Advanced software asset management methods can efficiently enforce compliance, reduce audit risk, cut costs, and enhance end-user productivity -- even as the complexity of IT itself increases. As IT systems, resources, assets, and information are more scattered across more enterprise locations and devices -- as well as across various cloud service environments -- how can IT leaders hope to know where their "stuff" is, who’s using it, how to secure it, and then accurately pay for it? Better than ever, it turns out. Advanced software asset management (SAM) methods can efficiently enforce compliance, reduce audit risk, cut costs, and enhance end-user productivity -- even as the complexity of IT itself increases.
Is your company struggling with the idea of using “cloud hosting” in order to save money? Truth be known, using cost savings as the primary reason for moving to cloud will almost guarantee failure. Some reasons that typically lead to cloud computing costing more include: Building and migrating to a private cloud, which will almost always cost more than staying in a traditional data center; Migrating legacy applications that weren’t designed to operate in a virtualized environment or are tied to very specific environments run on older operating systems or require out-of-date drivers;
This is the first DevOps book that shows a realistic and achievable view of the full implementation of DevOps. Most of the books and other literature I have read on DevOps are all about the culture, the attitudes, how it relates to Agile and Lean practices, and a high level view of microservices. This book includes all that, but they are not its main focus, and it goes several steps further with respect to the architecture and infrastructure needed for the implementation.
Full disclosure: I’m relatively new to the DevOps movement. I’ve been in a customer service, sales, or project management role for most of career so far. So some of you might stop reading at this point because I don’t have 10 years of experience running a DevOps team (another thing I learned last week – no one does!). With that said, I think some of the core principles I learned at DevOpsDays Chicago can be applied to whatever role you’re in.
If you’re part of a substantial development organization standardized on Microsoft development tools, chances are you’ll need to integrate Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio with third-party tools. The DevOps movement further highlights the need to connect a diverse set of people, processes, and tools, including the business stakeholders and the operations space. When establishing a modern end-to-end development practice you’ll almost certainly need to hit the integration button. Here are a few insights to set you on the right path: The Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is highly extensible, with thousands of plugins for every imaginable purpose. Want to tweet right from your IDE? There’s a plugin for that. One of the more common IDE integrations brings work items into Visual Studio from a diverse range of third-party development management tools like JIRA, Rally, VersionOne, IBM RTC, HP Quality Center, etc. This allows developers to code in Visual Studio, enjoying its integrated UI experience with the ability to receive, view, and update work items that are actually managed in an external tool.
“The exciting part of IoT is that it is exploding during a time that enterprise customers are well versed in open source technologies,” explained Anders Brown, Managing Director of Luxoft IoT Practice, in this exclusive Q&A with @ThingsExpo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff. Anders Brown: How important are monitoring, analytics, and handling Big Data to your customers?
Today, there is countless data collected and analyzed by companies. Just a few years ago, that data was useless, now data is collected and used to provide answers and solve problems. As big data use cases continue to evolve, there will be an increasing number of business missions that will be served by new approaches to data. With the adoption of an enterprise data hub, developers are finding new agility to create services and applications, as well as decision-making that leads to market dominating strategies. According to Cognitio's co-founder and partner Bob Gourley, this adoption will lead to two types of companies: those who will use big data to dominate in the market, and those who will ultimately be dominated by others.
Transitioning from the freedom of summer to the structure of back to work and school can be tough for all of us. Yet, September is a time of renewal, a time to refocus on our goals and remember that, sometimes, making big changes begins with small ones. The key is not to overwhelm ourselves, but to keep moving forward, often with small steps at a time. We know that the big work of migrating hundreds of thousands of machines running Windows Server 2003 -- including 175 million websites or one fifth of the internet, according to recent numbers provided by Internet services firm Netcraft -- still lies ahead.
“It's important to have control over each module and each service in order to distribute the load and make the whole system flexible. We need to work with every component of the infrastructure and adjust it – and IaaS with its ready solutions helps us and saves both our and our customers' time,” explained MobiDev CEO Oleg Lola and CCO Oleksii Ostroverkhyi, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff.
One hundred percent of mobile experts in our recent survey of 108 mobile experts purchase products online. Ninety percent have purchased products and services using mobile devices, but only 13% use mobile devices exclusively for purchasing products. Forty-five percent typically use only desktops/laptops, and 40% use both equally. These are some of the findings from the survey we conducted in May of 2015. How often do mobile experts purchase products and services using their mobile devices? Only 1% purchase products using mobile devices daily, 30% weekly, 43% monthly and 20% once every three months.
WebRTC services have already permeated corporate communications in the form of videoconferencing solutions. However, WebRTC has the potential of going beyond and catalyzing a new class of services providing more than calls with capabilities such as mass-scale real-time media broadcasting, enriched and augmented video, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Luis Lopez, CEO of Kurento, will introduce the technologies required for implementing these ideas and some early experiments performed in the Kurento open source software community in areas such as entertainment, video surveillance, interactive media broadcasting, gaming or advertising. He will conclude with a discussion of their potential business applications beyond plain call models.
Even though you are running an agile development process, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your performance testing is being conducted in a truly agile way. Saving performance testing for a “final sprint” before release still treats it like a waterfall development step, with all the cost and risk that comes with that. In this post, we will show you how to make load testing happen early and often by putting SLAs on the agile task board.
