Disruptive macro trends in technology are impacting and dramatically changing the "art of the possible" relative to supply chain management practices through the innovative use of IoT, cloud, machine learning and Big Data to enable connected ecosystems of engagement. Enterprise informatics can now move beyond point solutions that merely monitor the past and implement integrated enterprise fabrics that enable end-to-end supply chain visibility to improve customer service delivery and optimize supplier management. Learn about enterprise architecture strategies for designing connected systems that integrate physical and digital supply chains with your enterprise systems, leveraging IoT devices, hybrid cloud and network service providers to enable innovative business models while mitigating risk, managing security and increasing capacity to meet customer changing SLA requirements.
Whether it is JMeter, SoapUI, Load Runner, SilkTest, Neotys or one of the cloud-based load testing solutions such as Keynote, Dynatrace (formerly Gomez) or others, breaking an application under heavy load is easy these days. Finding the problem based on automatically generated load testing reports is not. Can you tell me what is wrong based on the following reports? I’ve helped engineering organizations over the last 10 – 15 years to either run or analyze load tests. In this blog post I share my best practices and metrics I typically look when analyzing load testing results. I am not relying on the out-of-the box load testing reports, but instead I extend them based on the tools and capabilities, or put in an APM tool such as Dynatrace to capture this type of data while the load testing tool drives the load.
“We are strong believers in the DevOps movement and our staff has been doing DevOps for large enterprise environments for a number of years. The solution that we build is intended to allow DevOps teams to do security at the speed of DevOps," explained Justin Lundy, Founder & CTO of Evident.io, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Recurring revenue models are great for driving new business in every market sector, but they are complex and need to be effectively managed to maximize profits. How you handle the range of options for pricing, co-terming and proration will ultimately determine the fate of your bottom line. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Brendan O'Brien, Co-founder at Aria Systems, session examined: How time impacts recurring revenue How to effectively handle customer plan changes The range of pricing and packaging options to consider
Enterprises are adopting mobile technologies at an unprecedented rate. As Business News Daily recently reported, 1.3 billion workers will go mobile by 2015, and with that massive number, the need for enterprise mobile apps can only skyrocket. With that increase, many mobile app developers will be called upon to create internal mobile enterprise apps. These apps have many requirements and considerations that differ from the typical app destined for the public app stores. In this article, we will take the top three challenges and share some tips on how to meet these challenges:
SYS-CON Media announced that Cisco, a worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow, has launched a new ad campaign in Cloud Computing Journal. The ad campaign, a webcast titled 'Is Your Data Center Ready for the Application Economy?', focuses on the latest data center networking technologies, including SDN or ACI, and how customers are using SDN and ACI in their organizations to achieve business agility. The Cisco webcast is available on-demand.
Security can create serious friction for DevOps processes. We've come up with an approach to alleviate the friction and provide security value to DevOps teams. In her session at DevOps Summit, Shannon Lietz, Senior Manager of DevSecOps at Intuit, will discuss how DevSecOps got started and how it has evolved. Shannon Lietz has over two decades of experience pursuing next generation security solutions. She is currently the DevSecOps Leader for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s cloud security strategy, roadmap and implementation in support of corporate innovation with a DevSecOps mindset.
Cloud services are the newest tool in the arsenal of IT products in the market today. These cloud services integrate process and tools. In order to use these products effectively, organizations must have a good understanding of themselves and their business requirements. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Brian Lewis, Principal Architect at Verizon Cloud, outlined key areas of organizational focus, and how to formalize an actionable plan when migrating applications and internal services to the cloud.
"At Harbinger we do products as well as services. Our services are with helping companies move their products to the cloud operating systems. Some of the challenges we have seen as far as cloud adoption goes are in the cloud security space," noted Shrikant Pattathil, Executive Vice President at Harbinger Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
At the start of a new year we have the opportunity to look ahead and think about what trends will likely shape the coming months. 2015 is poised to be transformative for government agencies and enterprises, as an increasing number of organizations look to modernize their computing environments, expand their focus on secure and compliant hosting, and meet the growing demands of an increasingly mobile workforce. What trends will we see emerge this year? Here are the top seven predictions we see for 2015.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is causing data centers to become radically decentralized and atomized within a new paradigm known as “fog computing.” To support IoT applications, such as connected cars and smart grids, data centers' core functions will be decentralized out to the network's edges and endpoints (aka “fogs”). As this trend takes hold, Big Data analytics platforms will focus on high-volume log analysis (aka “logs”) and rely heavily on cognitive-computing algorithms (aka “cogs”) to make sense of it all.
