BroadSoft on Tuesday announced that it is a recipient of the 2014 Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award in the Hosted/Cloud Internet Protocol (IP) Telephony market for Latin America. According to Frost & Sullivan market research, the Latin America (LATAM) hosted/cloud Internet Protocol (IP) telephony market, including integrated unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) applications, is currently experiencing a rapid growth trajectory and is expected to exhibit a tenfold rise in annual revenues in the 2013-2020 period. With more than 600 cloud deployments internationally, BroadSoft was recognized as a pioneer in delivering hosted communications solutions in LATAM and across the globe, and as being strongly positioned to enable LATAM service providers to capitalize on this market opportunity.
The stack is the hack, Jack. That's my takeaway from several events I attended over the past few weeks in Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia. I listened to and participated in discussions about everything from large datacenter management (think Facebook Open Compute) to enterprise-level cyberfraud (at a seminar in Manila attended by the US State Dept. and Philippine National Police) to the world of entrepreneurial startups, app deployment, and mobility (in a series of meetups and talks in both the US and Asia.) All had something to do with some sort of stack – IT is interconnected, globally, as never before. The increasingly ubiquitous nature of decent connectivity across the globe has joined billions of people into one large, mobile, data-driven stack of information and entertainment. All aspects of all this will be present in force at our upcoming Cloud Expo | @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York June 9-11. The event, as has been its practice recently, will also feature the WebRTC Summit (chaired by Acision's Peter Dunkley) and DevOps Summit (chaired by CA's Andi Mann). This time out, there is also the IoT Bootcamp (taught by Janakiram MSV, who conducted a fabulous Cloud Bootcamp at Cloud Expo last November in Santa Clara), and for the first time, the DevOps Certification Foundation Track (taught by Alan Shimel of the DevOps Institute.) But back to the stack—or stacks. There are many ways to view the current era. One way is to look at SMAC—social media, mobility, analytics, and cloud computing: 93% of marketers now use social media for business (according to AdWeek) In the US, 89% of adults 18-29 are regular social media users. No surprise, but two-thirds of adults in the 30-64 age group are also active, as well as 43% of those age 65 and over (according to AdWeek). Mobile access has now reached a median of 100MB per person in the US, and an amazing 361MB per person in Asia (according to Sandvine). Mobile will represent more than 50% of all Internet traffic by the end of next year (according to Cisco). Analytics are driving a Big Data era that's going to put the world into the Zettabyte Age (a zettabyte is one million petabytes) by the end of next year (according to Cisco). Big Data is dovetailing with the emerging Internet of Things, which will see 82% annual growth rates in the machine-to-machine (M2M) market alone this year and beyond (according to Cisco). The IoT has almost 5 billion “things” deployed today, and will grow to 20 billion in 2020 (according to Gartner). Analytics are seen as forming a market greater than $40 billion by 2018 (according to IDC). Then there's cloud computing, which is reaching some level of maturity even as it still commands only about 8% of the world's $2.1 trillion in IT expenditures (according to several sources). Even at that, cloud now commands well over $100 billion in hardware services alone, and has the vibrant software ecosystem that will be on display at Cloud Expo. SMAC is of course just one way to look at the overall picture. The open-source world has given us OpenStack and Apache CloudStack, which continue to drive a lot of conversations if not enormous revenue just yet. The venerable LAMP stack and its many derivatives has quietly become a de facto way to build serious websites and connect them to serious back ends. The idea of stacking all this IT across compute resources, connectivity, and the software the drives it is taking hold. I've grown fond of telling people that I'm glad the dot-com crash occurred more than a decade ago, because had I been able to retire then (and oh how close so many of us came to doing so) I would have missed today, the greatest era of innovation and creativity in the history of computing. Things are stacking up for this to be a great year.
SYS-CON Events announced today the DevOps Foundation Certification Course, being held June ?, 2015, in conjunction with DevOps Summit and 16th Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. This sixteen (16) hour course provides an introduction to DevOps – the cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration, integration and automation in order to improve the flow of work between software developers and IT operations professionals. Improved workflows will result in an improved ability to design, develop, deploy and operate software and services faster.
The list of ‘new paradigm’ technologies that now surrounds us appears to be at an all time high. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the Internet of Things (IoT), today we have to deal with what the industry likes to call ‘paradigm shifts’ at every level of IT. This is disruption; of course, we understand that – change is almost always disruptive.
SYS-CON Events announced today that SoftLayer, an IBM company, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place June 9-11, 2015 at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place November 3–5, 2015 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. With a global footprint of data centers and network points of presence, SoftLayer provides infrastructure as a service to leading-edge customers ranging from Web startups to global enterprises. SoftLayer’s modular architecture, full-featured API, and sophisticated automation provide unparalleled performance and control. Its flexible unified platform seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices linked via a worldwide network for secure, low-latency communications.
