Over the past few years, the use of artificial intelligence has expanded more rapidly than many of us could have imagined. While this may invoke fear and dread in some, these relatively new technology applications are clearly delivering real value to our global society. This value is generally seen in four distinct areas:
Central to the idea of DevOps is collaboration between all of the teams involved in IT applications and infrastructure. Developers, Operations, Quality Assurance, Security, and more, all have stakes in the delivery of a product or service. So, what does collaboration mean when it comes to monitoring in the world of DevOps? In the past, different teams involved in creating or maintaining an application would first finish their portion completely before passing it on to the next team. For example, the Development team would first write code for the entire app, or specific features in the app, before passing it to the Quality Assurance (QA) team. The QA team would then do their testing and analysis before sending it forward to Operations, and so on.
The emergence of hyper-scale Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is challenging the traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) value proposition. SaaS CEOs, investors and SaaS buyers must carefully evaluate the implications of “all-in” migration to hyperscale IaaS platforms that offer value-added platform services that go beyond simple infrastructure services. This article provides a point of view and insights into changes in the SaaS market, which has three principal drivers 1) technical, 2) business, and 3) security and compliance.
Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer’s datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day. First, Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry's first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer's datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day.Now, Workspot DaaS 2.0 is the industry's first full-cloud Desktop as a Service solution combining Workspot VDI 2.0 with Microsoft Azure to deliver thousands of desktops in a day, in any part of the world and with zero CapEx.
I hear it often; I need to acquire more customers like my “most valuable” customers. But what makes a customer “most valuable”? What are the characteristics and/or behaviors that make a customer “most valuable”? This simple question is anything but simple. Let me explain through an exercise. Let’s say that you work for an airline (note: this exercise works equally well with other customer-centric industries such as hospitality, gaming, entertainment, retail, credit cards, financial services, telco and insurance). You have been asked to identify the airline’s “most valuable” customers. This information will be used to prioritize marketing, sales, support and product development efforts. As part of your analysis, you identify three different customer scenarios and need to determine which of these customer scenarios is “most valuable”:
Whether they’re located in a public, private, or hybrid cloud environment, cloud technologies are constantly evolving. While the innovation is exciting, the end mission of delivering business value and rapidly producing incremental product features is paramount. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, Kiran Chitturi, CTO Architect at Sungard AS, discussed DevOps culture, its evolution of frameworks and technologies, and how it is achieving maturity. He also covered various styles and stacks in DevOps with examples and live demos – on AWS using tools/techniques for continuous integration, configuration management and delivery orchestration.
Businesses are struggling to manage the information flow and interactions between all of these new devices and things jumping on their network, and the apps and IT systems they control. The data businesses gather is only helpful if they can do something with it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, discussed how different the impact of IoT will be for large businesses, expanding how IoT will allow large organizations to make their legacy applications and systems more useful by leveraging an increasingly disparate ecosystem of technologies, users and devices to create actionable business intelligence.
@ThingsExpo has been named the Top 5 Most Influential Internet of Things Brand by Onalytica in the ‘The Internet of Things Landscape 2015: Top 100 Individuals and Brands.' Onalytica analyzed Twitter conversations around the #IoT debate to uncover the most influential brands and individuals driving the conversation. Onalytica captured data from 56,224 users. The PageRank based methodology they use to extract influencers on a particular topic (tweets mentioning #InternetofThings or #IoT in this case) takes into account the number and quality of contextual references that a user receives.
A number of retailers, especially small businesses, are moving away from these expensive systems to cheaper, yet a lot more sophisticated cloud alternatives. A typical cloud PoS system should cost retailers between $50 to $200 a month. Point of Sale (Pos) systems typically haven’t required an internet connection. These devices come with a cash register, a barcode scanner and a card reading machine that connects to the bank via a fixed line connection. In addition to this, the higher end PoS systems come with inventory tracking and management tools as well. All of this does not come cheap and the hardware for these devices can cost anywhere between $2000 to $4000. This is not including the monthly support fee of between $25 to $100 that PoS providers charge businesses.
The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Or will it? Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform and how we integrate our thinking to solve complicated problems. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, demonstrated how to move beyond today's coding paradigm and share the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerate application delivery times, and ensure that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution.
As companies adopt the cloud-to-streamline workflow, deployment hasn’t been very seamless because of IT concerns surrounding security risks. The cloud offers many benefits, but protecting and securing information can be tricky across multiple cloud providers and remains IT’s overall responsibility. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Simon Bain, CEO of SearchYourCloud, addressed security compliance issues associated with cloud applications and how document-level encryption is critical for supplementing existing enterprise security solutions. He drew from case studies, outlined best practices for businesses and demoed how data can be transported and stored to and from the cloud already encrypted and securely accessed no matter where it’s stored.
Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business’s productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren’t present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud – because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature – can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box.
"Storage is growing. All of IDC's estimates say that unstructured data is now 80% of the world's data. We provide storage systems that can actually deal with that scale of data - software-defined storage systems," stated Paul Turner, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Cloudian, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place June 6-8, 2017 at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, is co-located with the 20th International Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. @ThingsExpo New York Call for Papers is now open.
I was on a high-rise construction site 34-floors above the city. I was talking to the construction crew when a fight broke out. There was an explosion and the floor collapsed. I removed the virtual reality (VR) goggles and laughed. It was so real. The VR solutions provided an incredible experience, almost like being there. As good as my experience was, it was not reality. It was a controlled pre-programmed experience - a notional idea. Today, however, VR and sensor technologies enable a notional idea to become reality – a Real-Reality.
Software delivery was once specific to the IT industry. Now, Continuous Delivery pipelines are used around world from e-commerce to airline software. Building a software delivery pipeline once involved hours of scripting and manual steps–a process that’s painful, if not impossible, to scale. However Continuous Delivery with Application Release Automation tools offers a scripting-free, automated experience. Continuous Delivery pipelines are immensely powerful for the modern enterprise, boosting production and even customer satisfaction.
@ThingsExpo has been named the Top 5 Most Influential M2M Brand by Onalytica in the ‘Machine to Machine: Top 100 Influencers and Brands.' Onalytica analyzed the online debate on M2M by looking at over 85,000 tweets to provide the most influential individuals and brands that drive the discussion. According to Onalytica the "analysis showed a very engaged community with a lot of interactive tweets. The M2M discussion seems to be more fragmented and driven by some of the major brands present in the M2M space. This really allows some room for influential individuals to create more high value interactions amongst community members."
So, you bought into the current machine learning craze and went on to collect millions/billions of records from this promising new data source. Now, what do you do with them? Too often, the abundance of data quickly turns into an abundance of problems. How do you extract that "magic essence" from your data without falling into the common pitfalls? In her session at @ThingsExpo, Natalia Ponomareva, Software Engineer at Google, provided tips on how to be successful in large scale machine learning. She briefly reviewed the frameworks available to train machine learning models on large amounts of data, touched on feature engineering and algorithm selection, and gave a few tips to help you avoid the most common mistakes.
The Jevons Paradox suggests that when technological advances increase efficiency of a resource, it results in an overall increase in consumption. Writing on the increased use of coal as a result of technological improvements, 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons found that these improvements led to the development of new ways to utilize coal. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Thiele, Chief Strategy Officer for Apcera, compared the Jevons Paradox to modern-day enterprise IT, examining how the Internet and the cloud has allowed for the democratization of IT, resulting in an increased demand for the cloud and the drive to develop new ways to utilize it.
IoT solutions exploit operational data generated by Internet-connected smart “things” for the purpose of gaining operational insight and producing “better outcomes” (for example, create new business models, eliminate unscheduled maintenance, etc.). The explosive proliferation of IoT solutions will result in an exponential growth in the volume of IoT data, precipitating significant Information Governance issues: who owns the IoT data, what are the rights/duties of IoT solutions adopters towards this data, how to deal with Data Residency and Data Privacy issues, how to manage the lifecycle of IoT data, etc.?
President Obama recently announced the launch of a new national awareness campaign to "encourage more Americans to move beyond passwords – adding an extra layer of security like a fingerprint or codes sent to your cellphone." The shift from single passwords to multi-factor authentication couldn’t be timelier or more strategic. This session will focus on why passwords alone are no longer effective, and why the time to act is now. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Chris Webber, security strategist at Centrify, discussed how we can move away from passwords towards better, more secure methods of identity verification.
"There are a lot of security issues with connected vehicles right now. We provide the connected vehicle infrastructure for both Hyundai and OnStar," explained David Miller, Chief Security Officer at Covisint, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Blockchain is certainly the rage. No matter the industry, you can’t seem to have a technology discussion before the topic is raised. According to Gartner’s latest hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ Approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just this year, according to PwC executive Seamus Cushley. While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is being taken very seriously across industries and cannot be ignored.
As digital transformations gather pace across the enterprise, companies are faced with a range of difficult challenges to overcome. Maintaining security in the face of cloud adoption, a flood of personal mobile devices in the workplace, and the sharp rise in internet-connected devices can seem daunting. These technology trends are maturing and businesses are looking for ways to combine them and differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
"There's a clear point of entry for web attacks. Everyone knows where it is. If we could get smart about inspecting what's coming in through that 'door,' we could not only get a lot of security benefits, it's also a better way to do business," explained Jaeson Yoo, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Penta Security Systems Inc., in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.