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Today’s topics include IBM’s partnership with R Consortium to improve the R programming language, Lenovo’s expansion of its networking, storage and server portfolios, Intel’s launch of its latest high-end processor and Salesforce’s plan to streamline the sales process for Lightning Voice.
The R Consortium, an open-source foundation to support the R programming language and its user community, on June 6 announced that IBM joined the organization as a Platinum member. R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.
The Linux Foundation launched the R Consortium last year. As a Platinum member of the R Consortium, IBM will gain a seat on both the board of directors and Infrastructure Steering Committee, helping to provide support and technical guidance to the R community.
Lenovo officials are continuing to partner with other tech vendors and software makers as they expand the company’s data center infrastructure portfolio. The company on June 6 unveiled new server, storage, networking and hyperconverged infrastructure offerings that expand on executives’ strategy to make the Chinese tech vendor a larger player in the $87 billion data center technology space through a combination of in-house development and outside partnerships.
Lenovo has looked to accelerate its capabilities in the space since buying IBM’s x86 server business two years ago for $2.3 billion, a move that immediately made the company the world’s third-largest server maker.
Intel is launching the latest version of its high-end Xeon E7 server processors with its eye firmly on the growing data analytics needs in the enterprise. On June 6, Intel offcials unveiled the Xeon E7-8800/4800 v4 product families that are built on the company’s “Broadwell-EX” core architecture.
While the 14-nanometer chips can be applied to a broad range of mission-critical applications, such as data-intensive workloads, including online transaction processing, supply-chain management and enterprise resource planning, the primary aim is to make it easier, faster and more affordable for enterprises to collect and analyze in real time the massive amounts of structured and unstructured data being generated and to turn those analyses into actionable business decisions.
Salesforce is bringing some needed efficiency to the sales process with the introduction of Lightning Voice, new phone capabilities built directly into its Lightning Sales Cloud. The feature helps streamline the process of logging sales calls.
Typically, a sales rep would use his or her desk or mobile phone, call a number, take notes in some capacity and then later, ideally, log the interaction in Salesforce. With Lighting Voice, the rep can dial the number from a keypad within the application, or even just click on the number if it’s included with a sales lead’s information.
A note-taking section automatically pops up, and the details of the call are logged in Salesforce automatically. That last step can be a hassle for reps and often is forgotten or ignored. But automating the entire process makes it more efficient: A rep with a list of leads can move right from one call to the next, without leaving the interface.