At Fractal Analytics, we believe in chasing three ‘I's in what we do for our clients, or even for any internal development, to be able to deliver value. These ‘I's are critical for our success (as we perceive it), and forms the core of our thinking.
Thanks to an early season skiing accident, I found myself sitting in the Emergency Department of a small hospital in a Colorado ski town. The hospital had recently gone through a major renovation and was proud of its investment on HIT (Health care IT). Most patient workflows are now automated. Check-in and registration were a breeze. Within a few minutes, my patient record was updated, and my case was well documented. With an electronic signature of consent and a scan of my insurance card, all I needed to do was wait for my turn. A large monitor displayed my name as well as the names of others waiting to be seen, as well as the likely waiting time.
We are all here because we are sold on the transformative promise of The Cloud. But what good is all of this ephemeral, on-demand infrastructure if your usage doesn't actually improve the agility and speed of your business? How must Operations adapt in order to avoid stifling your Cloud initiative? In his session at DevOps Summit, Damon Edwards, co-founder and managing partner of the DTO Solutions, will highlight the successful organizational, process, and tooling patterns of high-performing companies that have reshaped their Operations to enable the business to get full value from their Cloud investment.
The annual holiday shopping season, which starts on Thanksgiving weekend and runs through the end of December, is undoubtedly the most crucial time of the year for many eCommerce websites, with sales from this period having a dramatic effect on the year-end bottom line. Web performance – or, the overall speed and availability of a website or mobile site – is an issue year-round, but it takes on increased importance during the holidays. Ironically, it is at this time of year that networks and infrastructure come under the most strain from traffic and are more vulnerable than ever to performance degradations. Yet busy, hurried holiday shoppers expect better performance than ever, and the stakes for lost conversions are frighteningly high. When customers encounter long load times, they’re likely to abandon their current shopping destination and move on to a competitor’s site that is performing better, sending potential revenue out the door. What’s worse, studies have shown that if a site freezes or crashes, is too slow, or involves an overly complicated checkout process, 75 percent of shoppers will no longer buy from that site.
The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), which enables organizations to seamlessly run in a hybrid cloud model (public + private cloud), is here to stay. IDC estimates that the software-defined networking market will be valued at $3.7 billion by 2016. Security is a key component and benefit of the SDDC, and offers an opportunity to build security 'from the ground up' and weave it into the environment from day one. In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Reuven Harrison, CTO and Co-Founder of Tufin, will discuss the main security considerations enterprises face when rolling out SDDCs and how they can harness key functionality of a virtual environment to achieve more granular security controls across hybrid environments.
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. Modern infrastructure constantly generates log data at a rate faster than humans can easily analyze. And now that data centers can be built and torn down with scripts, the amount of activity and data is exponential.
When it comes to cloud computing, there is no “one size fits all” platform for getting work done. High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are not web applications. Thankfully, there are clouds specifically designed for running HPC workloads rather than web applications. No matter what type of work they do, all clouds have "Cloud Controllers" which put resources to work, and often feature load balancing and metering capabilities. An HPC Cloud uses a Job Scheduler to assign work when requested. Basically, this puts work in queues for future execution on appropriate resources. Jobs are then run as resources become available.
How do you surge ahead of the competitors and completely shake up the game? What determines who becomes the next Netflix, Apple, or Salesforce of your industry? It all comes down to identifying the opportunity to grow revenue and gain the competitive advantage. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel – just reinvent how you package and sell your products and services. Consider the brands above – each company is not the sole provider, or even the inventor, of the products and services they sell. A convergence of cloud computing technologies, mobility, and changing consumer preferences created the opportunity for brands to take the lead by repackaging products and services already sold in the marketplace.
