While not quite mainstream yet, WebRTC is starting to gain ground with Carriers, Enterprises and Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) alike. WebRTC makes it easy for developers to add audio and video communications into their applications by using Web browsers as their platform. But like any market, every customer engagement has unique requirements, as well as constraints. And of course, one size does not fit all. In her session at WebRTC Summit, Dr. Natasha Tamaskar, Vice President, Head of Cloud and Mobile Strategy at GENBAND, will explore what is needed to take a real time communications engagement experience from a simple communication, to a truly immersive multi-layer engagement experience. Furthermore, she will explore the role of a Communications Platform as a Service (PaaS) in delivering this experience.
JavaScript has emerged in the past couple years as the de facto expression of next generation web technologies, and a critical component of HTML5 technologies – along with CSS and JQuery. JavaScript is really ubiquitous – it’s literally showing up everywhere! There are many other reasons why JavaScript and JS-based tools like JSON and Node.js are becoming the wave of the future. JavaScript is the #1 most-used language on GitHub, and this trend is only going to increase. Gartner stated in its strategic trends forecast for 2014 that JavaScript improvements will continue to “push HTML5 and the browser as a mainstream enterprise application development environment.”
Manufacturing comprises 17 to 18% of the global economy, and is set to rack up about $13.5 trillion in revenues this year. China assumed leadership in the sector a few years ago and will account for about $2.5 trillion this year; manufacturing revenues in the US will approach $2 trillion. The developed world and China continue to dominate the sector. Things are less good among developing nations. As an example, the Philippines (where I have family and an office) produces about 1% of US revenue in manufacturing, with about 33% of the US population. There are slightly more than 1 million manufacturing jobs in the Philippines, compared to perhaps 14 million in the US. So the US, which has notoriously seen its manufacturing sector gutted since the year 2000, has roughly 14 times the number of manufacturing jobs with only three times the population of the Philippines. This provides a good illustration of the yawning economic gap that remains between a highly developed nation and a classic developing nation. Will It Be Fashionable Again? It's been fashionable for a couple of decades to dismiss manufacturing, instead repeating the common wisdom that we've moved into a services-oriented economy. Everybody wants to build the Knowledge Society today. I agree with the truism that old-style 1950s labor-intensive manufacturing will neither be returning to the US nor will elevate others into the modern age. Even China is now experiencing dramatically lower economic growth, and is finally starting to grapple with the enormous pollution problems the last two decades of growth have created. Meanwhile, But, we still have to make stuff. Even as automated processes, robots, and emerging IoT feedback loops bring about productivity increases, there remains a need by so many of us pesky humans to have a job that can feed us and our families. Not everyone will be a Java programmer or PHP jockey. Not everyone will complete four years of college. Meanwhile, recent studies by Circle Research and Vodafone indicate that 20% of manufacturing companies have taken up M2M. On a related note, Gartner has estimated there are already about 370 “things” in use in the global automotive business alone, with an anticipated rise to 3.5 billion by the year 2020. Reality Bites But the actual, physical challenge in developing a global manufacturing sector for the 21st century is amazingly daunting, in my view. When I'm in Silicon Valley, safely ensconced in my office or at an event, I hear and see the fantastical visions being created there for the future. But when I'm driving around the now-barren streets of west Rockford, IL (a former small manufacturing hub located close to one of my US offices) or walking the streets of Metro Manila (where my research institute is headquartered), I see the challenge up close. There is nothing virtual or abstracted about it. There are constitutional and structural barriers impeding the growth of a healthy economy in the Philippines, and a legacy of obtuse thinking in much of the US Midwest. Optimism and great vision alone cannot improve things, and Silicon Valley's optimism should be taken in certain-sized doses only. It is especially difficult to swallow when accompanied by the self-centered Randianism or invasive Fabianism that are so popular in the region. As I ride a jeepney along MacArthur Blvd. through the barrios of slightly industrialized Pampanga Province, Philippines, where factory workers in my family make about $70 per month, I wonder how M2M and the IoT can elevate the masses here. I have the same thoughts as I drive through the burned-out, greened-in former middle-class neighborhoods of west Rockford. Optimism may be the least bad choice available.
As Marc Andreessen says software is eating the world. Everything is rapidly moving toward being software-defined – from our phones and cars through our washing machines to the datacenter. However, there are larger challenges when implementing software defined on a larger scale - when building software defined infrastructure. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Boyan Ivanov, CEO of StorPool, will provide some practical insights on what, how and why when implementing "software-defined" in the datacenter.
Chef and Canonical announced a partnership to integrate and distribute Chef with Ubuntu. Canonical is integrating the Chef automation platform with Canonical's Machine-As-A-Service (MAAS), enabling users to automate the provisioning, configuration and deployment of bare metal compute resources in the data center. Canonical is packaging Chef 12 server in upcoming distributions of its Ubuntu open source operating system and will provide commercial support for Chef within its user base.
