We explore how retailer Columbia Sportswear has made great strides in improving their business results through modernized IT, and where they expect to go next with their software-defined strategy. To learn more about the new wave of IT, we sat down with Suzan Pickett, Manager of Global Infrastructure Services at Columbia Sportswear in Portland, Oregon; Tim Melvin, Director of Global Technology Infrastructure at Columbia, and Carlos Tronco, Lead Systems Engineer at Columbia Sportswear. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
The cloud has transformed how we think about software quality. Instead of preventing failures, we must focus on automatic recovery from failure. In other words, resilience trumps traditional quality measures. Continuous delivery models further squeeze traditional notions of quality. Remember the venerable project management Iron Triangle? Among time, scope, and cost, you can only fix two or quality will suffer. Only in today's DevOps world, continuous testing, integration, and deployment upend the time metric, the DevOps cadence reinvents project scope, and cost metrics expand past software development to the total cost of ownership of the end-to-end digital initiative.
NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable company, has opened a new enterprise-class data center located in Santa Clara, California. The new data center will enable NaviSite to meet growing demands for its enterprise-class Cloud and Managed Services from existing and new customers. This facility, which is owned by data center solution provider Digital Realty, will join NaviSite’s fabric of nine existing data centers across the U.S. and U.K., all of which are designed to provide a resilient, secure, high-performance environment for business applications and mission critical data.
For capabilities that are not a core competency of an enterprise, today’s IT teams are hard pressed to justify why the needs of the business could not be met with a leading SaaS solution. Here’s the truth. Check out my latest whitepaper that I coauthored for Bulger Partners.
SYS-CON Media announced today that XebiaLabs launched a popular blog feed on DevOps Journal with close to 2,000 story reads in less than a day. DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing. DevOps Journal brings valuable information to DevOps professionals who are transforming the way enterprise IT is done.
It’s inevitable that web application problems are going to happen. Here at Neotys, our business is based on helping you prevent problems through website monitoring and testing. But problems can come from anywhere, and sometimes you just need to know where to look. So we decided to put together a short guide on some of the most common performance issues you’ll encounter. Now, it's important to remember that the best way to address performance problems is to find and eliminate them before they affect users in the first place. One of the best tools you can have in your pocket is a good maintenance program. Develop a strategy for downtime and create redundancy and scaling plans. Think about what kind of user load you'll need to handle over the next month, as well as the next year. And of course, test load regularly and monitor production performance continually.
Big Data is amazing, it's life changing and yes it is changing how we see our world. Big Data, however, can sometimes be too big. Organizations that are not amassing massive amounts of information and feeding into their decision buckets, smaller data that feeds in from customer buying patterns, buying decisions and buying influences can be more useful when used in the right way. In their session at Big Data Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will provide an insider view of the data derived from different industries and how data can be used to create a massive shift in changing your business direction and make more informed, engaged and credible decisions that drive your bottom line.
IaaS will drive further consolidation among data center outsourcers and hosting providers. Why? Because the flexibility and cost advantage of IaaS cloud providers requires data center outsourcers and hosting providers to either adopt IaaS or move into niches. With standards driving down IaaS licenses and implementation costs, data center outsourcers and hosting providers could move into IaaS either on their own (which requires sufficient scale) or through partnerships. It's easy to imagine a net of partnering providers offering IaaS under a virtual umbrella as a standardized offering to customers.
It is no surprise to anyone that service providers need to find new sources of revenue and increase profitability. The digital, cloud and as-a-service revolution provides a silver lining. As IT organizations feel the tension that comes from a combination of aging legacy B2B infrastructure, changing business mandates and rapidly evolving e-commerce requirements, they are increasingly looking at digital services and outsourcing to trusted providers. They want a trusted partner to deliver connected digital services; including mobile, cloud and M2M/IoT. The pressure is on for businesses to think about an end-to-end ‘order to cash’ process that spans multiple applications and systems, engages external business partners as well as taps into data and services that are increasingly located in the cloud. In other words – a giant mash-up of sorts. IT is not just about implementing an internal process as much as it is about structuring one shared multi-enterprise process(es).
It’s no secret that telecommuting is a highly disputed topic. For the general employee, the jury is still out on the pros and cons of telecommuting. For organizations like Yahoo!, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and U.S. Postal Service, telecommuting is not an option due to the need to foster collaboration, alleged employee abuse of telework benefits and mounting security concerns, respectively. Among the startup scene and various other organizations, though, telecommuting is seen as a way to provide flexibility and improve work/life balance.
There has been a lot of discussion recently in the DevOps space over whether there is a unique form of DevOps for large enterprises or is it just vendors looking to sell services and tools. In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Riley, a technologist, discussed whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or not. What makes DevOps adoption in the enterprise unique or what doesn’t? Unique or not, what does this mean for adopting DevOps in enterprise size organizations? He also explored different vendor approaches and success/failure examples with the idea of preparing you to help instill DevOps in your business
SYS-CON Events announced today that IDenticard 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. IDenticard™ is the security division of Brady Corp (NYSE: BRC), a $1.5 billion manufacturer of identification products. We have small-company values with the strength and stability of a major corporation. IDenticard offers local sales, support and service to our customers across the United States and Canada. Our partner network encompasses some 300 of the world's leading systems integrators and security systems installation specialists.
