The Internet of Things is a misnomer. That implies that everything is on the Internet, and that simply should not be - especially for things that are blurring the line between medical devices that stimulate like a pacemaker and quantified self-sensors like a pedometer or pulse tracker. The mesh of things that we manage must be segmented into zones of trust for sensing data, transmitting data, receiving command and control administrative changes, and peer-to-peer mesh messaging. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Ryan Bagnulo, Solution Architect / Software Engineer at SOA Software, focused on design patterns for segmentation, policy enforcement and administration.
You use an agile process; your goal is to make your organization more agile. But what about your data infrastructure? The truth is, today's databases are anything but agile - they are effectively static repositories that are cumbersome to work with, difficult to change, and cannot keep pace with application demands. Performance suffers as a result, and it takes far longer than it should to deliver new features and capabilities needed to make your organization competitive. As your application and business needs change, data repositories and structures get outmoded rapidly, resulting in increased work for application developers and slow performance for end users. Further, as data sizes grow into the "Big Data" realm, this problem is exacerbated and becomes even more difficult to address. A seemingly simple schema change can take hours (or more) to perform, and as requirements evolve, the disconnect between existing data structures and actual needs diverge.
You use an agile process; your goal is to make your organization more agile. But what about your data infrastructure? The truth is, today's databases are anything but agile - they are effectively static repositories that are cumbersome to work with, difficult to change, and cannot keep pace with application demands. Performance suffers as a result, and it takes far longer than it should to deliver new features and capabilities needed to make your organization competitive. As your application and business needs change, data repositories and structures get outmoded rapidly, resulting in increased work for application developers and slow performance for end users. Further, as data sizes grow into the "Big Data" realm, this problem is exacerbated and becomes even more difficult to address. A seemingly simple schema change can take hours (or more) to perform, and as requirements evolve, the disconnect between existing data structures and actual needs diverge.
"Desktop as a Service is emerging as a very big trend. One of the big influencers of this – for Esri – is that we have a large user base that uses virtualization and they are looking at Desktop as a Service right now," explained John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"Desktop as a Service is emerging as a very big trend. One of the big influencers of this – for Esri – is that we have a large user base that uses virtualization and they are looking at Desktop as a Service right now," explained John Meza, Product Engineer at Esri, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
IBM has announced software that allows people to hide or anonymize their personal information on the Web, ensuring protection from identity theft and other misuse. Developed by researchers at IBM's laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, the software – called Identity Mixer – will enable consumers to purchase goods and services on the Internet without disclosing personal information. As consumers hand over personal details in exchange for downloading music or subscribing to online newsletters, they leave a data trail behind that reveals pieces of information about the size, frequency and source of their online purchases that can be traced back to the user. IBM's Identity Mixer software eliminates the trail by using artificial identity information, known as pseudonyms, to make online transactions anonymous. For example, the software allows people to purchase books or clothing without revealing their credit card number. It can confirm someone's spending limit without sharing their bank balance, or provide proof of age without disclosing their date of birth.
IBM has announced software that allows people to hide or anonymize their personal information on the Web, ensuring protection from identity theft and other misuse. Developed by researchers at IBM's laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, the software – called Identity Mixer – will enable consumers to purchase goods and services on the Internet without disclosing personal information. As consumers hand over personal details in exchange for downloading music or subscribing to online newsletters, they leave a data trail behind that reveals pieces of information about the size, frequency and source of their online purchases that can be traced back to the user. IBM's Identity Mixer software eliminates the trail by using artificial identity information, known as pseudonyms, to make online transactions anonymous. For example, the software allows people to purchase books or clothing without revealing their credit card number. It can confirm someone's spending limit without sharing their bank balance, or provide proof of age without disclosing their date of birth.
The 3rd International Internet of @ThingsExpo, 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 its Call for Papers is now open. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the biggest idea since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago.
The Internet of Things will greatly expand the opportunities for data collection and new business models driven off of that data. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Esmeralda Swartz, CMO of MetraTech, discussed how for this to be effective you not only need to have infrastructure and operational models capable of utilizing this new phenomenon, but increasingly service providers will need to convince a skeptical public to participate. Get ready to show them the money!
This week Apple disclosed its fourth quarter financial results and it was simply astounding sending wall street analysts scrambling with their way-off forecasts. In the last quarter of 2014, Apple made a stunning profit of $18B (38% growth from a year ago) on a revenue base of $74.6B. This is the record profit made by any company ever! During that quarter iPhone sales reached 75m with a hefty growth in China market, and iPhone revenue reached $51.18B (70% of total revenue). This is more than Google and Microsoft revenue combined for that quarter. As Tim Cook said, they sold 34000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, every day of the quarter. Apple now is the most valuable company in the planet!
This week Apple disclosed its fourth quarter financial results and it was simply astounding sending wall street analysts scrambling with their way-off forecasts. In the last quarter of 2014, Apple made a stunning profit of $18B (38% growth from a year ago) on a revenue base of $74.6B. This is the record profit made by any company ever! During that quarter iPhone sales reached 75m with a hefty growth in China market, and iPhone revenue reached $51.18B (70% of total revenue). This is more than Google and Microsoft revenue combined for that quarter. As Tim Cook said, they sold 34000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, every day of the quarter. Apple now is the most valuable company in the planet!
Not only will the Patriots take on the Seattle Seahawks in the big game, but many web based companies will be taking on large-scale traffic challenges after airing their prime time commercials that day. After hearing this, you should ignore the pregame hype, put down the nachos and get your servers ready for maxxed out user load.
