Home > Companies > Thought Leaders > Q&A with Olivia (Ross) Taylor, Director of CRO at Directive Consulting

Q&A with Olivia (Ross) Taylor, Director of CRO at Directive Consulting

Olivia Taylor, Director of CRO at Directive Consulting has 10 years of working experience in graphic designing and has expert knowledge in CRO/UX in landing pages and websites designing.

Olivia was recently nominated for the Orange County Business Journal's Top 25 Women in Business Awards.

MEDIA 7: What’s your superpower?
OLIVIA TAYLOR: I would like to think my superpower is empathy. That’s part of what CRO is: figuring out and understanding what’s going on through people’s minds and finding out what people need and want.

M7: Does it point to user intent, a term generally used in Account Based Marketing?
OT: Yes, exactly that. Because I’m able to basically understand where the consumer and the buyer is coming from, I can better optimize my clients’ websites, change that language in the headline and the subhead to relate to the customers’ pain points and better describe the benefits of what my client can provide to them.

M7: Your career spans an impressive 8 years from a Graphic Designer to being a Director of CRO at Directive Consulting. What attracted you to this industry, and how does Directive Consulting fit into your story?
OT: I became a designer because all other subjects in school were boring. 2+2 will always be 4, but with design, there are so many possibilities - so many different solutions to a problem. Plus, I always loved drawing and creating.
While going to school, I worked as a designer at a few different places. Then upon graduating, I worked at a tech company in-house but it just wasn’t for me. I moved on to an agency that was full-service, but that also was not the right fit. After that job, I ended up at a PPC agency where I learned about CRO. I started there as just a designer and left there as the Director of CRO.

Using the skills I learned there, I was able to join the upstanding company that is Directive where I’m learning so much more, and doing so many more awesome things than I did at any other job and it has been amazing. It’s so wonderful to work at a place that is professional and that takes the work so seriously, only striving to be the best at being different. 


"The best way we can convince the customers is that we need to address what our client does, that no other competitor can do."

M7: Could you tell us about your best practices for creating an ideal customer experience?
OT: A functioning website that loads quickly
Easy navigation and user experience
Clear offerings and clear unique value propositions (what is it that you do that no competitor does?)
Great social proof (testimonials and case studies from current clients, awards, etc)

Great customer service: prompt support, regular email check-ins to see how your customer is doing, offer deals and promotions - all of these things keep a customer coming back for more.

M7: While creating a unique value proposition, how do you drive in the utility? In other words, how do you convince the customer about the uniqueness of your service?
OT: We definitely have to utilize this through the headline and anywhere in the hero section of the landing page or the homepage because that’s where people are landing first and you need to be able to grab their attention in the first five seconds. So, the best way we can convince the customers, is that we need to address what our client does, that no other competitor can do.

If you can say we’re the only platform that does x, y, and z, that is a great unique selling point. Another thing to consider is backing up your clients with data. If you are offering some sort of platform that will save me time on the implementation of a process, then tell me how much time I’m going to save. If you say, “Cut down your execution time by 90% with our platform” that’s a unique value proposition. That shows the benefit to the user there, and that will entice users to click through and complete the form. So, gaining conversions is usually based around giving real data that explains exactly what value the visitors are going to see or how much money is going to be made or saved, and how much time is going to be saved to solve a problem with this solution. The other side of the coin is “we are the only ones that do x y z” and that will basically set a business apart from their competitors.

M7: How does collaboration and communication come into play in your role?
OT: It’s the entire job. I oversee a design team and I need to make sure my team is not only communicating with me but communicating with other departments. PPC, SEO, and CRO must all work together to get the job done and we’re stronger together than apart. I have daily follow-ups on different accounts, weekly meetings, client sync ups - whatever it takes to make sure that I and the rest of the team have complete transparency into what is happening with these accounts so that we can assist in whatever way we can. We want our specialists and account managers to own their strategy, but the directors are responsible for approving the strategy and improving it if needed.


"As designers, we need to remember that form follows function, so we must be sure that this information is easily accessible, that the message is clear."

M7: What are the biggest mistakes you see businesses making when attempting to optimize their site to increase conversions?
OT: These companies spend tens of thousands of dollars on a rebrand which will be done by a branding agency that has no knowledge of designing a site for increased conversions. Too many times we’ve had clients come in that just had a rebrand done and their conversions plummeted. So we will go in and audit the site to find out what is causing the problem. Too often, design takes over function but we must always remember that form follows function. As an example, the white space in the new site may be beautiful, but none of your visitors can even see what you’re offering until they get halfway down the page. Things like this are the biggest issues we see.

Also, with too many changes implemented at once, it makes it harder to pinpoint what caused the drop in conversions. It’s often times all of the things combined together that caused the problem. If a company is going to focus on increasing conversions, the changes need to be based on data and not on whims or best practices. Data doesn’t lie.

M7: What is the most challenging part of doing a conversion optimization project? What type of resource commitment do you require from your team?
OT: The most challenging part is that the results cannot be guaranteed. Our tests are based on data but they’re just that: a test, a hypothesis. Nothing is written in stone. 9 out of 10 times I will be right in my hypothesis, but there will always be a test that fails. We still celebrate the failure because we still learn from it. We can find out why the test didn’t work and use it to narrow down on what will work.

As far as resources are concerned, we want to make sure that we’re testing at least a few things each week per client. We use Hotjar for qualitative research as well as Google Optimize for on-page testing, and Instapage/Unbounce for landing page testing. Reporting is a big part of our deliverable so a good amount of our time is spent gathering the data and providing insights to the client.

