The human work of solving problems, facing challenges and overcoming obstacles tends to share a common goal: creating stable, secure and predictable environments. The tendency for most humans is that once we solve a challenge, we want to be done with it. That propensity, however, does not fit with today’s reality of perpetual change. In the digital business world, organizations have no choice but to operate in an unclear, uncertain and continuously shifting environment that requires a new mindset and approach to formulating business strategies. Digital winners recognize that change is part of the game, and that they need to develop ways to exploit continuous ambiguity. In fact, in our surveys of high-tech professionals, when we asked how long they thought digital transformation initiatives would last, about one-third of the surveyed technology professionals answered “forever” – and as we all know, forever is a long, long time.
IT teams define success as solving problems quickly. To enable ITSM modernization we have to think of adopting the tools and methods that will enable resolution of ITSM issues more quickly. To be clear, modernization does not mean stepping away from SLAs or DevOps. Instead, modernization means bringing on automation of key IT processes and capturing information that can be used to improve future customer interactions or product launches or methodologies.
Any significant business process that can be documented and best practices identified - will be. Any defined process that can be standardized - will be. Standardized processes that can be codified and automated (through robotic software automation), will be - if the volume justifies it. If the process is repeatable across many companies it will be offered as a shared service on a platform in a cloud.
I recently had the opportunity to give a 10-minute keynote at DataWorks Summit 2017. I know what most of you are thinking: Schmarzo can barely introduce himself in 10 minutes! What sort of keynote could he give in just 10 minutes? And to be honest, I too struggled with what to say. But after some brainstorming with my marketing experts (Jeff Abbott, Erin Banks, and Chris Hill), we came up with an idea: Pose 5 questions that every organization needs to consider as they prepare themselves for digital transformation. And while I didn’t have enough time in 10 minutes to answer those questions in a keynote, I certainly do in a blog!
The year 2017 so far has been the year of digital transformation with cloud , IoT , APIs and Low code application development gaining focus . Companies that build Low Code Platforms and help organisations build business applications are beginning to see these technologies scale up. Low code platforms market is expected to scale up to $20B by the end of the decade, says Forrester. So ,when a lot of business enterprises across the globe have been talking about this low code revolution we delve deep into the realms of this application development methodology and its role in digital transformation.
Is your organization’s IT system operationally mature, and is it application-centric? In today’s digital landscape, achieving both of these are crucial for the success of any serious IT operation — both at the enterprise level and in the context of smaller organizations. What is operational maturity? It is a general measure of the overall consistency, reliability, resilience, coherence, and sophistication of an IT system at the levels of management, design, and operation.
As consumers in the age of digital innovation, we benefit from an abundance of technologies, each seeking to simplify our daily lives. Be it Apple, Amazon or Google, our digital service providers are only too happy for us to take advantage of their latest cool apps or funky new tools. With so much free stuff and low cost pay as you go options, we've never had it so good. It's a no brainer, win-win for both consumer and producer. Or is it?
Jackson is a popular library for handling JSON in Java applications, quickly becoming the de-facto standard in the ecosystem. Starting with version 2, it has also introduced a mature XML implementation alongside its established JSON support. Adding the Jackson XML module to the project only needs a single dependency - the Jackson XML module itself.
Cloud providers like AWS have proven to be a viable option for running mainframe application workloads. The most effective method to exploit the value of Unisys mainframe applications and data is a transformative migration to modern systems frameworks in AWS, reusing as much of the original application source as possible. Execute a discover, design, modern, test, and implement cycle to move mainframe applications. Some mainframe migration tools can keep existing code in place, but expect to replace components and rethink data storage.
In 2016, artificial intelligence (AI) reached its climax. Research and advisory firm Tractica predicted that the annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $38.8 billion by 2025. The revenue for enterprise AI applications will increase from $358 million in 2016 to $31.2 billion by 2025, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 64.3%. Thus, IT and business decision makers must face up to the potentials of AI already today. For each kind of organization this leads to the question, which type of technologies or infrastructure they can leverage to operate an AI-ready enterprise stack.
As today's digital disruptions bounce and smash their way through conventional technologies and conventional wisdom alike, predicting their path is a multifaceted challenge. So many areas of technology advance on Moore's Law-like exponential curves that divining the future is fraught with danger. Such is the problem with artificial intelligence (AI), and its related concepts, including cognitive computing, machine learning, and deep learning.
Service providers have long been lauded for a willingness to ‘eat their own dog food,’ i.e. to use their own products or services for internal operations and/or development. For Catchpoint, that means that we use our own digital experience monitoring platform to ensure that the platform itself is running optimally. Regular tests of our own infrastructure ensure that our customers are not being hampered by performance issues on our end. For a commercial enterprise company like Honeywell, which manufactures thousands of different products from aircraft engines and avionics to home appliances, eating their own dog food is a much more daunting challenge, and difficult to accomplish without some outside help.
