The cloud is now a fact of life but generating recurring revenues that are driven by solutions and services on a consumption model have been hard to implement, until now. In their session at 16th Cloud Expo, Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder of Solgenia, and Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia, will discuss how a top European telco has leveraged the innovative recurring revenue generating capability of the consumption cloud to enable a unique cloud monetization model to drive results.
Application troubleshooting survey reveals integrated tools lead to significant response time improvements Thirty-seven percent of developers rely on user notifications to identify issues, yet integrated tools reduce customer impact by 62%. See the Infographic below or download the complete report here.
JFrog on Thursday announced that it has added Docker support to Bintray, its distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) platform. When combined with JFrog’s Artifactory binary repository management system, organizations can now manage Docker images with an end-to-end solution that supports all technologies. The new version of Bintray allows organizations to create an unlimited number of private Docker repositories, and through the use of fast Akamai content delivery networks (CDNs), it decreases the download time of large Docker repositories, speeding DevOps work significantly. Bintray’s highly available service and download layer also helps Docker users eliminate service disruption and performance degradation issues.
When it comes to cybersecurity initiatives, the U.S. government has not taken a back seat. Perhaps owning to the number of high profile breaches and damaging insider attacks that have occurred in the past few years, this White House in particular has been very vocal about the federal government’s role in putting a stop to cyberattacks. Recent examples of this include Obama’s visit to Stanford University to put meet with CEOs and CSOs at major companies and discuss cybersecurity challenges, the establishment of a cybersecurity center to collect cybersecurity intelligence and the signing of an executive order to promote information sharing. In January, Congress also kicked off hearings about a national breach notification law; the law’s tenants would, in most cases, mandate breach notification to consumers within 30 days. Currently, there are 51 differing state and territorial breach notification rules in effect. The proposed federal data breach legislation to regularize responses across the country would replace the patchwork of varied laws on the topic.
Skytap Inc., has appointed David Frost as vice president of professional services. David joins Skytap from Deloitte Consulting where he served as Managing Director leading SAP, Cloud, and Advanced Technology Services. At Skytap, David will head the company's professional services organization, and spearhead a new consulting practice that will guide IT organizations through the adoption of DevOps best practices. David's appointment comes on the heels of Skytap's recent $35 million Series D funding announcement, and record growth in 2014.
It is not an unusual situation for an Analyst to move into a end user or a vendor role, especially if the analyst came from an operational background originally. I and John Rakowski (Forrester) come from end user practitioner roles before an analyst firm, if anything we are rounding out our experiences and knowledge. We’ve seen several analysts move from Gartner, several I knew well Chris Wolf and Mark Margevicius who are at VMware and Aneel Lakhani at SignalFuse. Several have recently left Forrester as indicated in this article. Everyone knows the APM industry and IT software in general is incestuious, we’re all going to work together again. There are loads of great technology companies out there, and many more ideas to be explored and created.
Mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT) have thrust many businesses into the era of the truly digital enterprise. This means opening up new channels and business opportunities. APIs are the key, enabling the digital enterprise to connect itself to myriad external apps and partners while cracking open an equally expansive range of fresh internal connections. Everything a digital enterprise touches through a Mobile or IoT device is backed by an API. As an enterprise, you are consuming more data and services as APIs from third parties than ever before. The question, however, is “Do you know if you are getting the service level out of those third-party APIs that you are paying for?” Are you able to stop the he said/she said arguments with support when something goes wrong?
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a technology designed to make DevOps easier and allow developers to focus on application development. The PaaS takes care of provisioning, scaling, HA, and other cloud management aspects. Apache Stratos is a PaaS codebase developed in Apache and designed to create a highly productive developer environment while also supporting powerful deployment options. Integration with the Docker platform, CoreOS Linux distribution, and Kubernetes container management system brings more scalability and flexibility to Apache Stratos PaaS. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Lakmal Warusawithana, Director of Cloud Architecture at WSO2 Inc., will discuss installing and deploying sample applications using Docker, CoreOS and Kubernetes, and walkthrough how it can be extended to support new application containers. He will also demonstrate app deployment, provisioning, auto-scaling, and more.
In every era of innovation, disruptive technologies have had their disbelievers who resisted adopting new concepts. But in today’s business world, “being disruptive” has really empowered many businesses to make tough decisions, investments, and lead the changes that need to be seen organization-wide. Now, many disruptive technologies are truly the foundation for growth – like cloud. Unfortunately, the same pioneering attitude from the executive team doesn’t always trickle down to the internal IT departments. For example, the companies that manufacture, supply, and service some of the most remarkable high-tech equipment in the world often heavily rely on outdated IT systems to run their own internal processes.
Every innovation or invention was originally a daydream. You like to imagine a “what-if” scenario. And with all the attention being paid to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) you don’t have to stretch the imagination too much to see how this may impact commercial and homeowners insurance. We’re beyond the point of accepting this as a leap of faith. The groundwork is laid. Now it’s just a matter of time. We can thank the inventors of smart thermostats for developing a practical business application that everyone can relate to. Gone are the salad days of smart home apps, the early chalkboard drawings that imagined equipping the refrigerator with a speaker that would bark you orders to add milk to your grocery list.
Continuous Delivery is all about making small changes. Work flows more easily, planning is simpler, error detection is helped and the time from idea to value is reduced when we make changes in small increments, but how do you solve big problems in small pieces? How do you maintain a coherent design when each change is small? There are many facets to this problem. The organisations that are best at it tend to take a very broad view of design and think about things like how teams are structured, how work is defined and how design works when delivering a flow of many small features.
