A successful recurring revenue business requires a focus on monetization across every aspect of the customer relationship, not just billing or payments. Monetization is an end-to-end process from activation through cancelation. While traditional billing systems are designed to manage one-time sales, modern systems are designed to support recurring revenue management with the functionality and integration capabilities necessary to coordinate and manage business processes and customer touch points.
Even as cloud and managed services grow increasingly central to business strategy and performance, challenges remain. The biggest sticking point for companies seeking to capitalize on the cloud is data security. Keeping data safe is an issue in any computing environment, and it has been a focus since the earliest days of the cloud revolution. Understandably so: a lot can go wrong when you allow valuable information to live outside the firewall. Recent revelations about government snooping, along with a steady stream of well-publicized data breaches, only add to the uncertainty
As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.
When it comes to cybersecurity initiatives, the U.S. government has not taken a back seat. Perhaps owning to the number of high profile breaches and damaging insider attacks that have occurred in the past few years, this White House in particular has been very vocal about the federal government’s role in putting a stop to cyberattacks. Recent examples of this include Obama’s visit to Stanford University to put meet with CEOs and CSOs at major companies and discuss cybersecurity challenges, the establishment of a cybersecurity center to collect cybersecurity intelligence and the signing of an executive order to promote information sharing. In January, Congress also kicked off hearings about a national breach notification law; the law’s tenants would, in most cases, mandate breach notification to consumers within 30 days. Currently, there are 51 differing state and territorial breach notification rules in effect. The proposed federal data breach legislation to regularize responses across the country would replace the patchwork of varied laws on the topic.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a technology designed to make DevOps easier and allow developers to focus on application development. The PaaS takes care of provisioning, scaling, HA, and other cloud management aspects. Apache Stratos is a PaaS codebase developed in Apache and designed to create a highly productive developer environment while also supporting powerful deployment options. Integration with the Docker platform, CoreOS Linux distribution, and Kubernetes container management system brings more scalability and flexibility to Apache Stratos PaaS. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Lakmal Warusawithana, Director of Cloud Architecture at WSO2 Inc., will discuss installing and deploying sample applications using Docker, CoreOS and Kubernetes, and walkthrough how it can be extended to support new application containers. He will also demonstrate app deployment, provisioning, auto-scaling, and more.
In every era of innovation, disruptive technologies have had their disbelievers who resisted adopting new concepts. But in today’s business world, “being disruptive” has really empowered many businesses to make tough decisions, investments, and lead the changes that need to be seen organization-wide. Now, many disruptive technologies are truly the foundation for growth – like cloud. Unfortunately, the same pioneering attitude from the executive team doesn’t always trickle down to the internal IT departments. For example, the companies that manufacture, supply, and service some of the most remarkable high-tech equipment in the world often heavily rely on outdated IT systems to run their own internal processes.
JFrog on Thursday announced that it has added Docker support to Bintray, its distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) platform. When combined with JFrog’s Artifactory binary repository management system, organizations can now manage Docker images with an end-to-end solution that supports all technologies. The new version of Bintray allows organizations to create an unlimited number of private Docker repositories, and through the use of fast Akamai content delivery networks (CDNs), it decreases the download time of large Docker repositories, speeding DevOps work significantly. Bintray’s highly available service and download layer also helps Docker users eliminate service disruption and performance degradation issues.
Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment. In his General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, discussed how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.
Every innovation or invention was originally a daydream. You like to imagine a “what-if” scenario. And with all the attention being paid to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) you don’t have to stretch the imagination too much to see how this may impact commercial and homeowners insurance. We’re beyond the point of accepting this as a leap of faith. The groundwork is laid. Now it’s just a matter of time. We can thank the inventors of smart thermostats for developing a practical business application that everyone can relate to. Gone are the salad days of smart home apps, the early chalkboard drawings that imagined equipping the refrigerator with a speaker that would bark you orders to add milk to your grocery list.
Continuous Delivery is all about making small changes. Work flows more easily, planning is simpler, error detection is helped and the time from idea to value is reduced when we make changes in small increments, but how do you solve big problems in small pieces? How do you maintain a coherent design when each change is small? There are many facets to this problem. The organisations that are best at it tend to take a very broad view of design and think about things like how teams are structured, how work is defined and how design works when delivering a flow of many small features.
Over on the other side of the fence IT ops are screaming at the various portfolio dev teams for releasing highly risky functionality way too frequently but since the Agile dev adoption production has only had a couple of low priority P4 incidents caused by bad code releases. Things must be looking good with the new dev process but then a few months down the track BAM a P1 incident the Monday morning after a agile delivered release is deployed. Highly important business functionality is broken in one of the downstream systems. It's all hands to the pump and both IT dev and IT Ops team are getting frustrated with each other trying to resolve the incident holding back blame on which side of the fence caused the incident. A few hours later all fixed and the communication goes out to the business that prod incident is resolved.
An anatomy of startup ventures for the Internet of Things market. Like GE describes in their white paper Pushing the Boundaries of Mind and Machine, this is basically a process of innovating through more intelligent machines to reinvent workflow models. For a useful overview as to what constitutes an ‘IoT startup’, check out one example for some key characteristics: Hutgrip. Hutgrip is a SaaS solution that replaces VPNs with the Cloud and real time analytics, with the headline points being: Clear description of the business benefit the new technology will bring – Smarter automation of big cost processes will drive huge savings for many firms. Very nicely presented too.
The results for Apache Kafka version distribution poll are in. Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote! The distribution pie chart is below, but we could summarize it as follows: It’s great to see Kafka users being so quick to migrate to the latest version of Kafka! We’re extra happy to see such quick 0.8.2 adoption because we put a lot of effort into improving Kafka metric, as well as making all 100+ Kafka metrics available via SPM Kafka 0.8.2 monitoring a few weeks ago, right after Kafka 0.8.2 was released.
