Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m extremely passionate about opportunities involving Internet of Things (IoT) – or should I call it Identity of Things – and what it will bring to end-consumers and businesses alike! The industry of connected devices is growing at a breakneck speed and consumers are getting more and more excited as they learn about the ever-expanding possibilities. But are brands preparing themselves properly for IoT? Do they know the complexities involved?
In 2016, total worldwide retail sales reached $22 trillion, of which digital commerce makes up $1.9 trillion, or 8.7% of the total. While the majority of retail sales still occur in brick-and-mortar stores, overall growth is predominantly driven by digital commerce, which was expected to expand rapidly worldwide at a 23.7% growth rate in 2016, and by 2020 to represent 14.6% of total retail spending of $27 trillion. Of course, digital commerce numbers vary depending on the product category. Online sales penetration for many product types - electronics, apparel, furniture, home improvement, etc. - are significantly higher than worldwide retail sales projections, while categories such as petrol, convenience and grocery have a much lower penetration.
Information Technology has advanced in different areas at different speeds. This has always been true, as people found workable solutions to the problems that faced them today, most often before there was a market for those solutions. While things like virtualization and eventually cloud computing grew slowly, programming languages sat at the same point for around a decade before the current round of new languages and approaches—Python, Ruby, Node, Swift—came about. These things seem unrelated, but there is a union of the two sets of changes that we are about to see blossom.
These days attacks are becoming more sophisticated and more common. Mobile devices, cloud computing and the Internet of Things have increased the number of access points that must be secured. To complicate matters, CISOs are been directed to secure system without compromising the seamless experience that customers expect across channels, and if the organization is in a regulated industry, compliance issues likely increase the team’s workload. To best detect threats and respond to incidents quickly, many organizations decide they need a security operations center to provide proper protection and continuous prevention. Then they must decide whether to build an internal Security Operations Center (SOC) or outsource.
Digital transformation requires rapid network changes. Navigating these changes well is difficult but critical, as the function of business applications are at stake. Customers aren’t interested in what’s going on behind the scenes; they simply want the platform to work. Hosting Facts researchers found that a single-second delay in website loading time can result in a seven percent loss in conversion, and 40 percent of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Software developers are the modern equivalent of medieval craftsman. In the old days, masters of the constructive arts — such as those who transformed trees into furniture — would take responsibility for the entire user experience. They did everything from design and configuration to implementation and delivery. If a chair leg broke or wobbled, the craftsman would also be responsible for resolving the fix.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Auditwerx will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Auditwerx specializes in SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 attestation services throughout the U.S. and Canada. As a division of Carr, Riggs & Ingram (CRI), one of the top 20 largest CPA firms nationally, you can expect the resources, skills, and experience of a much larger firm combined with the accessibility and attention of a boutique firm.
Imagine having the ability to leverage all of your current technology and to be able to compose it into one resource pool. Now imagine, as your business grows, not having to deploy a complete new appliance to scale your infrastructure. Also imagine a true multi-cloud capability that allows live migration without any modification between cloud environments regardless of whether that cloud is your private cloud or your public AWS, Azure or Google instance. Now think of a world that is not locked into that rigid appliance vendor or specific public cloud provider, where all silos are now unified into one. No longer do you have to imagine as that is Composable Infrastructure.
Even though DevOps has been around for a few years, it still is a fuzzy area for some organizations. A mashup of development and operations teams, DevOps centers on collaboration and a culture that seamlessly integrates developers and IT operations teams working to put out the best new apps. Because DevOps encompasses two teams working from ideation through product release, DevOps tools fall into several categories including those for logging, monitoring, automation, security, and configuration management.
Next month will mark the 47th anniversary of Apollo 13. The film that recounts the story is a favorite of mine, probably because it so masterfully captures the incredible suspense, fear, and hope felt by people everywhere, that I personally recall very well. I also know how an organization’s digital transformation can generate similar reactions! Apollo 13 was likely a casualty of the space program’s incredibly aggressive schedule. NASA, with U.S. political and military leaders, was motivated by competition from the U.S.S.R. and fear of the potential consequences of not being first. Urgency often overruled caution. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Alan Winters, an entertainment executive/TV producer turned serial entrepreneur, will present a success story of an entrepreneur who has both suffered through and benefited from offshore development across multiple businesses: The smart choice, or how to select the right offshore development partner Warning signs, or how to minimize chances of making the wrong choice Collaboration, or how to establish the most effective work processes Budget control, or how to maximize project results within possible constraints
In 2016, blockchain technology came close to hitting its peak on Gartner’s annual Hype Cycle, signaling an imminent shift from an emerging, theoretical technology to widespread adoption. Like cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things (IoT) before it, blockchain is the tech industry’s latest Next Big Thing. Analysts and industry experts say it holds immense potential for organizations, but many business leaders don’t yet see a practical application for their operations. While a lot of people know blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, what about enterprise applications in other industries?
According to a roundup by Gartner, the average cost of downtime for an enterprise is $5,600 per minute. While the data collected was from incredibly large companies, the cost of downtime for even small startups is no laughing matter. Let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, that your core product is a web app that relies solely on organic sales, totaling $1 million in revenue a year. This amounts to about $2 in lost revenue per minute. This doesn't sound like too much in the grand scheme of things, but revenue is only a small part of your downtime costs. We also must consider wasted operating costs.