M7: According to you, what prompts a visitor to scroll down to the bottom of a webpage?
OT: Usually you would have to have a message that entices them in the hero section of the landing page. Just like we discussed about the UVPs, we need to show the customer right when they land on the page, that this is the solution for your problem. That will entice them to scroll down. You can sometimes kind of coax people to scroll down: I like to use false CTAs to get more information and if they click that CTA, it will scroll down to the benefit section on the page and that will get people to start scrolling. And from that benefit section you could have a CTA linking to the case studies on the landing page and get them to scroll down even further on the page.

The main issue is people think of redesigning their page to look better and they see horrible conversions because it may be beautiful but it’s not functional. The messaging is vague and does not relate to what it is they do as a company that’s better than anybody else. They don’t adjust the benefits, and they’re too stuck on this flowery and technical language that a lot of SaaS companies like to use. So, the biggest thing is being very upfront with what you do in layman’s terms, making it as clear as possible to the lowest common denominator, so that you have a potentially larger pool of leads versus only having that technical jargon that only a few may understand. This usually relates a lot to B2B and SaaS clients. They get really hung up on their own language that’s very technical but the common man that needs their service doesn’t understand that...just tell them what the benefit is.

So, to summarize that long rant: basically, make sure that the messaging is clear about the benefits right away, then use CTAs on your page to entice people to keep scrolling so they continue to learn more. Keep people engaged and reading, section by section.


"Gaining conversions is based around giving real data that explains what value the visitors are going to see or how much money is going to be made or saved, and how much time is going to be saved."

M7: In a world where anyone can start a web-based business, generating trust is more important than ever before. Considering this, what impact does design have on revenue?
OT: It has a huge impact. If you land on a site that is poorly designed - it’s ugly, it’s confusing, you have no idea what they sell - do you think you would stay on that site for long? No, you’d go to a site that has a clear hero image showing the product and how it works, and a headline that explains what sets it apart from any other competitor product. The way information is presented is just as important as what information is being said.




One-size-doesn’t-fit-all and I’ve seen pages that - funny enough - looked horrible but converted better than the redesign we did, just because the form was more readily available. All the information was above the fold and it looked really scrunched. However, the customers got whatever they needed right away and that was what was important. So even when you’re seeing this image of bad vs good, we could argue that maybe the option on the right still won’t convert because it’s not quite explaining any unique value composition. It has a lot of beautiful imagery but it’s not getting to the point. Although these full-width websites with huge images is the trend, I think it needs to be taken with a grain of salt and used sparingly; and it needs to be dialed back a bit when it comes to conversions. You have these big beautiful images and people have to scroll very far just to get down to the first paragraph which is not good for conversions even though it’s trendy. As designers, we need to remember that form follows function, so we must be sure that this information is easily accessible, that the message is clear and if it is, then great! The beauty comes after that, but messaging has to be clear, concise, and easily understood.

M7: Directive Consulting ranks #1 on Google for “SEO Agency”. What SEO strategies and tools does the company leverage to channelize its sales campaigns?
OT: On page SEO and targeted guest posting with keyword driven anchor text. Then we continually write content around SEO and internally link back to our core SEO page.

M7: As a child what did you want to be when you grew up?
OT: I wanted to be a speleologist (a cave scientist) for years. I was obsessed with caves, stalactites, and stalagmites. I’ve always been interested in maths and sciences, but there are dangers tied to being a cave scientist so I gave up on that. I still sometimes wonder what would have been if I had gone into the sciences instead of design. Maybe I’ll try it out in a few years!

M7: That sounds interesting! Have you visited caves in your earlier days?
OT: Yes, I did visit just a few caves, nothing big like the Man of the cave or Carlsbad cavern but as a child I was very interested in science – Biology, Zoology, Geology just the world around me and caves are interesting because they��re the dark places that not many people go to. I love history, I love biology so I think caves are kind of that interesting combination of both cause they’re ancient and they have these creatures that are so bizarre you know, like these blind salamanders which is like a different world there. I got very fixated on that for a few years as a child, reading all the books I could about it. I had my mind set, this is what I was going to do and I didn’t take into account the dangers of being a cave scientist. You’ll have to get into tight little spaces and there could be cavemen, you could get lost and stuck. Me being a homebody and kind of a bookworm, I decided, you know, maybe this is not the path for me, but I was also an artistic child. I was drawing all the time and that’s how I ended up in design school instead. So a very different path, but I still love science and history so I might dabble in it later in my life but for now it’s been design.

ABOUT DIRECTIVE CONSULTING

Directive does beautiful search marketing for B2B and enterprise companies that share our values. We redefine the global standard for how marketers work, live, and grow. We are a group of SEO, PPC, and content experts who are passionate about working with the best B2B brands in the world. When we are not executing ROI driven campaigns, you can find us drinking cold brew, volunteering in our community, or playing an intense game of ping-pong.

More THOUGHT LEADERS

Q&A with Doron Youngerwood, VP Marketing at Continuity Software

Media 7 | May 28, 2021

Doron Youngerwood, VP Marketing at Continuity Software, is a result-driven tech marketing leader with a successful track record of managing & growing marketing teams, along with in-depth knowledge and proven success in the main pillars of marketing: go-to-market strategies, demand-gen, digital and brand....

Read More

Q&A with Div Manickam, Director of WW Services Marketing and Portfolio Management (Data Center Group) at Lenovo

Media 7 | March 24, 2021

Div Manickam, Director of WW Services Marketing and Portfolio Management (Data Center Group) at Lenovo, has led B2B SaaS initiatives in startups and Fortune 500 technology companies for 10+ years. With disciplined product marketing across the buyer journey and cross-functional relationships, she empowers mindful teams and fosters a vulnerable culture where everyone's voice is heard.  She enjoys sharing her experiences on authentic leadership and evolution of product marketing in Forbes Communications Council and Product Marketing Alliance. Just as committed and passionate, she enjoys traveling, is a foodie at heart, and a proud Google Local Guide exploring the world. And one day, she aspires to share her passion and story on TEDx....

