Big Data, cloud, analytics, contextual information, wearable tech, sensors, mobility, and WebRTC: together, these advances have created a perfect storm of technologies that are disrupting and transforming classic communications models and ecosystems. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Erik Perotti, Senior Manager of New Ventures on Plantronics’ Innovation team, will provide an overview of this technological shift, including associated business and consumer communications impacts, and opportunities it may enable, complement or entirely transform.
Sensors allow us to digitally monitor our physical world, and take real-time action on the data from afar. Plant managers, in fact, can manage multiple manufacturing locations around the world in real-time via sensors and Internet connectivity. Drone pilots in the Nevada desert; project military force by flying combat missions around the world via sensors and remote control. Trucking companies can track and manage, via telematics, thousands of trucks, trailers and their cargo all across the country in real-time. As automation increases due to advances in sensors, bandwidth, artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learning - precision becomes not only possible, but all-important.
SYS-CON Events announced today BZ Media LLC has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. BZ Media LLC is a high-tech media company that produces technical conferences and expositions, and publishes a magazine, newsletters and websites in the software development, SharePoint, mobile development and Commercial Drone markets.
Both prospects and customers often ask me why we need an artifact repository. Some think that as their favorite CI (Continuous Integration) server such as Jenkins already stores the output of each build, maybe there's no need to add an artifact repository to their existing tool chain. Others simply wonder why they need such a repository at all. In this blog post I'll discuss why it's essential for any continuous delivery and deployment project to version everything, and why artifact repositories such as Artifactory or Nexus are great choices for managing binary and other artifacts.
This post provides an update on the ongoing battle between Apple and the U.S. government regarding Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone, recovered by police after the horrific massacre in San Bernadino on December 2, 2015. It is just days before the March 22, 2016 hearing in this long-running, highly publicized dispute between the FBI and Apple, with the FBI’s demands of Apple being variously termed “jailbreak”, put a backdoor into, brute force access, compromise security of, or any number of other descriptors, in the case officially known as In the Matter of the Search of an Apple iPhone Seized During the Execution of a Search Warrant on a Black Lexus IS300, California License Plate 35KGD203. It is a good time, amongst all the massive press coverage and legal wrangling, to get back to some of the basics of the legal proceedings.
Gone are the days when SOAP, REST and microservices were buzzwords that did not apply to you. Gone are also the days when monolithic applications were built by organizations end-end. The availability of specialized components and services from different organizations and the access to these components through RESTful services has resulted in a major inflexion point with APIs becoming the mechanism for data interchange and systems to interact. Most organizations are familiar with the benefits of developing APIs that can be shared publicly and used by other third-party applications.
Cloud applications are well established for many activities such as CRM, HR, and billing. With the cloud paradigm proven for so many enterprise tasks, the question of cloud vs. on-premises seems like yesterday’s – or even last year’s – debate. But is the cloud ready to handle the unique requirements of legal work? The answer is yes, with a caveat. The cloud is ready for legal, but a legal firm must ensure its cloud vendor, cloud applications and internal processes for dealing with the vendor and applications are all in line with legal industry best practices.
Many years ago, I wrote a blog that aimed to help organizations evaluate open source projects in terms of enterprise suitability. That blog was lost when the employer took the publication off-line, and my Google-fu has been unable to recover a copy (if you happen to have it, ping me, I’d love a copy). At the time I wrote it, I considered blogs to be dispensable, with less need to keep a copy than articles – because they were largely opinion. Turns out that precisely because blogs are opinion+insight, you have to refer to them more to update or defend than most articles. I’ve been saving them since shortly after that particular blog was published, but that was no help here.
Big Data analytics and the Internet of Things are still relative newcomers. Given how quickly technology moves, though, it’s not surprising that their next incarnations are already being talked about: cognitive analytics and a much-grown Internet of Things (IoT). We all know about the Internet of Things: it’s data from a host of Web-connected devices that can be analyzed and studied, just like traditional data analytics. But what is cognitive analytics? Think back to old sci-fi shows. Remember the insanely smart, almost-human robot sidekick? Cognitive analytics isn’t there yet, but it does emulate that heady mixture of massive processing power and advanced logical capabilities. In some cases, cognitive analytics could be used to interact with humans; in others, it could handle tasks with very little human input.
SYS-CON Events announced today that IBM Cloud Data Services has been named "Bronze Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. IBM has announced a broad expansion of its Cloud Data Services portfolio with more than 25 services on the IBM Cloud. They are designed to help developers build, deploy and manage web and mobile applications and enable data scientists to discover hidden trends using data and analytics in the cloud. The hybrid cloud services can be deployed across multiple cloud providers and are based on open source technologies, open ecosystems that include company and third-party data, and open architectures that allow data to easily flow amongst the different services.
Exosite has announced its Taipei Office has formally been established. Exosite’s Taiwan operations have grown from the Taichung team, primarily focused on research and development, into a full-service IoT enablement organization with development and consulting capabilities. The new Taipei office is located in the Taipei Minsheng Dunhua district, surrounded by all its hardware and channel partners. Exosite will devote its time to the Taiwan market and expand its business into the Asia-Pacific market.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Men & Mice, the leading global provider of DNS, DHCP and IP address management overlay solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Men & Mice announced the release of Version 7.1 of the Men & Mice Suite. The Men & Mice Suite is a software-based IP Address Management (IPAM) solution, used by many large and growing global enterprises, to establish secure and efficient control of their networks.