Maybe EA is essentially governance. If someone from a line of business wants something from IT, they have to pass the request by the EA gatekeepers first. After all, nobody wants duplication or spaghetti integration, right? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. So nothing gets done until EA gives it the stamp of approval. If that’s the definition of EA, then the first thing we should do is burn that sucker to the ground. There’s no way any organization will ever be agile if there’s a whole department in charge of roadblocks. If Agile is up to the task, then more power to it.
In the Information Technology (IT) world, the word “enterprise” is bandied about quite often. First, I really have no idea how to bandy about. If it involves incense and oils, I may have an idea, but let’s talk about enterprises instead. If you do some serious digging, you’ll find out an enterprise is a federation, in other words, a collection of related business units with a common goal of profitability. It is an aggregate, dynamic yet unified entity that provides a product or service to benefit customers in return for revenue and profit. You’ll probably hear “enterprise” loosely and actually incorrectly used interchangeably with “company” or “business”.
Amazon and Google have built software-defined data centers (SDDCs) that deliver massively scalable services with great efficiency. Yet, building SDDCs has proven to be a near impossibility for ‘normal’ companies without hyper-scale resources. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, David Cauthron, founder and chief executive officer of Nimboxx, will discuss the evolution of virtualization (hardware, application, memory, storage) and how commodity / open source hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions are changing the virtualization and cloud computing landscape to give more organizations access to web-scale performance at significantly reduced cost savings.
The web app is agile. The REST API is agile. The testing and planning are agile. But alas, data infrastructures certainly are not. Once an application matures, changing the shape or indexing scheme of data often forces at best a top down planning exercise and at worst includes schema changes that force downtime. The time has come for a new approach that fundamentally advances the agility of distributed data infrastructures. Come learn about a new solution to the problems faced by software organizations as their products become successful and the data grows beyond the initial scope of the database, whether it starts out as relational SQL, NoSQL, or somewhere in between.
When it comes to how trends like Big Data, mobility, cloud computing and social networking have impacted organizations, it’s clear that it has led to a large shift that has paved the way for a new market of startups who boldly embrace these trends and other organizations who are still struggling to keep up. But these trends have only started to pave the way for what we might see in the next 10 years, and the future is exciting. We’ve seen the impact the four tech mega trends; Big Data, Always-Connected Mobile Devices, Social Networking and Cloud Computing, have on the way organizations operate. These trends mean they now need to be able to not just spot new opportunities, but also be able to innovate in an agile way, demonstrate transparency and trust, and deliver a unique and personalized user experience 24/7 in real time. These changes have had a significant impact in how the global economy interacts between customers and organizations across all platforms both physical and digital.
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, will discuss 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.
Akana has announced the availability of the new Akana Healthcare Solution. The API-driven solution helps healthcare organizations accelerate their transition to being secure, digitally interoperable businesses. It leverages the Health Level Seven International Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR) standard to enable broader business use of medical data. Akana developed the Healthcare Solution in response to healthcare businesses that want to increase electronic, multi-device access to health records while reducing operating costs and complying with government regulations.
This Enterprise Strategy Group lab validation report of the NEC Express5800/R320 server with Intel® Xeon® processor presents the benefits of 99.999% uptime NEC fault-tolerant servers that lower overall virtualized server total cost of ownership. This report also includes survey data on the significant costs associated with system outages impacting enterprise and web applications. Click Here to Download Report Now!
Microservice architecture is fast becoming a go-to solution for enterprise applications, but it's not always easy to make the transition from an established, monolithic infrastructure. Lightweight and loosely coupled, building a set of microservices is arguably more difficult than building a monolithic application. However, once established, microservices offer a series of advantages over traditional architectures as deployment times become shorter and iterating becomes easier.
The Internet of Things is in the early stages of mainstream deployment but it promises to unlock value and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize, and monetize their assets. IoT is a complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, analytics and devices that need to be able to communicate geographically and across all functions. Once the data is collected from numerous endpoints, the challenge then becomes converting it into actionable insight.
eCube Systems has released NXTmonitor, a full featured application orchestration solution. NXTmonitor, which inherited the code base of NXTminder, has been extended to support multi-discipline processes and will act as a DevOps utility in a heterogeneous enterprise environment. Previously, NXTminder was packaged with NXTera middleware to configure and manage Entera and NXTera RPC servers. “Since we are widening the focus of this solution to DevOps, we felt the need to change the name to NXTmonitor to accurately reflect the operations monitoring features it provides,” says Kevin Barnes, President of eCube Systems.
Tune into: a cloud mindset One of the tenets of the cloud religion is that it should be possible – through the use of intelligent software – to build reliable systems on top of unreliable hardware. Just like you can build reliable and affordable storage systems using RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks). One of…Read more Tune into the Cloud – Losing My Religion
Contrary to mainstream media attention, the multiple possibilities of how consumer IoT will transform our everyday lives aren’t the only angle of this headline-gaining trend. There’s a huge opportunity for “industrial IoT” and “Smart Cities” to impact the world in the same capacity – especially during critical situations. For example, a community water dam that needs to release water can leverage embedded critical communications logic to alert the appropriate individuals, on the right device, as soon as they are needed to take action.