The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a tool that organizations have used for many years to measure strategic, operational and financial performance. The concept behind the BSC is simple: a company and/or business unit prioritizes a set of 15 to 20 financial and non-financial metrics across four quadrants linked to the company’s market and operations strategy in order to measure and manage performance. While the BSC is a good organizing framework and remains relevant today, it needs a major shift to be effective in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) world where traditional BSC measures don’t adequately gauge and predict performance.
MongoDB Atlas leverages VPC peering for AWS, a service that allows multiple VPC networks to interact. This includes VPCs that belong to other AWS account holders. By performing cross account VPC peering, users ensure networks that host and communicate their data are secure. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Jay Gordon, a Developer Advocate at MongoDB, will explain how to properly architect your VPC using existing AWS tools and then peer with your MongoDB Atlas cluster. He'll discuss the security advantages you immediately gain, easier configuration of whitelisting networks and potential cost savings on bandwidth.
What do Delta, United, Marriott and National Car Rental all have in common? They’re some of the most popular and highest-rated brands among business travelers, according to Certify, and companies are working hard to ensure that their business clientele – and their tourism and leisure travel guests – are having the customer experience that boosts their brand and bottom line. The same goes for travel booking companies too, and they’re increasingly turning to cloud-based services and mobile technologies to keep their customer satisfaction and brand reputation first in a competitive marketplace. What companies like TripAdvisor, HotelsCombined or AirBnb have in common is a strong online presence boosted by technology investments.
My daughter is taking a class on entrepreneurship in her senior year of high school (yep, that’s the Silicon Valley for you). She loves the class, the energy of the teacher, and the creativity associated with the subject. As a result, we have had several conversations about what does it mean to be an entrepreneur. While I am sure there are folks more qualified than me to define what it means to be an entrepreneur, I’ve run into enough of those folks over the years to believe that I have a pretty decent perspective.
There was a recent tabloid piece featuring a video of a woman asking Alexa if it was connected to the CIA. At the time, the Echo Dot she was speaking to did not respond to the question. She asked a few times, and each time the Echo was silent. Conspiracy theorists weighed in. It was an amusing video, but the Daily Mail’s clickbait headline raises a legitimate question: Can Alexa lie? According to Amazon, you can “use the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to add intelligent voice control to any connected product that has a microphone and speaker.” Alexa uses machine learning to help it recognize what you say (Automatic Speech Recognition) and understand the question (Natural Language Understanding) and then routes your information as requested.
Retailers are witnessing a rising trend towards customers ordering food online and requesting hybrid delivery, such as home delivery, picking up from stores or dedicated pickup points. In light of this and other emerging innovations, retailers need to develop and deploy new applications quickly to support new customer-oriented services that maximize user convenience. If they fail, customers will turn to competitors offering the service capability they want and likely never return.
Digital transformation. It’s only two simple words, but in the increasingly complex, customer-centric enterprise IT landscape, it’s a phrase that carries multiple meanings — to the point where some would probably observe, tongue-in-cheek, that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’d be hard to argue that “digital transformation” hasn’t been pushed into buzzword territory by those of us who write about business IT, but I feel like that speaks more of the concept’s genuine relevance and importance to the success of today’s digital first enterprises than just simple hype. The sports media talks about the Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavs, and their superstar players a lot, too.
What sort of WebRTC based applications can we expect to see over the next year and beyond? One way to predict development trends is to see what sorts of applications startups are building. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arin Sime, founder of WebRTC.ventures, will discuss the current and likely future trends in WebRTC application development based on real requests for custom applications from real customers, as well as other public sources of information,
Special thanks for the help on this blog to the coolest, most hip group of industry experts that I have ever met: the Pathfinders. The Pathfinders is an elite forces group of master system engineers inside of Dell EMC who tackle our customers’ most difficult and inspiring challenges. I am honored to be part of that club! Suppose an autonomous vehicle learns of a more efficient route and wants sell this knowledge to other autonomous cars for a fee (using blockchain to handle machine to machine transaction). Suppose the autonomous vehicle could start to monetize itself; to self-fund its own operations and the acquisition of goods and services such as gas, repairs or vehicle upgrades (using blockchain to conduct commerce). Now suppose the autonomous vehicle could couple real-time analytics of vehicle performance and maintenance with real-time bidding for maintenance servicing and replacement parts (blockchain inserted again). Lastly, think “intelligent” vehicle depreciation and salvage value optimization where the autonomous vehicle continuously scours used car and auto parts markets for vehicles in need of older chassis, transmission and electrical components (again leveraging blockchain).
End-user experience is everything when it comes to facilitating workplace productivity. You could deploy or develop the most powerful applications anyone has ever seen-but they won't do any good if they offer a poor experience. This is a major reason why applications are moving to SaaS, PaaS and IaaS cloud computing models. The cloud simplifies applications on the back end, which translates to smoother end-user experiences. But as cloud apps integrate more services and user bases diversify, IT has to do more to streamline application platforms. Enter container technology.
By now, every company in the world is on the lookout for the digital disruption that will threaten their existence. In study after study, executives believe that technology has either already disrupted their industry, is in the process of disrupting it or will disrupt it in the near future. As a result, every organization is taking steps to prepare for or mitigate unforeseen disruptions. Yet in almost every industry, the disruption trend continues unabated.
The origins of SAP GRC software goes back decades, but adoption has been slow. But with the rigor of modern compliance regimes like SOX, coupled with the sheer volume and complexity of online transactions, there’s been an accelerating movement away from document-centric review processes to automation.