Read More

Q&A with Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World

MEDIA 7 | January 16, 2020

Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World is an award-winning, communication and marketing professional who helps companies harness the power of their brand to drive engagement and achieve measurable business results.  She has developed and led content and marcomm programs for B2B companies in the financial and professional services sectors in her over 15 years of industry experience. MEDIA 7: When did you start working and what was it? MALIHA AQEEL: I started my career in 1996 right after high school, freelancing as a journalist and features writer for a magazine in Dubai, UAE. Over time, I expanded my services to include scriptwriting for corporate videos and TV productions, writing and designing client newsletters and promotional collateral. M7: What made you want to pursue a career in branding and marketing communications? What aspect about your role brings you the most joy? MA: I didn’t consciously decide to pursue a career in marketing and communication as my plan was to become a filmmaker. However, I had great curiosity about what makes people prefer one brand over the other when a feature-by-feature comparison didn’t show a huge difference between similar products or services. I had taken a few advertising courses during university and it broadened my understanding of how powerful brand experiences and storytelling can drive business objectives. That balance of strategy and creativity is what I enjoy most about what I do and why I’ve continued to find purpose in my career. ...

Read More

Q&A with Doron Youngerwood, VP Marketing at Continuity Software

Media 7 | May 28, 2021

Doron Youngerwood, VP Marketing at Continuity Software, is a result-driven tech marketing leader with a successful track record of managing & growing marketing teams, along with in-depth knowledge and proven success in the main pillars of marketing: go-to-market strategies, demand-gen, digital and brand....

Read More

Q&A with Div Manickam, Director of WW Services Marketing and Portfolio Management (Data Center Group) at Lenovo

Media 7 | March 24, 2021

Div Manickam, Director of WW Services Marketing and Portfolio Management (Data Center Group) at Lenovo, has led B2B SaaS initiatives in startups and Fortune 500 technology companies for 10+ years. With disciplined product marketing across the buyer journey and cross-functional relationships, she empowers mindful teams and fosters a vulnerable culture where everyone's voice is heard.  She enjoys sharing her experiences on authentic leadership and evolution of product marketing in Forbes Communications Council and Product Marketing Alliance. Just as committed and passionate, she enjoys traveling, is a foodie at heart, and a proud Google Local Guide exploring the world. And one day, she aspires to share her passion and story on TEDx....

Read More

Q&A with Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World

MEDIA 7 | January 16, 2020

Maliha Aqeel, Director of Global Communications at Fix Network World is an award-winning, communication and marketing professional who helps companies harness the power of their brand to drive engagement and achieve measurable business results.  She has developed and led content and marcomm programs for B2B companies in the financial and professional services sectors in her over 15 years of industry experience. MEDIA 7: When did you start working and what was it? MALIHA AQEEL: I started my career in 1996 right after high school, freelancing as a journalist and features writer for a magazine in Dubai, UAE. Over time, I expanded my services to include scriptwriting for corporate videos and TV productions, writing and designing client newsletters and promotional collateral. M7: What made you want to pursue a career in branding and marketing communications? What aspect about your role brings you the most joy? MA: I didn’t consciously decide to pursue a career in marketing and communication as my plan was to become a filmmaker. However, I had great curiosity about what makes people prefer one brand over the other when a feature-by-feature comparison didn’t show a huge difference between similar products or services. I had taken a few advertising courses during university and it broadened my understanding of how powerful brand experiences and storytelling can drive business objectives. That balance of strategy and creativity is what I enjoy most about what I do and why I’ve continued to find purpose in my career. ...

Read More

Related News

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Alluxio Unveils New Data Platform for AI: Accelerating AI Products’ Time-to-Value and Maximizing Infrastructure ROI

