With most of the above-ground construction of the Second Avenue subway wrapping up soon, the city is planning a major overhaul of the busy Upper East Side corridor.

If you’ve been on Second Avenue recently, you know it’s a mess. But now the city’s Department of Transportation is preparing to clean it up.

“It’s a vibrant street – a lot of restaurants, a lot of retail – it’s really kind of a front door for the community,” said DOT Deputy Commissioner Ryan Russo.

The plans will be unveiled at a community board meeting Wednesday. They call for a protected bike lane, one parking lane, three travel lanes, and a lane for buses – all stretching from 105th to 68th streets.

The redesign will essentially be a continuation of what Second Avenue looks like now above 105th Street.

That part of Second Avenue has already been reconfigured, making it look similar to other redesigned avenues across Manhattan.

Transportation officials insist those redesigns have made the streets safer.

“We’ve seen a 20 percent reduction on average in injuries to all street users – that’s people inside motor vehicles, walking, biking cumulatively,” Russo said.

That said, there have been complaints, too.

Some residents fumed that the redesign of First Avenue took away parking spaces and created a hazard when bicyclists began riding in both directions in their new dedicated lane.

City Councilman Ben Kallos says residents might be pleasantly surprised by the changes to Second Avenue.

“We haven’t had parking on Second Avenue for quite some time, so having any parking back should be a good thing for drivers and riders alike. People will no longer be going the wrong way on the First Avenue bike lane because they will have a bike lane to go downtown,” Kallos said.

The meeting is expected to bring out passionate voices from both sides of the debate.

Transportation officials hope to have the redesign complete by late summer.

 

TYPICAL BUREAUCRATIC ANSWER. PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR A SUBWAY AND ALL YOU DO IS DRESS UP THE STREET ABOVE IT.

 

I CALL THAT “SHINING S..T”

 

What do you think?

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Is SaaS Based EDI A Cloud Service?

Confusion reigns over whether hosted or software as a service (SaaS) is the better choice for that next software overhaul. It doesn’t help that so many hosted vendors are touting their wares as SaaS or Cloud. Of course, there’s a reason for the blurring of label lines – SaaS is on an upswing in most markets. Put another way: everyone has their heads in the Cloud these days.

Confusion reigns over whether hosted or software as a service (SaaS) is the better choice for that next software overhaul. It doesn’t help that so many hosted vendors are touting their wares as SaaS or Cloud. Of course, there’s a reason for the blurring of label lines – SaaS is on an upswing in most markets. Put another way: everyone has their heads in the Cloud these days.

“According to a research survey conducted by Kelton Research, more than half of respondents reported that they are currently using SaaS applications,” says Larry Beck, senior director of Cloud Strategy at Avanade. “In the United States, this number increases to 68 percent.”

The more telling number, however, is not how many companies jumped on the Cloud, but how many decided to stay there. A recent Gartner survey found more than 95 percent of organizations expect to maintain or grow their use of software as a service (SaaS). Survey respondents cited significant integration requirements and a change in sourcing strategy as the top two reasons for adoption followed by high total cost of ownership (TCO) of other software options.

Trend or Spin
“SaaS applications clearly are no longer seen as a new deployment model by our survey base, with almost half of those surveyed affirming use of SaaS applications in their business for more than three years,” said Sharon Mertz, research director at Gartner. “The varying levels of maturity within the user base suggest growing opportunities for service providers along the adoption curve, as organizations seek assistance with initiatives ranging from process redesign to implementation to integration services.”

Read more: http://www.ec-bp.com/index.php/articles/industry-updates/11390-is-saas-based-edi-a-cloud-service#ixzz3wN3iSG4y

Yet Another Predictor For This Year

As 2015 begins to roll, it’s time to consider what this year may bring along with it in terms of issues and opportunities along the supply chain. Certainly things will change as they always do, but whether those changes will be good for each of us individually or not will depend on circumstances that will be different for every company.
In his story “Supply Chain Predictions for 2015” our own Michael Martz looked at topics including big data, robotics, drones, and the Internet of Things. I agree that all those expanding technologies will have significant impacts on everyone in the supply chain in the coming years. But I also think that the most significant issue we will see this year will be something prognosticators tend to disregard.

 

Find out about Love Promises and Fair Promise

 

Read more: http://www.ec-bp.com/index.php/articles/editors-blog/10865-yet-another-predicticator-for-this-year#ixzz3O1UIkkPz

Clouds Defined

Some time ago we sent out a survey asking about your perceptions of SaaS, Cloud computing, and Hosted solutions. Of course we were interested in EDI solutions, but the question is a generic one that applies to any application. The responses we received ranged from fairly detailed explanations of each, to “I don’t know what these are.” So for those who are unfamiliar with the differences, here is a primmer on the major differences and some discussion of the advantages of each. This falls far short of a full detailed explanation, but the basic concepts are accurate.

Definitions

These are generally accepted definitions of the three types of services. That said, there is always some room for variance and exception based on the provider and the application. We are interested in your experience with these services, so please comment if you have something to add.

Technical Traits

SaaS – Software as a Service

SaaS has been around for several years, and its most often cited example is Salesforce.com.

Cloud computing

Cloud platforms are relatively newer than SaaS systems, and they are not entirely the same. Clouds are computing resources (computer CPUs, disk drives, database engines) linked together via network connections. They may or may not be in the same location, and the users may never know the exact location of their data.

Hosted Systems

Hosted systems are typically single instance applications. They are likely to be the same applications that would be installed on computers within the enterprise.

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