Midway through the decade, the experts from Veeva Systems – a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry – look at what’s on the horizon over the next five years. Their forecasts are informed by a vision for what’s next in technology and insight gleaned from Veeva’s 200+ life sciences customers worldwide. Overall, these predictions reflect how new innovations will enable faster time to market, evolving commercial models, and new ways to support physicians and patients.
As we continue to work with global companies focused on everything mobile, one thing is clear – the mobile space is changing rapidly and with that comes opportunity for security attacks and identity theft. We are committed to delivering the best-of-breed mobile identity and mobile location-based transaction authentication solutions for retail merchants, financial institutions, wireless carriers and device manufacturers. For 2015 we see the following trends emerge in the mobile payments arena.
BMC Software plans to acquire assets of CDB Software, Inc., a mainframe data management company that has developed utilities for managing IBM DB2 databases with virtually no outage. Focusing on the availability of mission-critical applications is strategic for BMC as it continues to help its customers transform IT into a competitive advantage for their business. CDB's technology complements BMC's existing mainframe data management portfolio, which includes software utilities for DB2 administration, maintenance, application tuning, and backup/recovery. The integrated BMC portfolio will give DB2 customers an advantage as they manage ever-larger DB2 objects and real-time transaction volumes in a digital 24x7 world.
MapR Technologies on Tuesday announced the availability of free Hadoop On-Demand Training for developers, analysts and administrators which represents a $50M in-kind contribution* to the broad Hadoop community. The Hadoop training program is a multi-course curriculum designed to expand worldwide adoption of Hadoop technology. The curriculum provides engaging and interactive video lessons, hands-on exercises, labs and quizzes, enabling professionals to acquire valuable Hadoop skills and knowledge on their own schedule.
The steadily increasing frequency of data breach occurrences in 2014 has been both astounding and worrisome. From Target and Neiman Marcus to Michaels, Chick-fil-A and Home Depot, fraudsters are leaving no stone unturned, and the millions of customers unlucky enough to use infected point of sale (POS) machines at these retailers now need to worry about whether their sensitive information has fallen into the wrong hands. While retail IT organizations are keenly aware of the problem, they are often not so clear on the solution. Granted, though fraud-prevention solutions such as chip-and-PIN can help reduce the possibility that a customer’s stolen information is useable to a hacker, this is not a failsafe approach and will not prevent an attack in the first place. The vast majority of brick-and-mortar retail attacks are the result of malware being installed on POS terminals, relaying customer data directly to hackers upon a scan. That said, the real problem lies in the endpoint (POS), and once a particularly malicious malware, such as Backoff, takes hold, it is able to proliferate across other POS endpoints on the same network, creating one giant collection facility for hackers that provides customer credit and debit information.
If you're part of the decision making process in how to get started with Big Data then you've probably already discovered that open source Apache Hadoop has a big lead. You also know that unless you've got a particularly deep NoSQL team or want to write your own proprietary code that the free open source version of Hadoop is not for the great majority of businesses. You want the benefits of open source but with some support and some capabilities that tie the open source components together in an enterprise quality database system. You want a Hadoop Distribution.
While news about the malicious hacking trade and the actions of elusive cyber-criminals continue to grab headlines, the third of our annual Insider Threat reports confirm that the risk posed by those legitimately ‘inside the fence’ continues to top business data security concerns. Of course, there can be no denying that the breadth and depth of private and public sector breaches in the past few years that have resulted from trusted insiders turning rogue or being compromised by perpetrators of APTs and the like indicates that there is a major disconnect when it comes to organisations’ handling of data security – and, crucially, how they manage their privileged users.