GlobeNewswire | October 19, 2023

Alluxio, the data platform company for all data-driven workloads, today introduced Alluxio Enterprise AI, a new high-performance data platform designed to meet the rising demands of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads on an enterprise’s data infrastructure. Alluxio Enterprise AI brings together performance, data accessibility, scalability and cost-efficiency to enterprise AI and analytics infrastructure to fuel next-generation data-intensive applications like generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, large language models and high-performance data analytics. To stay competitive and achieve stronger business outcomes, enterprises are in a race to modernize their data and AI infrastructure. On this journey, they find that legacy data infrastructure cannot keep pace with next-generation data-intensive AI workloads. Challenges around low performance, data accessibility, GPU scarcity, complex data engineering, and underutilized resources frequently hinder enterprises' ability to extract value from their AI initiatives. According to Gartner®, “the value of operationalized AI lies in the ability to rapidly develop, deploy, adapt and maintain AI across different environments in the enterprise. Given the engineering complexity and the demand for faster time to market, it is critical to develop less rigid AI engineering pipelines or build AI models that can self-adapt in production.” “By 2026, enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the operationalizing AI models by at least 25%.” Alluxio empowers the world’s leading organizations with the most modern Data & AI platforms, and today we take another significant leap forward, said Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO, Alluxio. Alluxio Enterprise AI provides customers with streamlined solutions for AI and more by enabling enterprises to accelerate AI workloads and maximize value from their data. The leaders of tomorrow will know how to harness transformative AI and become increasingly data-driven with the newest technology for building and maintaining AI infrastructure for performance, seamless access and ease of management. With this announcement, Alluxio expands from a one-product portfolio to two product offerings - Alluxio Enterprise AI and Alluxio Enterprise Data - catering to the diverse needs of analytics and AI. Alluxio Enterprise AI is a new product that builds on the years of distributed systems experience accumulated from the previous Alluxio Enterprise Editions, combined with a new architecture that is optimized for AI/ML workloads. Alluxio Enterprise Data is the next-gen version of Alluxio Enterprise Edition, and will continue to be the ideal choice for businesses focused primarily on analytic workloads. Accelerating End-to-End Machine Learning Pipeline Alluxio Enterprise AI enables enterprise AI infrastructure to be performant, seamless, scalable and cost-effective on existing data lakes. Alluxio Enterprise AI helps data and AI leaders and practitioners achieve four key objectives in their AI initiatives: high-performance model training and deployment to yield quick business results; seamless data access for workloads across regions and clouds; infinite scale that has been battle-tested at internet giant’s scale; and maximized return on investments by working with existing tech stack instead of costly specialized storage. With Alluxio Enterprise AI, enterprises can expect up to 20x faster training speed compared to commodity storage, up to 10x accelerated model serving, over 90% GPU utilization, and up to 90% lower costs for AI infrastructure. Alluxio Enterprise AI has a distributed system architecture with decentralized metadata to eliminate bottlenecks when accessing massive numbers of small files, typical of AI workloads. This provides unlimited scalability beyond legacy architectures, regardless of file size or quantity. The distributed cache is tailored to AI workload I/O patterns, unlike traditional analytics. Finally, it supports analytics and full machine learning pipelines - from ingestion to ETL, pre-processing, training and serving. Alluxio Enterprise AI includes the following key features: Epic Performance for Model Training and Model Serving - Alluxio Enterprise AI offers significant performance improvements to model training and serving on an enterprise’s existing data lakes. The enhanced set of APIs for model training can deliver up to 20x performance over commodity storage. For model serving, Alluxio provides extreme concurrency and up to 10x acceleration for serving models from offline training clusters for online inference. Intelligent Distributed Caching Tailored to I/O Patterns of AI Workloads - Alluxio Enterprise AI’s distributed caching feature enables AI engines to read and write data through the high performance Alluxio cache instead of slow data lake storage. Alluxio’s intelligent caching strategies are tailored to the I/O patterns of AI engines – large file sequential access, large file random access, and massive small file access. This optimization delivers high throughput and low latency for data-hungry GPUs. Training clusters are continuously fed data from the high-performance distributed cache, achieving over 90% GPU utilization. Seamless Data Access for AI Workloads Across On-prem and Cloud Environments - Alluxio Enterprise AI provides a single pane of glass for enterprises to manage AI workloads across diverse infrastructure environments easily. Providing a source of truth of data for the machine learning pipeline, the product fundamentally removes the bottleneck of data lake silos in large enterprises. Sharing data between different business units and geographical locations becomes seamless with a standard data access layer via the Alluxio Enterprise AI platform. New Distributed System Architecture, Battle-tested At Scale - Alluxio Enterprise AI builds on a new innovative decentralized architecture, DORA (Decentralized Object Repository Architecture). This architecture sets the foundation to provide infinite scale for AI workloads. It allows an AI platform to handle up to 100 billion objects with commodity storage like Amazon S3. Leveraging Alluxio’s proven expertise in distributed systems, this new architecture has addressed the ever-increasing challenges of system scalability, metadata management, high availability, and performance. “Performance, cost optimization and GPU utilization are critical for optimizing next-generation workloads as organizations seek to scale AI throughout their businesses,” said Mike Leone, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Alluxio has a compelling offering that can truly help data and AI teams achieve higher performance, seamless data access, and ease of management for model training and model serving.” “We've collaborated closely with Alluxio and consider their platform essential to our data infrastructure,” said Rob Collins, Analytics Cloud Engineering Director, Aunalytics. “Aunalytics is enthusiastic about Alluxio's new distributed system for Enterprise AI, recognizing its immense potential in the ever-evolving AI industry.” “Our in-house-trained large language model powers our Q&A application and recommendation engines, greatly enhancing user experience and engagement,” said Mengyu Hu, Software Engineer in the data platform team, Zhihu. “In our AI infrastructure, Alluxio is at the core and center. Using Alluxio as the data access layer, we’ve significantly enhanced model training performance by 3x and deployment by 10x with GPU utilization doubled. We are excited about Alluxio’s Enterprise AI and its new DORA architecture supporting access to massive small files. This offering gives us confidence in supporting AI applications facing the upcoming artificial intelligence wave.” Deploying Alluxio in Machine Learning Pipelines According to Gartner, data accessibility and data volume/complexity is one the top three barriers to the implementation of AI techniques within an organization. Alluxio Enterprise AI can be added to the existing AI infrastructure consisting of AI compute engines and data lake storage. Sitting in the middle of compute and storage, Alluxio can work across model training and model serving in the machine learning pipeline to achieve optimal speed and cost. For example, using PyTorch as the engine for training and serving, and Amazon S3 as the existing data lake: Model Training: When a user is training models, the PyTorch data loader loads datasets from a virtual local path /mnt/alluxio_fuse/training_datasets. Instead of loading directly from S3, the data loader will load from the Alluxio cache instead. During training, the cached datasets will be used in multiple epochs, so the entire training speed is no longer bottlenecked by retrieving from S3. In this way, Alluxio speeds up training by shortening data loading and eliminates GPU idle time, increasing GPU utilization. After the models are trained, PyTorch writes the model files to S3 through Alluxio. Model Serving: The latest trained models need to be deployed to the inference cluster. Multiple TorchServe instances read the model files concurrently from S3. Alluxio caches these latest model files from S3 and serves them to inference clusters with low latency. As a result, downstream AI applications can start inferencing using the most up-to-date models as soon as they are available. Platform Integration with Existing Systems To integrate Alluxio with the existing platform, users can deploy an Alluxio cluster between compute engines and storage systems. On the compute engine side, Alluxio integrates seamlessly with popular machine learning frameworks like PyTorch, Apache Spark, TensorFlow and Ray. Enterprises can integrate Alluxio with these compute frameworks via REST API, POSIX API or S3 API. On the storage side, Alluxio connects with all types of filesystems or object storage in any location, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or both. Supported storage systems include Amazon S3, Google GCS, Azure Blob Storage, MinIO, Ceph, HDFS, and more. Alluxio works on both on-premise and cloud, either bare-metal or containerized environments. Supported cloud platforms include AWS, GCP and Azure Cloud.

