As ridesharing competitors and enhanced services increase, notable changes are occurring in the transportation model. Despite the cost-effective means and flexibility of ridesharing, both drivers and users will need to be aware of the connected environment and how it will impact the ridesharing experience. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Timothy Evavold, Executive Director Automotive at Covisint, will discuss key challenges and solutions to powering a ride sharing and/or multimodal model in the age of connected vehicles.
Analysis of 25,000 applications reveals 6.8% of packages/components used included known defects. Organizations standardizing on components between 2 - 3 years of age can decrease defect rates substantially. Open source and third-party packages/components live at the heart of high velocity software development organizations. Today, an average of 106 packages/components comprise 80 - 90% of a modern application, yet few organizations have visibility into what components are used where.
More and more companies are looking to microservices as an architectural pattern for breaking apart applications into more manageable pieces so that agile teams can deliver new features quicker and more effectively. What this pattern has done more than anything to date is spark organizational transformations, setting the foundation for future application development. In practice, however, there are a number of considerations to make that go beyond simply “build, ship, and run,” which changes how developers and operators work together to streamline cohesive systems.
According to Forrester Research, every business will become either a digital predator or digital prey by 2020. To avoid demise, organizations must rapidly create new sources of value in their end-to-end customer experiences. True digital predators also must break down information and process silos and extend digital transformation initiatives to empower employees with the digital resources needed to win, serve, and retain customers.
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.
What are the new priorities for the connected business? First: businesses need to think differently about the types of connections they will need to make – these span well beyond the traditional app to app into more modern forms of integration including SaaS integrations, mobile integrations, APIs, device integration and Big Data integration. It’s important these are unified together vs. doing them all piecemeal. Second, these types of connections need to be simple to design, adapt and configure. Plus, with the proliferation of IoT, there is an explosion in the number of devices requiring interconnection - both in terms of asset monitoring and spatial analytics.
Cognitive Computing is becoming the foundation for a new generation of solutions that have the potential to transform business. Unlike traditional approaches to building solutions, a cognitive computing approach allows the data to help determine the way applications are designed. This contrasts with conventional software development that begins with defining logic based on the current way a business operates. In her session at 18th Cloud Expo, Judith S. Hurwitz, President and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, Inc., put cognitive computing into perspective with its value to the business. The session detailed what it takes to build a cognitive application and the types of solutions that are the best fit for this data-driven approach.
How do you balance the need to “go fast” with the need to test everything and deliver high-quality software? With applications the driving force in today’s economy, the quality and release cadence of your software are critical to your business and your bottom line. You want to get software updated in the hands of your end users as quickly as possible. However, even the fastest release cycle wouldn’t make a difference if your product ends up being buggy or malfunctioning, resulting in a bad user experience or service interruption.
An IoT product’s log files speak volumes about what’s happening with your products in the field, pinpointing current and potential issues, and enabling you to predict failures and save millions of dollars in inventory. But until recently, no one knew how to listen. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dan Gettens, Chief Research Officer at OnProcess, will discuss recent research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and OnProcess Technology, where MIT created a new, breakthrough analytics model for spare parts forecasting and inventory planning using connected-product failure predictability. He’ll show how, by analyzing IoT data, you can slash both costly inventory stock and stock-outs, and meet heightened customer expectations for repairs and uptime.
Modern IT departments have enormous budgets and there’s a veritable feast of technology out there to choose from. IT spending worldwide will total $3.5 trillion this year, according to Gartner. The challenge lies in selecting the right technology to drive your business forward and successfully integrating it into your stack. The proliferation of new cloud services, with countless small niche players working to maximize cloud value, has led to a serious management challenge. Thankfully, IT departments do have a way out – they can look for vendor partnerships that do some of the integration legwork for them, or they can consider service orchestration and work with a systems integrator.
Digitization is driving a fundamental change in society that is transforming the way businesses work with their customers, their supply chains and their people. Digital transformation leverages DevOps best practices, such as Agile Parallel Development, Continuous Delivery and Agile Operations to capitalize on opportunities and create competitive differentiation in the application economy. However, information security has been notably absent from the DevOps movement. Speed doesn’t have to negatively impact security. Container-to-container communication should not be in clear text, yet it is. So why is it so hard to implement good security practices like encryption for DevOps? The primary reason, provisioning of keys and certificates in a DevOps environment takes too long and results in bottlenecks - so people don’t use encryption unless they have to.
While DevOps promises a better and tighter integration among an organization’s development and operation teams and transforms an application life cycle into a continual deployment, Chef and Azure together provides a speedy, cost-effective and highly scalable vehicle for realizing the business values of this transformation. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Yung Chou, a Technology Evangelist at Microsoft, will present a unique opportunity to witness how Chef and Azure work together. He will review and demonstrate the essentials of deploying a functional and realistic DevOps environment by managing Azure cloud services with Chef.
Fog Computing is being touted as the data communication solution our Internet of Things (IoT) devices are asking for by bringing the power of cloud computing closer to the end user. The fact is, the number of connected devices is going to continue to grow exponentionally. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020 IoT will include 26 billion connected things. Consider the impact that amount of data collected and processed will have.