Can the spatial component of your Big Data be harnessed and visualized, adding another dimension of power and analytics to your data? In his session at Big Data Expo®, John Meza, Product Engineer and Performance Engineering Team Lead at Esri, discussed the spatial queries that can be used within the Hadoop ecosystem and their integration with GeoSpatial applications. The GIS Tools for Hadoop project was also discussed and its implementation to discover location-based patterns and relationships in Big Data to enable better decision support. This was followed by a demonstration of GIS Big Data on a live cluster with expressive web mapping visualization.
Since 2008 and for the first time in history, more than half of humans live in urban areas, urging cities to become “smart.” Today, cities can leverage the wide availability of smartphones combined with new technologies such as Beacons or NFC to connect their urban furniture and environment to create citizen-first services that improve transportation, way-finding and information delivery. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Laetitia Gazel-Anthoine, CEO of Connecthings, will focus on successful use cases.
Wearable devices have come of age. The primary applications of wearables so far have been "the Quantified Self" or the tracking of one's fitness and health status. We propose the evolution of wearables into social and emotional communication devices. Our BE(tm) sensor uses light to visualize the skin conductance response. Our sensors are very inexpensive and can be massively distributed to audiences or groups of any size, in order to gauge reactions to performances, video, or any kind of presentation. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Jocelyn Scheirer, CEO & Founder of Bionolux, will discuss how the ability to wirelessly capture and analyze this kind of distributed wearable changes the game for marketers or anyone who wants to understand large scale gross emotional arousal response.
Enthusiasm for the Internet of Things has reached an all-time high. In 2013 alone, venture capitalists spent more than $1 billion dollars investing in the IoT space. With "smart" appliances and devices, IoT covers wearable smart devices, cloud services to hardware companies. Nest, a Google company, detects temperatures inside homes and automatically adjusts it by tracking its user's habit. These technologies are quickly developing and with it come challenges such as bridging infrastructure gaps, abiding by privacy concerns and making the concept a reality. These challenges can't be addressed without the kinds of agile software development and infrastructure approaches pioneered by the DevOps movement.
IT’s role is changing dramatically from working in isolation to operating hand in hand with the business team. Successful IT leaders understand that they need to keep a pulse on the newest technologies and work in unison with their business counterparts in order to remain at the forefront of their industry. By approaching IT service delivery through a business lens, IT is able to streamline processes, lessen the IT management burden, and empower end users. Management Cloud: IT’s Key to the New Front Office, a CA Technologies eBook, has the details on how Management Cloud allows IT to move up the totem pole.
There is no arguing the cloud is hot. In a recent blog post The Cloud – Is it your actual destination? I raise the point that the cloud itself is not the destination. It’s a vehicle, a conduit that can help you solve challenges and provide value back to the business. It is a powerful vehicle. IDC forecasts global public IT Cloud services spending to reach nearly $108B by 2017. Gartner expects that by 2016 the bulk of IT spend will be for the cloud. For all the hype, the cloud and its benefits are real.
In this Women in Technology Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing at Verizon Enterprise, Esmeralda Swartz, CMO at MetraTech; Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems; Seema Jethani, Director of Product Management at Basho Technologies; Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell Inc.; Anne Hungate, Senior Director of Software Quality at DIRECTV, discussed what path they took to find their spot within the technology industry and how do they see opportunities for other women in their area of expertise.
Appcore deploys cloud for service providers based on the Apache Cloud set. In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Nate Gordon, Director of Technology at Appcore, shows their new product that's coming out in January - Appcore Atlas, which is focused on deploying private clouds based on CloudStack in 15 minutes or less. Our upcoming June 9-11, 2015, event in New York City will present a total of 10 simultaneous tracks (the largest conference content in the world) by an all-star faculty, over three days, plus the popular two-day "Cloud Computing Bootcamp" presented by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with the Gigaom Research analyst network where he covers the Cloud Services landscape.
NuoDB just introduced the Swifts 2.1 Release. In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, Inc., discussed why scaling databases in the cloud is challenging, why building your application on top of the infrastructure that is designed with this in mind makes a difference, and what you can do with NuoDB that simplifies your programming model, your operations model.
