RealPage ActiveBuilding resident portal debuts eCommerce platform that drives incremental property yield, improves resident experience

RealPage Inc. has delivered its initial eCommerce platform for residents via its ActiveBuilding resident portal solution. The solution is purpose-built to enhance the resident experience and drive incremental yield from amenities, spaces, services and events. A radically redesigned, custom-branded mobile app facilitates all transactions by enabling residents to make purchases and manage apartment-related needs easily and conveniently. 

These advances deliver benefits to property owners and managers with proven success in beta testing. Residents can reserve and pay for amenities, spaces and events directly, including parking, guest suites, self-storage, clubhouses, conference rooms, yoga classes, cleaners, child care, dog walkers and more. 

PMCs earn income from assets they already have and through third-party service providers. So far, clients have monetized 25 different amenities and rentables with guest suites and parking generating the most incremental revenue with one client reporting over US$150 per unit per year in revenue lift. 

PMCs can build their brand by custom-branding the app with a property’s logo, color palette and photography. This also makes it simple to provide a community’s branded resident portal to residents. Residents simply enter their community name in the app store and the custom-branded app will appear. 

Residents can make all reservations and purchases from the app through a simple, end-to-end shopping cart experience. They can also renew their leases with just a few clicks. Residents were 2 to 3 percent more likely to renew according to beta test results.

“Property owners and managers have long faced the challenge of supplementing base rent because of market conditions, changing laws and competitors who are better set up to provide eCommerce,” says Jon Pastor, RealPage SVP Consumer Solutions. “Our new eCommerce platform and custom-branded app leapfrog that. Residents will jump at the chance to rent amenities and pay for services and events if they’re a click away. They love the convenience, too! By enabling residents to perform these tasks themselves, there is an added benefit of freeing staff to focus on other core duties. For example, during the beta test, property staff saved an average of 16.5 hours previously spent processing rent checks.”

API Fortress releases unlimited API monitoring for internal APIs

API Fortress announced Monday unlimited internal API Monitoring license, which allows companies to run any number of functional API monitors without paying additional metered usage fees. 

Metered usage pricing has contributed to a significant increase in QA costs for enterprises as their testing centers of excellence have encountered rapidly growing numbers of APIs. Modern apps and platforms need many more APIs, which involve an increasingly complex array of API calls to work properly.

Just because an API monitor returns a 200 does not mean that the API is working. Some APIs even use a 200 to indicate that there is an issue. In this eBook of API Horror Stories from actual API Fortress customers, one of the world's largest retailers believed that their retail app was functioning properly. Then they were mystified by a dip in revenues from certain product lines. 

When they ran API Fortress functional uptime monitors, they became aware of an API bug that their uptime monitors could never have detected - the cache function of their API management platform was causing the wrong data to populate certain product listings.

“Continuous delivery with CI/CD was the start of an important trend for test automation. That trend has continued to evolve, and now companies are asking why can't their functional API tests constantly test and monitor business-critical APIs? With API Fortress, they can,” said Patrick Poulin, CEO and co-founder of API Fortress. "With our unlimited monitoring, companies can detect API flaws early and diagnose API flaws quickly. You can schedule API monitoring on our platform without a CI (continuous integration) platform. We also let our customers deploy monitors on-premises, keeping all test and monitor data behind the firewall."

RoboMQ announces availability of the ServiceNow API connector on its no-code Connect iPaaS platform

RoboMQ announced this week availability of ServiceNow as an API connector on its Connect iPaaS platform. This partnership provides ServiceNow customers easy access to build and deploy integration workflows that streamline and automate business processes with other SaaS, cloud, and enterprise applications using the available API connectors within Connect iPaaS.

With its modern, intuitive, and no-code user experience (UX), Connect iPaaS provides the line of business users and citizen integrators a platform to build business processes by integrating SaaS, cloud, on-premise, and IoT applications. Common application integration workflows that solve everyday challenges faced among enterprises can be deployed in a matter of minutes using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

RoboMQ is a SaaS product development company behind the next generation of integration middleware and microservices application development platforms for the cloud, hybrid cloud, SaaS, enterprise applications and IoT. Connect iPaaS is a no-code API and data integration platform that provides business processes automation for HR, sales, marketing, finance, operations, and other lines of business teams.

By leveraging the power of Connect iPaaS's enterprise and SaaS application connectors with ServiceNow, line of business users can create business processes that enable lightning-fast incident response across channels, streamline employee access provisioning and asset management, and integrate service order fulfillment.

