-in AI capabilities, it allows you to easily derive meaningful insights from your data

Power Automate

Power Automate gives you the power to streamline repetitive tasks and create paperless processes, greatly increasing productivity and reducing errors. You can Use low-code, drag-and-drop tools and hundreds of pre-built connectors that automate repetitive, mundane tasks with ease. Furthermore, you can use Process Advisor and get guided recommendations for creating flows and deep insights that take the guesswork out of what to automate. Finally, AI tools make your automation even richer. Quickly process forms using document automation, process approvals, detect images and text, or create with prebuilt models.

Power Virtual Agents

Take your automation to the next level with Power Virtual Agents. Virtual Agents are sophisticated, AI-powered chatbots that can resolve common issues and answer questions around the clock. There’s no need to write code and the chatbots can easily be integrated with the products and services you use every day. Look up records, personalize conversations, hand off conversations to live agents, and call APIs. Choose from hundreds of pre-built connectors, or build custom workflows using Power Automate.

The Development Process

Applications are developed using a methodology called Fusion Teams that brings together professional developers, IT Professionals, Business Analysts and Citizen Developers.

The IT Professional basically acts as a Project Manager and is ultimately responsible for ongoing governance and delivery of the application as well as building security and governance guidelines and dealing with sensitive data. They work with Business Analysts, who may or may not also serve as Citizen Developers.

The professional developer comes into the picture to begin building the service that will become the solution. They access and analyze the legacy data and build the API that ultimately serves as the connection to the MS Power Platform ecosystem.
Once the API has been created, the Citizen Developer defines the user interface and uses open-source tools to create logic for the app.

Vertex Computer Systems is YOUR Power App Partner

With over 125 Microsoft certified professionals across 11 disciplines, Vertex Computer Systems has the technology experience and a mature delivery process that will make us a valuable solution partner for you.

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