TECHNOLOGY

Software Explained! What Is Phone Validation API? And Why is It Important?

Published

8 months ago

September 14, 2023

Software Explained! What Is Phone Validation API? And Why is It Important?

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are constantly challenged to keep up with the latest technological advancements.

The world of software and technology is an ever-shifting terrain, where staying ahead of the curve is essential for success.

One of the innovations making waves in this dynamic environment is the powerful phone number validation API. But what exactly is it, and why is it so crucial for businesses? Let’s delve into the world of phone validation APIs and explore the myriad reasons behind their importance.

What is a Phone Validation API?

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In a world where communication is paramount, accurate contact information is a cornerstone of any successful business. Phone validation APIs, short for Application Programming Interfaces, have emerged as a solution to the challenge of verifying the authenticity of phone numbers in real time. These APIs harness the power of automation and data analytics to ensure that phone numbers are valid, in service, and capable of receiving SMS or phone calls.

Phone validation APIs work by interfacing with external databases and algorithms to cross-reference and validate phone numbers. They are designed to instantly check if a phone number is correctly formatted, actively in use, and not associated with fraudulent or suspicious activities. This verification process is crucial for several reasons.

Why is Phone Validation API Important?

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Data Accuracy: Inaccurate or outdated contact information can lead to missed opportunities and communication breakdowns. Phone validation APIs play a vital role in maintaining data accuracy by ensuring that the phone numbers in your database are current and valid. This leads to more effective marketing campaigns, improved customer service, and reduced operational costs.

Fraud Prevention: Phone validation APIs are powerful tools in the fight against fraud. They can detect and flag phone numbers associated with fraudulent activities, such as phishing scams, identity theft, or spamming. By identifying and blocking these numbers, businesses can protect themselves and their customers from potential security threats.

Enhanced Customer Experience: A crucial aspect of providing excellent customer service is the ability to reach customers when needed. Phone validation APIs help ensure that businesses can contact customers via their preferred method – phone calls or SMS – without interruptions or errors. This improves the overall customer experience and fosters trust between businesses and their clientele.

Cost Savings: Invalid or disconnected phone numbers can result in wasted resources, including time and money spent on unsuccessful outreach efforts. Phone validation APIs prevent these wasteful endeavours by flagging unusable numbers in advance, allowing businesses to allocate their resources more efficiently.

Compliance with Regulations: Many regions and industries have strict regulations governing the use of phone numbers for marketing and communication purposes. Phone validation APIs assist businesses in complying with these regulations by ensuring that they only contact individuals who have consented to receive communications. This reduces the risk of costly legal repercussions and reputational damage.

Improved Lead Generation: For businesses that rely on lead generation, accurate contact information is essential. Phone validation APIs can instantly verify the authenticity of phone numbers provided by potential leads, ensuring that your sales and marketing teams are working with reliable data. This, in turn, leads to more effective lead nurturing and higher conversion rates.

Streamlined Operations: Integrating phone validation APIs into your business processes can streamline operations by automating the verification of phone numbers. This reduces the burden on your staff and minimizes the chances of human error, resulting in more efficient workflows.

Business Growth: Reliable phone validation is a critical component of scaling your business. As you expand your customer base and outreach efforts, maintaining data quality becomes increasingly challenging. Phone validation APIs offer a scalable solution that grows with your business, ensuring that you maintain data accuracy and security as you expand.

Competitive Advantage: In a competitive market, businesses that can reach customers efficiently and securely gain a significant advantage. Phone validation APIs enable you to stand out by providing a seamless and reliable communication experience for your customers, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and brand recognition.

Data Insights: Beyond validation, phone validation APIs can provide valuable insights into your customer data. By analyzing the patterns and trends associated with phone numbers, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize their communication strategies and target their audience more effectively.

In conclusion, the world of business is in a constant state of flux, driven by the rapid evolution of technology and software. To thrive in this ever-changing landscape, businesses must adapt and embrace innovative solutions like phone validation APIs. These powerful tools offer a multitude of benefits, from data accuracy and fraud prevention to enhanced customer experiences and cost savings. Incorporating phone validation APIs into your business processes not only ensures that you stay ahead of the curve but also positions you for sustainable growth and success in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud