When we look back at the IT world in 2015, we think of high profile hacks and crashes that brought vastly expensive systems to their knees - Ashley Madison, United Airlines, the New York Stock Exchange and so on... With the constant disruption and complexity added to an already convoluted IT landscape, your success in 2016 will center around how well you decipher complexity. Will you fail under the added weight of new technology, or can you weave your way through to rise above it?
Agile, which started in the development organization, has gradually expanded into other areas downstream - namely IT and Operations. Teams – then teams of teams – have streamlined processes, improved feedback loops and driven a much faster pace into IT departments which have had profound effects on the entire organization. In his session at DevOps Summit, Anders Wallgren, Chief Technology Officer of Electric Cloud, discussed how DevOps and Continuous Delivery have emerged to help connect development with IT operations (mainly through the introduction of Automation) to support and amplify agility, responsiveness and faster time to market throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
Who are you? How do you introduce yourself? Do you use a name, or do you greet a friend by the last four digits of his social security number? Assuming you don’t, why are we content to associate our identity with 10 random digits assigned by our phone company? Identity is an issue that affects everyone, but as individuals we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ben Klang, Founder & President of Mojo Lingo, discussed the impact of technology on identity. Should we federate, or not? How should identity be secured? Who owns the identity? How is identity created, addressed, and shared?
Beacon technology offers a new way for companies to deliver value to their customers by enabling micro-location based interaction at every physical touch point. This knowledge opens up a new playground for creating personalized services and inventing new experiences between a company and its customers, but how exactly can organizations monetize this? For the past two years we have heard about mobile notifications and messaging, but this has not taken off and could be considered spamming.
The traditional, on-premise computing model has established processes, accreditations, certifications, governance and compliance rules - FISMA, NERC CIP, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, IRS 1075. While the security industry is aggressively addressing the technical security gaps in cloud-driven services, many organizations using cloud services are struggling to implement and adapt strategic processes, procedures, and controls for cloud governance and due diligence.
Rapid innovation, changing business landscapes, and new IT demands force businesses to make changes quickly. The DevOps approach is a way to increase business agility through collaboration, communication, and integration across different teams in the IT organization. In his session at @DevOpsSummit, Chris Van Tuin, Chief Technologist for the Western US at Red Hat, discussed: The acceleration of application delivery for the business with DevOps
The Internet of Things has the potential to disrupt all industries, not just consumer, as businesses leverage the new insights and capabilities enabled by new devices / things, automation, integration and analytics, etc., to transform how they do business. One industry ripe for disruption is higher education. Colleges and universities are being challenged with serving more students and at the same time ensuring successful student outcomes. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Witeck, Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, looked at the potential of IoT in providing the platform for the next generation classroom, helping schools to easily offer a blended learning environment for students inside and outside of the classroom.
Cloud adoption across enterprises is accelerating and this momentum will continue to be a core focus for many organizations in 2016. Realizing we are still in the early stages of the cloud migration tsunami is both exciting and scary at the same time. When it comes to the cloud, unprecedented opportunities lie ahead that can be capitalized upon. There is also a serious threat of being left behind if not well prepared. Cloud enabled IT will percolate throughout all parts of the enterprise in some form or another. Every single aspect of IT – including server infrastructure, networks, storage, application development, packaged apps, and applications management – will all be touched and transformed by the cloud in short order.
NHK, Japan Broadcasting, will feature the upcoming @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley in a special 'Internet of Things' and smart technology documentary that will be filmed on the expo floor between November 3 to 5, 2015, in Santa Clara. NHK is the sole public TV network in Japan equivalent to the BBC in the UK and the largest in Asia with many award-winning science and technology programs. Japanese TV is producing a documentary about IoT and Smart technology and will be covering @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley. The program, to be aired during the peak viewership season of the year, will have a major impact on the industry in Japan. The film's director is writing a scenario to fit in the story in the next few days will be turned in to the network.
The Internet of Things is in the early stages of mainstream deployment but it promises to unlock value and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize, and monetize their assets. IoT is a complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, analytics and devices that need to be able to communicate geographically and across all functions. Once the data is collected from numerous endpoints, the challenge then becomes converting it into actionable insight.
“If data analysis is Big Data’s "tip of the spear" when it comes to delivering data-dependent value to customers or clients, we also must address how that spear is shaped, sharpened, aimed, and thrown – and, of course, whether or not it hits its intended target.” In Meeting the Mission of Transportation Safety, Richard McKinney, U.S. Department of Transportation's CIO, describes four components for what I call an “enterprise data strategy.”
Is ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) still relevant in the digital world? The short answer is…yes. The longer answer is: it depends on your organization’s understanding and application of ITIL. In order to best answer the question it’s important to take a step back and examine the goals and intent of ITIL.
As smart cars, pre-loaded with millions of lines of code, are becoming the norm in the automotive industry, the topic of safety has come to the forefront of the conversation in a big way. Most consumers remember several large-scale recalls in the past few years, and it’s left some a bit wary of software glitches that could affect driver safety.
Developers are often caught between a rock and a hard place. They aren’t allowed to employ the tricks of the trade that can squeeze more performance out of their code because the consequences – technical debt stemming from impaired maintainability - are generally considered even worse. It’s not appropriate, for example, to use bit-shifting techniques to do simple multiplication because while it might be milliseconds faster, it isn’t always universally understood and thus can cause issues with long-term maintainability.
