It wasn’t that long ago when the first smartphone came out, and we saw the pace of connected devices and associated mobile applications accelerate beyond what anyone could have imagined. Shortly after that, something incredible happened, we reached the point where there were more connected devices than people on the planet. Since then, we’ve used this to measure the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Research predicts there will be as many as 50 to 100, and possibly even 200 billion connected devices by 2020. Some businesses are already set up for IoT, like operators of large networks of devices such as self-service kiosks and vending machines. These devices are communicating information back to the enterprise and for those that aren’t, installing the proper hardware and software to do so is more cost efficient today than ever before. Any business that is going to scale is going to look for opportunities to automate its processes. We’ve seen history repeat itself from the Industrial Revolution to the automotive industry and more recently with Netflix automating the distribution of those little red envelopes. Netflix transformed their operations through the success of their streamlined mail business, becoming the premier provider of streamed digital media into the home. Anything that has successfully scaled has used automation effectively. Furthermore, we are seeing traditional retail and brick-and-mortar stores look for ways to combat increasing wages, and costs to maintain a physical environment. For many, that is through the implementation of kiosks and vending technology. We see this in hospitality with self-service ordering. Businesses are finding ways to automate through technology while improving the customer experience. An operator needs a central place to monitor and manage their business—one-time, real-time. The Perfect Storm The reality of increasing wages and rising costs of real estate, combined with the decreasing cost of sensors, computation, and storage has created the perfect storm for our next technology revolution. As a result, automation through the implementation of IoT is becoming more desirable and achievable. When taking a closer look at the specific drivers of these trends, it’s clear that the economics of IoT are very compelling. It is much less expense now to automate than before due to the decreasing costs of micro-electronics (examples: microcontrollers and sensors). The cost of data processing and computation is also reducing at a pace that we’ve never seen before. Additionally, the ability to now process and persist data in the cloud has helped alleviate concerns about rapid growth, through the dynamic, on-demand, scaling nature of cloud infrastructure. These technology drivers are a few of the many signs that IoT can help solve real business problems. Economic headwinds and more affordable technology have created the perfect storm for IoT to transform traditional physical environments through automation. Automation is just the tip of the IoT iceberg Once you’ve automated your operations, the next step is having the right set of management tools for your business. If you are operating a vast network of devices, having the ability to
With artificial intelligence and big data making prominent waves in industries everywhere, IBM is offering several new cloud services that will pair with their BlueMix service. It will offer better organization, smoother data generation, and accelerated migration to the cloud. Ultimately, businesses can experience greater effectiveness in every department.
Video experiences should be unique and exciting! But that doesn’t mean you need to patch all the pieces yourself. Users demand rich and engaging experiences and new ways to connect with you. But creating robust video applications at scale can be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Zohar Babin, Vice President of Platform, Ecosystem and Community at Kaltura, discussed how VPaaS enables you to move fast, creating scalable video experiences that reach your audience anywhere, in an enterprise grade secured environment, low-level video ingestion, processing, management, distribution, and playback. And experience microservices, the Big Data analytics to answer all your end-user consumption and behavior questions.
It's the holiday season, and one IT wish list item may be cloud control and confidence. There's a whole new crop of companies offering cloud management and governance services to ease the adoption and maintenance of cloud. There are a lot of challenges to getting the best value out of cloud, like security, multi-cloud management and end-to-end visibility. This time of year is ideal for eating a lot and finding out where your gifts are hidden around the house. Soon enough, though, it'll be resolution time when the new year arrives and you take stock of your big-picture goals for 2017. We hear a lot about "digital transformation" and modernizing IT, which can seem like awfully lofty goals. What's the actual day-to-day plan? What are the actions IT teams, managers and CIOs can take to make sure they're improving upon their current technologies and processes?
Like the daily newspaper that many thought would be dead by now, on-premise business process management tools are probably here to stay for the foreseeable future because a lot of enterprise IT directors are not convinced that their enterprise data is ready to transition to the cloud. Many enterprises prefer on-premise BPM software because it is tangible, visible, and exists within the enterprise boundaries. IT leadership feels that they have to have datacenters within their ‘jurisdiction' in order to keep their corporate data safe.
Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of (at least) three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the back-end service, and the mobile application for the end user’s controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target – this makes the integration of these separate pipelines and the coordination of software updates for IoT more problematic. How do you coordinate the diverse moving parts that must come together when developing your IoT product or updating each of its components?
SYS-CON Events announced today that Enzu will exhibit at SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place October 31-November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Enzu’s mission is to be the leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions worldwide. Enzu enables online businesses to use its IT infrastructure to their competitive advantage. By offering a suite of proven hosting and management services, Enzu wants companies to focus on the core of their online business and let Enzu manage their IT hosting infrastructure.
As the Microsoft Azure CTO explains microservices represents a major inflection point for the IT industry - An Application Revolution Powered by the Cloud. They themselves are pioneering the approach through new products like ‘Cognitive Microservices‘. My personal opinion is that they can be defined as the next major milestone in software engineering ever since, well software was invented and run on mainframes, they are that much of a landmark. They will re-write the agenda of software practices across corporations right through university curriculum. One critical aspect of course is the commercial opportunity, both in terms of exploiting them and also the vendor marketplace, which has been particularly impressive both in terms of their innovative embrace of the model and also their speed to market with significant plays.
Telcos embarking on a journey to adopt and exploit the NFV trend face a big challenge of existing legacy complexity, and a key message I have been marketing is that there already are best practices that can be reused from the Enterprise sector, especially from leading ‘digital natives' like Netflix and Linkedin. NTT Communications is a great example of this, employing the same ‘toolchain' of DevOps apps like Github, Ansible, Docker and Jenkins to do exactly that, better automate their own operations practices such as distributing NMS updates across multiple global data centers.
Your car. My toaster. Our lights. The neighbor’s thermostat. With an average of 7.8 connected devices per home, according to recent surveys, there are twice as many “things” in the house as the average 3.14 people per household in the US in 2015. And all of them are “talking.” Not all talk to each other, yet, though the foundation for that is clearly laid out. But all of them talk to apps which talk to them over the Internet. When you or I interact with that app, we do so via HTTP (hopefully secured). Whether it’s via a native mobile app that uses APIs or a modern web app is irrelevant; it is safe to say that both do so via HTTP.
DevOps and microservices are permeating software engineering teams broadly, whether these teams are in pure software shops but happen to run a business, such Uber and Airbnb, or in companies that rely heavily on software to run more traditional business, such as financial firms or high-end manufacturers. Microservices and DevOps have created software development and therefore business speed and agility benefits, but they have also created problems; specifically, they have created software security issues.
"There is a huge interest in Kubernetes. People are now starting to use Kubernetes and implement it," stated Sebastian Scheele, co-founder of Loodse, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"Splunk basically takes machine data and we make it usable, valuable and accessible for everyone. The way that plays in DevOps is - we need to make data-driven decisions to delivering applications," explained Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk and @DevOpsSummit Conference Chair, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
I’m told that it has been 21 years since Scrum became public when Jeff Sutherland and I presented it at an Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) workshop in Austin, TX, in October of 1995. Time sure does fly. Things mature. I’m still in the same building and at the same company where I first formulated Scrum.[1] Initially nobody knew of Scrum, yet it is now an open source body of knowledge translated into more than 30 languages[2] People use Scrum worldwide for developing software and other uses I never anticipated[3].
SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint, a leading digital experience intelligence company, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Catchpoint Systems is a leading Digital Performance Analytics company that provides unparalleled insight into your customer-critical services to help you consistently deliver an amazing customer experience. Designed for digital business, Catchpoint is the only end-user experience monitoring (EUM) platform that can simultaneously capture, index and analyze object-level performance data inline across the most extensive monitor types and node coverage, enabling a smarter, faster way to preempt issues and optimize service delivery. More than 350 customers in over 30 countries trust Catchpoint to strengthen their brand and grow their businesses.
