I recently attended and was a speaker at the 4th International Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I also had the opportunity to attend this event last year and I wrote a blog from that show talking about how the “Enterprise Impact of IoT” was a key theme of last year’s show. I was curious to see if the same theme would still resonate 365 days later and what, if any, changes I would see in the content presented.
Apps and devices shouldn't stop working when there's limited or no network connectivity. Learn how to bring data stored in a cloud database to the edge of the network (and back again) whenever an Internet connection is available. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Ben Perlmutter, a Sales Engineer with IBM Cloudant, demonstrated techniques for replicating cloud databases with devices in order to build offline-first mobile or Internet of Things (IoT) apps that can provide a better, faster user experience, both offline and online. The focus of this talk was on IBM Cloudant, Apache CouchDB, and related open source tools and open standards.
In today's enterprise, digital transformation represents organizational change even more so than technology change, as customer preferences and behavior drive end-to-end transformation across lines of business as well as IT. To capitalize on the ubiquitous disruption driving this transformation, companies must be able to innovate at an increasingly rapid pace. Traditional approaches for driving innovation are now woefully inadequate for keeping up with the breadth of disruption and change facing today's increasingly digital enterprise. It's time to rethink how we innovate, leveraging the very turbulence that drives the business to change. In his Opening Keynote at 17th Cloud Expo, Jason Bloomberg, leading expert on architecting agility for the enterprise and president of Intellyx, provided a thought-provoking look at how modern digital practices, including self-organization and DevOps, can provide a template for rethinking how innovation processes can continue to drive strategic value.
In 1854 Cholera broke out in the Soho neighborhood of London. Hundreds of people were struck down and died within days. No one at the time understood where the disease came from, how to treat it, or how it was transmitted. A local physician, Dr. John Snow spent every possible moment of his day studying the victims and data in an attempt to understand the disease. His biggest challenge was a lack of data. He had only the list of the dead and a blank map of the neighborhood. What he needed was more data. This was solved when he met the local priest, Henry Whitehouse. Whitehouse had recorded the time of death, and the location where all the families lived and died. When these sources of data where combined, and then overlaid on a map, visual patterns emerged which ultimately led the two to see the common denominator for all the victims was drinking contaminated water from the Broad Street water pump.
In today’s pharmaceutical supply chain, counterfeit activity is thriving. As pharma companies have expanded target markets and outsourced production over the last decade, the supply chain has become increasingly global, virtual, and vulnerable. Illicit activity has thrived, and patients have suffered, with hundreds of thousands dying each year from counterfeit and contaminated drugs. More than 40 countries have responded with new laws that regulate prescription medications as they travel through the supply chain. While this is a quantum leap forward for patient health, the implications for supply chain stakeholders, from pharmaceutical companies and their contract manufacturing partners to the pharmacies that serve patients are daunting: they must master each country’s disparate track and trace requirements; create a system architecture capable of generating, managing, and storing what will be unprecedented volumes of regulated data; and figure out how to efficiently exchange that data with hundreds to tens of thousands of direct and indirect supply chain partners.
Wearable technology has come a long way since the calculator watch. In the past whenever I thought of the term “wearable technology” the first things I would like of were always calculator watches and pedometers, but boy have things changed! Even if you’re a skeptic, this blogger thinks that pretty much everyone will be using some type of wearable tech by 2020. It seems like wearable technology is everywhere. Whether it is Google Glass, or the Samsung Galaxy Gear, there seems to be nothing that you can't tech out. There is Colour Change Couture, fabric that changes color when wet, The Programmable T-shirt, which, when combined with the smartphone app, allows the wearer to display tweets, Facebook statuses, and pictures. Celebs are even getting on the wearable tech bandwagon; Nicole Scherzinger wore a dress made of silk, Swarovski crystals, and 2,000 LED lights that displayed tweets in real time when the hashtag #tweetthedress was used. For more on the future of fashion, check out this slideshow (you really should, there's some pretty cool stuff in there).