"People are a lot more knowledgeable about APIs now. There are two types of people who work with APIs - IT people who want to use APIs for something internal and the product managers who want to do something outside APIs for people to connect to them," explained Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The Internet of Things will greatly expand the opportunities for data collection and new business models driven off of that data. In her session at @ThingsExpo, Esmeralda Swartz, CMO of MetraTech, discussed how for this to be effective you not only need to have infrastructure and operational models capable of utilizing this new phenomenon, but increasingly service providers will need to convince a skeptical public to participate. Get ready to show them the money!
"ElasticBox is an enterprise company that makes it very easy for developers and IT ops to collaborate to develop, build and deploy applications on any cloud - private, public or hybrid," stated Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Apache Drill is an open source, schema-free SQL query engine—that enables a business to extract the most value possible from data stored in Hadoop. Apache Drill does this by breaking down many of the technical barriers that had restricted the ways that analysts could work with data, and limited the intelligence that they could glean from it. With Apache Drill, data scientists are no longer constrained by the limitations of last generation tools, and they are free to work with data in a myriad of productive ways without draining IT resources.
The Internet of Things is not new. Historically, smart businesses have used its basic concept of leveraging data to drive better decision making and have capitalized on those insights to realize additional revenue opportunities. So, what has changed to make the Internet of Things one of the hottest topics in tech? In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Gray, Director, Embedded and Internet of Things, discussed the underlying factors that are driving the economics of intelligent systems. Discover how hardware commoditization, the ubiquitous nature of connectivity, and the emergence of Big Data and analysis are providing the pull to meet customer expectations of a widely connected, multi-dimensional universe of people, things, and information.
AWS was in the premier position having had a head start of more than 4 years in the cloud related business. The lowering of prices by Microsoft; a new CEO; an emphasized bet on the cloud have all contributed to Microsoft Azure's adoption by the enterprises. One of the reasons for this being the better tooling; the variety of applications and services; and not-for-Windows only shift have all contributed. Microsoft brought in a lot of enhancements that should prove this advantage Microsoft has gained further. The storage options with SSDs and the rapid, multifaceted updates to its Azure cloud computing platform are all very attractive for enterprises.
Recently, Forrester analyst Rick Holland brought up the point of quality vs. quantity when it comes to threat indicators. We agree, the focus should never be on the quantity of data, it should be on the quality of data. So the question becomes, where and how can you gather or make sense of this quality threat intelligence?
After reading Sean Michael Kerner’s article in Enterprise Networking Planet earlier this month, I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own to what he wrote. He discusses SDN and IPv6. Here’s my take on Software Defined Networking (SDN) in 2015: Given the ongoing hype and the range of benefits its proponents extol, I expect to see a continued increase in interest and evaluation of SDN. However with the ongoing battle between the major SDN vendors (OpenFlow, Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, Contrail, etc.) and the fear of ‘backing the wrong horse’, the lack of proven, mature enterprise deployments and the management and monitoring difficulties associated with SDN (most NMS do not yet adequately support SDN) it is unlikely that wide-scale enterprise deployments of SDN will occur in 2015. Whilst the perceived benefit of easing the management and implementation of distributed security policies, access-control and QoS by deploying SDN is undeniably appealing, lack of maturity will hold back wide-scale deployment for some time to come.
15th Cloud Expo, which took place Nov. 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, expanded the conference content of @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit to include two developer events. IBM held a Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held a Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor. The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provide short-term introductory projects that developers can complete between sessions.
Things are being built upon cloud foundations to transform organizations. This CEO Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Roger Strukhoff, Cloud Expo and @ThingsExpo conference chair, addressed the big issues involving these technologies and, more important, the results they will achieve. Rodney Rogers, chairman and CEO of Virtustream; Brendan O'Brien, co-founder of Aria Systems, Bart Copeland, president and CEO of ActiveState Software; Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn; Dave Wagstaff, VP and chief architect at BSQUARE Corporation; Seth Proctor, CTO of NuoDB, Inc.; and Andris Gailitis, CIO of DEAC, discussed how important public, private, and hybrid cloud are to the enterprise. How does one define Big Data? And how is the IoT tying all this together?
In their session at @ThingsExpo, Shyam Varan Nath, Principal Architect at GE, and Ibrahim Gokcen, who leads GE's advanced IoT analytics, focused on the Internet of Things / Industrial Internet and how to make it operational for business end-users. Learn about the challenges posed by machine and sensor data and how to marry it with enterprise data. They also discussed the tips and tricks to provide the Industrial Internet as an end-user consumable service using Big Data Analytics and Industrial Cloud.
A common pattern in the past few years is the creation of centralized Release Engineering groups. These professionals apply common patterns for automating releases, they have a solid understanding of build and testing frameworks, and they help a large organization standardize software delivery. These centralized groups have become more popular as enterprises support an increasing number of applications and a faster release cadence. In an ideal enterprise, all of your applications are packaged, delivered, and installed according to a standard, and these teams serve to apply and enforce enterprise IT policy. For example, the Release Engineering team may be responsible for a common Continuous Integration server, a standard approach to branching and tagging in source control, and the establishment of a common playbook for production releases.
OneCloud Software has launched the OneCloud Partner Program. Responding to demand from prospective partners, the Program offers managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers the resources they need to grow their business with the OneCloud Recovery solution. OneCloud Recovery is an automated solution for disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC), which leverages Amazon Web Services as the disaster recovery site. “This is a tremendous opportunity with an innovative hybrid cloud-based DR product and a partner committed to providing the tools and support that will enable a competitive advantage,” said Marc Crespi, CEO at OneCloud Software. "MSPs will have a superior software solution they can leverage to bring highly differentiated and strong margin offerings to customers, while resellers will have easy to sell and install solution capabilities that will extend their business.”