Hortonworks went through an IPO last Friday, December 12, 2014. It’s initial price of $16 soared by 60% immediately after. Today the stock price is $24.70 with a market cap of $1.02B. Another billion dollar club member. They compete with Cloudera and MapR in packaging the open source Hadoop platform for customers. How do they make money when the basic Apache Hadoop is free? – by offering added services like training and consulting. They can also add auxiliary products (not open source) that customers must pay for. The interesting fact is that Hortonworks’s CEO had claimed a $100m revenue this year, but looks like he is way short of that – $33m during first nine months. The future is quite uncertain!
Smart watches, which pioneered the wearable technology sector, earned collective revenue of US$700 million in 2013 with the sale of 3.1 million units. The sheer magnanimity of these watches can be inferred from quick sale they made and acceptance they received. Smart watches are nothing but wearable computing devices that a user wears for its functional capabilities supported by a matching smartphone.
At Graphflow, our mission is to empower online stores of all sizes to grow their businesses by providing them access to the same machine learning and Big Data tools used by the largest and most sophisticated tech players in the market. To deliver on this mission, we decided from the very beginning to go ‘all in’ on Spark for our scalable analytics and machine learning applications. When Graphflow started using Spark, it was on version 0.7.0, and it was relatively immature. A lot has changed over the past year and a half: Spark has become a top-level Apache project, version 1.2.0 was released, and Spark has matured significantly in terms of functionality, deployment, stability, and operations.
What is a hero? Well, to me, it’s someone who takes the right action when it’s needed and steps up to save the day. Are there heroes in the workplace? People whose actions save the day? People who commit great acts of organizational excellence? I would say that there are. And more, I believe that workplace heroes often suddenly appear when the right signal goes out. Software developers can be heroes. They alone have the power to create vital business solutions that the rest of the organization needs to succeed. Business leaders can dictate policy and call for changes to be made, but it’s the developers who have the skills to create the applications that can really make a difference.
An operations group tasked with accepting and supporting a software release. This group wants a predictable process, they view releases as incidents to be managed, and they answer to a business that wants predictability and accountability. One or more development groups tasked with creating software to be released. These groups tend to be more diverse. You might have one development group that is using bleeding-edge technology to create a next-generation website that is more research than development, and another group developing applications against Oracle that is more predictable.
In today’s highly connected world, the benefits and widespread adoption of cloud computing are not just limited to enterprises and government agencies; its transformative impact has prompted changes to a variety of businesses across several verticals – both big and small. In fact, a recent study by Emergent Research, ‘Small Business Success in the Cloud,’ found that the percentage of U.S. small businesses using cloud computing is expected to grow by more than half, from 37 percent to nearly 80 percent, by the year 2020.
Amazon, Google and Facebook are household names in part because of their mastery of Big Data. But what about organizations without billions of dollars to spend on Big Data tools - how can they extract value from their data? In his session at 6th Big Data Expo®, Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at Databricks, discussed how the zero management cost and scalability of the cloud is addressing the challenges and pain points that data engineers face when working with Big Data. He also shared how the growing demand for cloud-based Big Data workloads and frameworks is shaping the future of Big Data analysis.
Midway through the decade, the experts from Veeva Systems – a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry – look at what’s on the horizon over the next five years. Their forecasts are informed by a vision for what’s next in technology and insight gleaned from Veeva’s 200+ life sciences customers worldwide. Overall, these predictions reflect how new innovations will enable faster time to market, evolving commercial models, and new ways to support physicians and patients.
As we continue to work with global companies focused on everything mobile, one thing is clear – the mobile space is changing rapidly and with that comes opportunity for security attacks and identity theft. We are committed to delivering the best-of-breed mobile identity and mobile location-based transaction authentication solutions for retail merchants, financial institutions, wireless carriers and device manufacturers. For 2015 we see the following trends emerge in the mobile payments arena.
