"We are a custom software development, engineering firm. We specialize in cloud applications from helping customers that have on-premise applications migrating to the cloud, to helping customers design brand new apps in the cloud. And we specialize in mobile apps," explained Peter Di Stefano, Vice President of Marketing at Impiger Technologies, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Rather than thinking up my own, I figured I’d regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen. 8 Predictions About How the Security Industry Will Fare in 2017 – An eWeek slideshow looking at areas like IoT, ransomware, automated attacks and the security skills shortage in the industry. Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz), who does a monthly #eweekchat on twitter, covers many of the worries facing organizations.
In this strange new world where more and more power is drawn from business technology, companies are effectively straddling two paths on the road to innovation and transformation into digital enterprises. The first path is the heritage trail – with “legacy” technology forming the background. Here, extant technologies are transformed by core IT teams to provide more API-driven approaches. Legacy systems can restrict companies that are transitioning into digital enterprises. To truly become a leader in the space, it’s necessary to accommodate, incorporate, and exploit the new breed of enterprise technologies — cloud, Big Data, and APIs.
You are moving to the Cloud. The question is not if, it’s when. Now that your competitors are in the cloud and lapping you, your “when” better hurry up and get here. But saying and doing are two different things. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Robert Reeves, CTO of Datical, explained how DevOps can be your onramp to the cloud. By adopting simple, platform independent DevOps strategies, you can accelerate your move to the cloud. Spoiler Alert: He also makes sure you don’t forget the database in your adoption of DevOps and the cloud.
"Qosmos has launched L7Viewer, a network traffic analysis tool, so it analyzes all the traffic between the virtual machine and the data center and the virtual machine and the external world," stated Sebastien Synold, Product Line Manager at Qosmos, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Whether your IoT service is connecting cars, homes, appliances, wearable, cameras or other devices, one question hangs in the balance – how do you actually make money from this service? The ability to turn your IoT service into profit requires the ability to create a monetization strategy that is flexible, scalable and working for you in real-time. It must be a transparent, smoothly implemented strategy that all stakeholders – from customers to the board – will be able to understand and comprehend.
Okay, let me get this out there: I find the term “Citizen Data Scientist” confusing. Gartner defines a “citizen data scientist as “a person who creates or generates models that leverage predictive or prescriptive analytics but whose primary job function is outside of the field of statistics and analytics.” While we teach business users to “think like a data scientist” in their ability to identify those variables and metrics that might be better predictors of performance, I do not expect that the business stakeholders are going to be able to create and generate analytic models. I do not believe, nor do I expect, that the business stakeholders are going to be proficient enough with tools like SAS or R or Python or Mahout or MADlib to 1) create or generate the models, and then 2) be proficient enough to be able to interpret the t-tests, f-scores, p-values and residuals necessary to ascertain the analytic model’s goodness of time.
"ReadyTalk is an audio and web video conferencing provider. We've really come to embrace WebRTC as the platform for our future of technology," explained Dan Cunningham, CTO of ReadyTalk, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at WebRTC Summit at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"At ROHA we develop an app called Catcha. It was developed after we spent a year meeting with, talking to, interacting with senior citizens watching them use their smartphones and talking to them about how they use their smartphones so we could get to know their smartphone behavior," explained Dave Woods, Chief Innovation Officer at ROHA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Dataloop.IO, an innovator in cloud IT-monitoring whose products help organizations save time and money, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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. Dataloop.IO is an emerging software company on the cutting edge of major IT-infrastructure trends including cloud computing and microservices. The company, founded in the UK but now based in San Francisco, is developing the next generation of cloud monitoring required for microservices and DevOps.
Central to the idea of DevOps is collaboration between all of the teams involved in IT applications and infrastructure. Developers, Operations, Quality Assurance, Security, and more, all have stakes in the delivery of a product or service. So, what does collaboration mean when it comes to monitoring in the world of DevOps? In the past, different teams involved in creating or maintaining an application would first finish their portion completely before passing it on to the next team. For example, the Development team would first write code for the entire app, or specific features in the app, before passing it to the Quality Assurance (QA) team. The QA team would then do their testing and analysis before sending it forward to Operations, and so on.
Today’s IT environments are increasingly heterogeneous, with Linux, Java, Oracle and MySQL considered nearly as common as traditional Windows environments. In many cases, these platforms have been integrated into an organization’s Windows-based IT department by way of an acquisition of a company that leverages one of those platforms. In other cases, the applications may have been part of the IT department for years, but managed by a separate department or singular administrator. Still, whether it's a perception of required specialization, frustration over these platforms’ many version permutations or just general uncertainty and doubt, Linux, Java, Oracle and MySQL create mass monitoring confusion and are routinely considered “hard to reach” for even a seasoned IT professional. This problem goes both ways (when monitoring Windows is actually the unnatural element) but for the most part, IT shops are primarily Windows-based and consistently struggle to monitor these more niche platforms.
Information self-service is undoubtedly one of the main drivers of Modern Data Management. From “data services marketplaces” to “self-service Big Data analytics,” one of the objectives of most data-related initiatives today is to provide business professionals with new ways to solve their information needs with the goals of achieving self-reliance and minimizing the IT bottleneck. However, is it realistic to expect business users to assume this job? Studies [1] report that more than 60 percent of companies grade their experience with self-service initiatives as “average” or lower, with nearly four out of five (73 percent) claiming that “…it requires more training than expected.” So, what is the problem and what can we do to solve it? Let’s start with the easy part: data visualization, which is the last stage of the data analysis process. Self-service BI tools have been around for some years now, allowing business data analysts to create their own graphical reports. Although those tools are not for every business user, business analysts with data experience, basic knowledge of statistics and a bit of SQL, can use them successfully.