Cloud computing adds flexibility to enterprise IT. When companies wish to take advantage of this, they are finding they need to turn to microservices instead of their traditional, monolithic architectures to accommodate frequent change. Microservices can overcome the challnges presented by frequent change, “by splitting monoliths into multiple independent services, each with its own simple business logic,” according to Sergey Sverchkov, a Solutions Architect with Altoros. Doing so leads to another issue: “choosing either PaaS or IaaS for microservices is an open question, “ he says. Sergey recently posted a thoughtful piece on the topic of PaaS vs. IaaS when implementing microservices on the Altoros blog. Altoros provides system integration services for a worldwide client base with the Cloud Foundry PaaS, yet Sverchov's piece takes a balanced view of which approach to take. His fundamntal point is that a DevOps team will be spending a lot of time monkeying around (my phrase, not Sergey's) when companies work straight to the bare infrastructure; taking the PaaS approach. “An automated PaaS is a bigger investment,” he writes, “but it can shrink release cycles from weeks to hours and even eliminate some downsides of the microservices model.” In his post, Sergey covers six different areas regarding the implementation of microservices, and the differences between IaaS vs. PaaS in each of these areas, summarized as follows: 1. One service for one job. With IaaS, “every service is deployed as an (IaaS) instance; DevOps ar responsible for configuring valid communication interfaces.” With PaaS, “scalability can be controlled by a developer. Communication endpoints are served by the PaaS.” 2. Using different tools to implement different services. With IaaS, “DevOps needs to configure an application runtime.” With PaaS, “an application runtime is automatically deployed in a PaaS container.” 3. Loose coupling. With IaaS, “The DevOps team manages IaaS instances used for service deployment.” With PaaS, “containers are isolated elements for application deployment. Container lifecycle is managed by the Paas.” 4. Developer independence. With IaaS, “ DevOps may need to create multiple IaaS environments for each of the development groups.” Alternatively, with PaaS, development groups can be managed (using Cloud Foundry terminology) as “organizations” and “spaces.” 5. Continuous delivery. With IaaS, “DevOps engineers need to install and configure build-automation tools and integrate them with a project repository.” Specficially with Cloud Foundry, “build-automation solutions can be deployed as a regular application.” 6. Integration with external services. With IaaS, “the DevOps team deploys external services. Applications connect (to them) using properties.” With PaaS, “a service broker can be used to deploy and publish some external services. Service binding makes it easier to connect an application instance to external services.” In addition to the item about IaaS/PaaS and microservices, Sergey has authored a much longer technical whitepaper on the general topic of microservices vs. monolithic architectures, available through the blog section of the Altoros website. I heard a lot of talk last year about major public cloud infrastructure providers starting to subsume PaaS into their offerings. Besides the potential for a new era of vendor lock-in, the IaaS vs. PaaS debate also involves significant functionality issues and questions of the skillsets, and more important, efficiency enterprise IT will have as the presence of cloud – public, private, and hybrid – increases within their organizations. Sergey's post adds value to this debate.
"We have developers who are really passionate about getting their code out to customers, no matter what, in the shortest possible time. Operations are very focused on procedures and policies," explained Stan Klimoff, CTO of Qubell, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Nimble Storage, the flash storage solutions company, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. Nimble Storage (NYSE: NMBL) is redefining the storage market with its Adaptive Flash platform. Nimble’s flash storage solutions enable the consolidation of all workloads and eliminate storage silos by providing enterprises with significant improvements in application performance and storage capacity. At the same time, Nimble delivers superior data protection, while simplifying business operations and lowering costs. At the core of the Adaptive Flash platform is the patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture and InfoSight, an automated cloud-based management and support system that maintains storage system peak health. More than 4,300 enterprises, governments, and service providers have deployed Nimble’s flash storage solutions across 38 countries.
I saw more discussion on big data at CES 2015 this week, compared to previous years. Everyone talked about data as the central core of everything. The IoT (Internet of Things), NFC (near Field Communication) and M2M (Machine to Machine) communication are enabling pieces for many industries - security monitoring, asset and inventory tracking, healthcare, process control, building environment monitoring, vehicle tracking and telemetry, in-store customer engagement and digital signage. Big data is the big deal here. The Big Data ecosystem includes - cloud computing, M2M/IoT, dumb terminal 2.0 (devices getting dumber - more cloud, better broadband, less about storage and more about broadband access and high quality display), and analysis. The big data business is slated to be a $200B business in 2015. Every company must insert the big data ecosystem into their future roadmap or get left out. The key here is not the technology, but its business value.