It's time to face reality: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus," and in today's increasingly connected world, understanding "inter-planetary" alignments and deviations is mission-critical for cloud. In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems, discussed cultural expectations of privacy based on new research across these elements
Gordon Haff wrote an insightful column today about “skeuomorphic virtualizaton,” in other words the notion of thinking of virtual servers as having the same look and feel of the physical machines lying underneath. The upshot is that virtualization ends up just being a form of partioning; users view virtualized instances as no different from a single physical server. Gordon urges the end of skeuomorphism's reign of terror (my words, not his) now that containers are (back) in the news. So don't simply stuff “a hodepodge,” as Gordon says, of operating systems versions along with your app and all that goes with it (web server, database, storage, comms) into a container as if it's just another virtualized machine. Instead, he writes that it's time to think of “containerized operating systems, container packaging systems, container orchestration like Kubernetes, DevOps practices, microservices architectures, “cattle” (shorter term) workloads, software-defined everything, and pervasive open source as part of a new platform for cloud apps.” Reboot Time Old habits die hard. The relentless drive for efficiency in business focuses itself evermore on IT operations, breeding an instinct to view the new tool as simply an improved hammer and to simply try to slam things through with it more quickly. An increasing focus on DevOps, as seen from the high management level, can certainly reinforce this view. But that would be wrong. Containers give everyone another shot at imagining their software as a number of services rather than a unified application. Further, as Gordon notes, they let you throw in an OS here, some orchestration there, a VPN there, and truly become efficient (and more future-proof) in the way you design and deploy what you're trying to do. The original SOA days seem far away to me, but the idea of provisioning services is still a radical one. Too often today, software-as-a-service in the cloud still means software-as-an-application from the sky. The inexorability of Moore's Law allows people to slam things through for short-term gain rather than long-term efficiency, and this will be particularly true as containers become prized for their relative abstemious use of resources. But an expeditious, rather than more profound, use of containers will just create tomorrow's hodgepodge. The potential of containers to reboot the way we think of services and how they should be delivered can logically lead to re-imagining how users should experience what the services offer – and how skeuomorphic those experiences should be, of course.
Some of the network gear vendors cast a wary look at network management vendors, particularly those who do continual, automatic discovery of the network inventory and connectivity. Why? We know what’s actually out there, and what’s actually being used. We had one customer in the insurance industry who was due to renew their maintenance agreement with a large, well-known network gear vendor. The typical scenario was to be handed a spreadsheet by the salesperson, listing the serial numbers of the network devices they had purchased, together with a summary of maintenance charges.
"Application monitoring and intelligence can smooth the path in a DevOps environment. In a DevOps environment you see constant change. If you are trying to monitor things in a constantly changing environment, you're going to spend a lot of your job fixing your monitoring," explained Todd Rader, Solutions Architect at AppDynamics, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect at GE, and Ibrahim Gokcen, who leads GE's advanced IoT analytics, focused on the Internet of Things / Industrial Internet and how to make it operational for business end-users. Learn about the challenges posed by machine and sensor data and how to marry it with enterprise data. They also discussed the tips and tricks to provide the Industrial Internet as an end-user consumable service using Big Data Analytics and Industrial Cloud.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. So you've started to build applications with AngularJS; or, maybe you've done unit testing before but haven't used it with AngularJS; or, maybe it's all new to you, but either way this article should help to orient you to the value of using Karma with Jasmine and offer some tips on displaying functionalities of Angular JS. Let's get started! My app is small it doesn't need any tests, right?
Dale Kim is the Director of Industry Solutions at MapR. His background includes a variety of technical and management roles at information technology companies. While his experience includes work with relational databases, much of his career pertains to non-relational data in the areas of search, content management, and NoSQL, and includes senior roles in technical marketing, sales engineering, and support engineering. Dale holds an MBA from Santa Clara University, and a BA in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently identified four keys areas in which to focus for the next 15 years: Health, Farming, Banking, and Education. Bill himself holds forth on a regular basis about the challenges facing many billions of people in the world, particularly in Africa, as well as the opportunities to save lives and change lives. He does not seem naïve about the enormity of the challenges, and does not offer technology as a simple panacea to what ails the world. He also seems committed to respecting national sovereignty in implementing programs, difficult as that may be sometimes. And he seems to understand very clearly that even the vast wealth of his and his wife's foundation and its allies cannot hope to achieve signficant results on its own. I would add Energy, Transportation, and Government to Bill's and Melinda's list–aware that the Foundation supports these areas and many others as well. In our efforts at the Tau Institute, we then focus on how the Internet of Things will play a role in these areas as well as societal improvement and transformation overall. We've also chosen a 25-year timeframe, an thus use the term IoT 2040 to describe our activities. Our program includes research, events, consulting, and technical education. We have four overriding goals: 1. To spur beneficial economic development in all corners of the world 2. To reduce poverty & disease 3. To curtail violence as a way of settling disputes 4. To produce political and societal leaders who will maintain progress We think a good way to measure progress is through the research we've been conducting for the past few years, which creates relative,"pound-for-pound" rankings that show how well nations are doing with respect to their available resources. Our rankings reflect a lot of time spent, by me and by our associates and advisors, living in the various corners of the world. We integrate several technology and social factors into our algorithms -- on the one hand including average bandwidth, access to broadband, number of dataservers, on the other hand including income disparity, perception of corruption, human development, and the local cost of living. The most dynamic countries should correlate well over time with those most quickly growing their economies in an equitable way.