The holiday season is nearly upon us (I’ve already heard Christmas songs being played…really?) and retailers are usually the big winners during the holiday season. However, leading retailers are already thinking beyond the current holiday season, and not just from marketing and merchandising perspectives. These leading retailers are considering how this holiday season – and the resulting wealth of customer, product and operational data – can be converted into new analytic insights that can be used to optimize key business processes, uncover new monetization opportunities and create a more compelling, more prescriptive user experience all year round.
I’m a huge fan of open source DevOps tools. I’m also a huge fan of scaling open source tools for the enterprise. But having talked with my fair share of companies over the years, one important thing I’ve learned is that you can’t scale your release process using open source tools alone. They simply require too much scripting and maintenance when used that way. Scripting may be fine for smaller organizations, but it’s not ok in an enterprise environment that includes many independent teams and tons of applications. You’ll end up with an unmanageable spaghetti factory. And who maintains those scripts? Your developers, some of the most talented and expensive folks in your organization. This is bad for the company, of course, but also for developers, who are much happier building code than doing maintenance work. Standardization is the answer and that’s where commercial tools come in.
Infrastructure is widely available, but who’s managing inbound/outbound traffic? Data is created, stored, and managed online – who is protecting it and how? In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Jaeson Yoo, SVP of Business Development at Penta Security Systems Inc., discussed how to keep any and all infrastructure clean, safe, and efficient by monitoring and filtering all malicious HTTP/HTTPS traffic at the OSI Layer 7. Stop attacks and web intruders before they can enter your network.
"We are an all-flash array storage provider but our focus has been on VM-aware storage specifically for virtualized applications," stated Dhiraj Sehgal of Tintri in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
2016 brought about more cyberattacks than we thought possible, especially involving ransomware, and we definitely won't see that trend breaking stride in 2017. By next year, we expect every single adult in the US will know a blood relative that has had their identity stolen - the Internal Revenue Service reported that 2.7 million people had their identities stolen in 2014 and according to TransUnion, 19 people fall victim to identity theft every minute.
What happens when the different parts of a vehicle become smarter than the vehicle itself? As we move toward the era of smart everything, hundreds of entities in a vehicle that communicate with each other, the vehicle and external systems create a need for identity orchestration so that all entities work as a conglomerate. Much like an orchestra without a conductor, without the ability to secure, control, and connect the link between a vehicle’s head unit, devices, and systems and to manage the lifecycle of people, systems and devices, transportation and fleet services are at risk of having connected, yet disparate systems.
In his general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Manish Dixit, VP of Product and Engineering at Dice, discussed how Dice leverages data insights and tools to help both tech professionals and recruiters better understand how skills relate to each other and which skills are in high demand using interactive visualizations and salary indicator tools to maximize earning potential. Manish Dixit is VP of Product and Engineering at Dice. As the leader of the Product, Engineering and Data Sciences team at Dice, he takes a metrics-driven approach to management. His experience in building and managing high performance teams was built throughout his experience at Oracle, Sun Microsystems and SocialEkwity.
"We're a cybersecurity firm that specializes in engineering security solutions both at the software and hardware level. Security cannot be an after-the-fact afterthought, which is what it's become," stated Richard Blech, Chief Executive Officer at Secure Channels, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
We have been seeing a sudden rise in the deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL). It looks like the long “AI winter” is finally over. It is interesting to note that AI was mentioned by Alan Turing in a paper he wrote back in 1950 to suggest that there is possibility to build machines with true intelligence. Then in 1956, John McCarthy organized a conference at Dartmounth and coined the phrase Artificial Intelligence. Much of the next three decades did not see much activity and hence the phrase “AI Winter” was coined. Around 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue won the chess match against Kasparov. During the last few years, we saw deployments such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and IBM’s Watson (beating Jeopardy game show champions in 2011). In 2014, DeepMind team used a deep learning algorithm to create a program to win Atari games.
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann returns to 'DevOps at Cloud Expo 2017' as Conference Chair The @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. "DevOps is set to be one of the most profound disruptions to hit IT in decades," said Andi Mann. "It is a natural extension of cloud computing, and I have seen both firsthand and in independent research the fantastic results DevOps delivers. So I am excited to help the great team at @DevOpsSummit and Cloud Expo tell the world how they can leverage this emerging disruptive trend." Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, is an accomplished digital business executive with extensive global expertise as a strategist, technologist, innovator, and communicator. For over 30 years across five continents, Andi has built success with Fortune 500 corporations, vendors, governments, and as a leading research analyst and consultant. Andi is a sought-after commentator on business technology - published in USA Today, New York Times, Forbes, CIO, and Wall Street Journal; presented at Gartner ITxpo, VMworld, CA World, Interop, Cloud Expo, and DevOps Summit; participated and hosted interviews for radio, television, webcasts, podcasts, and live events; and more.
"This is specifically designed to accommodate some of the needs for high availability and failover in a network managed system for the major Korean corporations," stated Thomas Masters, Managing Director at InfranicsUSA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
DevOps is being widely accepted (if not fully adopted) as essential in enterprise IT. But as Enterprise DevOps gains maturity, expands scope, and increases velocity, the need for data-driven decisions across teams becomes more acute. DevOps teams in any modern business must wrangle the ‘digital exhaust’ from the delivery toolchain, "pervasive" and "cognitive" computing, APIs and services, mobile devices and applications, the Internet of Things, and now even blockchain. In this power panel at @DevOpsSummit 19th Cloud Expo, moderated by DevOps Conference Chair Andi Mann, panelists will explore this emerging use of Big Data generated by the digital business to complete the DevOps feedback loop, and inform operational and application decisions.