Converged infrastructure solutions are hastening the path to big-data business value and cloud deployment options. We'll also delve into how the right balance between open-source and commercial IT products helps in creating a big-data capability, and we'll further explore how converged infrastructure solutions are hastening the path to big-data business value and cloud deployment options.
Most informed CEOs seem to know intuitively that the most qualified person to lead their forward-looking business technology advancement isn’t likely to have the profile of a typical legacy CIO. In contrast, the role of a Digital Business Transformation innovator has very different requirements to the traditional IT utility infrastructure custodian of the past.
That said, some progressive CIOs are already making the transition to lead the digital competitiveness quest, and others will surely follow. Moreover, a few multinational companies currently have a CIO in a highly strategic, visible and collaborative position within the company. Their challenge is to guide the rest of the organization’s leadership to attain the required skills that will enable them to actively participate in the planning and execution of a new strategy – empowered by digital technologies.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) market research team recently completed a global study of the path that several organizations have taken to develop and deliver the digital learning support resources that their key internal stakeholders both need and want. The results of this research portrays an environment that may be familiar to many CEOs that have, or are about to, embark upon a similar journey.
The HBR survey found that companies that rate highly in both digital leadership and management have better business results than their peers, with stronger revenue growth and greater profit margins.
Just under a fifth of survey respondents fell into this early-adopter or “Digital Leader” category, while over a third were deemed to be “Laggards” – i.e. an organization that’s weak in both digital leadership and management. Moreover, nearly half of the survey respondents had mixed scores and were rated as “Followers.”
What set the leaders apart from their peer group, in laggard or follower organizations? These proactive CIOs help their business colleagues to understand which digital knowledge and skills need to reside in their function, and which they can defer to the IT support team. The CIOs and their staff typically communicate in language that makes sense to a Line of Business (LoB) leader that’s focused on achieving outcomes.
In 2011, then United States CIO Vivek Kundra released the US Federal Cloud Computing Strategy [1]. In the executive summary he pointed to cloud computing as a key component of the US Federal Government’s information technology modernization efforts: “Cloud computing has the potential to play a major part in addressing these inefficiencies and improving government service delivery. The cloud computing model can significantly help agencies grappling with the need to provide highly reliable, innovative services quickly despite resource constraints.”
Early in my DevOps Journey, I was introduced to a book of great significance circulating within the Web Operations industry titled The Phoenix Project. (You can read our review of Gene’s book, if interested.) Written as a novel and loosely based on many of the same principles explored in The Goal, this book has been read and referenced by many who have adopted DevOps into their continuous improvement and software delivery processes around the world. As I began planning my travel schedule last summer, I learned of a workshop taking place in Nashville by Gene Kim, co-author of The Phoenix Project. I jumped at the chance to not only meet and speak with Gene, but absorb as much as possible from his workshop.
Through WebRTC, audio and video communications are being embedded more easily than ever into applications, helping carriers, enterprises and independent software vendors deliver greater functionality to their end users. With today’s business world increasingly focused on outcomes, users’ growing calls for ease of use, and businesses craving smarter, tighter integration, what’s the next step in delivering a richer, more immersive experience? That richer, more fully integrated experience comes about through a Communications Platform as a Service which allows for messaging, screen sharing, videoconferencing and more. In her session at WebRTC Summit, Dr. Natasha Tamaskar, Vice President and Head of Cloud and Mobile Strategy and Ecosystem at GENBAND, will explore what’s next on the horizon and how to create amazing experiences by embedding real-time communications everywhere.
There are many parallels to Google’s move to set up Alphabet as a holding company to remain at the forefront of innovation and what is required by all companies to foster innovation in the age of the Cloud and IoT. No one will argue that Alphabet was a change Google needed to make to remain relevant, fresh and innovative across a number of product initiatives. Under the Alphabet structure, Google provides operating divisions with the freedom and accountability for making decisions all while being nimble and quick on their feet. And perhaps most importantly, keeping their most creative people engaged and well…creative and not stifled by red tape and bureaucracy.
Most informed CEOs seem to know intuitively that the most qualified person to lead their forward-looking business technology advancement isn’t likely to have the profile of a typical legacy CIO. In contrast, the role of a Digital Business Transformation innovator has very different requirements to the traditional IT utility infrastructure custodian of the past.
That said, some progressive CIOs are already making the transition to lead the digital competitiveness quest, and others will surely follow. Moreover, a few multinational companies currently have a CIO in a highly strategic, visible and collaborative position within the company. Their challenge is to guide the rest of the organization’s leadership to attain the required skills that will enable them to actively participate in the planning and execution of a new strategy – empowered by digital technologies.