So, I've been at my new role for about a month now and I'd like to share with you some observations that I've made with respect to the APM marketplace. In my conversations with many of the leading APM providers, I've seen some improvements in product integration, scale and in some cases, usability, since my earlier foray into this market several years ago. There is some new thinking about the need to support a broader range of users and environments. And in a few cases, some new pricing approaches are being introduced that no longer incorporate disincentives for wanting to use more of the product.
The speed of product development has increased massively in the past 10 years. At the same time our formal secure development and SDL methodologies have fallen behind. This forces product developers to choose between rapid release times and security. In his session at DevOps Summit, Michael Murray, Director of Cyber Security Consulting and Assessment at GE Healthcare, examined the problems and presented some solutions for moving security into the DevOps lifecycle to ensure that we get fast AND secure.
It is not an unusual situation for an Analyst to move into a end user or a vendor role, especially if the analyst came from an operational background originally. I and John Rakowski (Forrester) come from end user practitioner roles before an analyst firm, if anything we are rounding out our experiences and knowledge. We’ve seen several analysts move from Gartner, several I knew well Chris Wolf and Mark Margevicius who are at VMware and Aneel Lakhani at SignalFuse. Several have recently left Forrester as indicated in this article. Everyone knows the APM industry and IT software in general is incestuious, we’re all going to work together again. There are loads of great technology companies out there, and many more ideas to be explored and created.
Software Defined Storage provides many benefits for customers including agility, flexibility, faster adoption of new technology and cost effectiveness. However, for IT organizations it can be challenging and complex to build your Enterprise Grade Storage from software. In his session at Cloud Expo, Paul Turner, CMO at Cloudian, looked at the new Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) market and how it is changing the storage world. Now Software Defined Storage companies can build Enterprise grade rack-ready appliances using commodity servers and still provide all the benefits of Software Defined Storage. You too can have Enterprise Grade at 1C per GB per month.
A successful recurring revenue business requires a focus on monetization across every aspect of the customer relationship, not just billing or payments. Monetization is an end-to-end process from activation through cancelation. While traditional billing systems are designed to manage one-time sales, modern systems are designed to support recurring revenue management with the functionality and integration capabilities necessary to coordinate and manage business processes and customer touch points.
Red Hat has launched the Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice, a new global team of experts that will assist companies with more quickly on-ramping to the cloud. They will do this by providing solutions and services such as validated designs with reference architectures and agile methodology consulting, training, and support. The Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice is born out of the integration of technology and engineering expertise gained through the company’s 2014 acquisitions of leading Ceph storage system provider, Inktank, and cloud computing services provider, eNovance. Both companies provided the highly specialized skills, solution sets, methodologies and product expertise required to launch a truly forward-looking cloud practice capable of helping companies manage the complexities associated with the cloud.
You have to plan your Continuous Delivery pipeline with quality in mind from the outset. The only way to effectively do that is to design tests before development really begins, to continually collect metrics, and to build a test automation architecture integrated into your Continuous Delivery pipeline. The test automation architecture defines the setup of test tools and tests throughout the pipeline and should support flexibility and adaptability to help you meet your business objectives. This test automation architecture should facilitate easy selection of just the right tests to be performed to match the flow of your software through your pipeline as it gets closer to release. From unit tests and code level security, through functional and component testing, to integration and performance testing. The further the software progresses along the pipeline, the greater the number of dependencies on other systems, data, and infrastructure components – and, the more difficult it is to harmonize these variables. Making sane selections of tests to run at each moment in the pipeline becomes more and more important in order to focus on the area of interest.
As organizations shift toward IT-as-a-service models, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and now cloud environments grows with it. CommVault can ensure protection &E-Discovery of your data – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enterprise. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Randy De Meno, Chief Technologist - Windows Products and Microsoft Partnerships, will discuss how to cut costs, scale easily, and unleash insight with CommVault Simpana software, the only singular data and information management solution for cloud data protection and beyond.
An explosive combination of technology trends will be where ‘microservices’ and the IoT Internet of Things intersect, a concept we can describe by comparing it with a previous theme, the ‘X Internet.' The idea of using small self-contained application components has been popular since XML Web services began and a distributed computing future of smart fridges and kettles was imagined long back in the early Internet years.
Smart mobile teams know that delivering a 5-star app is more than just finding a good business use-case and designing an app with wow experience; it’s also about ensuring amazing app performance. Apps that perform well will engage the customer – poor app performance is a sure fire way to lose the customer and their business. To deliver a first-rate app performance, mobile teams have to master the many variables which affect performance:
Our guest on the podcast this week is Tim Prendergast, Founder and CEO of Evident.io. We discuss the concept of “continuous security” and other ways to keep up with the dynamically changing environments created by the cloud. Listen in to learn why it is essential that your security solutions match the speed of your release cycle, even becoming integrated into your DevOps initiatives. Check out this episode!
In my last article, Top DevOps Tools We Love, I proclaimed the availability of deployment automation scripts for our Dynatrace products. Today, you will learn about the basic concepts behind Ansible, which will enable you to roll your own playbook for integrating insightful end-to-end monitoring with Dynatrace into every part of your enterprise application in under 60 seconds. Enterprise applications are typically segregated into multiple, physically and logically independent, functional areas called tiers. As opposed to single-tiered monoliths, the multi-tier pattern enforces a distributed architecture that allows for enhanced maintainability and greater scalability, resulting in increased availability, resilience and performance.