Read More

Application Infrastructure

Iridium Unveils Project Stardust; Developing the Only Truly Global, Standards-Based IoT and Direct-to-Device Service

PR Newswire | January 12, 2024

Iridium Communications Inc., a leading provider of global voice and data satellite communications, today announced Project Stardust, the evolution of its direct-to-device (D2D) strategy with 3GPP 5G standards-based Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Non-Terrestrial Network (NB-NTN) service development. As a new standards-based solution, it will be deployed on Iridium's existing satellite network giving the company a unique ability to offer both high-quality proprietary and standardized D2D and IoT services to its customers. The early stages of programming Iridium's low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites offers a special opportunity to smartphone companies, OEMs, chipmakers, mobile network operators (MNO) and related IoT developers to have their requirements woven into the fabric of the Iridium® network. Iridium is already collaborating directly with several of these companies. "This is an exciting moment for Iridium and is a testament to the flexibility and capability built into our satellite constellation," said Iridium CEO Matt Desch. "The industry is moving quickly towards a more standards-based approach, and after surveying the field, we found that we're the best positioned to lead the way using our own network, particularly given our true global coverage." Iridium is designing its initial NB-IoT offering to support 5G NTN messaging and SOS capabilities for smartphones, tablets, cars, and related consumer applications. Adopting the service will enable device manufacturers to add a satellite connection to standardized devices, take advantage of existing, globally allocated and coordinated Iridium spectrum, and provide a superior low-latency LEO user experience. The Iridium network supports approximately 1,300 SOS and emergency (911 or equivalent) incidents per year, around the world and has readily available systems, processes, and partners to implement this capability for new devices. Iridium understands the market need for its customers to develop and certify products quickly. Applying our established onboarding processes, chipmakers and NB-IoT developers can join Iridium's ecosystem of about 500 partners, and choose a proprietary, standards-based, or dual-solution integration approach for added network redundancy. MNOs will have the opportunity to be a one-stop shop for ubiquitous coverage and off-grid use cases, with unmatched industry reliability. Iridium partners are supported by a 24/7 customer support, back office, billing, and provisioning system, all ready to support the new service upon launch. The Iridium satellite constellation's fully crosslinked, LEO architecture and global L-band spectrum provides a competitive service advantage versus other LEO and geostationary satellite networks. Certified to provide safety of life services by international regulatory bodies, the Iridium network has become the gold standard of reliability and continues to be the only network that provides connectivity everywhere on Earth. Operating in LEO, the Iridium constellation does not suffer from the same line-of-sight limitations, significant power requirements or outages that can affect entire regions from a single satellite as faced by geostationary systems. The recognized leader in satellite IoT and personal communications, Iridium has more than two decades of experience and an unmatched partner ecosystem supporting more than 2.2 million users around the world. As of the third quarter of 2023, Iridium subscribers have grown at a 15% CAGR over the last five years, and the company serves approximately 1.7 million IoT customers today, including about 900,000 personal trackers and satellite messengers for consumer, enterprise, and government applications. Known for its reliability, coverage, and low power requirements, the Iridium network is an ideal fit for NB-IoT NTN service. The company is currently working with several D2D and IoT-focused companies to understand and incorporate their use cases, requirements, and end-user needs into its planned service. The company anticipates testing to begin in 2025, with service in 2026. About Iridium Communications Inc. Iridium® is the only mobile voice and data satellite communications network that spans the entire globe. Iridium enables connections between people, organizations and assets to and from anywhere, in real time. Together with its ecosystem of partner companies, Iridium delivers an innovative and rich portfolio of reliable solutions for markets that require truly global communications. In 2019, the company completed a generational upgrade of its satellite network and launched its specialty broadband service, Iridium Certus®. Iridium Communications Inc. is headquartered in McLean, Va., U.S.A., and its common stock trades on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol IRDM.

Read More

Application Infrastructure

Legrand Acquires Data Center, Branch, and Edge Management Infrastructure Market Leader ZPE Systems, Inc.