I recently spent the weekend up in the lakes region of New Hampshire, and made the rounds of all the various country stores and craft shops that are a staple of the area. In one shop, I noticed something I hadn’t seen in a long time: a large set of Russian nesting dolls. The quality, craftsmanship, and level of detail were impressive. As I removed the cover on the first intricately painted doll, nestled inside was the next, slightly smaller one, a duplicate of the outer doll, with all of the same detail on a slightly smaller scale. As I continued opening each successive doll, revealing the next smaller duplicate, I started looking for discrepancies, loss of detail in the duplication as I dove recursively into smaller and smaller dolls. The quality and attention to detail, even at the smallest level, remained for each of the dolls. Each doll was a representation of information, just on different levels and scales.
Apps and devices shouldn't stop working when there's limited or no network connectivity. Learn how to bring data stored in a cloud database to the edge of the network (and back again) whenever an Internet connection is available. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Ben Perlmutter, a Sales Engineer with IBM Cloudant, demonstrated techniques for replicating cloud databases with devices in order to build offline-first mobile or Internet of Things (IoT) apps that can provide a better, faster user experience, both offline and online. The focus of this talk was on IBM Cloudant, Apache CouchDB, and related open source tools and open standards.
The IoT trend brings rise to a plethora of new and useful services that enrich our lives, simplify it, or save us time and money. To provide these kind of connected – and complex – services, software companies must have three different software teams (at least!) and they have to deliver the different, integrated, service components across different platforms and devices. In addition, software upgrades must be coordinated across all environments to ensure service continuity. Only an integrated DevOps platform can provide the traceability, visibility, shared control, and the ability to react quickly – for these complex software development, test, and deployment processes.
Microservices are a very exciting architectural approach that many organizations are looking to as a way to accelerate innovation. Microservices promise to allow teams to move away from monolithic "ball of mud" systems, but the reality is that, in the vast majority of organizations, different projects and technologies will continue to be developed at different speeds. How to handle the dependencies between these disparate systems with different iteration cycles? Consider the "canoncial problem" in this scenario: microservice A (releases daily) depends on a couple of additions to backend B (releases quarterly).
It’s a given that employee access to corporate systems should be both as secure and simple as possible. Up until recently however, time-strapped CIOs, under pressure from demanding staff and challenged with authenticating users all over the world on multiple devices, have been torn between relying on the fatally flawed password or hard token two-factor authentication (2FA) to keep their systems secure.
In today’s pharmaceutical supply chain, counterfeit activity is thriving. As pharma companies have expanded target markets and outsourced production over the last decade, the supply chain has become increasingly global, virtual, and vulnerable. Illicit activity has thrived, and patients have suffered, with hundreds of thousands dying each year from counterfeit and contaminated drugs. More than 40 countries have responded with new laws that regulate prescription medications as they travel through the supply chain. While this is a quantum leap forward for patient health, the implications for supply chain stakeholders, from pharmaceutical companies and their contract manufacturing partners to the pharmacies that serve patients are daunting: they must master each country’s disparate track and trace requirements; create a system architecture capable of generating, managing, and storing what will be unprecedented volumes of regulated data; and figure out how to efficiently exchange that data with hundreds to tens of thousands of direct and indirect supply chain partners.
Container technology is shaping the future of DevOps and it’s also changing the way organizations think about application development. With the rise of mobile applications in the enterprise, businesses are abandoning year-long development cycles and embracing technologies that enable rapid development and continuous deployment of apps. In his session at DevOps Summit, Kurt Collins, Developer Evangelist at Built.io, examined how Docker has evolved into a highly effective tool for application delivery by allowing increasingly popular Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mBaaS) platforms to quickly create and scale enterprise apps across mobile, web and IoT.
Culture is the most important ingredient of DevOps. The challenge for most organizations is defining and communicating a vision of beneficial DevOps culture for their organizations, and then facilitating the changes needed to achieve that. Often this comes down to an ability to provide true leadership. As a CIO, are your direct reports IT managers or are they IT leaders? The hard truth is that many IT managers have risen through the ranks based on their technical skills, not their leadership ability. Many are unable to effectively engage and inspire, creating forward momentum in the direction of desired change. Renowned for its approach to leadership and emphasis on their people, organizations increasingly look to our military for insight into these challenges.
The Internet of Everything is re-shaping technology trends–moving away from “request/response” architecture to an “always-on” Streaming Web where data is in constant motion and secure, reliable communication is an absolute necessity. As more and more THINGS go online, the challenges that developers will need to address will only increase exponentially. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Todd Greene, Founder & CEO of PubNub, exploreed the current state of IoT connectivity and review key trends and technology requirements that will drive the Internet of Things from hype to reality.