The Harvard Business Review (HBR) market research team recently completed a global study of the path that several organizations have taken to develop and deliver the digital learning support resources that their key internal stakeholders both need and want. The results of this research portrays an environment that may be familiar to many CEOs that have, or are about to, embark upon a similar journey.
The HBR survey found that companies that rate highly in both digital leadership and management have better business results than their peers, with stronger revenue growth and greater profit margins.
Just under a fifth of survey respondents fell into this early-adopter or “Digital Leader” category, while over a third were deemed to be “Laggards” – i.e. an organization that’s weak in both digital leadership and management. Moreover, nearly half of the survey respondents had mixed scores and were rated as “Followers.”
What set the leaders apart from their peer group, in laggard or follower organizations? These proactive CIOs help their business colleagues to understand which digital knowledge and skills need to reside in their function, and which they can defer to the IT support team. The CIOs and their staff typically communicate in language that makes sense to a Line of Business (LoB) leader that’s focused on achieving outcomes.
While many app developers are comfortable building apps for the smartphone, there is a whole new world out there. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Narayan Sainaney, Co-founder and CTO of Mojio, will discuss how the business case for connected car apps is growing and, with open platform companies having already done the heavy lifting, there really is no barrier to entry.
Docker containerization is increasingly being used in production environments. How can these environments best be monitored? Monitoring Docker containers as if they are lightweight virtual machines (i.e., monitoring the host from within the container), with all the common metrics that can be captured from an operating system, is an insufficient approach. Docker containers can’t be treated as lightweight virtual machines; they must be treated as what they are: isolated processes running on hosts. Why? Because they are processes that start and terminate quickly. Virtual machines aren’t designed to run for only a short time and then be terminated. Likewise, processes serve specific tasks while virtual machines typically serve multiple tasks.
WebRTC has had a real tough three or four years, and so have those working with it. Only a few short years ago, the development world were excited about WebRTC and proclaiming how awesome it was. You might have played with the technology a couple of years ago, only to find the extra infrastructure requirements were painful to implement and poorly documented. This probably left a bitter taste in your mouth, especially when things went wrong.
I was experimenting with Java HashSet, which is a pretty expensive collection to create, but it has a benefit of the O(1) performance on the retrieval of elements from this collection. Based on my experiments performance of HashSet is improved over the last year. I’ve written a small benchmark comparing the performance of the one year old JRE 1.8.0_05 with the latest 1.8.0_51. In my tests I’m creating a HashSet containing 100000 objects.
In the early 1990s major retailers began investing in data analytics to better manage their stores and warehouses by analyzing individual store sales. This insight gave them a perspective on the needs of the local market. Retailers soon advanced in their use of analytics and added external factors for consideration and planning like demographics, weather, geography, local events and competitor's promotions and campaigns.
IBM’s Blue Box Cloud, powered by OpenStack, is now available in any of IBM’s globally integrated cloud data centers running SoftLayer infrastructure. Less than 90 days after its acquisition of Blue Box, IBM has integrated its Blue Box Cloud Dedicated private-cloud-as-a-service into its broader portfolio of OpenStack® based solutions. The announcement, made today at the OpenStack Silicon Valley event, further highlights IBM’s continued support to deliver OpenStack solutions across all cloud deployment models—public, private and hybrid.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Micron Technology, Inc., a global leader in advanced semiconductor systems, will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Micron’s broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies – including DRAM, NAND and NOR Flash – is the basis for solid state drives, modules, multichip packages and other system solutions. Backed by more than 35 years of technology leadership, Micron's memory solutions enable the world's most innovative computing, consumer, enterprise storage, networking, mobile, embedded and automotive applications. Micron's common stock is traded on the NASDAQ under the MU symbol.
Disaster Recovery isn’t a new concept for IT folks. We’ve been backing up data for years to offsite locations, and used in-house data duplication in order to prevent the risks of losing data stores. But now that cloud adoption has increased, there have been some shifts in how traditional Disaster Recovery is being handled. First, we’re seeing increased adoption of cloud-based backup and disaster recovery. Gartner stated that between 2012 and 2016, one third of organizations are going to be looking at new solutions to replace current ones particularly because of cost, complexity or capability. These new solutions not just address data, but the applications themselves, and are paving way for Disaster Recovery as a Services (DRaaS). Unfortunately, there is still some confusion as to when cloud services may suffice for disaster recovery, or if looking at full-fledged DRaaS makes more sense for organizations. Let’s explore four of the key considerations when it comes to DRaaS and cloud backup services.