Enterprises can take advantage of the Connect iPaaS platform and ServiceNow integration by signing up for a free trial or a paid subscription online.

With the ServiceNow connector available on Connect iPaaS, free trial users and paid customers of RoboMQ have access to the full set of APIs available on ServiceNow including the custom objects to create workflows using drag and drop elements and semantic data mapping on a modern, intuitive, event-driven user interface. 

Connect iPaaS already has a range of available connectors such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft NAV, Office 365, SAP C/4, Smartsheet, Workday, Magento, Nexmo, Coupa, PagerDuty, Slack and Twilio.

"Businesses today require multiple applications to collaborate and be part of wider business workflows,” said Bramh Gupta, founder and CEO of RoboMQ. “Availability of ServiceNow API Connector on Connect iPaaS will allow users of ServiceNow to streamline their incident management, service management, and asset management processes by integration with other SaaS and ERP applications." 

Cray debuts ClusterStor E1000 storage to power data-driven workloads including AI, analytics, simulation and modeling

Cray, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company unveiled on Wednesday its Cray ClusterStor E1000 system, a new parallel storage platform for the exascale era. ClusterStor E1000 addresses the explosive growth of data from converged workloads and the need to access that data at improved speed, by offering an optimal balance of storage performance, efficiency and scalability, effectively eliminating job pipeline congestion caused by I/O bottlenecks. 

Cray ClusterStor E1000 systems will be available starting in the first quarter of next year. 

The next-generation global file storage system has already been selected by the US Department of Energy (DOE) for use at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the first three US exascale supercomputers will be housed (respectively Aurora, Frontier and El Capitan).

With the introduction of the ClusterStor E1000 storage system, Cray has completed the re-architecture of its end-to-end infrastructure portfolio, which encompasses Cray Shasta supercomputers, Cray Slingshot interconnect, and the Cray software platform. With Cray’s next-generation end-to-end supercomputing architecture, available for any datacenter environment, customers around the world can unleash the full potential of their data.

Recognizing data access challenges presented by the exascale era, Cray’s ClusterStor E1000 enables organizations to achieve their research missions and business objectives faster. ClusterStor E1000 systems can deliver up to 1.6 terabytes per second and up to 50 million I/O operations per second per rack – more than double compared to other parallel storage systems in the market today.

The new system also deliver purpose-engineered end-to-end PCIe 4.0 storage controllers serve the maximum performance of the underlying storage media to the compute nodes and new intelligent Cray software, ClusterStor Data Services, allows customers to align the data flow with their specific workflow, meaning they can place the application data at the right time on the right storage media (SSD pool or HDD pool) in the file system.

An entry-level system starts at 30 gigabytes per second and at less than 60 terabytes usable capacity. Customers can start at the size dictated by their current needs and scale as those needs grow, with maximum architectural headroom for future growth. 

The ClusterStor E1000 storage system can connect to any HPC compute system that supports high speed networks like 200 Gbps Cray Slingshot, Infiniband EDR/HDR and 100/200 Gbps Ethernet.

C2 Systems is now a Microsoft Certified Partner; helps to push cutting edge technology across the Azure platform

C2 Systems achieving this week certification from Microsoft that helped strengthens the relationship between the two organizations as C2 becomes an official channel partner of the software giant. 

Teams inside each company will now work more closely together to become intimately familiar with both C2’s Covalent and Microsoft’s Azure as well as the clients of each organization to deliver a combined solution that best serves the specific needs of their mutual clients.

The Dallas, Texas-based company delivers the commitment to deliver comprehensive, multi-channel, end-to-end loan origination platform, as well as to provide secure, compliant, cloud-delivered solution for consumer and small business lending that is powered by the scalable and secure Microsoft Azure framework. 

C2’s Covalent solution was built from the ground up to utilize Microsoft’s technology to provide lenders with modern and intuitive tools from which to deliver the highest level of customer experience.

C2 Covalent helps financial institutions make fast, consistent, high-quality credit decisions in an easily-deployable, cloud-based Loan Origination System (LOS). For associates, this enables consumer and small business loan origination with regulatory compliance and significant cost savings. For customers, it means a more seamless and efficient point of sale experience through additional product offerings, and lending decisions that are made within minutes.

The C2 Covalent ecosystem includes tools that can be utilized from point of sale, through underwriting and document preparation. Covalent connects to key third-party data sources for the various types of consumer and small business lending that gets done. Using its automation layer architecture, new data sources of tomorrow can be easily integrated so that users can always stay current.

All of these components can be combined to create the workflow and level of automation that is custom fit for the institution.