Every day, every hour, every minute, devices are becoming connected. The Internet of Things (or Iot) has gone from a buzzword floating through the echoes of Silicon Valley to a tangible and quickly advancing movement in the world of hardware. But, like a stone tossed into a pond, the effects of the Internet of Things are quickly rippling outward, causing immense changes to the environment surrounding it. And, as it turns out, the IoT is a rather big stone and it's making a large splash. The IoT revolution is necessitating enormous changes to companies who want to play in this brave new world - and those companies are not few in number.
Wearable technology has come a long way since the calculator watch. In the past whenever I thought of the term “wearable technology” the first things I would like of were always calculator watches and pedometers, but boy have things changed! Even if you’re a skeptic, this blogger thinks that pretty much everyone will be using some type of wearable tech by 2020. It seems like wearable technology is everywhere. Whether it is Google Glass, or the Samsung Galaxy Gear, there seems to be nothing that you can't tech out. There is Colour Change Couture, fabric that changes color when wet, The Programmable T-shirt, which, when combined with the smartphone app, allows the wearer to display tweets, Facebook statuses, and pictures. Celebs are even getting on the wearable tech bandwagon; Nicole Scherzinger wore a dress made of silk, Swarovski crystals, and 2,000 LED lights that displayed tweets in real time when the hashtag #tweetthedress was used. For more on the future of fashion, check out this slideshow (you really should, there's some pretty cool stuff in there).
PubNub has announced the release of BLOCKS, a set of customizable microservices that give developers a simple way to add code and deploy features for realtime apps.PubNub BLOCKS executes business logic directly on the data streaming through PubNub’s network without splitting it off to an intermediary server controlled by the customer. This revolutionary approach streamlines app development, reduces endpoint-to-endpoint latency, and allows apps to better leverage the enormous scalability of PubNub’s Data Stream Network.
It's been a busy time for tech's ongoing infatuation with containers. Amazon just announced EC2 Container Registry to simply container management. The new Azure container service taps into Microsoft's partnership with Docker and Mesosphere. You know when there's a standard for containers on the table there's money on the table, too. Everyone is talking containers because they reduce a ton of development-related challenges and make it much easier to move across production and testing environments and clouds. Containers are the technology that, many believe, deliver on the long-promised portability in the cloud to avoid vendor lock-in, and put developers, system administrators and their enterprises in the driver's seat.
The combined notions of open source and the ‘community contribution’ model of collaborative software application development are, of course, not new. The history of open source is actually traced back to early software exchanges between universities driven by academic principles of knowledge sharing in the 1960s. Sometime afterwards (August 25, 1991), Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds created Linux… and the rest is history.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, Inc., the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, 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. Alert Logic, Inc., provides Security-as-a-Service for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, delivering deep security insight and continuous protection for customers at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Fully managed by a team of experts, the Alert Logic Security-as-a-Service solution provides network, system and web application protection immediately, wherever your IT infrastructure resides.
I recently attended and was a speaker at the 4th International Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Santa Clara Convention Center. I also had the opportunity to attend this event last year and I wrote a blog from that show talking about how the “Enterprise Impact of IoT” was a key theme of last year’s show. I was curious to see if the same theme would still resonate 365 days later and what, if any, changes I would see in the content presented.
In his General Session at 17th Cloud Expo, Bruce Swann, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign, explored the key ingredients of cross-channel marketing in a digital world. Learn how the Adobe Marketing Cloud can help marketers embrace opportunities for personalized, relevant and real-time customer engagement across offline (direct mail, point of sale, call center) and digital (email, website, SMS, mobile apps, social networks, connected objects).
With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing IoT strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @ThingsExpo 2016 in New York and Silicon Valley. Learn what is going on, contribute to the discussions, and ensure that your enterprise is as "IoT-Ready" as it can be! Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place Nov 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 17th Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. 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.
The pervasiveness of software is driving the dynamics of business transactions everywhere. We live in a time of a highly competitive and truly global economy where the question being answered among businesses now is “who can innovate the fastest?” To keep pace with the increasing velocity of software updated being introduced to the market, enterprises embrace DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices, along with implementing a fully-automated software delivery process, in order to keep up with the demand to go faster.