The competition between the industry’s top cloud providers moved into the service integration space last week after Microsoft Corp. launched a new mamaged tool for coordinating work across popular web applications. Flow, as the offering is called, aims to challenge well-established alternatives such as IFTTT and Zapier by providing more than 35 pre-implemented connectors for handling various tasks.

A sales representative who has to deal with a lot of emails, for instance, can use the service to have an alert sent to their phone when they’re contacted by an important lead. And a co-worker over in the marketing department could employ Flow to pull important Twitter messages into an Excel spreadsheet without having to utilize complex data pipelining software. The time saved by automating such chores has the potential to add up quickly over a workday and thereby noticeably increase productivity in an organization.

That’s the same goal CloudFlare Inc. set out to achieve by adding support for the Server Push feature of HTTP/2 to its content delivery network the day after Flow’s launch. The capability enables browsers to load content without having to specifically request every element, a shortcut that the company says can improve response times by up to 15 percent. As a result, the millions of websites and cloud applications that rely on its platform will now be able to serve up pages several seconds faster than before.

CloudFlare rolled out the Server Push support against the backdrop of ServiceMax Inc. announcing an equally major update for its flagship field operations management system. The main highlight is a new analytics dashboard that enables a company’s management team to check up on key metrics like how long it takes on average for a technician to reach a customer’s home. From there, the software provides the ability to compare their data against industry benchmarks and explore areas for improvement. 

Image via Pixabay