Legrand | January 15, 2024

Legrand, a global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures, including data center solutions, has announced its acquisition is complete of ZPE Systems, Inc., a Fremont, California-based company that offers critical solutions and services to deliver resilience and security for customers' business critical infrastructure. This includes serial console servers, sensors, and services routers that enable remote access and management of network IT equipment from data centers to the edge. The acquisition brings together ZPE's secure and open management infrastructure and services delivery platform for data center, branch, and edge environments to Legrand's comprehensive data center solutions of overhead busway, custom cabinets, intelligent PDUs, KVM switches, and advanced fiber solutions. ZPE Systems will become a business unit of Legrand's Data, Power, and Control (DPC) Division. Arnaldo Zimmermann will continue to serve as Vice President and General Manager of ZPE Systems, reporting to Brian DiBella, President of Legrand's DPC Division. "ZPE Systems leads the fast growing and profitable data center and edge management infrastructure market. This acquisition allows Legrand to enter a promising new segment whose strong growth is expected to accelerate further with the development of artificial intelligence and associated needs," said John Selldorff, President and CEO, Legrand, North and Central America. "Edge computing, AI and operational technology will require more complex data centers and edge infrastructure with intelligent IT needs to be built in disparate remote geographies. This makes remote management and operation a critical requirement. ZPE Systems is well positioned to address this need through high performance automation infrastructure solutions, which are complementary to our current data center offerings." "By joining forces with Legrand, ZPE Systems is advancing our leadership position in management infrastructure and propelling our technology and solutions to further support existing and new market opportunities," said Zimmermann. About Legrand and Legrand, North and Central America Legrand is the global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures. Its comprehensive offering of solutions for commercial, industrial, and residential markets makes it a benchmark for customers worldwide. The Group harnesses technological and societal trends with lasting impacts on buildings with the purpose of improving lives by transforming the spaces where people live, work, and meet with electrical, digital infrastructures and connected solutions that are simple, innovative, and sustainable. Drawing on an approach that involves all teams and stakeholders, Legrand is pursuing its strategy of profitable and responsible growth driven by acquisitions and innovation, with a steady flow of new offerings—including products with enhanced value in use (faster expanding segments: data centers, connected offerings and energy efficiency programs). Legrand reported sales of €8.0 billion in 2022. The company is listed on Euronext Paris and is notably a component stock of the CAC 40 and CAC 40 ESG indexes.

Read More

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Alluxio Unveils New Data Platform for AI: Accelerating AI Products’ Time-to-Value and Maximizing Infrastructure ROI

