Nov 16 2017
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Amazon and Microsoft Ramp Up their AI Efforts

Amazon and Microsoft Ramp Up their AI Efforts

By | Cloud Computing, General | No Comments

In recent years, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have shifted to more of a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), and as a result, have vastly increased their investment in the implementation and advancement of AI over their fleets of online products and services. Recently, at Sydney’s Microsoft Summit (16-17 November 2017), Microsoft announced that they have stepped up their investment in the AI arena by releasing and showcasing new tools to enhance human and organisational capabilities. These tools include Visual Studio Tools for AI, Azure IoT Edge, Microsoft Translator, and Seeing AI. The reasoning that Microsoft gave to justify their focus is that the popularity of AI has been steadily increasing, which can be attributed to three main factors: cloud computing, powerful algorithms, and multitudes of data. Amazon, on the other…

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Oct 16 2017
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AWS and microsoft sitting in a tree

AI in the Cloud Market: AWS & Microsoft Lend a Big Hand

By | Cloud Computing, General | No Comments

Artificial intelligence (or AI) doesn’t necessarily play a big role in the current cloud hosting market, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are looking to change that. AI is starting to grow at an alarming rate and may be a significant role-player in the near future. According to Bernie Trudel, chairman of the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), AI “will become the killer application that will drive cloud computing forward”. He continues to mention that, although AI only accounts for 1% of the today’s global cloud computing market, its overall IT market share is growing at 52%, and its expected to rapidly grow to 10% of cloud revenue by 2025. Trudel made notable that, although the big players in the cloud game are currently offering AI capabilities, the cloud-based…

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Oct 11 2017
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AWS on the pedestal

5 Reasons Why AWS Leads the Cloud Market

By | Cloud Computing, General | No Comments

There is no doubt that in the cloud computing market, there is a lot of competition, but there is also a clear market leader. Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the charge among other web services from similar tech giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google, but how did they get there and what’s taking so long for someone of the likes of Google to knock them off their pedestal? Recent research from Synergy Research shows that Amazon has a seemingly unbeatable lead. John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, told TechCrunch that, on paper, AWS is too far ahead of any competitor trying to gain a short-term advantage. The reason behind their spectacular lead is simple: AWS was first. If you start the race before everyone else and keep at the…

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Sep 20 2017
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Say Hello to the New Atlassian

By | Case Study, In The Media | No Comments

Who is Atlassian? Atlassian is an Australian IT company that develops enterprise software, with its best-known products being its issue-tracking app, Jira, and team collaboration and wiki product, Confluence. In December 2015, Atlassian went public and made their initial public offering (IPO) under the symbol TEAM, valuing them at $4.37 billion. In summary, they big. What happened? A facelift It’s a nice sunny day in Sydney in mid-September of 2017, and Atlassian, after 15 years of consistency, has rebranded, changing their look and feel for a brighter and funner one, compared to the dreary previous look.It’s a hell of a lot simpler and, as they show in the above video, it’s going to be used with a lot more creativity and flair in mind—it’s flexible in a sense that they…

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Aug 31 2017
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How Aussie ecommerce stores can compete with the retail giant Amazon

By | eCommerce, General | No Comments

The powerhouse Amazon retail store is set to launch in Australia toward the end of 2018 and Aussie ecommerce retailers need to ready themselves for the competition storm ahead. 2018 may seem a while away but getting your ecommerce site in tip top shape and ready to compete can take time. Check out these helpful hints from the Anchor crew. Speed kills If you’ve ever heard of the tale of the tortoise and the hare, the moral is that “slow and steady wins the race”. This is definitely not the place for that phrase, because if your site loads as slowly as a 1995 dial up connection, your ecommerce store will not, I repeat, will not win the race. Site speed can be impacted by a number of factors and…

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Jul 20 2017
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Will Magento’s Progressive Web Apps drive more mobile revenue for merchants?

By | General | No Comments

Magento Live always has a few big announcements and this year’s London edition did not disappoint. With the promise of more traffic and higher conversions, Magento, in collaboration with Google, will offer native Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s) to the Magento ecommerce community in 2018. Even though that’s at LEAST five months away, you might already be pondering ‘What does that mean for my ecommerce site?’. Has responsive web design gone out of fashion like man buns and paleo diets? And how do I explain Progressive Web Apps to the boss? What are Progressive Web Apps? Progressive Web Apps are technically standard web pages that can ‘live’ on a user’s home screen and behave like a native app, without the need for downloading and installing an app. PWAs promise a faster,…

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May 09 2017
3

How Important is Hosting Location? Questions to Ask Your Hosting Provider

By | Cloud Computing, General | 4 Comments

The importance of your hosting partner location will depend on your organisation’s requirements and your business needs. For a small business focussed on a single country with fairly low traffic, starting with shared hosting, or small virtual private server is generally the most cost effective place to host your site.  Hosting your site or web application in the same geographical location as your website visitors reduces page load times and latency (the lag between requesting data and receiving it) and will greatly improve user experience. If you are running a business critical website or ecommerce application, or have customers or visitors from various global locations, then incorrectly placing your website in an unsuitably located data centre will cost you much more than a monthly hosting fee! Does the Location of My Hosting…

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Apr 13 2017
2

Magento Imagine Round Up

By | General | No Comments

When it comes to Magento, what happens in Vegas certainly doesn’t stay there! This year the Magento Imagine conference was yet again, no exception to the rule.  This year we, and over 2500 attendees heard the likes of Tennis pro, Serena Williams and Magento CEO, Mark Lavelle discussing the importance of thinking differently and outside the box. Missed out on the event? Here’s what some of our partners had to say about Magento Imagine:   Daniel Mylnikov- Head of Solutions Delivery at eWave, the Magento APAC  Partner of the Year at this year’s conference. A highlight of the conference were  the breakout sessions on Magento Business Intelligence, The Future of Active Magento Cyber Security and the Special Preview: See New Magento B2B Capabilities in Action.   Derek Nolde the Enterprise Sales Director at Section.io, said, “It was…

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Mar 27 2017
5

The Importance of a CDN: Speed and Security

By | General | No Comments

Many Anchor customers ask us for assistance with getting the best performance out of their website. Website performance is a complex topic to which there are many contributing factors:   from a hosting perspective, these can be as simple as underpowered infrastructure or over-contention, but geographic location and latency can often come into play as well. Having your site hosted in a modern, high-speed environment with world class managed services provides a solid foundation for your website. Utilising a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as well can assist in giving your website an extra boost in speed and performance. Anchor is an official partner with Cloudflare; a global Content Delivery Network designed to optimize security, performance and reliability. Cloudflare offers robust CDN capabilities in addition to other security services including DDoS (Distributed…

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Mar 13 2017
4

Maximising site performance: 5 key considerations

By | General | No Comments

Maintaining and managing the ongoing performance of your website or application is an area where ‘not my problem’ can be a recurring sentiment from all stakeholders.   It’s not just a case of getting your shiny new website or application onto the biggest, most highly spec-ed-up dedicated server or cloud instance that money can buy. There are many factors that can influence the performance of your website that you — yes you — need to make friends with. The relationship between site performance and business outcomes Websites today have evolved into fully fledged web applications. They started out as simple HTML, but have today evolved into complex, database driven, ‘rich’ multimedia content, requiring buckets of storage and computing power. Your server needs to run complex scripts and processes, and serves up…

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