2014 has been another year of growth and change for the workload automation industry. As the industry continues to evolve and mature, we are seeing workload automation becoming a necessary staple for most enterprises. According to leading technology analysts, 2015 promises to continue the trend of digitalizing business. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to the Internet of Things, digitalization is expanding into every corner of our business and personal lives. As a result of this digitalization, IT is continuing to play an integral role in today’s accelerating rate of business. Real-time data demands, SLA requirements, and software-defined applications and infrastructure all require more flexible and nimble IT operations.
One of the biggest challenges when developing connected devices is identifying user value and delivering it through successful user experiences. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kuniavsky, Principal Scientist, Innovation Services at PARC, described an IoT-specific approach to user experience design that combines approaches from interaction design, industrial design and service design to create experiences that go beyond simple connected gadgets to create lasting, multi-device experiences grounded in people's real needs and desires.
There's no doubt that the Internet of Things is driving the next wave of innovation. Google has spent billions over the past few months vacuuming up companies that specialize in smart appliances and machine learning. Already, Philips light bulbs, Audi automobiles, and Samsung washers and dryers can communicate with and be controlled from mobile devices. To take advantage of the opportunities the Internet of Things brings to your business, you'll want to start preparing now.
Operational Hadoop and the Lambda Architecture for Streaming Data Apache Hadoop is emerging as a distributed platform for handling large and fast incoming streams of data. Predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization, and Internet-of-Things analysis are examples where Hadoop provides the scalable storage, processing, and analytics platform to gain meaningful insights from granular data that is typically only valuable from a large-scale, aggregate view. One architecture useful for capturing and analyzing streaming data is the Lambda Architecture, representing a model of how to analyze real-time and historical data together.
Apache Hadoop is an open source big data processing platform that comes with its own extensive ecosystem to support various business and technical needs. Hadoop’s specialty is large-scale processing and analytics over volumes of data that cannot be efficiently handled by traditional technologies. Hadoop is often complemented by the class of database management technologies referred to as NoSQL, which is also great for large volumes of data, but NoSQL is more about fast reads and writes than about massive processing. NoSQL and Hadoop can work together to tackle big data challenges.
Working with Big Data is challenging, especially when decision makers depend on market insights and intelligence from your data but don't have quick access to it or find it unusable. In their session at 6th Big Data Expo, Ian Khan, Global Strategic Positioning & Brand Manager at Solgenia; Zel Bianco, President, CEO and Co-Founder of Interactive Edge of Solgenia; and Ermanno Bonifazi, CEO & Founder at Solgenia, discussed how a revolutionary cloud-based BI along with mobile analytics is already changing the way organizations rely on data for decisions that affect operations as well as strategy. Also learn how combined predictive analytics, data modelling, mobile, and cloud BI are fast changing the key decision-making mechanisms in the enterprise.
The industrial software market has treated data with the mentality of “collect everything now, worry about how to use it later.” We now find ourselves buried in data, with the pervasive connectivity of the (Industrial) Internet of Things only piling on more numbers. There’s too much data and not enough information. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Bob Gates, Global Marketing Director, GE’s Intelligent Platforms business, to discuss how realizing the power of IoT, software developers are now focused on understanding how industrial data can create intelligence for industrial operations. Imagine a world where a turbine can call its operator weeks before it breaks thanks to analytics. Assets aren’t destroyed, operators save millions, and lives may be saved.
Cultural, regulatory, environmental, political and economic (CREPE) conditions over the past decade are creating cross-industry solution spaces that require processes and technologies from both the Internet of Things (IoT), and Data Management and Analytics (DMA). These solution spaces are evolving into Sensor Analytics Ecosystems (SAE) that represent significant new opportunities for organizations of all types. Public Utilities throughout the world, providing electricity, natural gas and water, are pursuing SmartGrid initiatives that represent one of the more mature examples of SAE. We have spoken with, or attended presentations from, utilities in the United States, South America, Asia and Europe.
Cryptography has become one of the most underappreciated, misunderstood components of technology. It’s too easy for salespeople to dismiss concerns with three letters that nobody wants to question. ‘Yes, of course, we use AES.’ But what exactly are you trusting to be the ultimate guardian of your data? Let’s face it – you probably don’t know. An organic, grass-fed Kobe steak is a far cry from a Big Mac, but they’re both beef, right? Not exactly. Crypto is the same way. The US government requires all federally deployed technology to meet minimum standards. For encryption, if it hasn’t been certified to meet the FIPS 140-2 benchmark, it is considered the equivalent of exposing your data in plain text. That’s how crucial it is.
The 3rd International @ThingsExpo, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo - to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY - announces that it is now accepting Keynote Proposals. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades.