"Blue Box has been around for 10-11 years, and last year we launched Blue Box Cloud. We like the term 'Private Cloud as a Service' because we think that embodies what we are launching as a product - it's a managed hosted private cloud," explained Giles Frith, Vice President of Customer Operations at Blue Box, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"SOASTA built the concept of cloud testing in 2008. It's grown from rather meager beginnings to where now we are provisioning hundreds of thousands of servers on a daily basis on behalf of customers around the world to test their applications," explained Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Our last post defined customer lifetime value (CLV) as the metric critical in measuring the success or failure of a recurring revenue program. In order for your company to routinely return significant revenue, maximizing CLV needs to be at the top of your priority list. A CLV-supported strategy boosts many aspects of your business, from sales to customer service. When it comes to increasing customer retention and customer satisfaction, the two keys to driving long-term results, this same strategy works to increase both at every available opportunity.
“The age of the Internet of Things is upon us,” stated Thomas Svensson, senior vice-president and general manager EMEA, ThingWorx, “and working with forward-thinking companies, such as Elisa, enables us to deploy our leading technology so that customers can profit from complete, end-to-end solutions.” ThingWorx, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced on Monday that Elisa, Finnish provider of mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions, will deploy ThingWorx® platform technology to enable a new Elisa IoT service in Finland and Estonia.
Disruptive macro trends in technology are impacting and dramatically changing the "art of the possible" relative to supply chain management practices through the innovative use of IoT, cloud, machine learning and Big Data to enable connected ecosystems of engagement. Enterprise informatics can now move beyond point solutions that merely monitor the past and implement integrated enterprise fabrics that enable end-to-end supply chain visibility to improve customer service delivery and optimize supplier management. Learn about enterprise architecture strategies for designing connected systems that integrate physical and digital supply chains with your enterprise systems, leveraging IoT devices, hybrid cloud and network service providers to enable innovative business models while mitigating risk, managing security and increasing capacity to meet customer changing SLA requirements.
The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security. In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, examined the problems and presented some solutions for moving security into the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.
“We are strong believers in the DevOps movement and our staff has been doing DevOps for large enterprise environments for a number of years. The solution that we build is intended to allow DevOps teams to do security at the speed of DevOps," explained Justin Lundy, Founder & CTO of Evident.io, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
When properly implemented and managed, secure enterprise file sync-and-share (EFSS) applications can improve project management and empower your workforce. Unfortunately, making the business case for secure EFSS isn’t always easy – especially when users and management aren’t aware of the risks existing applications pose. Don’t get discouraged, though! The arguments in favor of change are strong. If you’re pushing your organization to eliminate public cloud use from the workplace, the following blueprint can help you set up a convincing business case.
Over the last few years the healthcare ecosystem has revolved around innovations in Electronic Health Record (HER) based systems. This evolution has helped us achieve much desired interoperability. Now the focus is shifting to other equally important aspects - scalability and performance. While applying cloud computing environments to the EHR systems, a special consideration needs to be given to the cloud enablement of Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), i.e., the largest single medical system in the United States. VistA is a collection of over 168 application packages/modules and is based on the client-server communication model operating on RPC broker. Moving VistA to a cloud platform is still in its infancy.
