Knowledge creation is a major source of value creation. And great companies –and their employees – know that continuous learning is a key to generating knowledge, and thus value. The agile mindset, particularly in development, is gaining popularity, with credit to a suite of powerful ideas and practices commonly known as the agile methodology – defined by Wikipedia as “software development methods based on iterative and incremental development.” In February 2001, a group of 17 software developers wrote the Agile Manifesto, the Magna Carta of the agile movement. At just 68 words, it was elegant, but at that point just words on paper. Early attempts to apply it came by adapting existing techniques such as lean manufacturing (adapted from Toyota’s methodologies), Crystal, Scrum and XP (Extreme Programming). Admittedly, we were still learning. Buying into “agile” signaled your ideals were more lofty than grounded. Agile supporters were revolutionary, but agile was not.
The Agile Architecture bar is set. Vendors should know what their products must do. Architects have some insight into the patterns they must follow. And business stakeholders can finally rest assured that at least it’s possible to achieve technology-enabled business agility. True, it’s difficult. Many of the pieces are only just now falling into place. Levels of maturity are low across the board. But we’re on our way.
Mr. George Romas is the Technical Director of the Cybersecurity Solutions Group at HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector. SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us again today, George. It's been roughly one year since our first meeting when we spoke about building security in, continuous monitoring, and the process that HP undertakes to develop and deliver the right cybersecurity solutions to HP customers. But, one year feels like a decade in the IT space - so much has happened. Today we'd like to discuss with you the topic of IoT (the Internet of Things). We read with great interest your recent blog on this subject. If you don't mind, can you please share with us your primer on IoT?
In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Tony Shan, a Chief Architect and Big Data consultant, will discuss the drivers, concept, means, and buildout of Big Data competency. He will start with why – the current resource deficit and the imperatives for new skillsets in the Big Data space. Then he will define the concept of Big Data Competency as the core skills required in the implementations of Big Data initiatives. Further, Shan will specify various roles that have different responsibilities in the Big Data project management. The desired skillsets are formulated for all these new and expanded roles. Moreover, we map the roles to the end-to-end Big Data lifecycle model to illustrate the key tasks and deliverables they are accountable for.
The cloud opens up new possibilities for businesses to continuously deliver software-driven innovation and enables new ways of collaboration. At 14th Cloud Expo, IBM, SoftLayer, an IBM Company, and Cloudant, an IBM Company, offer numerous sessions that cover many aspects of cloud and Big Data from how to leverage a cloud architecture, make Big Data cost effective, to how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence
In his General Session at 14th Cloud Expo, Matt Wood, GM of Data Science at Amazon Web Services, will discuss some observations, themes and stories gathered from over eight years of providing cloud computing services to customers. He'll discuss expeditions companies have made to the cloud, along with the business drivers, outcomes and technical requirements of delivering large scale, utility computing for any workload, within any organization. Matt Wood leads scientific and technical computing at Amazon Web Services in Seattle, Washington, where he drives programs around high performance computing, data-intensive science and big data.
Good optimization best practice can help a CIO to lower operating costs, increase asset utilization and employee productivity Somewhere back in the mid-nineties we started talking about optimization (or optimisation if you prefer) as if it were some part of the de facto terminology that we use to create and describe the wider IT establishment and the architectural constructs it is composed of.
A global asset management company needed to accelerate testing for parallel and Agile development. Learn how service virtualization and API test automation resulted in a 20X reduction in testing time. Ignis Asset Management is a global asset management company, headquartered in London, with over $100 billion (USD) in assets under management. Ignis recently embarked on a large project aimed at outsourcing the back office as well as implementing the architecture and applications required to support the outsourcing model.
Enterprise IT is under increasing pressure to deliver better services to the business faster, at lower cost, and with higher quality of service. Now, there’s a new page in the CIO playbook – delivering enterprise Database as a Service. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, David Swanger, Senior Director of Oracle Database Product Marketing at Oracle, will discuss how a Database as a Service (DBaaS) solution delivers on a broad range of requirements including simplified database consolidation and,self-service provisioning. He'll discuss how Oracle’s new multitenant architecture provides a superior enterprise database platform with new levels of flexibility, resiliency, and efficiency.