Digital transformation is too big and important for our future success to not understand the rules that apply to it. The first three rules for winning in this age of hyper-digital transformation are: Advantages in speed, analytics and operational tempos must be captured by implementing an optimized information logistics system (OILS) Real-time operational tempos (IT, people and business processes) must be achieved Businesses that can "analyze data and act and with speed" will dominate those that are slower.
There’s a tendency, particularly for networkers, to classify applications by the protocols they use. If it uses HTTP, it must be a web app. The thing is that HTTP has become what it was intended to be: a transport protocol. It is not an application protocol, in the sense that it defines application messages and states. It merely transports data in a very specific way. That’s particularly important in the age of the API and, increasingly, the age of things that might be using APIs. You see, APIs are primarily data centric constructs while web pages (think any HTML-based app) are document centric constructs.
Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy. Meanwhile, 94% of enterprises are using some form of XaaS - software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.
In his keynote at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, provided an overview of the evolution of the Internet and the Database and the future of their combination – the Blockchain. Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settlement products to hedge funds and investment banks. After, he co-founded a revenue cycle management company where he learned about Bitcoin and eventually Ethereum.
Video experiences should be unique and exciting! But that doesn’t mean you need to patch all the pieces yourself. Users demand rich and engaging experiences and new ways to connect with you. But creating robust video applications at scale can be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Zohar Babin, Vice President of Platform, Ecosystem and Community at Kaltura, will discuss how VPaaS enables you to move fast, creating scalable video experiences that reach your audience anywhere, in an enterprise grade secured environment, low-level video ingestion, processing, management, distribution, and playback. And experience microservices, the Big Data analytics to answer all your end-user consumption and behavior questions.
It feels like the barbarians are continually at the gate. We can’t seem to go more than a week before a new data breach is in the news, impacting potentially millions of individuals. The targets range from companies like Omni Hotels, which had been breached affecting up to 50,000 customers whose personal and credit card information was exposed, to North Carolina State University, where over 38,000 students’ personal information, including their SSNs, were at risk. As I mentioned in a recent blog ‘Internet of Things and Big Data – who owns your data?’, we have been storing our personal and credit card information in a variety of systems, credit card companies, banks, online retailers, hotels - and that’s just naming a few. The information in those systems is more valuable than gold to the hackers. The hacker attacks are constant, creative, and changing frequently.
Complete Internet of Things (IoT) embedded device security is not just about the device but involves the entire product’s identity, data and control integrity, and services traversing the cloud. A device can no longer be looked at as an island; it is a part of a system. In fact, given the cross-domain interactions enabled by IoT it could be a part of many systems. Also, depending on where the device is deployed, for example, in the office building versus a factory floor or oil field, security has to be weaved into processes without affecting operational reliability, uptime, efficiency and safety requirements. This issue is compounded by the magnitude of smart and connected devices that are projected to be disseminated throughout the network in all verticals.
Almost two-thirds of companies either have or soon will have IoT as the backbone of their business in 2016. However, IoT is far more complex than most firms expected. How can you not get trapped in the pitfalls? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Tony Shan, a renowned visionary and thought leader, will introduce a holistic method of IoTification, which is the process of IoTifying the existing technology and business models to adopt and leverage IoT. He will drill down to the components in this framework: Anatomy, Ramp-up, Use case, Business case, Architecture, Technology selection, Implementation, and Platform (ARUBA TIP). The interdisciplinary techniques and anti-patterns of this method will be discussed, along with best practices and lessons learned, to help organizations transform to and enable IoT effectively.
There’s been a seismic shift in monitoring earthquakes via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with advanced Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology having reshaped the industrial communication industry. Every device or machine along the network, even at the outermost edge, now has the opportunity to be fully-connected for automated collection and delivery of information. As Sensor-2-Server (S2S) communication technology evolves to keep up with the demand for this connectivity paradigm, new efficiencies are created and Big Data is available to drive actionable intelligence.
Time and again, those keeping a pulse on the Internet of Things (IoT) space frequently hear about the “rise of the machines.” Humanity is not only discovering fascinating ways to integrate machines into our daily lives, but also finding new uses for machines as well. How? Machines are now “internet-connected” just like the smartphones we carry around in our pockets. And this isn’t just on the commercial side with the likes of smart thermostats or connected vehicles – even tractors and oil and gas machinery are industrial examples of where new “things” are now on the digital network.
Kubernetes is a new and revolutionary open-sourced system for managing containers across multiple hosts in a cluster. Ansible is a simple IT automation tool for just about any requirement for reproducible environments. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Patrick Galbraith, a principal engineer at HPE, discussed how to build a fully functional Kubernetes cluster on a number of virtual machines or bare-metal hosts. Also included will be a brief demonstration of running a Galera MySQL cluster as a Kubernetes application.
Much of the value of DevOps comes from a (renewed) focus on measurement, sharing, and continuous feedback loops. In increasingly complex DevOps workflows and environments, and especially in larger, regulated, or more crystallized organizations, these core concepts become even more critical. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, showed how, by focusing on 'metrics that matter,' you can provide objective, transparent, and meaningful feedback on DevOps processes to all stakeholders. Learn from real-life examples how to use the data generated throughout application delivery to continuously identify, measure, and improve deployment speed, code quality, process efficiency, outsourcing value, security coverage, audit success, customer satisfaction, and business alignment.