Who needs to go out for dinner, when you have a tireless master chef waiting at home to prepare a gourmet meal for you, any time, day or night? That's the premise behind a new invention from Moley Robotics, a tech company based in London. Moley unveiled their new "robochef" prototype on April 14, 2015 at the Hannover Messe technology fair in Germany. Using hands produced by Shadow Robot Company, the robot chef is capable of producing meals from a collection of over 2,000 recipes, using natural motions learned from Tim Anderson, a human chef and winner of the BBC's MasterChef competition in 2011. Eventually, home chefs will be able to use a motion capture system to "teach" the robot new recipes, or download them from an iTunes-like service.
The best mobile applications are augmented by dedicated servers, the Internet and Cloud services. Mobile developers should focus on one thing: writing the next socially disruptive viral app. Thanks to the cloud, they can focus on the overall solution, not the underlying plumbing. From iOS to Android and Windows, developers can leverage cloud services to create a common cross-platform backend to persist user settings, app data, broadcast notifications, run jobs, etc. This session provides a high level technical overview of many cloud services available to mobile app developers, including authentication, storage, caching, notifications, streaming, predictive analytics, logging and more.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, 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. Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.
DevOps tasked with driving success in the cloud need a solution to efficiently leverage multiple clouds while avoiding cloud lock-in. Flexiant today announces the commercial availability of Flexiant Concerto. With Flexiant Concerto, DevOps have cloud freedom to automate the build, deployment and operations of applications consistently across multiple clouds. Concerto is available through four disruptive pricing models aimed to deliver multi-cloud at a price point everyone can afford.
The best mobile applications are augmented by dedicated servers, the Internet and Cloud services. Mobile developers should focus on one thing: writing the next socially disruptive viral app. Thanks to the cloud, they can focus on the overall solution, not the underlying plumbing. From iOS to Android and Windows, developers can leverage cloud services to create a common cross-platform backend to persist user settings, app data, broadcast notifications, run jobs, etc. This session provides a high level technical overview of many cloud services available to mobile app developers, including authentication, storage, caching, notifications, streaming, predictive analytics, logging and more.
SYS-CON Events announced today that SafeLogic has been named “Bag Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo® New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. SafeLogic provides security products for applications in mobile and server/appliance environments. SafeLogic’s flagship product CryptoComply is a FIPS 140-2 validated cryptographic engine designed to secure data on servers, workstations, appliances, mobile devices, and in the Cloud.
SYS-CON Events announced today that StorPool Storage 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. StorPool is distributed storage software that allows service providers, enterprises and other cloud builders to run data storage on standard x86 servers, instead of using expensive and inefficient storage arrays (SAN).
SYS-CON Events announced today that IndependenceIT, a leading software provider of simplified IT management solutions for workspaces, applications and desktops-as-a-service, 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. IndependenceIT's Cloud Workspace® Suite combines application, end-user and infrastructure management into a seamless, easy-to-manage platform, with a unified management interface and robust API for ease of integration with existing systems, simplifying deployment and increasing responsiveness.
Recent technology advances in miniaturization has positioned the wearables as the pinnacle of technology convergence with the human body. We inquire if wearables are mere standard miniaturized devices extended with the connectivity and present our views on considerations like design, applications, performance, efficiency, interoperability, usage scenarios, human device interaction and consequent trade-offs enabling wearables to impart optimal value.
In this session we look at creating interactive communications via the web by adding messaging, file transfer, and group communication (group chat and audio/video conferencing) into the web experience. We will also discuss potential applications of this technology in areas including B2B, B2C, P2P, and gaming. Peter is Technical Director at Acision. He graduated from The University of Edinburgh in 2000 with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science. After graduation Peter worked on a PSTN switch developing signalling stacks for SS7, ISDN and similar protocols and creating advanced routing and service applications.
So I guess we’ve officially entered a new era of lean and mean. I say this with the announcement of Ubuntu Snappy Core, “designed for lightweight cloud container hosts running Docker and for smart devices,” according to Canonical. “Snappy Ubuntu Core is the smallest Ubuntu available, designed for security and efficiency in devices or on the cloud.” This first version of Snappy Ubuntu Core features secure app containment and Docker 1.6 (1.5 in main release), is available on public clouds, and for ARM and x86 devices on several IoT boards. It’s a Trend! This announcement comes just as VMware announced its Project Photon, a Linux container OS that also follows the minimalist ethos. CoreOS and Project Atomic are other efforts in this area. Even Microsoft is joining the quest, with its Nano Server project for cloud computing and containers. The folks at Docker approve, noting in a recent blog, “VMWare’s announcement and other ecosystem announcements of this nature as being positive for the community because additional tools help to further liberate developers from the constraints of the infrastructure.” This is great, ironic stuff, in that as the IoT is introducing insane new levels of complexity in end-to-end computing infrastructures, the operating systems need to become much smaller. The underlying principle is taken from the world of single-purpose computing such as game machines--the days of the general-purpose PC with a bloated OS to manage any contingency seem to be fading into the mist. It’s wonderful that the leading edge is now crisp and snappy, even as it evokes quintessential old-man talk and old-man knowledge--to wit, the Wikipedia entry under “minimalism” in computer science has this marvelous chestnut: “In the late 1970s and early 1980s programmers had to work within the confines of relatively expensive and limited resources. 8 or 16 kilobytes of RAM was common; 64 kilobytes was considered a vast amount and was the entire address space accessible to the 8-bit CPUs predominant during the earliest generations of personal computers. The most common storage medium was the 5.25 inch floppy disk holding from 88 to 170kB.” As one sharing a birthday (more or less) with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Scott McNealy, I heartily approve of this new trend. It has nothing to do with ancient stories of how tough it was in the old days--Bronko Nagurski was a heck of a football player, too--and everything to do with creating a lean, flexible, massively scalable, highly performant IT infrastructure for this century, not the century just past.