We certainly live in interesting technological times. And no more interesting than the current competing IoT standards for connectivity. Various standards bodies, approaches, and ecosystems are vying for mindshare and positioning for a competitive edge. It is clear that when the dust settles, we will have new protocols, evolved protocols, that will change the way we interact with devices and infrastructure. We will also have evolved web protocols, like HTTP/2, that will be changing the very core of our infrastructures. At the same time, we have old approaches made new again like micro-services and reactive programming. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Todd Montgomery, Chief Architect at KAAZING, discussed this changing landscape and explored the various tradeoffs designers face today.
We recently changed over the entire phone system in our London office. After four years, the equipment failed, and it was time to update. As we did so, we also changed vendors. Why? It occurred to us that, for four years, we had put up with horrible support – we were the victims of fraud at one point, and the vendor did nothing to support us with the main telecom provider. The phone system could go down for a day before they came out to repair it. No big deal, right? What high tech software company needs to communicate to the outside world? So it was time to put in a new phone system. Though our original vendor offered lower terms than a competitor (though, note that they submitted their bid 48 hours later than they had promised, and while our phone system was STILL down!), we decided to pay a bit more with a vendor who seemed more eager and supportive for our business.
BMC Software plans to acquire assets of CDB Software, Inc., a mainframe data management company that has developed utilities for managing IBM DB2 databases with virtually no outage. Focusing on the availability of mission-critical applications is strategic for BMC as it continues to help its customers transform IT into a competitive advantage for their business. CDB's technology complements BMC's existing mainframe data management portfolio, which includes software utilities for DB2 administration, maintenance, application tuning, and backup/recovery. The integrated BMC portfolio will give DB2 customers an advantage as they manage ever-larger DB2 objects and real-time transaction volumes in a digital 24x7 world.
MapR Technologies on Tuesday announced the availability of free Hadoop On-Demand Training for developers, analysts and administrators which represents a $50M in-kind contribution* to the broad Hadoop community. The Hadoop training program is a multi-course curriculum designed to expand worldwide adoption of Hadoop technology. The curriculum provides engaging and interactive video lessons, hands-on exercises, labs and quizzes, enabling professionals to acquire valuable Hadoop skills and knowledge on their own schedule.
"Application monitoring and intelligence can smooth the path in a DevOps environment. In a DevOps environment you see constant change. If you are trying to monitor things in a constantly changing environment, you're going to spend a lot of your job fixing your monitoring," explained Todd Rader, Solutions Architect at AppDynamics, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
The steadily increasing frequency of data breach occurrences in 2014 has been both astounding and worrisome. From Target and Neiman Marcus to Michaels, Chick-fil-A and Home Depot, fraudsters are leaving no stone unturned, and the millions of customers unlucky enough to use infected point of sale (POS) machines at these retailers now need to worry about whether their sensitive information has fallen into the wrong hands. While retail IT organizations are keenly aware of the problem, they are often not so clear on the solution. Granted, though fraud-prevention solutions such as chip-and-PIN can help reduce the possibility that a customer’s stolen information is useable to a hacker, this is not a failsafe approach and will not prevent an attack in the first place. The vast majority of brick-and-mortar retail attacks are the result of malware being installed on POS terminals, relaying customer data directly to hackers upon a scan. That said, the real problem lies in the endpoint (POS), and once a particularly malicious malware, such as Backoff, takes hold, it is able to proliferate across other POS endpoints on the same network, creating one giant collection facility for hackers that provides customer credit and debit information.
Scott Jenson leads a project called The Physical Web within the Chrome team at Google. Project members are working to take the scalability and openness of the web and use it to talk to the exponentially exploding range of smart devices. Nearly every company today working on the IoT comes up with the same basic solution: use my server and you'll be fine. But if we really believe there will be trillions of these devices, that just can't scale. We need a system that is open a scalable and by using the URL as a basic building block, we open this up and get the same resilience that the web enjoys.
IBM and Docker, Inc. have announced a strategic partnership that enables enterprises to more efficiently, quickly and cost effectively build and run the next generation of applications on the IBM Cloud and on prem via the Docker open platform for distributed applications. Enterprises can use the combination of IBM and Docker to create and manage a new generation of portable distributed applications that are rapidly composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers, have a dynamic lifecycle, and can scale to run in concert anywhere from the developer’s laptop to hundreds of hosts in the cloud.