Have you ever deployed a change to production and thought “All went well – Systems are operating as expected!” but then you had to deal with users complaining that they keep running into errors? We recently moved some of our systems between two of our data centers – even moving some components to the public cloud. Everything was prepared well, system monitoring was set up and everyone gave the thumbs up to execute the move. Immediately following, our Operations dashboards continued to show green. Soon thereafter I received a complaint from a colleague who reported that he couldn’t use one of the migrated services (our free dynaTrace AJAX Edition) anymore as the authentication web service seemed to fail. The questions we asked ourselves were:
We live in a time when seconds – even milliseconds – can have a dramatic economic impact on your company’s future. With technology being the primary conduit for consumer interaction, the user experience is at center stage. User experience will be a deciding factor in separating the future winners from the losers. By building more speed and agility into the application delivery process, DevOps promises great rewards. However, with this promise, also come significant ramifications for failure.
A lot of buzz around the word WebRTC has made its meaning difficult to grasp. In his session at 2nd WebRTC Summit, Alex Gouaillard, Founder and CTO of Temasys Communications, will address the problem of defining what WebRTC is and maybe more importantly what it is not. From there the anatomy of a WebRTC-based solution / product / service will be illustrated, and the main vendors proposing the missing pieces of such a solution will be introduced. At the end of this session, attendees will have a clear understanding of what WebRTC is and is not, what the components of a WebRTC Solution are, and who the corresponding vendors are today.
Water’s path from sea level to a cloud is quite a journey and often misunderstood, similar to that of an organizations path as they traverse from a traditional on premise compute model, to public and private cloud adoption. Infrastructure changes have a ripple effect, and impact functions across an organization, not just in IT, everything from executive management, to finance – and often cause unnecessary strife and significant project delays. With the cloud, large capital expenditures are converted into monthly recurring payments, lengthy sales cycles are turned into self-service models, resource intensive POCs, turned into easy to implement free trials – the list goes on and on. These require new strategies to get projects approved, fast tracked and successful – the legacy method of yearly or quarterly budgeting, and lengthy solution testing and analysis no longer applies, but changing that mindset is no easy task.
The Internet of Things is the biggest idea since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. Why? Because the "things" are not just desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. The "things" come from the world of sensor-driven Big Data that is even now expanding the size of the Web beyond what we thought just a few years ago. How big? Estimates from everyone from Gartner to the US Government foresee a 100X time increase – then a 1,000X increase – in Web traffic over the next few years. The world will need hundreds of billions of dollars of new servers, memory, storage, and data centers. The challenge to software developers will be increasing as never before.
Enterprises have invested a lot in their own data centers and are reluctant to throw away that investment. Increasingly there is a trend to optimizing internal resources before combining public and private cloud resources to obtain maximum benefit. This Power Panel at 14th Cloud Expo will discuss various scenarios available to CIOs, the challenges of each and whether hybrid is a way to reach their end goal. Andrew Hillier is Co-Founder & CTO of CiRBA. He has twenty years of experience in the creation and implementation of mission-critical software for the world's largest financial institutions and utilities. A co-founder of CiRBA, he leads product strategy and defines the overall technology roadmap for the company.
IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS (infrastructure, platform and software as a service) all have their place in enterprises today and are no strangers to utilizing them. But with the multitude of technologies out in the market, how to make a decision on which to use and when? What is most efficient and effective? This Power Panel at 14th Cloud Expo will focus on the three and best use cases for each and how IT can be an enabler of all three.
Learn why network virtualization is the final frontier to conquer for high-utilization and high-performance clouds (since server and storage virtualization are already mature). 2013 was the year of SDN’s debut, but in his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Robert Drost, Co-Founder and COO of Pluribus Networks, will discuss how SDN’s relevant server-centric comparison for network virtualization (NV) is whether it operates like a server Type-I hypervisor (Bare Metal) or Type-II (Hosted). He will explain how OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Cisco ONE, VMware NSX, and others compare and work with server hypervisors and how to incorporate network virtualization in your cloud to improve analytics, compliance, management, scalability, reliability, cloudBursting, and billing features.
Social media of all types allows customers to share their interests and sentiments. To be successful, companies have to find ways to capture and process the information. The power of Big Data technology is being successfully applied to understanding such complex unknowns as consumer sentiment and even intent. And that understanding then vastly improves how retailers and myriad service providers manage their users' experiences -- increasingly in real time. Fortunately, today's consumers are quite willing to share their intents and sentiments via social media, if you can gather and process the information. Hence the rapidly developing field of social customer relationship management, or Social CRM.