This is the first of a series of posts and links to resources on server storage I/O performance and benchmarking (view more and follow-up posts here). The best I/O is the I/O that you do not have to do, the second best is the one with the least impact as well as low overhead. Drew Robb (@robbdrew) has a Data Storage Benchmarking Guide article over at Enterprise Storage Forum that provides a good framework and summary quick guide to server storage I/O benchmarking.
High-performing enterprise Software Quality Assurance (SQA) teams validate systems that are ready for use - getting most actively involved as components integrate and form complete systems. These teams catch and report on defects, making sure the customer gets the best software possible. SQA teams have leveraged automation and virtualization to execute more thorough testing in less time - bringing Dev and Ops together, ensuring production readiness. Does the emergence of DevOps mean the end of Enterprise SQA? Does the SQA function become redundant? In her session at DevOps Summit, Anne Hungate, Senior Director of Software Quality at DIRECTV, advocated for the evolution of Software Quality Engineering. She discussed how the role and impact of an SQA organization changes with DevOps and offer practical steps to move from assurance late in the lifecycle, to prevention, analytics, and customer insight. Anne also discussed how SQA teams are becoming more skilled in engineering methods and making the DevOps journey successful.
Recent security breaches have heightened our awareness of cybersecurity issues. The hack and other security breaches have resulted in unprecedented damages. However, the majority of mobile device users have yet to be sensitized to their personal and corporate security risks. For example, a security study found that 69 percent of users store sensitive personal information on their mobile devices. Examples include banking information, confidential work-related items and provocative videos and photos. In addition, 51 percent of mobile device consumers share usernames and passwords with family, friends and colleagues. This in spite of the fact that 80 percent of such devices are unprotected by security software. While mobile device security attacks are relatively small, they are the new frontier for hackers. Listed below are highlights from several mobile device surveys:
There’s no denying we’re in the midst of a cloud craze – but, behind all the hype, is cloud adoption really imperative? How much of the cloud buzz is fabrications of possible benefits, and how much of it is reality? To decipher what’s true and what’s false, I’ve put together a list of five reasons why cloud adoption is important, based on the facts. Freedom from responsibility and costs. Yes, when you move services to a cloud provider, you immediately relinquish some control. However, you instantly free yourself from the cost of hardware and server management, and gain back the time (or manpower) that it would ordinarily take to run IT systems.
DevOps Summit 2015 New York, co-located with the 16th International Cloud Expo - to be held June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY - announces that it is now accepting Keynote Proposals. The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.
Software AG and Wipro Ltd. have announced a joint solution platform for streaming analytics that provides real-time actionable intelligence for the Internet of Things (IoT) market. “The key to successfully addressing the IoT market is the ability to rapidly build and evolve apps that tap into, analyze and make smart decisions on fast, big data”, said John Bates, Global Head of Industry Solutions and CMO, Software AG. To address the huge market potential created by streaming analytics in conjunction with IoT and other emerging technologies, Wipro and Software AG have come up with a solution that provides enterprises with a competitive edge by responding to events in real-time with unlimited scalability.
Appcore deploys cloud for service providers based on the Apache Cloud set. In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Nate Gordon, Director of Technology at Appcore, shows their new product that's coming out in January - Appcore Atlas, which is focused on deploying private clouds based on CloudStack in 15 minutes or less. Our upcoming June 9-11, 2015, event in New York City will present a total of 10 simultaneous tracks (the largest conference content in the world) by an all-star faculty, over three days, plus the popular two-day "Cloud Computing Bootcamp" presented by Janakiram MSV, an analyst with the Gigaom Research analyst network where he covers the Cloud Services landscape.
Eighty-five percent of companies store information in some sort of unstructured manner. In this demo at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Fronczak, Product Manager at Solgenia, discussed their enterprise content management solution, which was created to help companies organize and take control of their digital assets.