"We are the top stocking distributor for HP renew products in North America. We can only sell to U.S. authorized partners and resellers for HP," explained Miguel Diazdelcastillo Jr., Sales Executive at Creative Business Solutions, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
This year I’m planning to run a one day workshop at a couple of software development conferences and privately for IT shops. The goal is to introduce JavaScript and related technologies to developers that are accustomed to developing in classical object-oriented languages like Java, C++ or C#. Below is the outline of this workshop.
Small data management solutions don’t work in our brave new Big Data world. Back in the small data days, we talked proudly about having gigabytes of structured data that had been carefully denormalized to reduce latency as much as possible. Today’s data is measured in petabytes, and it is dynamic, complex, and wildly varied in structure. Small data was a nicely planned garden, but Big Data is a jungle: rich with resources, abundant in growth, but also a bit overwhelming and easy to get lost in.
Building low-cost wearable devices can enhance the quality of our lives. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Sai Yamanoor, Embedded Software Engineer at Altschool, provided an example of putting together a small keychain within a $50 budget that educates the user about the air quality in their surroundings. He also provided examples such as building a wearable device that provides transit or recreational information. He then reviewed the resources available to build wearable devices at home including open source hardware, the raw materials required and the options available to power such wearable devices.
We certainly live in interesting technological times. And no more interesting than the current competing IoT standards for connectivity. Various standards bodies, approaches, and ecosystems are vying for mindshare and positioning for a competitive edge. It is clear that when the dust settles, we will have new protocols, evolved protocols, that will change the way we interact with devices and infrastructure. We will also have evolved web protocols, like HTTP/2, that will be changing the very core of our infrastructures. At the same time, we have old approaches made new again like micro-services and reactive programming. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Todd Montgomery, Chief Architect at KAAZING, discussed this changing landscape and explored the various tradeoffs designers face today.
“DevOps is really about the business. The business is under pressure today, competitively in the marketplace to respond to the expectations of the customer. The business is driving IT and the problem is that IT isn't responding fast enough," explained Mark Levy, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“The year of the cloud – we have no idea when it's really happening but we think it's happening now. For those technology providers like Zentera that are helping enterprises move to the cloud - it's been fun to watch," noted Mike Loftus, VP Product Management and Marketing at Zentera Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The consumption economy is here and so are cloud applications and solutions that offer more than subscription and flat fee models and at the same time are available on a pure consumption model, which not only reduces IT spend but also lowers infrastructure costs, and offers ease of use and availability. In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, discussed this shifting dynamic with an example of a top European Telco provider. Find out how they are leveraging the power of acloud-based consumption model services to offer more value to the mass market and enable a new revenue model that embraces the true meaning of the Third Industrial Revolution.
Enterprises are adopting mobile technologies at an unprecedented rate. As Business News Daily recently reported, 1.3 billion workers will go mobile by 2015, and with that massive number, the need for enterprise mobile apps can only skyrocket. With that increase, many mobile app developers will be called upon to create internal mobile enterprise apps. These apps have many requirements and considerations that differ from the typical app destined for the public app stores. In this article, we will take the top three challenges and share some tips on how to meet these challenges:
Today’s enterprise is being driven by disruptive competitive and human capital requirements to provide enterprise application access through not only desktops, but also mobile devices. To retrofit existing programs across all these devices using traditional programming methods is very costly and time consuming – often prohibitively so. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO, President, and Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., discussed how you can create applications that run on all mobile devices as well as laptops and desktops using a visual drag-and-drop application – and eForms-building techniques in 10% of the time it would take for traditional programming. Connect to all your existing in-house systems and databases as well as third-party applications like Salesforce, SAP, Office 365, etc., through easy-to-create and maintain process-centric enterprise workflow applications your team can create in days.