Consumers increasingly expect their electronic "things" to be connected to smart phones, tablets and the Internet. When that thing happens to be a medical device, the risks and benefits of connectivity must be carefully weighed. Once the decision is made that connecting the device is beneficial, medical device manufacturers must design their products to maintain patient safety and prevent compromised personal health information in the face of cybersecurity threats. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Clark Fortney, Software Engineer at Battelle, discussed how designing safe connected medical devices begins with systematically analyzing cyber threats against desired functionality and making smart hardware/software architectural choices accordingly. Memory protection strategies, functional isolation, runtime checks, programming oversight, and vulnerability assessment testing are some of the key methods to increase the cybersecurity of a medical device, or any connected device that performs important functions.
API Security has finally entered our security zeitgeist. OWASP Top 10 2017 - RC1 recognized API Security as a first class citizen by adding it as number 10, or A-10 on its list of web application vulnerabilities. We believe this is just the start. The attack surface area offered by API is orders or magnitude larger than any other attack surface area. Consider the fact the APIs expose cloud services, internal databases, application and even legacy mainframes over the internet. What could go wrong?
Internet-of-Things discussions can end up either going down the consumer gadget rabbit hole or focused on the sort of data logging that industrial manufacturers have been doing forever. However, in fact, companies today are already using IoT data both to optimize their operational technology and to improve the experience of customer interactions in novel ways. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Gordon Haff, Red Hat Technology Evangelist, shared examples from a wide range of industries – including energy, transportation, and retail – of using IoT to create new business opportunities and improve efficiency.
In his session at @ThingsExpo, Arvind Radhakrishnen discussed how IoT offers new business models in banking and financial services organizations with the capability to revolutionize products, payments, channels, business processes and asset management built on strong architectural foundation. The following topics were covered: How IoT stands to impact various business parameters including customer experience, cost and risk management within BFS organizations.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Golden Gate University will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Since 1901, non-profit Golden Gate University (GGU) has been helping adults achieve their professional goals by providing high quality, practice-based undergraduate and graduate educational programs in law, taxation, business and related professions. Many of its courses are taught by faculty actively working in their field of expertise, providing students with skills that can be applied immediately. The new MS in Business Analytics, like most of its programs, is available fully online or in-person in downtown SF.
As businesses adopt functionalities in cloud computing, it’s imperative that IT operations consistently ensure cloud systems work correctly – all of the time, and to their best capabilities. In his session at @BigDataExpo, Bernd Harzog, CEO and founder of OpsDataStore, presented an industry answer to the common question, “Are you running IT operations as efficiently and as cost effectively as you need to?” He then expounded on the industry issues he frequently came up against as an analyst, and how this led him to found OpsDataStore. He also discussed how data-driven IT operations will save money, and detect trends and patterns that precede actual problems by allowing never-before-seen transparency into the IT stack.
Given the popularity of the containers, further investment in the telco/cable industry is needed to transition existing VM-based solutions to containerized cloud native deployments. The networking architecture of the solution isolates the network traffic into different network planes (e.g., management, control, and media). This naturally makes support for multiple interfaces in container orchestration engines an indispensable requirement.
In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, CTO of Embotics, discussed how automation can provide the dynamic management required to cost-effectively deliver microservices and container solutions at scale. He also discussed how flexible automation is the key to effectively bridging and seamlessly coordinating both IT and developer needs for component orchestration across disparate clouds – an increasingly important requirement at today’s multi-cloud enterprise.
With the wave of personal assistants, such as Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant, and new startups leveraging AI and analytics to build personal companions, it’s becoming clear we are moving toward a new voice-controlled relationship with technology. As we have already seen in the consumer market, it is all but a given that these voice-activation systems will eventually make it into the enterprise environment, as the potential benefits of these systems could be tremendous in simplifying and automating activities. Although it may be a long time before we see the full likenesses of “HAL” from “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the technology is already here that can improve the ways businesses operate.
Enterprise architects are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies as they seek to utilize existing data center assets, leverage the advantages of cloud computing and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. This requires a globally aware traffic management strategy that can monitor infrastructure health across data centers and end-user experience globally, while responding to control changes and system specification at the speed of today’s DevOps teams. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Josh Gray, Chief Architect at Cedexis, covered strategies for orchestrating global traffic achieving the highest-quality end-user experience while spanning multiple clouds and data centers and reacting at the velocity of modern development teams.
Because IoT devices are deployed in mission-critical environments more than ever before, it’s increasingly imperative they be truly smart. IoT sensors simply stockpiling data isn’t useful. IoT must be artificially and naturally intelligent in order to provide more value In his session at @ThingsExpo, John Crupi, Vice President and Engineering System Architect at Greenwave Systems, will discuss how IoT artificial intelligence (AI) can be carried out via edge analytics and machine learning technologies that enable things to process event data at the source, learn patterns of behavior over time for taking independent action, and deliver more accurate results in real-time. This opens the door to limitless possibilities, enabling businesses to make better decisions with far less effort.
Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, will discuss the basics of Blockchain, preview the Blockchain Reference Architecture, and introduce the mechanics of a Blockchain Business Network.
In the blog “From Autonomous to Smart: Importance of Artificial Intelligence,” we discussed the two critical artificial intelligence (AI) challenges in creating “smart” edge devices: Artificial Intelligence Challenge #1: How do the Artificial Intelligence algorithms handle the unexpected, such as flash flooding, terrorist attacks, earthquakes, tornadoes, police car chases, emergency vehicles, blown tires, a child chasing a ball into the street, etc.?