There's something extraordinary going on in Vietnam, and I'm not sure everyone sees it. The country blazes from the dry pages of our research printouts, its incandescence obscuring its neighbors and making our office fire alarms nervous. Among the 105 nations we now survey, Vietnam will finish in or near the Top 20 in the world in our overall ranking, when we announce our latest results next month. It will be near the top in Asia. Our overall ranking integrates several socio-economic and technological factors. Additionally, Vietnam will rank near the top of the world in our pure tecnology development ranking. In contrast, Vietnam continues to lag in the traditional economic development rankings that I've read. The United Nations' Human Development Index places it 121st among 187 nations, tied with Guyana and trailing even Syria and Iraq. It fares a little better in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitive Index, finishing in a tepid tie for 65th among 144 nations, in the neighborhood of Peru, Colombia, Slovenia, and India. Another ranking, the Asia Cloud Computing Association's Cloud Readiness Index, places Vietnam dead last among 14 nations surveyed. Damned Lies & Statistics The country's mediocre to poor rankings in these surveys and others is no doubt strongly tied to less than $2,000 in per-person income, ranking around the bottom quartile of world incomes. Compare this amount to about $2,800 in the neighboring Philippines, $5,600 in Thailand, and $7,000 in China. Yet this statistic, as with all single statistics, doesn't tell the whole story. Our research takes the view that relative developmnt is the key; that is, how well is a country doing given its current economic resources. How strong are its underlying IT infrastructure and overarching societal development with respect to its overall wealth? And how dynamic is its environment? How quickly is its pace of change increasing? By these measures, Vietnam is a star. Its global buzz has diminished recently, as years of rapid development following enactment of doi moi (renovation or innovation) reform policies in 1986 led to uneven development and societal stress. Indeed, our research also shows Vietnam running “too hot” in our Goldilocks Index of pure technology development. How long can it sustain its current pace? (More later...)
“This win means a great deal to us because it is decided by the readers – the people who understand how use of our technology enables new insights that drive the business,” said Matt Davies, senior director, EMEA marketing, Splunk. “Splunk Enterprise enables organizations to improve service levels, reduce operations costs, mitigate security risks, enhance DevOps collaboration, create new product and service offerings and obtain deeper insight into customer behavior. Being named Best Business Application underlines the value Operational Intelligence delivers to our customers.”
With every New Year it is time to look back at the industry events of the past 12 months, and use our expertise to predict what lies ahead, in order to be more prepared. With regards to DDoS attacks, here is a short list of what to expect in 2015. We expect to see an increase in DDoS attacks size in terms of bandwidth, but likely there will be an emphasis on packets per second metric. Bandwidth is an important metric, and it is something most people can relate to. When shopping for home Internet connection, the bandwidth metric is what people are comparing.
The move in recent years to cloud computing services and architectures has added significant pace to the application development and deployment environment. When enterprise IT can spin up large computing instances in just minutes, developers can also design and deploy in small time frames that were unimaginable a few years ago. The consequent move toward lean, agile, and fast development leads to the need for the development and operations sides to work very closely together. Thus, DevOps becomes essential for any ambitious enterprise today. This Lunchtime Power Panel at DevOps Summit (http://DevOpsSummit.SYS-CON.com), was moderated by Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies. Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox; Myles Steinhauser, Software Development Engineer at Blue Box; Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell Inc.; and Mark Levy, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software go beyond the basics in a discussion of why DevOps is not only important for transformation, but is mission-critical for enterprises that want to stay in business.
"Appcore has been around since January 2008. We exclusively built clouds for service providers. We've been working with CloudStack since about that same time and our software sits on top of CloudStack," stated Jeff Tegethoff, CEO of Appcore, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 15th Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Bring the world's best IaaS to the world's best PaaS. In their session at 15th Cloud Expo, Animesh Singh, a Senior Cloud Architect and Strategist for IBM Cloud Labs, and Jason Anderson, a Cloud Architect for IBM Cloud Labs, shared their experiences running Cloud Foundry on OpenStack. They focused on how Cloud Foundry and OpenStack complement each other, how they technically integrate using cloud provider interface (CPI), how we could automate an OpenStack setup for Cloud Foundry deployments, and some of the best practices for configuring a scalable environment.
Here’s a short anecdote: a QA team maintained a test environment separate from their production environment, but they had gone through great lengths to ensure it matched what was in production in every respect. It was filled with the same hardware, and all the software was identical down to the patch level. They had a strong process to ensure that any change made to one environment was mirrored in the other. Perhaps you can see where this story is going. Sure enough, the environments turned out to not be identical. In fact, there was some BIOS setting that differed on the servers, which resulted in the production machines running slower than the test machines. As a result, the overall production system couldn’t handle the volume of traffic that the test system could, and one day, the whole live site unexpectedly crashed due to a load level it was supposed to be able to manage.