After what feel like an interminable cycle of media frenzy followed by hype and hysteria cycles, the practical elements of real world cloud implementations are starting to become better documented. But what is really different in the cloud? How do software applications behave, live, interact and interconnect inside the cloud? Where do cloud architectures differ so markedly from their predecessors that we need to learn a new set of mechanics – and, when do we start to refer to software programmers themselves as “cloud programmers” as a new breed?
SYS-CON Events announced today the IoT Bootcamp – Jumpstart Your IoT Strategy, being held June 9–10, 2015, in conjunction with 16th Cloud Expo and Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York City. This is your chance to jumpstart your IoT strategy. Combined with real-world scenarios and use cases, the IoT Bootcamp is not just based on presentations but includes hands-on demos and walkthroughs. We will introduce you to a variety of Do-It-Yourself IoT platforms including Arduino, Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Spark and Intel Edison. You will also get an overview of cloud technologies such as Amazon Kinesis, Azure Event Hubs, Google Cloud Pub/Sub that play an important role in IoT architecture. The immersive two-day workshop will provide you with everything you wanted to know about Internet of Things.
It's 2:15pm on a Friday, and I'm sitting in the keynote hall at PyCon 2013 fidgeting through a succession of lightning talks that have very little relevance to my life. Topics like "Python code coverage techniques" (ho-hum) and "Controlling Christmas lights with Python” (yawn - I wonder if there's anything new on Hacker News)...when Solomon Hykes takes the stage, unveils Docker, and the world shifts. If you haven't seen it yet, you should watch the video of Solomon's Pycon The Future of Linux Containers talk that spurred a revolution. It's short, but definitely worth the five minutes. Right at the five minute mark, you can hear the bell ring and then see the host force Solomon to end his talk - just when he had started talking about some really cool stuff. I heard several people, myself included, gasp "No!!!" right when Solomon got the hook. And no wonder, those five minutes were impressive. I swear I saw a bunch of attendees from Google racing out of the room after it was over, in search of pay phones, so they could alert the mothership.
WHOA.com has announced the newest addition to its data center footprint with the expansion into Equinix's newest state-of-the-art facility: DC-11 Washington, DC IBX+. Located in Ashburn, VA, this data center expands Whoa.com's presence to meet rapidly expanding customer demand for secure cloud solutions. Equinix, Inc. operates International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers in 32 markets across 15 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific. Equinix is committed to operating facilities that meet the rigorous standards and compliance needs of global businesses. Equinix IBX data centers deliver even greater levels of standards compliance and physical security to safeguard mission-critical data. Equinix, Inc. operates International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers in 32 markets across 15 countries in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific. Equinix is committed to operating facilities that meet the rigorous standards and compliance needs of global businesses. Equinix IBX data centers deliver even greater levels of standards compliance and physical security to safeguard mission-critical data.
After making a doctor’s appointment via your mobile device, you receive a calendar invite. The day of your appointment, you get a reminder with the doctor’s location and contact information. As you enter the doctor’s exam room, the medical team is equipped with the latest tablet containing your medical history – he or she makes real time updates to your medical file. At the end of your visit, you receive an electronic prescription to your preferred pharmacy and can schedule your next appointment.
It seems today we are in a constant state of business and technology disruption. The convergence of the social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) disruptions have both forced and enabled organizations to move at breakneck speeds addressing the needs and expectations of the lines of business/end users. This speed requires the development teams to be agile. They must be able to respond quickly to changing needs and demands of the organization. The quality assurance (QA) team still needs to ensure a quality product is being sent into production. Finally, the operations team needs to be able to adequately deploy and support these systems. Communication, collaboration, and streamlining of processes are key elements to the success of this rapidly changing environment. Out of that challenge was born the concept and term DevOps. Let’s talk about how DevOps may be able to leverage one of those disrupting technologies, the cloud, to help them operate and deliver on the promise of DevOps.
SYS-CON Events announced today that FierceDevOps will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. FierceDevOps keeps software developers and IT operations personnel updated on the latest news and trends around the rapidly evolving role of the traditional IT worker.
Business as usual for IT is evolving into a “Make or Buy” decision on a service-by-service conversation with input from the LOBs. How does your organization move forward with cloud? In his general session at 16th Cloud Expo, Paul Maravei, Regional Sales Manager, Hybrid Cloud and Managed Services at Cisco, discusses how Cisco and its partners offer a market-leading portfolio and ecosystem of cloud infrastructure and application services that allow you to uniquely and securely combine cloud business applications and services across multiple cloud delivery models.
WSM International has launched a DevOps services division that offers assessment, consulting and implementation to large enterprises and organizations with complex infrastructures. The concept of DevOps is to blend information technology (IT) software development with operations to optimize the computing infrastructure according to the specific needs of the organization. According to a recent press release from Gartner, "By 2016, DevOps will evolve from a niche strategy employed by large cloud providers to a mainstream strategy employed by 25 percent of Global 2000 organizations."
SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Solgenia is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between Personal and Professional Social, Mobile and Cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dramatically improve productivity, reduce collaboration costs, and increase the overall enterprise value by bringing collaboration and infrastructure solutions to the Cloud. Based on innovative patented technologies that support Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud models, all our products offer ease of use, platform neutrality and mobile ubiquity. Solgenia products and solutions are used by 3500 plus companies worldwide.