Over on the other side of the fence IT ops are screaming at the various portfolio dev teams for releasing highly risky functionality way too frequently but since the Agile dev adoption production has only had a couple of low priority P4 incidents caused by bad code releases. Things must be looking good with the new dev process but then a few months down the track BAM a P1 incident the Monday morning after a agile delivered release is deployed. Highly important business functionality is broken in one of the downstream systems. It's all hands to the pump and both IT dev and IT Ops team are getting frustrated with each other trying to resolve the incident holding back blame on which side of the fence caused the incident. A few hours later all fixed and the communication goes out to the business that prod incident is resolved.
The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security. In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, examined the problems and presented some solutions for moving security into the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.
A successful recurring revenue business requires a focus on monetization across every aspect of the customer relationship, not just billing or payments. Monetization is an end-to-end process from activation through cancelation. While traditional billing systems are designed to manage one-time sales, modern systems are designed to support recurring revenue management with the functionality and integration capabilities necessary to coordinate and manage business processes and customer touch points.
As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.
An explosive combination of technology trends will be where ‘microservices’ and the IoT Internet of Things intersect, a concept we can describe by comparing it with a previous theme, the ‘X Internet.' The idea of using small self-contained application components has been popular since XML Web services began and a distributed computing future of smart fridges and kettles was imagined long back in the early Internet years.
Smart mobile teams know that delivering a 5-star app is more than just finding a good business use-case and designing an app with wow experience; it’s also about ensuring amazing app performance. Apps that perform well will engage the customer – poor app performance is a sure fire way to lose the customer and their business. To deliver a first-rate app performance, mobile teams have to master the many variables which affect performance:
Our guest on the podcast this week is Tim Prendergast, Founder and CEO of Evident.io. We discuss the concept of “continuous security” and other ways to keep up with the dynamically changing environments created by the cloud. Listen in to learn why it is essential that your security solutions match the speed of your release cycle, even becoming integrated into your DevOps initiatives. Check out this episode!
Today’s enterprise is being driven by disruptive competitive and human capital requirements to provide enterprise application access through not only desktops, but also mobile devices. To retrofit existing programs across all these devices using traditional programming methods is very costly and time consuming – often prohibitively so. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jesse Shiah, CEO, President, and Co-Founder of AgilePoint Inc., discussed how you can create applications that run on all mobile devices as well as laptops and desktops using a visual drag-and-drop application – and eForms-building techniques in 10% of the time it would take for traditional programming. Connect to all your existing in-house systems and databases as well as third-party applications like Salesforce, SAP, Office 365, etc., through easy-to-create and maintain process-centric enterprise workflow applications your team can create in days.
Docker has acquired software-defined networking (SDN) startup SocketPlane. SocketPlane, which was founded in Q4, 2014, with a vision of delivering Docker-native networking, has been an active participant in shaping the initial efforts around Docker’s open API for networking. The explicit focus of the SocketPlane team within Docker will be on collaborating with the partner community to complete a rich set of networking APIs that addresses the needs of application developers and network and system administrators alike.
An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models. For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being: Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of big cost processes will drive huge savings for many firms. Very nicely presented too.
Then I’ve received an LinkedIn email from this woman stating that she had a business proposition for me, and if I was interested, she was ready to explain. She also provided her email that ended in outlook.com. I checked her LinkedIn profile again. Looked legit. She even had a Twitter account with recent tweets in two languages. I responded that I was ready to hear about this business proposition. Next day I’ve received a long email from her explaining how she had a private client named Lewis Fain who initially deposited €19M in their bank and she helped him to grow the wealth to €22M, but unfortunately he died in a car crash. She’s ready to wire transfer me the money, in one condition: we’d split the amount in half so she could improve the wellbeing of her family. She also asked me not to ruin her career in the bank if I was not interested.
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are increasing at an unprecedented rate. The threat landscape of today is drastically different than just a few years ago. Attacks are much more organized and sophisticated. They are harder to detect and even harder to anticipate. In the foreseeable future it's going to get a whole lot harder. Everything you know today will change. Keeping up with this changing landscape is already a daunting task. Your organization needs to use the latest tools, methods and expertise to guard against those threats. But will that be enough? In the foreseeable future attacks will originate from entirely new attack platforms. The tools and methods you use today will not protect you from the threats you will face tomorrow. Your security experts will be no match for this new threat. Where will these attacks come from? It isn't where you think.
Over the last couple of years I have talked to numerous enterprise customers, analysts, industry pundits, and others interested in cloud technologies, and one thing is abundantly clear – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) seems to mean different things to different people. But the term PaaS is irrelevant – it's just noise. What is relevant, and what is important, is what PaaS does: enable applications. That's what enterprises care about. They want to accelerate application development to get products to market faster and into users' hands sooner.
Welcome to my four-part series on what I’m going to call the Art of DevOps. We will embark on a mission to reveal the extremely valuable intelligence that’s been collected about a unique strategy to continuously deliver assets to the operational battleground safely, securely and quickly. This strategy drives optimal monitoring of the frontlines and enhanced communications with the troops supporting the initial development. I do make the assumption that most of you are battle-worthy veterans in one or more of the environments that I’ll review. Beyond this introduction blog, I’ll brief you on some of the best DevOps tactics to aid in your deployments while providing maximum situational awareness within each environment. I’ll also do my best to expand upon the best lines of defense with minimal disruption. Unfortunately, in my experience, many of you will be deficient either over lack of preparation such as test automation, damaged assets or organizational challenges in one or more areas of deployment. The goal of this series is to help you recognize where your deficits are, how to address certain scenarios and which tactics you need to use to lead a successful DevOps operation.