When it comes to protecting an IT investment, a natural choice today is to leverage a cloud technology. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Rick Vanover, Product Strategy Specialist at Veeam Software, will discuss how you can start to engage one or more cloud technologies for your data protection strategy. Whether you are looking for straightforward object-based storage to clouds such as Glacier or S3, implementing gateway appliances to storage such as Azure, leveraging cloud computing or want to develop a line of business around cloud services; there are options for protection today leveraging cloud solutions.
The benefits of using a Cloud Platform-as-a-Service are clear – higher elasticity, lower cost and risk, and support for new business models. But what are some of the pitfalls? What type of workloads should you start with? And what will make your deployment successful? Based on data from a recent survey of 300 IT organizations, many businesses are in the process of developing a PaaS architecture and infrastructure requirements for their cloud-based application PaaS. In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Ayalla Goldschmidt, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Oracle Fusion Middleware and Java Platform, will share results from this survey including successful Application PaaS use cases. Find out how your peers are planning for this new computing model and what the top five best practices are.
I just read through “The New Kingmakers,” a thought-provoking book by Stephen O'Grady of the small, but influential, analyst firm Redmonk. The thesis of the book is straightforward: technology changes have moved developers, previously of little importance within the world of IT, to a central direction-setting role within companies. O'Grady attributes this change to four factors: Open source, which democratizes both creation and access to software components, enabling developers direct access to useful software without having to obtain budget or endure sales interactions. This accounts for the move to PHP, MySQL, Cassandra, and Cloud Foundry rather than their proprietary equivalents.
With large security breaches constantly in the news, businesses are rightly concerned about security. Thankfully, big data and machine learning can work together to help. They read like a list of horror stories for businesses big and small alike. Sony’s PlayStation Network is hacked twice, exposing the personal information of 77 million customers. Zappos becomes the victim of a hack that exposes the addresses and phone numbers of 24 million people. Up to 81 million Yahoo email customers’ passwords are compromised, forcing the company to tell its users to reset them immediately. 110 million customers are affected when hackers infiltrate Target, and PIN numbers and credit card information are stolen. But these stories of major security breaches aren’t works of fiction--they actually happened, and it’s a concern businesses all over the world live with. Many companies are now turning to big data and machine learning as a way to tackle these risks and make sure valuable data is protected at all times.
“While cost has traditionally been a foundational benefit of the cloud, we believe that other factors can play a more important part in defining the cloud of tomorrow,” said Todd Gleason, Vice President of Technology at FireHost, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “We believe that the generalist cloud provider – those low-cost commodity clouds that created price competition and insecure clouds – are going to either be gobbled up or beaten up as the industry evolves from this generalist mentality to focus on specialist clouds that have a particular focus.” Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers? Todd Gleason: Standardization is important, but we’re concerned because security desperately needs to be part of this effort. It is not addressed enough, if at all. Much of the open standards work in cloud and other IT technologies traditionally is not security-conscious, making adoption riskier than many want to admit or truly understand. So, while standards are a good thing, we believe security should be baked in at their inception. We advocate for innovation, but it’s important that the innovative spirit is not blind to the need to protect vendors and customers.
Delivering modern application experiences requires a cloud based architecture that unlocks the silos of process and information within the organization. These capabilities must be resident in the cloud, and easily consumed by mobile applications. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Dan Sholler, Vice President, Platform and Technology at Infor, will discuss a common approach to access application capability, end to end process automation, and information stores designed to enable modern applications experiences, which are mostly or exclusively mobile.
Healthcare executives like you are challenged with implementing changes from healthcare reform, adapting to value-based reimbursement, and bending the cost curve. At the same time, you are expected to maintain a high level of patient satisfaction and deliver quality outcomes. Your operational and administrative systems need to support your expanded responsibilities by transforming traditional business processes and arming decision makers with sound, insightful information. The systems you use today should have the power to take you into the future, while ensuring that your care units, departments and facilities run efficiently and effectively. But finding a way to modernize your healthcare organization quickly, easily, and cost-effectively hasn’t been an easy thing to do.