Consumer IoT applications provide data about the user that just doesn’t exist in traditional PC or mobile web applications. This rich data, or “context,” enables the highly personalized consumer experiences that characterize many consumer IoT apps. This same data is also providing brands with unprecedented insight into how their connected products are being used, while, at the same time, powering highly targeted engagement and marketing opportunities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Nathan Treloar, President and COO of Bebaio, will explore examples of brands transforming their businesses by tapping into this powerful aspect of the IoT. He will also review some emerging techniques being used for hyper-contextual engagement in consumer IoT apps.
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about getting ready to address a coworker's bad code. This sparked some conversation across various media, including the following interesting question: ...seems that there is a breakdown in managing the development process. Why is Bob allowed [to keep] writing bad code? This feedback is interesting enough to merit a blog post in and of itself. I recognize a question that cuts to the heart of a software development conundrum when I see it. The structure of most organizations that employ software developers is this: the developers responsible for code report up through a structure of people that don't. To put it another way, the people responsible for personnel management usually don't understand how to evaluate the work of those reporting to them - at least not directly.
Everyone loves to talk about DevOps, but when it comes to real life enterprise implementation, things start to get a little shaky. Having gone through the process with hundreds of organizations, the XebiaLabs Sale Engineering Team relayed to me the 6 most common mistakes they see when enterprises implement DevOps for the first time. Change is never easy, but if you can dodge these top 6 mistakes, your transition to DevOps can be relatively painless.
The evolution of IT operations is upon us. There has been a lot of change in both direction and momentum over the last several years, and at this point, it is not hard to see the future of Ops. Perhaps, having worked for a networking firm and a server automation firm, it is easier to see than for the average operations person, so let’s just take a look at the burgeoning ops trends and technologies and see where they ultimately lead us…
I am not sure how many people remember Cisco SANTap. About ten years ago, Cisco introduced a data tapping mechanism in the MDS 9000 fibre channel switches. The idea was to allow the data path to be “tapped” at-will. Tapping in this case meant using a mechanism in the switch to split the data being written from client hosts to the storage, allowing the identical “split” data to be routed through a second, separate path. SANTap therefore allowed a copy of the data to be seamlessly “mirrored” through the switch and subsequently used by other applications for multiple purposes (especially for backup). It facilitated real-time protection of critical data, and allowed advanced functions such as migration, snapshots, etc.
What does “big enough” mean? It’s sometimes useful to argue by reductio ad absurdum. Hello, world doesn’t need to be broken down into smaller services. At the other extreme, building a monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is just asking for trouble: it’s too big, and it needs to be decomposed.
Over the last few years we’ve seen just about every part of the data centre move towards virtualization and software. First we virtualized desktops, then storage, then even our security tools. So when the idea of Software Defined Networking (SDN) started being floated around, it wasn’t a big surprise. But what exactly is it?
SYS-CON Events announced today that DataClear Inc. will exhibit at the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The DataClear ‘BlackBox’ is the only solution that moves your PC, browsing and data out of the United States and away from prying (and spying) eyes. Its solution automatically builds you a clean, on-demand, virus free, new virtual cloud based PC outside of the United States, and wipes it clean, destroying it completely when you log out. If you wish to store your data, the solution will include a custom data encryption system with multiple factor authentication. DataClear also provides a corporate solution for multiple networked users and secure cloud based servers.
One of the perennial cloud predictions has been that 200x would be the year of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud. The logic goes that if an automated data center in the sky is good, an automated development platform in the sky must be even better. “Normal” clouds like Amazon AWS give the developer a virtual computer to load their OS and App onto. PaaS gives the developer a virtual computer with the OS, database and middleware “pre-loaded,” thereby simplifying the deployment. Yet so far, PaaS adoption has been anemic and Gartner puts PaaS at 1% of the overall cloud market. At the same time, new technologies like Docker and containers have attracted far more attention from the developer community.
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about getting ready to address a coworker's bad code. This sparked some conversation across various media, including the following interesting question: ...seems that there is a breakdown in managing the development process. Why is Bob allowed [to keep] writing bad code? This feedback is interesting enough to merit a blog post in and of itself. I recognize a question that cuts to the heart of a software development conundrum when I see it. The structure of most organizations that employ software developers is this: the developers responsible for code report up through a structure of people that don't. To put it another way, the people responsible for personnel management usually don't understand how to evaluate the work of those reporting to them - at least not directly.