GlobeNewswire | October 19, 2023

Alluxio, the data platform company for all data-driven workloads, today introduced Alluxio Enterprise AI, a new high-performance data platform designed to meet the rising demands of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads on an enterprise’s data infrastructure. Alluxio Enterprise AI brings together performance, data accessibility, scalability and cost-efficiency to enterprise AI and analytics infrastructure to fuel next-generation data-intensive applications like generative AI, computer vision, natural language processing, large language models and high-performance data analytics. To stay competitive and achieve stronger business outcomes, enterprises are in a race to modernize their data and AI infrastructure. On this journey, they find that legacy data infrastructure cannot keep pace with next-generation data-intensive AI workloads. Challenges around low performance, data accessibility, GPU scarcity, complex data engineering, and underutilized resources frequently hinder enterprises' ability to extract value from their AI initiatives. According to Gartner®, “the value of operationalized AI lies in the ability to rapidly develop, deploy, adapt and maintain AI across different environments in the enterprise. Given the engineering complexity and the demand for faster time to market, it is critical to develop less rigid AI engineering pipelines or build AI models that can self-adapt in production.” “By 2026, enterprises that have adopted AI engineering practices to build and manage adaptive AI systems will outperform their peers in the operationalizing AI models by at least 25%.” Alluxio empowers the world’s leading organizations with the most modern Data & AI platforms, and today we take another significant leap forward, said Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO, Alluxio. Alluxio Enterprise AI provides customers with streamlined solutions for AI and more by enabling enterprises to accelerate AI workloads and maximize value from their data. The leaders of tomorrow will know how to harness transformative AI and become increasingly data-driven with the newest technology for building and maintaining AI infrastructure for performance, seamless access and ease of management. With this announcement, Alluxio expands from a one-product portfolio to two product offerings - Alluxio Enterprise AI and Alluxio Enterprise Data - catering to the diverse needs of analytics and AI. Alluxio Enterprise AI is a new product that builds on the years of distributed systems experience accumulated from the previous Alluxio Enterprise Editions, combined with a new architecture that is optimized for AI/ML workloads. Alluxio Enterprise Data is the next-gen version of Alluxio Enterprise Edition, and will continue to be the ideal choice for businesses focused primarily on analytic workloads. Accelerating End-to-End Machine Learning Pipeline Alluxio Enterprise AI enables enterprise AI infrastructure to be performant, seamless, scalable and cost-effective on existing data lakes. Alluxio Enterprise AI helps data and AI leaders and practitioners achieve four key objectives in their AI initiatives: high-performance model training and deployment to yield quick business results; seamless data access for workloads across regions and clouds; infinite scale that has been battle-tested at internet giant’s scale; and maximized return on investments by working with existing tech stack instead of costly specialized storage. With Alluxio Enterprise AI, enterprises can expect up to 20x faster training speed compared to commodity storage, up to 10x accelerated model serving, over 90% GPU utilization, and up to 90% lower costs for AI infrastructure. Alluxio Enterprise AI has a distributed system architecture with decentralized metadata to eliminate bottlenecks when accessing massive numbers of small files, typical of AI workloads. This provides unlimited scalability beyond legacy architectures, regardless of file size or quantity. The distributed cache is tailored to AI workload I/O patterns, unlike traditional analytics. Finally, it supports analytics and full machine learning pipelines - from ingestion to ETL, pre-processing, training and serving. Alluxio Enterprise AI includes the following key features: Epic Performance for Model Training and Model Serving - Alluxio Enterprise AI offers significant performance improvements to model training and serving on an enterprise’s existing data lakes. The enhanced set of APIs for model training can deliver up to 20x performance over commodity storage. For model serving, Alluxio provides extreme concurrency and up to 10x acceleration for serving models from offline training clusters for online inference. Intelligent Distributed Caching Tailored to I/O Patterns of AI Workloads - Alluxio Enterprise AI’s distributed caching feature enables AI engines to read and write data through the high performance Alluxio cache instead of slow data lake storage. Alluxio’s intelligent caching strategies are tailored to the I/O patterns of AI engines – large file sequential access, large file random access, and massive small file access. This optimization delivers high throughput and low latency for data-hungry GPUs. Training clusters are continuously fed data from the high-performance distributed cache, achieving over 90% GPU utilization. Seamless Data Access for AI Workloads Across On-prem and Cloud Environments - Alluxio Enterprise AI provides a single pane of glass for enterprises to manage AI workloads across diverse infrastructure environments easily. Providing a source of truth of data for the machine learning pipeline, the product fundamentally removes the bottleneck of data lake silos in large enterprises. Sharing data between different business units and geographical locations becomes seamless with a standard data access layer via the Alluxio Enterprise AI platform. New Distributed System Architecture, Battle-tested At Scale - Alluxio Enterprise AI builds on a new innovative decentralized architecture, DORA (Decentralized Object Repository Architecture). This architecture sets the foundation to provide infinite scale for AI workloads. It allows an AI platform to handle up to 100 billion objects with commodity storage like Amazon S3. Leveraging Alluxio’s proven expertise in distributed systems, this new architecture has addressed the ever-increasing challenges of system scalability, metadata management, high availability, and performance. “Performance, cost optimization and GPU utilization are critical for optimizing next-generation workloads as organizations seek to scale AI throughout their businesses,” said Mike Leone, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Alluxio has a compelling offering that can truly help data and AI teams achieve higher performance, seamless data access, and ease of management for model training and model serving.” “We've collaborated closely with Alluxio and consider their platform essential to our data infrastructure,” said Rob Collins, Analytics Cloud Engineering Director, Aunalytics. “Aunalytics is enthusiastic about Alluxio's new distributed system for Enterprise AI, recognizing its immense potential in the ever-evolving AI industry.” “Our in-house-trained large language model powers our Q&A application and recommendation engines, greatly enhancing user experience and engagement,” said Mengyu Hu, Software Engineer in the data platform team, Zhihu. “In our AI infrastructure, Alluxio is at the core and center. Using Alluxio as the data access layer, we’ve significantly enhanced model training performance by 3x and deployment by 10x with GPU utilization doubled. We are excited about Alluxio’s Enterprise AI and its new DORA architecture supporting access to massive small files. This offering gives us confidence in supporting AI applications facing the upcoming artificial intelligence wave.” Deploying Alluxio in Machine Learning Pipelines According to Gartner, data accessibility and data volume/complexity is one the top three barriers to the implementation of AI techniques within an organization. Alluxio Enterprise AI can be added to the existing AI infrastructure consisting of AI compute engines and data lake storage. Sitting in the middle of compute and storage, Alluxio can work across model training and model serving in the machine learning pipeline to achieve optimal speed and cost. For example, using PyTorch as the engine for training and serving, and Amazon S3 as the existing data lake: Model Training: When a user is training models, the PyTorch data loader loads datasets from a virtual local path /mnt/alluxio_fuse/training_datasets. Instead of loading directly from S3, the data loader will load from the Alluxio cache instead. During training, the cached datasets will be used in multiple epochs, so the entire training speed is no longer bottlenecked by retrieving from S3. In this way, Alluxio speeds up training by shortening data loading and eliminates GPU idle time, increasing GPU utilization. After the models are trained, PyTorch writes the model files to S3 through Alluxio. Model Serving: The latest trained models need to be deployed to the inference cluster. Multiple TorchServe instances read the model files concurrently from S3. Alluxio caches these latest model files from S3 and serves them to inference clusters with low latency. As a result, downstream AI applications can start inferencing using the most up-to-date models as soon as they are available. Platform Integration with Existing Systems To integrate Alluxio with the existing platform, users can deploy an Alluxio cluster between compute engines and storage systems. On the compute engine side, Alluxio integrates seamlessly with popular machine learning frameworks like PyTorch, Apache Spark, TensorFlow and Ray. Enterprises can integrate Alluxio with these compute frameworks via REST API, POSIX API or S3 API. On the storage side, Alluxio connects with all types of filesystems or object storage in any location, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or both. Supported storage systems include Amazon S3, Google GCS, Azure Blob Storage, MinIO, Ceph, HDFS, and more. Alluxio works on both on-premise and cloud, either bare-metal or containerized environments. Supported cloud platforms include AWS, GCP and Azure Cloud.

Read More

Application Infrastructure

Iridium Unveils Project Stardust; Developing the Only Truly Global, Standards-Based IoT and Direct-to-Device Service