Cloud computing can get confusing sometimes. For IT professionals who have been part of technology for the last few years sometimes new terminology is just a way to redefine things that were done in the past. “We’ve done that since 1995,” or “We used to do that in the ’80s,” is not an uncommon response that we sometimes hear when we speak about new things. Cloud computing is one such area that has its roots in the 1970s when the remote job entry system did somewhat of what today’s cloud computing technology does, but at a very small, miniature scale.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Formation Data Systems, a company revolutionizing enterprise storage, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Formation Data Systems enables organizations to realize transformative benefits of modern, software-defined storage to address the challenges faced by customers deploying traditional and modern applications. The revolutionary FormationOne™ Dynamic Storage Platform combines the agility, flexibility and simplicity of public cloud approaches with the control, security and flexibility of private datacenter storage. FormationOne has been built for Enterprise IT, SaaS application providers, and service providers, seeking ways to transform the agility and economics of their storage and data management environment.
SYS-CON Events announced today that (ISC)²® ("ISC-squared") will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. (ISC)²® and KPMG LLP have announced they will survey federal cybersecurity executives on the state of cybersecurity in the federal government.
The companies that are succeeding with their use of public cloud services are sharing similar stories online and at industry conferences about what they consider to be the leading drivers of their progress. These are usually in the form of bold, strategic decisions that demonstrate different thinking to where they were some years ago. These bold decisions reflect the changing focus on cloud to above that of the original Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model and toward the NoOps, higher-order cloud services such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Decisions such as adopting server-less models, embracing an open source software (OSS) approach as part of becoming a “software company,” and choosing to break with decades of IT supplier relationships – they all have a profound impact across the industry.
There are many challenges involved in architecting a resilient, scalable storage infrastructure for the next generation of hyper-scale modern data centers. In our previous blog post, we covered how to build a disaggregated storage model out of commodity hardware for lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in today's hyper-scale data centers. Deploying commodity hardware usually requires an intelligent orchestration and management software like FreeStor® to provide an abstraction layer separating heterogeneous storage hardware from the applications.
A myriad of point-tools are involved in every organizations’ software production. Some of our enterprise customers report using over 50 tools along their pipeline – from code development all the way to releasing into Production. For the majority of development organizations today, these tools are comprised of a mix of commercial and Open Source (OSS) technologies. Existing open source tools can be found throughout your software Dev and Ops teams - from programming languages, infrastructure and technology stacks, development and test tools, project management and bug tracking, source control management, CI, configuration management, and more - OSS is everywhere.
SYS-CON Events announced today that DDN Storage has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced it has continued its leadership as the dominant storage provider of the world’s fastest supercomputers for the seventh consecutive year with storage solutions that power two-thirds of identifiable sites on the most recent TOP500.org rankings list. The Top500 list ranks the largest supercomputing environments by performance capabilities, highlighting the vendors and technologies that can uniquely deliver the capabilities to power the most data intensive environments on the globe.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Fusion, a leading provider of cloud services, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 18th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Fusion has announced that an East Coast affiliate of a major national non-profit organization has signed a three year agreement with Fusion to migrate its voice communications systems to the cloud. A key reason for the non-profit organization’s selection was Fusion’s ability to improve productivity while lowering costs, which will enable the non-profit to devote more of its budget to its mission.
Hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming essential to today’s information technology processes. This is why hybrid cloud risk management has become the keystone to many modern corporate strategies. To effectively manage this shift, leading enterprises are reorganizing how the business side of IT is accomplished. When this reality is coupled with the rising cost of poor cybersecurity, decisions often rise to the board level.
There are few trends in enterprise IT receiving more attention in 2016 than DevOps. A combo of the words "development" and "operations," DevOps is a term that can mean a lot of different things depending on the context. Sometimes it refers to specific software or hardware tools, e.g., a DevOps automation platform for spinning up test labs or sandboxes – but more often it is used to describe a broad new approach to culture within an organization.
SYS-CON Events announced today that HGST, a Western Digital Company, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 18th Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 7-9, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York, New York. Helping the world harness the power of data, Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), has announced that its HGST Active Archive System has been certified with the FXT 5000 Series Edge Filer family from Avere, a leading provider of cloud file storage infrastructure. The combined strength of the HGST Active Archive System and Avere 5000 FXT Edge Filer provides maximum flexibility to enable enterprises to leverage the scalbility and economics of cloud architectures, while preserving investments in file storage and applications. The solution allows users to deploy on-premises and remote cloud-scale file storage as well as hybrid cloud-bursting models. The HGST Active Archive System provides exabyte scalability with 15-nines of data durability, while the Avere 5000 FXT Series Edge Filers provide effortless storage tiering between high performance NAS and the HGST Active Archive System. The cloud-bursting solution uses intelligent file system caching to shepherd only active data to cloud-based compute platforms, while still delivering the performance of local compute and storage.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Catchpoint Systems, Inc., a provider of innovative web and infrastructure monitoring solutions, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit at 18th Cloud Expo New York, which will take place June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Catchpoint Systems, Inc., has announced the addition of over 50 monitoring nodes in the last quarter, bringing its total to more than 500 worldwide. This expansion of new monitoring locations focuses on China, where the company has already invested heavily, as well as Africa and Iran.
I don't think we take competition serious enough. I don't think we fully understand how important digital transformation is, and the far-reaching economic implications of not competing effectively. In 2014 in a discussion about the struggling Finnish economy, Mr Stubb, the former prime minister of Finland, told a newspaper, "Steve Jobs took our [country's] jobs." His words describe the severe impact of not competing effectively on a nation's economy. In a global market innovation and competition from the other side of the world can powerfully and rapidly impact the local economy for good or bad.