Cloud and Big Data present unique dilemmas: embracing the benefits of these new technologies while maintaining the security of your organization's assets. When an outside party owns, controls and manages your infrastructure and computational resources, how can you be assured that sensitive data remains private and secure? How do you best protect data in mixed use cloud and big data infrastructure sets? Can you still satisfy the full range of reporting, compliance and regulatory requirements? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ashvin Kamaraju, VP of Engineering at Vormetric, discussed how to address data security in cloud and Big Data environments so that your organization isn't next week's data breach headline.
From telemedicine to smart cars, digital homes and industrial monitoring, the explosive growth of IoT has created exciting new business opportunities for real time calls and messaging. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ivelin Ivanov, CEO and Co-Founder of Telestax, shared some of the new revenue sources that IoT created for Restcomm – the open source telephony platform from Telestax. Ivelin Ivanov is a technology entrepreneur who founded Mobicents, an Open Source VoIP Platform, to help create, deploy, and manage applications integrating voice, video and data. He is the co-founder of TeleStax, an Open Source Cloud Communications company that helps the shift from legacy IN/SS7 telco networks to IP-based cloud comms. An early investor in multiple start-ups, he still finds time to code for his companies and contribute to open source projects.
2014 was a year of cloud security and compliance accomplishments and 2015 will certainly bring new challenges and new successes. In 2014, we worked closely with many customers who needed to adhere to HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance requirements. We made sure all bases were covered, data was protected, and compliance was achieved. Though PCI DSS 3.0 was officially released on November 7, 2013 and became effective on January 1, 2014, its compliance deadline took effect a year later, on January 1, 2015. This infographic explains what you need to know about PCI DSS 3.0.
SYS-CON Events announced today that CodeFutures, a leading supplier of database performance tools, has been named a “Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York, NY. CodeFutures is an independent software vendor focused on providing tools that deliver database performance tools that increase productivity during database development and increase database performance and scalability during production.
Databases take a long time to build, populate and manage, but deploying in the cloud holds great promise for changing all of that. Time is probably the most valuable commodity in business. "Time is money" is a trite way of saying that those who move the quickest are usually the ones who get the loot. But current database technology is anything but timely. Databases take a long time to build, populate and manage, and more often than not produce valuable results only after hours of number crunching. And with Big Data, social networking, the Internet of Things and other data-intensive workloads on the near horizon, database functionality is likely to become slower still.
"At Harbinger we do products as well as services. Our services are with helping companies move their products to the cloud operating systems. Some of the challenges we have seen as far as cloud adoption goes are in the cloud security space," noted Shrikant Pattathil, Executive Vice President at Harbinger 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.
Virtustream has announced its xStream cloud management platform (CMP) software is now certified as Vblock® Ready for VCE® Vblock Systems. Targeting customers running SAP applications, xStream will enable enterprises to easily move existing mission-critical workloads to Vblock System-based Private or Hybrid cloud environments, gaining performance and security improvements without re-engineering software. Virtustream is now also a member of the VCE Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.
Technology was dominated by several prevalent trends in 2014 – from the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data to the cloud and cyber security, it seems like there was barely a day without one of these trends creeping up in the news. Now we have entered 2015, these trends are still at the forefront of discussion, with many exciting opportunities, innovations and iterations being predicted for this year.
Orbograph is an innovative healthcare ISV that provides Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (HRCM) solutions, online medical scheduling, PHR, and other services to hospitals and clinics. The Leader: Ran Rothschild, Director of Operations The Project: The company’s next generation of products launched as a cloud service. Orbograph was seeking to benefit from the advantages of cloud computing (elasticity, flexibility, cost-effectiveness) without compromising full compliance with HIPAA, Safe Harbor, and the utmost protection for its sensitive customer and corporate data.