While recently attending a Dynatrace User Group in Hartford, I had the opportunity to sit in on a great presentation from a leading US insurance company as they explained their three-year APM journey. I see a lot of these success stories, but this one was especially impressive. To see how they have refined their internal processes, successes and performance best practices to ensure delivery of high quality, high performing and highly scalable applications over these years. The performance engineering group within the large US insurance company was the one that started adopting application performance management (APM) in the company. Overtime they built an APM maturity model that helped them achieve successful adoption of APM across all application owners.
Cloud computing is changing the way we look at IT costs, according to industry experts on a recent Cloud Luminary Fireside Chat panel discussion. Enterprise IT, traditionally viewed as a cost center, now plays a central role in the delivery of software-driven goods and services. Therefore, companies need to understand their cloud utilization and resulting costs in order to ensure profitability on their business offerings. Led by Bernard Golden, this fireside chat offers valuable insights on how organizations can get a better handle on their use of cloud computing.
One of the most difficult things to do today is to identify a legitimate user. Part of the problem is that the definition of a legitimate users depends greatly on the application. Your public facing website, for example, may loosely define legitimate as "can open a TCP connection and send HTTP request" while a business facing ERP or CRM system requires valid credentials and group membership as well as device or even network restrictions.
Hosted PaaS providers have given independent developers and startups huge advantages in efficiency and reduced time-to-market over their more process-bound counterparts in enterprises. Software frameworks are now available that allow enterprise IT departments to provide these same advantages for developers in their own organization. In his workshop session at DevOps Summit, Troy Topnik, ActiveState’s Technical Product Manager, will show how on-prem or cloud-hosted Private PaaS can enable organizations to use this technology on their own infrastructure, and introduce efficient development workflows for deploying applications.
Wearable technology was dominant at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) , and MWC was no exception to this trend. New versions of favorites, such as the Samsung Gear (three new products were released: the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo and the Gear Fit), shared the limelight with new wearables like Pebble Time Steel (the new premium version of the company’s previously released smartwatch) and the LG Watch Urbane. The most dramatic difference at MWC was an emphasis on presenting wearables as fashion accessories and moving away from the original clunky technology associated with the industry. Along with more pleasing aesthetics, software updates and more capabilities also target early adopters.
Modern Systems announced completion of a successful project with its new Rapid Program Modernization (eavRPMa"c) software. The eavRPMa"c technology architecturally transforms legacy applications, enabling faster feature development and reducing time-to-market for critical software updates. Working with Modern Systems, the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) leveraged eavRPMa"c to transform its Student Information System from Software AG's Natural syntax to a modern application leveraging C# and SQL Server. The newly modernized system enabled UCSB to leverage agile development methods and more extensive application integration.
In comparison to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has experienced a slower rate of adoption. However, PaaS is coming into its own as evidenced by increased usage and top technology companies such as HP and IBM supporting open source projects like Cloud Foundry by bringing their own PaaS to market. PaaS is important because apps are an important part of our lives. With this relatively new dependency on web and mobile applications, organizations need to find a way to automate their app deployment and management process just to stay in the game. If you are not looking for a way to speed up your pipeline, you can bet that your competition is. And PaaS is a critical component to achieving this.
Vicom Computer Services, Inc. was awarded an 11 year contract with the MTA. The MTA launched a request for proposal in September 2013 for a project encompassing and creating a fully redundant core data network across the three core data centers and upgrade user access to applications and facilities throughout NYC Transit. Vicom will design, install and maintain data communications hardware, software and a comprehensive enterprise management system for a network infrastructure upgrade at three NYC Transit core data center locations, six concentrator locations, 58 major facilities and approximately 250 smaller remote network locations throughout NYC Transit.
WebRTC? Si vous n’en avez pas encore entendu parlé, il est important que vous découvriez une technologie qui va profondément changer les modes de communication de tous vos collaborateurs. Je vais m’intéresser en priorité aux potentiels à moyen terme de cette technologie ; il existe encore des limites techniques importantes, mais elles vont sauter dans les mois qui viennent. Les entreprises peuvent et doivent, aujourd’hui, prendre en compte WebRTC dans leurs choix de solutions de communications synchrones.
I’ve been travelling recently. To places and fields that have limited to no mobile connectivity and this can be a challenge when a challenge arises. Immediately following Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, my family embarked on a multi-week European vacation. After spending a couple more days in Spain, we jumped on the rail to Paris for a couple days and then on to Rome for 10 days. The Eiffel Tower along with ‘I see London, I see France, I see Daddy’s….’ request was our daughter’s and Italy was something we’ve wanted to do for a while. During the train ride – which was fantastic – we saw vineyards, castles, the Alps, old bunkers and tons of scenery you never get on an airplane. It’s almost like eavesdropping on these remote lives as you pass by at 187 mph while they hang their clothes to dry or tend to their fields. Yes, mobile connectivity was very spotty but it was not a big deal since we were enjoying the views and had no reason to ‘connect.’ I even turned the phone off at various times just for the peace.