5G is not just faster data and/or higher capacity only. It is much more than these obvious characteristics. For one thing for IoT to succeed; the grand vision created for its debut on a universal scale, 5G is a must. More users; more devices interconnected at any instant of time. The 5G must address the issues arising out of interconnected devices in addition to only users. Also for IoT to succeed additional items like coverage of the serviced region (Can you hear me now!) and more efficient networks. The data rates required by 5G are some 1000 times that provided by 4G to make things happen with low latency. One immediate challenge is the unavailability of spectrum (700 MHZ to 3 GHZ).
Financial services organizations were among the earliest enterprise adopters of cloud computing. The ability to leverage massive compute, storage and networking resources via RESTful APIs and automated tools like Chef and Puppet made it possible for their high-horsepower IT users to develop a whole new array of applications. Companies like Wells Fargo, Fidelity and BBVA are visible, vocal and engaged supporters of the OpenStack community, running production clouds for applications ranging from dev/test and backup/DR to customer-facing applications that give them a competitive edge by rolling out new and improved software products faster than their peers.
SYS-CON Events announced today that the DevOps Institute has been named “Association Sponsor” of SYS-CON's DevOps Summit, which will take place on June 9–11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. The DevOps Institute provides enterprise level training and certification. Working with thought leaders from the DevOps community, the IT Service Management field and the IT training market, the DevOps Institute is setting the standard in quality for DevOps education and training.
SYS-CON Events announced today that BroadSoft, the leading global provider of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) services to operators worldwide, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON's WebRTC Summit, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. BroadSoft is the leading provider of software and services that enable mobile, fixed-line and cable service providers to offer Unified Communications over their Internet Protocol networks. The Company’s core communications platform enables the delivery of a range of enterprise and consumer calling, messaging and collaboration communication services, including private branch exchanges, video calling, text messaging and converged mobile and fixed-line services.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Alert Logic, the leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions for the cloud, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo® and DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo® and DevOps Summit 2015 Silicon Valley, which will take place November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Many of the well-known examples of DevOps success we read in blogs on the Internet paint an idyllic picture of DevOps productivity. A team was facing a stodgy, slow-moving operations department, teams weren’t delivering software on time. Those teams moved to DevOps, became proactive about infrastructure and deployment automation, and an overnight transition to productivity ensues. People are promoted, projects are successful, and developers and system administrators dance hand-in-hand in a finale that has everyone applauding. DevOps is magic, and sometimes this is the reality for smaller projects and startups.
Log data provides the most granular view into what is happening across your systems, applications, and end users. Logs can show you where the issues are in real-time, and provide a historical trending view over time. Logs give you the whole picture. Today, everything must be faster. Faster releases; faster and larger backlogs; faster complaints; faster bugs. The speed and performance of the modern software delivery pipeline brings a new set of challenges. How do you keep up? There really is only one option - automation and measurement. You need a method for automatically collecting data about your application and how it is being used. But also a good way to find the relevant information and act on it. And in order to do this your development team needs to lead with analytics first.
Even though Apple and Microsoft haven’t commented on the new open source technology which delivers high quality audio and video capabilities to desktop and mobile browsers, major carriers such as AT&T and Telefónica, leading infrastructure providers like Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson and new WebRTC application providers in likes of Teledini and NetDev are driving the technology forward. Research analyst, Sabir Rafiq comments, “WebRTC brings many opportunities; ABI Research believes major trends will start to form within the enterprise market with WebRTC. Companies will be willing to implement the new technology to aid productivity and reduce communication barriers within the workplace.” ABI Research recognizes that there are significant barriers in the way of WebRTC technology becoming widely adopted. Firstly, Apple is not showing any interest in WebRTC, similar to its approach to Adobe Flash. As it is a brand leader in the mobile space, this could impact short term opportunity. Microsoft’s alternative to WebRTC, the CU-RTC, could deter users away from WebRTC and should essentially be considered a competitor. In the end, we believe Apple and Microsoft will not ignore the market opportunity for WebRTC.
Companies in industries as diverse as banking and manufacturing are realizing that in order to remain competitive, they must become software-driven organizations. From customer-driven digital transformation to cloud computing for the back office, software is eating the world – one enterprise at a time. Enterprises have depended upon software for decades, of course. What’s different now is how modern advances in information technology are increasingly able to change the fundamentals of business itself via sophisticated automation and acceleration of every aspect of the organization.