Cloud-based Systems are Your Tools for Business Composition

Audiotool application - click to enlarge

A friend recently introduced me to Audiotool, a very interesting, fun, and easy-to-use music-composition platform. It contains the tools you need to quickly create digital music: drums, synths, effects, and a library of guitar, bass, vocal, and other sounds. You select the tool you want to use, create a beat, a melody, or an effect with it, and add it to the mix of your composition. I was amazed to watch my friend use Audiotool to quickly create a mix that sounds good on its own or in your favorite dance club. You can save the piece you created as a file for posterity or for additional editing. Audiotool is also a social-media platform for sharing your music and following your influencers.

Here’s a review of Audiotool by Terrence O’Brien of Switched, and here are some compositions by Sam’s Sound Box in the Audiotool community. Play it again, Sam! I’m currently working on “In the Hybrid Cloud,” my first Audiotool composition! I’ll have to work hard to catch up to Sam. I think I’ll follow his updates. If you need help getting started with Audiotool, here’s an excellent tutorial.

Audiotool makes it easy to experiment with sound. You scale up when you want higher volume and density in the mix, or scale down for quieter, minimal sections. You also don’t need to master a musical instrument or buy, maintain, and configure a lot of expensive equipment. Audiotool has what you need on demand from anywhere.

You know where I’m heading: cloud computing is quite like an Audiotool for your organization! With cloud-based systems, you can focus less on buying and configuring expensive and complex hardware and software, and more on provisioning the applications you want to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud. You can easily scale up to deliver more and better insights to more people, or scale down when your business needs change. You can classify most cloud purchases as operational expenses of your departmental budget rather than capital expenses of your organization, which usually require more levels of oversight and approval. With cloud computing, you have the creative license to experiment while improving your ability to serve and delight your internal and external audience.

Consider these cloud-based systems that you can use to quickly deliver business results at a tempo that matches the pace of change in your organization:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

How do you plan to use cloud-based systems to compose solutions that will be a hit with your customers?