Keeping pace with advancements in software delivery processes and tooling is taxing even for the most proficient organizations. Point tools, platforms, open source and the increasing adoption of private and public cloud services requires strong engineering rigor - all in the face of developer demands to use the tools of choice. As Agile has settled in as a mainstream practice, now DevOps has emerged as the next wave to improve software delivery speed and output. To make DevOps work, organizations must focus on what is most relevant to deliver value, reduce IT complexity, create more repeatable agile-based processes and leverage increasingly secure and stable, cloud-based infrastructure platforms. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Flint Brenton, CEO of CollabNet, outlined strategies for unifying a continuously changing, fragmented and disparate set of technologies and processes within common community architecture.
As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, addressed security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He drew from case studies, outlined best practices for businesses and demoed how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.
Over the past few years, the use of artificial intelligence has expanded more rapidly than many of us could have imagined. While this may invoke fear and dread in some, these relatively new technology applications are clearly delivering real value to our global society. This value is generally seen in four distinct areas:
Businesses are struggling to manage the information flow and interactions between all of these new devices and things jumping on their network, and the apps and IT systems they control. The data businesses gather is only helpful if they can do something with it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, discussed how different the impact of IoT will be for large businesses, expanding how IoT will allow large organizations to make their legacy applications and systems more useful by leveraging an increasingly disparate ecosystem of technologies, users and devices to create actionable business intelligence.
Whether they’re located in a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, cloud technologies are constantly evolving. While the innovation is exciting, the end mission of delivering business value and rapidly producing incremental product features is paramount. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Kiran Chitturi, CTO Architect at Sungard AS, discussed DevOps culture, its evolution of frameworks and technologies, and how it is achieving maturity. He also covered various styles and stacks in DevOps with examples and live demos – on AWS using tools/techniques for continuous integration, configuration management and delivery orchestration.
I hear it often; I need to acquire more customers like my “most valuable” customers. But what makes a customer “most valuable”? What are the characteristics and/or behaviors that make a customer “most valuable”? This simple question is anything but simple. Let me explain through an exercise. Let’s say that you work for an airline (note: this exercise works equally well with other customer-centric industries such as hospitality, gaming, entertainment, retail, credit cards, financial services, telco and insurance). You have been asked to identify the airline’s “most valuable” customers. This information will be used to prioritize marketing, sales, support and product development efforts. As part of your analysis, you identify three different customer scenarios and need to determine which of these customer scenarios is “most valuable”:
The emergence of hyper-scale Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is challenging the traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) value proposition. SaaS CEOs, investors and SaaS buyers must carefully evaluate the implications of “all-in” migration to hyperscale IaaS platforms that offer value-added platform services that go beyond simple infrastructure services. This article provides a point of view and insights into changes in the SaaS market, which has three principal drivers 1) technical, 2) business, and 3) security and compliance.
Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business’s productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren’t present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud – because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature – can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box.
@DevOpsSummit has been named the ‘Top DevOps Influencer' by iTrend. iTrend processes millions of conversations, tweets, interactions, news articles, press releases, blog posts - and extract meaning form them and analyzes mobile and desktop software platforms used to communicate, various metadata (such as geo location), and automation tools. In overall placement, @DevOpsSummit ranked as the number one ‘DevOps Influencer' followed by @CloudExpo at third, and @MicroservicesE at 24th.
Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer’s datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day. First, Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry's first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer's datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day.Now, Workspot DaaS 2.0 is the industry's first full-cloud Desktop as a Service solution combining Workspot VDI 2.0 with Microsoft Azure to deliver thousands of desktops in a day, in any part of the world and with zero CapEx.
With an estimated 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020, several industries will begin to expand their capabilities for retaining end point data at the edge to better utilize the range of data types and sheer volume of M2M data generated by the Internet of Things. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Don DeLoach, CEO and President of Infobright, discussed the infrastructures businesses will need to implement to handle this explosion of data by providing specific use cases for filtering, cleansing, enriching, storing and analyzing granular data at the edge that will help businesses achieve powerful insights from the many use cases of the Internet of Things.
President Obama recently announced the launch of a new national awareness campaign to "encourage more Americans to move beyond passwords – adding an extra layer of security like a fingerprint or codes sent to your cellphone." The shift from single passwords to multi-factor authentication couldn’t be timelier or more strategic. This session will focus on why passwords alone are no longer effective, and why the time to act is now. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Chris Webber, security strategist at Centrify, discussed how we can move away from passwords towards better, more secure methods of identity verification.
Software delivery was once specific to the IT industry. Now, Continuous Delivery pipelines are used around world from e-commerce to airline software. Building a software delivery pipeline once involved hours of scripting and manual steps–a process that’s painful, if not impossible, to scale. However Continuous Delivery with Application Release Automation tools offers a scripting-free, automated experience. Continuous Delivery pipelines are immensely powerful for the modern enterprise, boosting production and even customer satisfaction.