While not quite mainstream yet, WebRTC is starting to gain ground with Carriers, Enterprises and Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) alike. WebRTC makes it easy for developers to add audio and video communications into their applications by using Web browsers as their platform. But like any market, every customer engagement has unique requirements, as well as constraints. And of course, one size does not fit all. In her session at WebRTC Summit, Dr. Natasha Tamaskar, Vice President, Head of Cloud and Mobile Strategy at GENBAND, will explore what is needed to take a real time communications engagement experience from a simple communication, to a truly immersive multi-layer engagement experience. Furthermore, she will explore the role of a Communications Platform as a Service (PaaS) in delivering this experience.
@CloudExpo and @ThingsExpo, two of the most important technology events in the world, have hosted hundreds of sponsors and exhibitors since their launch eight years ago. In this blog post, I provide 10 tips on how our sponsors and exhibitors can maximize their participation at our events. But before reading my top 10 tips for our sponsors and exhibitors, please take a moment and watch this brief Sandy Carter video.
Smart Cities are here to stay, but for their promise to be delivered, the data they produce must not be put in new siloes. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Mathias Herberts, Co-founder and CTO of Cityzen Data, discussed the best practices that will ensure a successful smart city journey.
"LinearHub provides smart video conferencing, which is the Roundee service, and we archive all the video conferences and we also provide the transcript," stated Sunghyuk Kim, CEO of LinearHub, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Multiple agencies across the U.S. government are paying closer attention to the software they are buying. More specifically, they want to know what open source and third party components were used to build the software applications. The report notes: U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to know what open source components are being used in medical devices.
While cloud may have formally entered the enterprise in 2006, it’s now a reality for nearly every company. The Cloud Era got its start with Software as a service (SaaS) offerings that paved the way for innovations in CRM and email deployments, to create new opportunities for the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365. Still in its “early stages,” cloud now encompasses legacy applications, backups, disaster recovery, security/audit log management and so much more. 2017 will be full of continued maturation and will give way to a whole new generation of cloud-native applications.
When new technology becomes available to the public, it is often met with trepidation by those who feel it’s unnecessary or even hindering. Typically, younger generations embrace technology while older people scorn it, but of course, this is not universal. The “Internet of Things” (IoT) or the growing trend to have internet connectivity in traditionally non-tech devices such as clothing, accessories, and home appliances, offers a lot of benefits to people of all generations. For example, being able to track your health data and fitness information is useful to young millennials trying to be fit, as well as older individuals who need to monitor specific health concerns.
Providing secure, mobile access to sensitive data sets is a critical element in realizing the full potential of cloud computing. However, large data caches remain inaccessible to edge devices for reasons of security, size, format or limited viewing capabilities. Medical imaging, computer aided design and seismic interpretation are just a few examples of industries facing this challenge. Rather than fighting for incremental gains by pulling these datasets to edge devices, we need to embrace the immobile, heavy nature of this data by providing new opportunities for high-performance access and real-time collaboration.
The many IoT deployments around the world are busy integrating smart devices and sensors into their enterprise IT infrastructures. Yet all of this technology – and there are an amazing number of choices – is of no use without the software to gather, communicate, and analyze the new data flows. Without software, there is no IT. In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation; Alan Williamson, Principal at ParkerGale Capital; Chris Matthieu, Director IoT Engineering at Citrix; and Peter Vanderminden, Principal Industry Analyst at Flatiron Strategies looked at the protocols that communicate data and the emerging data analytics that bring its full value to the enterprise. The era of Big Data and "Little Big Data" has arrived, and will soon be eating an enterprise near you!
What are the new priorities for the connected business? First: businesses need to think differently about the types of connections they will need to make – these span well beyond the traditional app to app into more modern forms of integration including SaaS integrations, mobile integrations, APIs, device integration and Big Data integration. It’s important these are unified together vs. doing them all piecemeal. Second, these types of connections need to be simple to design, adapt and configure. Plus, with the proliferation of IoT, there is an explosion in the number of devices requiring interconnection - both in terms of asset monitoring and spatial analytics.