I keep coming across amazing use cases for IoT that radically change, enhance, or transforms industries. This week’s use case focuses on renewable energies like wind and solar power. I had the privilege of talking to Guido Jouret, president of the Digital Innovation Center at Envision Energy. Envision Energy is the maker of the Smart Wind Farm™ System which collects data from various sensors to aid in preventative maintenance of wind turbines and solar panels, optimizes the efficiency of energy production, and accurately and timely forecasts energy output.
The benefits of cloud billing can be irresistible. Always-on availability, flexibility, elastic scalability, low cost, global reach. But with high-profile security breaches from the likes of Target, Sony and health insurer Anthem, it’s understandable that thinking about turning your billing system over to the cloud could give you the willies. How can you capitalize on the cloud’s tantalizing advantages while minimizing risk? Here are three things to look for in a cloud billing system you can trust.
VictorOps is making on-call suck less with the only collaborative alert management platform on the market. With easy on-call scheduling management, a real-time incident timeline that gives you contextual relevance around your alerts and powerful reporting features that make post-mortems more effective, VictorOps helps your IT/DevOps team solve problems faster.
Skeuomorphism usually means retaining existing design cues in something new that doesn’t actually need them. However, the concept of skeuomorphism can be thought of as relating more broadly to applying existing patterns to new technologies that, in fact, cry out for new approaches. In his session at DevOps Summit, Gordon Haff, Senior Cloud Strategy Marketing and Evangelism Manager at Red Hat, will discuss why containers should be paired with new architectural practices such as microservices rather than mimicking legacy server virtualization workflows and architectures.
Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams. In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, will discuss how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved. Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innovation with a DevSecOps mindset.
Good food is not the most important attribute for a restaurant. Cleanliness is. It doesn’t matter how great your dishes are – if patrons catch even a glimpse of a roach, they won’t stick around to sample your cooking. The same principle applies to your company’s digital experience. You may have great products at a great price. But if customers have a bad experience with your digital channels, they won’t buy from you. In fact, studies show that 73-82% of customers abandon intended purchases because of a poor online experience.
Prior to implementing the Transmogrifier, I would get woken up for an alert and have no idea what it was, or what was needed to solve the problem. I would have to open 3 or 4 different tabs to try and wrap my head around the situation. Now with the Transmogrifier’s annotations, I save a good 5-10 minutes of trying to search for all the necessary documentation. There is no longer stress associated with having to obtain information from disparate places, and this has been extremely beneficial for the team.
Not all network management solutions are alike, even though they may sound that way sometimes. A sure sign of a network management tool trying to pass itself off as an enterprise solution is when it implements distributed polling as a way to scale. These systems scale server capacity by adding distributed pollers, each sharing a portion of the overall CPU load. But any network monitoring architect can tell you that the bottleneck in infrastructure management is I/O to the database. Having multiple pollers simultaneously send data back to a single data store does not solve the issue but can exacerbate it.
JMS provides a standard messaging API for interoperability of applications on the Java platform. This enables your JVM-backed applications to connect to each other to send and receive messages. RabbitMQ is a messaging broker that serves as an intermediary for messaging between multiple platforms/languages. ruxit now supports Java messaging, including monitoring of JMS message handlers, EJB message-driven beans, and the RabbitMQ consumer-plugin interface. We’ll continue to extend messaging support over the coming weeks.
About 15 years ago I gave an application performance presentation to some storage guys. Since I was a database jock at the time and didn’t “speak” I/O very well, I had to try a different approach. Rather than speaking over their heads in my own language, or faking it using their language, I tried to pick something neither of us were experts in – microeconomics. What’s interesting is that that presentation became my modus operandi for tuning systems. As I went from customer to customer, each with a different application or architecture, I needed a normalized approach so I didn’t get lost in the technology.
Our guest on the podcast this week is Alan Sharp-Paul, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of ScriptRock.We discuss a blog post by Alan entitled “You’re Doing DevOps Wrong. Automation in the Enterprise” that introduces the common misconception that automation is the first step that needs to be taken in your DevOps initiative. Listen in to learn what you should be doing before you automate.
After performing this analysis at a number of Fortune 500 companies and by collaborating with my peers in this space, I have compiled a list of 11 bottlenecks that have the biggest impact on the flow of work.
The SaaS model has truly revolutionized the way software is being used. Convenient, hosted on the now cloud, without the need for IT or hardware and so many more advantages. So what is cloud-based billing? A recent piece by Gigaom helps explain why cloud billing is beneficial and how it helps vendors move all aspects of a paper-based system to the cloud. But isn’t that old technology? Isn’t that about generating a PDF file and sending it to your customers instead of a printed invoice? Perhaps not. Perhaps this is about a billing system that works for the SaaS software, charges customers online and they can pay online. Perfect! This is turning out to be good.