If you're part of the decision making process in how to get started with Big Data then you've probably already discovered that open source Apache Hadoop has a big lead. You also know that unless you've got a particularly deep NoSQL team or want to write your own proprietary code that the free open source version of Hadoop is not for the great majority of businesses. You want the benefits of open source but with some support and some capabilities that tie the open source components together in an enterprise quality database system. You want a Hadoop Distribution.
While news about the malicious hacking trade and the actions of elusive cyber-criminals continue to grab headlines, the third of our annual Insider Threat reports confirm that the risk posed by those legitimately ‘inside the fence’ continues to top business data security concerns. Of course, there can be no denying that the breadth and depth of private and public sector breaches in the past few years that have resulted from trusted insiders turning rogue or being compromised by perpetrators of APTs and the like indicates that there is a major disconnect when it comes to organisations’ handling of data security – and, crucially, how they manage their privileged users.
It's time to face reality: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus," and in today's increasingly connected world, understanding "inter-planetary" alignments and deviations is mission-critical for cloud. In her session at 15th Cloud Expo, Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems, discussed cultural expectations of privacy based on new research across these elements
Gordon Haff wrote an insightful column today about “skeuomorphic virtualizaton,” in other words the notion of thinking of virtual servers as having the same look and feel of the physical machines lying underneath. The upshot is that virtualization ends up just being a form of partioning; users view virtualized instances as no different from a single physical server. Gordon urges the end of skeuomorphism's reign of terror (my words, not his) now that containers are (back) in the news. So don't simply stuff “a hodepodge,” as Gordon says, of operating systems versions along with your app and all that goes with it (web server, database, storage, comms) into a container as if it's just another virtualized machine. Instead, he writes that it's time to think of “containerized operating systems, container packaging systems, container orchestration like Kubernetes, DevOps practices, microservices architectures, “cattle” (shorter term) workloads, software-defined everything, and pervasive open source as part of a new platform for cloud apps.” Reboot Time Old habits die hard. The relentless drive for efficiency in business focuses itself evermore on IT operations, breeding an instinct to view the new tool as simply an improved hammer and to simply try to slam things through with it more quickly. An increasing focus on DevOps, as seen from the high management level, can certainly reinforce this view. But that would be wrong. Containers give everyone another shot at imagining their software as a number of services rather than a unified application. Further, as Gordon notes, they let you throw in an OS here, some orchestration there, a VPN there, and truly become efficient (and more future-proof) in the way you design and deploy what you're trying to do. The original SOA days seem far away to me, but the idea of provisioning services is still a radical one. Too often today, software-as-a-service in the cloud still means software-as-an-application from the sky. The inexorability of Moore's Law allows people to slam things through for short-term gain rather than long-term efficiency, and this will be particularly true as containers become prized for their relative abstemious use of resources. But an expeditious, rather than more profound, use of containers will just create tomorrow's hodgepodge. The potential of containers to reboot the way we think of services and how they should be delivered can logically lead to re-imagining how users should experience what the services offer – and how skeuomorphic those experiences should be, of course.
Some of the network gear vendors cast a wary look at network management vendors, particularly those who do continual, automatic discovery of the network inventory and connectivity. Why? We know what’s actually out there, and what’s actually being used. We had one customer in the insurance industry who was due to renew their maintenance agreement with a large, well-known network gear vendor. The typical scenario was to be handed a spreadsheet by the salesperson, listing the serial numbers of the network devices they had purchased, together with a summary of maintenance charges.
"Application monitoring and intelligence can smooth the path in a DevOps environment. In a DevOps environment you see constant change. If you are trying to monitor things in a constantly changing environment, you're going to spend a lot of your job fixing your monitoring," explained Todd Rader, Solutions Architect at AppDynamics, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Code Halos - aka "digital fingerprints" - are the key organizing principle to understand a) how dumb things become smart and b) how to monetize this dynamic. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Robert Brown, AVP, Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant Technology Solutions, outlined research, analysis and recommendations from his recently published book on this phenomena on the way leading edge organizations like GE and Disney are unlocking the Internet of Things opportunity and what steps your organization should be taking to position itself for the next platform of digital competition.
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.