Fortunately, meaningful and tangible business cases for IoT are plentiful in a broad array of industries and vertical markets. These range from simple warranty cost reduction for capital intensive assets, to minimizing downtime for vital business tools, to creating feedback loops improving product design, to improving and enhancing enterprise customer experiences. All of these business cases, which will be briefly explored in this session, hinge on cost effectively extracting relevant data from disparate devices and applying data analytics ultimately, business logic to that data. Properly implemented, IoT can effectively deliver these business outcomes.
The Year of the (Fire) Monkey is upon us and the curious, playful, smart, opportunistic and sometimes mischievous character could influence events throughout 2016. Whether you were born under the symbol or not, Monkeys thrive on challenges and 2016 is sure to bring some obstacles during the year. 2015 (Year of the Sheep) brought us a rash of high profile breaches, a bunch of new IoT devices and wearables, continued, bigger clouds and innovative attacks on vulnerable infrastructures along with the continuous deluge of big data. This is sure to continue as our digital, software-defined lives connect and intersect with the things around us. Organizations will need to extend their risk management focus to areas outside their control like the cloud and social channels but also consider the human element in all this. The new threats and heightened risk may put some companies in peril due to the lack of knowledgeable security IT personnel available.
As enterprises work to take advantage of Big Data technologies, they frequently become distracted by product-level decisions. In most new Big Data builds this approach is completely counter-productive: it presupposes tools that may not be a fit for development teams, forces IT to take on the burden of evaluating and maintaining unfamiliar technology, and represents a major up-front expense. In his session at @BigDataExpo at @ThingsExpo, Andrew Warfield, CTO and Co-Founder of Coho Data, will discuss how enterprises can bring Big Data tools to a point of customer value. He'll cover core lessons about how to approach Big Data and how to be successful at winning from Big Data in your environment.
The Net Neutrality fight has been all over the news this year with the latest installment on Net Neutrality coming in from T-Mobile. Private and public companies alike are tuned into to this continual saga to see how the eventual outcome will affect business and ultimately their online lives. But whether the FCC’s recent ruling on Net Neutrality stands the test of time or not, there is a new technology that will provide customers fast, reliable Internet services at much lower costs than private business lines.
Super Bowl 50 is upon us and while millions tune in for the faceoff between the Broncos and Panthers this Sunday, software testers will hold their breaths as these same fans flock to promoted web and mobile applications in droves. To the players, Super Bowl Sunday presents two paths: one to glory and one to crushing disappointment. Obviously, vying for victory is a team effort. But sometimes, just sometimes, the difference between winning and losing falls to one individual. With the biggest game of the year on the line and everyone watching, the final play commences.
As utility companies continue to track usage, consumers are growing equally cognizant of individual energy use as well, especially with the growth of private alternative energy practices such as home solar panels or wind power. That's why this week's IIoT top news is focused on the utility technology of tomorrow. This practice of selling privately generated energy back to the smart grid is in its infancy, but consumers now expect device connectivity to track, say, the amount of energy used by lights or the refrigerator during nighttime, off-peak hours. Because of that, the onus lies on utility companies to gather data and deploy advanced analytics that can be translated into relevant information for the average user.
Earlier this week it was reported that researchers at Boston-based security company, Rapid7, identified several security flaws in an app connected to a new toy from Mattel's Fisher-Price brand. The news of the security vulnerability caught our attention for a few reasons: The name of the toy - Smart Toy Bear - is strangely close to the name of our company SmartBear Software. More importantly, the story caught our attention because the security vulnerability brought up an important reminder about the important issue of security in today's connected world
I attended a HIVE-sponsored Meetup yesterday evening titled, “Rocking the database world with RocksDB”. Since I had never heard of RocksDB, I was curious to learn how it is rocking the database world. Facebook built this key value store storage layer originally to use for MySQL (instead of InnoDB), as MySQL is used heavily at Facebook. They claim that was not the only motivation. Then in 2013, they decided to open source RocksDB. Last evening’s speaker in an earlier post on November, 2013 had said, “Storing and accessing hundreds of petabytes of data is a huge challenge, and we’re constantly improving and overhauling our tools to make this as fast and efficient as possible. Today, we are open-sourcing RocksDB, an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage that we built and use here at Facebook.”