PR Newswire | January 12, 2024

Iridium Communications Inc., a leading provider of global voice and data satellite communications, today announced Project Stardust, the evolution of its direct-to-device (D2D) strategy with 3GPP 5G standards-based Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) Non-Terrestrial Network (NB-NTN) service development. As a new standards-based solution, it will be deployed on Iridium's existing satellite network giving the company a unique ability to offer both high-quality proprietary and standardized D2D and IoT services to its customers. The early stages of programming Iridium's low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites offers a special opportunity to smartphone companies, OEMs, chipmakers, mobile network operators (MNO) and related IoT developers to have their requirements woven into the fabric of the Iridium® network. Iridium is already collaborating directly with several of these companies. "This is an exciting moment for Iridium and is a testament to the flexibility and capability built into our satellite constellation," said Iridium CEO Matt Desch. "The industry is moving quickly towards a more standards-based approach, and after surveying the field, we found that we're the best positioned to lead the way using our own network, particularly given our true global coverage." Iridium is designing its initial NB-IoT offering to support 5G NTN messaging and SOS capabilities for smartphones, tablets, cars, and related consumer applications. Adopting the service will enable device manufacturers to add a satellite connection to standardized devices, take advantage of existing, globally allocated and coordinated Iridium spectrum, and provide a superior low-latency LEO user experience. The Iridium network supports approximately 1,300 SOS and emergency (911 or equivalent) incidents per year, around the world and has readily available systems, processes, and partners to implement this capability for new devices. Iridium understands the market need for its customers to develop and certify products quickly. Applying our established onboarding processes, chipmakers and NB-IoT developers can join Iridium's ecosystem of about 500 partners, and choose a proprietary, standards-based, or dual-solution integration approach for added network redundancy. MNOs will have the opportunity to be a one-stop shop for ubiquitous coverage and off-grid use cases, with unmatched industry reliability. Iridium partners are supported by a 24/7 customer support, back office, billing, and provisioning system, all ready to support the new service upon launch. The Iridium satellite constellation's fully crosslinked, LEO architecture and global L-band spectrum provides a competitive service advantage versus other LEO and geostationary satellite networks. Certified to provide safety of life services by international regulatory bodies, the Iridium network has become the gold standard of reliability and continues to be the only network that provides connectivity everywhere on Earth. Operating in LEO, the Iridium constellation does not suffer from the same line-of-sight limitations, significant power requirements or outages that can affect entire regions from a single satellite as faced by geostationary systems. The recognized leader in satellite IoT and personal communications, Iridium has more than two decades of experience and an unmatched partner ecosystem supporting more than 2.2 million users around the world. As of the third quarter of 2023, Iridium subscribers have grown at a 15% CAGR over the last five years, and the company serves approximately 1.7 million IoT customers today, including about 900,000 personal trackers and satellite messengers for consumer, enterprise, and government applications. Known for its reliability, coverage, and low power requirements, the Iridium network is an ideal fit for NB-IoT NTN service. The company is currently working with several D2D and IoT-focused companies to understand and incorporate their use cases, requirements, and end-user needs into its planned service. The company anticipates testing to begin in 2025, with service in 2026. About Iridium Communications Inc. Iridium® is the only mobile voice and data satellite communications network that spans the entire globe. Iridium enables connections between people, organizations and assets to and from anywhere, in real time. Together with its ecosystem of partner companies, Iridium delivers an innovative and rich portfolio of reliable solutions for markets that require truly global communications. In 2019, the company completed a generational upgrade of its satellite network and launched its specialty broadband service, Iridium Certus®. Iridium Communications Inc. is headquartered in McLean, Va., U.S.A., and its common stock trades on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol IRDM.

Read More

Application Infrastructure

Legrand Acquires Data Center, Branch, and Edge Management Infrastructure Market Leader ZPE Systems, Inc.

Legrand | January 15, 2024

Legrand, a global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures, including data center solutions, has announced its acquisition is complete of ZPE Systems, Inc., a Fremont, California-based company that offers critical solutions and services to deliver resilience and security for customers' business critical infrastructure. This includes serial console servers, sensors, and services routers that enable remote access and management of network IT equipment from data centers to the edge. The acquisition brings together ZPE's secure and open management infrastructure and services delivery platform for data center, branch, and edge environments to Legrand's comprehensive data center solutions of overhead busway, custom cabinets, intelligent PDUs, KVM switches, and advanced fiber solutions. ZPE Systems will become a business unit of Legrand's Data, Power, and Control (DPC) Division. Arnaldo Zimmermann will continue to serve as Vice President and General Manager of ZPE Systems, reporting to Brian DiBella, President of Legrand's DPC Division. "ZPE Systems leads the fast growing and profitable data center and edge management infrastructure market. This acquisition allows Legrand to enter a promising new segment whose strong growth is expected to accelerate further with the development of artificial intelligence and associated needs," said John Selldorff, President and CEO, Legrand, North and Central America. "Edge computing, AI and operational technology will require more complex data centers and edge infrastructure with intelligent IT needs to be built in disparate remote geographies. This makes remote management and operation a critical requirement. ZPE Systems is well positioned to address this need through high performance automation infrastructure solutions, which are complementary to our current data center offerings." "By joining forces with Legrand, ZPE Systems is advancing our leadership position in management infrastructure and propelling our technology and solutions to further support existing and new market opportunities," said Zimmermann. About Legrand and Legrand, North and Central America Legrand is the global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures. Its comprehensive offering of solutions for commercial, industrial, and residential markets makes it a benchmark for customers worldwide. The Group harnesses technological and societal trends with lasting impacts on buildings with the purpose of improving lives by transforming the spaces where people live, work, and meet with electrical, digital infrastructures and connected solutions that are simple, innovative, and sustainable. Drawing on an approach that involves all teams and stakeholders, Legrand is pursuing its strategy of profitable and responsible growth driven by acquisitions and innovation, with a steady flow of new offerings—including products with enhanced value in use (faster expanding segments: data centers, connected offerings and energy efficiency programs). Legrand reported sales of €8.0 billion in 2022. The company is listed on Euronext Paris and is notably a component stock of the CAC 40 and CAC 40 ESG indexes.

Read More

Spotlight

Directive Consulting

Directive does beautiful search marketing for B2B and enterprise companies that share our values. We redefine the global standard for how marketers work, live, and grow. We are a group of SEO, PPC and content experts who are passionate about working with the best B2B brands in the world. When we are...

Events

Resources

resource image

Why Content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

infographic

resource image

Biggest B2B Marketing Challenges That We See Everyday as an Agency

Video

resource image

DIRECTIVE CONSULTING PORTFOLIO

Whitepaper

Events