A number of retailers, especially small businesses, are moving away from these expensive systems to cheaper, yet a lot more sophisticated cloud alternatives. A typical cloud PoS system should cost retailers between $50 to $200 a month. Point of Sale (Pos) systems typically haven’t required an internet connection. These devices come with a cash register, a barcode scanner and a card reading machine that connects to the bank via a fixed line connection. In addition to this, the higher end PoS systems come with inventory tracking and management tools as well. All of this does not come cheap and the hardware for these devices can cost anywhere between $2000 to $4000. This is not including the monthly support fee of between $25 to $100 that PoS providers charge businesses.
@GonzalezCarmen has been ranked the Number One Influencer and @ThingsExpo has been named the Number One Brand in the “M2M 2016: Top 100 Influencers and Brands” by Onalytica. Onalytica analyzed tweets over the last 6 months mentioning the keywords M2M OR “Machine to Machine.” They then identified the top 100 most influential brands and individuals leading the discussion on Twitter.
So, you bought into the current machine learning craze and went on to collect millions/billions of records from this promising new data source. Now, what do you do with them? Too often, the abundance of data quickly turns into an abundance of problems. How do you extract that "magic essence" from your data without falling into the common pitfalls? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Natalia Ponomareva, Software Engineer at Google, provided tips on how to be successful in large scale machine learning. She briefly reviewed the frameworks available to train machine learning models on large amounts of data, touched on feature engineering and algorithm selection, and gave a few tips to help you avoid the most common mistakes.
IoT solutions exploit operational data generated by Internet-connected smart “things” for the purpose of gaining operational insight and producing “better outcomes” (for example, create new business models, eliminate unscheduled maintenance, etc.). The explosive proliferation of IoT solutions will result in an exponential growth in the volume of IoT data, precipitating significant Information Governance issues: who owns the IoT data, what are the rights/duties of IoT solutions adopters towards this data, how to deal with Data Residency and Data Privacy issues, how to manage the lifecycle of IoT data, etc.?
The Jevons Paradox suggests that when technological advances increase efficiency of a resource, it results in an overall increase in consumption. Writing on the increased use of coal as a result of technological improvements, 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons found that these improvements led to the development of new ways to utilize coal. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy Officer for Apcera, compared the Jevons Paradox to modern-day enterprise IT, examining how the Internet and the cloud has allowed for the democratization of IT, resulting in an increased demand for the cloud and the drive to develop new ways to utilize it.
The volume of transactions running through websites and mobile apps make customer-facing applications crucial to online businesses. If these applications perform well for their users, they generate revenue for the business. If they don't, they affect the credibility of the business, which in turn affects the overall revenue. It is therefore imperative that businesses understand how well their revenue-critical applications are behaving for their end users. From an IT team's point of view, understanding the user experience of their applications is becoming challenging as technology evolves. Newer and more complex applications are being written using an assortment of languages. These applications are being deployed on a wide variety of infrastructure components. To add to that, today's users access these modern applications on a variety of devices such as the Web, smartphones, tablets and smart watches.
"There are a lot of security issues with connected vehicles right now. We provide the connected vehicle infrastructure for both Hyundai and OnStar," explained David Miller, Chief Security Officer at Covisint, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Blockchain is certainly the rage. No matter the industry, you can’t seem to have a technology discussion before the topic is raised. According to Gartner’s latest hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ Approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just this year, according to PwC executive Seamus Cushley. While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is being taken very seriously across industries and cannot be ignored.
Internet-of-Things discussions can end up either going down the consumer gadget rabbit hole or focused on the sort of data logging that industrial manufacturers have been doing forever. However, in fact, companies today are already using IoT data both to optimize their operational technology and to improve the experience of customer interactions in novel ways. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gordon Haff, Red Hat Technology Evangelist, will share examples from a wide range of industries – including energy, transportation, and retail – of using IoT to create new business opportunities and improve efficiency.
Although it has gained significant traction in the consumer space, IoT is still in the early stages of adoption in enterprises environments. However, many companies are working on initiatives like Industry 4.0 that includes IoT as one of the key disruptive technologies expected to reshape businesses of tomorrow. The key challenges will be availability, robustness and reliability of networks that connect devices in a business environment. Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is expected to play a key role in overcoming these challenges. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mike Wood, vice president for VeloCloud Networks, discussed how SD-WAN can offer a simple, agile, cost-effective approach for enterprise IoT networks.
Technology vendors and analysts are eager to paint a rosy picture of how wonderful IoT is and why your deployment will be great with the use of their products and services. While it is easy to showcase successful IoT solutions, identifying IoT systems that missed the mark or failed can often provide more in the way of key lessons learned. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Peter Vanderminden, Principal Industry Analyst for IoT & Digital Supply Chain to Flatiron Strategies, will focus on how IoT deployments can go bad, and in some cases downright ugly, when firms focus on the wrong things and fail to be transparent with their customers concerning data ownership and usage surveillance.
Programmable network connectivity and network overlay technologies like Docker libnetwork, Weave Net, and Calico are essential tools for DevOps engineers using orchestration tools to manage and deploy Docker containers in production. Because network troubleshooting and optimization falls within the jurisdiction of DevOps, it’s vital that DevOps engineers understand exactly how network overlays work.