The Net Neutrality fight has been all over the news this year with the latest installment on Net Neutrality coming in from T-Mobile. Private and public companies alike are tuned into to this continual saga to see how the eventual outcome will affect business and ultimately their online lives. But whether the FCC’s recent ruling on Net Neutrality stands the test of time or not, there is a new technology that will provide customers fast, reliable Internet services at much lower costs than private business lines.
One of the bewildering things about DevOps is integrating the massive toolchain including the dozens of new tools that seem to crop up every year. Part of DevOps is Continuous Delivery and having a complex toolchain can add additional integration and setup to your developer environment. In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 18th Cloud Expo, Miko Matsumura, Chief Marketing Officer of Gradle Inc., will discuss which tools to use in a developer stack, how to provision the toolchain to minimize onboarding time for new developers, and how to maximize productivity according to some of the leading companies in Silicon Valley whether in the coding, build, integration, testing or deployment phase.
Fortunately, meaningful and tangible business cases for IoT are plentiful in a broad array of industries and vertical markets. These range from simple warranty cost reduction for capital intensive assets, to minimizing downtime for vital business tools, to creating feedback loops improving product design, to improving and enhancing enterprise customer experiences. All of these business cases, which will be briefly explored in this session, hinge on cost effectively extracting relevant data from disparate devices and applying data analytics ultimately, business logic to that data. Properly implemented, IoT can effectively deliver these business outcomes.
More than a decade ago, the choices were few to address the needs of data gathering and recording. Water and wastewater utilities, for example, had to be able to use a ‘fits all’ unit with set parameters and make their systems adaptable to the technology of the day. Since then, many municipal water systems such as those in Southern Utah, have had to broaden the area from which they gather, use and reclaim water. Most growing areas are even facing the dilemma of higher demands on services while trying to stay within shrinking budgets and manpower cutbacks. This is because in the past, many viewed electronic data gathering as a ‘want’ instead of a ‘need’ until now.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Pythian, a global IT services company specializing in helping companies adopt disruptive technologies to optimize revenue-generating systems, 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, New York. Founded in 1997, Pythian is a global IT services company that helps companies compete by adopting disruptive technologies such as cloud, Big Data, advanced analytics, and DevOps to advance innovation and increase agility. Specializing in designing, implementing, and managing systems that directly contribute to revenue growth and business success, Pythian's highly skilled technical teams work as an integrated extension of our clients' organizations to deliver continuous transformation and uninterrupted operational excellence.
Advances in technology and ubiquitous connectivity have made the utilization of a dispersed workforce more common. Whether that remote team is located across the street or country, management styles/ approaches will have to be adjusted to accommodate this new dynamic. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Sagi Brody, Chief Technology Officer at Webair Internet Development Inc., focused on the challenges of managing remote teams, providing real-world examples that demonstrate what works and what doesn’t. He covered proper training and integration of these teams into the corporate structure, and the most effective ways to introduce them to customers. He also discussed proper vetting of third-party teams should these functions be outsourced.
A few weeks ago my colleague PJ Hagerty wrote about driving your existing monolithic application toward a more modular design. This time around I'll dive a little bit deeper into its importance and the benefits of application modularization. One of the most important best practices in application development is testing, and more specifically automated and continuous testing. When your application is a monolith with multiple functionalities and responsibilities, automated testing becomes massively unwieldy. To illustrate this issue let's use the following illustration of conceptual (and, admittedly trivial) photo gallery web application.
Microsoft pulls a fast one! Good showing Microsoft. Project Natick is Microsoft's R&D feasibility project to explore, manufacture and operate a underwater. Hey, you don't look for cooling water, if you can take the salt out. How is latency improved? drop the datacenter at the nearest ocean or lake. Energy efficiency is no brainer considering the environment the datacenter is in. Bring in 3D manufacturing and you can have a datacenter manufactured and deployed in no time at all, no need for expensive land acquisition, licenses, certificates etc.
Performance is the elusive butterfly of API development. Everybody is intrigued with its beauty, yet few know how to capture it. In the old days, the approach of many shops to ensure a performant API was to create some code and then pass it over to the wall to QA to do load testing. Later some integration testing took place. As long as the API worked and it was met some marginal performance benchmarks, things were good. This worked well when a public, HTTP based API, consumed by a wide variety of distributed devices was more the exception than the rule. However, today APIs are a big deal and they are everywhere, so much so that companies are posting very big infographics prominently in the front page of the New York Times to create even more awareness about the technology to the general public.
Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On one hand, hybrid cloud is all the rage. Adopting this option promises all the cost savings of public cloud with the security and comfort of private cloud. This environment would not only check the box for meeting the cloud computing mandate, but also position the organization as innovative and industry-leading. Why wouldn’t a forward-leaning management team go all in with cloud?
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. The Men & Mice Suite overlay solution is already known for its powerful application in heterogeneous operating environments, enabling enterprises to scale without fuss. Building on a solid range of diverse platform support, the Men & Mice Suite is taking overlay dexterity one step further into the cloud through full support for Microsoft Azure DNS (January 2016) and AWS Amazon Route 53 (from 2014). Major cloud platform support allows Men & Mice Suite users free rein to extend their infrastructure into the cloud if, and when, they need it.
This post is the second in a series based on a discussion with Marc Andreessen. The first was on: AI, Robotics, Jobs and Accelerating The Future Gourley: Can you provide more context on what kind of education and training? Andreessen: It is fair to say I am biased on that subject but my view is that the quantitative skills will be in greater demand: Math, Economics, Science, Engineering, Computer Science. The requirements for these are rising at much higher rates so their premium is rising. All of us should seek to self educate on these when we can and this is what we should encourage our youth to pursue. We should of course value other more qualitative skills like history, politics, arts and culture, but understand that this is an increasingly technical world and even those people will need more understanding about how the world really works. If you want to be as relevant as possible, get as many quantitative skills as you can and keep learning.
In most cases, it is convenient to have some human interaction with a web (micro-)service, no matter how small it is. A traditional approach would be to create an HTTP interface, where user requests will be dispatched and HTML/CSS pages must be served. This approach is indeed very traditional for a web site, but not really convenient for a web service, which is not intended to be good looking, 24x7 up and running and UX-optimized. Instead, talking to a web service in a chat-bot mode would be much more convenient, both for a user and web service developer.
This post is the second in a series based on a discussion with Marc Andreessen. The first was on: AI, Robotics, Jobs and Accelerating The Future Gourley: Can you provide more context on what kind of education and training? Andreessen: It is fair to say I am biased on that subject but my view is that the quantitative skills will be in greater demand: Math, Economics, Science, Engineering, Computer Science. The requirements for these are rising at much higher rates so their premium is rising. All of us should seek to self educate on these when we can and this is what we should encourage our youth to pursue. We should of course value other more qualitative skills like history, politics, arts and culture, but understand that this is an increasingly technical world and even those people will need more understanding about how the world really works. If you want to be as relevant as possible, get as many quantitative skills as you can and keep learning.
In a previous post on theoretical Appsec vulnerabilities, I covered how "it's theoretical" is misused by those who are trying to avoid fixing a security vulnerability or taking responsibility for it-for example, the Lenovo Superfish breach, Heartbleed, and airline wifi attacks. The idea that a vulnerability is merely theoretical is not only ignorant but dangerous. Software exploits occur because bad actors operate by finding unexpected loopholes in a software system. Think of it this way - if you left your door unlocked is it a security issue? Or perhaps "If an unlocked door is never entered, is it really unlocked" if you're a philosopher. One could contend that the risk is theoretical, but most of us would say that such a statement is ridiculous. (Props to those who live in an area where door security isn't required.)
The arrival of the Microsoft Azure Stack Technical Preview marks a turning point in the cloud-computing market and forms a leading indicator of how dramatically Microsoft has changed in the past two years. The cloud turning point comes because the path to hybrid-cloud capabilities and benefits has a powerful new usher, one with the enterprise, developer, and service-provider presence, R and D budget, and competitive imperative to succeed in a market still underserved and nebulous.
Time for a blog about personal privacy, before we all have forgotten about the concept. The Circle is both the title of an 2009 album by Bon Jovi as a 2013 novel by Dave Eggers. A novel relevant for a cloud blog because it describes a future in which one company (the Circle) largely controls the nexus of information, social, mobile and cloud. The use of a novel as medium for the communication of ideas regarding business or politics is not new. Think of examples as “The Goal” (about manufacturing management), “The Phoenix Project” (about IT Management), “Animal Farm” (about politics) and of course “1984” (about society). The Circle remind us of 1984, although in The Circle citizens opt-in voluntarily to life under an all seeing and omnipresent authority. An authority which, incidentally, is not a government, but a commercial social media and cloud services outfit.