Our shopping experiences continue to change. Today, we use smartphones, tablets and laptops to shop, purchase and track shipments online, from anywhere at any time. We bring mobile devices into retail stores to compare prices and learn more about products on the shelf. We search for available inventories, the nearest store locations, and for new, used, shared and auctioned products and services. These digital transformations are profoundly altering the nature of retailing, and their velocity will only accelerate.
I recently had an opportunity to participate in the SPS Commerce DevOps day event; with over 100 engineers gathered to discuss topics ranging from remote team management, automation frameworks, managing docker deployments, and of course how dynamic monitoring can enable a more agile culture, it was one of the most interesting and collaborative days I’ve had the opportunity to be apart of. Bridget Kromhout – a rock star Cloud Foundry Engineer at Pivotal (@bridgetkromhout) – kicked off the day by discussing strategies for building globally distributed teams and embracing collaboration across time zones. Bridget is a great speaker, and the session was packed full of compelling anecdotes, but there were two specific takeaways that resonated with me, as they align closely to how I think about APM.
Agile, which started in the development organization, has gradually expanded into other areas downstream - namely IT and Operations. Teams – then teams of teams – have streamlined processes, improved feedback loops and driven a much faster pace into IT departments which have had profound effects on the entire organization. In his session at DevOps Summit, Anders Wallgren, Chief Technology Officer of Electric Cloud, discussed how DevOps and Continuous Delivery have emerged to help connect development with IT operations (mainly through the introduction of Automation) to support and amplify agility, responsiveness and faster time to market throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. The DevOps approach is a way to increase business agility through collaboration, communication, and integration across different teams in the IT organization. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist for the Western US at Red Hat, discussed: The acceleration of application delivery for the business with DevOps
Automating AWS environments is important for all businesses as it simplifies creation and setup of cloud resources, facilitates otherwise complex processes, and streamlines management. The benefits of automation are clear: accelerate execution, reduce human error and unwanted consequences, and increase the enterprise’s ability to rapidly adapt, all while reducing the overall cost of IT operations. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Patrick McClory, Director of Automation and DevOps at Datapipe, delved deep into the technical specifics of automation for AWS including a discussion of best practices and real world use cases for PCI compliance, application management, continuous integration, CloudFormation and auto-scaling.
Manufacturing connected IoT versions of traditional products requires more than multiple deep technology skills. It also requires a shift in mindset, to realize that connected, sensor-enabled “things” act more like services than what we usually think of as products. In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks, discussed how when sensors start generating detailed real-world data about products and how they’re being used, smart manufacturers can use the data to create additional revenue streams, such as improved warranties or premium features. Or slash maintenance costs by replacing parts before they fail. Or learn from the data to iterate better products that give customers what they really want.
The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business. One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, looked at the potential of IoT in providing the platform for the next generation classroom, helping schools to easily offer a blended learning environment for students inside and outside of the classroom.
With the exponential growth of network traffic slowing down data transmission, companies are looking for solutions. Recently, a solution has emerged that can help improve your data speed with data centers on the edge. These micro data center solutions can simplify the lives of many data center owners and operators because they are self-contained, secure computing environments, assembled in a factory and shipped in one enclosure which includes all the necessary power, cooling, security, and management tools. Their flexibility opens up a wave of new applications, made possible through reduced latency, increased security and cost efficiency.
Over the course of 2015 I was exposed to many companies going through Lean software delivery transformations – some very successful, but many less so. Having this visibility into the software lifecycle architecture of such a broad range of the world’s leading organizations was eye opening. Here’s what I found: most leading IT organizations are going through some kind of Lean transformation. The ones that succeed in accelerating software delivery will thrive. Those that fail will fall behind. And those that take no action, but continue down the complacent road of delivering software in the slow ways of yesteryear, will be displaced by their nimbler enterprise counterparts, or by startups. This will happen much more quickly than they realize. One of the most interesting things I learned was just how fast the return on investment from a successful transformation is, which spells market-changing dynamics for the Have and Have Nots of software delivery transformations in 2016 and 2017.
When we look back at the IT world in 2015, we think of high profile hacks and crashes that brought vastly expensive systems to their knees - Ashley Madison, United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and so on... With the constant disruption and complexity added to an already convoluted IT landscape, your success in 2016 will center around how well you decipher complexity. Will you fail under the added weight of new technology, or can you weave your way through to rise above it?
Who are you? How do you introduce yourself? Do you use a name, or do you greet a friend by the last four digits of his social security number? Assuming you don’t, why are we content to associate our identity with 10 random digits assigned by our phone company? Identity is an issue that affects everyone, but as individuals we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ben Klang, Founder & President of Mojo Lingo, discussed the impact of technology on identity. Should we federate, or not? How should identity be secured? Who owns the identity? How is identity created, addressed, and shared?
Beacon technology offers a new way for companies to deliver value to their customers by enabling micro-location based interaction at every physical touch point. This knowledge opens up a new playground for creating personalized services and inventing new experiences between a company and its customers, but how exactly can organizations monetize this? For the past two years we have heard about mobile notifications and messaging, but this has not taken off and could be considered spamming.
“If data analysis is Big Data’s "tip of the spear" when it comes to delivering data-dependent value to customers or clients, we also must address how that spear is shaped, sharpened, aimed, and thrown – and, of course, whether or not it hits its intended target.” In Meeting the Mission of Transportation Safety, Richard McKinney, U.S. Department of Transportation's CIO, describes four components for what I call an “enterprise data strategy.”
Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures, but monitoring and troubleshooting in a containerized environment can still be painful and impractical. Understanding even basic resource usage is difficult – let alone tracking network connections or malicious activity. In his session at DevOps Summit, Gianluca Borello, Sr. Software Engineer at Sysdig, covered the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including pros / cons and live demonstrations of each method. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source troubleshooting tool. Sysdig offers unprecedented container visibility without the need to break the “sanctity” of the container.
Cloud adoption across enterprises is accelerating and this momentum will continue to be a core focus for many organizations in 2016. Realizing we are still in the early stages of the cloud migration tsunami is both exciting and scary at the same time. When it comes to the cloud, unprecedented opportunities lie ahead that can be capitalized upon. There is also a serious threat of being left behind if not well prepared. Cloud enabled IT will percolate throughout all parts of the enterprise in some form or another. Every single aspect of IT – including server infrastructure, networks, storage, application development, packaged apps, and applications management – will all be touched and transformed by the cloud in short order.
Test automation is arguably the most important innovation to the process of QA testing in software development. The ability to automate regression testing and other repetitive test cases can significantly reduce the overall production time for even the most complex solutions. As software continues to be developed for new platforms – including mobile devices and the diverse array of endpoints that will be created during the rise of the Internet of Things - automation integration will have a huge hand to play delivering reliable, multifunctional products that end users want and need.
SYS-CON Events announced today that eCube Systems, the leading provider of modern development tools and best practices for Continuous Integration on OpenVMS, will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. eCube Systems offers a family of middleware products and development tools that maximize return on technology investment by leveraging existing technical equity to meet evolving business needs. Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies turn to eCube Systems to reduce risk, extend ROI and increase productivity as they consolidate existing capabilities and evolve legacy systems to meet modern requirements for productivity, flexibility and modern best practices.
Were you surprised with that new car in your driveway sporting a huge bow this holiday season? Yea, me neither. But we did get a new gaming console that doesn't require you to hold a controller in your hand. You know The One. It has a camera that picks up your body movements and turns that into action on your screen. It'll even scan your face and create a digitized, animated You right in front of your eyes. You can then choose your You to play games. Now I realize some of you have had these for several years but we've been stuck in 2010 at our house...at least with gaming consoles.
Most of today's technology was designed and developed for static, stationary environments. Even today, in a mobile world, mobile apps are most often developed based on assumed static endpoints. Why is that a problem? We are rarely static people. Let's consider two people in a vehicle. The driver, assuming they use their smartphone only when safely parked, searches for places, locations and directions based on a static starting point. However, if the person searching for places, locations and directions is a passenger in a moving car, a different set of information is appropriate. One based on movement, speed, direction, intersections, changing distances, etc. How should those variables change the way mobile apps are designed?
There's no doubt that there's a lot more "connected things" these days and that means a lot more data. Specifically, technology is moving out of the consumer's hands and into Healthcare, Oil & Gas, Transportation, Aviation and more. The spread of smart devices and sensors creates new forms of value and brings challenges for enterprises seeking to exploit this technology. However, while this boom in data has the potential to advance the industrial space in ways never before thought possible, few companies today have the right technologies in place or the right business models that can truly utilize the power of IoT.
If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you're not alone. Business success in today's digital age relies on application performance. Yet according to the Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015, nine out of 10 organizations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis. Executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. Consequently, this performance gap between the needs of the business and IT's ability to deliver leads directly to delays, missed deadlines, angry customers and damaged brands.
Gartner predicts that number of IoT devices in use worldwide will grow from an estimated 5 billion in 2015 to some 25 billion connected devices by 2020. The best business strategies will perfectly balance the ever-growing IoT market opportunities versus a rapidly evolving threat environment. To help IoT solution providers define their 2016 product roadmap, here are some of INSIDE Secure’s top IoT predictions for the year.
As every year begins, several experts and analyst firms like to make predictions. Let us try to make some observations in an area much talked about lately – Big Data. So here goes: Big Data quandary will continue as companies try to understand its value to business. Just dumping all kinds of data into a data lake (read Hadoop) is not going to solve anything. There has to be business value on what insights are needed. Therefore much like the Data Warehousing era brought additional tools in the ETL space, there is need for data curation and transformation for practical use besides the analytics piece.
A brilliant business often starts with an entrepreneur dreaming up a fantastic business idea. Most entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journeys are often strapped for cash, and according to a recent study, 95% of seed-stage founders thought it would either remain the same or get harder to raise money. Even access to Angel funds at the very start (idea stage) is generally uncommon. Startups want to sprout their ideas fast, and the last thing they want is to spend their time and energy is to find the ground, dig the soil, remove the weeds before sowing the seed, and water it till the idea breathes life.
Everyone is talking about the Cloud, whether on the news or in advertisements from top-tier tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. More important, the small and medium business (SMB) community has embraced the Cloud. Specifically, more than half of SMBs in the US currently use cloud storage, according to a new survey from Clutch. Cloud storage's increased popularity in the SMB market arises from the numerous benefits the service offers, such as the reduced cost of data storage, backup and recovery, improved workforce productivity from file sharing and collaboration, and additional disaster protection. These factors make cloud storage appealing to SMBs and will increase the rate of cloud storage service adoption in 2016.