Containers are revolutionizing the way we deploy and maintain our infrastructures, but monitoring and troubleshooting in a containerized environment can still be painful and impractical. Understanding even basic resource usage is difficult – let alone tracking network connections or malicious activity. In his session at DevOps Summit, Gianluca Borello, Sr. Software Engineer at Sysdig, covered the current state of the art for container monitoring and visibility, including pros / cons and live demonstrations of each method. Special emphasis will be put on sysdig, an open source troubleshooting tool. Sysdig offers unprecedented container visibility without the need to break the “sanctity” of the container.
Cloud adoption across enterprises is accelerating and this momentum will continue to be a core focus for many organizations in 2016. Realizing we are still in the early stages of the cloud migration tsunami is both exciting and scary at the same time. When it comes to the cloud, unprecedented opportunities lie ahead that can be capitalized upon. There is also a serious threat of being left behind if not well prepared. Cloud enabled IT will percolate throughout all parts of the enterprise in some form or another. Every single aspect of IT – including server infrastructure, networks, storage, application development, packaged apps, and applications management – will all be touched and transformed by the cloud in short order.
If a slow or unresponsive application on your mobile device or PC has ever left you feeling angry, frustrated and unproductive, you're not alone. Business success in today's digital age relies on application performance. Yet according to the Riverbed Global Application Performance Survey 2015, nine out of 10 organizations suffer from poor performance on a regular basis. Executives say the poor performance of enterprise applications has negatively impacted their work on a regular basis. Consequently, this performance gap between the needs of the business and IT's ability to deliver leads directly to delays, missed deadlines, angry customers and damaged brands.
Were you surprised with that new car in your driveway sporting a huge bow this holiday season? Yea, me neither. But we did get a new gaming console that doesn't require you to hold a controller in your hand. You know The One. It has a camera that picks up your body movements and turns that into action on your screen. It'll even scan your face and create a digitized, animated You right in front of your eyes. You can then choose your You to play games. Now I realize some of you have had these for several years but we've been stuck in 2010 at our house...at least with gaming consoles.
SYS-CON Events announced today that eCube Systems, the leading provider of modern development tools and best practices for Continuous Integration on OpenVMS, will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. eCube Systems offers a family of middleware products and development tools that maximize return on technology investment by leveraging existing technical equity to meet evolving business needs. Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies turn to eCube Systems to reduce risk, extend ROI and increase productivity as they consolidate existing capabilities and evolve legacy systems to meet modern requirements for productivity, flexibility and modern best practices.
Test automation is arguably the most important innovation to the process of QA testing in software development. The ability to automate regression testing and other repetitive test cases can significantly reduce the overall production time for even the most complex solutions. As software continues to be developed for new platforms – including mobile devices and the diverse array of endpoints that will be created during the rise of the Internet of Things - automation integration will have a huge hand to play delivering reliable, multifunctional products that end users want and need.
Test automation is arguably the most important innovation to the process of QA testing in software development. The ability to automate regression testing and other repetitive test cases can significantly reduce the overall production time for even the most complex solutions. As software continues to be developed for new platforms – including mobile devices and the diverse array of endpoints that will be created during the rise of the Internet of Things - automation integration will have a huge hand to play delivering reliable, multifunctional products that end users want and need.
A brilliant business often starts with an entrepreneur dreaming up a fantastic business idea. Most entrepreneurs at the beginning of their journeys are often strapped for cash, and according to a recent study, 95% of seed-stage founders thought it would either remain the same or get harder to raise money. Even access to Angel funds at the very start (idea stage) is generally uncommon. Startups want to sprout their ideas fast, and the last thing they want is to spend their time and energy is to find the ground, dig the soil, remove the weeds before sowing the seed, and water it till the idea breathes life.
Today’s software defined and driven business requires fast changes in business models, this permeates successful businesses. What this means is that almost every company is learning how to make small rapid changes and adjustments within their business, especially within software systems. The result of this is that IT is feeling immense pressure to evolve, the net result is a major uptick of private cloud (especially Apprenda, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, RedHat OpenShift) and public clouds (especially Amazon and Microsoft) within our install base of large enterprises. These new platforms enable faster development, testing, and releasing of software. Enterprise customers are getting much smarter, by using automation to drive the software lifecycle including continuous integration, and even experimenting and beginning to use continuous release processes. This is no longer a startup scenario, it’s a strategy for our large enterprise customers. These companies trying to build agile development and operations teams, by changing people, process, and technology to enable a DevOps feedback loop:
Everyone is talking about the Cloud, whether on the news or in advertisements from top-tier tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. More important, the small and medium business (SMB) community has embraced the Cloud. Specifically, more than half of SMBs in the US currently use cloud storage, according to a new survey from Clutch. Cloud storage's increased popularity in the SMB market arises from the numerous benefits the service offers, such as the reduced cost of data storage, backup and recovery, improved workforce productivity from file sharing and collaboration, and additional disaster protection. These factors make cloud storage appealing to SMBs and will increase the rate of cloud storage service adoption in 2016.
SYS-CON Events announced today that eCube Systems, the leading provider of modern development tools and best practices for Continuous Integration on OpenVMS, will exhibit at SYS-CON's @DevOpsSummit at Cloud Expo New York, which will take place on June 7-9, 2016, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. eCube Systems offers a family of middleware products and development tools that maximize return on technology investment by leveraging existing technical equity to meet evolving business needs. Fortune 1000 companies and government agencies turn to eCube Systems to reduce risk, extend ROI and increase productivity as they consolidate existing capabilities and evolve legacy systems to meet modern requirements for productivity, flexibility and modern best practices.